Thread by @MichaelWWara

So excited to see a bill that is near and dear to my heart in print! SB 440 (@SenBillDodd) would create a sustained funding source for wildfire hardening ($1 billion over 10 years) and earthquake retrofit ($500 million over 10 years). #resilience #wildfire

The California Senate and Assembly have tried for several years to fund wildfire hardening but have come up short. @GavinNewsom proposed a small pilot last January that was zeroed out due to COVID and has proposed it again this year. This bill takes a much bigger and bolder step.

The bill would accomplish this by creating post-event assessment for major quakes in California for which @CalQuake pays ~$150m per year for. Basically a new insurance policy for CA where the premium is paid to help reduce catastrophic risk in our state.

The assessment would only be triggered if something worse than a 1906 quake and fire occurred and would max out (if something like 2x Northridge losses occurred) at about $46 per household in California.

In the meantime, CA could meaningfully invest in making communities safer from the catastrophic risks we face. Wildfire and quake. The status quo approach is shipping money offshore to the global reinsurance industry (@CalQuake is the largest purchaser of reinsurance on earth).

So the trade is basically, instead of paying reinsurance capacity (whoever that is) $200M/y, we pay construction workers and arborists in CA $150M/y and take the chance that a 1 in 200 to 1 in 400 year quake will occur, after which we would have to pay up to $46/y for a decade.

Trading insurance for risk reduction is a deal I have long thought we need to do more of in CA. SB 440 is one approach to doing that. It’s a good deal for CA but faces a long uphill battle. Thanks @SenBillDodd for being an enduring champion of wildfire safety and resilience!

The bill text is here: leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavC…

I should have added that these tweets are my own personal views and not those of the CA Cat Council, the Wildfire Fund, @CalQuake, or the wonderful Senator @toniatkins who appointed me to serve in the Wildfire Fund oversight role.