Matt Mahan

If you prefer to have the trees there, you should pay the higher premium.

So more granular pricing, allowing appropriate pricing of risk is just really important.

Now, for the 5% to 10% of homes that are up in the hills, heavily wooded areas where there's lots of vegetation,

We'll have to have higher, first of all, when you build, there's a question of how much more we should be able to build out there.

Probably not a lot.

What materials you use, they need to be fire resistant and you'll have to pay much higher insurance just to cover the true cost of the likelihood of a fire and the cost of replacement.

The other piece of this though, is the state has to take more ownership for vegetation management.

We spend $8 in fire response and recovery for every $1 we spend on prevention.

And there are plenty of urbanized areas that are at risk because they're proximate to dense vegetation that the state has not taken ownership for clearing.

And yes, it should be in partnership with the federal government.

If they're federal lands, we should hold the federal government accountable for doing it.

But I just toured

Altadena and Palisades met with the homeowners there who were incredibly frustrated about the lack of rebuilding.

No one is quarterbacking this.

And if you go walk the Palisades today, you will see, once again, vegetation that's five feet tall that hasn't been managed in an area where people are trying to rebuild their homes.

So the state has to step up as governor.

I would create

a task force that just focuses on fixing the insurance market.

And if the state will invest in vegetation management to reduce the risk of catastrophic loss, you're going to see premiums go down over the long term.

Yeah, these kinds of price controls don't work in practice as we've seen.