Governor Newsom Signs Landmark Package of Wildfire Bills

September 2026 – The 2026 legislative session resulted in a package of new laws designed to significantly strengthen California’s ability to prevent, prepare for, and respond to wildfire. Signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in September, these measures advance several Task Force priorities, including landscape-scale wildfire mitigation, beneficial fire, community and home hardening, regional coordination, innovation, financing, and more efficient implementation of wildfire resilience projects. Together, these measures provide new authorities and tools that can help California increase the pace and scale of wildfire resilience investments while strengthening the connection between statewide policy, regional planning, and community-level implementation.

• AB 706 (Aguiar-Curry) Forest Organic Residue, Energy, and Safety Transformation and Wildfire Prevention Fund Act: Establishes the Forest Organic Residue Energy and Safety Transformation (FOREST) and Wildfire Prevention Fund to maintain and expand biomass power generation in the state, to revitalize idle facilities for biomass power generation, and to support biomass power generation facilities by creating additional capacity for power generation or feedstock utilization in strategically located regions of the state.

• AB 1699 (Rogers) Good Fire Act: Indefinitely extends the Prescribed Fire Liability Program, the pilot program which is currently active only until January 1, 2028. Expands the use of prescribed fire and cultural burning as wildfire resilience and ecosystem management tools; extends burn bosses’ certification from one year to three years, requires the Office of the State Fire Marshal (OSFM) to explore ways to expand the pool of burn boss instructors, and codifies Governor Newsom’s 2025 executive order to expand tools to safely deploy beneficial fire projects. 

• AB 1934 (Bennett) Home Hardening Certification Program: Requires the OSFM to develop an implementation plan for a voluntary home-hardening certification program that identifies an appropriate combination of home hardening products, techniques, and defensible space measures to reduce the risk of home loss during wildfire. 

• AB 1960 (Bennett) Wildfire Mitigation Validation: Requires CAL FIRE, in consultation with the OSFM’s Wildfire Mitigation Advisory Committee, to establish a framework for validating wildfire mitigation activities undertaken by communities that achieve specified levels of home hardening and defensible space. Authorizes CAL FIRE to provide Wildfire Prevention Grant funds (beginning FY28/29) to recognized communities that partner with fire safe councils or other eligible organizations.

• AB 1964 (Bennett) State Fire Marshal: home hardening. Requires OSFM to develop statewide home hardening standards and compile a report estimating the number of homes in moderate, high, and very high fire hazard severity zones that meet those standards and the number that require additional home hardening. 

• AB 2513 (Petrie-Norris): Regional Forest and Fire Capacity Program: Authorizes the Department of Conservation to directly award regional landscape grants to regional entities to implement the regional priority strategies that contribute to the achievement of the goals of California’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan. Expands wildfire prevention grant eligibility to include shrublands and other non-forested landscapes and expands eligible activities to include vegetation modification and ignition prevention.

• SB 894 (Allen) California Wildfire Resilience Loan Program: Establishes the California Wildfire Resilience Loan Program to provide, upon appropriation, financial assistance for projects and activities that reduce wildfire-related risks and losses, including home hardening and defensible space improvements.

• SB 973 (Becker) Wildfire County Coordinator Program: Codifies and expands the Wildfire County Coordinator Program within CAL FIRE and the California Fire Safe Council and mandates standardized county-level risk assessment tools. 

• SB 1079 (Stern) CAL FIRE Fire Innovation Unit: Establishes a Fire Innovation Unit within CAL FIRE to advance wildfire technology research, coordination, procurement, and deployment. The unit is intended to support technologies that improve community risk reduction and ecosystem- and landscape-scale resilience.

• SB 1370 (Stern) Covered Wildfire Mitigation Projects: consolidated and expedited review. Establishes a permanent consolidated and expedited state environmental and permitting review process for covered wildfire mitigation projects, administered jointly by the California Natural Resources Agency and the California Environmental Protection Agency. The law builds on temporary executive actions that streamlined review for hundreds of priority wildfire prevention projects and is intended to expedite authorization procedures, while maintaining specified environmental protections and requirements.