Diane Conklin and Joseph Mitchell bought a ridgetop house in Ramona in 1999 because they love the open space. They came up the driveway, saw the mountains sloping up the other side of Kimball Valley and thought “that’s it.”
“It’s an antidote to life today — to look out the window. All I have to do is look out the window,” Conklin said from a bench in their yard.
“We spend a lot of time doing that,” Mitchell added.
They also understand their beautiful view comes with the existential threat of wildfire.
“This looked like a moonscape in 2003,” Mitchell said, sweeping his arm over the chaparral blanketing the area.
In 2003, a backcountry hunter sparked the Cedar Fire, which burned more than a quarter million acres of San Diego County.
Mitchell said it destroyed two-thirds of their neighborhood. Their house survived, though. They had just received a permit for a home-defense sprinkler system that Mitchell, a particle physicist, built from scratch.
“I said, ‘You know, I'll give it a good test this weekend.’ And the next day was the Cedar Fire,” he said.
Three years later, San Diego Gas & Electric announced plans to build a high-voltage transmission line, the Sunrise Powerlink, through the same valley scarred by the Cedar Fire.
Conklin suggested Mitchell look into whether there’s a connection between utility equipment and fires, which wasn’t as well understood at the time. He began researching historical state data and realized power line fires were often more severe. Today, they’ve caused more than a quarter of the state’s most destructive wildfires, according to CalFire.
In 2006, Mitchell and Conklin channeled their advocacy through a small nonprofit they’d started a few years earlier, the Mussey Grade Road Alliance. Their work was interrupted by the massive Witch Creek Fire, which the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) ruled was caused by an improperly maintained SDG&E powerline.
But eventually the Alliance and other stakeholders succeeded in getting SDG&E to reroute the Sunrise Powerlink south.
Since then, Conklin and Mitchell have continued fighting utility plans during state regulatory proceedings. They remain focused on wildfire safety and in recent years, have also tapped into growing frustration with utility costs.
“Something's got to be done to give the ratepayers of California some relief,” Conklin said. “It just seems to be ratcheted up over and over.”
The Alliance is among a small handful of groups statewide called intervenors. They comb through arcane documents, sometimes numbering thousands of pages, to advocate for things they believe utilities should better prioritize.
SDG&E is owned by Sempra, one of California’s largest companies. Conklin said the David vs. Goliath resource gap doesn’t matter.
“It matters how sincere you are. It matters how factual you are. And it matters how principled you are,” she said. “In the end, I think that the bugaboo about it being complicated — well, everything's complicated. But you know, as a former journalist myself, if it's complex, it's suspect. So you just do it.”
The Mussy Grade Road Alliance’s latest project is SDG&E’s request to increase monthly bills by 8.6% starting in 2028. Under the proposal, an average electric bill would jump about $14 over 2027 estimates, while a natural gas bill would rise more than $8.
The utility, intervenors, and regulators will now gather evidence and expert testimony, write briefs and hold hearings to see if SDG&E’s request is reasonable. It's part of a complicated 18-month-plus budgeting process called a general rate case.
A lot of intervenors have sharp pencils when it comes to utility proposals — but ultimately help make the process more fair and transparent, said SDG&E spokesperson Anthony Wagner.
“The policy document gets more and more robust, predicated on all of these parties operating in unison … so that everyone knows what it looks like and everyone has been able to participate from the beginning all the way to the end,” he said.
SDG&E said it prioritized affordability and service reliability with its rate request, and the proposed increase is driven by rising wildfire insurance costs and ongoing system maintenance and operations.
The CPUC’s five voting members will have final say on the proposal.
The stakes are high for SDG&E customers. Eighteen percent of households were behind on their bills by an average of $501 over the second quarter of 2026, according to the CPUC Public Advocate’s Office, which found SDG&E rates have jumped 97% over the last decade.
Meanwhile, Sempra reported $762 million in adjusted earnings during a “strong” second quarter this year, up from $562 million over the same period in 2025.
The disparity led community activists to rally in support of affordable energy in front of Sempra’s downtown San Diego headquarters last week — a common sight when earnings reports are published.
Many intervenors base their arguments around affordability, including the San Diego-based nonprofit Utility Consumers’ Action Network. Executive Director Edward Lopez says UCAN may push SDG&E less on services delivered, and more on whether certain new infrastructure is necessary.
“Over the years, we've done our best to try to assert that, ‘Wait a minute here, what the utility is requesting is just too much,’” he said.
For the 2028 rate request, UCAN is looking into SDG&E’s proposals for wildfire mitigation, which involve burying power lines and covering conductors. The utility needs to follow state law and said reducing fire risk reduces legal liability. But those projects also have a price tag.
“Most parties would agree there's worth to a certain level of investment,” Lopez said. “But at what point does your return on that investment start to diminish, and the investment itself starts outweighing that return?”
During the last rate request cycle, SDG&E asked to collect $2.995 billion from customers in 2024. CPUC commissioners ultimately approved $2.669 billion after intervenors formally protested.
Intervenors are compensated by the CPUC, but only if their arguments impact the final decision and they don’t duplicate the work of others.
They deserve credit for successfully navigating a regulatory environment unlike any other in California, said Joe Kaatz, a senior staff attorney with the University of San Diego’s Energy Policy Initiatives Center. But he said there are limits to intervenors’ impact because they’re starting from SDG&E’s data and modeling.
“It's a regulated monopoly,” Kaatz said. "It's their system, their equipment. They know how their business operates, and they're the author of the application that the regulator is reviewing.”
Limited staffing also means most intervenors tend to make narrow challenges and recommendations.
For example, back in Ramona, Joseph Mitchell said SDG&E has improved its modeling for wildfire losses and was the first California utility to build stations for monitoring extreme weather.
Diane Conklin likened intervening to persisting through a lot of small battles over the years, ultimately stacking meaningful contributions.
“To that extent, you might start out as Joan of Arc, and end up rather more like a very highly motivated advisor,” she said.
Conklin and Mitchell plan to keep doing the work as long as it makes a difference.
“You'd never actually get to see the effect of the fire that doesn't start, but I know it's out there,” Mitchell said. “And when utility bills are up less than they would have been up otherwise, I know I'm part of that too.”
Still, squaring off with the utilities can be a lonely fight. And they’d love to have more company in the trenches.
