After brutal fire season, California lawmakers call for seasonal firefighters to be employed year-round
A bipartisan group of California lawmakers this week announced legislation that would transition about 3,000 seasonal firefighters who work for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to year-round employees. The legislation would also ensure fire engines, helicopters and vegetation management crews are working every month of the year.
'More aggressive fires, and an unrelenting year-round wildfire season, demands more aggressive responses,' Senate Pro Tem Mike McGuire, a Sonoma County Democrat, said in a statement. 'Wildfires don't take three months off. ... This investment will make communities more wildfire safe and greatly improve fire and emergency response in every corner of California.'
The transition to full-time staffing would cost the state an estimated $175 million each year, according to McGuire's office. It wasn't immediately clear where those dollars would come from.
Cal Fire currently lays off some of its lowest ranking firefighters — yet the largest proportion of its workforce — during the winter after they work for nine months, though they can be called back during emergencies. Cal Fire firefighters typically work April to December.
But in recent years, Cal Fire officials have continued to warn that California no longer has a fire season but instead has a year-round threat as human-caused climate change worsens, which has been found to intensify fires and made them more explosive. UC Irvine researchers found that climate change and increased development has lengthened the historical fire season.
Read more: Opinion: California's inmate firefighters deserve more than a raise. Make them employees
'January has highlighted a new reality of climate change, one that demands we fully prepare for year-round, climate-driven disasters, making legislation for increased staffing levels essential," Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena) said in a statement. "Firefighters are experiencing these staffing shortages firsthand and need additional personnel to ensure they can respond effectively to disasters wherever they occur."
The bill has not yet been formally introduced, but McGuire said it will be referred to as the Fight for Firefighters Act. Lawmakers announced the effort just weeks after two devastating fires razed parts of Los Angeles County in January — typically one of the slowest months for fires. Jesse Torres, a Cal Fire spokesperson, said the agency was forced to call back in firefighters who'd been laid off for January, February and March to respond to the major conflagrations.
We "are getting more devastating fires in months we never expected," Torres said. He said when he first started at Cal Fire in the late 1990s, he worked a seasonal shift from June to November. Now, seasonal fire crew staffing takes place from April through December, and is still not long enough, he said.
Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a similar bill, not because he didn't agree with the objective, but because he said the state was already planning to hire 2,000 new full-time firefighters who would work a new, shorter workweek.
But lawmakers say Cal Fire's crews deserve steady work that will not only improve the state's preparedness for fire, but also improve the firefighters' mental health and working conditions. A CalMatters investigation in 2022 uncovered a worsening mental health crisis among the agency's firefighters, who said they struggled to recover from grueling shifts and trauma from the front lines, with little assistance.
"From battling wildfires to responding to emergency calls, we owe the brave men and women of Cal Fire our highest debt of gratitude," Sen. Minority Leader Brian Jones (R-San Diego) said in a statement. "We have much more work to do, but this bill is a critical first step to giving our firefighters the job stability and support they need and deserve.'
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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The Hill
15 minutes ago
- The Hill
Perino hits back at Newsom social media criticism: ‘We get the joke'
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Fox News
31 minutes ago
- Fox News
New Schiff leak claim from whistleblower echoes years of similar accusations
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Yahoo
33 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Conservative critics of Gavin Newsom's social media feed appear to miss the point
It is no secret that Gov. Gavin Newsom relishes opportunities to get into political scuffles with Donald Trump and the White House, but lately, the California Democrat and his team have taken this to an unexpected level with a new online strategy. This tactics have hardly been subtle: Newsom's office recently started using social media to mock the president by emulating the president, publishing missives that are clearly intended to mimic Trump's hysterical tone and ridiculous writing style. (Some of the missives even conclude, 'Thank you for your attention to this very important matter!!!' echoing the Republican.) The content is deliberately rude, brash, self-aggrandizing and insulting — because it's satirizing the president who uses his own social media platform to push rude, brash, self-aggrandizing and insulting content. Some of Newsom's conservative critics appear to be missing the point of the effort. One Fox News host complained late last week that the governor's online content 'comes across as childish' and seems unbecoming of someone who's 'the governor of the biggest state in the union.' As HuffPost noted, a different Fox News host kept this going earlier this week. 'You have to stop it with the Twitter thing,' [former White House press secretary Dana] Perino said, before adding: 'I don't know where his wife is.' ... 'If I were [Newsom's] wife, I would say, 'You are making a fool of yourself, stop it' … He's got a big job as governor of California, but if he wants an even bigger job, he has to be a little bit more serious.' By all appearances, she was quite sincere. In keeping with the shtick, Newsom's office published a follow-up item specifically responding to the Fox News co-host's criticism in the same way Trump tends to respond to his own media critics. This really shouldn't be necessary, but let's go ahead and make this plain: The governor's social media team is doing a surprisingly good job sounding eerily similar to Trump. If it were me, I'd probably add a few more grammatical errors — the president has, for example, struggled to properly spell words like 'tap' — but the tone and style are spot-on. Whether the right understands this or not, to criticize Team Newsom's content as childish, foolish and fundamentally unserious is to necessarily criticize Trump's content as childish, foolish and fundamentally unserious since the former emulates the latter. A Politico report summarized the developments this way: 'With an inescapable, smashmouth, all-caps-laden and meme-filled X account, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is holding a mirror up to MAGA — and MAGA doesn't like what it sees.' Or as the governor's office put it, 'ALMOST A WEEK IN AND THEY STILL DON'T GET IT.' This article was originally published on
