SACRAMENTO — As PG&E Corp. and its utility subsidiary filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday over mounting costs from the past two wildfire seasons, California lawmakers expressed frustration that controversial wildfire liability reform legislation passed last year was not enough to prevent PG&E’s move and dismissed the possibility of intervening again to assist the troubled utility.
SB901, approved in the final hours of the legislative session last August to help PG&E navigate the fallout from the 2017 Wine Country fires, made it easier for the company to pass on some of the ensuing costs to customers, provided it had reasonably maintained its equipment before the blazes. Opponents dismissed the measure as a bailout.
Yet PG&E is now facing even greater potential liabilities from the Camp Fire, which ravaged Butte County last November and is not covered by the bill.
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State Sen. Bill Dodd, the Napa Democrat who carried SB901, said Tuesday that it “remains hard to do anything more than we’ve done” without a complete change in PG&E’s management. He noted that much of the board of directors is the same as it was in 2010, when one of the company’s natural gas pipelines exploded in San Bruno, killing eight people. He called for new executive leadership that would “submit to a culture of safety throughout the whole organization.”
“The mismanagement at PG&E has led to this,” Dodd said. “Nothing we were going to do was going to affect their cash position.”
Fire victims and their attorneys, led by activist Erin Brockovich, appeared at the Capitol last week, where they urged lawmakers to extend the provisions of SB901 to the Camp Fire as a matter of equality.
But Assemblyman Chris Holden, who briefly floated follow-up legislation last fall, said it’s not going to happen.
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