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

Assembly Member Muratsuchi's proposal to amend California's Emergency Services Act would explicitly recognize landslides as conditions warranting state and local emergency declarations, adding them to the existing list of qualifying events like floods, fires, and earthquakes.

The amendment modifies Section 8558 of the Government Code, which defines three degrees of emergency conditions. Under the proposed changes, both state and local officials could declare emergencies in response to landslides when conditions exceed the response capabilities of individual jurisdictions. For state emergencies, this applies when multiple counties require mutual aid, while local emergencies cover situations beyond a single political subdivision's resources.

The legislation maintains current provisions regarding utility companies during emergency declarations. Local emergency proclamations stemming from landslide-related deenergization events would not trigger additional obligations for electric utilities under Public Utilities Commission Decision 19-07-015, nor would they alter established cost-recovery mechanisms for utilities' deenergization-related expenses.