State and Local Responsibility Areas: which rules follow which land
Updated: Sep 21
PRC 4125 directs the Board of Forestry to classify all California land, and PRC 4126 and 4127 say what goes in and what stays out. Local and Federal Responsibility Areas are the residue, defined nowhere in statute. PRC 4292 and 4293 bind on land cover, but 14 CCR 1252's standing determination and 1257's exemptions stop at the boundary.
One 12 kV circuit leaving a Sonoma County substation on an August afternoon, and four poles on it. Pole 12 stands inside the city limits. Pole 44 stands on brush-covered private land two miles out. Pole 78 stands on a section line that a map shows as the boundary. Pole 91 stands inside a national forest. Same conductor, same crew, same tape measure, same day.
The clearance the statute asks for is the same four feet at three of those poles and arguably at all four. What differs is who determined that it was owed, which exemptions the utility can claim, whether a shortfall is a statutory public nuisance, and who receives the letter when the landowner says no. None of that is visible from the conductor, and none of it appears on a work order that says only "12 kV, brush, four feet."
The classification statute, and the two areas it never names
Three short sections do the whole of the drawing, and a fourth defines the term.
PRC 4102: "'State responsibility areas' means areas of the state in which the financial responsibility of preventing and suppressing fires has been determined by the board pursuant to Section 4125, to be primarily the responsibility of the state."
PRC 4125(a) is the classification duty, and its second sentence is the only place in the code where anything else is named:
The board shall classify all lands within the state, without regard to any classification of lands made by or for any federal agency or purpose, for the purpose of determining areas in which the financial responsibility of preventing and suppressing fires is primarily the responsibility of the state. The prevention and suppression of fires in all areas that are not so classified is primarily the responsibility of local or federal agencies, as the case may be.
PRC 4126 says what the Board shall include:
Land covered wholly or in part by forests or by trees producing or capable of producing forest products.
Land covered wholly or in part by timber, brush, undergrowth or grass, whether of commercial value or not, which protects soil from excessive erosion, retards runoff or accelerates percolation, if the land is a source of water available for irrigation or for domestic or industrial use.
Land principally used or useful for range or forage purposes contiguous to either of the first two.
PRC 4127 says what it shall not include:
(a) Lands owned or controlled by the federal government or any agency of the federal government. (b) Lands within the exterior boundaries of any city, except a city and county with a population of less than 25,000 if, at the time the city and county government is established, the county contains no municipal corporations. (c) Any other lands within the state which do not come within any of the classes which are described in Section 4126.
Read those together and the structure is a single positive classification with a residue. There is no statute that designates a Local Responsibility Area and no statute that designates a Federal Responsibility Area. Both terms describe what is left after the Board has finished. The Board's own regulation defining the term for safety-element review, 14 CCR 1265.00, defines "State Responsibility Area" and nothing else.
Government Code 51177, the definitions section for the very high fire hazard severity zone chapter, defines "local agency" as "a city, county, city and county, or district responsible for fire protection within a very high fire hazard severity zone." It defines state responsibility areas by pointing back at PRC 4102. It does not define a Local Responsibility Area either.
CAL FIRE's own field manual for this work reflects that asymmetry precisely. The California Power Line Fire Prevention Field Guide, 2021 edition, lists both LRA and FRA in its acronym definitions at page iv. Across the remaining 137 pages the phrase "Local Responsibility Area" appears zero times.
"Federal Responsibility Area" appears once, in a sentence at page 3 noting that the USFS Southwest Region 5 office has region-wide and individual Operations and Maintenance agreements with utility providers that have facilities in the Federal Responsibility Areas of the state. "State responsibility area" appears on nine separate pages. A program that builds its geographic framework from that guide will find one of the three areas described and two of them merely abbreviated.
What the line is drawn on
14 CCR 1220 is the regulation that makes the maps official. It provides that State Responsibility Area boundaries as defined in PRC 4102 are delineated on a series of maps on file in the Sacramento office of the Department, titled "Maps of State Responsibility Areas for Fire Protection."
The Board periodically amends and adopts those maps under PRC 4125 through 4128, "consistent with procedures contained in the publication entitled 'State Responsibility Area Classification System' as updated October 6, 2010." Its authority note cites PRC 4111 and 4125; its reference note cites 4102 and 4125 through 4128.
