The Brief

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Three decades ago, Nancy Wallace narrowly escaped death in what was then California's most destructive wildfire. Since then, the problem of wildfires has gotten much worse, so bad in fact that the state now faces a crisis in its market for home insurance. Solving the insurance crisis is something that's very much in Wallace's wheelhouse, and she's been developing some important ideas and tools to try to fix it.

Wallace is a professor of finance and real estate at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, and she's a former adviser to the U.S. Treasury Department and Federal Reserve. She specializes in identifying and mitigating financial risks in housing markets, and she's conducted some eye-opening studies on the rising risk of wildfires. She's working with climate scientists to create forecast models that can help rescue failing insurance markets. And she's advocating for new insurance schemes and financial products that would help California homeowners retrofit their homes and lower the danger that they're destroyed by future fires.

But Wallace's expertise in this area is more than just academic. It's informed by her horrifying experience.

A story that begins with fire

On Oct. 20, 1991, Wallace smelled smoke wafting in the air outside of her home, high in the hills above Oakland, Calif. The day before, a fire had broken out down her street. Firefighters had put it out, but she was now on high alert. The air felt dry. The wind was picking up. And the smell of smoke scared her.

Wallace grew up in Michigan, never experiencing the danger of wildfires. She and her husband had moved to Oakland a few years earlier when she got a job at nearby UC Berkeley. They scraped together every penny they could and bought a fixer-upper in the Oakland Hills, near the ridgeline of the mountains above the city, surrounded by Monterey pine and eucalyptus trees. They had finished remodeling their home just one month before this fateful day.

After smelling smoke, Wallace and her husband grabbed family heirlooms and antiques, important documents, some paintings and clothes, and their cat. They jumped in their car. And that's when they saw a hurricane of fire engulfing the neighborhood below them.

The Oakland Hills fire burned thousands of homes and created a dust cloud that could be seen for miles. Picture taken on Oct. 20, 1991.<br>

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<a href="https://www.gettyimages.com/search/photographer?photographer=San%20Francisco%20Chronicle%2FHearst%20Newspapers" class="Link" target="_blank" >San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers</a>

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They turned frantic. When they hit a fork in the road, they hesitated whether to turn right or left. Both directions were being enveloped by flames. Wallace insisted they go right.

" Seconds after going right, a car came out of the flames," Wallace says. "And they said, 'If you go up this road, you will die.'"

They said that power lines had fallen on a truck. A firefighter (who turned out to be Oakland Fire Battalion Chief James M. Riley Jr.) and a passenger he was trying to rescue were both dead, and the truck and power lines were blocking the road. Wallace and her husband were forced to turn around.

"At that point our cat shed her fur — literally shed her fur," Wallace says. "Because the fire was just beating on our car. I thought for sure the car would burst into flames."

They drove the other direction, down a winding, one-lane road through the heart of the inferno. Embers were flying everywhere. Houses and trees were bursting into flames. They saw a motorcyclist on fire. They saw frantic drivers crashing into trees. They saw a heroic policeman — officer John William Grubensky, who would soon die attempting to rescue a family from a burning home — on a loudspeaker, trying to keep people calm and get them out safely.

Wallace and her husband got lucky. Their 6-year-old son was miles away, safe and sound during the whole ordeal. He had spent the night at a friend's house. They were also lucky, of course, to escape with their lives. On the very same narrow street they had escaped on, vehicles after them got stuck behind a car that crashed, blocking their exit route. "Just on that one street, I think there were five people who died, along with Officer Grubensky," Wallace says.

The Claremont Hotel in October 1991

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About two weeks later, Nancy and her family returned to see what happened to their home. It had turned to ash. "In the middle of this ash was a porcelain bowl," Nancy says. Porcelain apparently doesn't burn. "It was just sitting on top of the ash by itself. It was surreal. Everything else was gone."

The Oakland Hills fire in 1991 ended up killing 25 people, injuring 150 others, and destroying around 3,000 homes. For a long time, it was the most destructive fire in California history. That is, until the last decade, when California has seen a mind-boggling uptick in even more destructive fires, including two in L.A. in recent weeks.

Why California properties got more valuable after fires

Around five years ago, Wallace recounted her incredible story in the Oakland Hills fire to her former Ph.D. student Carles Vergara-Alert, who was back in Berkeley on a sabbatical as a visiting professor, and two other Berkeley economists, Richard Stanton and Paulo Issler. And it inspired them to study how the rising risk of wildfires was affecting housing markets.

