The Brief

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In the final few weeks of his last legislative session as California governor, Gavin Newsom is asking lawmakers to help reduce how much profit-making utility companies must pay out after wildfires.

His administration has for weeks floated to lawmakers a wide-ranging but still-vague package of bills to address the spiraling costs of wildfires that has made a slew of different interests unhappy.

Insurance companies have launched an ad campaign against what they call a potential “utility bailout,” that would leave them unable to recover from the power companies the costs of paying homeowners’ insurance claims. Attorneys representing fire survivors and other plaintiffs that sue utilities don’t want to see their fees reduced.

Wildfire survivors worry the governor’s proposal would prevent them from being made financially whole for suffering trauma. Local government leaders are demanding that they continue to be paid the full cost to rebuild incinerated infrastructure.

On the other side are the politically influential utilities, who have drawn fury for their equipment sparking several of the state’s most devastating wildfires.

The state’s three investor-owned utilities, Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric, aren’t in imminent financial danger and last year saw profits rise. But fire costs have contributed to Californians paying the second-highest electricity rates in the country, and lawmakers and Newsom’s office worry that if it becomes harder for utilities to borrow money those bills will continue to climb. The utilities together provide power for about three-quarters of the state.

Newsom and the lawmakers say utilities are held responsible for too much after a wildfire and that bad actors like hedge funds are taking advantage to get a cut. If another devastating wildfire triggers damages too high for a utility to pay, the potentially resulting bankruptcy would make it even harder for victims to collect.

“The status quo doesn’t work,” Newsom said at a press conference last week when asked whether his proposal is in the best interests of fire survivors. “And we're trying to balance all of those needs in a very familiar process that will unfold over the course of the next few months.”

CalMatters asked the governor’s office whether the timeline Newsom mentioned was correct, considering the legislative session ends in three weeks. A spokesperson said the governor meant “the next couple of months of the legislative session,” and did not respond to whether Newsom will call a special session to address the issue.

As he mulls a presidential run, Newsom has political incentive to push through a deal. Opponents from the right are eager to paint California as unaffordable and lurching through disasters; further rate hikes or the specter of a utility bankruptcy wouldn’t help. But backing the utilities also comes with risks: Anger at the companies remains fresh after Edison was last week found by Cal Fire and the Los Angeles County Fire Department to be responsible for the January 2025 Eaton Fire that killed 19 people in Altadena.

The chair of a key Assembly committee, Democratic Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, is generally on board with Newsom’s proposals, but lawmakers in the Senate appear less certain. Fire survivors are urging them to slow down and commit to a more public debate.

“You cannot be ‘there are some bad actors’ and therefore we will have a secret bill,” said Joy Chen, who leads a group of Los Angeles wildfire survivors. “Then your bill is the bad actor.”

A familiar fight

It’s a redux of a bitter fight that has bookended Newsom’s time as governor.

He stepped into his role in the wake of devastating wildfires that tore through Northern California in 2017 and 2018, several of which PG&E was found to have been responsible for.

The utility was in a bind: Under California law it was strictly liable for fires that were getting more severe, partly due to climate change, and regulators were no longer letting the companies pass damages onto customers in cases where they were found careless.

Facing mounting suits from victims and insurance companies, the company in 2019 declared bankruptcy. Newsom quickly signed legislation to help buffer utilities from those claims, drawing accusations of a bailout. The state created a $21 billion wildfire fund, paid for half by utility shareholders and half by customers through a $2.50 surcharge on their monthly electricity bills, to pay victims’ claims, provided the utilities follow stricter safety regulations.

The remaining structure of a building burned from the Eaton Fire in Altadena. Jan. 8, 2025.

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Ted Soqui

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CalMatters

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Then in January 2025, during an intense windstorm, electricity arcing from a century-old out-of-service Edison tower in Southern California’s Eaton Canyon set dry brush ablaze. The resulting Eaton Fire, burning at the same time as the deadly Palisades Fire, claimed 19 lives and nearly 9,500 homes and other buildings. UCLA estimated losses at between $24 billion and 45 billion.

