Monday, April 13, 2026

Guest Opinion | Chris Holden: I Wrote the Law That Was Supposed to Protect Altadena. The CPUC Broke It.

Chris Holden

I grew up in Pasadena. I raised my family here. For more than 36 years I served this community, on the City Council, as Mayor, and in the State Assembly. I know the streets of Altadena. I know the families who lived on them.

On January 7, those streets burned. 19 people died. More than 9,000 structures were destroyed. The cause was a 102-year-old Southern California Edison transmission line, damaged in the 1971 Sylmar earthquake and abandoned by Edison ever since, left standing above a canyon full of dry brush. California’s regulators had the power to address it. They chose not to.

I know this because I wrote the law that gave them the tools to do something about it.

In 2019, I authored Assembly Bill 1054. At the time, California’s largest utility, PG&E, had filed for bankruptcy after its equipment caused a series of catastrophic wildfires, including the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people. With PG&E in bankruptcy, credit agencies were warning that Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric could follow. Without action, Californians faced the prospect of a destabilized electricity system, potentially crushing rate increases, and a cratering economy.

AB 1054 was designed to solve that crisis, and to do more. It created a $21 billion wildfire fund to ensure the utilities’ fire victims received compensation. It established a safety certification process requiring utilities to earn an annual clean bill of health before accessing those funds. It called for executive pay to be tied to safety performance. It was structured so that every dollar that the utilities said they wanted to invest in safety infrastructure would actually be spent on prevention.

When I saw that Edison reported a $4.5 billion profit in 2025, the same year its 102-year-old equipment sparked the Eaton Fire, it made me sick. That’s a 200% increase over the prior year. It was then that I fully felt the weight of what had gone wrong. In the same year that the company he runs burned down Altadena, Pedro Pizarro, the company’s CEO, took home $16.6 million.

AB 1054 was designed to tie profit to safety. Instead the CPUC handed Edison guaranteed hefty profits with no accountability for safety attached.

The tool was sound. The CPUC’s enforcement was not.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), five commissioners appointed by the Governor, has had six years to use what AB 1054 gave them. What they have done instead is protect utility profits, approve rate increase after rate increase, and rubber-stamp safety certifications that meant nothing.

Here is what that looks like in practice. Edison’s own records, reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, showed that towers near the Eaton Fire ignition point had 94 open work orders as of December 31. Nearly three dozen of those work orders carried ignition risk. Some had been sitting unresolved for years. The state’s Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety (OEIS) issued Edison a clean safety certificate anyway — less than a month before the fire broke out. The CPUC then approved Edison’s wildfire mitigation plan for the next three years, acknowledging the backlog included work orders on Edison’s riskiest circuits, and did nothing meaningful about it.

That is not enforcement. That is complicity.

Meanwhile, the same CPUC voted 4 to 1 just this past December to keep utility profit margins near 10%, nearly double what consumer experts say is fair. Edison’s electric rates have risen more than 40% in three years. More than 830,000 customers are behind on their bills. California now has the second-highest electricity rates in the nation.

Only Commissioner Darcie Houck had the courage to vote no. Joy Chen, executive director of the Eaton Fire Survivors Network, put it best when she explained that the predictable outcome of protecting shareholders from the consequences of their own negligence is not theoretical. It is observable — more catastrophic fires.

AB 1054 was designed to make the government’s guarantee of Investor Owned Utility profits contingent on the genuine reduction of wildfire risk. The CPUC turned it into the opposite, a mechanism that rewards utilities for promising to spend on infrastructure regardless of whether that spending makes anyone safer or even actually spends that money. The law gave the commission the power to act. They have chosen not to.

And the consequences fall almost entirely on everyone but Edison. If the company is found liable for the Eaton Fire, with damages estimated in the tens of billions, its maximum financial exposure under state law is capped at $4 billion.

Edison wins. Their executives make millions. Californians suffer.

I wrote AB 1054 to protect people, not profits. The CPUC must be reformed. Its enforcement powers must be strengthened, the safety certifications made genuinely rigorous, and the toothless “may” language around executive accountability changed to “shall.” When a utility causes a catastrophic wildfire that kills people, its executives should face real financial consequences, not a nominal bonus trim offset by soaring stock awards.

The people of Altadena are still living in the ash of what failed them. They rebuild each day not knowing whether the law, my law, will ever truly hold accountable the company that took everything from them. They deserve better than a regulator that looks the other way. So does every Californian paying an electric bill to a company that burned their neighbor’s home and walked away with a record profit.

I am not walking away. Not from this community, and not from this fight. I’m asking the CPUC not to either.

Chris Holden is CEO of LA Fire Justice, former California Assemblymember for the 41st District, former Mayor of Pasadena, and the author of AB 1054.