Newsom announces more firefighter jobs as US departments urged to become year-round wildfire agencies
LOS ANGELES — Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday that the state is looking to hire more firefighters.
The decision comes following the record-breaking 2020 wildfire season and ahead of peak fire season.
Newsom has approved $80.74 million for 1,399 additional firefighters with Cal Fire using Emergency Fund authorization. The new firefighters will work "to bolster fuels management and wildfire response efforts." The Governor’s January 2021 budget also proposes $1 billion to support wildfire and forest management, his office said.
The announcement comes as California’s U.S. senators and nearly two-dozen representatives asked the Agriculture and Interior departments on Monday to transition their agencies to a year-round wildland workforce because blazes are no longer limited to traditional fire seasons.
The move would require reclassifying more seasonal federal firefighter positions as permanent, said a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.
“As California and the West continue to contend with historic and destructive wildfire seasons, it has become clear that we are entering a ‘new normal’ in which increasingly intense wildfires wreak havoc during a nearly year-round fire season,” it said.
The letter signed by Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla and 21 members of Congress notes that 57% of forest land in California is owned by the U.S. government.
The request came after a disastrous 2020 in which more than 9,900 fires burned 4.25 million acres (1.72 million hectares), killed 33 people and destroyed nearly 10,500 homes and other buildings.
“And this year, we are already well above average for both the number of fires and acres burned,” the letter said.
Although it is still early spring, a wildfire erupted during the weekend in Siskiyou County and grew to more than 870 acres. It was 80% contained Monday, Cal Fire said.
The Associated Press and NewsChannel 3-12 contributed to this article.
