What Public Utilities Code section 8386 requires
Public Utilities Code section 8386 puts one duty on each electrical corporation: operate its lines so as to minimize catastrophic wildfire risk. It then requires a wildfire mitigation plan containing 23 listed items. Two reach contractors, at paragraphs (16) and (22)(C). SB 254 moved that list from subdivision (c) to (d) on September 19, 2025.
"Plans for vegetation management." Four words, at paragraph (9). That is the whole of what Public Utilities Code section 8386 says about vegetation management. Three paragraphs above it, the deenergization protocol requirement carries four subparagraphs and three clauses beneath one of them. Anyone reading section 8386 to find the standard a crew will be held to is reading the wrong document. What the section does supply is the list of things a utility's plan must contain, and the name of the agency that fills in everything else.
The utility's duty, and the cost clause inside it
Subdivision (a) is one sentence. It is the whole of the obligation:
Each electrical corporation shall construct, maintain, and operate its electrical lines and equipment in a manner that will minimize the risk of catastrophic wildfire posed by those electrical lines and equipment, taking into account both the time required to implement the proposed mitigation and the amount of risk reduced for the cost and risk remaining.
The party bound is the electrical corporation. No contractor is named as a party bound anywhere in section 8386. Contractors appear twice, each time as something the utility must do about them: count them at paragraph (16), audit their inspections at paragraph (22)(C). Both reach a crew through the contract. Flow-down clauses are the mechanism.
The clause beginning "taking into account" is the one that decides program budgets. Minimizing risk is qualified by the time a mitigation takes and by the risk reduced per dollar against the risk left standing. A utility that drops a program because it buys too little reduction for the money is arguing inside the statute. That argument gets made in the plan, and paragraph (14) requires it to be made against a named alternative.
Twenty-three paragraphs make a plan
Subdivision (d) opens "The wildfire mitigation plan shall include all of the following:" and runs to paragraph (23). The California Public Utilities Commission counts them the same way. Resolution SPD-36, issued June 27, 2025, put it in a sentence: "Pub. Util. Code Section 8386(c) requires that an electrical corporation's WMP contain 23 elements." The subdivision letter has since moved. The count has not.
¶ | What the plan must contain |
(1) | An accounting of the responsibilities of persons responsible for executing the plan |
(2) | The objectives of the plan |
(3) | Preventive strategies and programs, including consideration of dynamic climate change risks |
(4) | The metrics used to measure and track implementation, and the assumptions behind them |
(5) | How previously identified metrics applied to previous plan performances informed this plan |
(6) | Protocols for disabling reclosers and deenergizing distribution, and their public safety impacts |
(7) | Procedures for notifying customers who may be affected by deenergization |
(8) | Circuits frequently deenergized, and measures to reduce future deenergization of them |
(9) | Plans for vegetation management |
(10) | Plans for inspections of the electrical corporation's electrical infrastructure |
(11) | Protocols for deenergizing transmission infrastructure |
(12) | A prioritized list of all wildfire risks and risk drivers, with cost-per-avoided-ignition estimates |
(13) | How the plan accounts for risk identified in the Risk Assessment Mitigation Phase filing |
(14) | Actions to achieve the highest level of safety, reliability and resiliency, priced against alternatives |
(15) | Where and how undergrounding was considered in the highest wildfire risk areas |
(16) | A showing of an adequately sized and trained workforce, counting contract employees |
(17) | Geographic areas of higher wildfire threat than the commission fire threat map shows |
(18) | A risk methodology consistent with the one other electrical corporations use |
(19) | Consistency with the disaster and emergency preparedness plan under section 768.6 |
(20) | A statement of how service will be restored after a wildfire |
(21) | Protocols for the customer support activities the commission has adopted |
(22) | Processes to monitor and audit implementation, correct deficiencies, and audit inspections |
(23) | Any other information that the office may require |
Paragraph (23) is the one that keeps the list open. The office is the Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety, defined that way in section 8385. What it may require is set out in its WMP Guidelines, which are revised between cycles. A plan requirement that appears nowhere in section 8386 is not for that reason outside it.
Paragraph (22)(C) is the one that names contractor inspections, and the AB 1054 guide works through what it obliges. Paragraphs (9) and (10) are the two a vegetation contractor's entire scope hangs from, and between them they run to thirteen words.
