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with that i would like to call this meeting of the assembly committee on natural resources to order members before we begin a quick reminder to please meet your microphone when you are not speaking so that we can minimize background noise and with that will the secretary please call the role assemblywoman anderson president assemblywoman black here assemblywoman brownmay here assemblywoman carlton assemblywoman cohen here assemblywoman ellison assemblyman ellison present assemblywoman gonzalez here assemblywoman hanson here assemblywoman martinez president assemblywoman titus assemblyman wheeler here chair watts here uh please assemblywoman carlton present and please mark assemblyman titus present as she arrives we have a quorum uh with that we have one presentation on our agenda today from the state forester fire warden on wildfires in nevada uh and we will try and keep the meeting moving since we have some more meetings on the schedule for this evening a few quick housekeeping announcements before we start members of the public can provide testimony in a variety of ways information on how to participate can be found on every meeting agenda and on the help page of the legislature's website which can be found in a header at the top of every page participants must register in advance and can submit opinion polls or sign up to provide testimony by phone or video conference written comments can also be mailed to as emailed to asm nr asm.state.nv.us before during 48 hours after the committee's meeting exhibits or amendments must be submitted electronically as a pdf to our committee manager uh no later than 4 pm the business day prior to the meeting any amendments must include the bill number the statement of intent and contact information for the person the entity submitting all exhibits can be found electronically on the nevada legislature's website where you can also sign up for our personalized legislative tracking service we ask that any public comments be kept to two minutes so that all speakers can be accommodated and that we can keep the agenda moving and get through it in a timely fashion speakers are urged to avoid repetitive comments that have been made by previous speakers and as a final reminder uh it is unlawful for a person to knowingly misrepresent the facts when testifying before a legislative committee uh also i will uh remind and i don't think we have any uh motions on our hands today but when making a motion or a second i just want to remind members to please also state their name for the record and for the ease of me knowing who makes those motions so uh with that i believe we can go on to our presentation on wildfires in nevada uh so with that uh uh uh the presenter can begin whenever you're ready just state your name for the record and you may begin thank you for the record casey casey state forester fire warden for the nevada division of forestry i am going to share my screen with you here all right so um thank you for having me here today chair watts and members of the committee to speak to um wildfire in nevada oh so fire i'll start with what fire season 2020 looked like for us um we had a total of 802 fire starts across the state burning about 292 000 acres um this this is kind of a different year for us in that our fire starts were significantly up our average is about 600 fire starts per year we were up significantly um this year in addition our fire start the cause of the fires um we were significantly up in human human-caused starts and human-caused acres i believe that might be correlated to how many people were outdoors because of kevin but um this year 68 percent of our starts were human-caused and 76 of our acres were human caused our five-year average is about 52 percent of the starts um and 28 of the acres usually our lightning caused fires are the much larger fires one of the things i wanted to talk about quickly was the covet impacts we as a collective body state federal local government realized pretty early that there were going to be effects on fire suppression response due to covid19 primarily our concern was getting enough ground crews um either from them being impacted by actually responding to cove the coveted response or just not being able to travel across state lines so the blm the forest service local government fish and wildlife service and the bureau of indian affairs got together very early on in the season we increased staffing where we could across the state we put in some strict guidelines on how we were going to manage the covid issue with firefighters and still keep them safe throughout the state and we collectively came up with a state federal local government plan for how we were going to manage that and we increased our air assets across the state helicopters scoopers and um other response so that we could ensure that if we didn't have the ground crews we would at least have the air assets um until we could get the ground crews in the map you see here is just a map of the fire starts this year red and yellow where the human cause a red and green were the human causes like christmas and then yellow is the natural cause i've traditionally show you this graph every couple years the reason we do this is not because we care more about the humboldt watershed than other watersheds across the state but this does depict two things for the state this is an indicator of all watersheds across the state and the reason this is important we've overlaid um the actual acres burned each year over the water the water flows in the humboldt watershed one of the things that's important to note here is if you look at the first 20 years 1980 to 1999 um we burnt about 4 million acres across just over 4 million acres across the state of nevada we were averaging about 208 000 acres a year which you can see the highest year on record was 1999 at one point at just below 1.8 million acres that was an anomaly we didn't have years quite that large in those 20 years in the last 21 years really from 2000 to 2020 we've burnt just shy of 10 million acres across the state and we're averaging about 500 000 acres a year so we're seeing more of these peak fire seasons and they really do the the reason we overlay the watersheds is to show you that traditionally i know we always you know every year we have potential for large fire but the years where we have the peaks traditionally follows the wet years where we