Everything you need to know about the latest bills that were vetoed.
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How informed are you about the latest legislative updates? It has been a while since I last updated you all on this, so today, I’m here with an important summary of the latest changes. Fortunately, at the last meeting, all of the bad rent control and eviction bills were killed thanks to the governor vetoing them. Therefore, I’m sharing a list of all of the bullets that were dodged.
The first one I’m talking about today is SB78, which would tell the municipalities that they could individually implement rent control within their cities and counties. There's a battle going on between the state and the municipal parties. The State Legislative Council Bureau says that the municipalities have the authority to implement rent control, but the municipalities say that they don't. SB78 was going to codify that the counties can implement rent control, but it was killed.
There was also AB340, which would change the eviction process and add a couple of weeks to the process. Many of us know we are all still trying to work our way out of the pandemic backlog, so a lot of times, it's taking four to six months to get evictions done correctly. People wanted to add this to the process. However, we amended the bill to have fewer days, and then it was killed, so now we don’t have to worry about these extra processes.
"A lot of unattractive bills were vetoed by the governor recently."
The next one I want to discuss is AB298, which was going to restructure lease agreements. With this, there would be rent control for 18 months for anyone who was a senior citizen and on a fixed income. However, the governor vetoed that as well.
The last one I’m going to mention is AB335, which was going to create an eviction diversion court. This was also like rental assistance, but it was vetoed as well. Therefore, there weren’t too many changes made to the landlord-tenant laws.
I worked diligently with Legal Aid, who brought the majority of these bills forward, to try to amend them just in case they did go forward. However, I'm happy that my efforts were for no reason, as the bills were vetoed. I'm looking forward to working with a lot of the stakeholders over the next year to see how we can increase affordable housing and create a market where there's more supply. This way, demand won’t be so high and rental rates won't continue to increase, which would mean we don't have to keep fighting this battle with rent control.
This is a lot of information, so if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can call or email me anytime and I would be happy to hear from you.