California passed a law that all political fliers must say who paid for them.

You know there are a lot of entities that want to get around that.

A glossy brochure arrived today that you could only agree with its basic premise: that we need to put more money into the Wildfire Fund that was established six years ago to help individuals and communities recover because the fires are only getting worse.

It didn’t give any more information than that. No mention of a bill in the legislature and what it might actually say. Scary pictures and hunky linemen looking serious.

“Paid for by Sustainable Wildfire Fund California.”

The who. Wait. Someone paid millions of dollars at the very minimum to tell us to pressure a particular state senator to protect us from fires. Money that could have been spent towards exactly that goal, but obviously that was not their actual priority.

So I Googled to see just who these guys were.

San Diego Gas & Electric.

Southern California Edison.

And the ever infamous Pacific Gas & Electric, PG&E, held to be directly responsible for the worst of the fires up north that killed so many people after siphoning money to the then-CEO. Rate increases for them had been okayed by the state to replace equipment including wildland towers that were about 100 years old: they did not do that but the CEO’s enormous bonus magically matched the numbers that that rate increase had produced.

And so now we have the Wildfire Fund that they have to help pay into so that they have an economic incentive to do the maintenance jobs they were supposed to be doing all along. Upgraded lines, fewer fires.

My sister and brother-in-law and nephew spent four hours fleeing the Pacific Palisades fire bearing down on them with roads closed and bulldozers pushing abandoned cars out of the way for people like them who stayed in theirs, embers flying and the neighborhood blazing to ashes. The utility towers up the hill were believed to have helped spark that blaze.

Someone clearly doesn’t want to pay their share of their costs anymore. It’s not hard to guess that they want the taxpayers to.

We’re not the ones trying to stiff the hunky linemen. Nor the communities.