Food assistance: disasters: utilities.

Assembly Member Celeste Rodriguez's legislation establishes new data sharing protocols between California utilities and the State Department of Social Services to expedite food assistance during disasters. The measure requires electrical, gas, and water corporations, along with local publicly owned electric utilities, to provide aggregated customer outage data to help maximize federal nutrition assistance programs, including the Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (D-SNAP) and automated mass replacement of SNAP benefits.

Under the proposal, utilities must designate dedicated points of contact and enter into data sharing agreements with the Department of Social Services. The Public Utilities Commission will oversee these agreements, which must limit shared information to aggregated outage data without personal identifiers and restrict its use solely to food assistance purposes. The commission will also provide technical support to the department for implementing the new requirements.

The Department of Social Services must maintain utility liaisons and leverage the provided data to optimize federal nutrition assistance during emergencies. The department will evaluate the program's effectiveness through a report to the Legislature by December 2026, examining additional opportunities to maximize federal aid during disasters and identifying any needed oversight measures. While the bill creates new obligations for utilities and local agencies, it specifies that they may cover associated costs through existing fee authority rather than state reimbursement.