If Newsom gets his way, Californians harmed by utility negligence would have fewer protections than survivors in any state, including Utah, currently the nation’s worst.
For total-loss households, even the proposed $150,000 cap is largely a fiction. Newsom would compensate only the trauma of fleeing the fire that night, and only if your home later burned to the ground.
Survivors would receive zero for the lifelong trauma of losing our homes and communities.
If your home burned while you were visiting your mom in Claremont, you could receive zero because you did not flee that night. If you evacuated early because a neighbor warned you, nothing.
Your recovery would depend not on what you lost or the trauma you will carry for the rest of your life, but where you happened to be that night.
Newsom would also restrict the “economic damages” survivors need to get safely back home.
Thousands of surviving homes are contaminated by lead, arsenic, and other carcinogens. Newsom’s proposal could give the vast majority of smoke-damaged households nothing because our homes lie outside his still-undefined “zone of danger,” likely the burn area.
Newsom also wants to limit attorneys’ fees, making it much harder for survivors to find lawyers willing to take on corporations with armies of attorneys. (Meanwhile, utility monopoly defendants routinely pay their attorneys between $1,000 and $2,000 per hour.) Renters, lower-income families, and survivors with smaller claims would be hit hardest because their cases may require just as much investigation, expert testimony, and legal work, but involve less money. The wealthiest survivors may still be able to hire lawyers. Everyone else could retain rights on paper while losing any practical ability to enforce them.
Newsom also wants to eliminate insurers’ right to recover wildfire costs from the corporation responsible. That would force insurers to raise premiums or stop writing policies in fire-prone communities, pushing even more Californians onto the FAIR Plan.
Newsom’s proposal would compensate cities only for the depreciated value of destroyed infrastructure, not the cost of replacing it. If a functioning water system costs $20 million to rebuild, a city could receive only a fraction of that amount, leaving local taxpayers to pay the rest.
Cities could also be barred from recovering the cost of fighting the fire itself. If a city spent $10 million putting out a fire caused by a for-profit utility’s negligence, the utility could pay nothing. Local taxpayers would bear the entire cost.
Newsom is not eliminating these costs. He is transferring them from the corporations that caused the fires to the people they harmed.
This is not only an attack on wildfire survivors. It is a massive transfer of wealth from California families, policyholders, taxpayers, and communities to utility executives and Wall Street shareholders.
We still don’t know whether these restrictions would apply to Eaton Fire survivors. Newsom refuses to release the bill language or even name the bill he plans to gut and amend.
Edison is lobbying to ensure Eaton survivors are included.
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