Legislators push toward finish

This should have been a big year for the California Legislature.

Sacramento had a new Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who promised to embrace a larger outlook than had his hyperfocused predecessor, Jerry Brown. Democratic lawmakers won a supermajority in the 2018 election, which would allow them to pursue increased social spending and other longawaited priorities. Business lobbyists and taxpayer groups were openly anxious.

But as we enter the final weeks of the 201819 legislative session, revolution has failed to materialize. While there have certainly been spasms of controversial legislative action — like Sacramento’s constitutionally dubious decision to require presidential candidates to release their tax returns in order to be listed on the California ballot — for the most part, the Legislature has failed to drastically overturn the status quo.

In some ways, that’s been good: The Legislature hasn’t passed any rash overhauls of major systems, like singlepayer health care. In other ways, it’s been frustrating: The Legislature has failed to take major action on California’s combined crises in housing and homelessness. It’s got just a few weeks left to pass or deny hundreds of bills that will define its actions during this critical political year.

Here are the most important outstanding issues.

Housing: The Legislature introduced more than 200 bills to address the state’s crises and disgracefully allowed nearly all of them to die by the end of May. That puts tremendous pressure on lawmakers to pass the ones that have survived.

State Sen. Nancy Skinner, DBerkeley, is the author of SB330, which would prohibit jurisdictions with housing shortages and high housing costs from enacting more restrictive zoning rules and require them to speed up development for certain residential and mixeduse projects. It’s the most substantial housing development bill still alive in the Legislature right now, and it needs to get through a few final hurdles in the Assembly.

Other important remaining bills that need to be passed are state Sen. Jim Beall’s SB5, which would provide cities and counties with $200 million annually to build affordable housing, and AB1482 from San Francisco’s Democratic Assemblyman David Chiu, which would cap rental increases at the percentage of the cost of living plus 7%, or a maximum of 10% per year.

Vaccines: State Sen. Richard Pan, DSacramento, continues his fight against disease outbreaks and conspiracy theories with SB276, which would allow the state to review certain kinds of vaccination exemptions. Pan already took on the thankless task of strengthening California’s vaccination requirements — but medical exemptions, many of them dubious, have increased dramatically.

SB276 has two more votes in the Assembly and must get the governor’s signature, which isn’t a given. We were disappointed when Newsom pushed Pan to water down SB276 this summer. Education: Too many forprofit colleges have left California students with poor educations and high debts. California has the opportunity to advance two important bills that would help struggling students in the wake of their abandonment by the Trump administration: AB1343, which would limit the amount of governmentsponsored financial aid forprofits can collect for exservice members, and AB1345, which would prohibit colleges from offering recruitment bonuses to pump up admissions.

Employment: The most closely watched labor bill of the year is AB5,, which would set limits on when companies — notably gig economy stars such as Uber and Lyft — could classify workers as independent contractors. The potentially wideranging effects of a state Supreme Court decision, known as the Dynamex case, has created uncertainty and deep concerns for myriad businesses throughout the economy. Organized labor has been pushing to lock in an interpretation of that decision that would severely limit independent contracting. AB5 stalled last Monday but could reemerge in the closing weeks.