SACRAMENTO, Calif., Aug. 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Today is the final day any wildfire liability legislation can be put in print. Every Fire Survivor's Network and Consumer Watchdog issued the following principles to inform any legislation written in the remaining hours. 

Jamie Court, President of Consumer Watchdog, said:

"Today is the deadline. Any wildfire liability legislation written in these final hours must protect consumers and survivors, not cost them their money and their rights. The devil will be in the details, and Californians deserve to know exactly what any legislation will do before lawmakers are asked to vote. We are proud of the legislature for pushing back on the Governor's bailout plans and expect they will continue to stand up for survivors and consumers."

Joy Chen, Executive Director of Every Fire Survivor's Network, said:

"We are profoundly grateful for the resounding support legislators have expressed for real wildfire survivors over these past weeks.

We continue to reiterate that any legislation written today must preserve survivors' rights to recover full economic and noneconomic damages, including the rights of smoke-damage survivors outside any artificial line.

With only hours remaining, we offer the following principles in the spirit of support and partnership.

1. Fast Pay and Litigation Must Be Independent, Parallel Paths

"Fast Pay" sounds survivor-friendly and protective. But if written incorrectly, it could become the most dangerous remaining provision for survivors: a move away from utility accountability cloaked as survivor protection.

The Governor's original proposal would have required survivors to enter Fast Pay before filing a lawsuit. It contained no clear trigger for when the program would become active. Survivors could have been forced to sit on their rights for a year or more before even making a claim.

That is not Fast Pay. It is forced delay.

A new Fast Pay system will not appear overnight. After the PG&E bankruptcy, the Fire Victim Trust had to build the rules, forms, valuation standards, technology, staffing, and appeals process needed to evaluate claims.

Its trustee acknowledged that building the system "took time." Preliminary payments began nearly five months after the Trust was established. Individually evaluated payments did not begin until approximately eight months after its creation, and the initial payment was only 30% of each approved claim value. (Fire Victim Trust Trustee's letter)

California must learn from that experience. Survivors' rights, statutes of limitation, and access to evidence cannot be put on hold while a new system is being built.

Litigation is also how survivors uncover the truth. Through subpoenas, depositions, expert investigations, and court-supervised discovery, survivors' attorneys obtain evidence about what the utility knew, what safety work it performed, what it failed to do, and what caused the fire. Formal discovery cannot begin until after a lawsuit is filed.

That evidence allows courts, regulators, legislators, and the public to understand what happened and hold the utility accountable. Much of what Californians have learned about utilities' appalling safety failures would never have come to light without litigation.

Time matters. Physical evidence changes. Electronic records may be overwritten. Employees leave. Memories fade. Delaying survivors' access to the courts could allow critical evidence to disappear before anyone can obtain it.

A program presented as a way to help survivors must not prevent them from uncovering the truth about what destroyed their communities. If Fast Pay delays litigation and discovery, it does not merely delay survivors' rights. It weakens utility accountability.

Fast Pay must never force survivors to choose between receiving urgently needed money and preserving their legal rights. It must never delay discovery, prevent survivors from uncovering the truth, or give utilities time to escape accountability.

We recommend that the final legislation state explicitly that Fast Pay:

• Is optional and entirely independent of litigation.
• Allows Fast Pay and litigation to proceed simultaneously.
• Never delays a lawsuit, discovery, access to evidence, or utility accountability.
• Permits interim payments without requiring survivors to surrender unresolved claims.
• Provides full economic and noneconomic compensation for proven harm.
• Determines compensation through evidence, not artificial lines, categories, or caps.
• Includes transparent standards and an independent appeal process.
• Never requires the surrender of any legal right.

California does not have to choose between paying survivors faster and holding utilities accountable. A well-designed system can deliver both.

Fast Pay should give survivors a faster path to restore the lives the fire took from us. It should never become a faster path for utilities to hide the truth and escape accountability.

2. Attorney Fees: Address the Lawyers on Both Sides

We share the concern that no survivor's recovery should be consumed by unreasonable attorney fees. We support transparent fee agreements, strong protections against abusive solicitation, and meaningful court review of unreasonable fees.

At the same time, "billboard attorney" is a political label, not a legal standard. We urge care in drafting this provision so it does not prevent survivors from hiring the qualified lawyers they need to take on some of the largest and most powerful corporations in America.

