Community Voices: Before You Cap What a Victim’s Life Is Worth, Read Who’s Asking

Editor’s Note: The following article was printed in the Aug. 30, 2026, issue of The Bakersfield Californian. You can read the newspaper version or read it online at The Bakersfield Californian’s website.

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There is a memo making the rounds in Sacramento right now that most Kern County residents will never see. It is addressed to the Legislature and signed by more than 300 government agencies and insurance pools. The memo asks lawmakers to make it harder for injured people, including survivors of childhood sexual abuse, to be fully compensated when a public institution harms them.

Our own local government signed onto a coordinated push to limit what our neighbors can recover when a public agency’s negligence upends their lives. I think the people who live here deserve to know that, and to understand what’s actually being asked for behind the polished language.

The letter calls rising liability an “unsustainable fiscal trajectory.” It describes payments to victims as “costs” and “exposure.” But strip away the accounting vocabulary and every one of those dollars represents a real person.  A child abused by an employee an institution hired and kept around kids, a pedestrian killed by a dangerous condition a city already knew about, a family whose life was permanently altered by preventable negligence. When the agencies that write those checks recast the harm they caused as a budget problem, they’re asking lawmakers to look at a spreadsheet instead of a survivor.

I don’t say this without any foundational knowledge. For years, I represented the insurance side of these disputes. I know how these cases are defended, and I know the arguments in this letter by heart, because I used to make them. That’s exactly why I recognize what this document is.  It’s an attempt by the responsible party to get a discount for what they have taken from victims.

Look at what they actually propose.

They want caps on damages. A cap sounds reasonable until you understand who it hits. It does nothing to a person who suffers a minor injury. It bites exactly one group, the most catastrophically harmed among us, the person left paralyzed, the child with a lifelong brain injury, the abuse survivor facing decades of treatment. Caps take the ceiling off the wrongdoer’s responsibility by taking the floor out from under the victim’s future. And that unmet cost doesn’t vanish. It shifts onto Medi-Cal, onto families, onto the same taxpayers this letter claims to protect.

The coalition points to MICRA, California’s medical malpractice cap, as a model. They leave out that MICRA’s cap sat frozen and unadjusted from 1975 until the Legislature was forced to reform it in 2022, precisely because everyone came to see how unjust it had become to the most severely injured patients. Holding up MICRA as a template means holding up a policy this state just spent a decade repairing.

Most troubling is what they want to do to AB 218, the 2019 law that finally gave survivors of childhood sexual abuse a fair chance to be heard. Survivors of abuse frequently cannot come forward for years, often decades.  The trauma alone can make disclosure impossible until well into adulthood. The old rules the coalition wants to bring back slammed the courthouse door shut long before most survivors were able to walk through it. Their proposal to require victims to prove an institution “knew,” by the highest civil standard of proof, is the very rule that once let institutions win by losing files, quietly transferring abusers, and waiting for witnesses to die. It rewards the cover-up. It asks us to protect the institution because its own records are gone.

Ironically, the memo warns that claims filed by law firms, such as mine, “threaten the financial solvency of the very public agencies tasked with protecting and serving our vulnerable community members.”  Read this sentence again because it collapses under its own weight.  The government agencies that are harming “our vulnerable community members,” so often, children, are attempting to immunize themselves from being held accountable for the harm that they actually cause.  It’s actually disgusting.

Here are the parts the memo never mentions.  None of the claims are suggested to have been frivolous, and if they are, then take the case to trial and allow a jury to decide.  But before we even get there, there is a straightforward way for a public agency to lower its liability. Screen the people you hire. Act on complaints instead of ignoring them. Do a better job training your employees and holding them accountable.  Fix the dangerous conditions you already know about. Every reform in this letter lowers the price of negligence rather than the negligence itself. Capping damages doesn’t make a single child safer. It only removes the financial reason to keep them safe.

Survivors and injured victims don’t have taxpayer-funded law firms and unlimited budgets. What they have is the right to a full and fair recovery, and lawyers willing to take their case only if they win. That’s not a loophole. In our system, it’s often the only door to justice a working family has.

The Kern County Superintendent of Schools, County of Kern, and the City of Bakersfield put their names on a memo asking Sacramento to give them a discount for what they have taken from victims.  The rest of us should be paying attention.

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If you or someone you know is injured in an accident at the fault of someone else, or injured on the job no matter whose fault it is, contact the attorneys at Chain | Cohn | Clark by calling (661) 323-4000, or fill out a free consultation form, text, or chat with us at chainlaw.com.