That incorporated publication is where the criteria live, and its statement of legal basis is the single most useful sentence in it for anyone reasoning about fire risk from a map:
It is important to understand that the system is not based on the ability to protect an area from fire, but rather on the vegetative cover and natural resource values enumerated in PRC 4126.
So a State Responsibility Area polygon is not a statement that the ground is dangerous, and its absence is not a statement that the ground is safe. It is a statement about cover and resource value, filtered through three exclusions. A brush-covered ridge one foot inside a city limit is excluded by PRC 4127(b) no matter what grows on it, and a chaparral slope on Bureau of Land Management ground is excluded by 4127(a) no matter how it burns.
The classification system carries two numeric thresholds and a five-level process.
1. Field evaluation at the CAL FIRE Unit or the Contract County. 2. Regional review. 3. A State Review Team consisting of a member of the Fire Plan staff, a member of the Board, the Region SRA Coordinator for the area and a Contract County representative as needed. 4. The Director's approval. 5. The Board, which "under PRC Section 4125 ... is the final authority for approving changes in classification of SRA."
The field key screens on a residential and commercial structure density of three or more structural units per acre, and on a minimum island size. The State Review Team recommended that size and the Board adopted it at 250 acres for Development and 1,000 acres for Permanent Crops. Below those island sizes an area that otherwise looks like Local Responsibility Area "Remains SRA."
The State Review Key then asks five questions in Part A. A yes to any one of them classifies the land as State Responsibility Area. Each answer requires documentation:
Whether there is a significant threat of fire originating within the area and spreading to other State Responsibility Area.
Whether substantial values exist for the production of forest products, forage or water.
Whether omission would seriously impair the state's ability to protect adjoining State Responsibility Area lands.
Whether a fire denuding the area would initiate a fire and flood sequence.
Whether removal would cause administrative inefficiency.
The last of those five is worth noting by anyone who assumes the boundary tracks hazard. Administrative inefficiency is a sufficient reason to keep a parcel in.
Two ways the line moves, one without a hearing
This is the part that catches vegetation programs, because the two mechanisms produce identical effects on a span and only one of them is visible.
The formal route is the five-year review, and the most recent one is dated. CAL FIRE presented the State Responsibility Area 2025 Five-Year Review to the Board at its January 22, 2025 meeting. The Board held a public hearing on March 5, 2025 and took comment through March 9. At the April 9, 2025 meeting, Chairman O'Brien moved motion 04-09-03:
to adopt, in accordance with Public Resources Code section 4125, the boundaries of State Responsibility Area lands, as set forth in the State Responsibility Area (SRA) 2025 Five-Year Review Presented by CAL FIRE at the Board's January 22, 2025, meeting, with these revised boundaries taking effect 90 days from the date of this adoption.
Member Lopez seconded. The roll call recorded seven ayes, one member absent, and the motion passed. Ninety days from April 9, 2025 is July 8, 2025, which is the date a span reclassified in that review changed areas. It is not July 1, and the difference of a week is the kind of thing that decides which standard a June inspection was written against.
The informal route has no hearing at all. The classification system's review schedule provides that "Automatic exclusion and inclusion will be updated as needed by the State GIS coordinator" and that the State SRA Coordinator prepares an update and summary for the Board "as needed and at a minimum annually." Its field instructions are explicit about what falls into that category: "Incorporated cities and federally owned or controlled lands are automatic exclusions from SRA. Their boundaries must be kept current on the official SRA maps."
The trigger is external, and the document names it: "Upon notification from the State Board of Equalization, the State SRA Mapping Coordinator will update the corporate SRA GIS data layer with approved incorporations or land-use changes." CAL FIRE's published description of the SRA Viewer says the same thing from the data side, that beyond the five-year cycle, automatic changes happen yearly as a result of annexations or de-annexations by incorporated cities, federal land acquisitions or disposals, and county-level parcel changes.
The consequence for a corridor is direct. A city annexes 400 acres of brush on its northern edge. No Board vote, no public hearing, no reclassification finding, no vegetative-cover analysis. PRC 4127(b) excludes the land the moment it is inside the exterior boundary, the GIS layer catches up on its own schedule, and the four spans crossing that ground have left the State Responsibility Area. Nothing about the fuel changed, and everything about which regulations reach the span did.
Three statutory notice mechanisms sit against that, and one of them is addressed to the utility itself.
