13 Bills By Palo Alto's State Senator Taking Effect Jan. 1

The following was submitted for publication by the office of Jerry Hill:

Thirteen bills by State Senator Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo/Santa Clara Counties, take effect New Year’s Day, providing greater consumer safeguards, improved oversight of utilities, regulation of waste from auto shredding and prohibitions against extortionate mug shot websites.

In all Governor Brown signed 16 of Hill’s bills into law in 2014. Three were urgency bills that took effect when the governor signed them. The 13 taking effect on January 1, 2015, are:

• SB 434 – CPUC Commissioner Board Conflicts – Prohibits current and future members of the CPUC from sitting on governing boards of entities they create as commissioners.
  
  
• SB 636 – Due Process in CPUC Penalty Proceedings – Preserves due process in CPUC penalty proceedings by allowing commission staff to serve in an advocacy role or in an advisory role, but not both concurrently. Last year, the commission’s general counsel dismissed all the attorneys prosecuting PG&E. The attorneys felt it illegal and unethical to advocate that PG&E should not be penalized. Since the general counsel advises the commissioners, it would be unethical for the general counsel to also direct the prosecution. While an ethical separation of roles is already the general practice at the CPUC, agency guidelines allow this practice to be waived whenever convenient.
  
  
• SB 699 – Electric Grid Security – Requires the CPUC to adopt rules compelling utilities to protect the state’s electric power grid from vandalism and attack. The legislation was unanimously approved by the Senate just two days after the second of two serious security breaches in as many years at Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s Metcalf power substation near San Jose. The security breach occurred despite PG&E’s security improvements to the substation as a part of its three-year, $100 million program to increase security system wide. The improvements were prompted by an attack on April 16, 2013, in which snipers knocked out 17 giant transformers at the Metcalf facility and slipped into an underground vault to cut telephone cables. The former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has called the attack “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred” in the United States.
  
  
• SB 900 – CPUC Safety in Ratemaking – Requires the CPUC to consider the safety performance of natural gas and electricity companies when setting customer rates and developing regulations. For at least three years, the CPUC has recognized the need to scope safety into its proceedings, but the development of effective procedures for doing so has been slow. Because the commission has only recently begun to incorporate risk management tools in its policymaking, it has yet to embed safety considerations in the process. SB 900 would ensure such efforts continue and are completed.
  
  
• SB 915 – Mills High School Advanced Placement Testing – Clarifies rules for conducting advanced placement tests for college admission and placement and ensures that investigations and retesting occur in a timely fashion if exams are called into question. It was sponsored by parents and students from Mills High School who submitted the bill idea in the Senator’s annual “Oughta Be a Law …” contest after the test scores of 286 Mills students on 641 advanced placement exams were invalidated in July 2013. The testing process had been challenged and the agency overseeing the exams deemed that “testing irregularities” occurred, even though an investigation turned up no evidence of cheating or other impropriety.
  
  
• SB 968 – Martins Beach Access – Requires the State Lands Commission to enter into negotiations with Silicon Valley billionaire and Martins Beach property owner Vinod Khosla for one year, to acquire a right-of-way or easement for the creation of a public access route to and along the shoreline, including the sandy beach, at Martins Beach. If the commission is unable to reach an agreement to acquire a right-of-way or easement or Khosla does not voluntarily provide public access by January 1, 2016, the commission may acquire a right-of-way or easement, pursuant to Public Resources Code Section 6210.9 (eminent domain), for the creation of a public access route to and along the shoreline.
  
  
• SB 1027 – Bars Web Mug Shot ‘Extortion’ – Bars websites from posting arrest mug shots and then charging hundreds, and if not thousands, of dollars to take the photos down. Sites that post mug shots and charge fees to remove them have flourished by making the photos widely available via the Web. This bill stops these shakedowns. A mug shot is included in an arrest record for identification purposes but it is not intended to imply guilt. In more than half of the cases in California, an arrest does not lead to a charge or conviction.
  
  
• SB 1064 – NTSB Rail Safety Recommendations – Requires the CPUC to respond to National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommendations for rail safety. The legislation mirrors Hill’s AB 578 of 2012, which requires the CPUC to reply to NTSB recommendations for natural gas safety within 90 days and to vote on those recommendations and how they will be carried out. Last year, a rail car on the Angel’s Flight Railway in Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill derailed, leading to a dangerous rescue of four passengers. The firefighter who led the effort had no ropes, railing or walkway to prevent him or the passengers from falling onto concrete 25 feet below. After a fatal 2001 accident on the line, the NTSB had recommended that the commission prevent Angel’s Flight from reopening unless a walkway was constructed to provide a safe path of escape, but the CPUC chose not to do so – an action NTSB considered “unacceptable,” though there had been no mechanism to force the CPUC to comply.
  
