PD Editorial: Keep an eye on fire bills in Sacramento

It's fire season in Sacramento.

With the clock winding down on the 2017-18 session, legislators are increasingly focused on the cataclysmic wildfires that swept across Northern California in October and Southern California two months later - amid fears that more intense and more frequent fires will be a hallmark of the “new normal” of hotter, drier conditions associated with climate change.

Several bills would assist victims, but intensive lobbying by insurers succeeded in limiting most of the new consumer protections to future fires.

There's a battle looming over liability, a multi-billion-dollar concern for public utilities, including PG&E, and whether any new protections should apply retroactively.

If victims of the 2017 fires don't get help, we don't think utilities should either.

Legislators recently started a month-long summer recess, but work on this issue is likely to continue through the break. There are two proposals that deserve close scrutiny.

One is Senate Bill 901 by state Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa. The other is Assembly Bill 33 by Assemblyman Bill Quirk, D-Hayward.

Dodd's bill, which nominally involves plans for shutting off power lines during hazardous weather, was sent to a Senate-Assembly conference committee with the concurrence of legislative leaders and Gov. Jerry Brown.

The committee, which Dodd will co-chair, is charged with considering several fire-related policy issues, including “fair allocation of wildfire prevention and response costs in a manner that protects ratepayers.” In short, who should pay for public and private property damaged by utility-related wildfires. Under a legal doctrine known as inverse condemnation, liability currently rests with utilities, even if there is no finding of negligence.

A joint statement announcing the committee plan said liability rules won't be changed retroactively, a point Dodd reiterated in an interview. “I don't see that there's enough support in the Legislature to have anything be retroactive,” he told an editorial board member.

Dodd said the committee will hold several public hearings to gather information and hear public opinions. He rejected a call from fire victims and the county supervisors' association, who staged a news conference in Santa Rosa last week, to put off action until next year. “It needs to be decided this year to the extent that we have the problem now,” he said.

Quirk's bill, which originally dealt with electric vehicle service equipment, was rewritten entirely just before the Legislature started its recess, and it could test Dodd's belief that lawmakers won't grant relief retroactively.

As it's now written, AB 33 would allow PG&E to sell state-authorized bonds to pay civil damages, but not government fines, stemming from the 2017 fires.

Bottom line: Ratepayers, including some who lost their homes, would be on the hook for at least some of the damages.

And those damages could be substantial. PG&E suspended its dividend in December and took a $2.5 billion charge against its second-quarter earnings in anticipation of fire-related damages. Estimates have ranged as high as $15 billion, and PG&E officials have suggested the company could be bankrupted.

As we said in a recent editorial, it would be difficult to justify passing costs onto ratepayers if a utility is convicted of a criminal violation that resulted in a fire (which has yet to happen for any of the 2017 fires). Yet it wouldn't be unreasonable to consider sharing the costs when there is no finding of negligence.

But legislators shouldn't give utilities better treatment than fire victims, who haven't been granted retroactive help with their losses.

You can send a letter to the editor at letters@pressdemocrat.com