Memorandum Of - Tuolumne County: Fill & Download for Free

So, to start, this issue is a lot more complex than it lets on. Take a gander at this answer I wrote on a similar question first. It’s not long, and when you get back I’ll add some more context to it.Thomas Rhodes's answer to Should campfires be allowed in parks when they can get out of control and cause such devastation?Read that?Alright, cool, now for some more nuance.Estanislao Deloserrata Brought up that California’s state policies have not helped the state in this regard, and he’s right to some extent. State policies generally, not always, mirror the federal government’s policies in one way or another when it comes to areas like environmental policies and criminal justice reform (I said policies way too many times in that sentence, I’m so sorry). In this case, California’s forest regulations have mirrored the federal government’s for a long while, and the federal government hasn’t officially updated them since 2009. A memorandum was issued to most upper management employees in 2017, urging them to be more aggressive in fire management and to apply it holistically rather than just among fire staff, but the regulations themselves haven’t changed.Commensurately, California has yet to update theirs as well. From that page, most of their regulations haven’t changed since 2007 which seems about right. Like I said above, states mirror the federal government and usually lag behind about a year or two when it comes to these areas of policy and regulation. The federal government has more money to throw at things like long-term studies to determine the long-term effects of a particular policy or to experiment with new policies; Once the federal government finds something that works, the states adopt it from there.So why hasn’t California updated it’s regulations and how to apply them like the US Forestry Service and Fish and Wildlife have?Once again, money is the issue. California Wildfires Show Massive Failures of State Regulations – InsideSources The article restates a lot of what I said up above and in my previous answer regarding campfires, however it also gives a reason as to why these policies haven’t changed; to quote from the article:“Already this year more than 700,000 acres have burned across the state creating significant carbon releases that counter our efforts at reducing greenhouse gases,” said CAL Fire director Chief Ken Pimlott, on Wednesday. At the same time, Pimlott announced the awarding of $170 million in fire prevention grants and forest health projects.Although a significant sum, the money may be only a drop in the bucket of what is needed. While revenues from the state’s cap and trade program have been earmarked for fuel reduction, funding from other parts of the state budget was frozen. Funding at the local level is similarly precarious and, given the backlog of trees that need to be removed, even with state help, removing them is simply too expensive in many areas.“At a conservative estimate of $1,000 per tree for removal, we were looking at $9 million for roadside tree removal. At a 25 percent match for disaster assistance funding, that is $2.25 million that we had to come up with out of our reserves. Our reserves were $2.3 million, so the entirety of our reserves had to go just for the match,” Supervisor Randy Hanvelt of Tuolumne County explained in a meeting last year.California also has a unique issue as well: A lack of readily available water with which to fight these fires.In addition to problems with forest maintenance, California’s water control policies have restricted water use to protect various types of fish. Pumping restrictions at the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta sent 151,000 acre-feet of water to the Pacific Ocean in June. This volume, enough to meet the yearly water needs of almost half a million homes, could also have been redirected at least in part to help replenish groundwater supplies. Limitations on the amount of water that can be used for irrigation in other parts of the state has the potential to lower groundwater levels there as well.Even after the fires, these water levels are difficult to replenish. Without trees to hold water in the ground, rain quickly drains away, leaving the state’s water tables even lower.Before we go on, tt’s important to note that utility companies in California are not state-owned. Pacific Gas & Electric, the company currently under multiple lawsuits for it’s potential involvement in the Camp Fire (That’s not confusing), is an independently traded company on the New York Stock exchange, beholden to both shareholders and to the people of California. It is regulated, but it doesn’t belong to the State of California. Some reports have been made that a tower which had blown over in 2012 was seen sparking around the time the fire started, however these have yet to be substantiated. The investigation is still underway and a cause has yet to be determined.As for the state itself, again, money at the local and municipal level has been the restricting factor when it comes to implementing actual solutions to these problems. San Diego County was found to have very inadequate solutions and responses, completely lacking in coverage in some areas when it came to fighting the Witch Creek and Guejito fires of 2007. The reason? San Diego county only had a fire prevention budget of 8.5 million dollars to cover an area as populous as Orange County but five times the size of it.So where does that leave us when it comes to actually answering the question?California definitely isn’t blameless, but neither is the US government. Wildfire regulation has been slow to change and adapt, thanks in large part to a very prolific bear and an advertising campaign that was far too successful.I don’t like attributing to malice what can be attributed to stupidity, but in Trump’s case I fail to see how removing federal funding helps any of the problems we’ve talked about considering that funding is the primary obstacle to implementing proper wildfire protection regulations. That’s just fanning the flames and can only lead to more problems due to lack of funding in the future.