After the devastating 2020 Labor Day fires, the Oregon Legislature passed a bill that was supposed to lead to more wildfire awareness and resilience. It created a map of areas at high risk of fire. But that map led to a huge backlash from property owners. Now one of the Democratic state senators who helped create the map is sponsoring a bill that would repeal it. We’ll talk to Jeff Golden, who represents the Ashland area, about why — and what should happen instead.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Miller: This is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. After the devastating 2020 Labor Day fires, the Oregon Legislature passed a bill that was supposed to lead to more wildfire awareness and resilience. Among other things, it created a map of areas at high risk of fire. But that map led to a huge backlash from property owners, a backlash so strong that a few weeks ago, the state Senate voted unanimously to eliminate it.
Jeff Golden is a Democratic state senator from the Rogue Valley. He voted to create the map in 2021, and he voted to get rid of it recently. He joins us now to talk about both of those votes. Welcome back to the show.
Jeff Golden: Thanks a lot, Dave. Good to talk to you.
Miller: It’s great to have you on again. As we’ve talked about in the past, there were a number of different components of Senate Bill 762. But I think the map is the one that’s gotten the most attention, the most pushback. Why did you support this piece of the bill back in 2021? What did you think or hope it would accomplish?
Golden: Well, the basic reason was to know where in the state we should deploy and focus our limited resources. We’re in an age where state government’s never going to be able to finance a complete, full program. You’ve got to make choices. So that was the main reason.
And it was part … I should tell you that 762, which is kind of this massive omnibus bill, much of that, 80% to 90%, came from the recommendations of the study group that Governor Brown put in place called the Wildfire Response Council, that met in 2018 and 2019. And they searched out best practices around the country, around the world really, on wildfire. One of their 37 recommendations was a map to guide deployment of resources. So we put it in the bill.
There was very little attention to it at the time. There were concerns from some about the bill, but not about that. And we delegated to Oregon State University, which has credentials among the best in the world in terms of certified smart on construction of maps like this, and gave them almost no direction. We just said we need a map to fulfill this purpose. Let us have it within the next, I think, 18 months, and kind of forgot about it. There was no involvement from anybody but OSU and departments that they conferred with in the actual creation of the map.
Miller: Almost immediately when it came out, there was backlash. Then in 2022, it was changed a little bit. Even the name changed from “risk” to “hazard.” Why did that map create such animosity?
Golden: I think there are three reasons that we didn’t really foresee at the time. The first was that the bill, not the map itself … The map made designations, first in five categories. The final version was “low,” “moderate” and “high hazard.” And there was misinformation we could not get out in front of that basically said, if you are “high hazard,” you are cooked because the state’s going to be out insisting you remove every blade of grass, turn a 100-foot radius around your house into a moonscape. That’s what’s going to happen, and they’ll show up with chainsaws. It was just all kinds of things like that, just constant as we were trying to pass the bill. So there was this perception that being “high hazard” would be a disaster.
Number two, and really significantly, was the first map that rolled out, the first draft in 2022, came out exactly as people were starting to get just this avalanche of notices from their insurance companies that their premium was going way up, or they’d be canceled or non-renewed. That happened at exactly the same time, which joined the map and the insurance problems in people’s minds forever. We can talk more about that, but that’s not a conversation that turns out to be real fruitful.
Miller: Meaning, people assumed that it was this publicly-created map that was responsible for the premium increases, that insurance companies were basing their premium increases on this publicly created map?
Golden: That is demonstrably false, but I understand why people feel that way. I will tell you something for just a minute, which is that the insurance commissioner has put out a memo that compares Oregon to five other wildfire states – California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Washington – on several metrics: number of cancellations per 1,000 policies, number of non-renewals, percentage increase of premiums, average premium. And on almost all of these metrics, Oregon comes out the best. We have the best situation of those six other wildfire states, none of whom had Senate Bill 762 or these maps. So clearly, the map wasn’t a driver. But people still feared. And to this day, some still think that. So that was number two.
But I want to talk about the biggest issue, why I came back this session determined to repeal the map. And that’s a characteristic of the mapping model. Basically, the model that OSU used – which I understand to be state of the art after a lot of research – only factored in what we call landscape factors, weather, topography, vegetation that are assessed over parcels much, much bigger than individual parcels over the landscape. And OK, that’s fine. I understand and other people do, you can’t know conclusively the hazard level just by walking across the property.
But this model had no room whatsoever for anything specific to the property, yet it went ahead and assigned a designation, a hazard designation to that property. And basically, we were saying to people – I walked a lot of parcels with their owners – “Don’t believe the evidence of your eyes. It just doesn’t matter, not 1% in this formula, what you’ve done to your property, what surrounds it with concrete or water.” That was just asking people way too much to accept, and really deeply undermined the program and people’s interest in collaborating in a safer Oregon.
