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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

Can the Forest Service make this up with use fees? Like, could California pay the Forest Service to take care of its land surrounded by California?

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I think the issue is that it's federal land. They would just have to authorize California to do it on their behalf.

Here in Oregon (and elsewhere), we have multi-agency partnerships between governments, different federal agencies, local tribes, homeowners, etc.:

https://www.conservationgateway.org/ConservationPractices/Fi...

https://firenetworks.org/

I'm not sure how it works in California, but wildfires don't really care about our jurisdictional boundaries...

It could possibly be managed by the state by placing a tax on fire insurance which would basically be a workaround to Proposition 13. That would probably be about as popular as a Chinese "weather" balloon but it does have a certain poetry of having the people who use the forest — by living in it — pay to manage it.

The fire insurance that is unaffordable or just straight not available anymore to those same people?

Most California landowners are hardly poor. We're talking about a state with more than double the GDP per capita of Japan. And the property taxes are in some cases among the cheapest in the world. We're talking about just over a million homes in fire zones, while the total budget for the Forest Service is about $10 billion per annum. That's $10k per year per house to fund the financial equivalent of the entire Forest Service — for roughly a third the rent I pay on a studio apartment in Bergen County. I'll try to find a small enough violin for these landowners. Yes, there are some people who are asset-rich and liquidity poor, but we are not talking about West Virginia.

Effective fire prevention will also make fire insurance cheaper and reducing development in fire-prone areas will reduce the cost of forest management.

California has already taxed everything that can be taxed, and raised taxes to the point that further tax increases are likely to result in a decline in tax revenue.

Were the camp fire or the town of paradise burning down counter examples to your points? IIRC those were not terribly wealthy towns. Could you clarify?

Second, how do you know it is just one million homes? I'm interested to learn more there

I'm a little consfused what point you are trying to make with those numbers. I don't get how comparing the nation budget of the USFS against homes in California on fire zones is an argument for anything.

California spends a roughly an order of magnitude more per acre they are responsible for, when compared with the USFS so I don't think underspending by California is the issue here. The problem seems to be the lack of authority for CalFire to manage fire risk on federal land.

If the fire insurance is just straight not available, that is probably because people should not be living there.

There is only one reason why insurance straight up isn't available somewhere, and the reason is regulation.

I can assure you that no matter how high the risk of fire, insurers will be willing to provide insurance on that so long as they are legally allowed to charge the appropriate premiums.

That would be the part of the grandparent where the other option is ‘unaffordable’ yes?

> There is only one reason why...

Not true. Assume for the moment that you're the CEO of Golden Insurance Co., and you're still writing fire insurance policies in Burn County, CA. After Yet Another massive fire - and loads of "100% loss" payouts - from your balance sheet - the experts in your Risk Estimating Dept. say the premium to insure a $600K house in Burn Co. needs to be $200K/year - because they expect to pay out to replace that house ($600K) every 4 year ($150K/year), and they need the other $50K for overhead and temp. relocation benefits and rebuilding-cost inflation and a bit of hedge - just in case they're wrong, and things burn down even more often.

Now - if the fire insurance for a $600K house costs $200K/year, how many of the homeowners can and will actually pay that much for fire insurance? Perhaps a number that's falling like a rock? Meanwhile, Wall St. is howling about the horrible risk that your balance sheet is facing, if there's another big fire season. And the 99% of homeowners who can't afford those premiums are bitterly angry, and in a mood to string up the bearer of bad news (meaning you) from the highest tree still standing.

SO - why wouldn't you, as CEO, make the unfortunate decision to just stop writing fire insurance policies for properties in Burn Co., CA?

The answer amid a lack of regulation is NumptyCo sells a policy for $10k, pays most of that to its owner, and declares insolvency at the first sight of a claim.

No one is going to spend $10 a month to insure a paper plate. If no one is going to buy a policy, it doesn't make sense to have the infrastructure in place to sell that policy. Thus no one offers insurance policies on paper plates.

>people should not be living there

How do people afford to move and start new lives when you can't sell your property because it is uninsurable?

perhaps we should not treat systemic social failure as individuals' responsibility to resolve on their own without support of the State

> we should not treat systemic social failure as individuals' responsibility to resolve on their own without support of the State

Nobody is suggesting jailing the irresponsible. But there is no reason they’re entitled to that capital. They took a risk and it was a bad one.

People living in the forest (who’s doing this exactly? you didn’t specify) are not the problem. Wildfires are a natural event meant to bring balance to an overgrown forest. All of CA suffers from this so why force only some to pay?

Since CA tends to be a rich state, I vote that those living in SF and LA pay 75% of the required fees, and the remainder of the state pay the rest.

They can use the lumber fees from the forests to pay for the cost.

That is much more complicated than it appears. Cutting and transporting trees is not easy or free, and there is already a huge glut of wood caused by the die off from phytophthera. Might still be worth looking into.

I'm not from the region so I'm wonder if this glut of wood translating into low prices for end consumers?

lumber future prices are up over the last few months. currently 593, was 493 in July.

https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/commodities/lbr

Have you seen that happening?

Did prices for wood even go down post-COVID back to their previous level?

That's why I'm asking. I live in Canada where we produce a tremendous amount of lumber but it's processed in the US and the prices spiked during COVID and while they've gone down haven't returned to anything resembling the baseline.

Baseline before COVID, or baseline factoring in the (global) post COVID inflation spike?

It looks like it is more or less back to a rough pre-COVID baseline, if inflation is factored in: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lumber

(But I'm certainly not seeing the glut of cheap lumber that others may appear to be alluding to here...)

"Low prices for end consumers" seems to be around the current $3-$4 per 2x4x8 stud in retail terms, but standing lumber was never worth much even at the peak of the lumber shortage a couple years ago, it was all sawmill-limited.

Most consumers want straight boards for building. Most wood, particularly from die offs, is curvy branches that may be useful when ground up for wood based products like pellets, MDF, or paper.

This would be true if the federal allowed more than a nominal amount of logging. Most trees and logs come from private land. See page 8: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R45688

Not without Congress doing something to enable it.

> Not without Congress doing something to enable it

Why? We played with the farfetched hypothetical of California unilaterally acting on federal land. But if the Forest Service says “come on in” and they do, I’m struggling to see who would face any real consequences given the Congress’s power of the purse isn’t being touched.

OP is talking about CA paying money to the park service. Different than them handing over a license to burn.

> OP is talking about CA paying money to the park service

Sure. I don’t see how the Congress stops that if the USFS (not Parks) and Sacramento strike a deal.

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