The state wildfire fund is expected to be drained once the costs of insurance claims, Edison’s multimillion-dollar voluntary settlements with survivors and numerous unsettled lawsuits are tallied. (Lawmakers extended the fund last year to address future fires, adding to electricity customers’ surcharges through 2045.) Profiteering hedge funds have sought to take advantage by buying up insurance claims.

Newsom’s goal is twofold: Limit who can make claims to the fund and limit how much they can get. In private briefings last week and a document outlining his package released Tuesday, his office said he would combine the cost reductions with bills to boost home hardening, help homeowners get off the state’s insurer-of-last-resort and re-enter the home insurance market, tie utility executive pay to safety and require shareholders to pay down customers’ rates for two summers.

Details of the package remain scant. The outline released Tuesday did not include proposed legislative language.

CalMatters contacted the state’s three major utility companies. San Diego Gas & Electric did not respond. PG&E and Edison referred questions to Nathan Click, spokesperson for the utilities’ campaign, which is called Wildfire Victims First and has been blanketing the state with ads telling Californians to urge their lawmakers to act.

Click, who is also a political spokesperson for Newsom, did not answer specific questions, including whether utilities are meeting directly with lawmakers. Instead, he shared statements from a handful of business groups and a powerful electrical workers’ union urging lawmakers to advocate for the proposed liability reduction.

In addition, the chief executives of PG&E and Edison have said they plan to take action to protect their shareholders if California lawmakers do not pass legislation to limit their fire liability. They did not specify what they planned to do.

Over the past four years PG&E, Edison and SDG&E collectively spent $5.2 million on California political campaigns, sponsored travel for lawmakers and donations to officials’ favored charities, according to CalMatters’ Digital Democracy database.

PG&E also has the fifth-highest spending on lobbying in the 2025-2026 legislative session and was the top spender from April through June. In the first half of this year, the three utilities reported spending nearly $7 million to influence Newsom’s administration, the Legislature and their regulators at the California Public Utilities Commission.

Limiting damages

Newsom suggests chipping away at utilities’ liabilities by limiting attorneys’ fees, reducing the amount of money local governments can recoup to rebuild burned infrastructure and curbing how much some victims can receive in damages.

His proposal would set up a state-administered “fast pay” program to prioritize wildfire fund payouts for survivors whose loved ones are killed, who are injured or whose properties are destroyed. To participate, claimants would likely need to give up their right to sue the utility — trading an often lengthy wait through litigation to get comprehensive damages in exchange for the relief of a quicker payout.

For other victims “in harm’s way,” the Tuesday outline suggests allowing up to $150,000 in damages.

Newsom’s office and Petrie-Norris, who generally supports the idea, said they do not intend to limit emotional distress claims for survivors they deem legitimate but those kinds of damages should be curbed for others.

“If you were part of a disaster no one’s going to say you can’t make a claim,” Petrie-Norris, an Irvine Democrat who chairs the Assembly utilities committee, said. “If you did not actually experience a disaster, what non-economic damages should you be entitled to?”

Petrie-Norris and Newsom are concerned about billboard attorneys who seek clients to file lawsuits against utilities and the wildfire fund; one study has found attorneys are likely to get 30% to 40% of victims’ payouts. Groups representing survivors and attorneys argue it’s not so clear who should count as a victim. Residents who lost no property and stayed in their homes miles away could still be harmed by smoke inhalation, for example.

Chen said she was “stunned” after she was briefed by the governor’s office last week and was told that only people who are evacuated and have their house burn down would be eligible for non-economic damages.

“Let’s say someone was out of town, but their house burned down so they didn’t evacuate,” she said. “But they lost everything, so they have to rebuild. So you won’t compensate them for pain and suffering?”

Newsom also wants to stop investors from buying claims and prioritize small business claimants over corporations, but his office has not explained how to accomplish that.

