California cannot continue to reward utilities after the wildfires

By Joy Chen, especially for CalMatters

This comment was originally posted by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Guest Comment written by

A group calling itself First Fire Victims First has been emailing Californians this year and running ads claiming to speak for people like me.

It doesn’t work. This is a fake bushfire victim group, financed by the three for-profit California electric monopolies.

I am a survivor of the Eaton Fire. My organization, Every Fire Survivor’s Network, represents more than 10,000 people. We are the real victims of forest fires.

Eighteen months after the Eton fire, 2 out of 3 survivors remain displaced. Retirement savings are drained. Credit cards are maxed out. More than half of us are on the verge of losing our temporary housing.

Instead of protecting us, Gov. Gavin Newsom is working on an 11th-hour utility bailout behind closed doors — right now — before the Legislature reconvenes in August.

We’ve seen this before. We know how it ends.

Last September, in the last two days of the legislative session, Newsom and legislative leaders rejected and amended Senate Bill 254, removing a bill designed to protect wildfire survivors and replacing it with a 231-page bill protecting California’s electricity supply.

The rewrite came so late that the Legislature had to extend its session to meet the constitutional requirement for a 72-hour review. Some lawmakers admitted they didn’t know what they were voting on. One observer told the Los Angeles Times that it was “effectively a bailout.”

This is not the way democracy is supposed to work.

The state said electric companies needed protection or they would go bankrupt. California Public Utilities Commission approved a $1.1 billion rate hikeplus nearly $1 billion in back payments paid by California families to Southern California Edison—whose equipment was investigated as the probable source of the Eaton fire.

Two months later Edison increased the dividend to its shareholders for the 22nd consecutive year to nearly $1.3 billion. Edison’s three largest institutional shareholders are BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street.

Thanks to the rate hike, Edison’s profits have more than tripled in 2025 from $1.3 billion to $4.5 billion. CEO Pedro Pizarro pay jumped 20% to $16.5 million.

It was not bankruptcy protection. It was a transfer of wealth from hard-working Californians to Wall Street. This happened in the same year The Eaton fire killed 19 people and destroyed the lives of tens of thousands more.

California lawmakers and Newsom face a choice: protect families who have lost everything or hold corporations accountable.

A nationwide coalition recently launched a website, DearNewsom.organd includes the NAACP, the National Labor Organizing Network, which represents 70 immigrant rights organizations, and Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group with more than a million members.

NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said the letter urged Newsom to choose democracy over corporate special interests, calling on the governor to “stand with survivors, reject policies that protect corporate misconduct and ensure that California leads the nation in putting people before powerful interests.”

Put simply: An end to the bailout of the electric monopolies, negotiated behind closed doors, before the survivors are made whole.

If Newsom’s proposals are good for California, do so openly — through the regular legislative process — not in language inserted days before the end of the legislative session. Let California be a model for America, not a model for what happens when corporate power trumps democracy.

Newsom must apply the same basic principle that every parent teaches their child and that forms the basis of our nation’s civil justice system: You break it, fix it. No: You screw it up, your victims lose everything, and shareholders and executives walk away even richer.

If the results of repeated catastrophic failure are record profits, record executive compensation, and record shareholder dividends, then catastrophic failure is exactly what this system will continue to produce.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.