Gov. Brown signed $1 billion in wildfire prevention — and none of it applies to the fires this year

Protecting California from devastating wildfires was the Legislature’s biggest focus in this year’s session. Recognizing the urgency, lawmakers formed a special wildfire committee, heard from numerous experts, and, after several emotional debates, passed a $1 billion new law they said would “prevent catastrophic wildfires and protect Californians.”

Less than two months later, the deadliest and most destructive fire in state history swept through the mountain town of Paradise, killing at least 76 people.

The short answer, according to Gov. Jerry Brown, is that “some things only God can do.”

The longer answer is that the complex negotiations that produced the new law left a glaring gap for 2018 fire damage. Many provisions of Senate Bill 901 have not yet taken effect, and even when they do, will impact the state gradually.

A key aspect will likely take years, if not decades, to complete: Thinning forests and removing dead and dying trees that have turned huge swaths of California into kindling.

The law calls for spending $200 million a year over five years on clearing trees and brush to make forests less fire-prone — but the money doesn’t start flowing until 2019.

It also requires utility companies to come up with fire prevention plans — but those don’t begin until next year, either.

And it creates a five-member Commission on Catastrophic Wildfire Cost and Recovery within the governor’s office to decide whether utilities can pass costs onto customers and suggest broader changes to liability laws.

No commissioners have been named yet, and its first report isn’t due until July 1.

Even the most controversial and hard-fought part of the law — which makes it easier for utility companies to absorb the cost of fire damages by borrowing money and charging customers to pay it back over many years, a provision critics deemed a bailout — does not apply right now. It covers fires that burned in 2017, and those that start in 2019, but not any blazing this year.

“We have been overwhelmed by the risk of fire, and despite all the time and effort we put in, we are still unprepared,” said clean-energy lobbyist V. John White.

“It feels like it’s a bigger problem than we even imagined, and that’s all we spent most of the year working on.”

In addition to the main fire-prevention legislation, Brown signed more than two dozen bills in September that were inspired by 2017’s deadly wildfires, including measures meant to improve emergency alerts and insurance coverage.

But the shortcomings of the main prevention bill reflect how fraught it was to pass the legislation in an election year, with lawmakers facing pressure from utility companies and their labor unions — which are significant campaign donors — to loosen fire liability laws, and from fire victims and insurance companies to leave the liability law in place.

Lobbying on the issue was intense, with utilities spending twice as much as they normally do. They enjoyed support from some environmentalists who see the companies as critical players in California’s fight against climate change.

If the state is going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as required by law, it needs the utilities to help build components such as charging stations for electric cars and battery storage for solar power. Utilities argued that the liability law was hurting their credit ratings, which makes it more expensive to build clean-energy projects.

In the end, lawmakers did not change the liability law (known as inverse condemnation) that holds a utility responsible for damages from any fire traced to its equipment, even if it was not negligent. Instead, utilities got the controversial provision allowing them to spread out the massive cost of their liability for the 2017 wildfires.

By the time that tradeoff was agreed on, though, with the clock ticking down in the final days of the session and legislators bristling at accusations they were bailing out PG&E, there was little appetite for complicating the fragile consensus by factoring in the 2018 fire season, according to several Capitol sources. With existing laws still in place to handle liability for any 2018 wildfires, state lawmakers played the odds that utilities could get through the rest of the year without facing bankruptcy from another catastrophe.

Now the devastation of the last weeks — and reports that a PG&E power line near Paradise had problems in the minutes before the Camp Fire began — make it likely the debate will return to the Capitol next year.