SB 332’s prescribed fire liability fund (which protects practitioners from liability for intentional fire and formally defined “cultural fire practitioners” and “cultural burns” in California Code for the first time) provides essential legal infrastructure for scaling tribal and collaborative fire programs and should be built upon rather than treated as a ceiling.

Build tribal fire workforce capacity through a structured career ladder (training firefighters, developing burn bosses, and creating contract work opportunities with private landowners) so that tribal fire programs become financially sustainable rather than perpetually grant-dependent.

Pay fire crew workers at living wages with full benefits, recognizing that the hardness and complexity of this work requires compensation that competes with other employment, and that agency wage structures that pay significantly below living wage undermine both workforce retention and the ability to build tribally sovereign fire programs. 

Partner with state parks and other public land managers to create additional training and burning opportunities for tribal fire crews; expanding the land base available for cultural burns beyond what individual landowner relationships can provide. 

Land trusts and landowners should proactively develop land access agreements with tribal nations to enable cultural burns on their properties; recognizing that as long as tribes remain landless, every burn requires individual negotiation that consumes capacity better spent on the work itself.

Workforce capacity for fire-adaptive land management is insufficient, with fire crews often paid below living wages, limiting both retention and the ability to scale programs.

Cultural burns and prescribed fire, while increasingly enabled by state policy, remain difficult to implement at scale due to complex access agreements, liability concerns, and the particular burden on landless tribes who must negotiate with landowners for every project. 

• Illustrative Example: The Tamien Nation cultural fire program and YTT Northern Chumash tribal burns both illustrate this challenge: significant volunteer time and relationship work was required before a single burn could take place, and reimbursement-based grants nearly excluded key partners.

Conventional infrastructure and land management (including fire suppression policies that removed Indigenous burning practices) have created dangerous fuel accumulation and reduced landscape resilience, leaving communities more vulnerable to catastrophic wildfire.