By Hudson Sangree
SACRAMENTO — Members of California’s Senate and Assembly hastily passed a conference committee report Tuesday night intended to protect ratepayers and help utilities pay for wildfire damages.
Both utilities and ratepayer advocates were unhappy with the measure, leading the committee’s co-chairman to suggest he and his colleagues had done an OK job.
“It may be a little bit encouraging that utilities and ratepayers both have a problem with this,” said Sen. Bill Dodd, a Napa Valley Democrat.
The final conference committee report on Senate Bill 901 was approved in a confused rush Tuesday night as a deadline approached to get the bill in print 72 hours before the legislature reaches the end of its two-year session at midnight Friday.
Earlier versions of the bill would have removed the strict liability that California imposes on utilities if electrical equipment is a substantial cause of a wildfire.
Under the legal doctrine, Pacific Gas & Electric potentially faces billions of dollars in damages for last year’s devastating wine country fires, which leveled a swath of the city of Santa Rosa. State fire investigators said the utility was at least partly to blame for a number of those blazes because trees or branches hit PG&E power lines.
The conference committee deleted the provision eliminating strict liability and replaced it with a procedure that would allow the utilities to issue revenue bonds to cover wildfire costs. Charges would be added to customers’ bills to pay off the bond debts. (See Bond Sales Eyed to Fund Utility Wildfire Costs.)
That didn’t make utilities happy. A lobbyist for San Diego Gas & Electric told the committee Tuesday it was a step backward from the prior version of the bill.
Ratepayer advocates were outraged.
“We strongly oppose this bailout for PG&E,” said Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network. “Billions of dollars at stake should not be decided in such a rushed process.”
Other groups, including cities, counties and plaintiffs’ attorneys, supported the conference committee’s report because it left intact the strict liability standard, sometimes called “inverse condemnation,” which allows those harmed to be compensated without proving negligence.
The conference committee report also contains measures to prevent wildfires, including provisions governing forest management and tree removal. And it allows the California Public Utilities Commission to consider the reasonableness of a utility’s conduct in determining whether to allow it to recover wildfire costs from ratepayers.
The conference committee report will be incorporated into SB 901, which now goes back to the Senate and Assembly. Both houses must approve the bill by Friday if they want it to reach the desk of Gov. Jerry Brown.