This week the California Board of Forestry (BOF) announced it would be holding two additional workshops on its proposal to revise the State Fire Safe regulations. This follows an over eight-hour public workshop held December 22nd in which RCRC staff, as well as staff from the Association of California Water Agencies, raised concerns regarding the impacts of the draft regulations, particularly on rural communities. The BOF is set to consider the revised regulations at its January 19th joint committee meeting for submission to the Office of Administrative Law, thus beginning the formal rulemaking process.
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. On Wednesday, based on feedback from a working group of local government partners, RCRC submitted a revised rulemaking draft for BOF consideration, which outlined necessary amendments to the current BOF proposal.
Details on the upcoming regulatory workshops scheduled for January can be found here. For more information, please contact Tracy Rhine at trhine@rcrcnet.org.