Bills Address Drought, Gas Emissions and More

The California State Legislature is back in session - the beginning of a two year session.  Any bill that didn’t make it through both the Senate and the Assembly last year is dead.   So everything starts over and potential new laws must be reintroduced again with a new bill and a new bill number.

In order to make the process work, there are deadlines for introducing, hearing and passing bills.  One of the most important deadlines is the one for introducing bills.  This year that deadline was February 27.

For the 2015 -16 legislative sessions, 2,297 pieces of legislation were introduced - 1,504 in the State Assembly and 793 in the State Senate.   In the Assembly there were more bills introduced than the prior year but for the Senate the number was lower.  That is probably in part due to three senate positions being vacant with their incumbents elected to Congress.

Surprisingly, more than half of the legislation introduced currently describes only an intended purpose with details to be added later.  Those are called “spot” bills.  More specificity will need to be added soon so these bills can be assigned to a policy committee for hearing.  All bills with fiscal impacts must be heard and reported on by a policy committee by May 1 - the next important deadline. 

If a piece of legislation doesn’t have a fiscal impact, it gets an extra two weeks to be heard in a policy committee.  By May 15 we’ll know how many of the 2,297 bills may still become laws.

There are a multitude of issues that the Legislature is looking at - education, child safety, veterans’ benefits, body cameras for police, and vaccinations for school age children.  But two issues that appear to be dominating the agenda this session are water and power.

California’s drought has forced the state to reexamine how we manage, distribute and protect water.  There are eighteen bills that look at the Delta and at least 20 bills related to the Groundwater Management Act passed in the last session.

There is a bill that recommends a process for public water systems to use in meeting the new chromium-6 drinking water standards; a bill that would allow the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts to assist cities on storm-water and runoff management projects; and more than a dozen bills that call for conservation incentives, more water efficiency, plumbing retrofits, and requiring individual unit water meters for multi-unit residential buildings.

The Democratic leadership of the Senate and the Assembly released a comprehensive clean energy plan as called for in the Governor’s state of the state address.  It calls for decreasing greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 by 80 percent from the 1990 levels.

There is also legislation that would require California’s public retirement systems to divest in businesses related to coal combustion and several bills revisiting the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.

No matter how you measure it, that is a lot of legislative activity. The Legislature has its work cut out for it, and you, your business, and your community are going to be affected.  Everyone should pay attention.