Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, announced legislation on Monday to create the Wildfire Mitigation Planning Act to better prevent and contain wildfires.

The bill would create a framework for evaluating wildfire mitigation investments taken by state, federal and private actors and better coordinate utility wildfire mitigation efforts across California to increase the overall effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of wildfire related investments.

“With this cycle of heavy rains and prolonged droughts, we cannot take our eyes off of the risks that major wildfires present to communities across the state,” Sen. Dodd said. “Wildfires don’t respect county lines or utility service areas, so we need a coordinated and comprehensive approach to keeping California safe. We’ve made a lot of progress in recent years, but climate change continues to compound challenges and underscores the need for us to be thoughtful about how we do the most good, as quickly as possible, with our investments.”

Catastrophic wildfires impose enormous costs on the state of California and its residents.

In the aftermath of the Camp fire, Sen. Dodd co-authored AB 1054, which created a framework for electric utilities to evaluate their wildfire risk and plan for their wildfire mitigation investments and activities, overseen by the Office of Electric Infrastructure Safety within the California Natural Resources Agency.

More recently, the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force, a multiagency effort to identify needs and develop strategies to better manage wildfire risk, has produced plans to better manage wildfire risk.

Current spending on utility wildfire mitigation exceeds $10 billion per year while state budget wildfire expenditures have grown to $1.3 billion over two years.

Meanwhile the U.S. Forest Service recently announced major wildfire mitigation investments in California and other western states wildfire mitigation activities that will total $930 million.

No framework exists to evaluate how these multiple activities will interact and might be coordinated to maximize their effectiveness and cost-effectiveness.

The Wildfire Mitigation Planning Act would require the Office of Electric Infrastructure Safety to prepare a Wildfire Risk Mitigation Planning Framework every three years to quantify the potential benefits of actions taken by state and private actors to reduce wildfire risk.

The bill then requires that the Office of Electric Infrastructure Safety prepare a wildfire risk baseline and forecast on statewide baseline wildfire risk and risk mitigation potential over the next one to 10 years.

It would also mandate an annual wildfire mitigation scenarios report quantifying actual risk reduction from all actors and investments within the State of California.

Finally, Dodd’s measure empowers the Office of Electric Infrastructure Safety to coordinate utility spending with this planning framework in order to maximize the effectiveness of all investments related to wildfires being made within the State of California.

"Preventing catastrophic wildfire requires strong coordination between all of our investments,” said Michael Wara, interim policy director of the Sustainability Accelerator at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and director of Climate and Energy Policy Program and Senior Research Scholar at the Woods Institute for the Environment. “Building on current efforts, this bill would create a planning structure to maximize the effectiveness of California's work to reduce the impacts of wildfire. As California spends more to prevent catastrophic wildfire, we should also make sure that these investments go as far as possible in keeping residents safe. This bill creates a planning structure that does just that and ensures that all our efforts are well coordinated."

The act, also known as Senate Bill 436, is expected to receive its first committee hearing and vote next month.