The paragraph that counts contractor headcount
Paragraph (16) is a staffing requirement that reaches past the utility's own payroll:
A showing that the electrical corporation has an adequately sized and trained workforce to promptly restore service after a major event, taking into account employees of other utilities pursuant to mutual aid agreements and employees of entities that have entered into contracts with the electrical corporation.
In a plan this becomes a table of job titles, minimum qualifications and headcounts, with separate columns for utility employees and contracted employees. LS Power Grid California's 2026-2028 plan has one at Table 9-9. It holds a single row: licensed herbicide applicators, minimum qualification a Qualified Applicator License or Certificate. Both utility columns read 0. Both contractor columns read TBD, and so does the total.
That single row is paragraph (16) working as intended. The plan says plainly that "the majority of vegetation management activities are anticipated to be accomplished by qualified contractors," so a count of the utility's own applicators answers nothing. The number that matters is the contractor's, and the utility has to put it in a public document. A prime asked mid-cycle for certified headcounts by title is feeding a number into a public filing. What an evaluator checks at prequalification is the same data a year earlier.
Cost per avoided ignition, and the alternative considered
Two paragraphs decide which programs survive a plan cycle. Paragraph (12)(D) requires, for each risk on the prioritized list:
An estimate of cost-per-avoided ignition for each risk, or an explanation on why such a value could not be assigned to a particular risk.
Paragraph (14) requires the utility to present cost-efficiency measures "for at least two reasonable mitigation alternatives for a given identified wildfire risk," calculated the way the Commission's most recent risk-based decisionmaking framework proceeding directs.
Read together, these say that every mitigation in the plan was compared with something else on a cost-per-ignition-avoided basis before it was committed to. Covered conductor competes with enhanced clearing. Enhanced clearing competes with undergrounding at paragraph (15). A unit price is one input to that comparison, and the comparison is published. What an enhanced vegetation management program covers and how unit prices behave both sit downstream of it.
Where the statute is silent is on the method. It names no formula for cost per avoided ignition and no threshold at which an alternative wins. The Commission's risk framework proceeding supplies the calculation and Energy Safety judges the result. Neither is in section 8386.
The plan is public before anyone decides on it
Subdivision (e) is short. For a bidder it is the most useful thing in the section:
The office shall post all wildfire mitigation plans submitted pursuant to this section on the office's internet website beginning July 1, 2021, for no less than two months before the office's decision regarding approval of the plan. The office shall accept comments on each plan from the public, other local and state agencies, and interested parties, and verify that the plan complies with all applicable rules, regulations, and standards, as appropriate.
Two months is a floor. In practice plans sit in the 2026-2028-Base-WMPs docket far longer, through revisions and errata. LS Power Grid California's Revision 0 is dated July 25, 2025.
The consequence for a bidder is direct. Target volumes, priority remediation intervals, quality assurance pass rates and contractor headcounts are all visible in the docket before a solicitation is drafted from them. Reading the version that governs the year being bid is its own problem, and the WMP cycle guide covers it.
The subdivision letters moved on September 19, 2025
SB 254, Statutes of 2025, Chapter 119, amended section 8386 at Section 53 of that chapter. It inserted a new subdivision (c) requiring a preliminary plan alongside the general rate case beginning January 1, 2027. Everything below that insertion shifted down one letter.
What it is | Cited before September 19, 2025 | Cited now |
The construct-and-maintain duty | 8386(a) | 8386(a) |
The submission cycle | 8386(b) | 8386(b) |
Preliminary plan with the rate case | no equivalent | 8386(c)(1) |
The 23 plan contents | 8386(c)(1) to (c)(23) | 8386(d)(1) to (d)(23) |
Public posting before decision | 8386(d) | 8386(e) |
The numbers inside the list did not change. Vegetation management was paragraph (9) before and is paragraph (9) now. So a citation to 8386(c)(9) is not wrong about the requirement, only about where it currently sits.
