By Amy Kalish : marinpost -excerpt
There is a new and dangerous assault on local control. Senator Wiener is not content to merely wrest zoning from cities. He is now targeting Fire Hazard Severity Zone Maps as “impediments” to housing.
SB 610 upends local considerations — and would eliminate the State Fire Hazard Severity Zone maps and familiar terms — most noticeably “ember resistant zones.” A whole new system would instead declare portions of the state “Wildfire Mitigation Areas.” There would be no comparative maps to see where changes were made.
Wiener introduced SB-610 “Fire prevention: wildfire mitigation area: defensible space: State Fire Marshal” as a “gut and amend” bill, meaning the contents were completely changed after it had already passed the Senate in an innocuous form (a proposed annual report by the chair of the State Energy Resources Commission).
The Assembly had no time to digest the language or its ramifications and it has sailed through.
Wiener bluntly states the reasons to ditch a functioning system in his SB 610 Fact Sheet:
- “to keep localities from weaponizing the fire hazard mapping as anti-housing/development tools.”
- “LRA (Local Responsibility Area) maps can functionally result in restrictions on growth in those areas through imposing costly building standards, increased disaster planning and mitigation requirements, or increasing home insurance premiums.”
- “Local jurisdictions have the ability to misuse this process and make the majority of their community a high or very high FHSZ (Fire Hazard Severity Zone) map that could impact housing development.”
- In other words, the Maps must go in order to keep cities and counties from cheating their way out of “fair share housing.”…(more)
How can anybody be so callous about human lives?