Consumer groups won. Last month, the state Senate stripped most of the provisions from the bill, instead directing the insurance commissioner to review the current rules and report back to the legislature in two years. Even by the end of the annual legislative study on Monday night it had failed to get a clear step vote.
“It was effectively gutted,” said Rex Frasier, president of the California Personal Insurance Federation. “Despite a fire in half of California.”
The state insurance commissioner said his focus is now on working with high-risk communities so that insurers will provide adequate coverage without raising the rates enough to put their forest fires at risk. “I will continue to move quickly to meet the costs and availability of wildfire insurance affecting our state,” Mr. Lara said. “If the people of California will do their part to protect homes from wildfires,” industries should respond by agreeing to insure those homes, he said.
But reducing the human and economic toll of wildlife will require reform rather than tweaking the building code or promoting better landscaping, others said. It may also need to address the shortage of new housing in California cities, which has helped drive growth in areas at risk of burnout, a trend that continues even after years of severe wildfires.
David Shaw, former chief of staff at Cal Fire, said the spread of homes in the fire country seemed like a fair trade. “There is a great need to build housing in more affordable areas, basically what kind of these could be more open, fire-affected landscapes, because the land there is cheaper,” Mr. Shaw said. “There was a feeling, well, it was dangerous.”
But the logic that climate change makes wildfires more destructive seems less clear, he said. – More stringent restrictions on construction in high-risk areas exacerbate the short, statewide housing crisis, there are physical and political limitations to what the government can do to reduce this risk, which means insurance will become more expensive.
“We will never, ever have enough fire engines to park in every driveway,” Mr. Shaw said. “It’s just going to get worse.”
