Eaton wildfire survivors’ anger about Southern California Edison’s burying of electric wires in Altadena boiled over Tuesday with residents calling on government officials to temporarily halt the work.

In a letter to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, more than 120 Altadena residents and the town’s council wrote that they had witnessed “manifest failures” by Edison in recent months as it has been tearing up streets and digging trenches to bury the wires.

The residents cited the unexpected financial cost of the work to homeowners and possible harm to the town’s remaining trees. They also pointed out how the work will leave telecommunication wires above ground on poles.

“The current lack of coordination is compounding the stress of a community still reeling from the Eaton Fire, and risks causing further irreparable harm,” the residents wrote.

The council voted unanimously Tuesday night to send the letter.

Scott Johnson, an Edison spokesman, said Wednesday that the company has been working to address the concerns, including by looking for other sources of funds to help pay for the homeowners’ costs.

“We recognize this community has already faced a number of challenges,” he said.

Johnson said the company will allow homeowners to keep existing overhead lines connecting their homes to the grid if they are worried about the cost.

Edison’s crews, Johnson said, have also been trained to use equipment that avoids roots and preserves the health of trees.

The utility has said that burying the wires as the town rebuilds thousands of homes destroyed in the fire will make the electrical grid safer and more reliable.

But anger has grown as work crews have shown up unexpectedly and residents learned they’re on the hook to pay tens of thousands of dollars to connect their homes to the buried lines.

Residents have also found the crews digging under the town’s oak and pine trees that survived last year’s fire. Arborists say the trenches could destroy the roots of some of the last remaining trees and kill them.

Amy Bodek, the county’s regional planning director, recently warned Edison that a government ordinance protects oak trees and that “utility trenching is not exempt from these requirements.”

Residents have also pointed out that in much of Altadena, the telecom companies, including Spectrum and AT&T, have not agreed to bury their wires in Edison’s trenches. That means the telecom wires will remain on poles above ground, which residents say is visually unappealing.

“While our community supports the long-term benefits of moving utilities underground, the current execution by SCE is placing undue financial and planning burdens on homeowners, causing irreparable harm to our heritage tree canopy, and proceeding without adequate local oversight,” the residents wrote.

They want the project halted until the problems are addressed.

Edison announced last year that it would spend as much as $925 million to underground and rebuild its grid in Altadena and Malibu, where the Palisades fire caused devastation.

The work — which costs an estimated $4 million per mile — will earn the utility millions of dollars in profits as its electric customers pay for it over the next decades.

Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of Edison International, told Gov. Gavin Newsom last year that state utility rules would require Altadena and Malibu homeowners to pay to underground the electric wire from their property line to the panel on their house. Pizarro estimated it would cost $8,000 to $10,000 for each home.

But some residents, who need to dig long trenches, say it will cost them much more.

“We are rebuilding and with the insurance shortfall, our finances are stretched already,” Marilyn Chong, an Altadena resident, wrote in a comment attached to the letter. “Incurring the additional burden of financing SCE’s infrastructure is not something we can or should have to do.”

Other fire survivors complained of Edison’s lack of planning and coordination with residents.

“I’ve started rebuilding, and apparently there won’t be underground power lines for me to connect with in time when my house will be done,” wrote Gail Murphy. “So apparently I’m supposed to be using a generator, and for how long!?”

Johnson said the company has set up a phone line for people with concerns or questions. That line — 1-800-250-7339 — is answered Monday through Saturday, he said.

Residents can also go to Edison’s office in Altadena at 2680 Fair Oaks Avenue. The office is open Monday to Friday from 8 to 4:30.

It’s unclear if the Eaton fire would have been less disastrous if Altadena’s neighborhood power lines had been buried.

The blaze ignited under Edison’s towering transmission lines that run through Eaton Canyon. Those lines carry bulk power through the company’s territory. In Altadena, Edison is burying the smaller distribution lines, which carry power to homes.

The government investigation into the cause of the fire has not yet been released. Pizarro has said that a leading theory is that a century-old transmission line, which had not carried power for 50 years, somehow re-energized to spark the blaze.

The fire killed at least 19 people and destroyed more than 9,400 homes and other structures.

Along the southern stretch of California’s Central Coast, President Trump’s crusade against immigrants has left a visceral mark. It seems these days that almost everyone there has seen or felt the aftermath of an immigration raid: cars with shattered windows left idling and businesses emptied of their usual employees and patrons. The human toll is stark. Raids around Christmas removed at least 100 people from our communities, leaving children without parents and families without primary earners — creating crises that cascade far beyond the moment of enforcement.

