In simultaneous hearings Thursday, the Senate and Assembly Appropriations Committees took action on 1,171 bills on their respective suspense files. Measures with cost impacts over the committee-designated Suspense File threshold face one of two possible outcomes:

  • Passed off the Suspense File – often (but not always) with amendments to reduce the bill’s cost impacts – and moved to the floor for consideration by the full house; or,
  • Held in Committee – some bills remaining in committee that were pulled by the author or otherwise made a two-year bill may be acted upon next year but must pass out of the house of origin by the end of January 2024.

Below is a recap of the actions of the Appropriations Committees on notable measures.

Passed (moves to a floor vote)

  • AB 41 (Holden) would revise the Digital Infrastructure and Video Competition Act of 2006 to require the CPUC to hold a public hearing for any renewal of a state franchise and creates timelines for CPUC action on franchise applications. This bill would also require the CPUC to require video service providers to make video service available to all residences in its service area within 5 years of the issuance of a state-issued franchise. (SUPPORT)
     
  • AB 50 (Wood) seeks to establish clear expectations for electric utilities to provide timely service to new customers or increased levels of service to existing customers.  This measure would also require utilities to increase coordination and share information with local governments on system capacity and in developing distribution plans.  (SUPPORT)
     
  • AB 338 (Aguiar-Curry) would change the definition of public works to include fuels reduction projects done under contract, thereby requiring prevailing wage for projects paid for in part or whole by public funds. (OPPOSE)
     
  • AB 460 (Bauer-Kahan) would authorize State Water Board to issue, on its own motion or upon the petition of an interested party, an interim relief order in appropriate circumstances to implement or enforce these and related provisions of law.
     
  • AB 504 (Reyes) would declare the acts of sympathy striking and honoring a picket line a human right and void provisions in public employer policies or collective bargaining agreements limiting or preventing an employee's right to sympathy strike. (OPPOSE)
     
  • AB 764 (Bryan) would make changes to California’s FAIR MAPS Act, as proposed the bill will be costly, time-consuming, and challenging to implement with existing county resources. (OPPOSE UNLESS AMENDED)
     
  • AB 799 (Rivas) would establish the Homelessness Accountability and Results Act, which would make changes to the Homeless Housing, Assistance, and Prevention (HHAP) program to increase regional collaboration, update statewide goals, and performance metrics no later than January 1, 2025.
     
  • AB 869 (Wood) would provide grants to financially distressed small rural and district hospitals to pay for 2030 seismic upgrades and delay the requirement to 2035. (SUPPORT)
     
  • AB 998 (Connolly) would require the Energy Commission to prepare a report on the role of utility-scale biomass combustion facilities, including the role that shuttered facilities may help play in achieving the state’s forest health and wildfire risk reduction objectives.  (SUPPORT)
     
  • AB 1115 (Papan) would extend the sunset date on the state’s underground storage tank cleanup fund and fee, which pays for the remediation of leaking publicly and privately-owned underground storage tanks.  (SUPPORT)
     
  • AB 1168 (Bennett) would overturn an extensive statutory and case law record that has repeatedly affirmed county responsibility for the administration of emergency medical services and with that, the flexibility to design systems to equitably serve residents throughout their jurisdiction. (OPPOSE)
     
  • AB 1248 (Bryan) would require counties with populations of 300,000 or above to create an independent redistricting commission for the 2030 redistricting process. (OPPOSE UNLESS AMENDED)
     
  • AB 1337 (Wicks) would authorize State Water Board to adopt regulations for various water conservation purposes, including, but not limited to, to prevent the waste, unreasonable use, unreasonable method of use, or unreasonable method of diversion of water, and to implement these regulations through orders curtailing the diversion or use of water under any claim of right.
     
  • AB 1448 (Wallis) would enhance local enforcement mechanisms for unlicensed cannabis activities by creating a streamlined local administrative penalty process and allows a 50/50 state local split of the statutory penalties recovered in actions brought by local jurisdictions. (SPONSOR)
     
  • AB 1484 (Zbur) would inflexibly mandate that temporary employees must be included within the same bargaining unit as permanent employees and creates restrictions on discharging temporary employees. (OPPOSE)
     
  • AB 1548 (Hart) would expand CalRecycle’s solid and organic waste grant program to provide more flexibility and greater assistance to local governments seeking to increase reuse and recycling.  (SPONSOR)
     
  • AB 1563 (Bennett) would require a county, city, or any other water well permitting agency to obtain a written verification from the groundwater sustainability agency that manages the basin or area of the basin where the well is proposed to be located determining that, among other things, the extraction by the proposed well is consistent with any sustainable groundwater management program.
     