have real wet springs where we're getting a lot of moisture in the form of rain those are the years the three years following our high weather years with water are the years where we tend to have our largest fires wild fire response in nevada um you know obviously we're seeing larger fire occurrence and um a much more devastating loss across the united states um the west in particular nevada is um obviously engulfed in that part of the reasons for that is increasing fuels in our forest and rangelands um we've got a lot of invasive fine flashy fuels that are coming in um due to the return fire intervals we're seeing increasing temperatures and and much more drier conditions much more often we have increasing development obviously we're one of the fastest growing states in the nation we weren't for a while we we continue to go up and down in that department but we are building a lot of homes in the interface which then become fuels when the wildland fire gets into those those home areas wildland fire suppression is a comprehensive interagency approach we learned a long time ago in suppression that we could not do this by ourselves we needed everyone engaged together the federal agencies the state agencies and the local government agencies we didn't none of us co individually had the assets necessary to respond to the fire we were seeing in these landscapes so we work very very well together and i think that's why we had such a successful response this year um to wildland fire our um one of the things i meant to say earlier was our average initial attack success is about 95 across the state this year it was 97 we were more successful in initial attack and i think a lot of that could be attributed to our early air assets that we had available and we did have a lot more crews available within the state because at the times we were burning other states adjacent weren't for a little while and then oregon and washington and california did burn so one of the things we also realized is that we can't just focus on the fire suppression assets of our agencies um putting all of our eggs in the suppression basket we also had to really focus more on creating and sustaining landscapes that are resilient not only to wildland fire but to insect and disease um outbreaks that are common in our forests and rangelands and also um we needed to create and sustain communities that can withstand fire um fire in these ecosystems is natural but can be very devastating under the wrong circumstances the division of forestry's mission i thought most know but we provide professional natural resource and wild and fire management services to nevada citizens and visitors to enhance conserve and protect forest rangelands and watershed values so our job is not only to manage suppression assets we do have our own engines we have three helicopters we also have um hand crews that a large number of inmate working hand crews across the state um but we also our our primary mission is to try to create those resilient landscapes so all of our firefighters though they are firefighters by trade also our natural resource managers by training we put them in and have them doing work when they're not suppressing fire some of the accomplishments of the division this year we treated about 4 700 acres one of the things i would say here is we were on target um the last four years we've all been redirecting ourselves back to the mission and then kovid came so we were on target to overshoot um our we average about 5 000 acres so we're actually short of our average part of that could be due was due to we haven't had a lot of our inmate workforce um available to us so we are just generally understaffed in order to get to multiple projects out in the landscape so we're hoping once the the covid situation diminishes or or becomes less of a problem we'll have our workforce back out there and and doing more projects because that was our goal was to get an increase in acres we also um had uh some of the highlights um we did have a decrease in our plant materials that were sold though we sold 54 000 plants and 15 000 pounds of seed the seed was directly correlated to the fire season we didn't have the year before it was a small fire season 82 000 acres the seed sales actually correlate directly with that the plant sales being down that's about a third of our average plant sales um the that was due to having the nursery closed to the public for quite some time and having limited access to have letting them in because of covid then one of the other things as i kind of talked about earlier the water delivered i just wanted to highlight that number we actually doubled the water delivery to wildfires this year the state's three helicopters um dropped about 365 000 gallons of water on fires it's a great asset and initial attack primarily in forested areas where we have single tree lightning fires the scoopers we contracted with two scoopers within the united states that actually one was housed here for most of the summer at minden the second one came in about mid-summer and that was able to drop about 400 000 gallons of water on fires throughout the state having that early um scooper on on contract actually um with they they dropped on 200 fires and they were they were initially out there if they have a water source right available they were able to get thousands of gallons of water on the fire much much quicker than the other assets we had so we saw an example was the topsy lane fire within the first 15 minutes they had dumped 400 gallons of water um for a thousand gallons of water and it was out which would have been a lot longer if we had only a had initial attack ground forces so it was a great asset to have on contract one of the good things about having it under state contract as well was that when they're under federal contract they become national assets so when washington and oregon and california did begin to burn all of our air assets started to move out of state these ones we did move them out of state if we didn't have risk here but we were able to pull them back when we needed them which was nice i wanted to go over a couple of the programs within the division the wildland fire protection program which is a program that we offer to local government it's a cooperative program between state the division of forestry and local government fire protection districts to improve capabilities and efficiencies for suppression but really before