Principles

FAIR California is a coalition of organizations representing workers, small businesses, environmental advocates, consumers, renters, affordability advocates, and older adults. We share a common demand for greater accountability from large, for-profit electric and gas utilities amid rapidly-rising energy bills that severely burden residents and small businesses throughout California.

In their efforts to secure more revenue from ratepayers, these utilities routinely present the public and the California Public Utilities Commission with a false choice between safer infrastructure and affordable rates. Ratepayers and residents deserve both. We can have both safety and affordability, if the PUC holds for-profit electric utility companies accountable, as defined in the following principles:

FAIR California Principles

We urge greater:

  • Accountability of investor-owned utilities to ratepayers for their expenditures;
  • Restraint in increases of utility bills on struggling residents and businesses;
  • Responsibility for the ways in which for-profit utilities’ self-serving decisions exacerbate the affordability crisis experienced by our community, including:
    • Obstructing housing construction and other essential infrastructure through the delayed provision of service;
    • Driving up the cost of fire insurance, and in some cases, making fire insurance inaccessible altogether;
    • Increasing utility bills at a pace well in excess of the inflation rate; and
  • Consuming public expenditures for emergency response to wildfires and power shut-offs resulting from failed distribution infrastructure;
  • Focus of expenditures on safety, service, environmental sustainability, and systemwide resilience to deliver return to ratepayers;
  • Transparency about the source of funding used for corporate advertising, communications, advocacy, and other such expenditures;
  • Competition among utilities to reduce costs and improve customer service, including the expansion of community choice aggregation in California;
  • Competition and transparency in bidding and contracting processes of capital projects to accelerate and reduce the cost of undergrounding and other critical safety projects;
  • Assurance that PG&E will be held to its commitment to make whole those families who lost their homes and livelihoods in wildfires resulting from PG&E’s recklessness.