[House Hearing, 119 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                 CALIFORNIA FIRES AND THE CONSEQUENCES
                           OF OVERREGULATION

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE, 
                  REGULATORY REFORM, AND ANTITRUST

                       COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY

                     U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                    ONE HUNDRED NINETEENTH CONGRESS

                             FIRST SESSION

                               __________

                       THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2025

                               __________

                            Serial No. 119-2

                               __________

         Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary
         
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]         

               Available via: http://judiciary.house.gov
               
                                __________

                   U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE                    
58-753                      WASHINGTON : 2025                  
          
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------     
              
                       COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY

                        JIM JORDAN, Ohio, Chair

DARRELL ISSA, California             JAMIE RASKIN, Maryland, Ranking 
ANDY BIGGS, Arizona                      Member
TOM McCLINTOCK, California           JERROLD NADLER, New York
THOMAS P. TIFFANY, Wisconsin         ZOE LOFGREN, California
THOMAS MASSIE, Kentucky              STEVE COHEN, Tennessee
CHIP ROY, Texas                      HENRY C. ``HANK'' JOHNSON, Jr., 
SCOTT FITZGERALD, Wisconsin              Georgia
BEN CLINE, Virginia                  ERIC SWALWELL, California
LANCE GOODEN, Texas                  TED LIEU, California
JEFFERSON VAN DREW, New Jersey       PRAMILA JAYAPAL, Washington
TROY E. NEHLS, Texas                 J. LUIS CORREA, California
BARRY MOORE, Alabama                 MARY GAY SCANLON, Pennsylvania
KEVIN KILEY, California              JOE NEGUSE, Colorado
HARRIET M. HAGEMAN, Wyoming          LUCY McBATH, Georgia
LAUREL M. LEE, Florida               DEBORAH K. ROSS, North Carolina
WESLEY HUNT, Texas                   BECCA BALINT, Vermont
RUSSELL FRY, South Carolina          JESUS G. ``CHUY'' GARCIA, Illinois
GLENN GROTHMAN, Wisconsin            SYDNEY KAMLAGER-DOVE, California
BRAD KNOTT, North Carolina           JARED MOSKOWITZ, Florida
MARK HARRIS, North Carolina          DANIEL S. GOLDMAN, New York
ROBERT F. ONDER, Jr., Missouri       JASMINE CROCKETT, Texas
DEREK SCHMIDT, Kansas
BRANDON GILL, Texas
MICHAEL BAUMGARTNER, Washington
                                 ------                                

               SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE,
                    REGULATORY REFORM, AND ANTITRUST

                   SCOTT FITZGERALD, Wisconsin, Chair

DARRELL ISSA, California             JERROLD NADLER, New York, Ranking 
BEN CLINE, Virginia                      Member
LANCE GOODEN, Texas                  J. LUIS CORREA, California
HARRIET HAGEMAN, Wyoming             BECCA BALINT, Vermont
MARK HARRIS, North Carolina          JESUS G. ``CHUY'' GARCIA, Illinois
DEREK SCHMIDT, Kansas                ZOE LOFGREN, California
MICHAEL BAUMGARTNER, Washington      HENRY C. ``HANK'' JOHNSON, Jr., 
                                         Georgia

               CHRISTOPHER HIXON, Majority Staff Director
                  JULIE TAGEN, Minority Staff Director
                            
                            
                            C O N T E N T S

                              ----------                              

                       Thursday, February 6, 2025

                           OPENING STATEMENTS

                                                                   Page
The Honorable Scott Fitzgerald, Chair of the Subcommittee on the 
  Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust from the 
  State of Wisconsin.............................................     1
The Honorable Jerrold Nadler, Ranking Member of the Subcommittee 
  on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust 
  from the State of New York.....................................     3
The Honorable Jim Jordan, Chair of the Committee on the Judiciary 
  from the State of Ohio.........................................     4

                               WITNESSES

Steven Greenhut, Resident Senior Fellow, Western Region Director, 
  R Street Institute
  Oral Testimony.................................................     7
  Prepared Testimony.............................................     9
Edward Ring, Director Energy and Water Policy, California Policy 
  Center
  Oral Testimony.................................................    15
  Prepared Testimony.............................................    17
Steve Hilton, Founder, Golden Together
  Oral Testimony.................................................    38
  Prepared Testimony.............................................    40
Frank Frievalt, Director, Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) FIRE 
  Institute, California Polytechnic State University
  Oral Testimony.................................................    42
  Prepared Testimony.............................................    44

          LETTERS, STATEMENTS, ETC. SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING

All materials submitted for the record by the Subcommittee on the 
  Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust are 
  listed below...................................................    72

Materials submitted by the Honorable Jerrold Nadler, Ranking 
  Member of the Subcommittee on the Administrative State, 
  Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust from the State of New York, 
  for the record
    A letter to the Honorable Jim Jordan, Chair of the Committee 
        on the Judiciary from the State of Ohio, from the 
        Honorable Judy Chu from the State of California; the 
        Honorable Scott Fitzgerald, Chair of the Subcommittee on 
        the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and 
        Antitrust from the State of Wisconsin; the Honorable 
        Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the Committee of the 
        Judiciary from the State of Maryland; and the Honorable 
        Jerrold Nadler, Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on the 
        Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust 
        from the State of New York, Feb. 6, 2025, from the 
        Honorable Judy Chu from the State of California
    A letter to the Honorable Jim Jordan, Chair of the Committee 
        on the Judiciary from the State of Ohio, from the 
        Honorable Judy Chu from the State of California; the 
        Honorable Scott Fitzgerald, Chair of the Subcommittee on 
        the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and 
        Antitrust from the State of Wisconsin; the Honorable 
        Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the Committee of the 
        Judiciary from the State of Maryland; and the Honorable 
        Jerrold Nadler, Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on the 
        Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust 
        from the State of New York, Feb. 4, 2025, from the 
        Honorable Brad Sherman from the State of California
Materials submitted by the Honorable J. Luis Correa, a Member of 
  the Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory 
  Reform, and Antitrust from the State of California, for the 
  record
    An article entitled, ``Progressive becomes the latest big 
        insurer to flee disaster-prone Texas--leaving thousands 
        of residents scrambling for protection. What to do if you 
        lose coverage,'' Oct. 19, 2024, Moneywise
    An article entitled, ``15 State Facing an Imminent Insurance 
        Crisis,'' Oct. 4, 2024, Insurify
    An article entitled, ``Florida, California insurance crisis 
        is spreading. Is your state next?'' Jul. 2, 2024, CNBC
    An article entitled, ``More homeowners lose insurance in 
        areas hard-hit by climate disasters,'' Jan. 18, 2025, 
        Washington Post
    A letter to the Honorable Pete Hegseth, Secretary, Department 
        of Defense, Feb. 1, 2025, from the Honorable Jim Costa, a 
        Member of the Committee on the Judiciary from the State 
        of California
    A letter to the Honorable Scott Fitzgerald, Chair of the 
        Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory 
        Reform, and Antitrust from the State of Wisconsin, and 
        the Honorable Jerrold Nadler, of the Subcommittee on the 
        Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust 
        from the State of New York, Feb. 6, 2025, from the 
        California Democratic Congressional Delegation
Materials submitted by the Honorable Zoe Lofgren, a Member of the 
  Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, 
  and Antitrust from the State of California, for the record
    A fact sheet entitled, ``Governor Newsom's fire prevention 
        and response efforts.''
    A graphic entitled, ``The insurance industry's solutions were 
        tried in Florida and failed to stabilize the market,'' 
        showing insurance industry changes in the State of 
        Florida
    A graphic entitled, ``Over the past 20 years, home insurers 
        have done better in California than nationwide,'' showing 
        how California home insurers have done better
    A graphic entitled, ``Boardroom Influence: How Insurance 
        Professionals Shape R Street Institute.''
A statement from the National Association of Mutual Insurance 
  Companies (NAMIC), Feb. 6, 2025, submitted by the Honorable 
  Scott Fitzgerald, Chair of the Subcommittee on the 
  Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust from the 
  State of Wisconsin, for the record

