Wildfire County Coordinator Program

The law builds local capacity to plan, fund, and carry out wildfire-risk reduction, including home hardening, defensible space, evacuation planning, and smoke preparedness. It also seeks to align county work with state and regional resilience plans.

What the law does ​

• Requires the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to create the California Wildfire Preparedness Program, with guidance and tools for wildfire-risk modeling, county risk assessments, mitigation priorities, and preparedness plans.
• Requires the department to oversee the Wildfire County Coordinator Program and contract with the California Fire Safe Council to administer and deliver it.
• Gives participating counties support to coordinate wildfire prevention, mitigation, preparedness, and recovery activities, collect outcome and cost data, and connect with public funding.
• Supports measures to reduce the cost and improve delivery of home hardening and defensible-space work, including shared purchasing, standard retrofit scopes, and practitioner training.
• Requires coordination with the California Wildfire Mitigation Program Joint Powers Authority to streamline financial assistance for home hardening and defensible space in high-risk communities.
• Supports smoke-preparedness efforts such as clean-air spaces, HEPA-filter distribution, education, and communication about planned prescribed burns.

Who it affects ​

• Participating counties, local fire agencies, fire safe councils, resource conservation districts, tribes, cities, special districts, and wildfire-mitigation practitioners.
• Residents and communities at high wildfire or smoke risk.
• The California Fire Safe Council and the California Wildfire Mitigation Program Joint Powers Authority.

Context ​

The law does not regulate insurers' catastrophe or wildfire risk models used in insurance ratemaking filings.