Legislation

The Legislature will return from its summer recess on August 16. Upon its return, it will have only three and a half weeks to complete its work before adjournment on September 10.

The Legislature adjourned for their summer recess on July 15. It has been an intensely busy year in Sacramento and recess couldn’t have come soon enough.

On June 28, Governor Newsom signed California’s $267 billion budget. However, as we’ve reported previously, the signed budget contains the appropriations to spend state funds, but much work continues to finalize the budget behind the scenes. The annual Budget Act is always accompanied by a number of “trailer bills” which enact policy changes needed to implement the budget.

Last Wednesday the Secretary of State sent a letter to the Department of Finance (DOF) that among other things said “The Secretary of State is hereby notifying the Department of Finance that the proponents of the recall effort against Governor Gavin Newsom have submitted a sufficient number of valid signatures to initiate a recall election.”

June marks the halfway point in the legislative calendar. By early June,  most bills must pass out of the house they were introduced in to keep moving. The only exceptions are urgency bills and constitutional amendments which must be passed on a 2/3 vote of the Legislature.

Many of our updates in the last year have focused on the challenges Governor Newsom has been facing. It isn’t a stretch to say that he has held the office during the most challenging moment in history since World War II, and arguably ever.

The big news in the California Capitol is the release of the Governor’s May Revision to the 2021-22 State Budget that he proposed to the Legislature in January. This revised budget document is supposed to reflect updated tax revenues and spending trends to better enable the Legislature to pass a balanced budget on June 15 for the fiscal year that will begin on July 1.

April 30 marked the first significant legislative deadline of the 2021 legislative session whereby bills had to pass out of policy committees in the house of origin before being considered by the fiscal committee. This session, consistent with recent years, we have seen a plethora of employment-related legislation that would impose various requirements on all California employers. With the pandemic, bills of this nature have increased, with legislators proposing expansion of leave offered to…

As you’ve read or heard, Governor Newsom announced plans last week to reopen the state by June 15. With vaccination rates picking up in recent weeks, California hit a milestone of vaccinating 20 million Californians. Four million of those vaccinations have occurred in the state’s disadvantaged communities that have been hit hardest by the pandemic.…

Last year, Governor Newsom solemnly pronounced that after expecting record breaking surpluses in 2020, the state was facing a $54 billion deficit. That number was daunting, and comparable to the budget shortfalls experienced at the onset of the Great Recession. That massive deficit never materialized. The Governor and his Department of Finance (DOF) didn’t lie…