 
        CALIFORNIA FIRES AND THE CONSEQUENCES OF OVERREGULATION

                              ----------                              


                       Thursday, February 6, 2025

                        House of Representatives

               Subcommittee on the Administrative State,

                    Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust

                       Committee on the Judiciary

                             Washington, DC

    The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:06 a.m., in 
Room 2141, Rayburn House Office Building, the Hon. Scott 
Fitzgerald [Chair of the Subcommittee] presiding.
    Present: Representatives Fitzgerald, Jordan, Issa, Cline, 
Gooden, Hageman, Harris, Baumgartner, Nadler, Raskin, Correa, 
Balint, Garcia, Lofgren, and Johnson.
    Also present: Representatives McClintock, Kiley, Biggs, 
Lieu, Swalwell, and Kamlager-Dove.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The Subcommittee will come to order.
    Without objection, the Chair is authorized to declare a 
recess at any time.
    We welcome everyone to today's hearing on California Fires 
and the Consequences of Overregulation. We have a lot of 
Members that will be waiving on today.
    Without objection, Mr. McClintock, Mr. Kiley, Mr. Biggs, 
Mr. Lieu, Mr. Swalwell, Ms. Kamlager-Dove, and Mr. Moskowitz 
will be permitted to participate in today's hearing for the 
purposes of questioning the witnesses if a Member yields them 
time for that purpose.
    I will now recognize myself for an opening statement.
    Earlier this year, Southern California was hit with tragedy 
as fires exasperated by strong Santa Ana winds engulfed large 
sections of Los Angeles. California Department of Forestry and 
Fire Management reports that the ongoing wildfires have burned 
more than 57,000 acres, destroyed 16,000 structures, and 
tragically caused the death of 28 individuals.
    These fires are not a new occurrence. Wildfires have been 
plaguing Southern California for hundreds of years. Abundant 
forests and shrub land, coupled with the relatively dry climate 
and strong coastal winds, increase the risk and prevalence of 
fires.
    Given the heightened threat environment, one would think 
California would prioritize mitigation efforts to reduce the 
number and the strength of fires. Unfortunately, California 
leaders have insisted and, instead, prioritized often 
counterproductive goals, like planting trees, installing 
electric vehicle charging stations, over-equipping their 
communities and first responders with the tools they need to 
protect their citizens and livelihoods. Unfortunately, this 
thinking has resulted in decades of overregulation and have 
left Californians more vulnerable to wildfires.
    For example, the State's increase of lawsuits brought by 
environmental groups under the California Environmental Quality 
Act, known as CEQA, has delayed proper forest management 
projects such as controlled burns, timber harvesting, or brush 
clearing. It has also given rise to sue-and-settle litigation 
where environmental activists sue regulators for the purposes 
of imposing a friendly settlement agreement.
    Meanwhile, the California Coastal Commission has near 
dictoral powers to approve or deny any project along the 840-
mile coastline. This muscle was flexed in 2019 when the L.A. 
Department of Water and Power attempted to replace wooden power 
lines in the Pacific Palisades area with steel. They also tried 
to widen fire lanes and install fire-resistant power lines.
    The Coastal Commission put the project to a halt and 
ordered Water and Power to pay a nearly $2 million fine due to 
the discovery of an endangered plant in the vicinity of the 
project. Governor Newsom's--Governor Newsom rightfully waived 
the requirements of the CEQA and the Coastal Act to spare fire 
victims the burdensome permitting and review requirements as 
they rebuild their homes.
    Waiving the requirements exposes the very cumbersome nature 
of these regulations. Contributing to this crisis is the 
elected California State insurance commissioner, who routinely 
has chosen to put artificial price caps on insurance rates. 
This has led to decades of stagnant insurance premiums, as 
they're an obvious political incentive to oppose rate hikes and 
has caused insurers to pause issuing new policies or leave the 
State entirely.
    It has also caused more reliance on the State's insurers of 
the last resort, the California FAIR Plan. According to the Los 
Angeles Times and insurance companies that are leaving the 
State, the FAIR Plan has been seen as a policy that could count 
and grow for as little as 200,000 in 2020 to more than 450,000 
as of September 2024.
    Taking together, these regulations have fueled the 
frequency and strength of wildfires in California. State and 
local leaders have also deprioritized fire prevention in their 
budgets. L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, for example, approved a budget 
for 2024 that cut more than 17 million from the L.A. Fire 
Department. Governor Newsom, similarly, reduced funding for 
numerous fire safety and prevention programs in the State 
budget, including 101 million reductions for wildfire and fire 
resilience programs. I'm sure you can buy a lot of EV charging 
stations for $100 million.
    Today, we will hear from a panel of experts who have been 
preaching for years to stop appeasing the environmental 
activists and begin implementing adequate water and forest 
management policies. It's my hope that these witnesses will be 
prepared to offer recommendations that State and Federal 
lawmakers may use to protect California from future fires. With 
the absent of real regulatory reform in the State, I fear 
history is tragically bound to repeat itself.
    I now recognize Ranking Member, Mr. Nadler, for his opening 
statement.
    Mr. Nadler. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to congratulate 
you on becoming Chair of this Subcommittee. While I am sure 
that we will have many disagreements, beginning with today's 
hearing, I do look forward to working with you and to finding 
areas of common ground.
    Mr. Chair, while tens of thousands of Californians are 
still reeling from the fires that forced them to evacuate and 
that destroyed their homes and their livelihoods, Republicans 
are exploiting this crisis with a hearing that does nothing 
more than provide a sad excuse to further their long-held goal 
of dismantling the regulations that keep us safe.
    Rather than face the undeniable facts of climate change and 
the need for urgent, unfettered Federal assistance to help 
Californians rebuild their lives, Republicans want to change 
the subject. We should begin by remembering the tens of 
thousands of people whose lives have been upended by this 
disaster.
    [Video shown.]
    Mr. Nadler. The devastation wrought by these fires is 
unimaginable, and the only question we should be asking now is 
how we can help the people of California recover. Despite the 
heroism of first responders and plentiful water access--all but 
one small reservoir closed for maintenance--the fires 
tragically destroyed acres on acres of homes and communities.
    Instead of responding to this tragedy with open hearts, 
Republicans, led by President Trump and his unelected co-
president, Elon Musk, have resorted to a flurry of baseless 
accusations and scurrilous misinformation seeking to blame 
California's Democratic elected officials. When they claim to 
be helping the situation, they've actually done more harm than 
good.
    For example, President Trump has falsely argued that 
environmental protection policies left Southern California 
without sufficient water to fight the wildfires, despite clear 
evidence to the contrary. Nevertheless, he ordered the release 
of over two billion gallons of water in the Central Valley, 
purportedly to support his unsubstantiated claims. The 
President claimed that the water was, quote, ``heading to 
farmers throughout the State and to Los Angeles.'' This 
critical agriculture resource desperately needed by 
California's farmers for the spring was instead, due to the 
President's actions, diverted into the Pacific Ocean, 100 miles 
away from Los Angeles.
    California does not need political photo ops that waste 
desperately needed water. They need real Federal assistance. 
How does the President respond? By insisting that any Federal 
aid come with strings attached that further his own political 
agenda, like voter ID laws. Never mind that California already 
has voter ID laws, but the President wants to play politics 
rather than help those in need.
    [Video shown.]
    Mr. Nadler. That is outrageous. It is outrageous that 
Republicans in Congress, including Speaker Johnson, have 
indicated that they are open to placing conditions on disaster 
aid, especially ones that have nothing to do with wildfires. 
Not only is that wrong for California, but it is simply wrong 
to treat the citizens of any State as pawns in a political 
game.
    Natural disasters tragically affect millions of Americans 
across the country each year. As FEMA's website explains, its 
purpose is, quote, ``to help people before, during, and after 
disasters.'' To help people, all people. It is not there to 
help just the Republicans or just the Democrats or to promote 
partisan objectives. It has always been and should always 
remain strictly neutral in its work.
    The Members should be careful before they consider 
attaching political strings to the Federal funds needed to 
recover from natural disasters. If it can happen to California, 
it can happen to your State too.
    In 2024 alone, the States my colleagues across the aisle 
represent collectively had 122 extreme weather events that 
necessitated FEMA assistance. The 122 extreme weather events 
made worse and made more frequent by the realities of climate 
change that the majority still will not acknowledge.
    Imagine if then-President Biden had conditioned necessary 
FEMA disaster recovery funds on strings that they're no 
relation to the disasters their constituents are still 
recovering from. They would have been outraged, justifiably. 
Today, they remain silent.
    Today, instead of letting California recover from the 
blazes that were contained only five days ago and to take stock 
of how to rebuild, the majority is leveraging the pain and 
suffering of Americans to push a message of deregulation over 
all else. Instead of supporting our fellow Americans as they 
pick up the pieces, instead of ensuring that our neighbors have 
the resources they need to recover from this disaster, instead 
of working to slow the devastating effects of climate change 
that affect us all, Republicans will return to their tired old 
playbook and blame everything on overregulation.
    Today we are fortunate to be joined by Frank Frievalt, a 
retired Fire Chief with actual experience on the ground 
fighting fires and saving lives. I'm looking forward to hearing 
from a true expert on how we can best help California in its 
hours of need.
    I yield back.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentleman yields back.
    I now recognize the Chair of the Full Committee, Mr. 
Jordan, for his opening statement.
    Chair Jordan. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    The Ranking Member started off his comments by saying that 
Republicans wanted to dismantle the regulations that keep us 
safe. That keep us safe? Twenty-eight Californians lost their 
lives, 20,000 structures were destroyed, 40,000 acres where 
these fires took place, and California is the most heavily 
regulated State in the country.
    We're trying to figure out how we can stop this. This is 
not about dismantling--if regulations were going to solve the 
problem, they'd have been solved--everything would have been 
solved in California because you got more regulations than any 
other place.
    So, I appreciate the Chair bringing experts in here to tell 
us what's really going on. I appreciate this hearing.
    Oh, to be clear, the clip that was shown by Ranking Member 
Nadler of President Trump was before the fires. It was clear 
back in September, for goodness' sake.
    We're going to get to the truth with our witnesses. I want 
to thank the Chair for this important hearing about regulatory 
reform that really needs to happen, and we want to make sure 
the regulations that are in California don't come to the rest 
of the country because we don't want this happening all over 
our great Nation.
    With that, I yield back.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentleman yields back.
    Without objection, all other opening statements will be 
included in the record.
    We will now introduce today's witnesses, and I recognize 
the gentleman from California, Mr. Kiley, for that purpose.
    Mr. Kiley. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    We are fortunate to have with us today witnesses who know 
as well as anyone what has gone so wrong in my State, what has 
gone so wrong in the Golden State. They will share with us the 
titanic policy blunders and staggering failures of political 
leadership that have caused such harm to California and for 
which our citizens have paid such a high price.
    I believe that today's hearing can be a moment where we 
turn the tide and restore some sanity to California fire and 
water policy while issuing a warning to the rest of the country 
about the devastating consequences of these failed policies. As 
President Trump said, ``there can be no Golden Age without the 
Golden State.''
    Our first witness is Steve Hilton. Now, most probably know 
Mr. Hilton as a British and American commentator for, among 
other outlets, FOX News. He actually, back in 2010-2012, was 
the Director of Strategy for British Prime Minister David 
Cameron, and he has now brought his unique mix of brilliant 
strategy, passion, and commonsense approach to policy to found 
a nonprofit organization called Golden Together, which focuses 
on fixing the problems that are causing a mass exodus of people 
from the State of California. That mass exodus, by the way, is 
measurable.
    For five straight years, California has ranked No. 1 in the 
country in outbound U-Haul rentals. The greatest State in the 
country, the most beautiful State in the country has become the 
most popular State to leave.
    Mr. Hilton's testimony will cover the failures in 
leadership that have led to the lack of preparation for the 
fires in Los Angeles.
    Our second witness is someone who many of us in California 
know very well and whose insights we have been relying on for a 
long time. Mr. Steven Greenhut is a resident Senior Fellow and 
Western Region Director for State Affairs at R Street 
Institute. He was a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune 
who focused on California policy and State government. He 
authored the book, ``Winning the Water Wars: California can 
meet its water needs by promoting abundance rather than 
managing scarcity.''
    His testimony will identify many areas in which policy 
promises in California were made with no follow-through from 
California leaders. As a California resident, he can speak to 
the personal impact many of these policy decisions have had on 
him and his family.
    Finally, Mr. Edward Ring, who is perhaps as knowledgeable 
about water and fire policy in California as just about anyone. 
Dr. Ring is the Director of Water and Energy Policy for the 
California Policy Center. He has a deep tactical knowledge of 
the poor decisionmaking of environmentalist California 
policymakers. He will speak directly to the prolonged 
environmental review process and the meddling of environmental 
groups that prevent proper fire mitigation and water management 
from happening in California.
    Lest anyone think that the purpose of this hearing is 
simply to identify problems rather than present solutions, I'd 
encourage you to check out Dr. Ring's written testimony in 
which he has literally dozens and dozens of concrete policy 
changes that California could make right now to improve the 
situation.
    Thank you, Mr. Chair, for convening this important hearing. 
I yield back.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentleman yields back.
    I now recognize the Ranking Member, Mr. Nadler, to 
introduce the Democrat witness.
    Mr. Nadler. Thank you.
    Before I introduce our witness, I must take strong 
exception to what Mr. Kiley said when he said, ``California is 
the most beautiful State in the Union.'' Obviously, New York is 
the most beautiful State in the Union.
    Chief Frievalt has served since 1979 with special district, 
city, county, State, and Federal fire agencies, and rose from 
firefighter to fire chief. He holds an MS from Oklahoma State 
University in fire and emergency management administration and 
currently serves as the Director of the Wildland-Urban 
Interface Fire Institute at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.
    Frank is an SME for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation 
Wildfire Advisory Council and previously served as a Senior 
Policy Advisor to the Western Fire Chiefs Association, with an 
emphasis on the development of resilient wildland-urban 
interface communities. His work is grounded in aligning key 
stakeholders around a core set of parcel and community-level 
mitigations that will disrupt the fire pathways which lead to 
conflagration. He's pursuing actuarial evaluation of risk 
mitigations for both the public and private sectors because we 
share the same desired outcome: Minimizing property loss to the 
peril of wildfire.
    I yield back.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentleman yields back.
    We want to welcome the witnesses and certainly thank you 
for appearing today. We will begin by swearing you in.
    Would you please rise and raise your right hand?
    Do you swear or affirm under penalty of perjury that the 
testimony you're about to give is true and correct to the best 
of your knowledge, information, and belief, so help you God?
    Let the record reflect that the witnesses have answered in 
the affirmative.
    Thank you, and you can be seated.
    Please know that your written testimony will be entered 
into the record in its entirety. Accordingly, we ask that you 
summarize your testimony in five minutes today.
    Mr. Greenhut, you may begin.

                  STATEMENT OF STEVEN GREENHUT

    Mr. Greenhut. Thank you.
    Chair Fitzgerald, Ranking Member Nadler, and the Members of 
the Subcommittee, my name is Steven Greenhut. I'm Western 
Region Director for the R Street Institute, a free-market think 
tank, and have written extensively about California issues for 
newspapers and books for the past 27 years. I love the State 
and want to see it prosper.
    One of the common themes in my writing has been the State's 
commitment to expanding bureaucracy and regulation without much 
regard for whether the new programs accomplish their stated 
goals. The Los Angeles wildfires have exposed festering 
regulatory hurdles that have exacerbated the crisis. Many are 
years in the making, maddeningly complex, and not given to 
quick solutions. It's a confluence of bad policy involving 
brush clearance, water, insurance, firefighting, housing, and 
climate change.
    California has created a tangled web of regulation that 
renders this once innovative State incapable of accomplishing 
anything efficiently, even environmental protection. Consider 
California's extensive climate change agenda. Instead of 
building a resilient system that handles whatever Mother Nature 
throws our way, our State constantly uses it as an excuse for 
inaction on nuts-and-bolts issues.
    By the way, uncontrolled wildfires undermine whatever 
progress we're making in reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The 
University of Chicago research found that the 2020 wildfires 
emitted close to double the State's emissions reductions 
achieved over 16 years. The Governor has agreed that we need to 
step up brush clearance, but very little happens.
    The California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA, and other 
laws require environmental impact reports for clearance 
projects and 2-3 approvals for controlled burns. They can take 
years. The State could, for instance, consider using more funds 
from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund to pay for this rather 
than prioritizing a high-speed rail system that's unlikely to 
do much about the climate. It's always an issue of priorities.
    The wildfires have also highlighted California's 
counterproductive insurance regulations. I've been writing for 
years about the coming insurance catastrophe. It can take many 
months, close to a year, for insurers to wade through the 
process of hearings, rate reviews, and opposition to such hikes 
by consumer attorney interveners who earn large fees for their 
efforts.
    The problem goes back to Proposition 103, the 1988 ballot 
initiative that instituted the prior approval system for rate 
increases and rolled back rates. It created a price control 
system. Unable to easily adjust rates to reflect risk, insurers 
quietly and then not so quietly began exiting.
    The insurance commissioner crafted a suite of useful 
reforms that were showing some promise, but why did it take so 
long? With this catastrophic wildfire, it remains to be seen 
whether these changes will be enough to stop the continued 
exodus of insurers.
    Many homeowners in the L.A. area didn't have coverage or 
were relying on the State-created insurer of last resort, the 
FAIR Plan, and there's much talk of that barebones system 
facing possible insolvency. Rather than addressing the 
insurance emergency, the Governor and lawmakers found time for 
a performative special legislative session about so-called oil 
industry price gouging. Again, it's about priorities.
    Water policy is a tangential issue related to wildfires, 
but California has built little new water infrastructure since 
the seventies when the population was roughly half what it is 
today. The State passed a major water bond a decade ago, but 
we've seen little progress on building traditional 
infrastructure projects.
    The California Coastal Commission in 2022 even rejected a 
privately funded desalination plan in Huntington Beach over 
concerns about plankton. More water would not have stopped the 
wildfires, but additional water resources would bolster 
firefighting efforts and mitigate some of the effects of 
drought seasons.
    Instead of building the basic water infrastructure 
prioritized under the Pat Brown Administration, recent 
administrations have focused almost solely on conservation and 
rationing. Yet, approximately 50 percent of California's water 
flows to the Pacific, 40 percent is used for agriculture, and 
10 percent is for urban uses. Limiting swimming pools and car 
washing is no solution.
    We've seen criticisms about the inadequate number of 
firefighters. Thanks to union power, we see abundance of L.A. 
firefighters earning total compensation packages above $500,000 
a year, with one captain earning more than $900,000 a year. If 
pay reflected market rates, California's State government and 
municipalities could afford to hire more of them.
    Finally, I want to touch on California's cumbersome 
building regulations, which are a notable hurdle in the 
rebuilding process. Thankfully, the Governor issued an 
Executive Order suspending CEQA and the Coastal Act. Why has it 
taken disaster? State officials have relaxed some rules for 
arenas and high-density housing but not in a far-reaching 
manner. Little by little, California has built up a massive 
administrative State.
    I'm hoping the heartbreaking nature of the wildfires will 
finally cause State officials to rethink this failed approach.
    Thank you for your time.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Greenhut follows:]
    [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    Mr. Fitzgerald. Thank you, Mr. Greenhut.
    Mr. Ring, you may begin.

