Terrible bills that must not move forward

This week, the Assembly is voting on bills that face a Jan. 31 deadline to pass on the floor and move to the Senate, or they’re dead for the year. Some of these bills deserve to be dead permanently.

Assembly Bill 854 is one such bill. It seeks to force property owners who are in the rental housing business to stay in that business for at least five years, no matter how much money they are losing, before the state of California will allow them to go out of business.

This is the latest attempt by activists and allied lawmakers to take an axe to the Ellis Act, a state law passed in the mid-1980s. The law was the Legislature’s response to a court decision that said a California landlord who wanted to get out of the rental housing business could be forced by the local government to continue to rent units to tenants, because the housing was badly needed.

When housing is badly needed, the solution is not to force people to lose money in order to provide it. The solution, in a free country, is to reconsider all the costly, ineffective and counterproductive government mandates and restrictions that are causing the rental housing business to be unprofitable.

AB 854 would prohibit the buyers of rent-controlled apartment buildings from filing a notice under the Ellis Act of intent to withdraw accommodations — otherwise known as evicting the tenants — until they had owned the building for at least five years. This means current owners of rentcontrolled buildings would have more trouble selling them. The law is an effort to force property owners to stay in a money-losing business.

If this bill is enacted into law, mark the calendar for five years from now for a wave of evictions from affordable housing to sweep the state like a tsunami. AB 854 is not a solution. It’s a disaster.

Another terrible bill set for a vote soon is Assembly Bill 257, authored by departed Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, who left the Legislature to head up the California Labor Federation. AB 257 is a union wish-list to enable organizing of workers in the fast-food business.

AB 257 would establish the “Fast Food Sector Council” within the state Department of Industrial Relations. The 11 members of the council, appointed by the governor and legislative leaders, would establish “sectorwide minimum standards” for wages, hours and working conditions in fast-food chain restaurants.

The council would have subpoena power to acquire information for regular reviews of the “adequacy” of minimum standards in the fast-food industry, and the bill would require that standards set by the council be enforced by the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement. Claims of violations could be made by an employee or an employee’s representative, and both franchisors and franchisees could be held liable for violations.

Restaurants in California already operate under robust health regulations, workplace safety regulations, minimum wage laws, labor laws, COVID-19 pandemic orders and all the tax laws and regulatory requirements that drag California down to the bottom of so many lists of the worst places to do business. To single out fast-food restaurants for a “sectorwide” regulatory crackdown is just one more damaging blow to an industry that is currently suffering from inflation and labor shortages.

These bills should be defeated.