SACRAMENTO >> Hundreds of California bills either survive or perish this week as each house makes rapid-fire decisions on legislation that has accumulated on the so-called “suspense file” this session.
“This one goes out to all my friends who lost bills on #SuspenseFile,” tweeted Phillip Ung, director of legislation for the California Fair Political Practices Commission, on Friday afternoon. “Just know, that no bill ever truly dies.”
Among the survivors: identical Senate and Assembly versions of a closely watched proposal to dismantle the current bail-bonds system, by Sen. Bob Hertzberg, D-Van Nuys, and Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Oakland. Despite robo-calls this week from Dog the Bounty Hunter, who is lobbying on behalf of bail agents fighting the legislation, each bill moves to the floor of its respective house next week, a step cheered by civil rights advocates Friday.
“Money bail has essentially created a two-tiered system of justice in California: one for the wealthy and one for everyone else,” said John Bauters, of the Oakland-based group Californians for Safety and Justice. “By relying on wealth rather than risk to public safety to determine who is freed pretrial, money bail undermines the safety of our communities and the integrity of the justice system.”
The Senate’s appropriations committee, led by Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, made its decisions on Thursday, while its counterpart in the Assembly began going through the bills on Friday morning.
On Thursday, the Senate committee passed a flurry of bills to the Senate floor, including:
Senate Bill 30, by Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, which would block the state from doing business with any contractor involved in building the California-Mexico border wall;
Senate Bill 385, by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, which would allow local governments to move the closing time for bars to as late as 4 a.m.;
Senate Bill 179, by Sen. Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, which would make California the first state in the nation to create a third gender marker — “nonbinary” — on official state documents also will advance to the floor; and
Senate Bill 3, from Sen. Jim Beall, D-Campbell, a $3 billion bond to help pay for the construction of thousands of affordable housing units through existing programs such as CalHome.