during and after fires the map that you see depicts in green all of the entities that are currently within the program our non-participants are primarily down we split up clark county into multiple jurisdictions so we do have a couple in clark county but most we have five that are out boulder city clark county moapa mount charleston and north las vegas mineral county is not in and there's a portion of general lyon county that's not in but does not have a fire protection district and since the transfer of the walker river state park came over to the state it's really our jurisdiction anyway some of the challenges of this program is one getting full statewide participation this year we transferred the mutual aid position that the division of forestry had back from the department of emergency management for wildland fires to the division of forestry so the the purpose of the transfer as we discussed with the interim committee on wildfire was to ensure that we were getting all of the closest available resources to a wildfire quickly which includes local government assets they're a huge asset in the wildfire response and having them within our interagency dispatch centers actually increases our response capability significantly one of the other things that this program though it had mainly been um allowing the local governments a more solid way of budgeting for wildfires because we help support those large wildfire costs once it goes over 24 hours um one of the things that we hadn't focused so much on in the past but have in the last two years is how do we reduce risk in these participating entities so we had we did about 8 000 acres over the last four years of fuel reduction projects in these participating jurisdictions we've provided engines and water tenders as we can find them our goal is to build capacity in local government response and to reduce risk in high risk areas another challenge is that we are reliant as a division on those county receipts for our fire staff within the division some of the successes we had this year um is well we got a new formula i think you guys heard about that last session so we didn't do it this time i don't think they always loved the formula but we did um this program began in state fiscal year 14. we never had a formula it was always based on a concept that dealt with risk and cost but we actually did get a formula created so the formula is based on the risk in the county so that includes their vegetation the possibility of ignition their fire history as well as values at risk and the non-reimbursed costs to the state on behalf of that jurisdiction so we parse out the costs that way so the other successes we had we in we were able to increase suppression capacity um we increased program participation this year by two entities that was henderson um and las vegas the city of las vegas we were we did increase the fuel reduction projects that we were doing um with the local government they would tell us where these areas of high concern for them and if we had staff that were on stay in a fire station that day that weren't in suppression mode we actually sent them out to do to implement those projects we increased fire prevention events this year and we tried to increase coordination and communication though that's been a little more challenging in person this year i think we've done a good job over over zoom and other ways and we have some fire filling efficiencies coming with the contracted gold systems program where all of these costs will be entered into a system they will come right out of our dispatch centers automatically it will speak to our dispatch cavs so local government will just have to go in and check that yes in fact i had this um engine on there and here is my staffing and it will automatically um create a bill that comes into our office so hopefully our goal is to expedite the fire billing process so we're not sitting on fire bills for you know two to five years we did that significantly through our paper processes so far um but this will will hopefully even increase further i wanted to talk about the shared stewardship program governor syslax signed the shared stewardship agreement in november of 2019. this is a partnership between all the state agencies so department of wildlife department of agriculture the dcnr agencies which we are a part of the forest service the blm and the fish and wildlife service and how are we going to tackle this wildfire issue across the state with limited reserves and and abilities um that we each of our agencies face it's kind of like looking at the fuel reduction and and resilient landscapes pieces the same way we have collectively worked on wildfire suppression so um the purpose of the shared stewardship agreement was to collaboratively determine um state level management needs and priorities and to ensure that we are all collectively doing the right work in the right places and at the right scale to affect change in how fire moves through those ecosystems and that we are all using the best available tools um to do the most active management we can do ahead of wildfires the what you see before you is a map of the areas we collectively determined were the top 13 areas that needed our um concern and addressing at this point um though we still do do work in all the rest of the state from a shared stewardship perspective these were the areas that we were most concerned about from how fire would or does react in those ecosystems we are currently taking this and developing a strategic plan or a five-year program of in of work action that will drive how all of our agencies collectively work in these landscapes at a larger scale together um two projects have been selected as the landscape scale projects that are to be completed by the shared stewardship agreement for and by 2021 one of those projects is in elko spring creek and memorial that's the the name of the unit and one is in the spring mountains down south so we are working right now on implementing those projects the executive committee has been created for this there's a attack a technical assistance committee that's also in so that we're all kind of guiding our work together and and really looking at how these landscapes need our help collectively the fire adapted nevada program sits within the division of forestry as well however really is also an interagency program um guided by the state local government and federal agencies we are the the