http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/05/us/california-today-wildfires-budgets.html 2016-10-05 14:11:22 California Today: The Steep Costs of Fighting Wildfires Wednesday: Budgeting to suppress California’s fires, Google unveils its own smartphone, and parting thoughts from the longtime Los Angeles Downtown News publisher. === Good morning. (Want to get California Today by email? Let’s turn it over to Wildfires in California will continue to burn, as they have year after year, and the conditions are there to make each year more devastating than the last. The official forecast for the months ahead call for above-normal temperatures and below-normal precipitation in the southern part of the state, a dangerous combination on land already castigated by drought. What isn’t yet known is how, exactly, we’re going to pay to fight these fires in the fiscal year that has just begun. Budgeting for wildfire suppression is a bit of an exercise in prediction, based on the average cost of fighting fires over the previous 10 years. In other words, the federal government sets aside a specific amount of money to fight fires before the start of the fiscal year — and, consequently, before a single fire has burned. Climate change and development have made fires more challenging and costly to suppress. Since 1995, the 10-year average has increased by more than $700 million, To pay the tab, the The problem with that, he said, is that “you can’t go back and undo the lack of preparation that wasn’t done in prior years.” California, with its expensive and long fire season, has borne the brunt of these cuts. Of the 20 million acres of forestland in the state, six million to nine million acres are at risk of catastrophic fires because the vegetation is too dense or because there are too many dead or dying trees – 66 million of them in the Sierra Nevada alone, Jeanne Wade Evans, deputy regional forester, said during the call. For the fiscal year that ended last week, the Forest Service received a one-time infusion of $500 million — a “Band-Aid solution,” said Mr. Donovan, and one that is unlikely to happen again this year. The Obama administration has tried to change the way fire suppression is funded. Meanwhile, in Congress, several bills are vying to fix the problem, though there has been no agreement over how to get it done. See reporting in The New York Times on the Nov. 8 ballot initiatives: And dig into analyses of all 17 statewide measures by the • After protests over the • High school football players across the country are emulating the protest started by the 49ers backup quarterback • Judges are • With Apple’s iPhone in its sights, • A • Believe it or not, U.C. Berkeley students used to pay • • • In 1972, Sue Laris and her husband at the time started the weekly Back then, she wrote recently, the city’s downtown was mostly dormant. Forty-four years later, downtown Los Angeles has come alive with development, the publication has become a habit for thousands of readers, and Ms. Laris, 73, has run out of steam. “I’m getting cross-eyed,” she said in an interview. So she announced Ms. Laris said she hoped to find an owner who could steer the free weekly, with a print run of about 40,000, through a time of rapid change in Los Angeles. A recent Downtown News article with the headline “ “I drive down the street and I literally can’t even name all the places I see that are under construction,” Ms. Laris said. The influx of high-rise condominiums and other developments has been driven in part by an intense need for housing, she said, but also by a shift in policy makers’ thinking about the role of density in urban areas. “You can’t have a suburban feel to an urban area,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense for the future of cities.” That shift has met with fierce opposition from neighborhood groups and preservationists. The New York Times’ Los Angeles bureau chief, Adam Nagourney, The Downtown News hasn’t named a selling price, but Ms. Laris said at least nine parties have made inquiries. As for Ms. Laris, she said she has no plans for herself yet. She once thought she would be at the newspaper forever. “It’s like one of my children,” she said. “It’s very tough.” California Today goes live at 6 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: The California Today columnist, Mike McPhate, is a third-generation Californian — born outside Sacramento and raised in San Juan Capistrano. He lives in Davis. California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and attended U.C. Berkeley.