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HOT ISSUES for the Week of September 24, 2019
Tuesday, September 24
Legal Reform and Protection
OPPOSE AB 51 (Gonzalez; D-San Diego) JOB KILLER: Ban on Arbitration Agreements — Significantly expands employment litigation and increases costs for employers and employees by banning arbitration agreements made as a condition of employment, which is likely preempted under the Federal Arbitration Act and will only delay the resolution of claims. Banning such agreements benefits the trial attorneys, not the employer or employee. Governor Brown vetoed a similar measure last year and stated it “plainly violates federal law.” To Governor.
Health
OPPOSE AB 731 (Kalra; D-San Jose) Large Group Rate Review — Threatens employers with higher premiums by driving up administrative costs and imposing a burdensome rate review process for health plans and insurers in the large group market. To Governor.
Hazardous Waste
SUPPORT AB 733 (Quirk; D-Hayward) Acute Toxicity Study Bill — Provides the California Department of Toxic Substances Control with authority to evaluate whether alternative tests can be used to identify whether substances are hazardous waste or extremely hazardous waste, which is a positive first step toward reducing the number of products that are treated as hazardous waste when disposed of at retail. To Governor.
Privacy and Cybersecurity
SUPPORT AB 25 (Chau; D-Monterey Park) Largely Exempts Employment Data — Largely exempts employee, job applicant, and contractor data from the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which is a necessary fix to prevent huge, additional compliance costs for businesses for something never intended by this law designed for “consumers,” and is necessary to prevent negative, unintended consequences. To Governor.
SUPPORT AB 874 (Irwin; D-Thousand Oaks) Provides Two Clarifications of California Consumer Privacy Act’s Definition of “Personal Information” — Adds reasonable standard to the CCPA’s definition of personal information to avoid requiring businesses to compile consumer data in a way that would be hugely wasteful and harmful to consumer privacy. It also eliminates an unconstitutional limitation of business dissemination of publicly available government records from the definition of personal information. To Governor.
OPPOSE AB 1130 (Levine; D-Marin County) Expansion of the California Consumer Privacy Act’s (CCPA) Privacy Right of Action — Expands the CCPA’s onerous private right of action, which requires no proof of injury. To Governor.
SUPPORT AB 1355 (Chau; D-Monterey Park) Exempts Business to Business Dealings from CCPA — In addition to a number of technical fixes, this bill ensures that communications between businesses providing services or products to each other as well as the memorialization of such transactions will be largely exempt from the CCPA. To Governor.
Elections and Fair Political Practices
OPPOSE AB 1451 (Low; D-Campbell) Prohibits Compensation on a Per Signature Basis — Makes it a misdemeanor for a person to pay for signature collection on a per-signature basis for state or local initiatives, referendums or recall petitions. The current process serves as a check and balance on government. By making it harder to qualify ballot measures, Californians would be denied the right to address grievances with government through initiatives, referendums and recalls. To Governor.
Environmental Regulation
Oppose SB 1 (Atkins; D-San Diego) JOB KILLER: Negatively Impacts Water Management and Increases Litigation — Undermines current state efforts to move forward with Voluntary Agreements through a rigid approach to water management that fails to appreciate science-based decision-making to manage and provide reliable water supplies for California and protect, restore, and enhance the ecosystems of the Bay-Delta and its tributaries. It further increases the potential for costly litigation by forcing a federal agency to operate the Central Valley Project subject to the California Endangered Species Act when that state law is preempted by the federal Endangered Species Act. It further creates significant regulatory uncertainty and litigation risks to regulated entities by giving certain state agencies authority to adopt rules and regulations without any of the Administrative Procedure Act safeguards when the agency, in its discretion, determines that the federal rules and regulations in effect on January 19, 2017 are “less protective” than existing federal law. To Governor.
Housing and Land Use
SUPPORT SB 330 (Skinner; D-Berkeley) Streamlines Housing Development — Incentivizes more housing development by providing fee certainty for housing development projects by prohibiting local jurisdictions from changing fees midway through the development permitting process. To Governor.