Gavin Newsom speaks at a campaign stop in San Diego, Calif., November 2, 2018. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

California governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, has accepted large donations from Pacific Gas & Electric Co., a utility company he now excoriates for “greed” and “mismanagement.”

PG&E has faced widespread criticism for implementing blackouts for millions of customers to avoid sparking wildfires in the midst of California’s dry and windy fall weather.


“I have a message for PG&E,” Newsom wrote on Twitter on Friday. “Your years and years of greed. Years and years of mismanagement. Years and years of putting shareholders over people. Are OVER.”

Newsom and allies accepted $208,400 from the utility during his 2018 gubernatorial campaign, according to local affiliate ABC10. Of that total, $150,000 went to a political spending group called “Citizens Supporting Gavin Newsom for Governor 2018,” while the rest went to directly to Newsom’s campaign.

PG&E filed for bankruptcy in January 2019. Faulty PG&E electricity equipment has been blamed for sparking several wildfires in the past decade.


California has consistently shut down proposals to clear dead trees from forests and to trim trees near power lines state wide, creating conditions for a rash of wildfire outbreaks in recent years.

The Kincaid Fire currently burning in Sonoma County in the northern part of the state has forced the evacuation of roughly 200,000 people. The fire is twice the size of the city of San Fransisco.


Newsom declared a state of emergency on Sunday in response to the Kincaid Fire and several other wildfires throughout the state. He again threatened PG&E in a statement on the situation.

“There is a plan to get out of this. This is not the new normal,” Newsom said on Sunday at an evacuation center in northern California. “This is not a 10-year process to deal with this. That will not be the case… [PG&E] will be held to account to do something radically different

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