Should Wood Be a Public Utility?

California has built sophisticated public systems to manage water, waste, and electricity. But despite decades of worsening wildfire seasons, the state has no comparable infrastructure to manage forest biomass: the fallen trees, brush, and woody debris that accumulate on the forest floor and become fuel for those disasters. That gap in wildfire mitigation, argues Temra Costa, executive director of Sonoma County-based Regenerative Forest Solutions, threatens insurability, property values, community safety, and ecosystem health.

Costa brings more than two decades of work in ecological forestry and rural land stewardship to one of California's most urgent problems. "We have agencies that manage low-value organic material residuals (such as kitchen scraps and compost) from cities and other sewage waste," she says, "yet we haven't gotten to the forest." Costa proposes that creating a “wood utility”—defined as infrastructure to manage forest biomass—would bring value to what’s presently considered “waste” by some, but what she views as a valuable and underutilized resource.

What is a Wood Utility?

Today, forest biomass is traditionally handled in one of four ways:

1. It’s left alone
2. Burned in piles or for energy in power plants when in close proximity to facilities
3. Sent to sawmills if worth the trucking expense 
4. Chipped into low-value mulch

Chipping or burning in piles are the most common, cost-effective ways to manage the material, but any economic upside is generally lost. When left alone, and as it accumulates on the landscape over time, this potentially useful biomass creates fuel for wildfires. 

Management of this debris falls largely to private landowners, arborists, and underfunded state programs. However, a study by CAL FIRE and the University of Michigan found that selling wood from forest-thinning projects could help offset roughly 39 to 50 percent of treatment costs.

“The major bottleneck in California is sawmill infrastructure, which needs to grow by 95 percent to meet the current wildfire reduction goals that the state is setting,” says Costa. One forester in Sonoma County alone reported that 10 million board feet of timber went unharvested in 2025 because there was nowhere to process it. Fuels stay in the forest and fire risk compounds. But there’s a better way. 

Costa imagines a “wood utility facility” that would function like a water treatment plant: It takes in waste (in this case, raw woody biomass) and produces something usable—lumber for building, wood products for finishes and carpentry, engineered wood products such as mass timber, and biochar and other soil amendments. Not only would a wood utility facility furnish sustainable goods, but it would also reduce wildfire risk.

Consistent fuel reduction could support insurability and homeowner stability.

A robust and well-managed forest ecosystem can improve the safety and preserve the insurability of neighborhoods at risk for wildfires. Without better infrastructure to handle and process it, the ignition-ready debris left on forest floors is kindling ready to spark. For that reason, unprocessed biomass "is directly impacting our insurability here in Sonoma County," Costa says. California has already seen traditional insurers retreat in response to rising fire frequency.

Costa sees wood waste management as a way to help reverse those trends: "If you have a healthy forest that is more wildfire resilient, you won't have high-severity fires,” Costa explains, "You're also improving the landscape's capacity to store and hold water." That translates to a healthier watershed, more stable land values, fewer post-fire remediation costs, and communities that remain insurable over the long term. Costa has already connected with carriers, including AAA (CSAA), hoping to build programs that tie fuel reduction to measurable community resilience outcomes. These programs could help de-risk insurance markets to keep coverage available and encourage insurers that left to return. 

Wood utilities need investors who see that unmanaged fire is a portfolio problem.

State policymakers and private investors have largely assumed that the infrastructure to manage forests more effectively should be able to pay for itself through timber product sales alone. Costa disagrees: "The expectation that the capacity to deal with this issue should be market-based and market-driven is not presently feasible without aligned in-state markets that increase demand.” She wants to see dedicated infrastructure for: 

• Handling small-diameter and “waste” timber, similar to how municipalities manage water or electricity.
• Selling wood products produced through the utility management process—a secondary outcome to offset ongoing operating expenditures.