purpose of this is that other arm that we needed to focus on which was providing education to homeowners on what they can do to home harden their homes making sure that they have the right roofing materials making sure that we don't have a jurisdictional responsibility for that we do want to provide the education for what property owners can do to become more resilient once a fire comes through we're also focused on ensuring that they evacuate early and safely so working with local government and industry on how to get them out safely and and quickly and then also how to survive if they can't get out quickly or safely how do they survive within this community so so that's the focus of the program is trying to look at multiple different areas you're looking at you know defensible space of my backyard you're looking at the entire neighborhood surrounding that then you're looking at ingress egress how do i get in how do i get out is there only one way in only one way out how could is there a way for us to make two ways in and two ways out um and then the built environment like i said one of the um the committee to conduct an interim study concerning wildfires um did a poll on all of the things um that was a local government state federal agency representatives on on how are we going to look at both suppression and mitigation of wildfires in the state of nevada and collectively address those issues so i just listed here some of the committee sponsored bdrs and the areas for which they're they're moving forward a lot of them are looking at you know relating to noxious weeds um cheatgrass in the state of nevada's is is a noxious weed but is not listed as such um and so how do we manage or i guess now live with cheatgrass and try to reduce it in our environment so it's not causing the fire return intervals um increasing of say if the fire a normal fire cycle in some of these ecosystems would be 20 years now we're seeing it reduced to five years or even annually because of these fine flashy fuels so we're kind of looking at how do we more collectively work together that's what a lot of these bdrs are doing making sure that we solidify the relationships between the forest service the blm the fish and wildlife service and the state agencies so that beyond my tenure or whoever is in charge of those agencies we are working together both from a suppression standpoint which we have done for decades and from an implementation and resilient landscape perspective so that's that's our goal and with that i would be happy to answer any questions all right uh thank you for that presentation um and with that we'll go to questions i will start with assemblyman ellison thank you mr chair uh i'm looking at page two and it says bacteria said red uh red and green is human cause if you look at the top of the map that's following i-80 down so that's down along the highway is that from like cigarettes and and stuff like that throwed out up above there because most of the fires we have caused in our areas is mostly lightning and that's my first question then i got another one after that yeah i can't speak to all of those fire starts but when you see them usually along those highways it can be cigarettes it can be chains being drug on the ground that are causing sparks that was the big one for some of the fires along the front here and along that i-80 corridor the a lot of the issues along the i-80 corridors you're well aware um is the receptive fuels it's mostly cheatgrass along those right-of-ways and that's a big focus of ours is to try to get those right-of-ways kind of cleared out so that if you are driving a chain too low and it sparks there aren't receptive fuels on either side of the freeway um for that or a cigarette thrown out or or whatever that might be okay i know that they've got a good program starting indot does as far as uh cutting the grass down along that area but you could sure see that it's following up around lovelock uh through winnemucca battle mountain elko uh so it definitely fall on the corridor okay the other thing i've got is on grazing the ecosystem and the protection of uh you know like the sage grouse and stuff have you got a are you guys still working on a policy there for that um thank you again for the record casey casey uh we are i wouldn't say we are the division of forestry though we are part of the sagebrush ecosystem technical team um and they are still working on that nevada was one of the um pilot states for some um adaptive kind of shared stewardship like grazing permits so they looked at they took five i believe um ranches in nevada and looked at how their grazing permits were given through the federal agencies and how much more we could do um some of the restrictions that are put in place are actually causing more fire returns into those ecosystems before they can get cows back out so they did look at that and i think they found great success and i think you will see a big change in how those permits are awarded going forward and that was one area that was really great i would say for the cooperation and collaboration in nevada other states got one pilot project um nevada got five because we were working together a little bit better and had some some really forward-thinking ranching ranchers who were willing and able and had been doing this for decades but maybe just not taking any credit for for taking care of those ecosystems hey thank you mr chairman can i have one follow up please go ahead yeah thank you uh are you guys using any goats for the noxious weeds right now i know blm has looked at some of that but i haven't heard a lot out of the nevada division of forestry and i know the city of elko used some uh goats that to clean up the river yeah it's amazing what the goats do yes thanks for the question again casey casey i don't know if i have to say that every time but um for the record um yes we have used goats we did use them up here along um highway 50 for a project we were doing in cooperation with and the energy in a reduction we took our masticator out there and then brought the goats in afterward and we will do a reseeding as well following the the chomping of the vegetation we usually traditionally do it here also along the old burn scar here in carson city we are working to expand our good of the state contract right now and writing in some more um of these contracts get trying to get more contractors on the good of the state list with goats and and