                    STATEMENT OF EDWARD RING

    Mr. Ring. Thank you.
    Chair Jordan, Ranking Member Nadler, Chair Fitzgerald, 
Ranking Member Raskin, and the Members of the Subcommittee, 
thank you for the invitation to appear today to testify 
regarding California fires and the consequences of 
overregulation.
    My name is Edward Ring, and I'm the Director of Energy and 
Water Policy for the California Policy Center, a nonpartisan 
public policy research institute. My observations over the past 
decade have led me to the conclusion that many of you may 
share: Overregulation over at least the past--excuse me--
overregulation in California has made the State unaffordable to 
middle-class and low-income families. It has also endangered 
our lives, our homes, and our communities, and has harmed the 
environment at least as much as it has helped.
    Today's hearing centers on the consequences of 
overregulation in California with a specific focus on the 
recent and catastrophic wildfires that consumed thousands of 
homes in Los Angeles and cost many lives. While no amount of 
preventive measures or properly applied firefighting resources 
can stop all of the wildfires in our State, their frequency and 
their severity is a consequence of overregulation. The 
regulations most damaging to our forests are, ironically, 
justified by misguided environmentalist values.
    Because of environmentalist regulations and litigation 
pursuant to the California Environmental Quality Act, the 
California Endangered Species Act, and their Federal 
equivalents, California's annual timber harvest is down to 1.5 
billion board feet a year, 25 percent of what it was as 
recently as the 1980s. These and other environmental laws have 
nearly killed our logging industry while also making it much 
harder to do prescribed burns or graze. These forests are dried 
out, unhealthy, because there are now at least three times as 
many trees--at least three times as many trees per acre than 
the natural density, competing for limited light, water, and 
soil nutrients. There is an alternative.
    For example, in 2020, the Creek Fire burned 380,000 acres 
in the Central Sierra Mountains, but 20,000 acres in the middle 
of that fire, the watershed around Shaver Lake, didn't burn at 
all. That's because for several decades the owners practiced 
what they call total ecosystem management. They used prescribed 
burns, mechanical thinning, grazing, and selective logging to 
manage their forest. Wildlife biologists who were onsite 
claimed that specie counts in the area actually exceed levels 
found in forests where State regulations have banned logging.
    These practices need to be extended to all wildland in 
California. In the wildland-urban interface, Los Angeles in 
particular, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy ought to 
completely reprioritize their actions to first ensure reducing 
fire risk. California is only five percent urbanized, and that 
is where 94 percent of our State's population lives. We have 
the most densely populated urban areas of any State in America.
    The point here is that our State has plenty of open space 
and wilderness. Going to extreme lengths to return ecosystems 
to an untouched natural State is not appropriate along the 
perimeter of the city with 10 million people. In any case, our 
government at all levels has not outperformed private 
landowners in preserving habitat.
    The California State government has enacted regulations and 
enabled litigation that rewards special interests, while 
costing taxpayers literally hundreds of billions of dollars. 
Environmental regulations make housing unaffordable, leaving 
subsidized developers to inadequately fulfill a mission that 
the private sector can do. We pay higher utility rates to 
subsidize renewables. We have carbon sequestration, carbon 
offset trading, and carbon accounting. We have environmental 
litigation as a business model. Entire new industries created 
by political decree producing nothing of value.
    This disaster in Los Angeles is a clarifying moment. The 
leaders running California today can allow a deregulated 
private sector to create millions of good jobs delivering 
abundant energy, water, lumber, and housing, including 
rebuilding the lost homes in Los Angeles at a price normal 
people can afford, or we can ration our water, energy, and land 
expecting the government to subsidize millions of households 
that can no longer afford the essentials. We can manage our 
environment and expand our suburbs, redefining what constitutes 
a reasonable environmental impact, or we can retreat into high-
density urban cores and pretend the entire Earth should be 
turned back over to nature.
    I am including in my written testimony a list of laws that 
should be repealed, regulations that should be scrapped, and 
strategies whereby California, hopefully with the help from the 
Federal Government, can save our State.
    Thank you.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Ring follows:]
   [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    Mr. Fitzgerald. Thank you, Mr. Ring.
    Mr. Hilton, you may begin.

                   STATEMENT OF STEVE HILTON

    Mr. Hilton. Thank you very much.
    Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and all your colleagues, 
for giving me the opportunity to be here today. My comments 
reflect both the policy work that I've done that Mr. Kiley 
mentioned at my organization, Golden Together, specifically two 
reports which I'd like to draw your attention to: First, 
reducing California's carbon emissions through modern forest 
management, and, second, water abundance. My comments also 
reflect more recent conversations with firefighters in Los 
Angeles, retired firefighters across the State, and the victims 
of this disaster.
    I have to say to the Ranking Member, those victims will be 
offended by the remarks we just heard, which were, frankly, 
outrageous and offensive, preposterously claiming that the 
regulations keep us safe. It is the regulations that put 
Californians in danger, as we have all been highlighting.
    It's described sometimes, this disaster, as a natural 
disaster. It is not a natural disaster. This was a man-made 
disaster, more precisely a Democrat-made disaster. That is not 
hyperbole. That is the only plausible explanation for the 
impact here. We are still waiting, of course, to understand the 
ignition, what precisely ignited these fires. The impact, 
there's no question that it was the direct result of Democrat 
policy and Democrat appointments to the bureaucracies who 
implemented those policies.
    As we've been hearing, fire is a natural part of life in 
these areas that burned. That is not new. We have had fires for 
decades. We have had fire prevention for decades. In the last 
two decades, that kind of sensible fire prevention was blocked 
by Democrat policy.
    We have heard a lot, as we've watched these disasters 
unfold, about containment. What does containment mean? It 
doesn't mean putting out the fires. It means clearing the 
perimeter, fuel management, and fire prevention. That is what's 
actually happening, bulldozers and firefighters with axes.
    There's a simple question. We can do that before these fire 
disasters, or we can do it after. The choice that Democrats 
have made is to force it to be done by our brave firefighters 
after the event instead of preventively beforehand.
    Let's be specific. There is an article in The New York 
Times about Phillip and Claire Vogt, who designed and built one 
of the most fire-resistant homes in America on a peak in the 
Santa Monica Mountains.

        For months, Phillip had been volunteering to clear away the 
        dead undergrowth on the parkland surrounding his property, but 
        California officials told him he could be fined for meddling 
        with a sensitive habitat.

Who are these California officials? No. 1, CARB, the California 
Air Resources Board. In 2000, they issued new smoke management 
regulations that effectively prohibited the controlled burns 
that were the norm for decades before.
    As we were hearing, the California Coastal Commission 
prohibits sensible fire prevention measures to save Braunton's 
milkvetch shrub which they claim is endangered. Worst of all, 
as we were hearing, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, 
every single firefighter that I spoke to in Los Angeles said, 
``What are these people doing stopping us from taking the 
sensible steps to keep our communities safe?''
    This is the direct result of overregulation. I could go on. 
In 2020, the State Senate bill in the California legislature, 
SB-182, would have mandated fire prevention and resilience, 
including evacuation routes, vegetation management, fire safe 
construction. It was vetoed by Governor Newsom. Here is a quote 
from his veto letter, ``It fails to account for the 
consequences that could increase sprawl.''
    So, yet again, you have sensible fire prevention blocked by 
overregulation because of ideology about the war on single-
family homes that's being waged in California, on and on. Every 
single aspect of this disaster, the failures that led up to it, 
the failures of response, all of it the result of Democrat 
policy. Who else is there to blame? Who else has been in charge 
in Los Angeles and across the State of California in these 
years?
    Now we have some demands. We have demands from the people 
affected who never want to see this happen again. No. 1, any 
support from Congress for what's happened must include a 
requirement for their sensible reforms, the common sense 
measures that we have outlined here and is in the policy 
reports that we put before you.
    Safeguards to make sure this money, the Federal money is 
spent properly, any money. Just as we saw with the 9/11 victim 
compensation, we need a special master appointed to make sure 
that money is not wasted.
    Finally, there is a bill on the desk of Governor Newsom 
right now for Trump-proofing California, even as he goes to the 
office and begs for help for his State. Surely, a condition of 
any support must be for--
    Mr. Fitzgerald. Mr. Hilton? Mr. Hilton?
    Mr. Hilton. --Governor Newsom to veto that bill.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Hilton follows:]
   [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    Mr. Fitzgerald. Mr. Hilton, thank you. Thank you so much.
    Mr. Frievalt, you may begin.

