Check the facts: Did Gavin Newsom cut $100 million in fire prevention funding? | Politics News

As wildfires in California caused the least two dozen deaths and billions of dollars in damagesome social media users accused Gov. Gavin Newsom of cutting money to prevent the fires.

Many outlets, including Fox News, have reported that Newsom cut about $100 million for fire prevention from the state budget in the months before the Los Angeles fires.

Some of the posts relied on a Jan. 10 Newsweek article reporting that Newsom signed a budget in June that cut wildfire and forest resilience funding by $101 million. Republicans in the California Assembly have made similar statements about reducing fire protection, citing data from the state budget. President-elect Donald Trump published a Breitbart article that repeated the $100 million claim, citing Newsweek.

Newsom said it was a “ridiculous lie” that he cut $100 million, which he countered on his new California Fire Facts website. But the website didn’t dissect the $100 million; he focused on the big budget picture during his tenure, arguing that the budget increased for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, Cal Fire.

Newsom is right that the budget has increased. But it is not a lie that the money (actually more than 100 million dollars) has been reduced.

State Fire Service Budget Facts

In 2021 and 2022, California ran a budget surplus. The state has allocated an additional $16.3 billion to address issues ranging from drought and sustainable agriculture to wildfires and extreme heat, said Gokce Sencan, a research associate at the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank.

As part of this, the state allocated 2.8 billion dollars for forest fires and improving forest health. However, after budget deficits in 2023 and 2024, the state reduced that amount by $191 million ($47 million in 2023, $144 million in 2024). The budget deficit amounted to tens of billions of dollars.

Cal Firewhich oversees about 12.5 million hectares (31 million acres), responds to hazards and disasters including fires. The ministry has a budget of about 4.2 billion dollars for the period 2024-2025. Most of the money comes from state funds, but it also includes fees from local departments and the federal government.

The Newsweek story cited an analysis by the State Office of Legislative Analysts, a nonpartisan office that works for the state Assembly, that it said showed a $101 million cut. That office told PolitiFact that Newsweek cited a report summarizing the governor’s 2024-2025 budget proposal.

The proposal included $101 million in funding cuts for wildfires and forest resilience. That represented a reduction in the previous surplus-year budget agreement that called for one-time wildfire funding for a four-year period, from 2020 to 2024, said Rachel Ehlers, who works in the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

The adopted budget spending plan reduced the planned multi-year one-time funding for wildfires by $144 million.

“Let me emphasize: these were cuts to one-time increases, not cuts to Cal Fire’s ongoing core programs and funding,” Ehlers said.

Of the $144 million reduction, the largest – $46 million – was for a pilot project aimed at generating hydrogen from biomass through the Ministry of Environmental Protection. The goal of the forest management project was to address the issue of forest health and wildfire risk in the Sierra Nevada.

That pilot never took off, Ehlers said. The budget also cut $35 million for wildfire resiliency projects on state lands and $28 million for projects undertaken by state preserves.

Many of the program cuts were small, percentage-wise. For example, the forest health program dropped from $555 million to $552 million, a decrease of about half a percent. Prescribed fire and support crews, which use hand tools to fight fires, fell from $134 million to $129 million, a decrease of nearly 4 percent. Fire prevention grants remained the same at $475 million and fire prevention projects at $90 million.

Jim Stanley, a spokesman for the state Assembly Republican caucus, also pointed to figures showing a proposed cut of $100 million and an actual cut of $144 million. We asked Stanley if Republicans opposed the cuts at the time. He quoted House Republican Leader James Gallagher as saying in June 2024 that the budget did not adequately fund public safety.

In 2021, Cap Radio (a former PolitiFact partner) reported that Newsom “misrepresented his accomplishments and even disavowed investment in wildfire prevention. The investigation revealed that Newsom overstated, by 690 percent (a nearly eightfold increase), the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burning in the very forestry projects he said needed to be prioritized to protect the state’s most vulnerable communities.”

Cal Fire’s budget and spending have increased

Cal Fire’s total base budget for fire protection has nearly tripled over the past 10 years (from $1.1 billion in 2014-15 to $3 billion in 2023-24), according to an analysis by the Legislative Analyst’s Office in March prior to the approval of the 2024-25 budget .

Cal Fire’s overall budget has also increased, with its combined budget for fire protection, fire emergency suppression, resource management and fire prevention more than doubling over the past 10 years from $1.7 billion in 2014-2015. to $3.7 billion in 2023-2024. Newsom’s office sent us similar information showing the budget increase.

Number of employees working on fire protection it grew similarly during that decade, rising from 5,756 to 10,275.

Another way to look at Cal Fire is through expenditures rather than the budgeted amount because it’s not uncommon for the state to dip into other pots of money to spend more than budgeted to deal with fires.

The California Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates that Cal Fire’s total spending increased during Newsom’s tenure from $2.74 billion in 2019-2020. to $4.59 billion (not adjusted for inflation or including additional costs incurred due to the current fires in Los Angeles) in 2024-2025.

In November, California voters approved Proposition 4, a $10 billion climate bond that allocates $1.5 billion to forest health and wildfires.

PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird and chief correspondent Louis Jacobson contributed to this report.