The proposed bill package has so incensed some wildfire victims that opponents of the plan have shrugged at arguments that some claimants are taking advantage of the Wildfire Fund.

“The utilities are finding a lot of creative ways to avoid responsibility. That’s it,” said Graham Knaus, chief executive of the California Association of Counties. “We should not be opening the door for them to escape accountability.”

Shifting costs

Another component of the outline released Tuesday could affect homeowners across the state. Newsom is proposing to limit — or eliminate entirely — insurance companies' right to recoup money from utilities when a utility-caused fire forces those insurers to pay out homeowners' claims.

The process is known as subrogation. The two powerful industries have been at odds over it for years.

Utilities and insurance already clashed in 2018 when utilities unsuccessfully backed a bill to loosen a unique California legal doctrine that holds power providers strictly liable for wildfire damages near their equipment even if they aren’t found responsible for the fire.

“We’re a well-resourced industry, but not like (the utilities),” Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, recalled. “Their lobbying spend was just crazy.”

Denni Ritter, vice president for the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, said eliminating subrogation could impede the progress that has been made due to the regulations California adopted last year to address insurance availability problems.

“We’re at this precarious time,” Ritter said. Because the state now allows insurance companies to consider catastrophe modeling and reinsurance costs in pricing their premiums, some insurers have resumed writing new policies in California, and the number of policies in the last-resort FAIR Plan is growing at a slower rate, according to the state insurance department.

But if they can’t recover the costs of wildfire claims, Frazier and Ritter said insurance companies will raise premiums, which would affect homeowners even in areas with low fire risk.

“We don't understand how they're not embarrassed to suggest that the answer to their problem is to shift their costs over to other people,” Frazier said. “Why should a homeowners insurance customer in a dense urban environment have to pay considerably more?”

Sen. Ben Allen, the Democratic chair of the Senate utilities committee and a candidate for insurance commissioner, said he doesn’t want to make that tradeoff if the package doesn’t include other benefits for consumers or taxpayers.

Petrie-Norris said it could be worth it.

“If I can save you $2 on your utility bill and your insurance bill goes up by $1, that seems like a smart thing for us all to do,” she said. But we've got to make sure that's true and whether there are unintended consequences.”

Jeremia Kimelman and Digital Democracy engineer Andrew Chan contributed to this story.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Los Angeles County will begin sending mail-in ballots starting this Thursday ahead of the Nov. 3 elections. Counties across the state have until next Monday, Oct. 5, to begin mailing out ballots.

In the June primary, nearly 82% of the total ballots cast in L.A. County were through vote-by-mail ballots.

State and local officials are encouraging people to vote early.

When can I turn in my ballot?

L.A. County elections officials say voters can turn in their ballots by mail as soon as they receive them. No postage is necessary.

They can also turn them in starting this week at official dropboxes across the county, which are often found at parks, community centers or libraries.

Voters can also turn them in or vote in person at the county’s Vote Centers, which L.A. County officials say will start to open on Oct. 24. Officials say all Vote Centers will be open by Halloween.

What about in Orange County?

Orange County officials say U.S. Postal Service officials are scheduled to pick up about 1.9 million ballots from the county elections office on Saturday and start delivering them on Monday, Oct. 5.

The Trump administration has tried to restrict mail-in ballots. Will my ballot be affected?

The California Secretary of State’s office says nothing has currently changed. The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month issued an injunction on President Trump’s executive order requiring states to turn in lists of voters and ordering the USPS to send mail-in ballots to the people on the approved lists.

"Voters will be able to cast their ballots without uncertainty, without hesitation, and without fear that their voices will be questioned or their ballots rejected," said Secretary of State Shirley Weber.

Los Angeles County is reporting the highest number of rabid bats on record, a to-date total of 69, officials said.

This year’s rabid bat count has already matched 2025’s total, according to the L.A. County Department of Public Health, which released the count Monday, marking World Rabies Day.

