Below is a list of bills for which the League has taken a position and flagged as a “Hot” bill as of May 13. Legislation can be considered “Hot” for a variety of reasons, including having major impacts on cities statewide, setting an important precedent for future legislation, or being particularly controversial in a committee. Cities are encouraged to send letters in support or opposition to their legislators immediately.

The League routinely takes positions on bills throughout the legislative session. Bill’s tracked by the League are marked as “watch” until such time that a policy position is taken. Typically, positions are taken early in the year on bills for which the League has standing policy. These policy positions can be found in the League’s Summary of Existing Policy and Guiding Principles. Bills identified by the League without a standing policy are referred by League staff to one or more of the League’s eight policy committees for a policy recommendation and the board of directors for a full position.

All League position letters and select sample letters can be found under the bill number in our bill search function on the League’s website.


Employee Relations
AB 400 (Ma) Employment. Paid Sick Day. Oppose Provides that any employee, whether part-time, temporary, or seasonal, who works for seven or more days in a calendar year is entitled to paid sick days, which are accrued at a rate of one hour for every 30 hours worked. This bill does not apply to employees covered by a collective bargaining that provides for paid sick days. 

AB 438 (Williams) County Free Libraries: Withdrawal. Oppose Requires voters to approve a city council’s decision to provide library services through a private contractor. Administrative decisions are exactly the kind of decisions council members are elected by the voters to make. 

AB 455 (Campos) Public Employment: Local Public Employee Organizations. Oppose Requires 50 percent of the membership of a personnel or merit commission that administers personnel rules or a merit system to be appointed by members of the governing board of the public agency. The other 50 percent of members would be selected from a list provided to the public agency governing body by the largest recognized employee organization. 

AB 506 (Wieckowski) Municipal Bankruptcy, Fiscal Emergencies and Employee Relations. Oppose Prohibits any local government from filing Chapter 9 Federal Bankruptcy protection without first receiving permission from a “mediator” who should more accurately be called a “state-controlled non-governmental arbitrator.” Further, the measure contains an obstacle course of criteria and conditions that are replete with bias against local agencies. 

AB 646 (Atkins) Public Employee Organizations. Impasse Procedures. Oppose Many cities provide for impasse procedures, including mediation and fact-finding, in collective bargaining negotiations and bargain in good faith with their respective employee organizations. AB 646 removes this local authority by giving full discretion to public employee unions to request factfinding once an impasse is reached. Additionally, the significant cost that will be imposed on agencies for a process that is at the sole discretion of the local bargaining unit and not the agency is financially impractical for cities. 

SB 931 (Vargas) Public Agencies. Outside Legal Counsel. Oppose Provides that all public agencies are forbidden to use taxpayer dollars to pay for outside consultants or legal advisors for the purpose of counseling the public employer about ways to minimize or deter the exercise of public employee union activities. 

Public Safety
AB 604 (Skinner) Hypodermic Needles and Syringes. Oppose Allows the state Department of Public Health to authorize local health clinics to provide needle and syringe exchange services, pre-empting the current local decision making powers of the city or county.

Transportation and Public Works
SB 474 (Evans) Construction contracts: indemnity. Oppose Prohibits indemnification provisions in contracts between cities and contractors limiting a city’s ability to negotiate contract terms and ultimately resulting in increased costs to the public.

Land Use and Housing
AB 1220 (Alejo) Land Use: Cause of Actions: Time Limitations. Oppose Seeks to change the decision of a Court of Appeal (Urban Habitat v. city of Pleasanton). The bill would create a five year statute of limitations to challenge land use planning decisions. 

SB 184 (Leno) Land Use: Zoning Regulations. Support In response to Palmer/Sixth Street Properties L.P. v. city of Los Angeles, seeks to clarify that the Costa-Hawkins Act does not apply to inclusionary housing programs. This would make clear that inclusionary zoning is a permissible land use power. 

SB 444 (Evans) Land Use: Subdivisions: Rental Mobilehome Park Conversion. Support Allows an application to convert a mobilehome park from rental to resident-owned to be subject to all requirements of the Subdivision Map Act, thus allowing local governments the opportunity to mitigate the economic displacement of residents.

SB 469 (Vargas) Land Use: Development Project Review: Superstores. Oppose Requires a city or county prior to approving or disapproving a “superstore retailer” to require, at applicant expense, a private consultant to prepare an exhaustive economic impact report examining 17 different detailed conditions. A “superstore” is defined as more than 90,000 square feet, selling a wide range of consumer goods, and where 10 percent of the total floor area is devoted to selling non-taxable food items. This measure contains an exemption for “discount warehouses” (with no square foot limitations) that sell over half of their items in bulk and require a membership fee. 

Revenue and Taxation
AB 153 (Skinner) State Board of Equalization: Administration: Retailer Engaged in Business in this State and AB 155 (Calderon) Use Tax: Retailer Engaged in Business. Support Improve use tax collection through different approaches to increase the amount of state and local revenues collected from online sales.