other non-traditional use um things so that we can actually employ a lot more contractors out there to do a lot more of this work thank you mr chairman and thank you for allowing me to speak thank you thank you mr allison and thank you miss casey for identifying yourself for the record uh though it is repetitive it is helpful uh for our secretary uh taking notes so i appreciate that uh with that we'll go on to vice chair cohen thank you chair and thank you for the presentation miss casey can you give us a little more of the um scientific background about why cheatgrass is a problem and why noxious weeds are a problem like the the cycle kind of get into that a little bit yes again for the record casey casey or fire warden for the division of forestry um cheatgrass is an issue for us um like i said fire in these ecosystems is natural up in our our higher areas we had fire return intervals natural or man-made there was a lot of native american fire use um for prescribed fire over over thousands of years um to try to clean up the understories of forests um in our range lands fire comes at normal intervals um what happens with cheatgrass is so cheap grass is highly competitive to native um seed so it will out compete our native vegetation on all the time so when we have a first fire that comes through say like in the range it's a little bit different in our forested areas but when a first fire comes through we still have some some native vegetation that can compete with the cheatgrass though you'll start to see it coming in but it does allow for more receptivity because it gets drier a lot quicker than our native vegetation and it stays drier longer so um and like i said it puts out a lot of seed it's highly competitive so you start to increase that fire return interval so where you might have had fire return in these landscapes every 20 years now you're starting to see it come back every 10 years then once you get two fires that come through you're really outcome starting to out compete your cheatgrass is starting to take hold and and it depends also on how hot a fire burns through these zika systems if it burns all of the native seed bank um then we've got real problems in the first year so um cheatgrass is just very competitive and very flammable and that's why it allows for more fire to come into these ecosystems and as we start to see those return intervals get smaller and smaller and the cheat grass becomes the more dominant species there then we really are are inhibiting our ability to make a change from our rehab efforts as well because you've got to really go out there at a very large scale and put some herbicide application out there let it stay fallow for a while and then try to get some native seeds to compete all the while you still have cheatgrass seed banks cheatgrass has a large a long life span in a seed in the ground so it's just very hard to get it to actually go away thank you and uh follow-up chair yes go ahead and then is the cheat grass edible for wildlife or for cattle um thanks for the question again for the record casey casey am i have heard it is edible but not preferred i don't think it's something that they would seek out if if there were other um things on site they would eat the other more native or or introduced vegetation that they would prefer that's why oftentimes in our seed mixes because cheatgrass is so competitive we actually look at introduced species that will compete the better with cheatgrass but will give us a placehold for trying to get some natives to come back in so um i i don't think that they prefer it but yes they will graze on it if it's what's out there thank you thank you vice chair cohen uh with that we will go on to assemblywoman titus thank you mr chair as far as the cheek grass goes just a comment um that was actually planted uh originally as bronco grass and the department of agriculture indeed thought that that was going to be part of a food source and good for grazing it turns out that obviously there's a fire source but we're trying to get it back in and to recognize that that can be counted as part of their grazing allotment and look at if it's grazed at the appropriate time and that's the key is getting those cows on that and i think assembly ellison can answer any other questions on cheatgraph uh being um having his family in the cattle grazing business at times i have a couple questions if i might uh mr chair um for uh for casey i think that um and and first off the plant the nursery um is it open now is your nursery available to the public now or is it still closed due to coven thank you for the question casey case for the record it's open it's open with limited capacity at this point does the popul does the population have to make an appointment there or we can find it online and how do people access that thanks for the question casey casey again for the record um yes it's available online they do need to make um a reservation so you can either call in or you can go to our website forestry.mv.gov and there's a little um forum to sign in so we did that from a covered precaution standpoint just to make sure we didn't have a lot of people um we still do allow walk-ins so long as we're you know under the the recommended capacity yeah great because it's a great resource and i know i've been there and i and on my very different properties i have purchased uh plants and trees from that location and they all do well i'm curious about the seed program um it always seems like there's a shortage of the number of seeds and i'm worried uh how are we doing how's our storage for that what what's the uh what's availability of native seeds um to put out because i know it's been a big push on on our uh interim committee on wildfires and just you know getting our how do we compete with the um cheat grass if we don't have any seeds to put out there yeah thanks for the question again for the record casey casey um our seed bank is pretty small as you know there is a um another seed bank in ely that was just built with the federal partners we work collaboratively together one of the things that got encompassed under the shared stewardship contract and agreement was a native seed strategy for um it was interagency partnership between state federal local cooperators how are we going to increase native seed collection and sourcing up from site because as you all are probably very aware it does matter if where the seeds grown and at what elevations