Survivors of the devastating Eaton fire called on state lawmakers Wednesday to pass a bill requiring an audit of wildfire prevention spending by Southern California Edison and the state’s two other large for-profit power companies.
The survivors pointed to a Investigation by The Times It found that Edison had not spent millions of dollars as it disclosed to regulators before the fire to keep its transmission system safe. Edison began charging customers for the cost.
“Californians owe money to wildfire prevention,” Joey Chen, executive director of the Every Fire Survivor Network, told members of the Assembly Utilities and Energy Commission on Wednesday. “And when that job wasn’t done, we survivors paid the price.”
While the government investigation of the fire has not yet been released, Edison said He believes a century-old transmission line, which had been without power since 1971, may have been briefly reactivated on the night of January 7, 2025, to spark the fire. The Altadena fire killed 19 people and destroyed thousands of homes and other structures.
Chen’s wildfire survivor group and Consumer Watchdog sponsored the bill, known as Assembly Bill 1744. It would require wildfire protection spending by Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric to be audited by an independent accounting firm.
The state Public Utilities Commission will have to consider the audit’s findings before agreeing to raise customer rates to cover even higher wildfire expenses.
“If Edison had known it would be accountable for those funds, the wildfire wouldn’t have been started,” Jamie Court of Consumer Watchdog told the committee, referring to the Eaton fire.
All three utilities said at the hearing that they opposed the bill.
A lobbyist for San Diego Gas & Electric said he believed the audits were unnecessary because the commission was already reviewing spending.
“We feel it creates a repetitive process,” he said.
At the committee hearing, Edison’s lobbyist did not explain why the company was opposing the bill.
The company has previously said that safety is its top priority and that it does not believe there were any problems with the maintenance of its transmission lines before the Eaton fire.
Survivors of other deadly wildfires in the state also spoke out in support of the bill at the hearing, including the 2018 Camp Fire that killed 85 people and destroyed much of the town of Paradise. Investigators found that the fire started when equipment on a decades-old PG&E transmission line failed.
The bill’s author, Assemblywoman Tasha Boerner, an Encinitas Democrat, described how an independent audit of three companies’ wildfire spending from 2019 to 2020 found that $2.5 billion was unaccounted for.
They were the last independent audits of the three companies’ wildfire spending.
Despite the findings, the Commission did not require the companies to return any of the amounts in question to electric customers. Instead, the commission agreed that companies could spend billions of dollars more, Boerner said.
“This is clearly unacceptable,” she said.
Asked for comment on those audits, a lobbyist for San Diego Gas & Electric told the committee he was not familiar with the findings.
California’s electricity rates are the second highest in the country, behind Hawaii.
In 2024, wildfire expenses would account for 17% to 27% of the costs charged to consumers by the three companies, according to a legislative analysis of Boerner’s bill. The average residential customer pays $250 to $490 per year for that expense.
