Governor Newsom signs legislation to accelerate wildfire prevention projects, strengthen fire response, and harden communities against future disasters

The new legislation creates a more durable, ongoing process to achieve the faster project reviews demonstrated through the Governor’s temporary wildfire streamlining measures, helping move critical wildfire mitigation work from planning to implementation more efficiently while maintaining environmental safeguards. With these new laws, California will have more tools to protect communities, homes, infrastructure, ecosystems, and landscapes. The legislative package will:

🌲 Speed up wildfire mitigation projects to protect communities and landscapes to avoid catastrophic wildfires by enacting into law Governor Newsom’s executive proclamation, which has already fast-tracked more than 500 priority wildfire prevention projects, including over 310,000 activity acres of treatments across nearly 130,000 footprint acres across California. Projects impacted by the new law will move critical fuel reduction, forest restoration, and community protection projects from planning to implementation faster, saving a year or more of review and red tape.

🔥 Expand tools to safely deploy prescribed and cultural burning, including increasing and cutting red tape for State-Certified Prescribed Fire Burn Bosses. New legislation will extend burn bosses’ certification from one year to three years, require the State Fire Marshal to explore ways to expand the pool of burn boss instructors, and codify Governor Newsom’s 2025 executive order to expand tools to safely deploy beneficial fire projects.

💪 Establish the Fire Innovation Unit to serve as CAL FIRE’s innovation arm for wildfire technology research, coordination, procurement, and deployment for technologies that improve community risk reduction and ecosystem and landscape-scale resilience.

✅ Provide homeowners and communities with tools to improve community and home hardening, including establishing a low-interest loan program to incentivize home hardening and defensible space activities for homes and businesses, reducing up-front costs.

🤝 Promote local coordination by establishing the California Wildfire Preparedness Program to support county-level coordination of wildfire mitigation, prevention, preparedness, and recovery. The program will develop guidance and standards for local wildfire-risk modeling and analysis, helping communities prioritize mitigation investments.

⚡ Improve electric infrastructure safety by requiring the California Public Utilities Commission to update its rules to require the removal of permanently abandoned transmission lines, as determined by the Commission. It also requires utilities to account for active, inactive, and abandoned transmission infrastructure in their wildfire-mitigation plans.

💧 Strengthen water-system preparedness for urban retail water suppliers serving high- and very-high-fire-hazard-severity zones. Suppliers will incorporate wildfire preparedness and response into disaster-preparedness and emergency-response plans, including actions to mitigate impacts, prepare critical infrastructure, respond during a wildfire, and recover afterward.

California continues to make historic investments in wildfire resilience, including forest health, prescribed fire, community hardening, home retrofits, emergency preparedness, and new technology to detect and respond to fires faster. Earlier this month, the Governor, in partnership with the Legislature, allocated $25 million from the climate bond for a statewide community wildfire mitigation program and $117 million in Greenhouse Gas Reduction Funds to support projects that prevent wildfires, increase community resilience, make our forests healthier, and advance home and community hardening.

The Governor has signed the following bills:

AB 1699 by Assemblymember Chris Rogers (D-Santa Rosa) — Good Fire Act: Prescribed Fire Liability Pilot Program: burn bosses: California Environmental Quality Act.
AB 1749 by Assemblymember Dixon (R-Newport Beach) — Interfering with wildfire suppression and emergency responses with a drone.
AB 1934 by Assemblymember Steve Bennett (D-Ventura) — State Fire Marshal: home hardening certification program implementation plan.
AB 1960 by Assemblymember Steve Bennett (D-Ventura) — Wildfire Prevention Grants Program: wildfire mitigation validation.
AB 1964 by Assemblymember Steve Bennett (D-Ventura) — State Fire Marshal: home hardening.
AB 2075 by Assemblymember Steve Bennett (D-Ventura) — Forestry: safety requirements: fire equipment: internal combustion engines.
AB 2152 by Assemblymember Mark González (D-Los Angeles) — California Environmental Quality Act: essential local fire station projects: infrastructure project streamlining.
AB 2513 by Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris (D-Irvine) — Wildfire: Regional Forest and Fire Capacity Program: local assistance grant program: regional landscape grants.
SB 742 by Senator Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena) — Electricity: electrical infrastructure: permanently abandoned transmission facilities: emergency response: liaisons.
SB 894 by Senator Benjamin Allen (D-Santa Monica) — Wildfire resiliency: financial assistance.
SB 904 by Senator Kelly Seyarto (R-Murrieta) — Recovery from a state of emergency.
SB 959 by Senator Tim Grayson (D-Concord) — Average daily attendance: emergencies: major safety hazard.
SB 973 by Senator Josh Becker (D‑Menlo Park) — Wildfire County Coordinator Program.
SB 1079 by Senator Henry Stern (D–Los Angeles) — Department of Forestry and Fire Protection: Fire Innovation Unit. A signing message can be viewed here.
SB 1093 by Senator Benjamin Allen (D-Santa Monica) — Mobilehome parks: disaster assistance.
SB 1153 by Senator Anna Caballero (D-Merced) — Disaster preparedness: urban retail water suppliers and public water systems: wildfire.
SB 1370 by Senator Henry Stern (D–Los Angeles) — Covered wildfire mitigation projects: consolidated and expedited review. A signing message can be viewed here.

