By James Farr | OPINION CONTRIBUTOR
BLACKPRESSUSA—A secret Sacramento deal would protect Southern California Edison’s profits while Black ratepayers across California absorb the cost—and the governor holds the only pen that matters.
You Gonna Let My Good Air Out?
By late afternoon in August, the west-facing wall of the house in Oak Park has been collecting sun for three hours. The glass holds it. The drywall holds it. The air inside stops moving around two o’clock and doesn’t start again. Shades pulled. Fan running. The house baking anyway.
Outside, somebody pulled two chairs off the porch into whatever patch of shade the eave still throws. That is where the fellowshipping happens. A fire survivor who relocated from Altadena to Sacramento described it this way, now living through their second Central Valley summer: conversation flows, somebody goes in for something cold, a screen door opens, somebody hollers—where are those fans? The screen door closes. The only thing hotter than an Oak Park August afternoon is the grease at Fixins Soul Kitchen, about a mile up the road. Southern California Edison records another profitable quarter.
The Governor’s Mansion sits a few minutes north on H Street. The Capitol dome rises just beyond that. In every Black house, in every Black neighborhood, in every Black community around the way from both of them, somebody is telling somebody, you are going to let my good air out.
Summer in California’s inland communities carries a specific weight for Black households. It is an economic event. Groceries up. Gas up. Elders on fixed incomes are holding the weight of everybody around them on a cost of living that stopped making sense years ago. People with the smallest margins pay the premium the hardest.
In August, California’s governor is moving to make it worse.
Nineteen Dead. One Profitable Quarter.
On Jan. 7, 2025, a transmission tower owned and operated by Southern California Edison ignited what became the Eaton Fire. The tower was out of service. SCE had performed no maintenance. The Los Angeles County Fire Department confirmed SCE equipment as the cause.
Nineteen people died. More than 9,400 structures burned—approximately 6,900 of them homes—across Altadena and Pasadena. Altadena carries one of the largest concentrations of Black homeownership in Los Angeles County and in the country. Generational wealth built across decades, gone in a single night. Photographs. Deeds. The furniture somebody’s grandmother brought from the South. Gone.
Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of Edison International, the parent company of Southern California Edison, received $16.5 million in compensation in the year that followed. Edison International profits rose. The utilities are not struggling. They arrived in Sacramento profitable, compensated, and asking for more.
Into that same Sacramento, Gov. Gavin Newsom moves to give it to them.
No Bill. No Hearing. No Shame.
No bill exists in print. No bill number to look up. No public hearing to attend. No formal text to read.
What exists are discussions between the governor’s office, investor-owned utility companies, and sympathetic legislators—moving through the final 30 days of session. The proposals would cap what insurance companies can recover from utilities after paying survivor claims, eliminate or gut non-economic damages, and place broader limits on wildfire liability overall. Non-economic damages cover recovery for pain, trauma, lost photographs, and the destruction of irreplaceable generational wealth. The proposals make that pathway harder to walk.
State Sen. Sasha Perez represents the 25th District, which includes Altadena. Her second day in office was the day the Eaton Fire started. She spoke on Conversation Live: Altadena Forward, hosted by James Farr on KBLA Talk 1580. When the Los Angeles Times reported that utility companies threatened to cut California state programs unless the Legislature complied, Perez named what she saw.
“What I found particularly disgusting is over the last two days, the LA Times released an article with the utility company saying that if the Legislature was not to take action around these proposals, that they are going to cut California state programs so that they could give more profits to shareholders instead of trying to improve the lives of Californians and trying to make their equipment more safe,” Perez said. “It is utterly unacceptable. All they care about is their bottom line, which is giving profits to their shareholders.”
Newsom holds the pen. The clock runs regardless.
The System Behind the System
Chris Holden spent years in the California State Assembly and served as mayor of Pasadena. He now leads LA Fire Justice. His interview with Tavis Smiley on KBLA Talk 1580 was identified on air as editorial content independent of that sponsorship relationship. What Holden describes is not complicated. Utilities profit from infrastructure they bury underground and bill ratepayers for. Equipment they own outright and must maintain themselves generates nothing. The incentive runs one direction. The out-of-service SCE tower that started the Eaton Fire lived in the second category. SCE owned it. SCE neglected it. Nineteen people died inside that neglect.
