CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 25, 2019 OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 25, 2019 OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“WILL PUC,
UTILITIES MAKE FIRE VICTIMS OF MOST CALIFORNIANS?”
Until now, the California
Public Utilities Commission has appeared to work responsibly at minimizing
future wildfire risks in this thoroughly singed state, certifying new safety
plans from electric companies it regulates and imposing a few fines where the
big utilities have been found negligent.
But
those moves and a unanimous PUC vote in 2017 to hold one company financially
responsible for helping cause one of the huge fires that plague this state
might be no more than a smokescreen. The aim, it appears, has been to make the
commission and the utilities whose wishes it usually carries out look like
responsible public servants, when that may not be true.
This
was the upshot of a waiver filed quietly with the U.S. Supreme Court late last
month by PUC lawyer Christine Jun Hammond and an follow-up from another PUC
attorney three weeks later. The first document was Hammond’s response to an
attempt by the San Diego Gas & Electric Co. to get the high court to hear
its appeal of the 2017 decision. The ruling held the company liable for losses
in the 2007 Witch, Guejito and Rice fires. “I do not intend to file a
response,” Hammond’s form letter said. Without PUC opposition, it’s much more
likely the Supreme Court will eventually give SDG&E its way.
The
second PUC letter asks the court for another month to respond, apparently
contradicting Hammond. Suddenly there’s confusion about what this commission
really wants.
Here’s
the background to the legal maneuvering, which has huge implications for how
damages will be apportioned from many subsequent fires. These include the Camp,
Thomas, Carr, Woolsey, Mendocino Complex and Wine Country fires of 2017 and
2018. Companies like Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison
have accepted some blame for most of those.
At a
moment when high winds propelled wildfires across California early in December
2017, the PUC unanimously held SDG&E would have to pay more than $379
million in uninsured costs from the fires that devastated large parts of San
Diego County ten years earlier. The blazes destroyed more than 1,300 homes and
killed two persons. SDG&E has tried ever since to fob much of the cost onto
all its customers, including people whose homes burned.
State
investigators found SDG&E failed to properly maintain equipment or trim
tree branches and chaparral growing near power lines before the infernos began.
The company and its insurers paid more than $2 billion in claims, but it wants
customers to foot almost all other bills.
No,
said the PUC in a uniquely (for it) consumer-oriented decision. This was
utility negligence. That’s essentially what state authorities also found about
utility conduct before several of the later blazes, so the SDG&E decision
bore huge implications for other utilities. If the decision stands, it could
cost them many billions of dollars. Like SDG&E, they want to make all their
customers into financial fire victims.
So
PG&E and Edison filed court briefs as SDG&E appealed the ruling. All
the companies falsely claimed the assessment against SDG&E was due to
“inverse condemnation,” a concept in state law that holds utilities responsible
for fire damage even when they don’t cause it.
But the
SDG&E decision was about corporate negligence, not inverse condemnation.
The PUC could have defeated the utility argument by simply pointing this out
and urging the high court to uphold the PUC ruling by not taking the case.
It
might not do this, the Hammond waiver makes clear. The PUC also initially
claimed to represent all victims of the 2007 fires, another untruth. But before
San Diego lawyer Michael Aguirre, who has long represented some fire victims,
knew about that claim, the false statement had been circulated to all Supreme
Court justices, who will decide this summer whether to take the case.
“The utilities are trying to make other people
pay the bills for damage they caused,” Aguirre said. “If they win this case, it will be a
precedent for all the other fires.”
This
could be yet another case of the PUC carrying water for companies it’s supposed
to regulate. “It’s a backdoor effort by the PUC to get the customers to pay all
the bills,” Aguirre said. He might be dead-on right.
-30-
Email Thomas Elias
at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most
Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It,"
is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
No comments:
Post a Comment