Assembly Standing Committee on Local Government

Good afternoon, everyone. In the interest of time, while we wait for others to come in and have a quorum, I think we have a quorum anyway, but I'm just going to go to the housekeeping items. Welcome, everybody. Testimony for this hearing will be in person.

We also accept written testimony through the position letter portal on the Committee's website. As we proceed with witnesses and public comment, I want to make sure everyone understands that the Assembly has rules to ensure we maintain order and run an efficient and fair hearing.

We apply these rules consistently to all people who participate in our proceedings, regardless of the viewpoint they express, in order to facilitate the goal of hearing as much as possible from the public. Within the limits of our time, we will not permit conduct as disrupts, disturbs or otherwise impedes the orderly conduct of legislative proceedings.

We will not accept disruptive behavior or behavior that incites or threatens violence. And the rules for today's hearing are the no talking or loud noises from the audience. Public comment may be provided only at the designated time and place and as permitted by the Chair.

Public comments must relate to the subject of bills or information being discussed today. No engaging in conduct that disrupts, disturbs or otherwise impedes the orderly conduct of this hearing. Please be aware that violations of these rules may be subject to removal or other enforcement actions. We have two bills on our agenda today.

One of these items has been pooled, SB423 by Senator Gonzalez. We will take up to two primary witnesses in support and up to two primary witnesses in opposition for the remaining Bill. These witnesses will have three minutes each to provide their testimony.

All subsequent witnesses should state their name, their organization and their position on the Bill Only looks like we don't have quorum yet. We need one more and we also need the author of the Bill. With that, we'll just take a little bit of time. Thanks everybody for being here. Thank you for being here.

We also do have a quorum. Madam Clerk, would you please call the roll? Here we have a quorum. And with that we start with agenda item number one, SB415 by Senator Reyes. Senator, when you're ready.

Chair, members, thank you for this opportunity to present SB 415. Last year AB 98, by Assemblymember Carrillo and myself, was signed into law establishing new design field standards for 24 century warehouses, planning requirements for local governments and creating setbacks in sensitive receptors dependent on the size of the warehouse while a framework is put into place.

There were outstanding issues that needed to be addressed related to manufacturing facilities, implementing - implementation concerns and affordable housing requirements among others.

I am proud to have worked with the Chair to address several outstanding issues brought forward, including clarifying that manufacturing facilities are not considered logistics use facilities and therefore not subject to AB 98, giving local governments more time to update their truck routes circulation elements, providing safe harbor language acknowledging good faith efforts to meet the AB 98 deadline, allowing cities with no logistics use facilities to be exempt from the requirements to update their circulation element and allowing local governments outside the warehouse concentration zone to establish truck routes via ordinance.

We are confident that this bill fulfills the commitments Assemblymember Carrillo and I made last year to clarify AB 98 and ensure clear implementation.

I want to thank all the stakeholders and staff for their time and input on this bill and, specifically, Chair Carrillo for his commitment to seeing this issue through and his patience in helping us get here today. I respectfully ask for an aye.

Thank you. And there's no witnesses in support with you today?

No.

Are there any witness - principal witnesses, primary witnesses in opposition? Please come up to the desk.

Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, members. My name is William Weber. I'm a resident of the Town of Moraga. I have a few reasons in opposition today. One is that this disproportionately affects rural districts. Economic development is often limited in rural unincorporated areas where the median household income is generally lower, and unemployment is higher than the statewide average.

Warehouses and logistics facilities represent a tremendous opportunity for economic growth in many of these areas. It can have a significant benefit on the economic wellbeing of the residents involved in construction and operation of the project. This bill fails to address the negative impacts that logistics restrictions created by AB 98 will have on rural counties.

Second, years of cleanup legislation will be necessary to make AB 98 workable. AB 98 was a last-minute deal that received 19 pages of amendments in the final days of the 2024 legislative session. The bill was passed despite opposition from the business industry, local governments, and environmental justice groups.

While SB 415 makes beneficial changes to AB 98, ultimately there will be years of cleanup legislation necessary to make AB 98 workable for impacted parties. Finally, this will eliminate high paying jobs. Limits on the construction of warehouses will hinder the progress the state has made in increasing the movement of goods from its ports in creating jobs.

For these reasons, I respectfully request a no vote.

Thank you. Anybody in support? Just please state your name, affiliation and position on the bill.

Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members. Lauren De Valencia representing the American Planning Association. We are very pleased to be here in support of the cleanup amendments and really want to thank Senator Reyes, you, Mr. Chair, your staff for the incredible amount of work that's gone into this.

Our planners really need this cleanup to be able to implement AB 98 to the best of their abilities. And we really appreciate all the work that's gone into this, and I am very much asking for support. Thank you.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Mark Neuburger with the California State Association of Counties. Like to align my comments to those provided by APA and also personally thank the Senator, the Chair, the staff of this committee, and on the staff of your offices for all their assistance in getting the needed amendments we need on this bill.

CSAC is in support.

Thank you.

Good afternoon. John Kennedy with Rural County Representatives of California. We're here today in support of the bill. We think it provides a lot of the flexibility and makes some changes, so the bill is implementable in rural areas. So, appreciate the bill. Thank you.

Thank you.

Melissa Sparks-Kranz with the League of California Cities; here in support of the cleanup legislation today. We really want to thank the authors, Senator Reyes and Assemblymember Carrillo, for the immense amount of work that went into the cleanup this year. Thank you so much.