Documents carrying the old lettering are still in circulation and still operative. Resolution SPD-36 cites 8386(d) for the posting requirement, which is now 8386(e). LS Power Grid California's plan, submitted July 25, 2025, states that it "complies with Public Utilities Code § 8386(c)(21) regarding wildfire and PSPS-related support." Paragraph (21) still covers that. It is at (d)(21) today. Checking a contract citation against the current text costs a minute and settles the question.
Section 8386 does not reach every utility in California
Two limits are worth knowing before reading a plan.
The first is ownership. Section 8386 binds electrical corporations, which are investor-owned. A local publicly owned electric utility or an electrical cooperative works under section 8387 instead, on its own calendar and toward a different body. No Energy Safety approval decision stands behind that plan and no safety certification depends on it. Who enforces what traces the route.
The second is function. Independent transmission owners file under section 8386, and only part of it fits them. Paragraph (c)(2) is one sentence: "Paragraph (1) does not apply to independent transmission owners." That exempts them from the preliminary plan tied to a general rate case. The wider carve-out comes from Energy Safety's Guidelines.
LS Power Grid California's plan records that provisions "addressing communications with customers and protocols for disconnecting service to customers, do not apply to an ITO such as LSPGC." For what it still owes, the plan points to Table 3 of Section V of the 2026-2028 WMP Technical Guidelines. Paragraph (8), on frequently deenergized circuits, is one of the things it still owes.
Where this lands on a contract
Section 8386 never mentions a purchase order. Three of its requirements end up inside one anyway.
Paragraph (16) turns into a request for certified headcounts by title. The numbers a prime reports go into a public filing, so they have to match the certificates on file.
Paragraph (22)(C) turns into recordkeeping and quality clauses. What an Energy Safety audit examines is the test those records eventually face.
Paragraphs (12)(D) and (14) turn into pressure on unit price, because a program that cannot show a defensible cost per avoided ignition against its alternative is a program that shrinks at the next filing.
Everything a crew is actually held to comes from somewhere else: clearance from General Order 95 Rule 35 and Public Resources Code section 4293, inspection cycles from General Order 165, labor standards from the Department of Industrial Relations. Section 8386 is the document that decides how much of that work gets bought.
Further reading
How California utility Wildfire Mitigation Plans work under AB 1054: Why the plan exists, and the two agencies that approve it and pay for it.
The three-year WMP cycle and what changes between filings: When the plan is filed, and which version of it governs a scope of work.
What an Energy Safety vegetation audit examines: What happens after the plan is approved and the commitments come due.
Frequently asked questions
Does section 8386 tell a crew what clearance to achieve?
No. The whole of what section 8386 says about vegetation management is paragraph (d)(9), four words long: 'Plans for vegetation management.' Clearance distances are set elsewhere, in General Order 95 Rule 35 and Public Resources Code section 4293. Section 8386 governs what the utility must write down and commit to, not what a saw cuts.
Why do current documents cite section 8386(c) for the contents of a plan?
Because they were written before September 19, 2025. SB 254 inserted a new subdivision (c) on preliminary plans and pushed the 23-item contents list down to subdivision (d). CPUC Resolution SPD-36, issued June 27, 2025, states that 'Pub. Util. Code Section 8386(c) requires that an electrical corporation's WMP contain 23 elements.' That sentence was accurate when written and the paragraph numbers inside the list did not change.
Does section 8386 apply to a municipal utility?
No. Section 8386 binds electrical corporations, which are investor-owned. A local publicly owned electric utility or an electrical cooperative prepares its plan under section 8387, which routes the plan to the California Wildfire Safety Advisory Board rather than to Energy Safety. No Energy Safety approval decision stands behind it.
Can a contractor read a utility's plan before the solicitation goes out?
Yes. Section 8386(e) requires Energy Safety to post every plan on its website for no less than two months before it decides whether to approve it. LS Power Grid California's 2026-2028 plan, Revision 0, is dated July 25, 2025 and sits in the 2026-2028-Base-WMPs docket. The commitments a scope of work will be built from are public before the scope of work exists.
If the statute lists 23 items, why do the WMP Guidelines ask for far more?
Paragraph (d)(23) is 'Any other information that the office may require.' That paragraph is what lets the Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety expand a plan's contents through its WMP Guidelines without a change to the statute. A plan requirement that appears nowhere in section 8386 is not for that reason outside it.
