State Senator Henry Stern, who represents an area that stretches from Moorpark to Universal City, wants to slap an annual fire fee, statewide, on property owners in areas where the state is responsible for firefighting.
His argument is that people can afford to pay it.
In a hearing on his Senate Bill 1404 in the Senate Revenue and Taxation Committee last week, Stern said that in the “places I grew up in, like in Malibu or Marin” people like his parents “could probably pay $115” for fire protection.
However, the same fire fee that his friends and family can so effortlessly pay would also be levied on people who live in trailers, manufactured housing and small homes in rural areas. Some may pay two or three times as much as Stern’s wealthy clan, because the fee could be as high as $150 and would be owed for each “habitable structure” on the property. A house and two trailers? Three times the fee.
Staci Heaton with the Rural County Representatives of California spoke in opposition to the bill on behalf of 40 of the state’s 58 counties. She said many of the 4 million people living in the wildland urban interface are “low-income, socioeconomically disadvantaged” and already burdened with wildfire resilience costs.
Heaton said residents have been asked to pay thousands of dollars for home-hardening retrofits, and a sizable chunk of their monthly utility bills pays for wildfire mitigation activities. They’re paying more for insurance, when they can get it, and their county and city taxes pay for firefighting even if it’s in a different area.
“People are going to get double-charged” by a fire fee, Heaton said.
Maybe more than double-charged. The fire fee that Stern seeks to impose was initially created in 2011, but had high administrative costs and faced legal challenges. The fee was suspended in 2017 and was set to be repealed entirely in 2031 as part of a legislative deal to extend the cap-and-trade program, which collects money by auctioning permits to emit greenhouse gases. The deal called for wildfire resilience costs to be paid from those funds.
Refineries, utilities and manufacturers can’t operate without the emission permits. The cost is passed through to consumers in higher prices for gasoline, electricity and just about everything else.
So Californians throughout the state are already paying a lot for fire prevention. According to the Senate committee’s analysis of SB 1404, in 2015-16, CAL FIRE’s budget for wildfire resilience activities was $100 million, and by 2025-26 it was $700 million.
However, Sen. Henry Stern sees a moral value in charging people even more. He told the committee, “By folks having skin in the game” and paying a “modest fee,” they’d be “part of the solution.”
This is how the people you have elected to go to Sacramento do these jobs. Government failures are irrelevant. You have to pay more until you’re skinned alive in the game.
“It’s not as if we’re going to be cutting wildfire funding anytime soon,” Stern told the committee, “but we need everything we can get.”
“Everything we can get” is also the goal of the powerful labor union behind the “2026 Billionaire Tax Act.” This week, the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West turned in enough signatures to put the measure on the ballot. A simple majority of California voters is all it will take to seize 5% of the wealth of about 200 California billionaires, if they aren’t all Texas billionaires by then.
The union’s measure directs the money from the tax to benefit the union’s own priorities. All they’re missing is a parrot and a boat to be card-carrying pirates.
There’s not much difference between Stern’s argument for the fire fee and the SEIU-UHW’s argument for the billionaire tax. “They can afford it,” is the mantra. No reforms. No reviews. No belt-tightening. Just more tax increases.
The Billionaire Tax Act allows the Legislature to rewrite the law later as long as the change “furthers the purposes” of the Act. Since the purposes are confiscation and more spending, it could eventually become a “wealth tax” on home equity and retirement accounts.
Billionaires are bait. You’re the fish they want on the hook.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley