Comment by JumpCrisscross
Comment by JumpCrisscross 9 days ago
Can the Forest Service make this up with use fees? Like, could California pay the Forest Service to take care of its land surrounded by California?
Comment by JumpCrisscross 9 days ago
Can the Forest Service make this up with use fees? Like, could California pay the Forest Service to take care of its land surrounded by California?
Here in Oregon (and elsewhere), we have multi-agency partnerships between governments, different federal agencies, local tribes, homeowners, etc.:
https://www.conservationgateway.org/ConservationPractices/Fi...
I'm not sure how it works in California, but wildfires don't really care about our jurisdictional boundaries...
It could possibly be managed by the state by placing a tax on fire insurance which would basically be a workaround to Proposition 13. That would probably be about as popular as a Chinese "weather" balloon but it does have a certain poetry of having the people who use the forest — by living in it — pay to manage it.
The fire insurance that is unaffordable or just straight not available anymore to those same people?
There is only one reason why insurance straight up isn't available somewhere, and the reason is regulation.
I can assure you that no matter how high the risk of fire, insurers will be willing to provide insurance on that so long as they are legally allowed to charge the appropriate premiums.
Most California landowners are hardly poor. We're talking about a state with more than double the GDP per capita of Japan. And the property taxes are in some cases among the cheapest in the world. We're talking about just over a million homes in fire zones, while the total budget for the Forest Service is about $10 billion per annum. That's $10k per year per house to fund the financial equivalent of the entire Forest Service — for roughly a third the rent I pay on a studio apartment in Bergen County. I'll try to find a small enough violin for these landowners. Yes, there are some people who are asset-rich and liquidity poor, but we are not talking about West Virginia.
Effective fire prevention will also make fire insurance cheaper and reducing development in fire-prone areas will reduce the cost of forest management.
I'm a little consfused what point you are trying to make with those numbers. I don't get how comparing the nation budget of the USFS against homes in California on fire zones is an argument for anything.
California spends a roughly an order of magnitude more per acre they are responsible for, when compared with the USFS so I don't think underspending by California is the issue here. The problem seems to be the lack of authority for CalFire to manage fire risk on federal land.
California has already taxed everything that can be taxed, and raised taxes to the point that further tax increases are likely to result in a decline in tax revenue.
People living in the forest (who’s doing this exactly? you didn’t specify) are not the problem. Wildfires are a natural event meant to bring balance to an overgrown forest. All of CA suffers from this so why force only some to pay?
Since CA tends to be a rich state, I vote that those living in SF and LA pay 75% of the required fees, and the remainder of the state pay the rest.
They can use the lumber fees from the forests to pay for the cost.
This would be true if the federal allowed more than a nominal amount of logging. Most trees and logs come from private land. See page 8: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R45688
lumber future prices are up over the last few months. currently 593, was 493 in July.
> Not without Congress doing something to enable it
Why? We played with the farfetched hypothetical of California unilaterally acting on federal land. But if the Forest Service says “come on in” and they do, I’m struggling to see who would face any real consequences given the Congress’s power of the purse isn’t being touched.
> OP is talking about CA paying money to the park service
Sure. I don’t see how the Congress stops that if the USFS (not Parks) and Sacramento strike a deal.
I think the issue is that it's federal land. They would just have to authorize California to do it on their behalf.