                  STATEMENT OF FRANK FRIEVALT

    Mr. Frievalt. Good morning, Members of the Committee. My 
name is Frank Frievalt. I'm the current Director of the 
Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Institute at Cal Poly, San Luis 
Obispo. My opinions today are mine. They don't necessarily 
represent the CSU system.
    To the experience and education that was covered initially, 
I'd like to add that, of my time serving in the fire service, 
19 of those years were in California, 24 of those years were 
outside of California. I think this will be important as we 
look at--
    Mr. Fitzgerald. Mr. Frievalt, can you speak up just a 
little bit, please?
    Mr. Nadler. Make sure your mike's on.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The mike's on.
    Mr. Frievalt. Is that better? Very good. My apologies. I'm 
a soft talker.
    As I said, my name is Frank Frievalt. I am the Wildland-
Urban Interface Fire Institute Director at Cal Poly, San Luis 
Obispo. My comments today are mine. They do not necessarily 
represent those of the CSU, California State University.
    My experience that was discussed earlier, I want to make 
clear that about half of that has been inside California and 
about half of it has been outside of California. Additionally, 
the comments that I'll make are informed around my service on 
the Western Fire Chiefs Association, which represents the 
States of Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, 
Nevada, and Oregon. I also have a multistate mitigation 
alignment project underway that mitigations for wildland-urban 
interface properties that involves California, Oregon, 
Washington, Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, and Arizona.
    We are setting out really to solve two problems. The first 
is unacceptable levels of life and property loss in the 
wildland-urban interface. When we talk about interface, just 
like we have oceans and land connecting at the coastline, think 
of the interface as where combustible vegetation meets urban 
centers. So, when we say interface, that's really the intent.
    The second thing that we are solving is an impending 
national financial crisis that will cascade from the insurance 
market to the realty, mortgage lending, and general obligation 
municipal bond markets, in my opinion.
    There is, understandably, a lot of polarization on this 
issue. What I can tell you from my time working in the field on 
these types of disasters is that we need to reframe how we 
approach this going forward, and I would suggest we do it in 
the following ways.
    First, this is an urban conflagration problem. It is not a 
wildfire problem. It starts as a wildfire problem through 
embers entering communities and the reception of those 
communities on buildings. This is well-understood through Jack 
Cohen's work.
    Second, this is a national problem. It is not just a 
California problem. Lahaina, Hawaii, the Marshall Fire in 
Colorado, Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire in New Mexico. This one 
usually surprises people unless they lived back there--or here, 
the Gatlinburg fires from 2016. The 2,460 structures and 17,000 
acres. You don't normally think about that happening there.
    It's not just here. Essentially, if you look at the globe, 
30 degrees North and South of the Equator, Spain, Greece, 
Chile, Australia, and New Zealand, this is not just our issue. 
Unfortunately, we could learn from those as well.
    Another reframing is that, while climate accelerated this 
issue, it's really just two of the three primary issues.
    First, an accumulation of fuel since roughly 1910 due to 
national policy that made sense at the time and led to 
unintended consequences.
    Second, continued development into fire-dependent 
landscapes. These landscapes have a return interval that needs 
to be met.
    Third, while this issue has State and Federal consequences, 
it is always a local government issue. Unless we reframe our 
approach to the questions and the answers looking forward into 
what's coming versus looking backward into what has happened, 
we're going to continue to pursue things that are not going to 
be relevant to changing toward the outcomes that we need.
    I give you three things that I think we should commit to:
    First, is we need to prioritize selective management of 
combustible vegetation within one-half mile of wildland-urban 
interface communities above all other vegetation management 
actions. It's not to their exclusion, but it's that we need to 
prioritize those bases.
    Second, we need to retroactively harden existing structures 
in wildland-urban interface communities through evidence-based 
mitigations and create and maintain defensible space around 
those structures. To clarify, mitigations mean the various 
actions that you can take to make these structures less 
receptive, first and foremost, to embers and later to 
structure-to-structure spread.
    Third, we need to require that the evidence-based 
mitigations are included in the part of the actuarial pricing 
of risk and insurance rate setting. We know enough now about 
those relative contributions to the disruption of fire pathways 
to understand their value.
    I'll end with, the first time I understood we had a serious 
disconnect was that I had some property owners that passed our 
defensible space inspection brilliantly and had a nonrenewable 
before the week was up. I realized at that point how the fire 
service and how the insurance industries were looking at the 
same place were not connected. That's where I think we need to 
go to.
    Thank you.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Frievalt follows:]
   [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    Mr. Fitzgerald. Thank you, Mr. Frievalt.
    We'll now proceed under the five-minute rule with 
questions. The Chair recognizes myself for a number of 
questions starting out.
    The tragedy of recent fires in Los Angeles was undoubtedly 
made worse by some of the policies that make it impossible for 
California to manage long-standing fire risks inherent to the 
State.
    So, Mr. Ring, let me start with you. Why do you think there 
is such a resistance to these commonsense approaches that many 
have just heard about this morning and certainly have been 
hearing about since the fires happened in L.A.?
    Mr. Ring. I can't think of a harder question to answer. I 
find it inexplicable. I do think that some of the motivation 
for litigation, for example, that we see against sensible 
wildland management is an economic motive. Again, the 
regulatory and legal environment, because of these laws, are 
such that it's very easy to file a lawsuit to try to break any 
project that's going to develop land or manage wildland. So, I 
think a lot of it would have to do with that.
    Also, that there is a preoccupation with climate change 
that sort of diverts people from looking at, I think what Steve 
referred to as, ``the nuts and bolts.'' If you're concerned--
truly concerned about climate change, you would want to pursue 
sensible policies with more urgency, not less.
    It's partly ideology and it's partly some perverse 
incentives caused by the legal environment that we've created.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. So, what could the Federal Government do? 
What kind of steps could we take to ensure that all States, 
including California, have less roadblocks to mitigate?
    Mr. Ring. An act of Congress could, for example, make 
losers pay in frivolous lawsuits that have to do with 
environmental issues. That would be a reform that would cut 
across every law or regulation that's being exploited 
currently.
    Whereas, if you, for example, reform the Endangered Species 
Act, which is also necessary, and reforming NEPA is also 
necessary, but if you also assign responsibility to litigants 
that file frivolous lawsuits, you would take care of every 
regulation that's being exploited in that manner.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. Do you think there's anything that we're 
seeing and experiencing with the fires in California that would 
lead you to maybe scrutinize some of the statutes at the State 
level in other States that also experience forest fires, 
wildfires that California just experienced that makes sense, 
that there is a State to look toward maybe fine-tuning what's 
going on in California?
    Mr. Ring. Well, I can say that in California it would 
probably be helpful to take away the waivers that permit 
California to enact all kinds of laws that go well in excess of 
Federal regulations.
    As far as an example of a State that's managing their 
wildlands more responsibly, I can't answer that with specific 
knowledge. I think that in the Southeastern United States a lot 
of forest management is done in a way that makes a lot more 
sense.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. Very good. Thank you.
    Mr. Greenhut, let me ask you. Many States require the State 
insurance commissioner to approve a rate increase before it 
takes effect. The fast rate approvals are a crucial component 
of healthy State insurance markets. Many of us that served in 
State legislature worked in that area.
    Is there something that you're seeing that stands out when 
it comes to California that's lacking in this area, or are some 
of the moves or changes that have been made as a result of 
trying to better position themselves and, unfortunately, 
failing when it comes to insurance rates?
    Mr. Greenhut. There are about 12 States with prior approval 
systems, and California's is the strictest. You pointed out in 
your opening that--well, for one thing, it made the insurance 
commissioner an elected position. There aren't a lot of 
insurance commissioners often are looking to higher office who 
want to be the person who approved a major rate hike, and the 
problem is this has been going on for years. We're not able to 
just adjust the rates in the process.
    There are things that could be done within the Prop 103 
process. We could speed up the rate approval process, and 
California is notoriously slow for that. It's supposed to by 
the initiative, these rate reviews are supposed to take place 
within 60-180 days. The average is somewhere like 293 days.
    Then, there's one example. We have these intervenors who 
are consumer attorneys. Consumer Watchdog is one of them, and 
their predecessor group wrote the initiative. They earn 
substantial fees, essentially, opposing any sort of rate 
increase and that just drags it out.
    There's one example--
    Mr. Fitzgerald. We'll have an opportunity to talk a little 
bit further on that issue.
    Mr. Greenhut. Sure.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. I'm going to yield back.
    I'm going to recognize the Ranking Member for five minutes.
    Mr. Nadler. I thank the Chair.
    I first must respond to Mr. Hilton's inflammatory comments 
on my statement. Rules that prevent people's roofs from 
burning, rules that get rid of inflammatory material around 
homes, rules that mean that the house next door is less of a 
fire threat to your own, these are rules that save lives. 
Blanket deregulation would heighten fire risk, not lower it.
    We have heard claims from Republicans, including President 
Trump, that the water systems in California were strained 
because of overregulation. With the exception of one small 
reservoir that was down for scheduled maintenance, the 
reservoirs were full when the fires started.
    According to some estimates, when the Palisades Fire 
started, there were three million gallons of water stored 
locally. The demand to fight the fires was four times greater 
than the system had ever encountered.
    The widespread and simultaneous use of hydrants across the 
affected area did cause water pressure to drop. As experts have 
explained,

        Hydrants are designed for fighting fires at one or two houses 
        at a time, not hundreds.

As one expert in the field observed,

        We have really no lack of water. What we have is an 
        infrastructure that is not made to fight cataclysmic fires, 
        biblical-sized fires.