A pretty weird thing seemed to be happening to properties destroyed by fires. Nancy noticed it in her own community. After the fire, people got insurance money and rebuilt their homes. Their homes seemed to get bigger and nicer. And, like elsewhere in the Bay Area, their home values went on a rocket ship to the moon in the decades after the fire. It was like everyone had forgotten that it was still a risky area.

Of course, this was just a casual observation about one place. Wallace, Vergara-Alert, Issler and Stanton decided they wanted to build a comprehensive dataset to see what happened, more systematically, to California housing markets after they were scorched by wildfires.

The dataset they assembled is pretty amazing. After each fire in California, the state's fire agency, Cal Fire, sends a team of technicians to investigate. They create detailed maps of the burn areas and document, house by house, damages. The economists used this rich data on burn areas between 2001 and 2015, focusing on the houses that burned and the nearby houses that did not. They combined this data with their own comprehensive data on virtually every home in California.

You might think that property prices of the houses that burned would plummet. I mean, the house is destroyed, nearby parks, trees, hiking trails, and everything else is scorched, and the home's views become burn zones, at least in the near-to-medium term, before nature and man-made structures come back. Even more, you might think that the risks of living in the area would be top of mind for years to come, suppressing demand to live there. But no. Houses continue to be valuable investments in these fire-prone communities. Not only that. The economists found that, between 2001 and 2015, the properties that burned down and got rebuilt were actually significantly more valuable within five years of the catastrophe. Fire actually boosted their property values!

One sort of obvious reason for this is these rebuilt houses were newer. And they were built to follow a more modern, state-mandated building code, making them more resistant to fire and earthquakes and generally safer. And, just as Wallace had observed in her own neighborhood, these rebuilt houses tended to be bigger.

And, in big wildfires, the houses in whole neighborhoods got built back bigger and better. Because the value of your house is influenced by the value of houses in your neighborhood, that was another boost to property values. Meanwhile, nature recovers — and, Wallace says, it recovers rather quickly in areas with Mediterranean climates — and the amazing beauty of these Californian communities returns.

Now, fires are obviously devastating in terms of lives lost, people hurt, disruptions to business and so on. And for people who don't have insurance, they cause huge financial losses. But — at least in the period the economists studied, when, for the most part, there were functioning private insurance markets that offered full coverage and generous payouts — it seems like fires were actually a financial win for the average insured homeowner who lost their home. They were also a win for developers and construction companies, which rebuilt the homes. And they were at least partially a win for municipalities because rebuilt, more valuable homes meant higher property taxes, offsetting the tremendous taxpayer costs of fighting the fire and cleaning up afterwards.

Of course, there was at least one huge financial loser in all of this: insurance companies. They had to foot the massive bill for home reconstructions.

In normal insurance markets, that's fine. People pay premiums, and those premiums are estimated based on the probability of losses. When those losses materialize, the insurance company pays. It's the whole game.

But, Wallace says, something funky began happening in California's insurance markets, and the state's insurance system ended up breaking down.

How California's insurance market failed

First, the state has had restrictive regulations on what insurance companies can charge. Wallace says that a big force behind that was Proposition 103, which was championed by Ralph Nader. In the 1980s, Nader and other consumer activists argued that insurance companies should be strictly regulated when setting their premium rates. This ballot initiative, which was narrowly approved by California voters in 1988, required insurance companies to get rate hikes approved by the California Department of Insurance, and it introduced a bunch of measures that made rate hikes much harder to impose.

In this post-Prop. 103 regulatory scheme, for example, the state prevented insurance companies from using forward-looking estimates of risk — so-called "catastrophe models" — when setting their rates. Consumer advocates saw these kinds of models, which use computers to forecast an uncertain future, as a Trojan horse for price-gouging. The state forced insurers to only use backward-looking estimates of risk. They figured it was more transparent and fair to use hard, verifiable data from the past. The state required insurers to base their premium rates on a 20-year average of historical losses. It also prevented insurers from pricing into their premiums the cost of "reinsurance," or insurance for insurers — something that insurers sometimes need after extreme weather events require massive payouts.

With these and other measures, the California Department of Insurance effectively kept home insurance premiums artificially low. And, Nancy says, that had some big side effects, like incentivizing more people to live in fire-prone areas.

"Prices are important, especially for things like where people locate, where houses are built," Wallace says. Artificially low insurance prices, for example, may have encouraged cities and developers to build neighborhoods closer to the flammable wilderness. In fact, in recent decades, fire-prone areas have seen some of the fastest population growth rates in the state.