Health officials emphasized that rabid bats have been found all over the county "from suburban areas such as the San Fernando Valley to urban areas like downtown Los Angeles, in office buildings, parks, schools, businesses, and residential backyards."

That said, a large share of rabid bats — 68% of the 69 found so far — were in the Santa Clarita Valley, and they were mainly canyon bats, which are common in California.

When to be on high alert

Officials warned that a third of human encounters with rabid bats happened indoors, where the risk of exposure to the virus is higher.

Bat bites are small and can be hard to detect. Rabies can also be spread through scratches or other transfers of saliva.

“If you find a bat indoors or think you may have had contact with one, contact your medical provider or Public Health right away,” Dr. Muntu Davis, a Los Angeles County Health officer, said in a statement. “And remember, never touch a bat or any wild animals. Immediately report any bat found indoors, or outdoors if it appears sick, active during the day, unable to fly, or dead, to your local animal control.”

Who to call

Veterinary Public Health

Phone: 213-288-7060
Email: vet@ph.lacounty.gov
Website: publichealth.lacounty.gov/vet

*Call 211 to find your local animal control

What to know about rabies

Rabies in humans is treatable with a series of vaccines. Rabies is always fatal in animals, the county said in a release, so vaccinate your pets.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law Sunday that tightens building rules for sites that store explosive chemicals, responding to an Orange County chemical incident that forced thousands of residents to evacuate Memorial Day weekend.

The law also adds the chemical methyl methacrylate to a state program that aims to prevent chemical disasters.

In May, CalMatters reported that California’s toughest accidental-release prevention rules do not cover the chemical in the tank at GKN Aerospace, a company that makes cockpits and windshields in Garden Grove. Weeks later Democratic state Sen. Tom Umberg of Santa Ana amended an existing bill with language that addressed that gap. Assembly committee and floor analyses noted CalMatters’ reporting. 

Had the chemical exploded, it “would have been perhaps the greatest catastrophe, certainly in the last several decades in California,” Umberg said at a June Assembly hearing.

Umberg’s original proposal would have set stronger standards for more types of explosive chemicals, but legislators narrowed it significantly in last-minute negotiations.

The final law bars building new facilities near homes and schools and requires backup cooling systems. It also strips an exemption from environmental review that facilities storing methyl methacrylate previously qualified for.

Garden Grove advocates call the bill a good step, but say it offers the community little immediate recourse, especially with GKN Aerospace planning to reopen by the end of September.

The law’s siting requirements apply to new facilities, not to existing ones like GKN’s Garden Grove plant.

Mai Do, research and policy manager for the Orange County advocacy group Harbor Institute for Immigrant and Economic Justice, said she hopes the state will do more to address the threat of toxic chemicals at existing facilities.

“This is a much larger fight than just what's happened in Garden Grove,” Do said. “What we see in terms of the Lineage fire and other industrial crises is that this is a problem that is affecting a lot of different communities”

In an interview with CalMatters, Umberg said the bill reflected a balancing act. “This is a net benefit for the state, a net benefit for the community,” he said.

Stronger rules for new facilities, not existing ones

Over Memorial Day weekend, residents learned of a problem with a tank storing methyl methacrylate at the GKN Aerospace facility. A crack in the tank released pressure and, along with efforts by emergency responders, averted disaster, but questions remained about what went wrong.

CalMatters reported in May that methyl methacrylate and other chemicals that could explode under certain conditions falls outside the California Accidental Release Program, which requires facilities to maintain detailed plans for preventing or responding to chemical leaks or explosions.

Rachel Tochterman, a spokesperson for Sen. Umberg, said the senator took note and initially proposed incorporating a broader category of reactive chemicals into the program.

But industry groups opposed the plan, arguing it was too broad without clearer evidence.

Dawn Koepke, a lobbyist for the California Manufacturers and Technology Association and the California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance, said she does not believe a regulatory gap exists that would justify incorporating more chemicals into the state’s accidental release regimen.

Facilities storing toxic chemicals are already heavily regulated under other federal and state laws, she said, including a requirement for plans to protect people from chemical releases.

