Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

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Mr. PADILLA. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the bipartisan Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act. This crucial piece of legislation would help local communities defend themselves from the growing and pressing danger of wildfires.

This bill would empower communities to implement science-based methods for mitigating wildfire damage and provide funding to design and implement new Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Plans with community members, first responders, and relevant State agencies.

Today, is the 1-year anniversary of the devastating Eaton and Palisades fires in Los Angeles that taught us all that not all wildfires are forest fires and as such Federal preparedness efforts need to be improved and streamlined to ensure that we better prepared when the next natural disaster strikes. We increasingly see wildfires in the wildland urban interface, and we must do more to prepare and harden our communities. As the countless fires in my State and across the West have shown us, we need to increase Federal support for communities to mitigate the risk of catastrophic wildfires.

The Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act would work towards this goal by establishing guidelines for communities to conceptualize new Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Plans, CPWRP, that are developed in coordination with community members, first responders, and relevant State agencies.

This bill will achieve this through improving early detection technology, public outreach and education, alerts and warnings, evacuation planning, evacuation execution, and access for first responders; addressing vulnerable populations, including the elderly and those with disabilities; hardening critical infrastructure and homes; applying community-scale defensible space across contiguous areas; building local capacity to implement and oversee the plan; deploying distributed energy resources; implementing strategic land use planning; educating community members; and coordinating with existing wildfire plans like a Community Wildfire Protection Plan. Aside from this, the bill will provide grants for at-risk communities, complete a report on existing programs to protect communities from wildfires, and it will allow for structure hardening that will help build more fire resilient communities.

I would like to thank my colleague Senator Sheehy for being a great partner here in the Senate to advance and put forth commonsense wildfire legislation that will help Western States and the country become better equipped to respond to increasing wildfires. I also want to express my appreciation to Representatives Huffman and Obernolte for leading this effort on the House side.

I look forward to working with my colleagues to advance this bill this Congress to ensure that communities are better equipped to meet the growing threat of fires.

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