and making sure that we're putting the right seed back in the right places so that was pretty big for us so we created a committee they did just come out with this the native seed strategy and it's looking at how do we increase that seed part of what we're doing even at our nursery s y we have a lot of land out there so we have our greenhouses but we also have land in the back so we have been um creating seed increased beds so we got a list of the highest priority species for things like sage grouse or or mule deer habitat or other areas that we're having a hard time actually buying and we are um and we're growing them out we're looking at trying to help um get more private industry folks and ranchers um involved in this as well so trying to create contracts that would be long term so that they have some stability in this process if we were to ask them to gross a sagebrush um it sounds weird to want to grow sagebrush but seed is not a given every year it's all dependent upon how much moisture we get and so those are the types of things that that group is looking at and implementing across agencies excellent thank you and if i might have another question mr chair go ahead following up on that that nursery is right outside of washoe valley and do you have anything in southern nevada that could absolutely benefit i think from a nursery program or is it just here at the washoe in washoe valley where you have your nursery um thanks again for the question casey casey for the record we have two state tree nurseries the one um there on east lake boulevard is where the seed bank is directly next door and our office our second one is in las vegas it's right um directly attached to the floyd lamb state or i think it's a county park now but um it's um in that same driveway into that area it used to be way on the outskirts of town and now it's right in the middle of suburbia so statutes require that we sell the plants for conservation purposes in bulk um so one of the bills you'll see this year is trying to kind of expand on on some of that but we do have two vegas is great for us actually and it is the primary growing source for us as you know our growing season up here is pretty short even with the greenhouse um so vegas is the primary one who's growing most of the things and then we move them into to outside shade structures up here um to be sold up here too great thank you and then final question um uh settlement allison asked a question about that corridor and um you know pointing out about grazing and we have we have the board of sheep that go on the carson city hillside out here we know that that low is fire risk and some of that and and goats and whatever we can to graze off some of this he also mentioned um maybe uh you mentioned ndot and you know the cutting and making sure that that fuel beside the roads is kept down but it's been my impression in the past that um they also have a program where they put an herbicide or some fire not an arbor stop but maybe a fire retardant that they they spread alongside the roadside are you partnering with ndot on that program thank you for the question again for the record casey casey i'm not sure if i'm um we have partnered with them on right-of-way projects um all across the state both from a fuel thinning perspective to a tree thinning perspective so there's visual areas of open space for deer and other things that might cross the road i'm not aware of them putting down retardant in those areas pre-suppression but i do know that they've done a lot of like a lot of times you'll see that green spray that they put out there that's right the hydro seeding stuff that they're doing um we've worked with them with herbicides we have we have done prescribed burning in those right-of-ways for them but i'm not aware of spraying any of the um retardant ahead of it okay i i it's that green thing the the stuffed alongside the highway i thought that was a return that they put down to prevent those wildfires from happening and i'm hearing that maybe that's not what that is so um could be wrong on that anyway thank you for the questions uh mr chair and thank you again for the presentation and i'm excited to hear that that there's more rapid response and early you know early intervention and a billion billion in efficiencies that you're doing so thank you for the presentation and appreciate what you do for nevada thank you thank you thank you assemblywoman uh next we'll go to assemblywoman anderson thank you chair watts and thank you again for the presentation very informative uh one question that i have has to do with um i would say this are there are there some ideas of how we can improve our emergency response delivery services i realize that this is a little bit of a regional thing because the emergency services that are necessary and um douglas for the time for the pine haven fire and washo for the numbers fire or even here in carson for the um the fire autopsy drive that you spoke of would be different but are there some possible resources that you are all looking at for to help with these um how we can get those emergency response services quickly thank you for the question again for the record casey casey um we're always looking at how do we improve our efficiencies and that was one of the long discussions we had at the interim committee on how do we get stuff particularly local government whose jurisdiction this really is out there quicker they dispatched through a 9-1-1 dispatch center to all emergencies they're all risk not just wildland fire we um the state and the federal agencies are really wildland fire focused and we dispatch out of an interagency dispatch center that's run between all of our agencies so one of the things that came out of that committee was we needed to be more efficient and look at those local government assets and how we get them into our dispatch centers so we have made that transition here on the front um in we have five interagency dispatch centers around the state one um las vegas winnemucca ely elko here minden and so we the primary moving part that the largest amount of moving local government parts is here along the front so we started with that one it's the most complicated so it's taken us a while in transition um but we did just meet with them last week and i think we did dispatch them this year and so we're actually just trying to formalize that plan on how they get into our our our system to actually be immediate