state regulator

Spectrum owner Charter Communications is nearing the finish line in its long-awaited $34.5-billion purchase of Cox Enterprises to form the nation’s largest internet and cable television company.

California’s Public Utilities Commission is scheduled to vote next week to approve the merger that would bolster Southern California’s dominant provider with more than 5 million customers. Securing the approval of California regulators — the deal’s final hurdle — has been a slog as federal officials gave Charter their consent months ago.

Customers of privately held Cox, the Atlanta-based company that serves Rancho Palos Verdes, Rolling Hills Estates, Las Vegas and large parts of Orange and San Diego counties, would be switched to Spectrum service. Charter is the industry leader, providing Spectrum internet, phone and cable TV packages for Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties.

It’s been more than a year since the companies unveiled their proposed union, and they hope to combine operations this month. But flaps have flared up in the last lap.

Public interest groups have argued that the PUC’s proposed settlement with Charter doesn’t go far enough to ensure long-term affordable internet for low-income residents or accommodations for customers reeling from natural disasters such as last year’s Eaton and Palisades fires.

In addition, advocates have asked utilities commissioners to demand that Charter commit to fostering workplace diversity, equity and inclusion among its proposed 9,000-member workforce in California. Such programs have been under siege since President Trump returned to the White House.

“State regulators like the CPUC have an important role to play — they have a voice and leverage if they choose to use it,” said Jason Solomon, director of the National Institute for Workers’ Rights, a Bay Area group that is lobbying for Charter to renew its commitment to a diverse workplace.

“It’s important that California stand up for its own laws, policies and values,” Solomon said.

A Spectrum truck in New York City.

(Star Max/IPx)

The five-member commission is set to vote on the Charter-Cox merger Thursday. The panel will consider two competing proposals; both would allow the merger to go through with various conditions.

Charter years ago pledged to create a diverse workplace but scaled back its public statements amid Trump’s vocal demands that companies dump DEI programs. Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, also has championed eliminating diversity programs, saying they are discriminatory.

The FCC in February approved Charter’s proposed purchase of Cox’s residential cable, commercial fiber, cloud and information technology businesses. To win Carr’s approval, Charter agreed to “new safeguards to protect against DEI discrimination,” according to the FCC.

Charter is in a bind. It disavowed diversity efforts to win the FCC’s blessing but now is facing calls in California to embrace such commitments.

“In a state as diverse as California we should protect diversity in the workplace,” said Jessica J. González, co-chief executive of advocacy group Free Press. “We have a responsibility to stand up to what’s been going on in the federal government, and in the Trump administration, to force companies to roll back their policies.”

In its public filings, Charters said it would reach out to diverse suppliers and work with business groups, including the Women’s Business Development Council, the California LGBTQ Chamber of Commerce, the African American Chamber, the California Hispanic Chamber and the Cal Asian Chamber.

“This transaction will be good for consumers, community leaders, and businesses across California as it will provide them with lower prices, greater value, better service, and support from Spectrum’s 100% U.S.-based employees,” the Stamford, Conn. company said in a statement.

Concerns heightened among activists after one of the two proposed settlements, hashed out between Charter and Commissioner Matthew Baker, the commission’s Public Advocates Office and the California Emerging Technology Fund, failed to include diversity efforts.

Advocates viewed Baker’s proposal as weaker on broadband access provisions too, including commitments to provide low-cost internet for disadvantaged residents and communities that lack service.

“For us, it’s really about making sure everyone in Cox’s and Charter’s service territory benefits from this transaction,” said Paul Goodman, counsel for the Berkeley-based Center for Accessible Technology.

“We want to make sure that communities that have been historically overlooked get the same benefits from the transaction as everyone else,” Goodman said.

For example, a coalition of advocacy groups is seeking to prevent Spectrum from tacking on equipment charges for customers on low-income plans.

Commissioners will be asked to select from Baker’s draft decision or last month’s proposal from the agency’s administrative law judge, Jamie Ormond. Advocates are urging the panel to adopt Ormond’s version because it contains more compliance conditions, including mechanisms to foster an inclusive workplace.

