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  • 2018-11-13 (xsd:date)
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  • Did California Governor Jerry Brown Veto a Wildfire Management Bill, Increasing the Risk of Wildfires? (en)
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  • In November 2018, after the Camp Fire broke out in Northern California, killing more than 40 people and destroying thousands of homes, social media users began sharing a three-month-old article that placed a share of the blame for California's 2018 wildfire season, already one of the most destructive in living memory, at the desk of Governor Jerry Brown. On 8 August, the Flash Report web site, which covers California politics from a conservative-leaning point of view, reported on a piece of legislation from 2016 which was intended to address one aspect of the state's perennial wildfire problem but was vetoed by Governor Brown, a Democrat. The article carried the headline CA Gov. Jerry Brown Vetoed Bipartisan Wildfire Management Bill in 2016 and read: In the context of the Camp Fire in November, Facebook users shared the Flash Report article widely, with many observers citing it as evidence that Brown bore some of the blame for the many similar wildfires which cost lives and caused massive destruction to property in the intervening two years. As Flash Report indicated in their August article, Governor Brown did indeed veto Senate Bill 1463 in September 2016, after it had been passed by both houses of the California legislature without a single vote in opposition. That legislation would have had imposed the following requirement: Flash Report was somewhat self-contradictory in their characterization of this veto. On the one hand, the article claimed that Brown did not properly address his rationale for refusing to sign the bill, but it also accurately wrote that Brown had said, roughly speaking, he regarded the provisions of the legislation as redundant due to an initiative that was already under way. In his veto message, Brown wrote: The author of the Flash Report article, Katy Grimes, claimed a link between the prevalence of destructive fires in California in recent years and Brown's decision to veto SB 1463, referencing one of her earlier articles: Despite drawing this connection, Grimes' article did not contain any specific evidence to support the notion that Brown's vetoing SB 1463 contributed to or exacerbated California's wildfire problem. In response to our questions, a spokesperson for Brown directed us to a spokesperson for the California Public Utilities Commission, who outlined in further detail the risk mitigation efforts undertaken as part of the agency's initiative with CalFire (the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) and said that the bill Brown vetoed would actually have slowed down that progress: (en)
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