And greater density in fire country may have contributed, Wallace says, to problems like narrow roads prone to traffic jams, making escapes from wildfires — like the one she personally made — much harder. And this increased number of people living in fire-prone areas meant that taxpayers had to invest much more in firefighting and other public services to keep people safe.

For a time, California's insurance system was maybe workable. Big, destructive fires used to be rarer, so the insurance system didn't experience as much stress. But, Wallace says, around a decade ago, there was a tipping point where big wildfires started becoming more frequent and more destructive. California has seen hotter temperatures. Droughts have increased. Wind speeds have picked up. And big, destructive fires have become more commonplace.

With climate change, it has started to become clear that the future will not look like the past, and California's regulations requiring insurers to make pricing decisions based on backward-looking models of risk have started to look pretty dumb.

In a free market for insurance, a higher risk for catastrophe would result in higher insurance premiums. But since California regulations prevented that, insurance premiums stayed artificially low. As big fires began demanding big payouts and the specter of more mass destruction loomed larger, insurance companies struggled to make the math work. And so they began fleeing the state.

"The California Department of Insurance is seriously at fault," Wallace says. "They destroyed the markets."

With no ability to get standard private insurance, many Californians, especially in high-risk areas, were forced onto the state-created insurance plan of last resort, the California FAIR Plan (which is funded by private insurance companies and their policyholders in exchange for these insurers being able to sell property insurance in the state). This plan was not meant to be a permanent solution. It's a high-risk pool. It's expensive and it caps insurance payouts, so people with valuable properties, for example, can't get the full value of their homes insured. (For more on the Fair Plan, listen to The Indicator's recent podcast episode, "Who's on the hook for California's uninsurable homes?")

Last year, seeing insurers fleeing their state — and perhaps seeing the studies by Wallace and others — California regulators came to the conclusion that the state's insurance regulations were unworkable. California's insurance commissioner, supported by Gov. Gavin Newsom, ended the ban on using forward-looking catastrophe models for setting premiums, giving the green light to the insurance industry to start actually trying to price in the rising risk and cost of wildfires. As part of this deal, insurers have agreed to underwrite more policies in fire-prone areas. Those changes took effect mere weeks ago, just before the outbreak of fires around Los Angeles.

Newsom recently touted the fact that, after these changes took effect, a private insurer agreed to insure homes in the town of Paradise, which notoriously burned entirely to the ground in 2018 (listen to this 2021 Planet Money episode about efforts to rebuild the town).

" I thought that was an absolutely crucial step," Wallace says of California's recent reforms to how it regulates insurance markets. "Now we have to get to work and figure out what the true pricing should be."

What is the right price for living in fire country?

Finding the right price for insurance premiums entails building and refining statistical models that can nail down the risks of wildfires for houses and businesses around the state. The current models, Wallace says, are not good enough. Insurance companies and the government, she says, "literally do not know" what the real risks are. There is quite a bit of uncertainty about, for example, how far fires can spread, which exact homes are the most at risk, and whether big fires in certain places are like 50- or 20- or 10-year events. Inaccurate estimates of fire risks, Wallace says, could result in premiums that are too low, as has been the case for a while in much of California, but also too high in some cases.

And that's why she and her colleagues at UC Berkeley, and, more specifically, Wallace's lab at the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics, have been building bridges across disciplines, marshaling the data and intellect of climate scientists, computer scientists, engineers, economists and more to create high-tech models that can better estimate the risk of wildfires.

And that's important. As we've seen, the costs of fire destruction are enormous. And someone has to pay for it. If homeowners want to continue living in fire-prone areas, Wallace says, they need to bear more of the risk and, in effect, pay higher insurance premiums.

"This risk cannot be borne exclusively by insurance companies," Wallace says. "It's also got to be borne by homeowners." Bearing more of that risk would, she says, incentivize homeowners to take more actions to protect their properties (and fight what economists call "moral hazard," or people's tendency to not take steps to mitigate risk when they're insured).

Beyond just accurately pricing wildfire risks, Wallace says, the government and insurance companies should work to incentivize and help homeowners to retrofit older, more flammable homes. Wallace points to a study by economists Patrick Baylis and Judson Boomhower. The economists find that California houses built after the mid-1990s — and, even more, those built after 2008 — are far more likely to survive wildfires. That's because the state strengthened its building codes during those years, requiring that homes be built with, for example, more fire-retardant siding and roofs.

" In Paradise, in Sonoma, in Napa, the Woolsey Fire, the houses that survive are those with the post-2008 building code requirements," Wallace says. "The major problem in California is that our [older] housing stock is not built to withstand the embers and the radiant heat of fires."

