PG&E must pay $4 million fine for Camp Fire

SACRAMENTO — PG&E Corp. received its criminal sentence Thursday for igniting the deadliest wildfire in California history: a $4 million fine that the judge and prosecutor acknowledged may have been too small for the crimes committed.

Two days after the utility’s chief executive entered guilty pleas to 85 felony charges in connection with the 2018 Camp fire, a Butte County Superior Court judge levied the maximum penalty allowed by state law: $3.5 million in fines and penalties, plus $500,000 in additional fees to cover prosecutors’ investigative costs.

Judge Michael Deems, speaking to a nearly empty Chico courtroom, expressed some frustration that “PG&E cannot be sent to prison” and said a person who committed the same crime would be facing 90 years in prison.

Mike Ramsey, the Butte County district attorney, noted that Camp fire victims had been demanding prison terms for PG&E’s top executives.

But under California law, those executives couldn’t be prosecuted for behavior about which they lacked direct knowledge. And he said it “would have been impossible” to prove criminal charges against any of the rank-and-file employees who failed — over the course of decades — to maintain the flawed transmission tower that sparked the Camp fire.

The fine, while the maximum allowed by law, is “too little for the enormity of the criminal behavior,” Ramsey told the judge before the sentence was announced. “But it is a start.”

The DA said he respects CEO Bill Johnson and his successor, incoming CEO Bill Smith, as honorable men with a “burning desire to change the culture of PG&E.”