State of emergency and local emergency: landslides and climate change.

Assembly Member Muratsuchi, with Senator Allen as principal coauthor, reconfigures California’s emergency framework by expressly including deenergization events among the conditions that can constitute a local emergency, while also maintaining landslide as a basis for a state emergency. The measure preserves the three-category structure of emergencies and keeps Governor and local authorities' overarching powers intact, while aligning local capability to respond to energy-disruption scenarios with the broader hazard set.

The bill expands the local-emergency trigger to explicitly add deenergization events alongside landslide, cyberterrorism, sudden energy shortages, electromagnetic pulse events, plant or animal infestations, and other conditions requiring extraordinary measures beyond a single jurisdiction’s resources. It also clarifies that a local emergency proclaimed because of a deenergization event does not trigger electric-utility obligations under the state’s energy-regulation framework, nor does it alter the utilities’ PUC-approved cost-recovery mechanisms for deenergization-related costs.

Implementation and policy context considerations include no new appropriations attached to the measure, with fiscal review required by the legislative process but no dedicated funding in the bill itself. The changes affect local governments and emergency-management operations by broadening the basis for local declarations and clarifying the interaction with energy-utility regulation and cost recovery. Ambiguities identified in the bill’s text relate to defining a “deenergization event” and how local authorities should prioritize multiple concurrent hazards, as well as how the expanded triggers interact with mutual-aid protocols and existing energy-disruption policies.