Bills, Bills, Bills: Breaking Down the 2025 California Legislative Session
The legislative session is in full swing, which means the team at Calkin Public Affairs (Calkin PA) is hyper-focused on what is going on inside the halls, rooms and on the floor of the Capitol Building.
California legislators had until February 21st to introduce bills into the current session, which will make their way through the process until October 12th – the last day Governor Newsom can sign a bill into law or veto it. Legislators and their staff are working tirelessly to gain support for their bills and generate opposition for bills with competing interests.
In this session there were 2,494 bills introduced, giving the legislature an incredibly full docket of policy to review and decide on. And even with the initial state budget proposal trending toward a small surplus, many will be fighting for every budget dollar available. Members and staff have worked hard to tackle some of the state’s most pressing issues as part of these bills.
Our team has been tracking this session closely and sees the following areas as critical focal points:
Energy: Addressing rising electricity costs and investing in safe alternative energy infrastructure.
Housing: Fixing the housing crisis by streamlining construction/reconstruction in disaster areas and easing the rising cost of purchasing homes.
Public Safety: Addressing the effects of the opioid epidemic, ensuring effective rollout of the recently passed Proposition 36 and limiting collaboration of state agencies with U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement.
Healthcare: Preserving access to medical treatments, including gender affirming care and reproductive care, improving patient privacy and increasing affordability.
Environment: Defending against federal rollbacks of environmental and climate change policy, improving wildfire resiliency in vulnerable communities, safeguarding drinking water and promoting drought resiliency.
In addition to these priorities, shortly after the presidential election, the Democratic majority in the Legislature began planning strategies to “Trump-proof” the state with the intent to maintain, and ideally advance, California’s status as an equitable, diverse and inclusive state. But the Speaker’s directive to focus on affordability and cost of living, along with other hot-button issues, may overshadow even the most well-intended social causes when it comes to budget dollars and bill focus.
The Calkin PA team has identified the following bills – many of these important to our clients – as ones to watch this year:
In energy, utility rates and technology projects will be front and center, the bills AB 303 (Addis), SB 332 (Wahab) and SB 331 (Padilla) all address battery energy storage system (BESS) projects, rate increases and exemptions from regulatory agencies.
Across housing, streamlining the permitting process and easing restrictions will be seen as critical to addressing the housing shortage. SB 79 (Weiner), AB 609 (Wicks) and AB 1154 (Carrillo) aim to approve more housing in transit-rich areas, streamline development processes and clean up around ADUs.
Public safety remains a top concern for constituents across the state. Bills such as AB 421 (Solache) and AB 1333 (Zbur) aim to change issues around immigration enforcement and homicide circumstances.
When it comes to healthcare, costs and access are critical for considering legislation, with SB 246 (Caballero) and SB 40 (Weiner) aiming to expand Medi-Cal funding to address physician shortages and cap insulin prices.
In financial services, there is a significant effort to defend credit unions, community banks, and small businesses from onerous changes to credit card swipe fees by defeating AB 1065 (Ortega), which will unfairly tax these community businesses to benefit a handful of large, multi-state and national big box retailers.
Finally, the environment is a topic that is always hot in California (pun intended). AB 794 (Gabriel), SB 501 (Allen) and SB 682 (Allen) are focused on addressing appropriate water levels, household hazardous waste and substances within product safety regulations, respectively.
As of this writing, AB 916 and AB 1065 are no longer moving forward this session, both of which are successful outcomes for our clients and a testament to their proactive and strategic approach to defeating these bills in 2025.
There is a lot to consider and track this legislative session. We look forward to watching, analyzing and providing our informed perspectives on what the Legislature is up to throughout the course of the year.
One thing is for sure, much like politics on the national scale, things are unpredictable right now. But our commitment to helping clients navigate the complexities of California politics – and policies – remains simple. We hope you’ll join us to keep up to date through the twists and turns of this legislative session. We can’t promise smooth sailing on any front, but we can promise to provide insights, updates and an informed perspective along the way.