PRC 4125(b) requires the Department, on or before July 1, 1991 and every fifth year after, to provide maps identifying the boundaries of classified lands to the county assessor for every county containing any. It also requires the Department to notify assessors of changes resulting from periodic boundary modifications approved by the Board.
PRC 4125(c) requires a notice posted at the offices of the county recorder, county assessor and county planning agency identifying the location of the map and of any later change information the county receives. Both run to the county.
14 CCR 1252.1 runs to the company. After stating where the official maps are kept, it provides that when the Board revises State Responsibility Area boundaries under PRC 4125 through 4128, "the Director will forward a legal description of a boundary change(s) to the respective electric utility(s) serving the area(s)."
That is a dated document, naming a utility, describing a specific piece of ground, and the Title 14 article it sits in contains nothing else like it. It is the cleanest evidence available of when a corridor entered or left the area, and it belongs in the corridor file rather than in general correspondence. It also has a gap that follows from the paragraph above: it is triggered by a Board revision, which is exactly what an annexation is not.
Which obligations follow the land, and which follow the utility
The useful question is never "is this span in the State Responsibility Area." It is "which of the twelve things I owe on this span change if it is not."
Obligation | What switches it on | Where it stops |
PRC 4292 pole firebreak | Land cover, plus a determination by the Director or the responsible fire protection agency | Nowhere on its face; no area named in the statute |
PRC 4293 conductor clearance | Same | Same |
14 CCR 1252 standing determination | Being inside a State Responsibility Area | The area boundary |
14 CCR 1253 fire season | The declared season for the county | Reaches only through 1252 |
14 CCR 1255 firebreak exemptions | Pole and connector facts | No area limit in its text |
14 CCR 1257 clearance exemptions | Conductor, area and tree facts | The area boundary, in the chapeau |
14 CCR 1257(a)(3)(B) July 1 report | Having primary distribution conductors in a State Responsibility Area | Company-wide once switched on |
PRC 4171 public nuisance | A fire-hazard condition on property in a State Responsibility Area | The area boundary |
PRC 4202 fire hazard severity zones | Land inside a State Responsibility Area | The area boundary |
PRC 4295.5 right of entry | A State Responsibility Area or a high fire threat district | Outside both |
PRC 4295 relief | Absence of the legal right to clear | No geography at all |
GO 95 Rule 35, Table 1 | The utility's Commission jurisdiction | Not a land question |
GO 165 inspection cycles | The same | Not a land question |
NERC FAC-003 | The facility's voltage and function | Not a land question |
Two lines in that table do most of the work.
The first is the top pair. PRC 4292 and PRC 4293 do not contain the words "state responsibility area." Each binds "any person that owns, controls, operates, or maintains any electrical transmission or distribution line upon any mountainous land, or in forest-covered land, brush-covered land, or grass-covered land." Each conditions the duty "during such times and in such areas as are determined to be necessary by the director or the agency which has primary responsibility for the fire protection of such areas."
The geography in those sections is a description of what grows on the ground, not a classification. What the boundary decides is not whether the statute reads on the span but whether the determination has already been made for it, standing, by 14 CCR 1252. Inside the area it has.
Outside it, the determination belongs to somebody else, and Article 4 neither makes it, nor requires it to be made, nor says what form it takes. The four, six and ten feet themselves and the ten-foot firebreak at the pole are unchanged by any of this.
The second is the bottom three rows. Commission jurisdiction attaches to the utility, not to the acre. Rule 35 and Table 1 reach a jurisdictional utility's overhead line wherever it stands, GO 165's inspection cycles likewise, and FAC-003's applicability is a question about voltage and function rather than about land.
A span inside city limits with no State Responsibility Area status and no fire-threat tier still owes its Table 1 Case 13 minimum and still sits inside a GO 165 patrol interval. The responsibility area answers half the file and none of the other half.
The exemption that stops at the line
The two exemption sections in Title 14 Article 4 are usually described as a matched pair, one for poles and one for spans. On the question of geography they are not a pair at all, and the difference is in the first clause of each.
14 CCR 1257 opens: "(a) The minimum clearance provisions of PRC 4293 applicable in State Responsibility Areas are exempted:". The area is written into the grant.
14 CCR 1255 opens: "The minimum clearance provisions of PRC 4292 are not required around poles and towers, including line junction, corner ...". No area appears in that sentence, and its note cites and references PRC 4292 alone.
