April 24
The Press Democrat on population loss in Northern California wine country:
Sonoma County lost something even more vital than housing to the 2017 wildfires. We said goodbye to about 3,300 neighbors.
That, according to a new U.S. Census Bureau report, is how many people moved away in the year following the Tubbs and Nuns fires. The census pegs the population decline as 50% more than a previous calculation by the state Department of Finance.
These numbers are more than a curiosity. They reflect a dysfunctional housing market as well as the obstacles and costs of rebuilding after the fires. They foretell looming challenges for local employers and for public programs whose funding is linked to population, among them highways, housing assistance, education and health care. And, as Supervisor David Rabbitt noted, a decline in population can portend a loss of diversity in the community.
“Either story is one of migration away from Sonoma County and a harbinger of how places like Butte County may be seeing its population change for 2018,” Sonoma State University economics professor Robert Eyler told Staff Writer Martin Espinoza.
The drop in population also underscores the importance of assuring a complete and accurate count next year in the decennial U.S. census, as those results will determine funding levels for myriad public programs in the coming decade.
Over the 18 months since the fires, we have heard from many ex-Sonoma County residents who hadn’t planned to relocate but decided after losing their homes that it would be easier, and in many cases much less expensive, to start over somewhere else.
Meanwhile, hundreds of new homes are going up in Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park, where about 40% of pre-fire residents were renters. With substantially higher rents for the new houses, many long-time residents are being priced out of the neighborhood.
“I don’t think you’re going to see the same families coming back,” Sarah Giometti, a volunteer with the neighborhood support group Coffey Strong, said recently. “Coffey Park is going to lose some of the character that people liked about it.”
“How can our economy continue to function if working-class people can’t afford to live here?” asked Tricia Woods, a Coffey Strong board member.
Public schools already were coping with declining enrollment before the fires, but the pace has increased. The number of students in Santa Rosa public schools fell from 16,400 in the 2016-17 school year to 15, 400 this year, with a projected loss of 300 more students next year and at least 500 more by 2020-21. The trend was a factor in the decision not to rebuild the Hidden Valley Satellite School, the only local school that burned in the 2017 fire.
The state agreed to protect Sonoma County school districts from reductions in enrollment-based funding for two years after the fires. But the reprieve ends next year.
The 2020 census, which is now less than 12 months away, is always important for every community. It’s never been more important here.
For now, the upcoming census is caught up in controversy over the Trump administration’s ill-advised plan to risk an undercount by asking about people’s citizenship - an issue argued Tuesday at the U.S. Supreme Court. However that plays out, it will be crucial to raise public awareness to guarantee an accurate count in Sonoma County and across the country.
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April 23
The Press-Enterprise on authorities’ reaction to a California law that limited civil asset forfeiture:
When the Legislature debated a bill to restrict California law enforcement agencies’ ability to seize houses, cars and cash they say may be “linked to crimes,” police and prosecutors complained that its passage would cost them millions of dollars that they depend upon to fund various programs.
A new analysis by the Southern California News Group has found that Senate Bill 443, which went into effect in 2017, has indeed slashed the money California agencies receive from “equitable sharing” - a civil-asset-forfeiture program whereby state and federal law enforcement split the proceeds of any private assets they take.
With the data in, police are complaining again about the financial hit, but the drop in revenue is good news for Californians. There’s nothing “equitable” about a program by which the government seizes property without first convicting its owners of a crime.
Asset forfeiture was created during the height of the 1980s War on Drugs to give cops a tool to attack the profit motive of drug kingpins. But then police agencies became addicted to the profits. Instead of targeting the likes of Pablo Escobar, they focused on easy marks. There is no due process, because the property, not its owners, is the target. So police don’t need to gain a conviction and victims have to go through a long process to try to get their property back.
That process is, quite frankly, un-American. Two former Justice Department officials who helped create asset forfeiture later argued that “the tactic has turned into an evil itself, with the corruption it engendered among government and law enforcement coming to clearly outweigh any benefits.” They called for the program to be abolished, but there are few things tougher than prying funds from the hands of government agencies.
One 2012 Anaheim example encapsulated the problem. Anaheim police partnered with the feds to seize a $1.5 million office building after a tenant was accused of selling $37 worth of marijuana to an undercover officer.
The case eventually was dropped, but it shows how the program targets ordinary people. Police have confiscated people’s cars after picayune amounts of drugs were detected or seized cash after a traffic stop without ever linking it to criminal activity.
While they grab people’s assets without proving law breaking, some police departments have themselves played fast and loose with the rules. The “equitable sharing” idea was designed to let local agencies circumvent state laws that limited the use of forfeiture. Instead of following state limits, locals operated under looser national standards and then split the loot with the feds.
