Behind Closed Doors: How Zone 0 Policy Is Actually Being Shaped
The attached email (May 2025) between a California Board of Forestry Zone 0 Committee member, former Berkeley Fire Chief Dave Winnacker — active in the Zone 0 marketplace — and a Cal Poly fire institute director offers a rare look inside the policymaking process that is reshaping wildfire regulations across the state.
What it shows should concern anyone who believes fire policy ought to be grounded in transparency, rigorous science and open public debate.
In this exchange, a former fire chief—who recently came out of retirement to lead Berkeley’s EMBER ordinance, widely viewed as “Zone 0 on steroids”—offers to help “frame” the state’s Zone 0 regulations. At the same time, legitimate concerns raised by scientists, ecologists, and the public are characterized as delay tactics.
In that email, Chief Winnacker explicitly acknowledges that our legacy wildfire safety approach—developed for conifer timber landscapes—is not optimized for dense suburban and urban environments, and that the BOF should introduce a different, more appropriate approach.
That’s a remarkable statement, because it confirms what many of us have been saying: the forest model they are using does not fit the urban and suburban environment.
And yet, despite that acknowledgment, the BOF Zone 0 Committee continues to rely on that same legacy framework—focusing on live green vegetation in the City of Los Angeles as the primary driver of risk within five feet of structures.
The email also reveals a significant policy pivot: toward an urban fire strategy focused almost exclusively on Zone 0, despite the well-established reality that in dense communities, wildfire losses are driven primarily by structure-to-structure ignition—not surrounding vegetation alone.
This matters because the public is being told a very different story.
We are told that:
The science is settled
The approach is balanced
The policy reflects consensus
But behind the scenes, the discussion is far less certain—and far more strategic.
California is on the verge of adopting regulations that will permanently reshape residential landscapes, urban tree canopy, and ecological systems. Before that happens, the public deserves to see how those decisions are actually being made.
When policy is shaped in private and presented as settled science in public, the problem isn’t just the policy. It’s the process.