Sierra Business Council is deeply saddened by the loss of life and property from the wildfires in the Los Angeles region. No one who hasn’t experienced it can truly understand what it means to lose a loved one, home, or business, which is terrible, but also your place, memories, history, and the culture of your community. Our thoughts and best wishes go out to the people suffering this loss, the affected communities, and our valued partners and friends in Los Angeles. Our sincere thanks go out to the courageous firefighters and first responders working tirelessly to protect lives and property. 

The fire crisis in Los Angeles will have deep and difficult consequences for the Los Angeles region and for the entire state of California. Sierra Business Council strongly supports the emergency legislation and $2.5 billion budget allocation proposed by Governor Newsom to assist the Los Angeles region in their recovery and the immediate allocation of federal disaster recovery funding from the federal government without extraneous conditions. 

Recent events should convince Californians that we are not doing enough to plan for, manage, and mitigate the impact of wildfire. The annual cost of wildfire in California is approximately $117 billion per year in lost life, property, infrastructure, and tax revenue, emergency response cost, damage to ecosystems, and impacts to public health. These costs are rapidly rising as our climate changes and will continue to wreak havoc in rural and urban regions. 

The State of California currently spends about $400 million per year on wildfire mitigation. Based on the best available research, SBC estimates the cost of mitigating wildfires across the state to be at least $3 billion per year every year for the next 10-20 years to return our landscapes to a resilient condition. Admittedly, we need better science to truly understand the cost, but we also don’t have the luxury of waiting for perfect science to take action. 

As we mobilize to support our friends in Los Angeles and continue to support our friends in all of the communities severely affected by wildfire in the Sierra Nevada, we need to be working together– across urban and rural, north and south, inland and coastal–to demand that the State of California increase funding for wildfire resilience and mitigation. We are all in this together.

We encourage all of our friends to get actively engaged in the California Wildfire Resilience and Forest Management Task Force. This is the premier location for citizens to get involved in the policy decisions necessary to achieve resilience. 

SBC will continue to advocate for permanent dedicated funding for wildfire resilience and mitigation in the California budget and to increase that investment to at least $3 billion per year through a variety of sources at the federal, state, and local levels. The current administration has done more than any other to manage wildfire and should be applauded, but we need to do much, much more. You will be hearing more from us about what to do and how you can help throughout the year.

Finally, let’s remember that the most daunting problems seem insurmountable until they are not. Big problems are solved by persistent, concerted, consistent actions, large and small, that create incremental progress, which shifts the culture and the mindset, and one day the accumulation of effort prevails.   

Cheers,

Steve Frisch