DRIVING THE DAY: Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday expanded a special Trump-resistance legislative session to include billions of dollars in wildfire spending as catastrophic blazes continue to tear through Los Angeles County. (More on this below.) THE FIRE PREVENTION NEXT TIME — Last November, dozens of fire-fighting measures — from wildfire prevention bonds to stopgap special taxes — appeared on ballots around the state, part of local governments’ response to the previous decade’s large wildfires that leveled entire towns and burned a quarter of the state’s forestland. Many passed, in both rural communities typically skeptical of new taxes and spending and dense urban areas where wildfire has not always been a leading public-safety concern. In Los Angeles County, voters approved Measure E, which by generating $150 million per year to raise equipment and staffing levels for county firefighters, now “couldn’t be more relevant,” as County Supervisor Kathryn Barger put it last week. The first test of whether those fires will be felt at ballots elsewhere in the state comes in a rural Central Valley community 250 miles north of the Pacific Palisades. In March, voters in Merced County’s Dos Palos will decide on a half-cent sales tax to bolster the city’s heavily underfunded fire department. “There is more and more a sense of urgency,” said Oakland city councilmember Janani Ramachandran, who authored Measure MM, which last year established a new tax to prepare for and combat fires in the wooded hillsides above the city’s core. “I think a lot of people are starting to understand that wildfire danger is real. But there's always a hesitation to give the city the money to do something about it.” That urgency was reflected beyond the rural stretches of Northern California or the Sierra Nevada where the threat of fire has been a longstanding part of the landscape. Santa Cruz enacted a countywide parcel parcel tax at the ballot to fund wildfire protection projects. In Livingston, voters overwhelmingly supported a 1 percent transaction and use tax that will give the small Merced County burg its first city-run firehouse. “There’s no part of the state that’s been untouched by it,” said Robb Korinke, a consultant who specializes in local ballot measure campaigns. “Fire concerns are even outpacing homelessness in many of these areas.” Forward-looking, fire prevention initiatives on the local ballot are the exception rather than the rule, according to Korinke. Most fire taxes end up on the ballot, he said, as a way to fund existing levels of service at a time when emergency services can take up as much as half a city’s budget and climate change threatens ever-greater catastrophe. “Municipalities are in fiscal distress,” Korinke said. “Where else is it going to come from?” Such is the case in Merced County, where voters last November failed to approve Measure R, which would have increased county sales taxes to fund fire response. (The measure won majority support but fell short of the two-thirds necessary to pass a special tax.) County officials responded by closing at least one fire station and consolidating others. Dos Palos faces the closure of the only fire department within its city limits. The next closest department, run by Cal Fire, is over 5 miles away. (Livingston is using its new tax revenue to keep the county-run fire department open while the city begins financing its own fire service.) In response, Dos Palos’ city council drafted a city sales tax increase that would deliver an estimated $200,000 annual increase to the fire department and stave off the county’s plans to close it in July. Two-thirds of voters will have to back Measure S to enact the tax increase, which will appear as the sole item on a March 4 special-election ballot. “If there's another fire somewhere else, will we get priority? Nobody knows the answer to that,” said Katy Miller Reed, the recently sworn in mayor of Dos Palos. Voters have not always been persuaded by such arguments, especially if it requires raising their own taxes. In the San Diego-area city Santee, voters shot down a similar sales tax measure to the one currently being proposed in Dos Palos in November. Miller Reed hopes the news from Los Angeles will remind voters what fire can do to a city. “That could totally happen to us,” said Miller Reed. “If we want to ensure that our town has priority, we are going to have to pay for it.” Welcome to Ballot Measure Weekly, a special edition of Playbook PM focused on California’s lively realm of ballot measure campaigns. With the fires raging in Los Angeles, we’re doing things a bit differently this week. Drop us a line at eschultheis@politico.com and wmccarthy@politico.com, or find us on X — @emilyrs and @wrmccart.
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