California’s three investor-owned utilities—SCE, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), and San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E)—serve roughly 75 to 80 percent of the state’s electricity customers, according to the California Public Utilities Commission. Municipal utilities, including the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), Pasadena Water and Power, and Sacramento Municipal Utility District, serve the rest. Municipal utilities have not burned down communities. Holden raises restructuring the investor-owned utility model as a serious legislative option. Sacramento has not explored it.
Meanwhile, Perez launched a year-long investigation into State Farm after Altadena and Palisades residents flooded her office with complaints about delayed and denied claims—violations of existing California law confirmed by the California Department of Insurance. She introduced legislation to impose interest penalties on late-paying insurers and require timely loss estimates for survivors. “These are bills that should have been passed years ago,” Perez said. “The fact that the industry has gotten away with this for so long is pretty shocking.”
Utilities and insurers share no formal agreement. They share something more durable—a mandate to protect shareholder profit and a lobbying apparatus powerful enough to keep Sacramento from making that mandate inconvenient. Newsom controls the pen. The math is not complicated.
This Is Not a California Story
The template taking shape in Sacramento does not stay in Sacramento. Cap liability. Restrict insurer recourse—gut non-economic damages. Draft the legislation without public participation and move it through in the final weeks of session before opposition can organize. The utility industry operates nationally. Its lobbying apparatus operates nationally. What it tests in California it deploys everywhere else.
Gas prices hit Black households in Chicago the same way they hit Black households in Riverside. Groceries that haven’t flattened cost the same in Atlanta as they do in Stockton. The people absorbing the cost of this model live everywhere this readership lives.
In East Los Angeles, a warehouse operated by Lineage Logistics—one of the world’s largest temperature-controlled supply chain companies—caught fire and burned for multiple days in the Boyle Heights neighborhood. The facility released ammonia, the chemical refrigerant stored in large quantities in cold storage operations at that industrial scale, along with thick, toxic smoke that hung over the surrounding area long after the flames died down. Boyle Heights residents sheltered in place. Burning eyes. Respiratory irritation. The particular helplessness of watching a corporation’s building poison your air while you wait for someone in authority to tell you how bad it actually is. The stench reached Altadena, twelve to fifteen miles north, where fire survivors already carrying heightened environmental sensitivity said they smelled it for days. Lineage Logistics owned the building. The neighborhood did not store the ammonia. The neighborhood did not choose the location. The neighborhood absorbed the cost—and that connection runs from Boyle Heights to Altadena to Oak Park to every community in this country where industry gets placed close enough to profit and far enough from accountability.
When corporations cause harm, who pays? The man who wants to answer that question from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. holds the pen in Sacramento right now.
The Pen. The Whiteout. The White House.
Perez took office Jan. 6, 2025. The fire started the next morning. Since then she has fought secret utility legislation, investigated State Farm’s violations of existing law, introduced accountability measures the insurance industry blocked for years, and represented a community absorbing the worst loss it has ever known—all before completing her second year in office. She does it inside a Capitol where utilities hold financial leverage over the legislators who regulate them.
Gavin Newsom calls his political brand Forward. He has built his governorship, his national profile, and his argument to the country around that word. Forward assumes momentum. It assumes progress. It assumes the people in its path are moving with it.
The survivors in Altadena are still rebuilding. Ratepayers across inland California still pay bills that rise. The man who controls accountability for those bills reaches for a bigger pen in a bigger house. Newsom holds the whiteout. He decides what gets erased from the record of who caused this harm and what survivors can recover. That is a leadership story. And the country he wants to lead deserves to read it before he gets there.
Disclosure: Chris Holden leads LA Fire Justice, which sponsors programming on KBLA Talk 1580. His interview with Tavis Smiley, conducted on that platform, was identified on air as editorial content independent of that relationship.
