Oregon lawmakers are considering a legislative package that would provide some protection to utility companies whose equipment sparks wildfires.

House Bill 3917, introduced Tuesday by Rep. Pam Marsh, D-Ashland, would create a fund to help people who lose homes or businesses to utility-caused wildfires — as long as they agree not to sue utility companies for that damage.

Marsh is also sponsoring a complementary bill, House Bill 3666, which would allow the Oregon Public Utility Commission to grant a safety certificate to utilities it deems are “acting reasonably with regard to wildfire safety practices.”

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The wildfire assistance fund created by HB 3917 would be seeded by utility companies that are regulated by the state’s Public Utility Commission, including Pacific Power and Portland General Electric. Half of their their seed contribution could come from ratepayer dollars, and the other half would come from the share of rates designated for profits.

Utilities would contribute more to the fund if their equipment sparked a wildfire. They’d be allowed to increase customer rates to cover these costs. If an investigator determined the company acted negligently, then that money could not come from customers’ rates.

An independent administrator could also ask the Legislature to contribute additional money through the state’s all-purpose General Fund.

No public comments had been submitted in response to HB 3917 in the hours right after the wildfire assistance fund was proposed on Tuesday, but many attorneys who have represented wildfire victims in cases against utility companies have taken issue with portions of its companion bill.

They say HB 3666 gives trillion-dollar private companies like Berkshire Hathaway, which owns PacifiCorp, immunity against lawsuits, because these companies could argue that they did what they reasonably could to prevent their equipment from starting a fire if they get a safety certificate from the Oregon Public Utility Commission.

“[Berkshire Hathaway] wants Oregonians to give it a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card, no matter how badly it acts” said Cody Berne, an attorney who has represented Oregon wildfire survivors in a class-action lawsuit against PacifiCorp.

Berkshire Hathaway has supported similar legislation in other states where it owns utility companies, including in California, Wyoming and Idaho. Oregon’s HB 3666 is the only bill that would offer utilities a certificate showing it they are “acting reasonably” by creating and implementing a wildfire safety plan.

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In California, for instance, a wildfire safety certificate is only used to determine whether utility can pass on costs to ratepayers and whether they can access a wildfire relief fund.

Marsh, whose district lost upwards of 2,500 homes to the 2020 Labor Day weekend fires, doesn’t see HB 3666 as an immunity bill. Rather, it ensures utilities are following their own wildfire mitigation plans.

“I asked legislative counsel, which drafted the bill, for very specific answers to a couple of questions, like, ‘Does this bill give immunity to utilities that hold a safety certification?’” Marsh said. “And the answer was, ‘No.’”

Still, Marsh recognizes these bills provide utility companies a level of financial protection. Marsh’s district is mostly served by Pacific Power, a subsidiary of PacifiCorp.

“We know that utilities are operating in a time of tremendous risk, and we really don’t want our utilities to go bankrupt,” Marsh said.

Investor owned utility companies, like PacifiCorp and Portland General Electric, support this two-bill legislative package.

“What we’re trying to do is mitigate the risk of catastrophic wildfires from starting in the first place by increasing the standards, clarifying the standards, and holding utilities more accountable to those standards in the hopes of mitigating additional wildfire risk,” Kristen Sheeran, PGE vice president for policy and resource planning, said.

In financial filings, PacifiCorp executives have estimated that the 2020 and 2022 wildfires cost the company nearly $2.7 billion. Berkshire Hathaway has estimated that its utilities face at least $8 billion in claims across all wildfire lawsuits filed in Oregon and California.

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In California, utility customers largely footed those costs through ratepayer increases. Between 2019 and 2023, California’s public utility commission allowed the state’s three largest utilities to collect $27 billion in wildfire prevention and insurance costs from ratepayers, according to a legislative report.

Some nonprofit cooperatives that provide electricity to rural areas support Marsh’s wildfire certification bill, HB 3666. These organizations formed in Oregon in the 1920s and ‘30s to serve mountainous, sparsely populated areas that investor-owned utilities weren’t interested in.

Keith Brooks, general manager at the Douglas Electric Cooperative serving the Douglas County area, said a lawsuit similar to the ones PacifiCorp has faced would drive his organization into the ground.

“They’ll just have to tell us who to turn the keys over to the cooperative, which is really scary for us, because this is a community-owned power company,” Brooks said. “Truthfully, I don’t think anybody’s going to want the keys.”

Brooks said the Douglas Electric Cooperative has tripled its spending on vegetation management over the last few years to ensure trees don’t fall on power lines. The co-op also buries all new power lines. Still, these actions alone won’t protect the nonprofit if its equipment sparks a fire. The likelihood of that increases each year, as climate change makes weather in this Southern Oregon community hotter and drier.

Brooks wants the state utility commission to tell him if his wildfire mitigation plan is enough, and what to do if it isn’t, because wildfire prevention work isn’t cheap.

“I hear every day people talk about choices that they’re making between food or medicine, and electricity. Their bill is already going up because of wildfire mitigation,” Brooks said. “I need every dollar to count.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/03/11/oregon-wildfire-bills-offer-some-financial-protections-to-utility-companies/