Take that at face value on the annexed 400 acres from the section above. A local fire protection agency with primary responsibility there determines that PRC 4292 and 4293 are necessary during the declared season, which is exactly the determination the statutes contemplate and which nothing in Article 4 forbids. The firebreak exemptions travel: a pole with continuous conductors is still outside PRC 4292 under 1255(a), and a pole whose only connector is one of the ten types listed in 1255(b) is still outside it.
The clearance exemptions do not. Intact tree wire on that span is not exempted by 1257(a)(1), because 1257 grants relief only from "the minimum clearance provisions of PRC 4293 applicable in State Responsibility Areas." Neither is intact self-supporting aerial cable under the same subsection, nor an Exempt Tree confirmed by a Certified Arborist or Registered Professional Forester under 1257(a)(3).
The result is the wrong way around from what anyone would design. Relief is thinner on the land where the underlying determination is weaker. Whether CAL FIRE would press that reading is a separate question, and nothing in the 2021 Field Guide addresses it, because the guide's discussion of these sections never leaves the State Responsibility Area.
What is not in doubt is what the two texts say, and a utility claiming a tree wire exemption on non-SRA ground is claiming something 1257's own opening clause does not appear to give it. That claim belongs in the file with its reasoning attached rather than as a category.
One reporting duty runs the other direction and catches companies that think of themselves as urban. 14 CCR 1257(a)(3)(B) binds "All Utility Companies with primary distribution conductors in State Responsibility Areas (SRA) of California." The trigger is having any. A municipal utility whose service territory is 95 percent inside city limits, with one feeder crossing three miles of county brush, is inside that sentence. The annual inspection, the location and species database and the July 1 report to CAL FIRE attach on the strength of that one feeder.
The agency behind the determination
Both statutes name two possible determining authorities, "the director or the agency which has primary responsibility for the fire protection of such areas." Article 4 stopped defining the second one on November 23, 2005, when the amendment filed October 24, 2005 repealed the definition of "Agency" from 14 CCR 1251.
Inside the State Responsibility Area that repeal costs nothing, because 1252 supplies the Director's determination outright. Outside it, the phrase carries the entire condition and has nothing behind it, which is why a program operating on Local Responsibility Area land has to name the agency in its own records rather than refer to it.
Even inside the State Responsibility Area the answer is not always CAL FIRE. PRC 4129 lets a county's board of supervisors provide by ordinance that the county elects to assume responsibility for the prevention and suppression of all fires on all land in the county. The election reaches "lands within state responsibility areas when the Director of Forestry and Fire Protection concurs in accordance with criteria adopted by the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection," and excludes federal land and land inside cities.
After the effective date of the contract referred to in PRC 4133, the county exercises for the contract's duration all the duty, power, authority and responsibility for those fires. Six counties operate this way: Kern, Los Angeles, Marin, Orange, Santa Barbara and Ventura.
What a contract county changes and what it does not are both worth stating plainly, because they are frequently reversed. The classification does not change. The land remains State Responsibility Area, drawn by the Board under PRC 4125 through 4128, and 14 CCR 1252's standing determination reaches it exactly as it reaches CAL FIRE-served ground.
The service and the enforcement contact do change. The classification system itself is built around that. Field evaluation happens "at the Unit or Contract County," the State Review Team seats "a representative for the affected Contract County as needed," and the Director must "advise the Contract Counties of any potential fiscal impacts" of a proposed reclassification.
On the enforcement side, PRC 4119 makes the Director or a duly authorized agent responsible for enforcing the state forest and fire laws and authorizes inspection of all properties except the interior of dwellings. The 2021 Field Guide's note on that section states that "by interagency agreement, many employees of the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and certain county fire departments are 'duly authorized agents' of the Director of Forestry and Fire Protection."
This lands hardest on the one document a vegetation program is most likely to get wrong: the access file. CAL FIRE's guidance at page 22 of the 2021 guide tells utilities that where permission cannot be secured they should "report their access problems to the responsible fire protection agency." That is a mailing instruction with a variable in it. On CAL FIRE-served State Responsibility Area ground the addressee is the Unit. In Ventura County it is the county fire department.
On Local Responsibility Area ground it is the city or district fire agency, by name. What a refusal file has to hold before a refusal answers for a span is its own subject, and the contribution the responsibility area makes to it is the address on the envelope. The 2019 right of entry in PRC 4295.5 runs in State Responsibility Areas and high fire threat districts and in neither case depends on who serves the ground.
