By Laurence Darmiento, LOS ANGELES TIMES
Gov. Gavin Newsom called Tuesday for a report that will study whether to limit the liabilities of California’s investor-owned utilities if they’re found to have caused wildfires – as well as to possibly establish a state-supported property insurance fund.
The executive order is more broadly intended to come up with ideas on how to reduce the risk and better share the cost of wildfires – as well as to shore up California’s insurance market and investor-owned utilities – following the devastation caused by the January Los Angeles blazes.
“There’s no Republican or Democratic thermometer – red and blue state alike, and countries around the world, are facing this climate-fueled insurance crisis. And California is taking action,” Newsom said in a statement accompanying his order.
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Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, a leading Los Angeles advocacy group, agreed with Newsom that it is important to consider some sort of public insurance option but was skeptical much would come of the effort.
“It’s just a question of whether anything’s going to get done, because he only has a year left in office,” he said.
Consumer Watchdog, he noted, worked on a bill that would have leveraged the state’s credit rating to assist in lowering the cost of reinsurance, which is bought by insurers to protect themselves from catastrophic claims. However, it never got off the ground.