But updating California's older housing stock is expensive. Which is why Wallace wants policymakers and businesspeople to create new home loan programs, which would make it feasible for California homeowners to invest in making their homes more resistant to fire. She believes this could even be a money-making product for financial firms. " If you're a bank, wouldn't you like to invest in home loans that make the mortgages that you're also planning to make safer?"

Wallace also hopes that, going forward, insurers could offer discounts on home insurance for taking anti-fire measures that lower risks, further incentivizing homeowners to protect their homes and reduce costs. This could be facilitated by technological innovations. For example, Wallace points to a former grad student of hers who created an app, Firebreak, which helps homeowners identify fire risks around their properties.

What happens after the L.A. fires?

As Wallace and her colleagues found in their study, for a long time, California homes that were destroyed by fires ended up getting bigger, better and more valuable. Will the same thing happen again in Los Angeles hillsides after the latest shocking fires?

Wallace suggests that it's possible this time is different. For one, "We don't have that insurance market anymore," Wallace says. "It's been broken  by not allowing firms to price the risk."

Many homes in the L.A. hills were forced off of private insurance policies that gave them full coverage, and they had to turn to the California FAIR Plan, which caps residential coverage at $3 million. There are a significant number of destroyed homes that were worth more than that. Wallace also points to less affluent neighborhoods, like Altadena, where many homeowners did not have insurance (only people with mortgages are required to have fire casualty insurance). Absent some sort of government help, many fire victims will likely be unable to afford reconstruction. In the wake of natural disasters, construction costs tend to surge because tons of people need to build all at once and there are shortages of everything.

Another big cost will be building back better. If the city and state are being sensible, Wallace says, they will make investments in better infrastructure, like a less fire-prone electricity grid and better water systems to fight fires, making it less likely for future fires to break out and spread. Even more, she says, the state should continue mandating that builders of new houses follow the building code that has proved to be more resilient to fires. " It's absolutely nonsensical to build back in the same risky way," Wallace says. (Newsom recently issued a vague executive order on this issue, directing state agencies to waive building regulations to speed up construction, but only those regulations "that can safely be suspended.")

Because of high costs and more limited insurance coverage and other factors, Wallace says, there may be fewer homes built in the L.A. neighborhoods devastated by fires. And, with higher insurance premiums reflecting the risk for buildings there, these neighborhoods will likely become even more exclusive dens for the rich.

Despite the current tragic circumstances, however, these burned-down neighborhoods still have a lot going for them. Their views of the ocean and the city are often incredible. Their charred parks and hiking trails will recover. And they're still close to a legendary metropolis, with a vibrant culture, an incredible economy and a housing shortage. Land in L.A. is still very valuable.

"L.A. is a major, metropolitan, gateway city of the world," Wallace says. "And it is not going away."

And whether it's floods or tornadoes or earthquakes or wildfires, human beings have a remarkable knack for comfortably living in areas with lots of risk.

Wallace expects that, if the state pursues the right path to make these neighborhoods more resilient to future fires and follows through with fixing the state's broken insurance system, destroyed properties in L.A. will be rebuilt, insurable in the private market and they'll eventually "return to trajectory," increasing in value like they were in the years preceding the devastation.

As for the victims who lost everything in the fires, Wallace, reflecting on her own experience losing her home, advises people to begin creating inventories of the things they lost and working with builders to get real estimates of the costs to rebuild, keeping in mind that construction costs will likely climb as everyone else seeks to rebuild. Such information can be crucial for getting adequate payouts. Insurers may provide a vital service, she suggests, but they're not really your friends.

Our most recent Planet Money episode has more on the fires in California. Hosts Sarah Gonzalez and Nick Fountain report on conditions inside the Altadena burn zone, and how one father and son are approaching the difficult choice of how, or whether, to rebuild.

A new NASA space telescope launched Sunday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida that will help scientists probe the nature of dark matter, dark energy and other mysteries of the universe.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is about the size of a tour bus, lifted off at 4:26 a.m. PT on SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. The 18,000-pound spacecraft is now on a million-mile journey that will take it to its new home in space.

"What a glorious dawn launch," NASA's Jackie Townsend, Roman telescope project manager, said at a press briefing soon after liftoff. "The ride was magnificent. It put us right where we wanted to be."

More good news came shortly after launch as the telescope began deploying its solar panels and other instruments. "Ground controllers at NASA Goddard have been receiving telemetry data from Roman, and apparently all systems are nominal," said NASA administrator Jared Isaacman.