  
• SB 1249 – Auto & Appliance Shredder Waste Regulation – Requires the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) to regulate shredded automobile and metal appliance waste. Roughly 700,000 tons of this waste – also called fluff – is disposed of in the state’s landfills each year. But state toxics regulators have failed to revoke an exemption granted decades ago to the metal shredding industry regarding this type of waste, despite warnings from top scientists that this waste could become hazardous during the shredding process. A 2001 legal opinion by DTSC attorneys called the exemption “outdated and legally incorrect.” Seven fires have broken out at metal recycling facilities in the Bay Area since 2007. After fires in November and December, Redwood City leaders called on regulators to do more to help protect residents from future incidents. This bill rescinds exemptions for facilities that deal with vehicle shredder waste and require DTSC to develop regulations to ensure that treatment, transport and disposal are conducted in a manner that protects public health and the environment. The legislation also provides for better DTSC oversight of the industry to prevent contamination, explosions and other risks to California communities.
  
  
• SB 1311 - Establishing Hospital Protocols for Antibiotic Use in Patients – Requires general acute care hospitals in California to establish antibiotic stewardship programs byJuly 1, 2015. The widespread use of antibiotics has increased resistance to infections and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevent (CDC) estimates that each year more than two million Americans are infected with, and 23,000 die from, antibiotic resistant infections. Antibiotic stewardship programs can reduce antibiotic resistance by ensuring that antibiotics are used only when necessary, that the right antibiotic is chosen, and that antibiotics are administered correctly.
  
  
• SB 1409 – CPUC Safety Investigations – Requires the CPUC to list in a report the gas and electric accident investigations the commission finalized in the previous year, as well as those pending completion. The bill also requires the commission to summarize these investigations in its annual report. The CPUC has reported that 150 fatalities and 413 injuries have occurred involving PG&E’s, Southern California Edison’s, and San Diego Gas and Electric’s electrical facilities since 2003. An average of 13 such fatalities occur in California each year. Although the CPUC is required by law to investigate accidents involving electricity infrastructure that result in fatalities and serious injuries, the investigations typically take years to complete, and there is no accounting of completed investigations or those in progress, nor has the public been told of the nature of these accidents.
  
  
• SB 1415 – Bay Area Quality Management District Advisory Council – Modernizes the Bay Area Air Quality Management District’s (BAAQMD) Advisory Council. Currently the BAAQMD is the only air management district in the state with prescriptive categories of people that must serve on their Advisory Council which was established in 1959. The bill reduces the cumbersome membership of 20 to a manageable seven, and it would also require the members of the Advisory Council to be skilled and experienced in the fields of air pollution, the health impacts of air pollution or climate change.
  
  
• SB 1433 – Modern Infrastructure Contracting – Extends the sunset for the “design-build” contracting tool for transit operators for two years. “Design-build” is a contracting process that allows both the design of a project and its construction to be covered in a single contract—a tool well-suited to large, complicated infrastructure projects. This two-year extension better allows transit operators to deliver critical capital projects like the BART extension or the electrification of CalTrain.

Hill’s three urgency bills took effect when Governor Brown signed them in September. Those bills are:

SB 445 – Underground Storage Tank Cleanup
Approved by the governor, September 25, 2014 – Protects soil and groundwater from petroleum contamination by making several reforms to the state’s underground storage tank cleanup fund such as requiring single-wall gas station tanks to be replaced within 10 years. Also allows money from the fund to be used for surface and groundwater contamination cleanup and provide the State Water Board with more authority to crack down on fraud from claimants and consultants.

SB 611 – Limousine Safety Inspections
,Approved by the governor, September 30, 2014 – Spurred by a tragic limousine fire that killed five women last year on the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge, this bill expands safety protections to limousines that seat 10 or fewer people. Specifically, the bill requires that modified limousines with a seating capacity of fewer than 10 passengers be equipped with two readily accessible and fully charged fire extinguishers and be inspected by the California Highway Patrol every 13 months.

SB 1430 – San Francisco International Airport Unlicensed Commercial Transportation Operators

Approved by the governor, September 15, 2014
Closes a procedural loophole and enables the San Mateo County District Attorney to prosecute unlicensed commercial transportation operators that illegally transport passengers to San Francisco International Airport.