One further wrinkle exists for exactly one county. PRC 4129.1 applies only where the population exceeds 8,000,000, which in California means Los Angeles County alone.
Where a city's incorporation removes land from a State Responsibility Area and the county continues to provide residential fire service, the county must contract with the newly incorporated city on the same terms as the state contract for three years after incorporation. The county may also bill the city for actual revenue losses within a stated formula. It does not alter the Department's powers or duties, and it does not put the land back in the area.
Where the boundary runs through the pole
PRC 4128 permits the Board, "for purposes of administrative convenience," to "designate roads, pipelines, streams, or other recognizable landmarks as arbitrary boundaries." That sentence is why so many State Responsibility Area edges follow linear features, and why so many of them run through utility infrastructure rather than beside it.
Two short regulations then say what happens when they do, and both resolve against the utility. Under 14 CCR 1252.2, a boundary that follows a road, highway, street, railroad, stream, canal or river runs down the middle of it. 14 CCR 1252.3 goes further and reaches structures directly. Where the boundaries are on section, township or range lines, or on powerline rights of way, the poles, towers and conductors located there are within the area.
Pole 78 from the opening, standing on the section line, is inside the State Responsibility Area, and so is every conductor leaving it. The full text of both rules, and the fact that the 2021 Field Guide omits 1252.3 entirely from its reprint of the article, matters most to programs that mapped their corridors from the guide, because the omitted rule is the one that decides contested spans.
Three fire geographies, and none is the others
A California span can carry three independent designations drawn by three bodies under three statutes, and the most expensive errors in this subject come from treating any two of them as the same layer.
The State Responsibility Area is the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection's, under PRC 4125 through 4128, on vegetative cover and resource value. It determines where 14 CCR 1252's standing determination applies and where 14 CCR 1257's exemptions are available.
The High Fire-Threat District is the CPUC's, defined at GO 95 Rule 21.2-D as Zone 1 of the tree mortality map plus Tiers 2 and 3 of the CPUC Fire-Threat Map. It determines which case of Table 1 applies and how long a Level 2 correction may take. It has nothing to do with the Board's classification and its boundaries were drawn from a different analysis for a different purpose.
Fire Hazard Severity Zones are a third product, and they split along the same responsibility-area line this page is about. Inside the State Responsibility Area, PRC 4202 directs that "the director shall classify lands within state responsibility areas into fire hazard severity zones," implemented at 14 CCR 1280.01, and the current adopted zones took effect April 1, 2024.
Outside it, Government Code 51178 has the State Fire Marshal identify moderate, high and very high zones, and Government Code 51179 requires the local agency to designate them by ordinance within 120 days of receiving the recommendations. The Office of the State Fire Marshal released its Local Responsibility Area recommendations in four phases during 2025, on February 10, February 24, March 10 and March 24.
The point for a vegetation program is a negative one, and it is worth writing down because it saves arguments. No provision of GO 95, no provision of GO 165, and neither PRC 4292 nor PRC 4293 turns on a Fire Hazard Severity Zone. The zone drives defensible space, building standards and disclosure.
It does not change a clearance, an inspection interval or a correction deadline on a conductor. A span can sit in a Very High zone and owe the Case 13 numbers because it is outside the High Fire-Threat District, and a span can sit in a Moderate zone inside Tier 3 and owe Case 14.
One consequence does turn on the State Responsibility Area alone, and it is an enforcement one. PRC 4171 provides that "any condition endangering public safety by creating a fire hazard and which exists upon any property which is included within any state responsibility area is a public nuisance." That characterization, with the abatement machinery that follows it, is available on one side of the boundary and not the other.
It sits alongside rather than instead of PRC 4021, which reaches the negligent or willful omission of an act required by the relevant chapters of the Public Resources Code and carries no geographic limit of its own. Which body will actually look at a given file, and what each can do with it follows from those two provisions more than from anything in the clearance rules.
What the record has to name
A responsibility area is an assertion about a parcel, and an assertion is only auditable if the file says what it was checked against and on what date.
Five elements make one checkable.
The area, named as one of three. State Responsibility Area, Local Responsibility Area or federal. "Rural" and "wildland" are not answers to this question, and neither is the fire-threat tier.
