Report: Gavin Newsom’s Wildfire Prevention Program Has Not Completed a Single Project

California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) wildfire prevention program has yet to complete a single project, two years after it was announced, thanks to onerous state environmental regulations that could allow wildfires to start and spread far more easily.

An investigation by Capital Public Radio and National Public Radio’s California Newsroom revealed that the prorgam, the California Vegetation Treatment Program (CalVTP), “hasn’t led to the completion of a single project,” contrary to claims that it would cover 45,000 acres in its first year alone.

Capital Public Radio reported:

A monthslong investigation by CapRadio and The California Newsroom found that projects across the state … are encountering a bureaucratic bottleneck before shovels can even break ground. The state’s byzantine environmental approval process, required under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), is slowing projects from Mendocino County to the Sierra Nevada to the Central Coast. The landmark environmental law was intended to protect ecologically and environmentally sensitive landscapes. But foresters worry that the glacial pace of environmental approvals under CEQA may lead to a much worse outcome — extreme wildfires obliterating these areas.

To combat this, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration launched a program more than two years ago that promised to break the logjam, by fast-tracking environmental reviews. But that program, called the California Vegetation Treatment Program (CalVTP), hasn’t led to the completion of a single project so far. This stands in stark contrast to projections by the state Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, which anticipated CalVTP would lead to 45,000 acres of completed work in its first year.

…

Money is not the problem. The state set aside roughly $1.5 billion for fire mitigation and forest resilience last year. Cal Fire is scrambling to get this money out the door, and many projects across the state are funded. But the clock is ticking. Without the green light to complete prescribed burns, fuel breaks and vegetation thinning, nearby communities are at the mercy of another wildfire season that threatens to be just as devastating as the last two, which burned nearly 7 million acres combined.

In 2021, Capital Public Radio and the California Newsroom conducted another investigation that found that the governor had misled the public about the success of the state’s wildfire prevention efforts, overstating progress by 690%.

Democrats have evaded responsibility for forest management in California by blaming climate change for massive wildfires. Then-President Donald Trump drew criticism for blaming the state’s poor forest management, while wildfires were burning.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.