This week at the California Board of Forestry (BOF) joint committee meeting, staff provided a brief update on the State Fire Safe regulations process, including a commitment to hold additional stakeholder discussions before submitting the rulemaking package to the Office of Administrative Law. The joint committee did not take any further formal action on the proposal. RCRC staff testified during public comment, expressing appreciation to the BOF for accepting RCRC’s recommendation to hold additional, multidisciplinary stakeholder meetings.
The next stakeholder workshop will occur on January 27th, focusing on revisions to Articles 4 and 5 of the proposed regulations. Registration for the meeting can be found here. Staff stated during the joint committee meeting that the BOF intends to hold an additional meeting, tentatively scheduled for February 9th. All public comment received by the BOF since the first workshop in November is now available for viewing on the BOF website, and will be updated weekly.
The State Fire Safe regulations set forth basic wildfire protection standards for development in the State Responsibility Area and, beginning July 1, 2021, the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones of the Local Responsibility Area. The changes made in the draft rulemaking, will have extraordinary impacts on housing production, not only in rural areas of the state, but also in more urbanized regions of California. For instance, the draft regulations would prohibit any future building construction on property served by a road that has not been upgraded, or that cannot be upgraded to meet current standards, such as dead-end roads. These upgrade requirements include road widening, re-surfacing, leveling grades and curves, and bridge improvements, from the property line to the nearest fire station, and apply to the building of a single residential unit or any business increasing its "service capacity." All required upgrades would be at the expense of the property owner.
RCRC staff has been in discussions with the BOF since April, 2020 on proposed revisions to the State Fire Safe regulations and have offered both written and oral comments on the preceding emergency rulemaking that ultimately made more minor changes to the regulations.
For updates from the BOF on the Fire Safe Regulations and other activities of the BOF Resource Protection Committee, subscribe to email updates here. For more information, please contact Tracy Rhine at trhine@rcrcnet.org.