The journey to Roman's new home

Roman has an unusual origin story: Initially designed as a spy telescope for the National Reconnaissance Office, the spacecraft was donated to NASA instead. The new telescope is named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer who was known as the 'Mother of Hubble' for her championing of the iconic Hubble Space Telescope. Her namesake telescope will have the sharpness of Hubble but a field of view that is at least 100 times larger, allowing it to image huge swaths of the sky at once.

Before it can do that, the Roman Space Telescope will have to get to its new home in the sky about a million miles away. Roman will live at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point known as L2. There, the competing gravitational pulls of the Earth and the Sun help the telescope keep a steady orbit while using minimal fuel. The James Webb Space Telescope orbits at this point, which gives the spacecraft an unobstructed view of the sky.

"It takes us a good three-plus months to get out there, and we're spending that time checking everything out and doing a whole bunch of calibrations and making sure everything is working the way we know it can," said NASA's Jeremy Perkins, an integration and test scientist on the mission. "It's basically like our time to kick the tires and just make sure that the focus is right, the pointing is right."

Uncovering cosmic mysteries

Roman is on a kind of ghost hunt, searching for more evidence of dark matter — mysterious, invisible stuff whose gravitational influence appears to hold galaxies together and define the overarching structure of the cosmos. Roman will study how gravity subtly affects the path of light along great distances throughout a massive survey of the sky. By doing this, the telescope will help map both normal and dark matter, giving scientists a better understanding of just what this elusive substance might be.

Astronomers will also use Roman's observations to uncover dark energy, the strange force that is believed to drive the expansion of the universe. Scientists' understanding of dark energy comes from observations of a kind of exploding star known as a Type Ia supernova. These supernovas appear to shine at known and predictable brightness throughout the cosmos, giving them the nickname "standard candles." By cataloguing even more of these supernovas, scientists hope to develop a better understanding of how dark energy works, which could fundamentally change the way astronomers view the universe.

Roman will also search for planets outside our solar system. Since astronomers confirmed their existence in the 1990s, more than 6,000 exoplanets have been identified. With Roman, NASA expects to identify more than 100,000 of them by identifying dips in starlight caused by a planet passing in front of its own star. The telescope also hopes to find some 1,000 through microlensing — a technique that searches for tiny changes in background starlight caused by the gravity of a far-off planet.

"Why do we care so much about exoplanets? Because one of our main goals at NASA is answering the question: Are we alone in the universe?" Nicky Fox, NASA's associate administrator of the science mission directive, said at the Sunday morning briefing.

The spacecraft is poised to bring scientists a step closer to answering that question: It will demonstrate technology that can take a picture of a planet by selectively blocking out the light from its home star.

"We are going to make this giant leap forward with the coronagraph technology that is going to allow us to look at these distant worlds and start to really resolve the atmosphere around them to let us know if they could be habitable," she said.

A deluge of data

The telescope will beam back 1.4 terabytes of raw science data each day, using a refrigerator-sized high-gain antenna. The data will be available immediately to scientists and the public.

"Roman's database at the end of its prime mission after five years is going to be bigger than your standard music streaming platform," Perkins said.

Because of the massive amounts of data, NASA is making it available to anyone through a cloud-based system called Roman Nexus. For Perkins, that's what makes this mission unique — anyone can look at the raw data and find new discoveries.

"It's all the things that we are not expecting to see," he said. "It's all these one-in-a-million things that we're going to be able to see with Roman that really excites me."
Copyright 2026 NPR

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday backed off his proposal to reduce costs for electrical utilities after their equipment sparks wildfires, agreeing instead to a narrower deal after homeowners, insurers and fire survivors argued his original plan would have shifted those costs onto them.

Instead, Newsom and Senate and Assembly leaders agreed on a narrower package of wildfire policies, including prohibiting private equity groups from investing in wildfire claims and denying utility CEO bonuses in the years their companies cause fatal fires.

The deal is a victory for lawmakers who refused to reduce damages to victims and shift costs away from utilities. Opponents included insurance companies, consumer advocates and survivors of the January 2025 Eaton Fire caused by Southern California Edison equipment that killed 19 people in Altadena.

Under the agreement announced Saturday, the state would create a “fast-pay” program for survivors’ property loss, pain and suffering in the wake of a utility-caused fire. It would include deadlines for determining which claims are valid within 60 days of receipt, and settlement offers within 30 days after that, but survivors could still pursue the long process of suing utilities if they choose.

The state also commits to improving its local wildfire mitigation efforts and sharing more data on insurance coverage in areas with fire risk.

The final agreement, which lawmakers will vote on in Senate Bill 492, caps a contentious series of closed-door negotiations between Newsom’s office and legislative leaders on how much utility companies should pay after fires.

