Food assistance: disasters: utilities.

Assembly Member Celeste Rodriguez's legislation establishes a data sharing framework between California utilities and social services agencies to enhance emergency food assistance delivery during disasters. The measure requires electrical, gas, and water corporations to provide aggregated customer outage data by ZIP code to the State Department of Social Services for coordinating federal nutrition programs like the Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Under the bill's provisions, the Public Utilities Commission must create memoranda of understanding with regulated utilities to facilitate this data exchange, while local publicly owned utilities must establish similar agreements through their governing boards. The shared information excludes personally identifiable details and can only be used for emergency food assistance purposes. Each utility must designate a dedicated liaison to coordinate with the Department of Social Services.

The Department of Social Services will incorporate this utility data to automate and expedite the distribution of federal nutrition benefits, including D-SNAP and the Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer for Children program (SUN Bucks). The department must submit a report to the Legislature by December 31, 2026, examining additional ways to maximize federal food assistance during declared emergencies and identifying any necessary oversight measures. The reporting requirement sunsets on January 1, 2030.