    Director Frievalt, for these large-scale urban fires like 
ones in Eaton and Palisades, would you say that these are once-
in-a-career fires?
    Mr. Frievalt. Thank you for the question.
    Initially, when it started, maybe. We can look at--you have 
plenty of access to the history and records and severity of 
Wildland-Urban Interface Fire institutes--or incidents. They're 
certainly on the rise.
    I would also mention that, to date, our largest acreage, 
life and property losses actually occurred a long time ago. 
First, at least it was recorded in this way, 1871 in Peshtigo, 
Wisconsin. That was burned somewhere between 1.5-2.4 million 
acres; between 1,200-2,500 people were killed. It jumped Green 
Bay. Sixteen towns were burned in that process.
    Mr. Nadler. Thank you. I have one other question. After 
large fires like these, we should be doing everything we can to 
help people in need, not point fingers and trying to blame 
elected leaders.
    You made a number of recommendations, but what would be 
most helpful to the people of California during this difficult 
time?
    Mr. Frievalt. Well, right now, we need to focus on the 
recovery part, for sure. As we move forward--I'll go back to 
the three concurrent integrated actions that I mentioned in my 
opening statement--we have to prioritize selective management 
of fuel treatment immediately around wildland-urban interface 
communities, we need to retroactively harden the existing 
inventory of structures, and we need to require evidence-based 
mitigations be included in the pricing of risk.
    Mr. Nadler. Thank you.
    I now yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from 
California, Mr. Lieu, who can speak of the devastation and the 
need for disaster relief funds.
    Mr. Lieu. Thank you, Ranking Member Nadler, for yielding 
your time. Thank you, Chair Fitzgerald, for letting me attend.
    Mr. Hilton, are you a firefighter?
    Mr. Hilton. I'm not a firefighter, but I--
    Mr. Lieu. Mr. Ring, are you a firefighter? Mr. Ring?
    It's just a yes-or-no question. Mr. Ring, are you a 
firefighter?
    Mr. Ring. No.
    Mr. Lieu. All right. Mr. Greenhut, are you a firefighter?
    Mr. Greenhut. I'm not a firefighter.
    Mr. Hilton. Are you a firefighter?
    Mr. Lieu. The Northern part of my district was evacuated. 
I've talked to numerous firefighters. I've visited the 
intensive damage. I've had multiple briefings from the 
firefighters, first responders, and fire chiefs. This is what 
they told me: The reason these fires in Southern California 
spread so quickly, caused so much damage was because of Santa 
Ana winds that reached unprecedented gusts of a hundred miles 
per hour, gusts so high the helicopters and the airplanes could 
not fly; also because of very low relative humidity and the 
driest conditions in California history.
    None of the firefighters said it was about overregulation, 
homeless people, the delta smelt fish, the timber harvests, or 
voter ID laws. So, shame on anyone who is exploiting the pain 
and suffering of disaster victims to jam through partisan 
ideological policies.
    We should get disaster aid to these disaster victims now, 
without conditions, just like we treat every other disaster 
victim across America. We just gave aid this past December to 
South Carolina, Florida, and Oklahoma. The Democrats say, 
``hey, we want you to do better on climate change policies in 
your State.'' No. We just gave that aid because these are 
Americans who are suffering. So, do not exploit them.
    I yield back.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentleman yields back.
    The Ranking Member has a unanimous consent request.
    Mr. Nadler. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    Since the majority is having this hearing on California 
fires without the participation of Members who represent the 
Palisades and Eaton, I seek unanimous consent to enter 
statements from Representatives Chu and Sherman into the 
record.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. Without objection.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. We now recognize the gentleman from North 
Carolina, Mr. Harris.
    Mr. Harris. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    We're all here trying to learn more about how to prevent 
these situations from developing in the future. I want to just, 
first, thank all of you for being on the panel today and 
sharing. I want to address a question to Mr. Steven Greenhut, 
if I may.
    Recently, areas in my own home State of North Carolina that 
were devastated by Hurricane Helene are now dealing with 
wildfires ourselves. Unfortunately, in the last couple of 
weeks, the aftermath of the storm's destruction has been 
providing fuel for these fires.
    I want to talk for a moment about the concept of utilizing 
controlled burns to mitigate wildfires. I know there are 
prescribed burn projects that happened in my district, and I 
think it's important that they continue. It is my understanding 
that implementing prescribed burns has become more difficult 
due to the regulations in California.
    Mr. Greenhut, are there significant barriers that exist in 
California to exercising these prescribed burns, and, if so, 
what are they?
    Mr. Greenhut. Yes. The California Environmental Quality 
Act, which continues to come up, CEQA, it just imposes enormous 
hurdles and delays in doing any sort of projects. So, when we 
had these horrific wildfires up in Paradise, Butte County, 
after the fires, it took two years before the county was even 
able to let out contracts for brush clearance. There was a 
previous fire where it took 18 months, I believe, to get an 
CEQA approval to do some brush clearance, and the community was 
destroyed shortly thereafter. So, CEQA is a huge hurdle for 
everything.
    One of the points about CEQA, we hear a lot that, oh, we 
need these regulations to protect the environment. The CEQA 
delays and lawsuit process doesn't help the environment.
    I was just looking up, 49 percent of lawsuits, CEQA 
lawsuits, are public projects. Many of them are environmental 
projects, including parks, university housing, and renewable 
energy. Eighty percent of them are infill projects, which are 
lot of people in California say we need more of those to deal 
with climate change. Yet, the lawsuits target those projects.
    Sixty-Four percent of the lawsuits are from associations, 
such as unions, without having--which don't have a history of 
environmental activism. In other words, they use them to secure 
wage concessions.
    So, is this helping the environment? If we're slowing 
prescribed burns and brush clearance, and we've done very 
little--we're supposed to do about, according to CAL FIRE, 
about a million acres of clearance a year on Federal and State 
land and have been doing around 125,000 acres a year, and the 
Governor said, ``we need to do more of it.'' It's just we 
haven't seen more of it and so, yes.
    Mr. Harris. Well, and that was going to be a followup 
question. I understand that Governor Newsom publicly committed 
to step up the rate of mechanical thinning and prescribed burns 
to clean up the excessive fuel in the forest.
    Again, I'll just ask you, has Governor Newsom followed 
through on that commitment at this point?
    Mr. Greenhut. Well, I agree with what he's saying needs to 
be done. What I'm looking at is that we have all these 
bureaucratic hurdles. So, even if a Governor issues an 
Executive Order, everything still gets just gummed up in the 
works. That's what I want to address is some of these long-term 
regulatory issues, not the short-term partisan issues.
    Mr. Harris. Well, let me ask you this. I want you to use 
the balance of the time.
    If you were in charge of setting policy related to forest 
management and prescribed burns, what changes would you make?
    Mr. Greenhut. Well, I think the focus, since I'm not an 
expert in forest clearance, is dealing with CEQA.
    Mr. Harris. Sure.
    Mr. Greenhut. That is an impediment to everything. Our 
State--whenever there's a project, our State needs some 
lawmaker wants to get through, such as the Kings Arena in 
Sacramento, what's the first thing they do? A CEQA exemption. 
State has offered CEQA exemptions on different high-density 
housing projects. I agree with that.
    It's just that we need to do it in a far-reaching manner so 
that all sorts of projects are spared the delays and the added 
costs. Often developers don't even--and public agencies don't 
even propose projects because they know it's going to lead to 
lawsuits and years of litigation and higher costs.
    Mr. Harris. Well, again, let me just say in closing, I want 
to thank all of you on the panel for what you're sharing. I 
don't think anybody is here to exploit anything today.
    I think we're here because we want to get the takeaways 
that can help us prevent anything like this from happening 
again. Certainly, I feel that way for my own home State of 
North Carolina and others around the country.
    So, thank you, gentlemen, for sharing.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentleman yields back.
    I now recognize the gentleman from Maryland, the Ranking 
Member of the Full Committee, Mr. Raskin.
    Mr. Raskin. Mr. Chair, thank you very much.
    I appreciate the remark of the gentleman from North 
Carolina that we should not be here to engage in political 
rhetoric and exploitation of these terrible events.
    States, counties, and localities all over America are 
affected by weather calamities that are coming on with 
extraordinary velocity because of climate change.
    I want to yield to the distinguished gentleman from 
California, Mr. Lieu, several minutes to pursue his line of 
questions.
    Mr. Lieu. Thank you, Ranking Member Raskin.
    So, the majority's witnesses, Mr. Hilton, Mr. Ring, and Mr. 
Greenhut, are not firefighters. Thank goodness we do have a 
firefighter on this panel today, Mr. Frievalt, who not only was 
a firefighter, he was a Fire Chief. He, in his testimony, talks 
about that this is not a traditional wildfire. This is a 
wildland-urban conflagration.
    I'm going to show you, in a little bit, a video of what was 
happening. I just want to explain, when you solve the wrong 
problem, not only do you not get the solution, but you can 
cause harm.
    Donald Trump has it in his mind that somehow there's a 
spigot in Northern California that he's going to open a valve 
and dump water to Southern California. Here are the facts. 
Southern California's reservoirs are at near-record levels when 
this fire happened. Didn't matter. Because Donald Trump then 
ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to release over two billion 
gallons of water that almost flooded farmland if not for the 
local water districts that pushed back.
    Guess what? This water was saved for the farmers for the 
summer season when they needed the water. So, the President 
wasted all this water that isn't even reaching Southern 
California, it's going to evaporate, for a PR stunt. This was a 
harmful, ludicrous action to solve for the wrong problem.
    So, I want to show a video now of what was happening in the 
Eaton Fire that wiped out Altadena. Just watch this 15-second 
video.
    [Video shown.]
    Mr. Lieu. That is not a timber harvest problem, not a 
desalinization problem, not a homeless person problem, not a 
voter ID problem. That is burning embers being blown by 
unprecedented Santa Ana winds that reached up to 100 miles per 
hour. These burning embers that could be softball size would 
fly for miles and miles and miles and hit a structure and set 
that structure on fire, and then that structure became the fuel 
for the fire. That's what was happening. The structures became 
the fuel for the fire.
    So, Mr. Frievalt, can you talk about--first, confirm that 
this true, and then explain in your testimony about 
strengthening the structure, the fire-resistant materials.
    Mr. Frievalt. I concur with what you said initially. Repeat 
the last part of your question, please.
    Mr. Lieu. In your testimony, you talk about how to harden 
some of these structures, fire resistant materials, which 
actually is something that might make sense, not for their 
other random policies that the majority witnesses are trying to 
jam through on ideological reasons.
    Mr. Frievalt. I would point to two standing sets of work 
that we could start on yesterday. The first is the wildfire 
prepared home designation from the Insurance Institute for 
Business & Home Safety. That's a package of mitigations that 
has been proven to be effective on really two things. First, it 
is preventative embers getting into structures and then 
starting the structure itself on fire. It also helps with low 
duration, low intensity fire in and around the structure.
    While those are necessary, they're insufficient when we get 
high concentrations of structure. We need to get enough of 
those parcel level mitigations done to protect structure-to-
structure spread. If you just do one here, one there, you'll 
still lose that piece.
    Second, comes out of the National Institute for Standards 
and Technology, Technical Note 2205, Hazard Mitigation 
Methodology, excellent set of recommendations.
    Mr. Lieu. Thank you.
    Let me just say this. It is particularly outrageous for 
witnesses to somehow blame Democrats. You know who signed CEQA? 
Ronald Reagan. That's who signed CEQA.
    Governor Newsom prepositioned assets before this fire, but 
those helicopters and airplanes could not fly over the Eaton 
fire because of their 100 mile per hour winds. That was the 
truth. That is what happened. Go do your own research.
    I yield back.
    Mr. Raskin. I'll yield back to the Chair.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentleman from Maryland yields back.
    We now recognize the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Gooden.
    Mr. Gooden. I yield my time to Mr. McClintock.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentleman yields his time.
    Mr. McClintock. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
    First, I want to assure Mr. Lieu that Messrs. Hilton, Ring, 
and Greenhut are three of the most insightful experts on 
California public policy that I've had the honor to work with 
during my 45 years of public service, and I can't imagine a 
more distinguished panel than we have before us right now.
    Mr. Lieu might also be surprised to learn that before the 
modern era, California lost four and a half million acres a 
year on average to catastrophic fire. Then, in the 20th 
century, we established land management agencies to do a little 
of the gardening ourselves instead of leaving it to nature.
    We auctioned off excess timber to logging companies that 
paid us to remove the excess. We leased public lands to cattle 
and sheep ranchers to suppress brush growth through grazing. We 
did controlled burns to remove undergrowth. We cut fire breaks 
to contain fires. We used herbicides to keep brush from 
residential areas. We put out fires before they could explode 
out of control. Our fire losses declined from four and a half 
million acres a year on average to just 250,000 acres a year 
throughout the 20th century.
    We don't know do those practices anymore. Our fire losses 
are now back up to an average of a million and a half acres. In 
2020, four and a half million acres.
    Mr. Greenhut, what happened?
    Mr. Greenhut. Thanks, Congressman.
    It just seems like an ideological shift. We've moved toward 
land preservation at all costs. I was just looking through, 
thinking of--
    Mr. McClintock. It doesn't preserve the land, does it? It's 
causing incineration of the land.
    Mr. Greenhut. Exactly. The idea is to preserve species. We 
pointed out before that some of its growth control too. Pointed 
out that a project was stopped for hardening the telephone 
poles over concerns about an endangered weed.
    Mr. McClintock. Mr. Ring, is this a policy issue or is this 
an act of God?
    Mr. Ring. Everything's an act of God, but policy has a lot 
to do with what actually happens.
    California's forest, since the enforcement of environmental 
regulations became more aggressive, are now overgrown. I know 
you're very familiar with this. The average tree density--and 
this is verified by several studies from universities in 
California: Merced, Berkeley, Davis, and elsewhere. The tree 
density in the central Sierra is now about five times what's 
historically normal.
    The ladder fuels which would--ordinarily, that's the scrub 
and underbrush, and young trees, which would normally burn in 
controlled burns or fires started by lightning strikes. When 
that doesn't happen anymore, you have trees that are allegedly 
dying because of climate change, but they're actually dying 
because you've got so many more trees competing with the same 
amount of light and nutrients.
    Mr. McClintock. Well, yes, you can actually tell the 
boundary between the private lands that are not subject to 
these laws and the public lands just by the condition of the 
forest on each side of that boundary line. How clever of the 