Wood utilities are an early-mover opportunity for investors with conservation values, or exposure to fire-prone geographies, and a willingness to think in longer arcs. Every forested area has biomass to manage, Costa explains; ideally, each would have a dedicated processing facility. However, the model doesn't fit neatly into existing ways of allocating capital, and so far, "venture capital, for example, hasn’t shown significant interest in the slower ROI of sawmill infrastructure at this time," Costa says.

"We're going to have to find those aligned, unique private investors and philanthropists in our area that have a stake in the game—they have homes in these rural places, or they understand the conservation value of proactively stewarded forests," says Costa. “But ultimately, we need concessionary finance to get this rolling, and the most likely place to kickstart this work is through state grant programs.”

To meet its wildfire reduction goals, the state of California needs more biomass processing capacity.

Despite the growing need, biomass processing capacity in California keeps shrinking. Roseburg Forest Products closed a veneer product and biomass processing facility in Weed, California, in late 2025 as part of a broader consolidation effort. Meanwhile, California’s stringent Forest Practice Rules, which oversee any wood trying to make it to market, have made it cheaper to mill wood in Oregon, Washington, or Idaho and ship it into California. 

State programs like BioRAM and BioMAT (programs designed to support medium and large facilities that convert woody material into energy) were created to address the processing capacity challenge from a biomass-to-energy standpoint but are being sunsetted by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). 

"The state has been working to find solutions to enable more treatments to occur, but neither the infrastructure to process nor the funding to revitalize old or new sites is readily available,” says Costa. 

Some signals of progress exist. Several new facilities are being planned or are underway in the state. (A map of all forest product and biomass facilities, active, idle, proposed, and closed, can be viewed here.) A government program called Cal FRAME has set up biomass management pilots in seven regions and is looking to formalize these pilots through the creation of Joint Powers Authorities, a framework that is underway and gaining momentum. 

But Costa argues that what’s missing is investment in near-term processing infrastructure and market demand. “The CAL FRAME program aims to institutionalize the concept of publicly-managed biomass. This is an excellent advancement, but we also need the wood processing capacity to provide a place for material, as well as in-state demand incentives, like New Mexico’s Sustainable Building Tax Credit, to strengthen local markets and provide jobs in the forestry and wood products sectors,” says Costa. “If there were infrastructure development funding available and/or in-state wood procurement policies for government agencies, then we wouldn't have as many issues getting funding.”

The Timbershed initiative could become Sonoma County’s first “wood utility” facility. 

While state programs work through longer implementation timelines, Regenerative Forest Solutions is moving on its own. Through its Timbershed initiative, a planned wood products campus and mass timber manufacturing facility in Sonoma County, Costa's team is in due diligence to acquire Berry's Sawmill in Cazadero, an already permitted industrial facility that could become a replicable model. "We’ve come to the conclusion that we’re the ones who we’ve been waiting for to take action," Costa says. "Revitalizing older infrastructure with existing permits in place is the fastest route to being operational.” 

Timbershed will focus on using timber harvested for ecological improvement and wildfire prevention purposes, including Douglas fir, small-diameter redwood, and local hardwoods, to produce specialty wood products with an open-source material traceability framework. This lets architects, builders, and buyers verify the sustainability of what they're purchasing.

Wood grows, whether or not there’s infrastructure to manage it.

Costa knows the cost of inaction firsthand. She’s a private forest land owner herself with about 170 acres, and it costs anywhere between $1,000 to $12,000 an acre to treat forested land that hasn’t been effectively managed. Public funding just isn’t enough to fill the cost of stewardship for the 33 million forested acres across the state. 

According to local foresters, forest biomass naturally grows between four and eight percent a year, depending on conditions. That growth demands management. For insurers reconsidering market exposure, public officials managing shrinking budgets, and investors looking for opportunities in fire-prone areas, it’s worth considering whether the cost of building wood management infrastructure is lower than the cost of continuing without it. 

"Do we want to produce something useful out of this material?” asks Costa. “Or do we want it to always be a cost to society and limit our stewardship and wildfire resilience potential?”

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