Legislators make gains in housing, packaging

SACRAMENTO — California legislators adjourned for the year around 1 a.m. Thursday after passing bills to confront some of the state’s thorniest and most glaring problems, capping their most productive session in years.

Measures they approved would: mandate treatment for mentally ill people, speed up housing construction in urban centers, set ambitious targets to reduce planet-warming emissions and reduce how much plastic consumers use once and throw in the trash.

The outcome is a stark shift from the last few years, when legislators’ work was often overshadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic and political infighting that killed major proposals.

Political insiders said several factors probably shaped legislators’ decision to swing for the fences, including pressure to respond to the state’s most pressing problems, the opportunity to spend a

huge one-time budget surplus and the realization that nearly a third of them will retire at the end of the year.

“They went big, which is pretty rare. We're used to incrementalism,” said Steve Maviglio, a Democratic strategist and former top adviser to three Assembly speakers. “There's a real need to put points on the board given the direction on the state right now.”

One of the few areas where the Democratic supermajority struggled to advance its agenda was vaccine-related bills. Lawmakers shelved proposals that would have allowed teenagers to get vaccinated without a parent's consent, mandated vaccines for nearly all workers and eliminated a personal-belief exemption for students whose parents object to the COVID vaccine.

That said, some of the most high-profile bills that legislators pushed through revived controversial policy debates that had repeatedly resulted in gridlock in past sessions.

To respond to the housing crisis, they passed AB2011 by Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, which would require cities to fast-track permitting and zoning to build units in commercial areas, such as vacant office buildings and strip malls.

Wicks' bill is also significant because a dispute over unionlabor provisions had sidelined dozens of bills to increase housing density in the last three years.

Her bill cleared the Legislature with broad, bipartisan support after legislators agreed to also pass a bill with language favored by the state Building and Construction Trades Council.

Gov. Gavin Newsom hasn't said whether he plans to sign the bill; he has until until Sept. 30 to sign or veto legislation.

Another landmark policy that legislators approved earlier this summer seeks to dramatically shrink the amount of disposable packaging and foodware that Californians use in their daily lives. It was a hard-fought victory for environmentalists after plastic-reduction bills died at the Capitol three years in a row.

SB54 by state Sen. Ben Allen, D-Santa Monica, gives plastic manufacturers 10 years to make sure that all packaging and foodware items can be recycled, composted or reused. Newsom signed the bill in June.

But perhaps the most outsize factor that led to a more fruitful round of lawmaking in Sacramento this year was Newsom himself. He had a far more visible, hands-on role in crafting policy in 2022.

Although as governor he has always been an instrumental player on budget negotiations and through his final say on bills, Newsom made himself the public face of several proposals in a way he didn't in his first three years in office.

He announced his highestprofile policy proposal in a March interview with The Chronicle: a new system called

Care Court that can order counties to provide services to Californians with severe mental illness and require them to accept the help.

Newsom didn't testify before lawmakers for the bill as his predecessor Jerry Brown did for his priority bills and attorney general nominee. But Newsom sent a top deputy, Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly, to speak in his place.

“The Care Court proposal is a paradigm shift,” Ghaly told senators during a committee hearing on the bill in April.

While bills that aimed to expand treatment for mental illness without Newsom's public backing died, Care Court sailed through the Legislature despite staunch opposition from civil liberties groups.

In its final votes in both chambers of the Legislature, the bill encountered barely any opposition, and garnered support from Republicans and Democrats alike.

Assembly Member Suzette Valladares, R-Santa Clarita (Los Angeles County), said she wished the bill had been passed 10 years earlier, when her cousin was living in a tent in a homeless encampment and died.

“I wish that my family had the tools that this bill is going to bring forward so that he might still be alive,” she said.

It passed the Assembly 61-2, and passed the Senate unanimously, a rarity for a high-profile bill.

Newsom also championed the Legislature's passage of an ambitious slate of bills to combat climate change. In the final two weeks of session, he made the unusual move of calling on legislators to pass a raft of environment and energy bills.

In the end, he and lawmakers surprised skeptics and passed most of the legislation he had called for, including a bill to create safety zones around oil wells near homes and another to require the state to speed up its transition to a 100% clean electrical grid.

Newsom also convinced legislators to allow Diablo Canyon, the state's last nuclear power plant, to remain open five years past its scheduled closure to boost the state's energy supply.

Robin Swanson, a Democratic strategist and former legislative staffer, said lawmakers' success passing major bills related to climate and mental health treatment was largely a result of Newsom engaging. In the past, the governor has largely tried to shape policy through executive orders and administrative rules.

“Clearly, he was very handson this year,” Swanson said. “He can't do everything by executive authority, so I think that's why you saw more outreach to legislators.”

But Newsom had more mixed success with one of his other big priorities: gun control.

When Texas enacted a law to let private citizens sue people who help a woman obtain an abortion, Newsom excoriated the move. He called for lawmakers to send him a bill modeled on the Texas law that would challenge its legal justification by creating a similar private right to sue for people seeking to hold gunmakers accountable for weapons that violate California's strict gun laws.

“California will use that authority to protect people's lives, where Texas used it to put women in harm's way,” he said.

Lawmakers complied and quickly sent him a bill to let Californians sue manufacturers of assault weapons and ghost guns, which he signed in July.

After the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that likely invalidates California's tight restrictions on permits that allow people to carry concealed guns, Newsom and his hand-picked attorney general, Rob Bonta, called for stricter concealed carry legislation in response to the court's action.

That concealed-carry bill struggled. On Tuesday night, it came up two votes short of the 54 it needed to pass, but its lead sponsor in the chamber, Assembly Member Reggie Jones-Sawyer, D-Los Angeles, received permission to bring the bill up again the next day.

Jones-Sawyer told reporters at the back of the chamber on Wednesday that Newsom's office was among those calling lawmakers, urging them to support the bill. Their efforts came up short: The measure failed in the final minutes of the legislative session.