Commissioners have “a statutory duty” under the state’s utilities code “to deny the transaction outright rather than approve a weaker deal,” the advocates argued in a recent filing.

Solomon’s group is pushing for an “organizational infrastructure for equal opportunity compliance,” including reporting compensation and promotion data for Charter’s California workforce and pay equity audits.

The state has required diversity measures before — despite such initiatives being out of favor in Washington. In January, the commission approved Verizon Communications’ purchase of Frontier Communications.

In that proceeding, Verizon pledged to “further California’s public policy goals of diverse supply chains and workforces, including a $10 million partnership with the California State University system,” the PUC said.

Under both Ormond’s and Baker’s proposals, Charter would be required to offer affordable broadband to low-income residents, including California LifeLine service tiers. It would have to sell stand-alone broadband plans for five years, although advocates would like to see that extended to 10 years.

The company has agreed to spend at least $275 million to upgrade its California network and complete its 1-gigabit service capability across its legacy service areas within three years.

Charter also agreed to invest at least $30 million in customer outreach initiatives, such as digital literacy training and device access for low-income communities. The company also is being asked to provide free broadband and Wi-Fi service for about 50 eligible institutions, including schools, libraries and community centers for several years.

Charter was criticized after the January 2025 fires for charging fees for equipment that burned, said Natalie Gonzalez, director of Digital Equity Los Angeles, one of the advocacy groups that is asking for Charter to “improve disaster response and customer service standards … during life’s most challenging moments.”

Charter pushed back on that contention, saying it helped residents in the burn areas.

“We opened all our wifi hot spots to anyone (non Spectrum customers) and were deeply involved in the restoration efforts,” the company said in its documents.

The advocates, including Digital Equity LA and the California Alliance for Digital Equity, compiled evidence to help commissioners determine whether the merger was in the public interest.

Should the deal go through, Cox subscribers will soon see changes. Charter plans to roll out its Spectrum products and fees to Cox customers next month.

Subscribers can opt for their existing pricing or switch to a Spectrum bundle that includes such apps as Disney+, Hulu, ESPN and Paramount+.

Charter has also said it would offer Cox subscribers a year of free service when they switch their cellphone carrier to Spectrum.

The Charter name will be dropped in one year and the combined company will become Cox, although consumer products will keep the Spectrum brand.

The switch is because the Cox family — descendants of an Ohio press baron who bought his first newspaper in 1898, began acquiring cable systems in 1962 — will become the firm’s largest shareholder group, with about 23% of the stock.

In a recent earnings call, Charter Chief Executive Chris Winfrey told investors the combined company would have nearly 37 million customers nationwide.

It expects to generate $67 billion a year in revenue and about $28 billion in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.

New surveillance footage and other evidence from Southern California Edison confirms that a century-old, idle transmission line that the utility failed to remove ignited last year’s deadly Eaton wildfire, lawyers for insurers said in a court filing.

Video obtained from a surveillance camera at Gerrish Swim & Tennis Club in Pasadena shows two bright flashes occurring in the location of the tower holding the idle line at 6:11 p.m. on Jan. 7, 2025.

The flashes correspond to the time that Edison recorded two faults, three seconds apart, on another transmission line more than five miles away, the lawyers said in the filing, citing new data provided by the utility.

Soon after the faults, residents nearby recorded videos of a fire burning at the base of the tower, which is known as M16T1.

“Southern California Edison has spent the last sixteen months attempting to forestall the inevitable legal consequences of razing a large swath of the communities of Altadena and Pasadena to the ground,” the lawyers wrote in the filing.

“The Eaton Fire could not have occurred if SCE had simply disassembled and removed Structure M16T1,” the lawyers added.

The lawyers filing the May 18 motion represent property insurers that paid tens of millions of dollars to residents who lost their homes. Their motion asks the judge to order a judgment in the insurers’ favor that would make Edison liable for the damage under inverse condemnation, a legal doctrine in the state constitution.

Courts have ruled that the doctrine requires private utilities such as Edison to pay for property they destroy, even if they haven’t been found to have acted negligently.

Kathleen Dunleavy, a spokeswoman for Edison, said the company did not learn about the existence of the swim club video until the lawyers submitted it in court with their filing.

