The Butte County Board of Supervisors met Tuesday weighing urgent housing needs against long-term impacts. Read the full story here.
Governor Gavin Newsom toured parts of the Camp Fire burn zone yesterday, a day after signing legislation stabilizing local school funding.
Through the quirks of California’s spending system local schools are primarily funded by property tax. With the destroying roughly 90 percent of Paradise and surrounding communities, the hit is huge.
Newsom was on hand to deliver good news to local elected officials at Pine Ridge Elementary in Magalia, one of the few schools in the burn zone to survive virtually unscathed.
“We signed legislation yesterday committing something the state of California has never committed to any community, and that’s three years to offset and backfill 100 percent of the property tax losses of this community and also to do the same for our school system. That’s not something you should applaud, that’s something you should expect.” Newsom said.
Newsom’s visit coincided with a bus tour organized by the California Forestry Association for state legislators and local officials, which also visited Pine Ridge. Principal Talin Tamzarian said half of the school’s students relocated since the fire, but the student population bounced back after a local middle school was moved in.
Assemblyman James Gallagher, praised the governor for swiftly signing the tax measure, and called for more action.
“We know there’s a lot more things that we need to do and we’ve been having some conversations about that. One of it is, we need to do better on forestry management, we know that. Without this build up of fuels, we would not have had this kind of devastation and so, we want to bring back the logging industry that’s provided a lot of jobs to this area.” Gallagher said.
Former Paradise Fire Chief Jim Broshears, who now works with the local Fire Safe Council, credited the campus’s survival on the tenacious efforts of firefighters and $30,000 worth of work removing brush, dead trees and other fuels. Little is left of the surrounding neighborhood.