How bills get killed in the Legislature

No ban on offshore drilling in state waters. No election day holiday. No speed cameras.

Those measures were among dozens of bills that died in the California Legislature on Thursday, without debate, as the Assembly and Senate appropriations committees moved hundreds of bills through a procedural bottleneck for legislation with significant fiscal impacts.

Here are four key measures that got shelved:

Speed cameras

AB2336 sought to use automated cameras to reduce excessive speeding in San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland as the region fights a surge in traffic accidents. It’s the third time since 2017 that the bill has failed.

Assembly Members Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, and Laura Friedman, D-Glendale (Los Angeles County), carried the measure, which would have allowed the Bay Area’s three largest cities and Los Angeles to run a speed camera pilot program for five years. Commonly referred to as automated speed enforcement, these cameras are used to snap pictures of speeding motorists.

The bill faced opposition from privacy advocates, who said it would drastically increase surveillance of private citizens, as well as social equity groups that said it could lead to more tickets for people of color whose communities often have poorly designed streets.

Offshore drilling

SB953 would have banned oil drilling in state waters following last year’s oil spill off the Orange County coast, when nearly 25,000 gallons of crude oil spilled into the water off of Huntington Beach. The bill sought to require the State Lands Commission to terminate its offshore oil and gas leases.

The author, Sen. Dave Min, D-Irvine, argued that the bill, SB953, was needed to prevent