Consumer Watchdog Reports: Assembly Kills Landmark Legislation Requiring Independent Audits of Utility Wildfire Spending, Rebuke to Wildfire Survivors As Utilities Seek Bailout Worth Billions

SACRAMENTO, Calif., May 14, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The California Assembly Appropriations Committee failed to advance Assembly Bill 1774 (Boerner), which requires independent audits of Wildfire Mitigation Plan (WMP) spending before additional funding is approved. 

AB 1774 passed the Assembly Energy Committee 11 – 0 with the support of the Chair. The bill was aimed at confirming the appropriate use of the $9 billion in annual utility wildfire mitigation spending, while utilities seek a multi-billion dollar bailout of their responsibility to wildfire survivors when they start fires.

The bill was the subject of testimony at hearings over the last two days about the California Earthquake Authority (CEA) report recommending limits on wildfire survivors' rights and removing accountability for wildfires from for-profit electric utilities.

"The fact that Assembly leadership doesn't want to account for the $9 billion in annual wildfire mitigation spending at the time that they are considering a multi-billion dollar bailout for utilities that start fires shows that the utilities control the Assembly, not sound public policy," said Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog. "This is a slap in the face to wildfire survivors and ratepayers and it proves the $20 million in utility company campaign contributions during this session means more to Assembly leadership than controlling the $9 billion in utility wildfire spending. Anything the Assembly does now on wildfire reform will be seen in the light of this sham."

Joy Chen, executive director of the Every Fire Survivor's Network (EFSN), which connects more than 10,000 Eaton and Palisades fire survivors and allies, testified about the need for AB 1774 and more utility accountability on spending, rather than limits on survivors' rights, in the Senate and Assembly Energy Committees Tuesday and Wednesday.

"Pass AB 1774, requiring independent audits of utility wildfire mitigation spending," Chen told the committees. She pointed to the first and last state audit of utility wildfire spending, completed in 2021, which found utilities got $6 billion in wildfire mitigation spending, and couldn't account for $2.5 billion of it. 

A Los Angeles Times investigation found that Edison had not spent hundreds of millions of dollars that it told regulators before the fire was needed to keep its system safe. Edison had been charging ratepayers for the work. 

"Had AB 1774 been law, the Eaton Fire may never have happened," said Chen. "Californians funded the wildfire prevention, and we survivors paid the price when that work was not done."    

"California families are already paying some of the highest utility bills in the nation for wildfire prevention. This bill was about one simple principle: if utilities charge the public for safety work, they should have to prove the work was actually completed. I'm deeply disappointed that legislators sided with for-profit utilities seeking to avoid accountability, instead of with the Californians whose lives and homes are on the line."

The LA Times wrote about AB 1774 following its earlier passage from the Assembly Energy Committee.

Consumer Watchdog president Jamie Court pointed to the conclusions of the only three audits of utility wildfire spending in modern history, which found the utilities could not show that they spent $2.5 billion of the $6 billion in 2019-2020 WMP spending authorized. The Public Utilities Commission let the utilities keep the money and authorized more for 2021-2023 wildfire spending.  

"California's three investor-owned utilities spend approximately $9 billion annually on wildfire mitigation plan – and that spending is accelerating.  But we don't know how, where, or if it is ever spent," said Court. "That's because there have been only three audits in modern history of wildfire mitigation plan spending. The results are not encouraging from the perspective of utility accountability."

"If utilities know they are being watched, they are more likely to spend wildfire mitigation funds in effective ways rather than holding onto that money in their accounts where they make investment income on the money," Court said.  

"The Eaton fire appears to have been started by an abandoned transmission line, a ghost line, that sparked when the current from a live line running next to it jumped," Court continued. "An LA Times investigation found that Edison failed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars it has been authorized to spend on wildfire mitigation to maintain and remove old transmission lines. Had Edison known it would be accountable for its wildfire mitigation spending would that ghost line have been removed?"

The following public interest groups support AB 1774:

Ballona Wetlands Institute, Bay Area-System Change not Climate Change, California Environmental Voters, California Nurses Association, Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice (CCAEJ), Climate Hawks Vote, Coastal Lands Action Network (CLAN), Consumer Attorneys of California, Courage California, Eaton Fire Survivors Network, Environmental Working Group, Extreme Weather Survivors Action Fund, Food & Water Watch, Long Beach Gray Panthers, Public Citizen, Santa Cruz Climate Action Network, Sierra Club California, SoCal 350 Climate Action, Sunflower Alliance, The Protect Our Communities Foundation, Transition Sebastopol, TURN—The Utility Reform Network.

The three for-profit electric monopolies, including SDG&E's parent company Sempra, gave state legislators $19,377,728 in 2025-2026 and spent $11,866,570 on lobbying. 

SOURCE Consumer Watchdog