Sacramento Report: Five Bills We’re Watching

When California legislators come back from summer recess in a couple weeks, it will be crunch time to get their proposals passed. 

San Diego lawmakers have introduced bills on issues including housing, public safety and digital security. Those had to pass either the state Senate or Assembly in June. To cross the finish line, they must be approved by both houses by Sept. 12 and get the governor’s signature by Oct. 12. 

Here are five bills I’m following, and what they mean for San Diego. All of these bills passed their house of origin and cleared one or more committees in the opposite house. They’ll head to final votes starting this month.  

Speed up the Housing Permits 

Housing reform was a theme of this year’s legislative session, as lawmakers scrambled to cut red tape and speed up home-building. 

They passed a package of reforms that streamline review under the state’s landmark environmental law, the California Environmental Quality Act, to exempt urban infill developments from CEQA review and freeze building standards for six years. 

Other housing legislation is still working its way through. Assemblymember Chris Ward proposed expediting permits for smaller residential buildings. His bill would require local governments to review plans within 30 days and allow builders to hire an architect or engineer to do the review if the city or county can’t meet that deadline. It would apply to buildings between one and 10 units.  

Delays drive up housing costs and discourage construction, which is particularly problematic amid San Diego’s housing shortage, Ward wrote in a statement to Voice of San Diego. He argued that the bill “removes a key bottleneck for projects that are ready to go.” 

Pacific Beach Project Inspires Restrictions on Housing Incentive  

When developers planned a 22-story project in Pacific Beach, dubbed the “Turquoise Tower,” state Sen. Catherine Blakespear took notice. 

The project would employ California’s density bonus laws – which let developers build bigger, higher structures if they include affordable housing – to build a 239-foot high-rise with extensive retail space and a few low-rent apartments. 

The density bonus law is intended to encourage housing, Blakespear said, but in this case, it’s being used to build a big commercial project in a San Diego neighborhood.  

She introduced a bill to prevent similar projects in the future, which would block developers from using the state’s bonus law for projects that don’t include substantial housing. 

The law would keep developers “from using the density bonus to override local restrictions to build large luxury hotels with little residential housing,” Blakespear said in a statement. 

Funding Fire Insurance  

The California FAIR Plan has been stretched thin for years, as more homeowners are forced off conventional plans and onto the fire insurance policy of last resort.  

The plan insures properties in high fire risk areas that don’t qualify for traditional coverage. Over the past few years that number has doubled throughout the state. In San Diego, FAIR plan coverage quadrupled between 20202 and 2024. 

The catastrophic fires in Los Angeles have strained the limits of the system, as the plan paid out nearly $1 billion to about 5,000 homeowners.  

Assemblymember David Alvarez has a proposal to keep the FAIR Plan solvent. He wants to give the California Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank authority to issue bonds in cases where catastrophic events strain the plan’s ability to pay claims. That would extend the timeline for covering big claims by giving insurers “a much longer runway to pay off the debts of the FAIR Plan,” Alvarez wrote in the bill’s analysis. 

Rules for Placing Sexually Violent Predators   

San Diego County has the highest number of released violent sex offenders in the state, and state Sen. Brian Jones has been trying for years to tighten rules for their placement and monitoring.  

Jones tried again this year with a pair of bills to place guardrails on the process. One would mandate that the Department of State Hospitals consider public safety when placing sexually violent predators in neighborhoods. The other would require the department to study options for transitional housing on state property instead of releasing violent sex offenders to neighborhoods.   

But he’s not in the home stretch yet. Similar legislation he introduced last year also passed the Senate, but then died in the Assembly. 

Ban Against Predatory Chatbots  

As chatbots learn to mimic human communication, kids are at risk of misinformation and manipulation. State Sen. Steve Padilla wants to add safeguards to protect children from the “addictive, isolating, and influential aspects of artificial intelligence chatbots.” 

He cited examples of children and teens urged to try dangerous pranks or even prodded to suicide by chatbots, and noted that the lack of protocols “leaves the users to serve as the test subjects” for the technology. 

Padilla’s bill would ban chatbot platforms from encouraging engagement and require them to establish a protocol for addressing suicide and self-harm by users. It calls for an annual report detailing how many times users have expressed suicidal intentions, and would make the results publicly available.  

Padilla and other lawmakers have been calling for regulations on artificial intelligence, but a suite of bills last year didn’t make the cut.  

Gerrymandering Battles 

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott just released a House map configured to give Republicans up to five more seats in Congress in 2026. California leaders are crying foul, and proposing ways to either block gerrymandered voting districts, or to fight fire with fire. 

Sen. Alex Padilla joined other senators to reintroduce the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, legislation to restore the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which they said was eroded by recent federal court rulings. It’s named for the late Georgia Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis. 

Their proposal would require review of jurisdictions with patterns of voting rights violations, protect minority communities from discriminatory voting practices, and defend election workers from threats and intimidation, Padilla stated. 

Meanwhile Gov. Gavin Newsom is saying if you can’t beat them join them. If Texas passes its gerrymandered map, he said, California will draw up new districts of its own. He raised that battle cry in social media posts lambasting Texas and defending California’s redistricting.  

There’s a glitch though. California relies on an independent, bipartisan citizen redistricting commission, while the Texas legislature draws its own. We’ll be watching to see if Newsom calls a special election to alter California’s process, or finds some other workaround. 

The Sacramento Report runs every Friday. Do you have tips, ideas or questions? Send them to me at deborah@voiceofsandiego.org. 

The post Sacramento Report: Five Bills We’re Watching appeared first on Voice of San Diego.