Cunningham votes to fund wildfire prevention projects
Jordan Cunningham.
California should be treating a million acres a year in order to limit catastrophic fire danger, says Stanford institute
–This week, Assemblyman Jordan Cunningham (R-San Luis Obispo) announced that he has voted to increase funding for wildfire prevention projects. Specifically, SB 155 will continuously appropriate $200 million towards wildfire prevention projects each year through the 2028-29 fiscal year.
“California’s fire seasons get more dangerous each year due to worsening drought and a failure to invest in wildfire prevention and mitigation,” said Cunningham. “Wildfires cause massive destruction of human life and property, and the smoke from recent fires have resulted at times in the Central Coast having the worst air quality in the world. If we’re going to protect at-risk communities from devastating wildfires and dangerously bad air quality, we need to make investments into prevention and mitigation projects.”
According to Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, California should be treating a million acres a year in order to limit catastrophic fire danger. In 2020, California treated only 32,000 acres.
Assemblyman Jordan Cunningham is a small business owner; former school board member and prosecutor, husband and father of four. He represents all of San Luis Obispo County and a portion of Santa Barbara County, including Arroyo Grande, Atascadero, Cambria, Paso Robles, Grover Beach, Guadalupe, Lompoc, Los Osos, Morro Bay, Nipomo, Orcutt, Pismo Beach, Templeton, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Maria, and surrounding communities.