climate to know exactly where the boundary lines are and only 
decimate the Federal lands.
    I can offer some good news and that is, in 2016, we got a 
categorical exclusion from NEPA for forest thinning projects in 
the Tahoe Basin Management Unit. That simple change has taken 
the environmental studies from four and a half years down to 
just a few months. It has taken the environmental reports from 
800 pages down to a few dozen. It's increased the timber yield 
on the Tahoe Basin from one million board feed a year to nine 
million board feed a year. It's tripled the amount of treated 
acreage. That's what saved the town of South Lake Tahoe from 
the Caldor Fire.
    Unfortunately, right across the boundary line was the town 
of Grizzly Flats that was not protected by this law. It was 
completely incinerated by the same fire. Now, we got those 
provisions finally this year, just a few weeks ago, into the 
Fix Our Forest Act. It passed the House with 141 Democrats 
opposing it.
    Mr. Hilton, I'll give you the final word. What would you 
say to those Democrats?
    Mr. Hilton. I think I'd first say to Mr. Lieu, we'd take 
his righteous indignation a little bit more seriously if he 
wasn't in nearly every single case the first to jump on one of 
the terrible tragedies that we see too often in our country of 
mass shooting, to immediately call for the kinds of reforms 
that would stop it happening.
    Mr. Lieu. These fires have nothing to do with mass 
shootings.
    Mr. Hilton. Exactly. That's what we're here to do, to stop 
people dying, to stop people losing their homes, and to stop 
the terrible human and economic cost of these fires. That's 
what we are here arguing for, those changes that could be made 
and would stop the severity and impact of these kinds of fires.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentleman's time has expired.
    We'll now go to the gentleman from California, Mr. Correa.
    Mr. Correa. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    I also want to thank and welcome our witnesses here today. 
It is a very important issue for California, as well as the 
rest of the country.
    I'm a life-long Californian. I know the Santa Ana winds. 
They're hot, dry, strong, unpredictable, and unforgiving. Just 
heard Mr. Lieu talk about 100 mile an hour winds. This time, 
this area, it was the perfect storm.
    Hurricane strength winds, along with prolonged droughts, in 
Southern California made just fighting these fires impossible, 
led to devastation, loss of property, and terribly loss of 
life. Natural disasters are plaguing every State; floods, 
hurricanes, and fires. Insurance companies are leaving many 
States, not just California.
    Texas led the Nation when it came to natural disasters. 
From 2004-2024, there were $179 billion-plus natural disasters 
in Texas; North Carolina had 82; Virginia had 80; Wisconsin had 
49; Wyoming had 31; Florida had 61; and California had 31. 
These disasters occur in every State and their frequency is 
increasing. These disasters, these perfect storms I would say, 
occur more and more.
    Last May in Texas, a storm with hurricane-force winds 
knocked out power to over a million homes and businesses. In 
Florida and North Carolina, Hurricane Helene caused historic 
flooding and tremendous damage.
    Catastrophic wildfires have occurred across the Nation, 
including the Germann Road Fire in Wisconsin and the Great 
Smoky Mountains wildfire in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Insurers are 
fleeing these States. In Florida and Louisiana, many insurers 
have either left or gone bankrupt.
    In Texas, North Carolina, and many other States, you're 
seeing tremendous rate increases. In Texas, which experienced 
$16 billion weather-related events in 2023, five major insurers 
have ended or limited their coverage. Florida, Louisiana, and 
North Carolina all have reported nonrenewal rates greater than 
that in California in 2023. Nationwide, nonrenewal rates have 
jumped up 30 percent from 2018-2022.
    What we're trying to say is this is not a California 
crisis. This is a national crisis. We're California. Everybody 
likes to bash us. We are the center of the universe, that I'd 
say. We're the center of high tech, biotech, and we are the 
center of the entertainment industry.
    By the way, we're the No. 5 economy in the world. I hope 
that doesn't bring us any tariffs. We're also home to 70 
percent of the venture capital in the U.S., and, of course, 
home to 40 million people.
    Let's be clear. Disaster aid should never be preconditioned 
on political agendas. All of us have voted for aid for other 
States when they needed it, and we do learn from every disaster 
in California.
    Right now, California has dedicated billions of dollars, 
nearly doubling the amount we spent in 2019, to address the 
causes of forest fires. CAL FIRE and others have worked on over 
a million acres to reduce these activities that would lead to 
fires.
    California, we're doing our job. It's just the situations 
that have been impossible.
    We're all Americans, and I hope all of us remember that 
when it comes to disaster relief. When one American suffers, 
the rest of us need to show up and help. That's what we do 
best.
    Mr. Chair, I'm out of time. I yield.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentleman yields back.
    I now recognize the gentlewoman from Wyoming, Ms. Hageman.
    Ms. Hageman. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    Climate change and global warming are the scapegoats for 
the Democrats and radical environmentalists to deflect 
attention from their failed policies and the destruction caused 
by their own actions.
    In 2001, under Bill Clinton, the Forest Service adopted the 
Roadless Rule, which was designed to deny access, management, 
and use to 58.5 million acres of national forest service lands. 
We warned at the time that this rule would cause catastrophic 
forest fires, reduce the amount of water available for 
communities for farming and other uses, and also result in 
catastrophic pine beetle outbreaks, which is, in fact, exactly 
what has occurred. Every single one of the things that we 
described would happen has, in fact, happened, and California 
has suffered maybe more than many of the States.
    Recently, the gentleman who ran the Forest Service under 
Joe Biden actually admitted in a hearing that the Roadless Rule 
was one of the primary roadblocks to proper an effective forest 
range management. To say that the government is always trying 
to fix its last solution, I don't think you need to look any 
further than the Roadless Rule.
    California has essentially the same water infrastructure in 
place today with 40 million people that it had in the 1960s 
with 16 million people. When we talk about putting conditions 
on the kind of relief that is going to be necessary to help to 
rebuild California, it must include additional water 
infrastructure and fire mitigation methods to avoid having 
these kinds of catastrophes happen ever again.
    I have an article that I have just recently pulled up. It 
stated that Newsom vetoed a bill to enhance fire mitigation so 
he could grab the land for affordable housing. This was a bill 
that was introduced in 2020, SB182. It was authored by then 
State Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson, a Democrat from Santa 
Barbara, whose district had just suffered the Thomas Fire. This 
bill sought to increase local planning requirements and 
guidelines for permitting development in certain fire hazard 
severity zones.
    What happened to that bill? It passed through both the 
Senate and the House. It was actually a very good bill. What 
happened? Mr. Newsom vetoed it. Why did he veto it? Because it 
did not comport with his idea of getting rid of single-family 
homes and pushing people into multifamily homes.
    In his letter, veto letter, he actually stated, ``Wildfire 
resilience must become a more consistent part of land use and 
development decisions.'' ``However''--whenever a politician 
uses the word ``however,'' you know they're going in the 
opposite direction, don't you? ``However, it must be done while 
meeting our housing needs.''
    For him, he wanted the money and the attention and the 
policy to focus on multifamily homes, not in protecting and 
hardening the resources available for the existing homes.
    So, call me a bit skeptical when I hear the folks on the 
other side jump up and down and scream and yell about the fact 
that they've been doing everything necessary to try to harden 
and try to address these catastrophes when the exact opposite 
is, in fact, true.
    These catastrophes that we have seen over the last couple 
of months did not need to happen. This is not about climate 
change. This is not about global warming. This is about bad 
land use decisions, bad policies, and restrictions on being 
able to actually make the kinds of changes that must be made.
    Mr. Ring, while you were being questioned earlier, you 
mentioned the need for ESA reform and penalties for frivolous 
lawsuits, but I don't think that you had sufficient time to 
explain what you were referring to. Would you please explain 
what you were talking about?
    Mr. Ring. Well, Steve talked about this as well, and it 
applies to almost any kind of development or land use decision 
in California. There are laws, and it's not just CEQA, it's the 
California Air Quality Management. The CARB is an agency, and 
the Coastal Commission, which came up. There's countless laws 
and regulations that provide grounds for lawsuits.
    One of the things that might be a very meaningful reform to 
CEQA would be to take away standing to third-party attorneys 
that truly have used CEQA as a business model and restrict CEQA 
lawsuits to district attorneys and the State Attorney General.
    By the way, when CEQA was signed by Governor Reagan in 
1970, it was a two-page document that could be filed within 
weeks. Now, it's an 800-page document that takes years.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. Mr. Ring, the gentleman's time has expired. 
Thank you.
    Ms. Hageman. Thank you for your testimony.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. We're now going to go to Mr. Correa for a 
UC.
    Mr. Correa. Mr. Chair, I would like to submit some 
documents for the record.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. Yes, without objection.
    Mr. Correa. First, Progressive Insurance becomes the latest 
insurer to flee Texas, October 19, 2024.
    Second, 15 States Facing Eminent Insurance Crisis, October 
4, 2024.
    Third, the insurance crisis that started in Florida and 
California is now spreading. Your State could be next, July 2, 
2024.
    Fourth, California isn't the only place where insurers are 
dropping homeowners, January 18, 2025.
    Fifth, letter from Congressman Costa to Secretary Hegseth, 
dated February 1, 2025, concerning unplanned water releases.
    Sixth, a letter from the Members of the California 
delegation to the Chair Fitzgerald, and Ranking Member Nadler, 
dated February 5, 2025, supporting Californian's insurance 
regulation.
    Thank you.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. Without objection.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The Chair now recognizes the gentlewoman 
from Vermont, Ms. Balint.
    Ms. Balint. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    The scale of this disaster is really almost impossible to 
comprehend. We've got 29 people who are dead. We've got 16,000 
structures that were destroyed, so many Californians injured. 
While these devastating fires were raging on, Republicans' 
first reaction was to blame the wildfires on, quote, ``DEI.''
    I'd like every witness to answer this simple question yes 
or no, starting with Mr. Greenhut. Do you believe that people 
in Los Angeles died because the fire chief is a lesbian? Yes or 
no?
    Mr. Greenhut. No.
    Ms. Balint. No. OK.
    Mr. Ring, do you believe people in Los Angeles died because 
the fire chief is a lesbian?
    Mr. Ring. No.
    Ms. Balint. Great.
    Mr.--I don't know because your name is now upside down.
    Mr. Hilton, do you believe that people in Los Angeles died 
because the fire chief is a lesbian?
    Mr. Hilton. No.
    Ms. Balint. Mr. Frievalt, do you believe that the people of 
Los Angeles died because the fire chief is a lesbian?
    Mr. Frievalt. No.
    Ms. Balint. Great. So, glad we established that.
    I want to remind everyone that while fires raged through 
Main Street and Palisades, Elon Musk said that DEI means people 
die, in reference to the Los Angeles Fire Department's 
response. My House colleagues seem to agree.
    This here is a tweet from Representative Marjorie Taylor 
Greene posted on her official social media. It says, ``How is 
your DEI mayor of Los Angeles working out for you?''
    It's become crystal clear that the phrase ``DEI'' is used 
in place of much more offensive terms to talk about people of 
color, to talk about women, or queer people in this country. 
It's sickening and they are literally saying this while people 
are dying.
    So, obviously, this has nothing to do with the families who 
lost everything. It does not do anything for the communities 
that were destroyed. It's an absolutely wrong way to deal with, 
when you have a natural disaster. I know because the last two 
summers in Vermont we've had catastrophic flooding.
    What people need at this moment is leadership. Americans 
need us to get the resources that they need out to them 
immediately. America does not need a President that is hell-
bent on dismantling our Federal emergency management system or 
conditioning aid to California to profit off a community's 
devastation.
    All this talk of DEI is a complete and utter distraction 
from the fact that we need a plan, an actual plan to help the 
people of California who lost everything.
    At this point, I'm going to yield back the balance of my 
time to the gentlelady from California, Ms. Kamlager-Dove.
    Ms. Kamlager-Dove. Thank you, Congresswoman, for yielding 
me your time. Thank you, Mr. Chair, for allowing me to be here.
    I love California, and I don't like people shading my 
State, but sometimes funding disparities and a national 
election out of the fifth largest economy in the world, 
California, can roil a person's feelings about our State as a 
whole. These frail emotions should not debilitate a leader's 
execution of their job serving all the American people.
    California fires and the consequence of overregulations is 
a gross title misnomer.
    Mr. Frievalt, I have a few yes or no questions for you. 
Would you agree that the Eaton Fire happened in Altadena, an 
unincorporated portion of Los Angeles County? Yes or no?
    Mr. Frievalt. Yes.
    Ms. Kamlager-Dove. OK. Is it safe to say that L.A. County 
has more relaxed zoning ordinances and building regulations 
than the city of Los Angeles?
    Mr. Frievalt. I do not have enough knowledge to give you a 
yes or no answer.
    Ms. Kamlager-Dove. The answer is yes.
    Would you agree that permissive building codes--the notion 
of permissive building codes are antithetical to 
overregulation?
    Mr. Frievalt. The details in that question are too foreign 
for me to answer yes or no.
    Ms. Kamlager-Dove. It's a very simple question.
    Permissive building codes do not equal overregulation.
    Mr. Frievalt. I can't answer the question.
    Ms. Kamlager-Dove. All right. I'm going to answer that for 
you. Yes. Because at the end of the day, I would say, and I 
don't know if you would agree, that the entire framing of this 
hearing is actually based on a false premise. Yes or no?
    Mr. Frievalt. I believe we're approaching the discussion 
from a legacy standpoint. We're looking backward in the 
discussions and the questions when we need to be looking 
forward.
    Ms. Kamlager-Dove. We do. Instead of blaming California for 
overregulation, we should be talking about ways to help the 
thousands of people who lost their lives in these fires, 
including some of my own family members.
    With that, I yield back.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentlelady's time has expired and 
yields back.
    I now recognize the Chair of the Committee, Mr. Jordan.
    Chair Jordan. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    Mr. Hilton, you said in your testimony the speed, scale, 
and destructiveness of the fires was the direct result of 
Democrat policies. I want to know why.
    I assume those policies are why they stopped logging in 
California, why they stopped clearing controlled burns, and 
other things that's been mentioned by all the experts and some 
of our colleagues. Why would they stop those things if they 
were working?
    Mr. Hilton. The answer is that, as we discussed earlier, 
there's an ideology in play, which is extreme, and it avoids 
the kind of commonsense action that had been taken for years, 
and that is what is at the heart of the fuel load. That is the 
key concept here.
    Of course, it's true that there are winds, but it's not 
true to say that these Santa Ana winds were unprecedented. They 
