Correcting the most recent LA Times story

The Los Angeles Times’ most recent piece is another disappointing example of bias in its reporting. Starting with an inaccurate headline, the article cherry-picks statistics to support a seemingly predetermined premise without providing necessary information to lend much-needed context to the issue. Here are the facts:

• The General Rate Case process, which is the funding mechanism for investor-owned utilities in California (including much of SCE’s infrastructure work), covers a span of four years. That means utilities must forecast the work needed to provide safe and reliable service they will need to do four years ahead. Regulators understand — as we hope our customers do — that circumstances change, and a utility might determine other projects are a higher safety priority.
• California investor-owned utilities must routinely change priorities and spend on projects other than initially planned. What this means is that the utility is still investing the money customers contributed, contrary to what the Times has implied.
• Many of the statistics listed in the article are misleading as they do not provide context for a full understanding of the situation. For example, much of the work that was not completed during that period was outside of high fire risk areas (HFRA) and related to building new transmission facilities or upgrading existing ones. Contrary to the implications in the article, as shown in the graphs below, SCE prudently and adequately spent authorized funding on wildfire mitigation-related inspections, maintenance and repairs on its transmission infrastructure in the years leading up to the January 2025 events.

• The story omits an important fact we provided to the reporter — inspections in HFRA in 2025 have been on par with the previous few years:

It is unfortunate that the Los Angeles Times continues with its one-sided reporting. This is a disservice to its readers at a time when accuracy and true journalism are needed the most.