Newsom wanted utilities to have to pay less to insurance companies, some wildfire survivors, local governments and corporations claiming damages after a fire. His administration is concerned the mounting costs threaten investor confidence in the state’s three major for-profit utilities: Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric. He said that could lead to higher borrowing costs for the companies and higher electricity bills for Californians.

Newsom also argued his plan would prioritize paying survivors who lose their homes. In past fires, investors have funded lawsuits or claims have been sold to hedge funds, increasing the number of third parties seeking to profit from wildfire payouts, Newsom’s office has said.

SB 492 does not include most of the proposals Newsom wanted and does not substantially change how much utilities must pay after fires they cause. California’s $18 billion wildfire fund that utilities draw from to pay fire damages — and which would fund claims in the fast-pay program — is funded 50-50 by utility customers and shareholders. Proponents of Newsom’s proposals remain concerned that another catastrophic fire could drain that money, leaving utilities facing a mountain of costs and another round of potential bankruptcies.

Nine of the state’s 20 most destructive wildfires were caused by electrical equipment or power lines.

“This system needs full structural reform — not a partial one,” Newsom said in a statement Saturday morning. “I urge the Legislature to build on this progress next year and finish the work we started to secure the Wildfire Fund’s long-term durability, stabilize electricity rates, and ensure fire victims are never again turned into unsecured creditors in a bankruptcy proceeding.”

Negotiations may resume next year

Sen. Josh Becker, a Menlo Park Democrat who was closely involved in the negotiations, acknowledged that lawmakers would likely have to return to the issue of utility liabilities under a future governor.

“What I heard very clearly, certainly from senators, from the Assembly and even from all the stakeholders was that they’re willing to do that,” he said. “They’re willing to start getting around the table and looking at some of those structural issues. But that takes time. We ran out of time in this session.”

“We certainly stood with fire survivors,” said Sen. Ben Allen, a Democrat who represents Palisades Fire survivors. “Challenges with affordability of electricity (remain). That’s not going away.”

The utilities agreed and said there needs to be a long-term solution.

“While we appreciate the efforts made, we are disappointed that the state couldn’t develop comprehensive wildfire reform,” said Southern California Edison spokesperson David Eisenhauer.

San Diego Gas & Electric would not comment and referred questions to Wildfire Victims First, the utility-backed campaign whose priorities aligned with the governor’s wish list.

Campaign spokesperson Nathan Click said the state still needs to make urgent structural reforms “to ensure a fair recovery system.”

PG&E spokesperson Lynsey Paulo said the company is reviewing the bill and is “focused on helping wildfire survivors recover faster, making communities safer, and protecting customer utility bills.” Company stocks tumbled Friday after reports of a potential agreement that did not include any utility cost-shifts.

Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón, the Santa Barbara Democrat whose caucus opposed Newsom’s cost-shifting proposals, said in a statement the agreement “supports survivors in their recovery, curbs Wall Street practices that increase costs on consumers, and mitigates the destruction of these wildfires in the first place.”

Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, an Irvine Democrat who led negotiations for the Assembly, in a statement called the deal “an important step forward.”

“We held the line to protect the people who needed it most,” she said.

The biggest sticking point was the governor’s insistence on eliminating subrogation, which allows insurance companies to sue utilities to recoup their costs for wildfire claims. Lawmakers were staunchly opposed to eliminating that avenue out of concern that it would disrupt the state’s fragile insurance market, raise premiums and cause insurers to flee the state, and they rejected it.

“This outcome keeps costs with the parties responsible for wildfires and helps protect the progress California is making in stabilizing its insurance market,” said Denni Ritter, a vice president at the American Property Casualty Insurance Association.

While the deal is a win for the insurance industry, a senator who represents Eaton Fire survivors said it’s important to also hold insurers accountable.

“We know that in many cases, insurance companies delayed and denied fire survivors’ claims and payments, delaying recovery,” said Democratic Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez. “We need all industries to come to the table in a real way.”

State lawmakers also resisted the governor’s effort to limit survivors’ non-economic damages, an important victory for the Eaton Fire survivors who relentlessly campaigned against the proposal.

Fire survivors and consumer advocates credited the Senate, especially Limón, for pushing back on Newsom.

“In the face of extraordinary pressure from some of the most powerful interests in our state, they centered survivors and California families,” said Joy Chen, executive director of Every Fire Survivor’s Network.

Advocacy group Consumer Watchdog, which worked in concert with fire survivors, called the negotiations “an exercise in the democratic process.”

“(The Legislature) told (Newsom) they wouldn’t bend in closed-door negotiations,” said Jamie Court, president of the group.