were their highest in 14 years, but not unprecedented. When we 
hear about Los Angeles, of course, I agree about the points 
that were made in relation to the fire chief, but there is an 
important--if we could use a different--take one letter from 
the acronym DEI and just take the ``I'' and start a different 
word with it, ``incompetence.''
    Because you did see a total lack of coordination between 
the city firefighting force, the county, and other leadership. 
You saw a massive delay in getting equipment to that forest 
fire, which could have made a big difference in containing it. 
Forty-four minutes before anyone was there. You had the 
warnings of this disaster on January 2nd of severe winds; on 
January 3rd, life threatening winds; on January 4th, the mayor 
leaves the country. You saw a totally unprecedented set of 
incompetent responses in preparation.
    The policy failures we've outlined them. The brush 
clearance was stopped, and so the fuel load was higher, and 
that meant it spread. This conflagration spread so much quicker 
than it needs to have been.
    A point that Mr. Nadler made about the reservoir. We need 
to address this. He talked about a small reservoir. No, it was 
117 million gallons. It was built in the 1960s precisely for 
the purpose of dealing with wildfires. That's why it was built.
    It was offline for one year. Why was it offline for a year? 
Because it was action to comply with Federal regulation about 
the covers, a small tear in the cover, and they emptied the 
reservoir for a year.
    These are serious points. I hear all the time we mustn't 
politicize, mustn't make it political. I agree with that. It is 
about policy. It is about policy choices that were made that 
led to the scale and severity and impact of that.
    On insurance as well. I heard this talk about Florida. No, 
it's a different reason you had a crisis in Florida with 
insurance. It's about scam and frivolous lawsuits which have 
been addressed by the Governor.
    In California, one of the reasons that insurance costs are 
so high is because it costs four or five times as much to build 
the exact same floor plan for a building in California as it 
does in neighboring States. Why? Because of the building codes, 
because of the CEQA legislation.
    Exactly as my colleague was saying, we need to end the 
private right of action under CEQA. That would make a huge 
difference. You can help with that. We are all here to stop 
this kind of thing happening again, and there are practical 
commonsense things we can do, which all of us have laid out.
    Chair Jordan. I'm going to yield my time to the gentleman 
from California, the remainder of my time.
    Mr. Kiley. Thank you very much.
    In response to the gentlewoman from Vermont, I think the 
issue here is, for example, there was one firefighter turned 
whistleblower who said that L.A. will only purchase from 
vendors that support DEI, resulting in the fire department 
having to go with a vendor that will have to pay twice as much 
or the shipment may take twice as long because of that 
requirement.
    So, I think the point is that a public safety organization 
should be singularly focused on public safety, and this is not 
the place for ideology or social engineering.
    Mr. Hilton, one of the things that was appalling to many of 
us in the middle of the fires was that our Governor Gavin 
Newsom, set up a political website that was devoted to 
promoting himself and defending his record and trying to 
deflect blame and a rapid response organization designed to 
attack people and call any criticism of his record 
misinformation.
    I do think it's important to set the record straight. This 
is a story from Capital Public Radio from a few years ago. Now, 
is Cap Radio, is that the local FOX News affiliate or 
something?
    Mr. Hilton. I don't think it is.
    Mr. Kiley. Yes. It's the NPR affiliate, right?
    Mr. Hilton. It's NPR.
    Mr. Kiley. Not known to be a right-leaning conservative 
outlet.
    Here's the headline: ``Newsom misled the public about 
wildfire prevention efforts ahead of the worst fire season on 
record.'' An investigation from Cap Radio and NPR's California 
newsroom found the Governor has misrepresented his 
accomplishments and even disinvested in wildfire prevention. 
The investigation found Newsom overstated by an astounding 690 
percent the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and 
prescribed burns in the very forestry projects he said, 
``needed to be prioritized to protect the State's most 
vulnerable communities.''
    If it's true that fuel management and fuel reduction 
projects are so unimportant, as we're hearing from the other 
side today, then why did the Governor feel the need to lie 
about it?
    I yield back.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentleman yields back.
    I now recognize the gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Garcia.
    Mr. Garcia. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and to all the witnesses 
here today.
    Now, in my opinion, the topic of this hearing is missing 
the point. What we should be focusing on is (1) how to help 
now, and (2) how to address the root causes of drought and 
intensifying fires to prevent this from happening again. 
Instead, we've seen officials in the Trump Administration are 
talking about DEI instead of how we're going to help people. My 
colleague, Representative Balint, has already made that point. 
We're talking about how to cut disaster aid instead of letting 
FEMA do its job, which is literally to help people after 
disasters.
    I'd like to hear from Mr. Frievalt, our witness who's a 
retired fire chief. Please, a yes or no answer. The question 
won't be that difficult.
    Yes or no, is DEI making firefighters less effective?
    Mr. Frievalt. No.
    Mr. Garcia. Thank you. That's all right.
    Contrary to Elon Musk's claims that the L.A. firefighters 
did not prioritize DEI over saving lives. That is a lie, and it 
is a slap in the face to dedicated professionals and volunteers 
across the country who undergo rigorous training and risk their 
lives to save others.
    It was offensive when President Trump used DEI to blame air 
traffic controllers, and it's offensive here too. Despite 
Trump's lies about FEMA, the Agency continues to help disaster-
impacted communities during times of great need.
    So, again, I'd like to ask a question to Mr. Frievalt. Mr. 
Frievalt, yes or no, is climate change worsening disasters?
    Mr. Frievalt. From the fire perspective, the one element of 
climate change I can speak to is vapor pressure deficit.
    Mr. Garcia. Is that a yes in that respect?
    Mr. Frievalt. That part is making it more severe, yes.
    Mr. Garcia. Thank you, sir.
    As climate change worsens, disasters across the country, 
and as FEMA disaster declarations rise, districts across the 
country, represented Members across the political spectrum are 
at risk. In fact, in two Illinois counties from my district 
that it runs through, Cook County and DuPage County, we've had 
no fewer than five disasters declared since 2019. Two of those 
disasters, both flooding-related, hit my district real hard, 
and many of my constituents were able to receive FEMA's 
assistance for repairs and losses.
    Without further ado, Mr. Chair, I would like to yield my 
time to my friend from California, Mr. Swalwell.
    Mr. Swalwell. Thank you, Mr. Garcia.
    I've toured the Altadena area. I visited the Palisades. 
I've had disasters in my own district, fire and flood. Every 
person in those disasters and experiences told me the same 
thing. They just want the government to help them. They just 
want the government to help them.
    That's what a woman told me when she stood on a pile of 
ashes in the Palisades and brought gloves and a large garbage 
bag and searched for any memento for her child, and walked away 
with a tin bowl that her daughter uses in her make-believe 
kitchen. She's not worried about the red team or the blue team. 
She's not worried about did DEI cause this or not. She just 
wants the government to help them.
    My colleagues, including Mr. Issa, we walked Altadena last 
week together. We heard the fire chief say these were 80 mile 
per hour winds. He said it would have taken every fire engine 
in California to stop the devastation that occurred in 
California.
    I just ask my colleagues. Let's work together on this. 
Let's be in the solutions business. Don't use DEI as an alibi. 
Because when the President blames DEI on an air disaster and 
blames DEI on a fire disaster, what that tells me is DEI to you 
stands for ``didn't even investigate.'' That's what it means to 
fire victims in California as well. We're in the solutions 
business here.
    Chief Frievalt, I'd like for you to just tell us, as we 
move forward, as we look at code and zoning, what can we do to 
better protect against unseasonable winds in this new era that 
we're in?
    Mr. Frievalt. I return back to my opening statements on the 
three concurrent integrated actions. I don't believe you were 
here, but essentially prioritize selective management of 
combustible fuels immediately adjacent to wildland-urban 
interface communities, retroactively harden existing structures 
in rural communities through evidence-based mitigations with 
defensible space, and require evidence-based mitigations to be 
included in part of the actuarial pricing of the insurance rate 
setting.
    Mr. Swalwell. Thank you.
    Thank you, Mr. Garcia.
    I yield back.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentleman yields back.
    I now go to the Congressman from California, Mr. Issa.
    Mr. Issa. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    Hello, Mr. Hilton. I'm going to direct my questions toward 
you, but I'm going to first thank my friend and colleague, Mr. 
Swalwell. Because we were there together. We did stand 
together. We heard the same chiefs say the same thing.
    The problem is he mentioned something that absolutely is 
true. Those people, the firefighters and the residents of 
Altadena, could not have stopped that fire. It was not going to 
happen with 80 mile an hour sustained winds. Whether there was 
unlimited water or not, it would have gone sideways. It 
wouldn't have gone down if they dropped it. We heard that 
together.
    We also heard a question from one of our mayors who asked, 
looking up at the hill where we were told the fire began--and 
they actually had camera footage of it beginning--could you 
have stopped it? No. Exactly as Mr. Swalwell said. Then he 
asked, ``well, but if it had been cleared, would this have 
happened?'' He said, ``absolutely not.''
    So, we have two truisms. One is no amount of water, no 
amount of fire equipment in the State in any way, shape, or 
form could have stopped the sustained 80 mile an hour wind with 
an unlimited amount of fuel that had built up over 30 years, 
never having been cleared under California law.
    Followup questions, Mr. Hilton. The mayor, mayor of Vista 
asked the question, ``Why wasn't it cleared?'' He said, ``we 
can't get the authority.'' He said, ``on the other side of the 
mountain on more Federal land, some of it has been, but we have 
not been able to get a controlled burn on that in 30 years.''
    I'm going to ask you just one more followup. I'll give you 
one more followup question and then I'll explain it to you. 
Amazingly, we asked, ``is this fire--could it happen again?'' 
He said, ``oh, after what happened there, it couldn't happen 
again for a decade because it's been cleared.''
    Mr. Hilton. Yes.
    Mr. Issa. Mr. Hilton, is that what you're trying to 
achieve? Is that what you're bringing to us, is the commonsense 
question of why didn't we clear it, and when are we going to 
clear similar hillsides so that people not suffer again?
    Mr. Hilton. Exactly. It is the best or most simple, common 
sense preventative measure we can take. Here it is. This is the 
California Air Resources Board, 2000, their new smoke 
management guidelines which prevented the clearance. Those 
hills haven't been cleared for 25 years. How's the smoke now? 
It's just so counterproductive. I'm not saying it's ill-
intentioned, but the consequences have been deadly and 
devastating.
    As I mentioned earlier, the Santa Monica Mountain 
Conservancy, stopping people, saying you're going to be fined 
if you take responsible action to clear the brush. As I said 
earlier, it's our firefighters who end up having to clear the 
brush after the event. That's what they're doing when they say 
we're containing the fire. They're using bulldozers and axes to 
stop the perimeter from spreading. Why don't we do it before? 
Then we can prevent this loss of life.
    I agree with Mr. Swalwell. We need solutions. I totally 
agree. That's why my organization, Golden Together published a 
document, ``Rescue, Reform, Rebuild,'' with specific 
recommendations for how we can stop it happening again.
    Even on the question of firefighting, we can learn from 
other countries who do this better using technology to spot 
fires much early, so they can be extinguished earlier, so they 
don't spread and turn into these kinds of--
    Mr. Issa. If I can call on my colleague, Mr. Swalwell, 
again. Last month, I introduced H.R. 71, and, oddly enough, 
what you see behind me is the amount of pages of green tape 
wrapped bureaucracy we would eliminate if H.R. 731 passes. Yes, 
that's five feet of single-line printing that we would 
eliminate. That's what we're trying to do, and I would hope 
that my colleague would look at the bill, join me in cutting 
through some of that red tape.
    I want to leave with one thing. We have a lot to do 
together. Hopefully this hearing is going to cause people to 
realize that we can't blame just the water reservoir. We can't 
blame not enough firemen. We certainly can't blame the 
homeowners. We have to blame the fact that we created an event 
that was going to happen sooner or later. It happened to happen 
there.
    Mr. Hilton, what you brought to us today, and all of you, 
is the reality that this will happen again the next time 
there's a spark and a sustained wind in California and fuel 
that has not been taken away for more than 30 years.
    So, I'm hoping that we learn from this. I'm hoping that my 
colleagues and I can work together on the points that we can 
agree on. I want to thank the witnesses for bringing up the 
fact that this was preventable. The problem was your 
government.
    Thank you. I yield back.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentleman yields back.
    I now recognize the gentlewoman from California, Ms. 
Lofgren.
    Ms. Lofgren. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    I was also able to visit the scene of the fire last week 
with my colleague Mr. Issa and Swalwell. It was just tragic. 
The devastation is hard to comprehend, and the people, 
thousands and thousands of people who lost everything, it's 
really tragic.
    We need to work together to make sure that we do our very 
best to prevent something like that from ever happening again.
    I do think it's important that we have the facts in front 
of us. For example, under the State's leadership, the number of 
CAL FIRE personnel nearly doubled from 2019 to the present. The 
State has now invested $2 billion in managing and reducing fuel 
load in forests. In fact, the prescribed fire activity has more 
than doubled from 2021-2023.
    I'd like to ask unanimous consent to put a fact sheet into 
the record, Mr. Chair.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. Without objection.
    Ms. Lofgren. I understand that the R Street has connections 
to ensure--there have been representatives from insurance 
companies, nothing illegal or wrong about that, but what's 
being proposed is really in the insurance area something that 
is, I don't think, workable.
    Florida tried it and it didn't work. The premiums are two 
and a half times as high in Florida as they are in California, 
but there is a problem with insurance in California and across 
the United States that we don't have an answer to.
    I would ask unanimous consent to put that information in 
the record, Mr. Chair.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. Without objection.
    Ms. Lofgren. I would just like to note, looking at the 
mountains in back of the fire in Altadena you talk about 
forest, that wasn't a forest. It was chaparral. It was scrub.
    One of the things that happens in California is we go from 
the rivers to the drought. In 2023, Los Angeles County got 200 
percent of average rainfall. It just soaked the place, and the 
vegetation took off. The next year, 2024, was the second driest 
year in history in L.A. County. So, all that vegetation that 
got spurred by the rain dried to a tinder. It was a tinder box.
    One of the things that the fire chief told us when we 
visited last week is they want to do prescribed burns when it's 
wet. It's just about to rain, because they don't want--in New 
Mexico, they had a conflagration because a prescribed burn took 
off. It hasn't done that kind of rain in L.A., except for this 
