Gov. signed legislation to accelerate wildfire mitigation projects, expand prescribed and cultural burning, and create new tools for firefighters, the governor’s office said on Sept. 29, 2026.
The office said the bills codify emergency streamlining measures that have already fast-tracked more than 500 priority wildfire-prevention projects, including over 310,000 activity acres of treatments across nearly 130,000 footprint acres; the administration said those changes can shave a year or more from review timelines for complex projects, moving fuel reduction and restoration from planning to implementation faster while maintaining environmental safeguards.
The package extends State‑Certified Prescribed Fire Burn Boss certification from one year to three years and directs the State Fire Marshal to explore expanding the pool of burn-boss instructors, the office said; it also codifies the governor’s 2025 executive order expanding tools for beneficial fire projects.
The legislation establishes a Fire Innovation Unit inside CAL FIRE to coordinate wildfire-technology research, procurement, and deployment; it creates a California Wildfire Preparedness Program to support county-level mitigation planning and standards for local risk modeling and analysis, the governor’s office said.
Homeowners and businesses will get new tools to harden buildings; the package creates a low-interest loan program to reduce up-front costs for home hardening and defensible-space activities, the office said.
The bills also require the California Public Utilities Commission to update rules to address permanently abandoned transmission lines and to account for active, inactive, and abandoned transmission infrastructure in utilities’ wildfire-mitigation plans; urban retail water suppliers in high- and very-high-fire-hazard zones must incorporate wildfire preparedness into disaster and emergency-response plans, the office said.
The governor signed multiple bills by name, including AB 1699 (Good Fire Act: Prescribed Fire Liability Pilot Program), AB 1749 (interfering with wildfire suppression with a drone), AB 1964 (State Fire Marshal: home hardening), SB 1079 (creating the Fire Innovation Unit), and SB 1370 (consolidated and expedited review for covered wildfire mitigation projects), the office provided.
The administration cited on-the-ground projects completed under the temporary streamlining, including a 600+ acre fuels-reduction project near the Palisades in Los Angeles; the 450-acre Prosper Ridge prescribed and cultural burn project in Humboldt County; and a nearly 3,000-acre Scott Valley/Callahan fuels-reduction project in Siskiyou County, the office said; other cited projects included strategic fuel breaks in San Luis Obispo and Calaveras counties and stewardship work in Santa Cruz and San Diego counties that used grazing to reduce fuels. The office attributed the project list and acreage counts to the streamlining it enacted earlier this year and in 2025. .
State
Gavin Newsom
Governor · Democrat
Named 2 times in this story.
Portrait: Official portrait
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