The economic consequences of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids are equally severe. Recent farmer surveys have shown that immigration raids and the fear they generate have caused farmworker shortages, particularly in labor-intensive crops such as strawberries — the region’s most valuable agricultural commodity — where fruit rots on the plant without the immigrant workers who pick it.

Early research quantifying the economic impact of ICE raids in Oxnard estimates direct crop losses of $3 billion to $7 billion with significant spillover into other sectors of the economy. As families lose income to raids — whether through the direct loss of a working family member or in the form of lost business production or sales — they spend less in the local economy. The ripple effect means that the total economic impact of ICE raids is much greater than unpicked crops, with harm most concentrated among the most vulnerable: farmworkers.

Recent changes to a foreign worker program threaten to deepen the wound. The federal program, known as H-2A, allows growers and farm labor contractors to recruit temporary foreign workers to meet seasonal labor demand. It has become the fastest-growing work visa system in U.S. agriculture. It carries with it a well–documented history of wage theft, abuse and trafficking enabled, in part, by H-2A workers’ relative isolation and inability to seek other employment while in the United States.

Until October 2025, the wages paid to H-2A workers were, although low, not so low as to distort the labor market and drag down the wages paid to domestic farmworkers. In October, the Trump administration delivered a huge pay cut to H-2A workers and, in doing so, undercut wages for farmworkers across America regardless of visa status. Trump’s changes include both a direct wage cut as well as new provisions allowing employers to charge housing fees of up to $3 per hour worked.

Estimates of the pay that farmworkers will lose because of these changes range from $4.4 billion to $5.4 billion, or 10% to 12% of farmworkers’ annual wages. Given these figures, the losses suffered by farmworkers in Santa Barbara County alone — where I conduct research — could range from $126 million to $152 million annually, with subsequent decreases in spending and tax revenue reverberating through the region.

With H-2A labor now cheaper relative to domestic farmworkers, visa holders are likely to fill at least one-fifth of all agricultural jobs in Santa Barbara County. This exceeds the program’s 2023 peak in the county, when 18.1% of all agriculture jobs were filled by H-2A, before wage increases caused many growers to drop out of the program in 2024 and 2025. Including housing deductions, employers can now pay H-2A workers $13.90 an hour, significantly below California’s minimum wage of $16.90 an hour. Growers have a strong incentive to substitute resident workers for lower-cost H-2A labor, resulting in local farmworkers losing jobs and income. In addition, because of decreased income and employment, more farmworker families will be forced to rely on benefit programs such as CalFresh, increasing government expenditures.

The tax and budget consequences of expanded H-2A use should be a serious concern for local and state governments. Not only have Trump’s changes significantly reduced farmworkers’ taxable income, but H-2A workers themselves generate less local tax revenue and economic activity than resident workers would.

H-2A employers and employees are exempt from key payroll taxes, including Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance. At the same time, the program’s temporary structure — averaging about six months — means workers remit a larger share of their earnings abroad to support families they cannot bring with them, further limiting local spending and the sales tax base.

Elected officials are not powerless in the face of these changes. A range of policy levers could help stabilize a labor market under mounting strain, particularly those that reinforce a meaningful wage floor and limit further downward pressure on earnings. This could include raising the agricultural minimum wage, increasing the California Employment Development Department’s program oversight capacity, and bolstering legal protections for undocumented farmworkers organizing for better working conditions.

The United Farm Workers are currently challenging the Trump administration’s pay rate and housing deduction in court, arguing they constitute one of the largest wealth transfers from workers to employers in the history of American agriculture. Meanwhile, Assemblymember Maggy Krell (D–Sacramento) has introduced legislation to raise the minimum hourly wage for certain agricultural workers to $19.75 — effectively restoring the previous H-2A rate. But that fix, while essential, would not take effect until 2027 and still needs to be passed. In the interim, the state and local governments must act decisively to enforce the existing wage floor, ensuring employers cannot use expanded housing deductions to push workers’ pay below the legal minimum.

These are not radical steps; they are basic protections. The alternative is to accept a race to the bottom — on wages, on working conditions and on the economic stability of the region itself.

Matt Kinsella-Walsh is a graduate researcher with the UC Santa Barbara Community Labor Center and the Organizing Knowledges Project. He researches agricultural economics and labor in the North American strawberry industry.