week, from last April. There was no rain at all. They couldn't 
do a prescribed burn on those hillsides. They're too steep to 
put bulldozers in. That's impossible.
    So, I'm just wondering, Mr. Frievalt, as a fire chief, what 
do you do in a situation like that?
    I grew up with the mission that only you can prevent forest 
fires, right. Smokey the Bear told us that. We didn't realize 
when we did that we were building up this fuel load that needed 
to--it's a tinder box. It needs to be removed. It's going to 
take a while to sort through the accumulation of that fire.
    What do you do in a situation like Altadena where you have 
that chaparral, it's dry as a tinder, and it's not wet? You 
can't burn it. What do you do, Mr. Frievalt?
    Mr. Frievalt. This is why I keep coming back to needing to 
rethink the problem. This is not a wildfire problem. When we 
have embers that will travel miles, fire breaks won't 
accomplish what you're looking for. We will have fires and 
ignitions and the conditions we have now long before any of the 
policy discussions we're going to have--the current ones we're 
having are going to have an effect.
    We must, as fast as possible, deal with the ignitability of 
the structures in these fire-dependent landscapes. If this is 
really about dropping losses of property and life in those 
settings, if that's what we're setting out to do, with laser 
focus we have to mitigate those structures and do it at a 
density that will keep the structures from becoming a fuel 
tide.
    You've heard it from everybody. Those conditions, you 
cannot stop the fire spread. Those conditions are going to get 
worse. They're not going to plateau. This discussion about fire 
breaks and the idea of treating millions of acres, we need to 
get there.
    To your point, it's called prescribed fires for a reason. 
There's a prescription, which means there are parameters that 
you do them in. If you don't do them in the right way, you do 
have things like the Peshtigo Fire or the Hermits Peak Fire. 
So, you absolutely need to harden structures first.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentlewoman's time has expired.
    I now recognize the gentleman from Washington, Mr. Baum-
gartner.
    Mr. Baumgartner. Well, thank you, Mr. Chair, and to the 
Members of the Committee and to our distinguished panelists 
here.
    I was able to visit the fires last week. Saw that immense 
destruction. I also have some personal background here. My 
father was 40 years a professor of forestry. My uncle was a 
smoke jumper. My other uncle laid out more timber sales than 
anyone in Oregon history. I worked two summers on fire science 
research teams, and, frankly, we have way too much fuel load in 
our Western forest given 100 years of fire suppression.
    I'd like to get the solutions, so I'm going to show a short 
video from some folks in Northeast Washington that can go in 
and do the kind of forest management that we need to reduce 
these fuel loads. This is from Vaagen Timber. What they do is 
they can take very small diameter trees and still get some 
value out of them and clean out the forest.
    This is what the solution would look like. If we could play 
the video.
    [Video shown.]
    Mr. Baumgartner. Thank you.
    This is the solution that we need to implement in many of 
our forests in the Western U.S.
    My question, perhaps to Mr. Ring here, would be, what would 
it take for California to be able to implement these 
commonsense forest policies to rebalance our forest for a 
healthy forest?
    Mr. Ring. Well, we'd have to bring back the timber 
industry. We'd have to have a way to bring back, for example, 
130 mills. We're in California. You need to be within 60 miles 
of a forest to have an economical mill, and we're down to 30 
mills. That's an example of something where there needs to be 
some revolving loan funds, for example, to help the timber 
industry get back up to speed.
    We need to allow logging into national forests, which is 
very hard. Fifty-seven percent of California's forests' 
marketable timber is in national forest.
    We also have to recognize that private companies thin the 
forests far more efficiently. I talked with firefighters as 
well, Congressman Lieu, and the firefighters that I talked with 
said that CAL FIRE typically has so many people on the job and 
does forest clearing with so many rules and command and control 
and so forth that they are at about--well, he gave me an 
example, one of the firefighters. There was 28 people doing 
half the work that a three-man crew on an adjacent property was 
able to do from a private company.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. Thank you, Mr. Ring.
    I'm going to ask unanimous consent to enter into the record 
the statement from NAMIC. Without objection.
    We now go to the gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Johnson, for 
five minutes.
    Mr. Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    It's good to be with you all today. Thank you for your 
testimony.
    On January 24th, President Trump announced that he wanted 
to dismantle FEMA, saying, quote, ``I think we're going to 
recommend that FEMA go away.''
    Now, what FEMA does is help people before, during, and 
after disasters, and they've got a track record of 
effectiveness.
    Now, Mr. Hilton, yes or no, do you agree with President 
Trump that we should get rid of FEMA?
    Mr. Hilton. I don't think that question is relevant to this 
hearing, frankly. We're talking about the role of 
overregulation leading to the wildfires.
    Mr. Johnson. No, no, no, no, no. Listen, I'm the one--hold 
on, sir. Hold on, sir. I'm the one that asks the questions.
    Mr. Hilton. Sir, I'm responding by saying I don't think 
it's relevant to the hearing.
    Mr. Johnson. Well, if you don't want to answer the 
question, that's something different, and I understand why you 
would not.
    Mr. Hilton. I just think we should focus our time on 
something--
    Mr. Johnson. You're probably afraid to answer the question.
    Let me ask you, Mr. Ring. Do you agree that FEMA should be 
eliminated?
    Mr. Ring. Reform, not eliminate, no.
    Mr. Johnson. What about you, Mr. Greenhut?
    Mr. Greenhut. I don't have any opinion on FEMA. That's not 
why I'm here.
    Mr. Johnson. OK. Well, I can understand why you wouldn't 
want to opine on it either. You're probably afraid also.
    Mr. Greenhut. I'm not afraid. I just don't like to take 
opinions on things that I haven't studied.
    Mr. Johnson. You're not afraid of crossing Donald Trump?
    Mr. Greenhut. I'm not here on a partisan basis. I'm not 
even a Republican.
    Mr. Johnson. Well, you still don't want to cross swords 
with Donald Trump. I understand. A lot of our witnesses feel 
the same way that you do and for good reason.
    Now, let me ask you this question, Mr. Frievalt. Last week, 
in his esteemed wisdom, President Trump ordered the release of 
billions of gallons of water from two dams in the California 
Central Valley in a different basin than Los Angeles sits. His 
reason was to enable Los Angeles to have more water to put out 
the fires.
    Now, neither of those dams would supply water to Los 
Angeles. Isn't that correct?
    Mr. Frievalt. That is my understanding.
    Mr. Johnson. There's no way to move water from one basin to 
the next, correct?
    Mr. Frievalt. That is my understanding.
    Mr. Johnson. Instead of releasing water that goes to fight 
the fires in Los Angeles from San Francisco, those billions of 
gallons of water that President Trump ordered the Corps of 
Engineers to release just went to waste, correct?
    Mr. Frievalt. I do not know the final outcome of the water 
or the water system at that level.
    Mr. Johnson. Well, it went on into the ocean. The plan had 
been for that water to enable farmers in the Central Valley to 
be able to water their crops during the upcoming season of 
growth. Isn't that right?
    Mr. Frievalt. I'm sorry. Restate the last part of the 
question.
    Mr. Johnson. In other words, the water that President Trump 
wasted, putting it in the Pacific Ocean, was meant for farmers 
in the Central Valley to use in this current growing season to 
water their crops, correct?
    Mr. Hilton. Would you like me to help you with this 
question, sir?
    Mr. Johnson. No.
    Mr. Hilton. Because I can give you the answers you're 
looking for.
    Mr. Johnson. I'm not interested in talking--
    Mr. Hilton. You're not interested in actual answers?
    Mr. Johnson. Since you are afraid to answer my questions.
    Mr. Hilton. I'm just about to answer your question if 
you'll let me.
    Mr. Johnson. I'm the one asking the questions. You're the 
one that should be answering them, but you've already refused 
to do so.
    Mr. Hilton. I'm trying to, but you're not letting me.
    Mr. Johnson. I'm not asking you about this one, though. Mr. 
Frievalt I'm talking to.
    Mr. Frievalt?
    Mr. Hilton. He said he's not focused on it. I can help you 
with it, if you'll only ask me.
    Mr. Frievalt. Let me answer, sir.
    Mr. Johnson. Sir, if you would just be quiet, that would be 
helpful.
    Mr. Frievalt?
    Mr. Frievalt. I do not understand the operational benefit 
to the L.A. fires and the release of the water.
    Mr. Johnson. Yes. It was a ridiculous decision, reckless, 
and unhelpful.
    Mr. Frievalt, you have 40 years of experience in the fire 
service. The other witnesses said that, ``California's air 
quality regulations stopped the controlled burns that would 
have prevented the fires.'' Given Southern California's 
chaparral-dominated ecosystems, those kinds of controlled burns 
would have actually put them at greater risk of uncontrolled 
fires. Isn't that correct?
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentleman's time has expired.
    Mr. Johnson. The Chair is not going to afford me the same 
leeway that it has afforded other Members of the panel to go 
over their time?
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The witness can answer the question.
    Mr. Johnson. Thank you, sir.
    Mr. Frievalt. I believe the question was did the air 
quality management rules impede the ability to do prescribed 
fires. Is that the question?
    Mr. Johnson. Yes, would those controlled burns have 
actually put the community at greater risk of uncontrolled 
fires?
    Mr. Frievalt. Prescribed fires conducted outside of 
prescription can cause greater risk. Prescribed fires done 
within prescription can be a tremendous benefit.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. All right. The gentleman's time has 
expired.
    I recognize the gentleman from Virginia, Mr. Cline.
    Mr. Cline. Thank you.
    I want to ask Mr. Greenhut. California's home insurance 
market is being held hostage by insurance commissioners and a 
judicial system that punishes insurers for attempting to price 
insurance based on risk. For example, in 2014, State Farm 
requested a rate increase of 6.9 percent, which was opposed by 
the insurance commissioner and an advocacy group. Initially, 
State Farm was told that instead of a rate increase, they were 
to retrospectively reduce rates by seven percent and rebate 
their customers $100 million in excess premiums.
    After years of litigation, the courts ruled that State Farm 
didn't have to pay back the excessive premiums, but they were 
ordered to pay 2.2 million to the consumer group for their 
legal fees. My understanding is this is allowing outside 
intervenors, as it were, to challenge proposed insurance rate 
increases and being paid expenses for doing so.
    Is it reasonable to expect insurance companies to operate 
in an environment that required them to pay off their 
challengers even when they win in court?
    Mr. Greenhut. Well, imagine this started in 2016, and it 
was resolved, what, a year or two ago. The whole system--and it 
was designed by the consumer organization, and they get paid 
intervenor fees for, supposedly, standing up for consumers. 
That whole process took several years.
    Imagine going, if you have a business, and you propose a 
rate increase, and then the government says, no, you have to 
decrease rates by X amount. Then you get launched into this 
long court battle. Even after you win the court battle, which 
State Farm did--and it was a pretty strong verdict in their 
favor--they still had to pay these intervenors around a couple 
million dollars.
    Now, under Prop 103, there are things that the State could 
do without going back to the initiative process to look more 
closely at how these intervenors are paid and make sure that 
they contribute substantially to the process. A lot of this is 
language in Prop 103. We need to enforce that language as it 
exists.
    There are things that could be done about that intervenor 
process without going back to the ballot.
    Mr. Cline. It sounds like, once again, California way of 
thinking. To that end, let me yield the remainder of my time to 
my colleague from California, Mr. Kiley.
    Mr. Kiley. Thank you very much.
    One of the problems with making climate change the sole 
focus of these discussions is that it leads to a sense of 
fatalism, like there's nothing we can do, or it leads to 
measures that are absurdly misaligned to the nature of the 
problem.
    So, for example, in 2020, in the midst of the worst fire 
season of California history, just unimaginable suffering, the 
Governor, Gavin Newsom, came up with a grand solution, which 
was to ban gas-powered cars. This is actually what he did. His 
reasoning was, the cars cause emissions, which cause climate 
change, which cause the fires; therefore, we just need to ban 
the cars. In fact, followed up with a ban on trucks, on trains, 
even on lawnmowers and leaf blowers.
    So, Mr. Ring, in your opinion, what is the most effective 
strategy when it comes to fire prevention? Is it banning cars 
and leaf blowers or is it reducing fuel through things like 
prescribed burns and strategic tree removal?
    Mr. Ring. Well, the answer to me is obvious. You're not 
going to have any sort of short-term impact certainly or even 
long-term impact if the rest of the world doesn't do the same 
thing with respect to whatever the theories may hold with 
respect to greenhouse gas and climate change.
    What you can do is bring back logging, bring back grazing, 
and also mechanical thinning, which would be effective in the 
chaparral and out on the steep hillsides. You can do mechanical 
thinning, and you can do grazing. There's equipment that can do 
that nowadays. Of course, grazing, they've been able to do that 
for millennia.
    Bringing back logging, thinning, grazing, and prescribed 
burns is the solution. A lot of that can be done commercially, 
which would actually generate tax revenue and good jobs instead 
of costing hundreds of billions of dollars.
    Mr. Kiley. By the way, which is more effective at reducing 
or limiting emissions, those sorts of fire prevention measures 
or banning certain consumer goods?
    Mr. Ring. Well, I banning consumer goods has almost no 
impact on emissions compared to being able to properly manage 
our forests and wildlands.
    Mr. Kiley. In fact, wasn't there a study showing--and, Mr. 
Greenhut, I think you can speak to this--that in the 2020 
fires, the emissions that were let out there was twice as much 
as any savings California had for, what was it, the previous 
16--
    Mr. Greenhut. Sixteen years. We're undermining any gains 
we're making in every wildfire.
    Mr. Kiley. That's right.
    I'll just close by pointing to an example that was brought 
up earlier. My district was hit by one of the most devastating 
fires in State history where hundreds of people lost their 
homes in Grizzly Flats. That fire might not have happened or 
been as severe as it had been if it had not for delays through 
CEQA and NEPA with a forest management project that had dragged 
on for years and years and years.
    On the other hand, the fire was limited from going into 
South Tahoe because of the categorical exclusion that Mr. 
McClintock spoke of in the Christmas Valley. You had the fire 
that might not have started if we had done our job properly. 
Because we had this narrow form of relief, at least we were 
able to stop it from spreading even further.
    I think that that is the recipe for how we can reform these 
policies and restore some common sense going forward.
    I yield back.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentleman yields back.
    That concludes today's hearing. We thank our witnesses for 
appearing before the Committee today.
    Without objection, all members will have five legislative 
days to submit additional written questions for the witnesses 
or additional materials for the record.
    Without objection, the hearing is adjourned.
    [Whereupon, at 12:09 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]

    All materials submitted for the record by Members of the 
Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, 
and Antitrust can be found at: https://docs.house.gov/
Committee/
Calendar/ByEvent.aspx?EventID=117864.

                                 [all]