more immediately available great thank you i have a feeling it's a little bit more of an in-depth discussion so i might be reaching out to you a little bit privately as well so thank you happy to do that it's um fire um response in nevada with the jurisdictions um and the the checkerboard landscape is very complicated i can draw a nice like map and and a lot of stuff on a white board that might help you to understand but um it is a very complicated response and because of all of our agents but we do a good job every year um which i'm hoping that we can correlate that that response of really working together and giving up our jurisdictional you know focus and and really working together can can correlate over to how do we reduce the risk on the front side as well all right thank you for that question i have a couple of quick questions um one is so we've talked about collecting seed to restore habitat we've talked about grazing we've talked about deploying additional assets for response i was just wondering um if we could talk a little bit about technology i know in the last session we got a presentation on cameras to detect uh wildfires early and i was just wondering if um there's been any uh technology deployed or developed that you see assisting in um wildfire response and and recovery thank you for the question chair watts um again for the record casey casey yes um that we have been looking at how technology can help assist obviously the fire cameras are great for detection um they also assist us when we have um one of the reasons those cameras are so important for detection is anybody can watch them they're open to the public if anybody sees something start you can see smoke pretty immediately we're working on systems where it may auto detect the smoke and immediately go into an interagency dispatch center those have been great we have um i think there are about 20 more cameras going out this year there's about 50 of them around the state right now we've got a lot of coverage and what we're trying to do is make sure that we have coverage from multiple different angles in case we lose those types of one goes down we still have coverage um there's a lot of technology we use weather systems we've been putting in with our partnership with nv energy putting in a lot of weather stations and weather systems it helps us to determine really how hot and dry at that micro level at that micro ecosystem what does it really look like out there and that's really impactful from a fire perspective when we're looking at what are the relative humidities what's the wind speeds in which directions so we've deployed a lot of those we also have mobile devices that are weather stations that we take out with us we've looked at how drones could assist and we have used drones on fires both from going up and and looking at the perimeter and mapping the perimeter um and um in in other aspects like seating there's it's strange to say but they have drones that like shoot seeds from the sky into the ground and it probably is pretty effective because at least it gets in there so we're looking at multiple ways that technology can help um there's a lot of great mapping tools out there nv energy is coming up online with a lot of fuel moisture readers around the state so it actually is taking real live reads of what the fuel moistures are at different elevations and in different fuel types which is extremely helpful for us during prescribed fires but also during um when we're looking at how hot is it um what are we gonna staff up for if we need you know if we know that we are really dry and our fuel moistures are dry and we have potential for any starts we can staff up for that so so we're constantly evolving with with the technology out there thank you that's very informative and it's great to see the increased collaboration between uh governmental entities at all levels as well as other partners uh including uh envy energy's increased involvement as they uh step up their uh wildfire response plans so that's helpful uh back to the issue of human starts and i'm sure that you know discuss some of the um education that goes around into communities on preventing some of the emergencies with communities that are on the interface um can you talk about any um activities that you have in terms of education outreach or or any other initiatives that might be able to address the increase in human starts that we're seeing for wildfire yes thanks for the question again for the record casey casey we have we have always had an educational component smokey bear we have um you know goes out to schools talks to kids about about starts um it's pretty effective um to talk to kids about it because then they go home and talk to their parents so that that's helpful um but we have recognized in the past couple years as we started to see an increase in human cause fires we're constantly looking at data and why those fires are starting a couple years back a lot of our large fires were started by target shooting so we actually called the prevention team in it's an interagency team with federal state and local government partners who come into the state um to directly target you know psas and and billboards and and fact sheets and going door-to-door to hand out and talk to people about you know there are conditions out there that are different than there were 20 years ago in areas where you you used to be able to go and there was no vegetation in the understory and shoot you can't anymore because we've had these um fine flash flashy fuels come in and so that's part of the educational tool so we look at that every year um every year we're looking collaboratively on what's what's the biggest cause of the is it you know illegal campfires and we'll do a big um push on on how to try to stop that um i would like to say it's effective but as you just keep seeing the numbers increase and we're effective in some areas we're unaware of some others so so we're still working through how do we get that education to the people that really need it we do work across states um with the national association of state foresters or the council of western state foresters we're also talking about things that are joint across our state so that we're not just saying it here as often it's tourists coming in that don't aren't really aware of our of our vegetation issues or or what might be out in this landscape so we are working across state boundaries to try