Streamlined permitting making an impact on-the-ground

Governor Newsom’s executive order, which has now been codified as law, has helped move critical fuel reduction, forest restoration, and community protection projects from planning to implementation faster, saving a year or more of review and red tape for more complicated projects. Partners across the state have been able to complete work more efficiently while maintaining strong environmental protections. Notable projects include:

Protecting communities impacted by the 2025 Los Angeles firestorms: 600+ acre fuels reduction collaborative project protecting communities in the Los Angeles area near the Palisades footprint, led by the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority.
Expanding prescribed and cultural burning on the North Coast: 450-acre Prosper Ridge Community Wildfire Resilience Project that is incorporating cultural burning and prescribed fire for community protection in Humboldt County.
Restoring large landscapes and protecting rural Northern California communities: Nearly 3,000-acre Scott Valley/Callahan Fuels Reduction Project to restore ecosystem health and protect vulnerable rural communities in Siskiyou County.
Assisting senior and disabled residents protect their homes in the Sierra Nevada: 302-acre project to assist senior and disabled WUI residents in Tuolumne County with removing vegetation and creating defensible space
Restoring wildfire impacted private lands on the Central Coast: 520-acre Calforests supported disaster recovery project of private lands in Santa Cruz County impacted by the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fires
Reducing wildfire risk through prescribed grazing in Southern California: 240-acre project in San Diego County to protect the Sycuan Reservation from wildfire by reducing fire hazard with the use of 300 grazing goats.
Protecting the Heritage Ranch community in San Luis Obispo County: 485-acre project to construct an 8-mile strategic fuel break, improve roadside clearance, and create defensible space to protect the 3,800-resident Heritage Ranch community, a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone with a history of large wildfires.
Reducing wildfire risk near Arnold in Calaveras County: 2,171-acre strategic fuel break to protect the community of Arnold, using mechanical mastication, manual hand cutting, and piling and chipping to reduce fuel loads and prepare the landscape for prescribed fire.
Reducing fire risk in San Elijo in San Diego County: 10-acre project to enhance community defensible space by removing hazardous and dead non-native trees and invasive vegetation, including eucalyptus, acacia, palms, and black mustard.
Strengthening wildfire protection in the Hiouchi-Smith River Area of Del Norte County: 1,677-acre project to improve existing emergency containment lines created during the Chetco Bar and Smith River Complex fires and establish a more permanent shaded fuel break along strategic ridgetops.

Building on nation-leading prevention funding and wildfire readiness

As part of the state’s ongoing investment in wildfire resilience and emergency response, CAL FIRE has significantly expanded its workforce over the past five years by adding an average of 1,800 full-time and 600 seasonal positions annually. Over the next four years and beyond, CAL FIRE will continue to hire additional firefighters, natural resource professionals, and support personnel to meet the state’s growing demands.

Governor Newsom has invested millions of dollars to protect communities from wildfire, with $135 million available for new and ongoing prevention projects and $72 million going out the door to projects across the state. This is part of over $5 billion that the Newsom administration, in collaboration with the legislature, has invested in wildfire and forest resilience since 2019.

This builds on consecutive years of intensive and focused work by California to confront the severe ongoing risk of catastrophic wildfires. Bold moves to streamline state-level regulatory processes build on long-term efforts already underway in California to increase wildfire response and forest management in the face of a hotter, drier climate.

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