Opinion: Time for Newsom to make good on California fire preparedness promises

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On Wednesday, Capital Public Radio and National Public Radio's California Newsroom published an investigation that set tongues wagging. It said Gov. Gavin Newsom had vastly exaggerated the state's wildfire preparedness in January 2020 — before the state suffered its most burned land in a single year in recorded history: 4.3 million acres.

The report noted that upon taking office in January 2019, Newsom issued an executive order identifying 35 "priority projects" to prevent wildfires on 90,000 high-risk acres. But state records show that only 11,399 acres were improved by fire crews — meaning that early last year, the governor had exaggerated by 690 percent the amount of work the state had actually done, according to CPR and NPR.

The Newsom administration and some state lawmakers and fire experts immediately pushed back at the CPR/NPR report as being misleading. They emphasized that the 11,399 acres that were subject to fuel breaks, removal of dead trees, forest thinning and prescribed burns were at the most dangerous sites, and thus reduced the risks to the 90,000 acres that Newsom said had been protected.

Newsom or his aides should have said that for the CPR/NPR story and been that precise when putting out self-congratulatory statements about fire preparedness before what became a nightmare fire season last year. Instead, his office doubled down on that initial failing by ignoring CPR/NPR inquiries for two weeks, then Cal Fire Chief Thom Porter took the blame for Newsom's misleading statements.

The governor comes off worse after closer inspection of another key point made by CPR and NPR. They found that, overall, Cal Fire used fire-prevention tactics on 64,000 acres statewide in 2019, but only 32,000 acres in 2020 and 24,000 acres from January to May of this year. The nominal reason for the huge cut last year was because of assumptions that the pandemic would send state revenue plummeting. Instead, the stock market exploded after plunging during initial pandemic lockdowns, and it was evident by October that California's capital gains tax revenue would balloon. That is what came to pass, with a record budget surplus in fiscal 2021-22.

And yet the governor who pledged to transform the state's wildfire response is now running a state that is on track to have Cal Fire improve fire readiness on fewer acres in 2021 than it did in 2019 — even though a severe drought is now plaguing most of the state. The Newsom administration says the picture will rapidly improve with the state budget that takes effect on July 1. But it should have rapidly improved nine months ago when California was burning and it became clear state revenue wouldn't crater. "This is a climate damn emergency," he said in September.

On his first day in office, Newsom vowed "to prevent or contain to the greatest extent possible future destructive fires such as those that ravaged California in 2018." He has not done that — yet.

He has no defense for reducing fire containment efforts due to false assumptions about revenue plunging. The fiscal outlook and fire risk are clear now. This is an emergency, and Newsom should follow through on what he is promising this time.

This story originally appeared in San Diego Union-Tribune.

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