“It’s very disappointing and inappropriate that this video was not produced in discovery,” she said. “We hope that video has been turned over to the appropriate authorities.”

Dunleavy said the company believes the lawyers’ motion “is wrong on the facts and the law.”

“We’ll respond more fully in our own court filing,” she said.

Attorneys for the insurers did not respond to requests for comment.

In a February 2025 letter to state regulators, Edison said it had detected a single fault on a line more than five miles away from Altadena about 6:11 p.m. on the night the fire ignited. It said the fault caused a brief surge of electricity on its four live transmission lines in Eaton Canyon.

The company said in the letter that it was looking into whether the power surge could have caused electricity to jump to the idle line that runs parallel to the live wires through a process called induction.

Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of Edison International, later said that a leading theory of the fire’s ignition was that the idle line became energized briefly through induction, sparking the fire.

At the same time, the company has not accepted blame for the fire, saying repeatedly that its own confidential investigation into the cause, as well as a separate inquiry by Los Angeles County and state fire officials, is continuing.

According to the court filing, evidence obtained by the lawyers shows that the company stopped using the transmission line in 1971 and designated it as “out-of-service.”

“The declaration of Out of Service shall only be used when the line … or piece of equipment is expected to remain permanently out of service,” Edison stated in an internal document known as a system operating bulletin, according to the filing.

Edison executives told The Times last year that they left the line in place because they believed it might be needed in the future.

“We have these inactive lines still available because there is a reasonable chance we’re going to use them in the future,” Shinjini Menon, Edison’s senior vice president of system planning and engineering, said then.

Dunleavy said Friday that the idle lines are kept in place for a variety of reasons, including to preserve the right of way Edison had obtained to construct them and to support future needs for more electricity as the state aims to meet its clean energy goals.

Last year, The Times reported that state regulators, knowing old electric lines posed hazards, proposed a rule in 2001 that would have forced Edison and other utilities to remove idle lines unless they could prove they would use them in the future.

Under pressure from Edison and the other companies, the rule was weakened to allow utilities to keep the unused lines in place until executives decided they were “permanently abandoned.”

In their May 18 filing, the lawyers said Edison executives had known about the risk of induction for more than 100 years. They cited a 1923 contract between Edison and Pacific Electric Railway Co. that said that “leakage of electricity or induction from or between” conductors was an inherent risk of operating multiple electrical circuits in proximity.

“That’s why SCE grounds idle lines and inspects them,” Dunleavy said of the risk.

Copies of Edison’s fault records from that night, its operating bulletin and thousands of other documents, including depositions, are sealed from public view under a protective order that Edison and lawyers for the victims asked the judge to approve last year.

The L.A. County district attorney is investigating whether Edison should be criminally prosecuted for its actions in the fire, the company said in an investor filing this year.

The fire killed at least 19 people and left thousands of families homeless.

A hearing on the lawyers’ motion is scheduled for Aug. 11 in L.A. County Superior Court.

Edison has offered to compensate victims of the fire who give up their right to sue the utility.

The company said last week that it had so far received more than 3,500 claims from about 10,000 people. It said it had extended nearly 1,900 offers to those people, totaling more than $650 million.

Many victims have refused the offers, saying they don’t fully cover their losses from the devastating blaze.

Edison has told its investors it expects to actually pay little or nothing for the fire because of a 2019 state law. The company anticipates that it will be reimbursed for its payments to victims by a $21-billion fund created by the law known as
Assembly Bill 1054.

The law shields utilities from the damages of fires sparked by their equipment as long as they follow certain requirements, including submitting a plan to state regulators for reducing the risk that their equipment sparks fires. Regulators review the plan and track whether the utilities are making progress in reducing the fire risk.

Since 2019, Edison has spent billions of dollars on making its lines safer, including by undergrounding them and installing insulated wires. Those costs continue to raise customer electric bills.

In the last 10 years, Edison’s rates increased by 101%, according to an April report by the public advocates office at the California Public Utilities Commission.

Despite the spending, Edison’s electric lines sparked more fires in 2024 than in 2019. The company blamed the increase on erratic weather that created more dried vegetation.