Pérez commended survivors for pressuring lawmakers over the past couple of weeks.

“The fire survivors have shaped this entire conversation,” Pérez said. “They made a tremendous impact.”

For many millennials, '90s Nickelodeon shows such as Hey Arnold!, Doug, and Rocko’s Modern Life represent a golden age of animation, with theme songs and music scores often just as weird and offbeat as the characters and storylines.

Take the theme song of Hey Arnold! — an earworm that introduced a generation of young TV viewers to acid jazz, funk, hip-hop and more, even if they didn’t realize it at the time.

Hey Arnold! composer Jim Lang is taking the show's music on tour, with a few stops in SoCal.

LAist’s Robert Garrova caught up with Lang to talk about the show’s endearing music legacy.

On whether he and the other musicians on the show set out to introduce young people to new musical genres

Lang:  I wish I could take credit for being that intentional about it. But we weren't really hoping to introduce anybody to jazz. That was just a wonderful kinda side benefit of the way the show played out.

Was the music too good for a kids' show? Take for instance the theme music for the fan-favorite Pigeon Man episode

Lang:  I don't think there's any such thing as music that's too good for a kids' show. I think children have the hugest imagination for absorbing things that they've never seen before, for being delighted by the unusual.

Those things [music scores] all work because the writers and the animators and the background artists and everybody did such an incredible job before it ever showed up at my studio. That's it. You just kind of shut up and get out of the way and let the image kind of play through you in a way.

On what it felt like being at Nickelodeon in the '90s when the bosses were saying, 'Hey, yeah, let's do some acid jazz on a kids show'

Lang: Well, the women that started Nickelodeon and that ran that company in that era were a really unusual breed, and they were super adventurous. They didn't discourage, you know, people doing crazy stuff.

On what fans' reactions are at the live shows

Lang: Oh, it's just such a love fest. It is nostalgic. The music is meaningful to them because the show, after five seasons, there was a sound to it, and people found it relatable. So getting to hear a band actually play that stuff live, it sounds familiar to the audience in a way that I think people were just thrilled by.

Before the 1980s, tribal leaders of the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation were struggling to care for their people. That’s when, like many tribes, they decided to open a bingo hall on their reservation in San Bernardino County.

The enterprise eventually became the powerhouse Yaamava’ Resort & Casino, a place famous across the Southland for its snappy “you in?” slogan and roster of concert billboards, featuring the likes of Pitbull, Stevie Nicks and the Jonas Brothers.

The tribe is celebrating 40 years of gaming. But in between the high-limit gaming rooms, intimate performances and the  biggest gaming floor in the West — with over 7,500 slot machines — you’ll find a story of self-determination in the face of California bureaucracy.

A brief history

The Yuhaaviatam’s homeland is the San Bernardino mountains, valleys and high deserts. They were previously known as the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, but recently reclaimed their ancestral name, Yuhaaviatam (yu-HAH-vee-ah-tahm), which means “people of the pines.” According to the tribe, the community was forced to leave after decades of violence, colonization and displacement.

One big change came in the mid 1800s when a San Bernardino militia killed Native people. The Yuhaaviatam’s leader at the time, Paakuma, who was known outside the tribe by his Spanish name of Santos Manuel, led the couple dozen remaining members out of the mountains.

The tribe moved around the region, but the federal government eventually placed them on the San Manuel Reservation in 1891. Johnny Hernandez Jr., the Yuhaaviatam’s vice chairman, told LAist it was a time of hardship.

“ We were put up against the hillside there with non-fertile land and really in an area where people probably didn’t think that we were going to survive,” he said.

The Yuhaaviatam had to rebuild largely on their own. The tribe got by financially with apricot orchards and other small ventures. When members needed money, they’d sell some of their livestock or hold bake sales. Hernandez said it wasn’t enough to fund what people needed.

The bingo hall origin

The entrance of San Manuel Bingo.

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Courtesy the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation

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By the ‘80s, other tribes across the United States were in a similar predicament. Looking for ways to generate other forms of revenue, some turned to bingo halls, often outside the jurisdiction of states’ gambling regulations, as their economic springboard.

Under the leadership of tribal chairman Henry Duro, the Yuhaaviatam proposed opening a high-stakes bingo hall. According to newspaper reports, they faced immediate opposition.

Local officials feared the operation would disrupt nearby neighborhoods and foster illicit activity. One critic was San Bernardino City Councilmember Steve Marks, who reportedly instructed city officials to find “every legal way possible to stop the project.”

