Who’s Afraid of a Wildfire Map?

Two bills are moving through the legislature to reverse some of the 2021 legislative session’s HB 762, a sprawling bill that was reacting, perhaps an overreaction, to the Labor Day fires in 2020, the only time, in my lifetime, that Oregon saw Santa Ana winds. A regular occurrence in California since before the Industrial Revolution, Santa Ana winds drive fire risk beyond what Oregon normally faces, both in forests and urban areas, so with a common-held belief that these winds will become more frequent than a once-in-a-century probability, Oregon enacted a policy of assessing fire risk beyond the previously established fire protection zones that have long been manged by the Department of Forestry’s Fire Protection Division. This mapping of fire risk would guide a new coordination of state and county governments to implement measures that mitigate risk and put out fires. Private property owners in high-risk areas will see duties imposed on them by the regulations that this new regime will develop.

One way of reversing HB 762 is to redo it. That’s what SB 678 would do. Sponsored by Senators Daniel Bonham (R-The Dalles), Noah Robinson (R-Cave Junction), and David Brock Smith (R-Port Orfort), this bill would restructure the governance and scale back some of the regulatory scope.

In contrast to that Solomonic approach, SB 83 simply repeals most of the 2021 law, including the full deletion of ORS 477.490, which mandated the “Statewide wildfire hazard map.” You’d never know this by reading the text of the bill that’s on the Oregon Legislative Information page at the time I’m publishing this story. Maybe that was a drafting error, but the original version of this bill left ORS 477.490 on the books. On April 8th, the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Wildfire approved Amendment 9 with that and many other new deletions, but the new version of SB 83 has not yet been posted to the legislative website.

While several parts of ORS 477 passed in a rush in 2021 may need early reform, the entire exercise of using the Department of Forestry’s expertise to produce the public good of wildfire risk mapping isn’t one of them. That map has been creating most of the public ire, but in listening to the lobbying against it, I haven’t seen any persuasive arguments against this transparent tool.

The concerns about the regulatory regime are certainly valid, the means by which duties will be imposed on property owners. That does not require throwing the map into a memory hole.

I’ve also heard claims that the map is not accurate. I have yet to see specific examples of an error from people making this argument, but let’s remember that a map is just a model. All models are wrong, but some models are helpful. Any map of fire risk is inherently more accurate than treating all of Oregon as if it has the same level of risk.

I suspect that is the real reason why the map gets so much opposition, not because of any inaccuracy, but because of the impact that an accurate portrayal of fire risk would have on insurance premiums. People living in high-risk areas want people living in lower-risk areas to subsidize their property insurance, so this isn’t so much about protecting property rights as it is seeking rents from other property owners.

The private insurance market is the better means of managing fire risk. Insurance companies’ higher premiums send price signals as to where people ought to live. If you want to own property in a high-risk area, you should be required to pay for the higher risk. Even when facts emerge that we didn’t choose, we don’t want higher-risk people being cross-subsidized by lower-risk people when insurance markets can avoid it. The fact that young men pay higher auto insurance than young women is not an injustice. It’s a market efficiency.

Insurance companies impose the most efficient regulations, because they do so in a voluntary way. Rather than use a regulatory regime to mandate fire protection measures, insurance companies offer lower premiums for data-driven solutions at a faster pace than government mandates. When property owners are required to pay for their own risk, the carrots that insurance costs provide can more efficiently manage most social risk than the sticks wielded by the coercive power of the state. The Oregon Department of Forestry can easily produce a map that facilitates a more efficient insurance market, a classic public good fulfilled by a legitimate role for state government.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.