SIERRA CITY — Jessica Morse, Democrat candidate for Congress running against the incumbent Kevin Kiley, campaigned last weekend in Sierra City to a group of roughly 25 supporters. In a 40-minute speech, she outlined several issues she believes relevant to Sierra County.

Morse worked in foreign aid, joining the US Agency for International Development (USAID) after college, which sent her to Baghdad during the war in Iraq. Later, she worked with the State Department and Department of Defense and was deputy secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency (CNRA).

Morse focused her speech on efforts to improve fire safety in the region. She was involved in the relief efforts for the Camp Fire, which killed at least 85 people and destroyed Paradise and Concow. She is supportive of the various fuel management projects now being undertaken in the National Forests and claimed that she was responsible for bringing together leaders of local, state, and national level fire agencies to develop a plan for managing forests.

Morse also claims to have improved the efficiency of wildfire management project implementations in her role at CNRA, reducing the time needed for projects to complete time-consuming processes, including environmental reviews. She prides herself on getting projects such as the North Yuba Landscape Resiliency Project up and running quickly. Morse said that due to those projects and better communication between departments, which she facilitated, the area burned by wildfire went from 2.5 million acres in 2021 to 360,000 in 2022 despite a similar number of fires. Although Morse’s numbers are correct for total fires, it should be noted that 26% fewer fires occurred on forest service land from 2021 to 2022, according to CAL FIRE statistics.

After a question was asked about her plans to tackle the area’s incredibly high fire insurance costs, Morse suggested that a significant contributor was reinsurance, a type of insurance that insurance companies purchase to cover total losses like those of Paradise and Concow, becoming more expensive due to many factors including climate change. She suggested creating “federally backed reinsurance” at a fraction of the global rate, but only if insurance companies actively participated in risk reduction, including home hardening and creating defensible space. Morse also takes credit for a currently active state program that creates rate reductions for collective fire hardening, such as Firewise communities, though she acknowledges the reductions have little impact.

Morse touched on two national issues: abortion access and Trump. She promised to be a “champion driving a national reproductive rights guarantee for women across the country” and directly compared Trump’s rhetoric to that of the Nazi party.