to get that education to be consistent and across all agencies wonderful thank you so much for that information and i have one last question i was just wondering if you could speak a little bit about what the um firefighting workforce looks like particularly the non-inmate workforce and any issues that you may see in recruitment and retention in that regard and and then kind of how that relates to our reliance on on inmate firefighters to help us combat wildfires thank you for the question again for the record casey casey i'll speak to the division of forestry specifically so our workforce in in firefighting wildland firefighting has fluctuated over the years as you know there was a statute um historically where we were actually an all-risk fire department just like cal fire is we were not just responding to wildland fires but to all emergencies um that went away about eight years ago and we moved to a solely wildland fire response agency when that shift happened a lot of the staff was picked up by the county where that responsibility was lying so a lot of the ndf staff moved over and became county fire protection staff so there hasn't been a decrease in staffing but it has been a shift it shifted out of the division of forestry and into the county um we're seeing just generally across the agency a retention issue because often we don't compete with wages in private industry and or the public sector so um but firefighters who come here um we do offer things that others don't we have three helicopters granted they're 50 years old well one of them's new um two of them are really really old um from the time of world war ii but um but but they're safe as we do maintain them to to current standards but um we have we have programs like that that others don't that do draw in people and keep them here um we are our largest workforce if you take out in inmate firefighters is seasonal firefighters and part of our our push was to try to get a longer season for them and we were able to do that a little bit in last session because as you know we need um you know historically our fire seasons were five months we would bring them on do their training for a month and then you know three months of firefighting a month of cooldown and there's your five months now we're looking at about nine months um trying to keep them on um for project work as well so it's it's generally a little bit hard um but from a retention standpoint we have a lot of firefighters that have been with us for quite some time um i i like to think that the mission of we don't have that all-risk component so you don't need to be a paramedic um in our agency and some people um really care about the ecosystems in nevada and so like that mix of both caring about it from a suppression standpoint and being able to implement fuel reduction ahead of time so we do tend to see but we have a small number i think we have six um staffed engines across the state we're really support to local government and to the federal agencies the three helicopters um here at minden a large contingent of about 50 um seasonal firefighters and dispatchers that come on during the peak of the fire season to help us out and and just to speak to the inmate workforce um i think that um the whole reason the program was was created between the department of corrections and the division of forestry was actually to provide skills to to um inmates that are coming into the system to hopefully reduce the the return rates into the prison system in the state of nevada so when we bring them into the system um i don't think we always intended them to be firefighters though they are a large firefighting workforce for us their their primary mission as ours is too is is natural resource management and we give them the same accreditations um they go through the same training our free staff have and they take that with them um when they leave so so part of the the real goal of the program was to try to give them skills um we don't see a lot of them going into firefighting as a career following but we do see a lot of them going into the tree care industry um into so we are working right now with the university on how do we get a bigger program there to give accreditations and certifications um concurrent with national standards that could be more helpful to them in that industry and we do provide them the training and the saw classes and the climbing classes and the how to tie a knot classes um while they're in there and that was really the goal of the program [Music] thank you very much miss casey for that uh information there is a lot of helpful uh information there and uh very interesting to to think of ways that we can continue to build that pipeline in order to reduce recidivism and provide opportunities for folks so it's good to hear that that there are other opportunities that folks are moving into and hopefully there are not barriers for those that want to pursue firefighting to access it i heard you specifically mentioned the state's uh does not have a paramedic requirement i didn't know that was very interesting and good to hear and if there are any of those barriers i hope that we can be made aware of them so that we can consider addressing those in the legislature so with that i think that's all the questions that we have i know mr ellison you had an additional question uh since we do have another meeting starting soon i'm going to ask you to please take that question offline and again uh thank you miss casey for the presentation for the couple of people that are following along online i've got my wildland firefighter foundation pin on today in the 52-week club there so with that we will now move on to the next agenda item which is public comment as a reminder to provide public comment by phone you must register online on the legislative website information is also available on our committee agendas registrants will receive a phone number meeting id and instructions to join them please remember to clearly state your name and limit your comments to two minutes and with that will the staff and broadcast production services please add the first caller with public comment to the meeting chair the public line is open and working but there are no callers at this time all right thank you very much uh with that that concludes our meeting for today our next meeting will be on monday february 15th at 4 o'clock p.m thank you all committee members this meeting is adjourned you