Asset-forfeiture funds were never supposed to supplant agencies’ budgets, but only to fund extra programs. The agencies, however, have come to depend on the cash for their operations. They sometimes treat the money in questionable ways, with a recent report suggesting that a New York district attorney used these dollars to pay for luxury travel.
We’re dismayed that California law enforcement continues to criticize SB443 based on budgetary concerns. Sorry, but police are required to pursue justice, not profits. If law-enforcement agencies really want to seize private assets, they can do so - but only after convicting the owner of a crime.
There’s a need for federal reforms, but at least California’s law is showing results.
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April 21
The Sacramento Bee on California homes adopting fire-safe code:
After the apocalyptic Camp Fire reduced most of Paradise to ashes last November, a clear pattern emerged.
Fifty-one percent of the 350 houses built after 2008 escaped damage, according to an analysis by McClatchy. Yet only 18 percent of the 12,100 houses built before 2008 did.
What made the difference? Building codes.
The homes with the highest survival rate appear to have benefited from “a landmark 2008 building code designed for California’s fire-prone regions - requiring fire-resistant roofs, siding and other safeguards,” according to a story by The Sacramento Bee’s Dale Kasler and Phillip Reese.
When it comes to defending California’s homes against the threat of wildfires, regulation is protection. The fire-safe building code, known as the 7A code, worked as intended. Homes constructed in compliance with the 2008 standards were built to survive.
As many as 3 million homes stand in what the state calls “very high fire hazard severity zones,” according to Cal Fire. These areas, where the climate and the presence of combustible foliage can lead to tinderbox conditions, are destined to burn. The data on which homes survived the Camp Fire should be a call to action for every city in the danger zones.
Unfortunately, short-term thinking can triumph over common sense. Cities facing severe fire risks can avoid compliance with the fire-resistant building codes, or choose to avoid their obvious advantages, despite the fact that “a new home built to wild-fire-resistant codes can be constructed for roughly the same cost as a typical home,” according to a report by Headwaters Economics.
Take Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park neighborhood, where the Tubbs Fire killed five people and destroyed 1,321 homes in 2017. The neighborhood wasn’t considered a fire hazard zone, unlike some other areas of Santa Rosa. The Tubbs Fire proved otherwise, but Coffey Park still isn’t designated as a “very high fire hazard zone” by Cal Fire.
“City officials are OK with that,” according to The Bee. “Although developers rebuilding Coffey Park are being urged to consider fire-resistant materials, city spokeswoman Adriane Mertens said the city doesn’t see any reason to impose the 7A code in the neighborhood.”
Mertens suggested high winds on the night of the fire meant officials have no reason to require fire-safe construction as Coffey Park is rebuilt. One fire scientist called Santa Rosa’s stance “an error in judgment.”
Folsom also appears to have its head in the sand with regards to fire risk. It’s allowing the Folsom Ranch development to be built without adherence to the fire-safe code. The parcel of land south of Highway 50 was formerly managed by Cal Fire and designated as a moderate fire risk zone, which would trigger the fire-safe building requirements. Once Folsom annexed the land for the new development, the city decided to opt out of the 7A code because the area was never considered a “very high” fire hazard zone.
The city will require “vegetation management” plans and fire-resistant fencing. But they may eventually put 25,000 people into non-fire-safe housing in an area Cal Fire knows has a higher risk of burning.
Getting officials and developers to follow the fire-safe code in increased risk zones is hard. But the even bigger problem is how to retrofit the millions of homes built before the new standards existed.
“What are we going to do about the existing housing stock that’s been built in these places?” asked Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist at UC Santa Barbara interviewed by The Bee. “For the existing housing stock that’s out there, that isn’t built to these codes, we have a massive retrofitting issue on our hands.”
“You’ve got to get in and retrofit,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom, citing McClatchy’s reporting during a press conference at the state’s Office of Emergency Services operations center.
Assembly Bill 38 is a good place to start. The bill by Democratic Assemblyman Jim Wood of Santa Rosa would provide $1 billion in loan funds to help homeowners retrofit their properties. It’s not enough money to retrofit every home, but it’s a start and that can raise public awareness of the dire need for fire-safe retrofits in hazard zones.
The state fire marshal is currently developing a list of low-cost fire retrofits that the state plans to promote once it’s finalized in 2020.
In addition, Cal Fire is revising its fire zone maps, and the “very high fire hazard” zones will surely spread over a larger portion of the state. This time around, local officials won’t be able to opt out of the requirements, as they can under current law.
A series of recent “atmospheric river” storms made fire season seem like a bad memory. But it’s all too easy for most Californians to forget that these rains feed the growth of vegetation that turns into kindling.
Thanks to McClatchy’s analysis, we now know fire-safe building codes can mean the difference between survival and destruction. When the next big incinerating fire barrels down on a city full of ready-to-burn homes in the hazard zone, we can’t claim we didn’t know better.
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