After experiencing budget surpluses in 2021-2022, the state of California experienced two years of budget deficits in 2023-2024, resulting in budget clawbacks, reluctance to invest in new programs, and a higher-than-usual veto rate, which affected a number of our priority bills.
The good news:
- Proposition 4: Four years after launching the Food and Farm Resilience Coalition, our campaign to include robust food and farm resilience investments in a state climate bond succeeded. Now we need your help to pass it this November!
- SB 675: Four years after grazier Marie Hoff first shared her wildfire story and call-to-action to elevate grazing as a wildfire solution on our blog, we succeeded in our multi-year effort to pass legislation to integrate prescribed grazing into the state’s wildfire resilience strategies, policies, and programs.
As those two examples illustrate, changing policy requires time, persistence, and community. Our policy successes were possible because of people like you—supporting our policy work by sharing your stories, lobbying in the capitol, and raising awareness. Together, we will continue to make progress!
Below, we provide more details on our wins, as well as some losses, in the 2024 legislative session.
Proposition 4: Bipartisan Bond Includes Record Sustainable Ag, Wildfire Prevention, and Drought and Flood Resilience Investments
Amidst an extreme heat wave and multiple active wildfires, a bipartisan supermajority of California legislators passed a historic $10 billion climate resilience bond in July, now on the November ballot as Proposition 4.
If approved by a majority of voters in November, Prop 4 will catalyze a wide range of investments to make rural and agricultural communities safer and more resilient to wildfires, floods, droughts, and extreme heat. This includes unprecedented investments of hundreds of millions of dollars in climate smart agriculture, local food system infrastructure, and farmworker health and well-being. See our previous blog for a breakdown of Prop 4’s investments. Special thanks to Speaker Robert Rivas, Assemblymember Lori Wilson, their legislative staff, and members of the Food and Farm Resilience Coalition for four years of tireless advocacy!
By investing now in making our communities more resilient to increasing extreme weather, we will save tens of billions of dollars in disaster relief and recovery later. For example, wildfires alone caused an average of $117 billion in economic damages annually in California, including loss of life and property damage, between 2017-2021. Of this amount, an estimated $5 billion annually was incurred as a fiscal loss by the State of California due to reduced tax revenues and increased wildfire response costs.
Now we need you to help by voting Yes on Prop 4!
In the meantime, check out the official Yes on 4 website and our previous blog for more information. We’ll be sharing more about Prop 4 in our blog next week.
CalCAN-Sponsored Bills
SB 675 (Limón) Prescribed Grazing as a Wildfire Solution: Signed!
The Governor signed SB 675, authored by Senator Monique Limón (D-Santa Barbara), on September 27. This achievement marks an important milestone in the years-long effort to more fully integrate prescribed grazing into the state’s wildfire resilience strategies, policies, and programs.
Wildfires have caused billions of dollars of damage in recent years and taken a heavy toll on California communities, including skyrocketing insurance premiums, hazardous levels of smoke, and loss of life. These fires have also become a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions in the state (e.g. the second largest source in 2020), further fueling climate change and catastrophic wildfire conditions. Prescribed grazing is a versatile, ecologically-based wildfire mitigation strategy with many co-benefits. Prescribed grazing naturally cycles nutrients, stores carbon, and removes fuels from the landscape by converting vegetation into food, fiber, and manure. Prescribed grazing can also be safer, more cost-effective, and better received by the public than herbicidal, mechanical, and prescribed fire treatments, depending on the location, available infrastructure, and management goals.
SB 675 advances prescribed grazing as a multi-benefit wildfire solution by:
- Requiring the State’s Wildfire Task Force to develop a strategic action plan to expand the use of prescribed grazing to support the state’s efforts to increase the pace and scale of wildfire resilience activities and strengthen the protection of fire-threatened communities.
- Requiring the state’s Range Management Advisory Committee, which is made up of rangeland ecologists and graziers, to develop guidance and best management practices to support local entities like cities, counties, fire safe councils, and homeowners associations in developing prescribed grazing plans.
- Explicitly allowing fencing and livestock watering tanks and troughs to be an eligible expense in the Wildfire Prevention Grants Program to lower the cost of prescribed grazing for annual vegetation management.
We thank Senator Limón and her staff for their collaboration and persistence over the past two years working on this legislation. We also thank the broad coalition that supported the bill, which included 57 agricultural, environmental, public health, local government, and fire safety organizations, as well as many experts and practitioners in the fields of prescribed grazing, rangeland ecology, and firefighting. We will continue engaging our partners in the implementation of SB 675, including the development of the guidance, best management practices, and strategic action plan called for by the bill.
