The year was 2019.

It is when a wildfire strike force report ordered by Governor Gavin Newsom was completed.

A year prior, faulty PG&E equipment fell to the brush laden ground during high winds.

The fire ignited ended up killing 85 people, burned 18,600 structures (mostly homes), charred 240 square miles, forced 52,000 to flee, and caused $16 billion in damage.

It was declared extinguished after 18 days.

Paradise, a community of 26,000 souls without a Hollywood-style celebrity among them, was almost wiped off the face of the earth.

It led to PG&E copping to 85 counts of manslaughter.

So why is that report handed to Newsom and accepted with much media fanfare by the governor in 2019 important?

It’s because of what it said and what Newsom didn’t do.

More precisely, it is what the governor blocked from happening.

First the report.

It stated climate change was on the verge of making the fire season year round in California.

Wind driven fires burning through dry vegetation, the report noted, was responsible for the destructive and deadly fires in California history, including the Paradise fire in 2018 and two other first in 2019.

It was noted more than 25 percent of the state was considered high or extreme risk for fire.

In those area lived 11 million people. 

It was also pointed out thousands of wildfires occur each year.

No one can accuse Newsom of being a climate change denier.

But that doesn’t explain what he did last year.

Newsom vetoed two bills authored by fellow Democrats and approved by the California Legislature.

One was to have Cal Fire fully manned throughout the year, instead of just during the nine months that for years was considered the extent of the fire season in California.

The other called for the expedited processing of permits by local and state agencies to manage vegetation, the primary fuel of destructive wind-driven wildfires.

Assemblyman Heath Flora of Ripon — who was a volunteer firefighter for 15 years and was with Cal Fire from 2005 through 2007 — last week called for those two bills Newsom vetoed to be re-introduced.

The report Newsom accepted in 2019 made it clear fire season would become a year-round condition in the state he governs due to climate change.

Yet five years later, he vetoed having the one agency tasked primarily with wild land fires not to be fully manned year-round.

January, in case you might wonder, is not considered part of the 9-month fire season.

Would more manpower help ease the threat of wildfires?

Yes, because it would have meant three more months that trains wild land firefighters could have engaged in efforts to reduce fuel loads via vegetation management.

The expedited permit process Newsom rejected was aimed at requiring bureaucratic review of requests to manage vegetation to be completed within 90 days of receipt. 

The review process was required primarily to assure the protection of endangered or threatened species.

A permit was needed to allow the inadvertent taking of a plant, bird, or animal that are protected. The application required outlining how such a risk to listed species would be minimized.

Keep in mind an expedited permit process would have been far from declaring open season on endangered species.

Nor did it address someone from suing, primarily environmental groups, to have the courts block a permit once approved from resulting in vegetation management moving forward as it has in more than a instances over the years.

There is already a blanket environmental impact review document in place statewide for vegetation management permit that requires local jurisdictions to complete a checklist.

Yet, the permitting process has turned into a bureaucratic foot dragging marathon making California’s response to endless cycles of wildfire threat about as nimble as a rock rolling uphill.

Adopted vegetation management techniques include prescribed burns, hardening landscape around homes, the use of goats and other grazing animals, manually reducing brush by minimizing its size/thickness and footprint, as well as by the use of herbicides.

So why did Newsom pass on a chance to implement two pieces of legislation that would help address the wildfire threat of climate change as outlined in 2019?

The reason is simple.

Sacramento’s focus has never been to protect nearly 40 million residents.

Instead, it has been on stopping, slowing down or reversing manmade climate change that is part of the equation.

Manmade climate change exists.

But to ignore nature is to be ignorant of how California’s present-day landscaped has been shaped.

The most prominent example is Yosemite Valley, which is the end product of what three glacial periods and subsequent retreats did to massive slabs of granite that once covered dozens upon dozens of square miles.

Forget about the LA fires in several days negating whatever greenhouse gas reduction gains were made last year.

A solid case can be made for cleaning up our act as anyone who has spent the last 40 years in the Central Valley can attest to the much cleaner air.

The hard truth is what California does, or the USA for that matter, is almost useless given how things are going with much of the rest of the planet.

And we are actually making it worse by ever tightening regulations that send oil production and other basic mining and heavy manufacturing for products that the USA consumes to nation’s where processes are much more damaging to the environment.

Do not misunderstand.

This does not mean everything we are doing in the war on greenhouse gas emissions is wrong.

However, Sacramento is so focused on trying to prevent climate change, that we are doing very little to help Californians live with climate change.

That can run the gamut from where we build homes to how effectively we can minimize fire, heat/cold, and flood threats, the primary three punches climate change delivers.

When he released the April 2019 wildfire report, Newsom was quoted as saying, “Under the status quo, all parties lose — the wildfire survivors, energy consumers, and Californians committed to addressing climate change. The imperative now is on action.”

Newsom uttered those words nearly six years ago.

Apparently, he didn’t mean what he said.

His dual vetoes last year are evidence the hot wind blowing out of Sacramento do Californians no more favors than the Santa Ana winds or the Diablo winds that laid waste to the Oakland Hills in 1991.

This column is the opinion of editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Bulletin or 209 Multimedia. He can be reached at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com