  • AB 1637 (Irwin) would require, no later than January 1, 2026, a local agency that maintains an internet website to utilize a “.gov” or a “.ca.gov” domain. The bill was amended in Appropriations to only apply to cities and counties. (OPPOSE UNLESS AMENDED)
     
  • AB 1713 (Gipson) would require a state or local agency that receives federal funds that are subject to an expiration date to submit a written report to the Legislature or the local agency’s legislative body, respectively, no later than one year before the funding expiration date with a summary of how funds have been expended and a plan for the remaining funds to be expended. (OPPOSE)
     
  • SB 75 (Roth) would authorize 26 additional judgeships, subject to appropriation. (SUPPORT)
     
  • SB 252 (Gonzalez) would prohibit the boards of the Public Employees’ Retirement System and the State Teachers’ Retirement System from making new investments or renewing existing investments of public employee retirement funds in a fossil fuel company. (OPPOSE)
     
  • SB 389 (Allen) would, upon specified findings, authorize the State Water Resources Control Board to investigate the diversion and use of water from a stream system to determine whether the diversion and use are based upon appropriation, riparian right, or other basis of right.
     
  • SB 525 (Durazo) would create a new health care minimum wage of $25 for hourly and $104,000 for salaried employees starting in 2024 impacting county behavioral health, public health, clinics, hospitals and correctional health care settings.  (OPPOSE)
     
  • SB 753 (Caballero) would amend Section 11358 of the Health and Safety Code to include groundwater as a public resource, and establishes that the theft of groundwater, unauthorized tapping into a water conveyance or storage infrastructure, or digging an unpermitted, illegal well may also be punished by imprisonment. (SPONSOR)

Held in Committee

  • AB 54 (Aguiar-Curry) would have funded research and created an advisory committee to mitigate the damage to winegrapes and wine that can occur from exposure to wildfire smoke. (SUPPORT)
     
  • AB 78 (Ward) would have made changes in Section 890 of the Penal Code, which would increase the per diem rate paid to civil and criminal grand juries from the current statutorily required $15 per day to an amount “equal to seventy percent of the county median daily income.” (OPPOSE UNLESS AMENDED)
     
  • AB 625 (Aguiar-Curry) would have made various changes to help achieve the state’s forest health and wildfire risk reduction goals by increasing the productive use of forest waste biomass through energy generation and wood products manufacturing. (SUPPORT)
     
  • AB 909 (Hoover) would have expanded California’s illegal dumping grant program to also fund management of illegally dumped hazardous wastes. (SPONSOR)
     
  • AB 1504 (McCarty) would have required local agencies to complete a plan for the installation of electric vehicle charging stations in the public right-of-way.  (OPPOSE UNLESS AMENDED)
     
  • SB 7 (Blakespear) would have required each city and county to provide housing for homeless individuals within its jurisdiction, based on their most recent point-in-time count, and would have required each jurisdiction to develop a housing obligation plan.
     
  • SB 83 (Wiener) would have required electrical utilities to interconnect a development project within eight weeks of that project becoming “interconnection ready.”  (SUPPORT)
     
  • SB 527 (Min) would have established a process by which gas utilities could abandon service to neighborhoods and forced those communities to shift to electric appliances and heating systems.  (OPPOSE)
     
  • SB 634 (Becker) would have required an opportunity housing project to be a use by right if the project has a relocation housing transition plan for a situation when the parcel on which the project is located is no longer suitable for opportunity housing projects. (OPPOSE UNLESS AMENDED)
     
  • SB 820 (Alvarado-Gil) would adapt the same seizure of property provisions currently applicable to unlicensed manufacturing of alcoholic beverages (i.e., moonshining), to cover unlicensed commercial cannabis activities. (SPONSOR) - designated as a 2-year bill by the author