The layer version and its effective date. CAL FIRE publishes the current classification through the State Responsibility Area Viewer, and the underlying official maps are the ones described in 14 CCR 1220 and held under 14 CCR 1252.1.
A determination made against the layer as it stood in June 2025 and a determination made in August 2025 can differ on the same parcel, because the 2025 review's boundaries took effect 90 days after April 9, 2025. Recording the version is what lets a later reader tell which of those two a finding belongs to.
The observed land cover. PRC 4292 and 4293 bind on mountainous, forest-covered, brush-covered or grass-covered land, and the responsibility area is a separate fact from that one. Both are required and neither substitutes for the other. Article 4 defines none of the four cover terms, so what the file can hold is what the inspector saw.
The responsible fire protection agency, by name, wherever it is not CAL FIRE. In a contract county, the county fire department. On Local Responsibility Area ground, the city or district. That name is the addressee for an access report and the author of any determination outside the State Responsibility Area, and it is the field that the repealed definition of "Agency" in 14 CCR 1251 left with nothing behind it.
The county's declared fire season status on the date of the work, which 14 CCR 1253 makes an element of whether either statute applied at all.
Set that against the four poles this page opened with. "Pole 44, Sonoma 1104, 12 kV, State Responsibility Area per SRA Viewer as of the boundaries effective July 8 2025, brush-covered, Sonoma County fire season declared, CAL FIRE Sonoma-Lake-Napa Unit, 30 inches at closest approach on August 14 2026" is a testable finding. A stranger can check it against PRC 4293(a), against 14 CCR 1252 and 1253, and against 14 CCR 1257 if an exemption is later claimed.
"Pole 12, same circuit, inside city limits, Local Responsibility Area, no standing determination, city fire department, Table 1 Case 13 applies" is a different finding with a different set of open questions, and the most important thing about it is that it says so. What a clearance record has to carry to survive being read a year later is a larger subject, and the responsibility area's contribution to it is that it is the field which decides whether the rest of the entry was written against the right rule.
Further reading
PRC 4293: radial clearance in State Responsibility Areas: The clearance obligation the area determination switches on, and the second duty beside it.
Title 14 CCR sections 1250 to 1258: the implementing rules: The article that conditions itself on this boundary in four separate sections.
High Fire-Threat District: what Tier 2 and Tier 3 change: The other California fire geography, drawn by a different agency for different rules.
Frequently asked questions
What is a State Responsibility Area?
PRC 4102 defines it as areas of the state in which the financial responsibility of preventing and suppressing fires has been determined by the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, under PRC 4125, to be primarily the responsibility of the state. PRC 4126 lists the three land types the Board must include and PRC 4127 lists the three it must exclude, which are federal land, land inside city limits, and anything not meeting 4126.
Is there a legal definition of Local Responsibility Area?
Not in the Public Resources Code. The only statutory reference is the second sentence of PRC 4125(a), which says the prevention and suppression of fires in areas not classified as state responsibility is primarily the responsibility of local or federal agencies, as the case may be. 14 CCR 1265.00 defines State Responsibility Area and no other area. Government Code 51177 defines local agency but not Local Responsibility Area.
Do PRC 4292 and PRC 4293 apply outside a State Responsibility Area?
On their own terms, yes. Both statutes bind on mountainous, forest-covered, brush-covered or grass-covered land and say nothing about responsibility areas. What stops at the boundary is 14 CCR 1252, the Director's standing determination that the sections are necessary. Outside a State Responsibility Area that determination belongs to whichever agency has primary fire protection responsibility, and no section of Title 14 Article 4 makes it for them.
Does a city annexation move a span out of the State Responsibility Area?
Yes, and without a Board vote. The State Responsibility Area Classification System incorporated by 14 CCR 1220 treats incorporated cities and federally owned or controlled land as automatic exclusions whose boundaries are kept current by the State GIS coordinator, with a summary to the Board at minimum annually. Only reclassifications on vegetative-cover grounds go through the five-level review and a Board hearing.
Who is the responsible fire protection agency in a contract county?
The county fire department. Under PRC 4129 a county may elect by ordinance to assume responsibility for all fires on all land in the county, including State Responsibility Area land, with the Director's concurrence and a contract under PRC 4133. Six counties do so: Kern, Los Angeles, Marin, Orange, Santa Barbara and Ventura. The land stays classified as State Responsibility Area; only the agency changes.