Utilities also employ armies of attorneys. Their litigation strategies can delay recovery through years of discovery disputes, procedural challenges, and appeals. If plaintiff-side attorney fees are capped, then fees paid to utility defense attorneys should be capped, too. Any serious effort to get survivors paid faster must address unnecessary delay and excessive legal spending on both sides.

We recommend provisions that:

• Cap fees paid to utility defense attorneys.
• Preserve survivors' ability to hire qualified counsel.
• Require clear, written disclosure of contingency fees and litigation expenses.
• Allow courts to review fees for reasonableness based on the work performed and result achieved.
• Establish firm deadlines for utilities to preserve and produce evidence, evaluate claims, and make reasonable settlement offers.
• Require transparent reporting of utility legal fees and litigation spending arising from catastrophic fires.
• Prevent utilities from charging ratepayers for legal strategies used to delay or reduce payments to survivors.

Please do not weaken survivors' ability to hire lawyers while leaving utility armies of lawyers free to delay justice.

3. Statewide Community Wildfire Strategy: Include Utility Accountability

We strongly support establishing a statewide community wildfire strategy. We respectfully recommend including the independent financial audits required by AB 1774, which passed the Assembly Utilities and Energy Committee 11–0 but was held on the Assembly Appropriations Committee's suspense file. 

California's three utility monopolies collect approximately $9 billion from ratepayers every year for wildfire mitigation, with no regular independent financial audits proving they performed the work.

The first and only CPUC audit, conducted in 2021, examined approximately $6 billion in authorized wildfire mitigation spending and recommended disallowing $2.5 billion the utilities could not substantiate. The CPUC let them keep the full $6 billion and continue collecting more.

A nine-month Los Angeles Times investigation found that before the Eaton Fire, Edison failed to complete hundreds of millions of dollars in transmission maintenance and upgrades it had told regulators were necessary, even as customers paid for that work. The neglected system included the old transmission line investigators identified as the source of the Eaton Fire.

Had independent financial audits forced Edison to prove it performed the wildfire-prevention work customers paid for, those failures could have been exposed before they became catastrophic. The Eaton Fire could potentially have been prevented.

That's why Every Fire Survivor's Network and Consumer Watchdog co-sponsored AB 1774. We recommend incorporating its core requirements into the statewide strategy:

• Require regular independent financial audits of utility wildfire mitigation spending.
• Require utilities to return money collected for work they did not perform.
• Pause additional wildfire mitigation collections until the required audits are complete.
• Make Wildfire Fund protection depend on actual safety performance, not an approved safety plan.

A safety plan is not safety. The work has to get done.

4. CEO Bonuses: Follow the Money to Shareholders

We support prohibiting utility CEOs from receiving bonuses after a catastrophic utility-caused fire. We respectfully recommend broadening that provision to address the much larger sums flowing to shareholders.

In 2025 alone, California's three utility holding companies reported nearly $60 million in CEO compensation, more than $3 billion in shareholder dividends, and more than $10 billion in profits and adjusted earnings.

Last month, the CEOs of PG&E Corporation and Edison International threatened to invest less in California and send more money to shareholders if legislators did not approve the Governor's bailout. PG&E even raised the possibility of stock buybacks.

As outlined in our Survivor-First Proposal, we recommend:

• Pausing dividends, stock buybacks, executive bonuses, and stock awards after a catastrophic utility-caused fire until survivors and affected communities are fully compensated.
• Reducing the responsible utility's authorized return on equity to the long-term U.S. Treasury rate until survivors and communities are made whole.
• Prohibiting stock buybacks by the holding company of any utility participating in the Wildfire Fund.

If there is money for stock buybacks, there is money for safety. If there is money for dividends, there is money for survivors.

Today, Every Word Matters

With no meaningful opportunity to amend the legislation after today, every word matters.

We ask lawmakers to hold fast to these principles:

Protect survivors. Hold utilities accountable. Make them perform the safety work Californians already paid for. And do not allow a program promising faster payment to become a faster path away from accountability.

We would be grateful to support legislation that upholds these principles. If the final language does not, we ask legislators to vote no.

No legislation is better than rushed legislation that sacrifices survivors' rights or utility accountability.

Whenever our experience or assistance can be useful, we stand ready to help."

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SOURCE Consumer Watchdog