Wildfire mitigation bill could change prevention and liability in Arizona

PHOENIX (AZFamily) — A bill is making its way through the Arizona House and could change how wildfires are prevented in state.

House Bill 2201 is a wildfire mitigation bill that would require the government, utility companies, fire agencies and others to have wildfire prevention plans in place. According to Arizona Public Service President Ted Geisler, there is currently no prevention plan in Arizona.

“We don’t want to wait for devastation to reach our communities, we want to get ahead of that,” Geisler said. “If we can focus on setting these standards, we can ensure protecting the communities. We are ensuring reliability, and we’re keeping it affordable for customers because prevention is a lower cost situation than having to rebuild after a fire.”

The wildfire mitigation plans would include mandatory compliance, vegetation management, power line safety, coordination with fire agencies, public outreach, clarification of legal liability and added restrictions on legal claims.

There’s a section of the bill that would keep utility companies from being held liable if they cause a wildfire. Insurance company lobbyist Marc Osborn said this bill could put a lot of Arizonans in trouble if catastrophe occurs.

“What they’ve basically done in the bill is they looked at all the lawsuits in utilities across the country, figured out what causes of action folks have used to recover, and either made it nearly impossible to use those causes of action or outright eliminate them,” Osborn said. “The big thing in the Eaton Fire was did they turn off their lines in time not to create a fire? They have a provision in the bill that says it’s at the sole discretion of the utility of when to de-energize their lines. What that does is that you cannot assign any fault to the utility company if they fail to de-energize their lines.”

But Gesiler argued that wouldn’t be the case at all.

“It would increase reliability for utilities to be filing robust plans with the state on a regular basis, ensuring that there’s alignment on what preventative measures look like and then requiring utility companies to be accountable for meeting those preventable measures on a regular basis,” Geisler said.

The bill has support from the Professional Fire Fighters of Arizona, which provides assistance for Arizona firefighters. President Dan Freiberg said due to continual funding issues and ripe wildfire conditions, it’s only a matter of time a catastrophe occurs unless a plan is in place.

“For many years at the capitol, we’ve been going down there and beating the drum and saying we have a massive fire district funding problem, and a problem becomes a crisis, and a crisis becomes a catastrophe,” Freiberg said. “If we’re not able to fund fire districts and we’re not able to put enough firefighters in place and have enough fire stations with good working equipment, then the next best thing is to try and prevent the fire from ever happening.”

The bill has already passed through a House Committee. It will now go through the necessary steps to be finalized before it’s debated on the House floor.

See a spelling or grammatical error in our story? Please click here to report it.

Do you have a photo or video of a breaking news story? Send it to us here with a brief description.

Copyright 2025 KTVK/KPHO. All rights reserved.