Comment by scythe
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.