Gavin Newsom Broke His Promise About California's Fire Management Work

Starting last year, the governor “fast-tracked” land, now totaling nearly 100,000 acres, for fire management. So far, state-approved groups have completed projects covering less than 1 percent.

Last year, in the aftermath of Los Angeles’s devastating wildfires, California Governor Gavin Newsom promised to speed up “critical” wildfire-prevention projects. Newsom issued an emergency proclamation to “cut bureaucratic red tape” and “fast-track critical projects,” including brush clearance, forest thinning, prescribed burning, and other forms of fuels reduction.

“These are the forest management projects we need to protect our communities most vulnerable to wildfire,” Newsom said last spring. “[W]e’re going to get them done.”

We filed a public records request to discover whether Newsom is keeping his word. As of last month, the Newsom administration had fast-tracked fuels-reduction work on roughly 87,000 acres of land. But internal records we obtained from state fire authorities indicate that state-approved organizations had completed projects totaling about 781 acres—less than 1 percent.

These numbers are disastrous. The governor’s office insisted that these projects, which are part of the state’s larger wildfire-prevention efforts, were “critical” and would help “protect communities from catastrophic wildfire.” The documents we obtained, which concern the fast-tracked projects, reveal that the Newsom administration has failed to protect the state.

What has put so much of California at risk to burn? In part, the state’s environmental rules. In California, fuels-reduction projects typically require environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Under standard CEQA review, a vegetation-management project typically requires an initial study, an Environmental Impact Report, a public comment period, alternatives analysis, and agency certification. That process can take several months for simple projects and a year or more for complex ones.

Newsom’s emergency proclamation provided a way for certain projects to bypass this CEQA process but limited the exemption to small projects of no more than 3,000 acres. The application window expired last month. Now, despite the governor’s declaration of war against “red tape,” it seems that the red tape won.

The same story is unfolding around the state. In the San Ramon Valley, east of San Francisco, the local fire district recently sought to conduct wildfire mitigation work on California State Parks land in areas that the state itself classifies as “Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones.” The local district had developed a mitigation plan, secured local funding, and was ready to start working.

But according to the district, California State Parks imposed “regulatory and procedural barriers” that slowed and narrowed the project, including restrictions on treating protected manzanita species, mandatory cultural and habitat monitoring, and oversight fees. As a result, the district says that it was able to complete wildfire mitigation work on only 22 of the 300 acres planned—and wasted about 75 percent of the project budget on state-mandated compliance costs.

The Newsom administration suggested that the fast-track initiative would avoid such catastrophic failures. Earlier this year, the governor’s office announced that California had approved more than 300 expedited wildfire-safety projects in 300 days. This might sound impressive, but a closer examination reveals the ruse: approved projects include a 0.24-acre tree-pruning project near Camp Nelson; a 0.36-acre project that will fell trees near Thousand Oaks; and a six-acre effort to manage vegetation along a transmission line in Sonoma County.

And as we have seen, approved projects are not the same as completed projects. Despite stacking the list with small projects, only about 13 percent had been completed as of last month.

We sent a comment request to the governor’s office, which directed us to the California Natural Resources Agency. Using updated data, an agency spokesperson told us that the state had “fast-tracked approval of over 400 projects, across nearly 100,000 acres,” and claimed that about half of those projects, “spanning over 35,000 acres,” were either “underway or completed.” When we pressed CNRA about the acreage total, another official admitted that only “798 footprint acres” had been completed, and that the agency couldn’t “anticipate how much progress” had been made on the rest. After we sent our first comment request, Newsom’s office published a press release about the emergency declaration and related actions, which didn’t mention how many fast-track acres had been completed.

The fundamental role of government is to ensure the physical safety of its people. In fire-prone California, that means allocating enough resources to reduce extreme fire risk and making sure approved mitigation work is completed. Under Governor Gavin Newsom, the state budget has increased by $106 billion. Yet funding for wildfire and forest programs—brush clearing, thinning, prescribed burning—has fallen, from a peak of $1.1 billion in 2022 to $620 million in 2026. Newsom’s proposed budget for the coming year, a record $349 billion, would reduce wildfire and forest funding even further, to $457 million.

Newsom’s actions are reckless and ideological. The state has funded solar panels and sex-change procedures for illegal immigrants but cannot be bothered to protect its residents from recurring wildfires. As the summer heats up, California residents should remember: Newsom’s priorities have left them more vulnerable than ever.

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Shawn Regan is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Kenneth Schrupp is an investigative reporter at City Journal.