So I really saw no choice other than withdrawing these maps. All of my Senate colleagues agreed and now it’s over in the House.
Miller: Am I right that at the beginning of the session you were pushing for a tweak to the map, as opposed to a wholesale elimination? In other words, a map that would get rid of the lot level, the individual house level designations, but keep some kind of broader designations?
Golden: That was a part of the conversation early, like in the first few weeks of the session. I said, “What’s it going to be?” Do we completely withdraw the maps? Or, does it still have utility for telling us which regions need the extra equipment, personnel and repositioning of resources, all that stuff, and maybe have it used for a grant program to help people make their property safer? And it really became clear that the map was tainted beyond salvage, that people would still think, “Well, OK, so my parcel isn’t high hazard, but my region is and that’s still going to ruin my insurance.”
So we really assessed, do we still need this for its original purpose, helping us deploy resources? And the fact is, we now know where to deploy resources. And we thought the smarter move was to repeal it entirely.
Miller: OK, so it sounds like you’re saying there was some value, that you do know where to place resources, which was one of the points of this. But it does make me wonder, now that the map is gone, that the dangers of the increased severity of wildfires, increased number of potentially devastating wildfires, that’s not gone. That remains with us. So what’s the best public policy going forward … as opposed to the private sector making their decisions about whether or not people can be underwritten, say, for insurance. What’s the best public policy to encourage people to make their homes more resilient in this age of high intensity fires?
Golden: Much better question than looking in the rearview mirror. Now what do we do? There’s been a major shift that we’ve discovered through all this, Dave, which is that we in government don’t have the effective sticks and carrots to help people. You start out, first of all, knowing that by and large people want to protect their own property, make it safer, and have their neighborhoods and communities be safer. So that’s there. But in this environment, forceful regulation of rural residents isn’t gonna work anywhere, even if the map made more sense. And as I say, the map just didn’t make sense to people. You know who has the effect of sticks and carrots is the insurance industry.
So our policy now, embodied in Senate Bill 85 this session, is advancing a collaboration with the insurance industry. And our insurance commissioner and fire marshal are in the national lead in this conversation. It’s been going on for quite a while, where we collaboratively establish standards for defensible space and home hardening, and get some assurance from the industry that if people implement those, if they do everything reasonable to reduce their risk, they’re going to have access to affordable insurance.
Now, that’s the goal. I’m not at all sure we can 100% achieve it because of the conditions out there being so severe. But that’s the idea. If we put out a regulation, we’ve got a lot of angry people just basically saying, “we’re not gonna do this.” [If] the insurance company calls or writes you a letter saying, “you know what, your roof needs attention,” you don’t start protesting. You put some attention into your roof.
So that’s where we’re going and it’s neighborhood-based. We are encouraging more and more voluntary neighborhood associations, which would meet standards that on-the-ground inspectors would give them. And once they achieve that, they would get a certification. And that’s important to the insurance industry because, as an individual property owner, if you do everything perfectly to reduce risk and your neighbors haven’t, the insurance industry is not that interested in you. They don’t think your property is that safe. But when you can help form these associations of 20, 30, 50 adjacent property owners, you start achieving a landscape that the insurance industry believes does alter the risk, and they’re more open to the idea of offering better insurance terms.
Miller: Before I say goodbye, just a big picture question. This is such a waste of public resources. The mapping, the information gathering, the public meetings, the public outreach. It went on for a number of years and now it’s all just evaporated. What lessons have you taken from this particular saga, which is about wildfire hazard mapping, that could be applied to other legislative efforts for any other contentious topic going forward? What’s the big lesson that you’ve drawn from this?
Golden: Well, still learning it. As I mentioned, the three reasons that led to the repeal of the map – I don’t think we would have anticipated that the insurance cancellations would happen right as the map rolled out. We have to collaborate better on a bipartisan basis to try to not encourage misinformation that scares the hell out of people. But the other thing is, we sort of took on faith. We’re not map makers. So we took this recommendation from Governor Brown’s counsel and said, “OK, we need a map, who are the most expert map makers,” and delegated the task. Maybe we should have examined more, tried to envision more, what’s this map gonna mean, how’s it gonna land on the ground?
All I can think of, and it’s totally 20/20 hindsight, is rather than just saying, “here, OSU, take care of this,” try to game out what it would mean on the ground and what would happen if a very safe looking property came out “high hazard.” Maybe that’s perfect hindsight. But we’re still learning. There’s really a balance here. As legislators, how far do we delve into, how is this map that we need going to be put together versus set policy? That’s a dynamic changing balance. And in this case, we didn’t pay enough attention to how the map would be put together.
Miller: Jeff Golden, thanks very much.
Golden: Hey, thanks for your interest, Dave. Talk to you later.
Miller: Jeff Golden is a Democratic state senator from the Rogue Valley.
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