On Tuesday, the California Board of Forestry (BOF) held a public workshop to discuss its proposal to revise the State Fire Safe regulations. The draft rulemaking is set to be heard by the BOF at its January 19th meeting, and another on January 20th for submission to the Office of Administrative Law. This latest workshop was held in response to concerns expressed during the December BOF meeting at which staff initially presented the specific regulation changes. After more than eight hours of discussion, staff was directed to schedule another public workshop prior to the January board meeting, in order to solicit additional feedback from both the public and attending board members.
The State Fire Safe regulations set forth basic wildfire protection standards for development in State Responsibility Area (SRA) and, beginning July 1, 2021, the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones of the Local Responsibility Area (LRA). 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 of this year 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. RCRC has formed a working group of local government partners and other interested stakeholders, to provide coordinated comments on the current draft regulation.
For more information, please contact Tracy Rhine at trhine@rcrcnet.org.