Good afternoon. Chair and members. Skyler Wannacott, on behalf of the California Business Properties Association and our members NAOP California and BOMA California. Also here representing a large coalition of groups and support over 40 organizations, including NAOP SoCal and NAIOP Inland Empire that worked really hard on this issue over the past two years. I want to thank Mr. Chair Carillo and Senator Reyes and especially your guys staff for working on this over the past year. It's been a ton of work and we are here in strong support. Thank you.

Mr. Chair, members, Kurt Kimmelshue here today on behalf of the International Warehouse Logistics Association, in support. Thank you.

Good afternoon. Taylor Triffo, on behalf of the California Grocers, in support.

Mr. Chairman, Oracio Gonzalez on behalf of California's Business Roundtable; I just want to again commend Senator Reyes and Member Carrillo for listening to us and really getting this to a much better place. Thank you.

Thank you.

Mr. Chair and members, Andrew Antwih with Shaw Yoder Antwih Schmelzer & Lange; here today on behalf of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association. Credit to both authors and staff and thank Senator Reyes especially for hearing us out on issues that we brought to the table. And thank you; we support.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members. Faith with the - Faith Conley with Vitamin Group on behalf of Supply Chain Federation. No position but did want to be very grateful to you both for getting this done. A lot of stuff in there is very imperative to the logistics industry. It's been a long road.

So, I want to thank you both as well as your staff and the consultants for working on this today.

Thank you. Good afternoon, Chair and members. Adam Regele with the California Chamber of Commerce. We certainly echo all of the positivity and the outlined points of the cleanup that Senator Reyes has outlined in SB 415. And so that policy is certainly one that we support.

But we continue to flag for the Legislature that eight hours before this years long process was negotiated, a bill was gotten amended on policies that were negotiated and then expressly not included as part of this package. To see it come up eight hours later in another bill we believe is an end or run around on this process.

And so, we continue to flag that SB 352 in our view is not in good faith to the broad good faith negotiations. Thank you.

Anybody else in support or opposition? Seeing nobody else. Committee members, comments, questions, a motion? Motion by Assemblymember Pacheco. We have a second too, but Assemblymember Hoover has comment or question.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yeah, I just want to make a brief comment. I do appreciate obviously the work that's gone into this bill. It's great to see, you know, so many stakeholders supporting the bill. But I do want to continue sort of... on the comments that were made by one of the stakeholders just on process.

And I do continue to be disappointed in sort of how this policy is being made. Obviously last year's bill, with all due respect to the author and the Chair, of course, was done sort of at the very end of legislative session.

And not only that, but on that floor debate specifically, about five or six people that rose their mics to speak in opposition were actually not able to speak in opposition on the bill, even on the Assembly floor.

And so, while I do appreciate the efforts going into cleaning this up, I think we have a long way to go when it comes to actually addressing all of the, all of the issues with the legislation that was passed in a hurry last year.

And I will be supporting the bill today but would just encourage us to continue to work with stakeholders on future fixes as well. Thank you.

Thank you Assemblymember Hoover. Seeing no one else. Would you like to close, Senator?

I do appreciate the comments from our colleague. I think what is important to remember is that these issues, or these bills have been introduced almost every session; trying to get through this and I guess we just needed to have Chair Carrillo be part of it to get it through.

I appreciate the comments from those who are in support. Spending the time with industry was extremely important. And I think sometimes for some of us, we will look to one side. And that is, for me, is protecting the community, making sure that environmental justice was addressed.

But spending the time with industry in this cleanup was very important and I appreciated all of their input. And most especially, I do want to give a special thanks to Chair Carrillo for his leadership in this and our respective staffs.

Well, thank you for that. And I'll just add that it's a commitment that we both made to keep working on it. We really did a lot of work on this and a lot of improvements. I do realize that we still need to keep working on it, maybe in the future.

But I appreciate all the work that you also put into this legislation. It's been a yearlong of negotiations, as you and I know. Right after this was passed on the Assembly floor last year, AB 98 right afterwards, we continue to work on this issue. Even though the journey was tough.

We accomplished a lot and a few things that we accomplished. We provided most local governments a viable pathway to meeting the truck route requirements of AB 98 via local ordinance. I think that's a big win for local governments.

Required the courts to consider jurisdictions, circumstances, a good fit effort to come into compliance with AB 98 when considering cases brought against jurisdictions regarding compliance with AB 98. We provided all frames for jurisdictions that don't have warehouses and don't plan to have any warehouses. I know that was one of the concerns that we heard yesterday on the Senate Committee.

These are just a few of the accomplishments that we made. Any changes made by this bill were carefully negotiated and agreed upon all stakeholders. Again, realizing that we still need to continue working through this, again, committed to continue to do that. And I do want to thank you for your tenacity on how we got to this place.

Appreciate the work that we did together. And I just want to also thank staff, both offices, your office and my office, and also the local government staff. Principal Consultant Linda, our intern, Julia and Jimmy and Marisa. And by the way, this is the last hearing of this year. Angela, of course, of course.

I did say the principal consultant. Thank you all for the hard work that you put into it and this being the last local hearing of this year. Thank you again for the work that you put together. With that we do have a motion and a second. Would you please call the roll?

[Roll Call]. Vote is 8-0.

The motion is do pass with a 0?

Yes.

No noes. We're missing Wilson.

Oh, so Wilson is here.

Would you like to add on?

Yeah.

So now we have...10. 10 out of 10. Thank you, everybody.

The bill is 10-0. The bill is out. Motion do pass. Thank you.

All right, does it - does it go to the floor now?

With that, we adjourn this hearing for today. Thank you.