Rural electric cooperatives urge state benchmarks, funding for wildfire mitigation; trial lawyers press accountability

Representatives of Oregon’s electric cooperatives told the House Judiciary Committee that rising wildfire risk and mitigation costs require clear state benchmarks and a conversation about funding, while lawyers for fire victims urged preserving accountability and said a commission or compensation fund should be considered later.

Tucker Billman, director of government relations for the Oregon Rural Electric Cooperative Association (ORECA), told the committee that Oregon’s 18 not-for-profit electric cooperatives serve about 10% of the state’s electricity customers — roughly 500,000 Oregonians — mostly in rural, higher-fire-risk territory. Billman said co-ops do not have shareholders, operate at cost, and that the cost of wildfire mitigation is passed to members. He told the committee cooperatives need state guidance on when wildfire mitigation is “sufficient” so they can balance member rates with safety investments.

Brad Wilson, president and CEO of Central Electric Cooperative (CEC), described CEC’s service area, infrastructure and mitigation work: CEC serves about 31,000 members across 5,300 square miles and maintains over 4,000 miles of transmission and distribution lines that cross national forests and high-risk fire areas. He said cooperatives have board-approved wildfire mitigation plans filed with the Oregon Public Utility Commission (OPUC) and that CEC has increased vegetation-management spending — nearly tripling that spending over five years — and added roughly $700,000 to its budget last year specifically for vegetation management. Wilson described investments in pole replacements, targeted undergrounding where feasible, new monitoring technologies, revised operational practices during fire season, and community outreach and coordination with local emergency managers.

Both witnesses told the committee that cooperatives are open to additional oversight but said they need a clear benchmark from the state to know when they have “done enough” and to avoid overburdening members with rising costs.

Representatives of the Oregon Trial Lawyers Association, including John Devlin (co-chair of the legislative committee) and Cody Byrne, told the committee they support prospective safety direction but warned that the proposed certification model in HB 3666 could be misunderstood to limit litigation or otherwise shift the financial burden of corporate misconduct onto fire victims or ratepayers. Devlin explained the difference between negligence and gross negligence and said Oregon does not have California-style strict liability for utility-caused fires; Byrne urged accountability and proposed a Blue Ribbon Commission to take a holistic look at wildfire mitigation, liability and compensation. Byrne said a compensation fund could be appropriate in the future but called it premature until investor-owned utilities make victims whole for prior harms.

Committee members asked about whether the proposed certification would create a “checkbox” exercise for oversight, the capacity of the OPUC to audit plans, and whether a certification could later be used as a partial defense in litigation. Both co-op witnesses and the trial lawyers agreed that oversight capacity and clarity about the effect of a certificate in court are important questions for the legislature to resolve.

Chair Cropp said committee staff will prepare a memo summarizing approaches other states have adopted and are considering. The committee closed the informational hearing with a plan to circulate that memo to members.

No formal committee votes were taken during the informational hearing.