“ I think from the community, there was a lot of concern about having gaming in their backyard,” Hernandez said, who’s Duro’s nephew. “Everybody understands that gaming can lead to issues with not only the person, but the families …  so we really take that responsibility seriously.”

City leaders tried to push the bingo hall off the reservation and even tried to delay construction in court. The Yuhaaviatam had talks with San Bernardino to find a solution, but according to reports in October 1985, that effort broke down.

San Manuel Bingo could hold 2,500 players at a time.

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Courtesy the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation

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A view of San Manuel Bingo in its heyday.

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Courtesy the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation

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Ultimately, the Yuhaaviatam moved forward with building San Manuel Indian Bingo on the reservation, which opened on July 24, 1986. It was a hit. They had sold out nights.  People even climbed over the back walls to play.

“A funny story that my chairwoman Lynn always tells is that those ones that really were against [the bingo hall] and had the biggest concerns were the first ones in line to go into the bingo and to game,” Hernandez said.

He grew up next door to the bingo hall and would sit outside to watch the stream of people go in and out. He said the building looked like a box compared to the casino they have now. But inside, hundreds of hopeful bingo winners packed rows upon rows of tables.

“ They would have costume contests and everything, and it was real lively,” Hernandez said. “I remember a lot of people were excited to be there.”

When the bingo hall opened in 1986, it soon became popular.

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Courtesy the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation

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Employees at the bingo hall.

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Courtesy the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation

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As controversial as the bingo hall was to some, it was also a source of employment for San Bernardino. Kenneth Shoji, the tribe’s spokesperson, told LAist how when the hall opened, much of the area around was in an economic downtown.

“ The air base had closed. Kaiser Steel was closing. Santa Fe [Depot] had down-scaled significantly,” Shoji said. “Many people who came to work here were coming from those industries.  In fact, many tribal elders … also came from those businesses.”

The rise of tribal gaming

San Manuel Indian Bingo opened the door to financial stability, but tribal gaming enterprises still faced trouble in California. State and local leaders wanted to shut them down.

One fight ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court.  Two Native reservations, Cabazon and Morongo, ran bingo and card games in Riverside County, which began a few years before the Yuhaaviatam’s enterprise. Officials argued the state had the right to ban tribal gaming to discourage gambling.

The Supreme Court ended up siding with the tribes in part because California already permitted multiple forms of gaming, like horse racing, card games and a state-sponsored lottery.

The ruling led to the creation of the  Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, a landmark piece of legislation that Congress signed into law in 1988. It paved the way for tribal nations to run more profitable forms of gaming, like craps and slot machines.

Casino games at Yaamava’ Resort & Casino.

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Cato Hernández

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LAist

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The act established regulations that split gaming into three classes and created a system where tribes would have to make agreements with states before offering the highest level.

Randall Akee, a professor of economic development in Indigenous communities at Harvard University, told LAist it took awhile for California to get on board.

“Tribal gaming really as an industry, larger scale in California, took off in the post-2000 era,” he said.

That came with the passage of Prop. 1A and Prop. 5, which permitted compacts for Class III gaming on tribal lands in California. The deals have been moneymakers. According to the National Indian Gaming Commission, California and northern Nevada (which are calculated together) lead the nation in gross gaming revenue, bringing in $12.6 billion in fiscal year 2025.

Akee said the Yuhaaviatam people have created a large gaming footprint in California despite their small population and geographical size. Overall, the tribe is one of San Bernardino County’s top employers with nearly 8,000 employees, according to Shoji.

A miniaturized version of Yaamava's tower.

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Cato Hernández

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LAist

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A display celebrating 40 years of the Yuhaaviatam's gaming enterprise.

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Cato Hernández

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LAist

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They’ve also expanded their gaming enterprise into new, larger buildings. When San Manuel Casino (as the bingo hall was later named) opened in 2021, it was rebranded to Yaamava’ Resort & Casino. The $760 million expansion, with a 17-story hotel tower and 432 rooms and suites, brought their footprint to over 700,000 square feet. A parking structure now stands in place of the former bingo hall.

Hernandez said tribal gaming has helped his community thrive. They use the revenue to pay for critical resources, like supplying medical care to elders, hiring teachers for schools and buying generators to curb power outages. The tribe has also donated over $450 million to local communities.

“  I think the thing that people always forget or don’t understand is that every time we buy a piece of land, we’re just going to throw a casino there,” Hernandez said. “First and foremost, we’re a tribe. We have the needs for our people, and [want to] protect our cultural resources.”

The Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation is a financial supporter of LAist. Like other funders, the tribe has no influence on our coverage.