Session Recap
Wildfires & Disaster Preparedness Committee
79th CSG West Annual Meeting
Salt Lake City, Utah
Introduction: Wildfire Resilience Demands More Than a Single Solution
Wildfire has become one of the defining policy challenges facing the West, affecting communities, public lands, insurance markets, and state budgets alike. During the CSG West Wildfires & Disaster Preparedness Committee session, legislators examined the multifaceted policy landscape surrounding wildfire and explored how Western states can reduce risk across public lands and private property while strengthening community-level preparedness.
Committee Co-Chair, Oregon Senator David Brock Smith, framed the discussion by asking how many legislators in the room had been personally affected by wildfire, underscoring how widespread its impacts have become across the West. There is no “silver bullet” for wildfire resilience, he emphasized, introducing the session’s central premise: no single intervention can meaningfully reduce wildfire risk on its own—whether through land management, home hardening, insurance reform, or emerging technologies. The discussion focused on what a more holistic approach to wildfire resilience requires, and the actions state legislators can take to advance it.
Panelists included Eric Horne, California director of Megafire Action; Patty Hernandez, executive director and co-founder of Headwaters Economics, a Montana-based nonprofit that works with local governments across the West on wildfire-resilient building codes and land-use planning; and Tyson Bertone-Riggs of the Alliance for Wildfire Resilience, an organization that formed following the congressionally chartered Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission.
In Western states, the scale, cost, and complexity of wildfire have outpaced the systems built to manage it. Legislators and panelist alike raised concerns about the growing home insurance crisis, permitting delays that slow federal land treatments, and the limits of one-size-fits-all federal approaches in a region where California’s landscape and legal environment differ sharply from those of Utah or Alaska. Legislators also shared lessons from across the region, illustrating how Western states increasingly serve as policy laboratories for one another.
Key Takeaways
1. Wildfire mitigation requires simultaneous action across three fronts.
Eric Horne framed wildfire mitigation challenges around three interconnected categories: landscape-level land management, home hardening in the built environment, and technology and innovation. California’s nine-bill Mega Fire Prevention Package addresses all three, he argued, because treating any one in isolation—thinning forests without hardening homes, or hardening homes without addressing insurance—fails to meaningfully change outcomes. Panelists also noted that some of the largest recent home-loss events have become “urban conflagrations,” in which burning homes ignite neighboring homes—a structure-to-structure fire spread that landscape-level land management alone cannot prevent.
2. Home hardening is a market challenge that requires a different toolkit.
Because home hardening happens on private property, panelists argued that government’s traditional public-works approach of regulating, funding, and building is not well suited to the challenge. Horne described a “customer journey” framework: homeowners need a clear standard, an affordable way to pay for retrofits, and a demonstrable payoff, such as insurance discounts. A poll of California homeowners in high-hazard zones found that cost was the single largest barrier to taking action. Rather than relying on large one-off grants, panelists pointed to low-interest financing, loan-loss reserve funds, and tax credits as more cost-effective ways for states to encourage widespread home hardening. California’s existing $10 million grant program, for example, has funded only 150 retrofits over the past three years.
3. States can take deliberate actions—even without large budgets.
Patty Hernandez outlined a three-part framework for state-level action. First, enabling legislation gives local governments the authority to adopt standards that reflect their risk. She cited a cautionary example in which Montana’s early voluntary wildfire building code was paired with a provision barring communities from exceeding it—now limiting some jurisdictions from adopting stronger standards. Second, technical assistance and funding can fill local capacity gaps. After passing a mandatory wildfire building code, Colorado deployed state building inspectors and intergovernmental agreement templates to help rural communities that lack the tax base to support a dedicated inspector. Finally, incentive-based models such as the Utah Resilience Fund tie state cost-sharing for long-term suppression expenses to a local jurisdiction’s upfront commitment to wildfire risk reduction.
4. Federal permitting reform has emerged as rare bipartisan common ground, but it addresses only part of the problem.
Panelists described a growing political consensus behind the proposed federal Fix Our Forests Act, with support ranging from environmental organizations to timber interests. The legislation would expand categorical exclusions for forest treatment projects from 3,000 to 10,000 acres in designated high-risk “firesheds.” Horne cited the Eaton Fire near Los Angeles as a cautionary example: a properly planned 9,000-acre fuel-break project was divided into smaller sections to qualify for faster permitting, and one of those fuel breaks lay roughly 300 feet from where the fire ultimately began— despite not receiving approval until four years after the original application was filed. Several legislators also questioned whether a 10,000-acre exclusion is sufficient for wilderness-heavy landscapes, noting that the figure was not derived from a state-by-state risk analysis.
5. Federal wildland fire agency consolidation is likely to proceed, raising the stakes for state legislators to engage now.
Tyson Bertone-Riggs explained that the administration’s move to unify wildland fire functions from several Department of the Interior agencies into a single wildland fire service is largely underway. Incorporating the U.S. Forest Service’s fire functions, however, would require congressional action and remains contested. Federal agencies employ roughly 35,000 firefighting employees, compared to approximately one million personnel available at the local level. Panelists urged legislators to build relationships with their congressional delegations now, emphasizing the need for coordination among federal, state, and local officials as wildland fire management spans jurisdictional boundaries. No formal body currently represents state and local governments in the redesign process.
Looking Ahead
Several unresolved and emerging issues surfaced repeatedly during the session.
- Smoke damage presents an emerging insurance challenge: Distinct from structural fire loss, smoke damage is creating a new insurance challenge. California Assemblymember Mike Gipson described homes left structurally intact after the Palisades and Eaton fires but rendered uninhabitable by smoke contamination embedded in wood and building materials—with no existing insurance product or standard to address it. California is now convening stakeholder groups with insurers to develop a new approach; a development other states may wish to monitor.
- Wildfire risk mapping remains a work in progress: Panelists noted that wildfire risk mapping remains politically challenging. Oregon’s earlier mapping effort drew armed protests at public meetings. Utah and Colorado are now testing alternative approaches that pair state-level extreme-risk mapping with locally validated data and, in Utah’s case, a fee structure that supports county-level mitigation efforts.
- States are testing innovative mitigation tools: Panelists also pointed to continued state experimentation as a source of transferable lessons, including creative revenue tools such as expanded tourism and resort taxes dedicated to mitigation, financing mechanisms modeled on low-interest lending, technology pilots such as autonomous detection and suppression technologies, and satellite-based risk modeling.
- CSG West’s Wildfire Dashboard remains a growing resource for policymakers: The CSG West Forging a Resilient West Wildfire Dashboard was highlighted as an ongoing resource tracking state legislation and federal policy activity across the 13 Western states. The CSG West Wildfires & Disaster Preparedness Committee will continue expanding these resources ahead of the 2027 legislative session.
Final Reflection
Panelists closed on a cautiously optimistic note. Bertone-Riggs pointed to the unusual coalition supporting the Fix Our Forest Act—spanning environmental groups and timber interests—as evidence that practical, action-oriented consensus is displacing an older, more polarized framing of forest management. Horne added that the convergence of federal permitting reform with a maturing, science-based understanding of why homes burn—and how to reduce that risk affordably—offers reason for optimism over the coming decade, provided that states continue to innovate, share lessons with one another, and engage with their federal delegations to act.
