Legislative Update

Legislative Bill Deadline Looms

Next Friday, February 22, 2019, is the deadline for legislators to introduce any measures to be considered in the first year of the 2019-20 legislative session. As of Thursday, there have been 855 bills introduced, 567 in the Assembly and 288 in the Senate. This is less than half of the approximately 2,000 measures that are expected to be introduced in 2019, so expect to see a flurry of activity next week as legislators scramble to make the deadline. Some of the more significant bills that have been introduced the past few weeks include:

• Assembly Bill (AB) 260 (Quirk-Silva, D-Orange County) would require a campus of the California Community Colleges (CCCs) or the California State University that issues student identification cards to include on the back of the student identification cards the telephone number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, the Crisis Text Line, or a local crisis telephone number and text line, and specified local law enforcement and security telephone number information
   
• AB 381 (Reyes, D-San Bernardino) would add domestic violence centers to the existing on-campus and community-based organizations with which governing boards should enter into memoranda of understanding, agreements, or collaborative partnerships, to the extent feasible
   
• AB 463 (Cervantes, D-Corona) would require the Chancellor’s Office to develop and provide to community college districts specified materials designed to increase awareness of the federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program among community college faculty members and would require the governing board of a community college district to annually provide the materials to those faculty members
   
• AB 500 (Gonzalez, D-San Diego) would require the governing board of a school district, charter school, and community college district to provide at least six weeks of a leave of absence with full pay for a certificated employee, or an academic employee, who is required to be absent from duty because of pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, and recovery from those conditions
   
• Senate Bill 173 (Dodd, D-Napa) would require the California Department of Social Services to create a standardized form to be used by community colleges and universities to verify the work study eligibility of students who are approved and anticipate participating in state or federal work study

Governor Newsom Delivers First State of the State Address

On Tuesday, February 12, 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom delivered his first State of the State address to a joint session of the State Assembly and State Senate.

On the education front, Governor Newsom only mentioned in passing his proposal for two years of free tuition at the CCCs, but did talk about the fiscal pressures that K-12 school districts are currently facing and the difficulty they are having in balancing their budgets even in these good economic times, which is an issue shared by CCCs. Noting that while the Los Angeles Unified School District (USD) strike is over, the same causes of “understaffed schools, overcrowded classrooms, pension pressures, the achievement gap, and charter school growth” face other districts, calling out Sacramento City USD, Fresno USD, and Oakland USD.

On the workforce front, Governor Newsom announced the appointment of a new Commission on California’s Workforce & Future of Work to bring together leaders from labor and business and come up with new ideas to “expand worker opportunity without extinguishing innovation or flexibility.”

Ending his address on a positive point, Governor Newsom said that he believes in California and knows that the best is yet to come.