By Hudson Sangree

Lawmakers have unveiled a new plan to help California’s investor-owned utilities cover the costs of wildfires sparked by transmission lines.

The new plan calls for the California Public Utilities Commission to authorize the IOUs to pay for wildfires by selling revenue bonds and passing on the costs to customers through charges on their utility bills. It would also direct the PUC to look at whether a utility acted unreasonably by disregarding fire risks, or whether outside factors such as extreme weather contributed to fires. The proposal includes provisions for managing vegetation near power lines and easing regulations for tree cutting.

The new plan was outlined Friday by State Sen. Bill Dodd, one of the co-chairmen of a legislative conference committee tasked with mitigating wildfire risks and addressing their costs.

A prior plan proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown would have lessened the legal liability of the companies but was tabled after critics called it a multibillion-dollar bailout. (See California Utilities Lose Bid to Reduce Wildfire Liability.)

Senate Bill 901, the vehicle for the governor’s wildfire proposals, will be amended to include parts of the governor’s original proposal and the new changes, which Brown’s office vetted, Dodd said. “We can all agree that the status quo is unacceptable,” he said.

The committee must decide soon on the final provisions of SB 901. The current two-year legislative sessions ends at midnight Friday, when bills not sent to the governor will expire.

State Assemblyman Chris Holden, the other co-chairman, said lawmakers faced a daunting job in trying to prevent wildfires, protect fire victims and ratepayers, and ensure the stability of the state’s utilities. “The ramifications and the stakes are clearly very high, no matter which way we go or how we go there,” Holden said during Friday’s hearing.

The governor’s initial plan would have done away with California’s unique system of holding utilities strictly liable for all damage caused by power-line sparked fires. Instead, it would have required courts to weigh the reasonableness of the IOUs behavior and factor in other causes that contributed to fires.

The new plan maintains strict liability but provides a clearer route for passing on the damages to ratepayers.

The details of the new plan remain sketchy, including whether it would cover the October 2017 fires in the Napa and Sonoma valleys, which caused death and urban destruction on a scale rarely seen in Northern California. Investigators for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection blamed nearly a dozen of the worst blazes on Pacific Gas and Electric power lines and equipment coming into contact with trees and branches. PG&E faces billions of dollars of damages in those cases.

Some critics, including ratepayer advocates, remain concerned that lawmakers are primarily focused on helping utilities, not fire victims or utility customers.

“The ratepayers are the ones that are number one on my list. I want to be sure that they are not the ones that suffer because of mismanagement,” Assemblywoman Eloise Gomez Reyes said.

But Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, an outspoken critic of the utilities, thanked her fellow conference committee members Friday for focusing more on residents and less on IOUs in the new outline. “This is a massive undertaking for a massive problem,” she said.