Official roll call, clerk.house.gov roll 598. Acreage, structures and dates, CAL FIRE.
Carbajal was there after the fire. The vote was before it.
Carbajal urged the White House to approve more federal assistance for Thomas Fire victims. That came after. The vote came five weeks before.
But it is all after. The vote five weeks before the fire was the prevention question.
232 members read the same bill and voted yes.
They had the same objection available to them. They weighed it against the condition of the forest and came down the other way. Thirty three days later the largest wildfire in California history at the time came through the Los Padres and into this county.
The judgement was tested five weeks later, in public, on our ground.
What this page does not claim.
“The Thomas Fire was caused by power lines. Not by fuel load, and not by this vote.”
Nobody can say that bill would have stopped it. That is not the claim. The bill widened the acreage that could be thinned without full environmental review, and that worry was widely shared.
This page is not about what started that fire. It is about what we do before the next one.
Reduce the fuel, keep the review.
There is a live project on the table. Los Padres has a Wildfire Risk Reduction Project proposing vegetation treatment across four ranger districts, using mechanical thinning and prescribed fire. Bob names it and backs it, with environmental review left intact.
Not a forestry problem. A maintenance problem, on land the federal government owns and has not maintained.
Ask Carbajal to answer for roll call 598.
Ballots mail on 5 October. Add your name and we will put the question to him before then.
Or fund the campaign directly.