Newsom’s office pushed for the change as part of a wider effort to protect California’s wildfire liability fund and prevent utilities from potentially being driven into bankruptcy.
Page F1From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 31 August 2026
Wildfire burns 85,000 acres; lawmakers block bid to stop insurers suing utilities that caused it.
As it ran on the front
The Ross Fire burned eighty-five thousand acres across two counties this month. That is the input to this ledger entry; the output is a bill, and the question on the table in Sacramento was who signs it. Governor Newsom proposed stopping insurance companies from suing the utility companies whose equipment starts fires like this one, on the theory that the utilities would then have more capital to spend on grid hardening instead of settlements. The legislature declined the governor's proposal. Insurers keep the right to sue.
Run the numbers as filed: insurers who pay out wildfire claims can recover those payouts by suing the utility found responsible, and utilities recover their settlement costs, per the state's cost-recovery framework, by raising rates on customers. The insurer's exposure and the utility's exposure both resolve, eventually, into the same column: the ratepayer's bill. The legislature did not choose between protecting insurers and protecting utilities. It chose the sequence in which the same cost passes through both, on its way to the same address it always ends up at.…
…(cont) This is not a story about who is right in the underlying liability dispute; courts will sort that, case by case, fire by fire. It is a story about where the eighty-five thousand acres show up on a household ledger eighteen months from now, filed under a rate increase nobody remembers voting for. Insurance premiums in wildfire-affected counties in this state have already climbed faster than the statewide average; this bill does not reverse that trend, it preserves the mechanism that produces it.
Newsom's proposal would have removed one link in the chain between fire and bill. The legislature kept the chain intact. Nobody in this specific dispute is described, in the reporting, as having lied about what the bill does; the bill does what it does, plainly, and the acreage is the only adjective this ledger needs.
In the meantime, two counties remain, as of this filing, partially burned, hon.
“The fire burns the acreage, and the lawmakers make sure the insurers keep their seat at the table when it's time to bill somebody for it. Nobody in that fight is talking about the family whose rate goes up eighteen months from now to cover the settlement. That's the part that never makes the press release.”
The receipts
The Ross wildfire has burned more than 80,000 acres across Palo Pinto and Jack counties, forcing evacuations, closing roads and disrupting schools.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.