AB 2313 (Bennett) Equipment-Sharing: Vetoed, but Funded in Prop 4
AB 2313, authored by Assemblymember Bennett (D-Ventura), was vetoed by the Governor due to the state’s budget deficit and the lack of funding allocated to implement the program in this year’s budget. AB 2313 was CalCAN and CAFF’s co-sponsored bill that would have directed the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) to develop a program to fund equipment sharing. These programs would allow farmers to borrow or lease high-value equipment from regional agricultural centers that purchase and maintain equipment for healthy soils practices, on-farm conservation practices, storage, and processing. To learn more about equipment sharing, see our previous blog post highlighting the work of the California Plowshares equipment-sharing program in Southern California.
But there is hope in Proposition 4. Thanks to our collective advocacy on AB 2313, we were able to secure $15 million in funding for equipment sharing in Prop 4. If Prop 4 is approved by a majority of voters this fall, there will be funds available in the years ahead for CDFA to implement an equipment-sharing program. If that happens, we will continue working with the coalition that supported AB 2313 and our partners at CDFA to establish a new equipment-sharing program building on the framework outlined in AB 2313.
Other 2024 Bills CalCAN Engaged With
CalCAN took positions on a total of 14 bills this year. Below, we summarize some of the notable wins and losses.
Wins
SB 1101 (Limón) – Beneficial Fire – Signed!
This bill expands the use of beneficial fire by:
- Expanding proactive fire planning across public and private lands,
- Accelerating CAL FIRE’s implementation of prescribed fire by streamlining the Department’s contracting and procurement processes, and
- Deepening our understanding of wildfire impacts and wildfire severity by improving post-fire mapping and reporting.
SB 1448 (Hurtado) – Land Equity Task Force & Food Hub Program – Signed!
This bill allows appointed members of the Land Equity Task Force, which includes farmers, to receive compensation for their time. The bill also addresses an administrative barrier to establishing a new Farm to Community Food Hub Program at CDFA by simplifying overly prescriptive requirements for advisory committee members.
SB 310 (Dodd) – Cultural Burns – Signed!
This bill formally recognizes Tribal sovereignty with respect to cultural burning practices. The bill authorizes the Secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency and local air districts to engage with Tribes on a sovereign-to-sovereign basis in order to coordinate cultural burning activities and confirm that no state or local burn permits or air quality permits are needed if such agreements are made. The bill also makes an important modification to state liability law for fire suppression costs incurred as a result of prescribed fire use.
SB 1016 (Gonzalez) – Latino and Indigenous Disparities Reduction – Signed!
This bill requires demographic data to be disaggregated by ethnicity and used to report on critical health-related outcomes, including rates of major diseases, leading causes of death, and other important health information. This bill will help the State Department of Public Health better understand and address health issues affecting farmworkers, who are disproportionately Latino and Indigenous.
Losses
AB 2734 (Connolly) – Healthy Soils Program & Technical Assistance Improvements – Vetoed
This bill would have made the following improvements to CDFA’s Healthy Soils Program:
- Authorized CDFA to extend on-farm demonstration projects to up to five years
- Encouraged consultation with the CDFA advisory bodies, including, but not limited to, the California Organic Products Advisory Committee, to better align organic and climate-smart programs.
- Authorized incentive grant recipients to request advance payments of their remaining award.
The bill also would have provided more flexibility to the Climate Smart Ag Technical Assistance Program by expanding the definition of technical assistance to include important activities like training and project implementation assistance and to allow funds to support capacity building and coordination for technical assistance providers to deliver high-quality technical assistance.
SB 1374 (Becker) – Net Energy Metering Aggregation – Vetoed
Net energy metering aggregation (NEMA) allows renewable energy that is connected to the grid through one meter to be credited against electricity use on other meters. For example, energy produced through solar panels on a barn roof could be used as a credit for energy consumed within the same billing period by an irrigation pump in a field. CalCAN was part of an agricultural coalition that successfully advocated for NEMA in California in 2012. We wrote a progress report on the topic in 2016. Unfortunately, the California Public Utilities Commission ended NEMA in a decision last year. SB 1374 would have reversed that decision and restored net energy metering aggregation (NEMA) for schools and multifamily residences. An earlier version of the bill also would have restored NEMA for farms and ranches.
SB 227 (Durazo) – Safety Net for All – Vetoed
This bill would have required the Employment Development Department (EDD) to develop a plan to implement an Excluded Workers Program to provide unemployment insurance benefits to workers ineligible for federal unemployment benefits due to their immigration status – which includes many farmworkers in California.
While some of our legislative efforts faced setbacks, the wins we achieved this year set a strong foundation for future progress. We look forward to continuing these efforts as we look toward the 2025 legislative season.