Koepke said she worried that "jumping to conclusions and over-regulating" could affect "a wider array of facilities."

Tim Shestek, a lobbyist representing the American Chemistry Council and other groups, said in an email that Umberg’s original proposal would have affected “far more facilities, substances and sectors than were in the original scope.”

After amendments on the next-to-last day of the legislative session, nine industry groups stopped lobbying against the bill.

Most provisions of the law only apply to methyl methacrylate — the chemical involved in the Garden Grove incident. The bill adds it to the state’s accidental release program, requires facilities to maintain prevention and emergency-response plans, and closes the environmental-review exemption for new sites where the chemical is present.

Scrapped from the bill: a requirement to map reactive-chemical sites in CalEnviroScreen, a state program that identifies polluted communities.

GKN Aerospace plans to reopen 

Steve Carlin, senior vice president for GKN Aerospace programs, said the company has been working with regulators and independent experts “to safely reset the remainder of the facility with the appropriate oversight” work that has included inspections, upgrades to safety equipment, and additional monitoring. The company plans to reopen in the next few days.

The company also announced an additional $100 million program to pay residents and businesses that lost money during evacuations.

Lisa Fu, director of the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, a worker-safety group, wants California to regulate hazardous chemicals more broadly.

“It's just unfortunate that it's a piecemeal thing,” said Lisa Fu, director of the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative. “Is it worth it to go piece by piece in terms of trying to ban certain chemicals? It makes the work harder for us, and you can see who's benefiting and who's not.”

Newsom also signed a pair of bills in response to the Lineage fire, a June cold storage fire in Los Angeles. The fire briefly prompted a shelter-in-place order over fears that toxic anhydrous ammonia had been released into the air.

The new laws raise the fines agencies can levy on companies that endanger health and safety. They also bar building permits for cold storage facilities that lack contingency funds or insurance to help communities in emergencies.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

California is now the second state to recognize the two main Muslim holidays as state holidays.

Eid ul Fitr is the festival marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan, and Eid ul Adha is the festival honoring Abraham or Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son as a mark of his devotion to God. They join a state holiday list that also includes Lunar New Year and Diwali.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the change into law Monday. Washington first recognized the holidays in 2025.

Oussama Mokeddem, legislative and government affairs director at the California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told LAist the signing day is  “an exciting day for the California Muslim community and a big day for the American Muslim community at large.”

Muslims follow the lunar calendar, so the dates of the two festivals vary each year. Next year, Eid ul Fitr will likely fall on March 10 and Eid ul Adha on May 17.

Why it's important to Californians

The holiday recognition comes at a time when the community is facing “unwarranted and unjustified criticism,” Mokeddem said, which he cited as a reason for a May 2026 attack at the Islamic Center of San Diego. A recent Pew study also found that 42% of Americans believe Muslim Americans have a negative impact on the country.

Adam Khaja, an 11th grader at Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District, said the holiday recognition signals that  "you don't have to give up an important part of your identity to fully participate in Californian society."

" For a long time, immigrant and minority communities have sometimes felt pressure to leave parts of their identity at home in order to fit into American educational or industrial institutions," he said.

What does the holiday recognition mean?

California is home to more than 1 million Muslims, and with this law, state employees can use existing paid time off to celebrate the two holidays.

And for students in K-12 public schools, Mokeddem said the law does not mandate statewide time off, but local school districts can declare a district-wide day off if enough community members bring it up as a need.

He added that students can also cite state law when they are absent from school to celebrate the holiday.

Khaja said he will be advocating for his school district to give a district-wide day off.

"Eid has always been a huge part of our lives, but I think that the school calendar and district policies haven't always reflected that," he said.

He hopes his students will not be put in a situation now "to choose between going to school or fully participating in one of the most important days of their faith."

Muslim Women Professionals, a nonprofit, has templates on how to advocate for time off to celebrate Eid ul Fitr and Eid ul Adha.