2024 Legislation

PRIORITY

* Indicates a Jewish California-sponsored item

^Indicates two-year bill

Green: Indicates victory!

Included in the budget ($80 million annually for two years): *California State Nonprofit Security Grant Program – $80 million: Provides funding for synagogues and other nonprofits at risk of hate-motivated violence to secure their institutions from hate crimes.

Included in the budget ($5 million): *California Teachers Collaborative on Holocaust and Genocide Education – $5 million: Expands the work of the Teachers Collaborative to ensure schools meet their requirement to teach about the Holocaust. The Teachers Collaborative is composed of 14 leading California Holocaust and genocide educational institutions working together to create lesson plans, vehicles for the distribution of new curriculum, and teacher training programs.

Signed into law: AB 1979 (Ward): Doxing Victims Recourse Act – Provides recourse for doxing victims by allowing a victim to pursue civil action to receive restitution for the harms endured because of being doxed. Doxing is when someone releases another person’s private, personally identifying information, without their consent, with the intent to cause that person harm.

Signed into law: AB 2621 (Gabriel): Requires law enforcement trainings on hate crimes to include education on the role gun violence restraining orders (GVROs) can play in preventing hate-based violence.

Signed into law: *AB 2867 (Gabriel): Ensures that California law is applied to protect residents seeking to reclaim art stolen in times of political persecution. This is a critical protection for many in our own community who were victims of the Nazi looting in World War II.

Signed into law: AB 2917 (Zbur): Prevents violent acts of armed extremism by naming risk factors judges should consider in deciding whether to issue a gun violence restraining order (GVRO), removing firearms before clear threats turn into tragedy. The risk factors added include threats of violence made against groups and locations where groups gather, and threats made against any person or group protected by California’s hate crimes law.

Died in Senate Appropriations at Request of Author: *AB 2918 (Zbur): Applies common sense guardrails and transparency policies to the implementation process of K-12 Ethnic Studies curricula, helping to ensure that pedagogically-sound Ethnic Studies is taught in our classrooms.

Signed into law: *AB 2925 (Friedman): Requires antisemitism to be included in higher education anti-discrimination and DEI trainings.

Signed into law: AB 3024 (Ward): Stop Hate Littering Act – In response to an uptick in antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ flyers illegally distributed on private property, ensures victims of hate littering are provided adequate protections and civil recourse. Hate littering is defined as the distribution of hateful propaganda targeting one’s race, gender, religion, or other actual or perceived protected characteristics in the form of flyers, posters, or symbols, with the intent to terrorize. These protections and recourse are afforded under existing law called the Ralph Act, which will be expanded to include hate littering.

Signed into law: ^SB 399 (Wahab): Prevents employers from disciplining workers who refuse to attend meetings where the sole purpose of the meeting is to convey an employers’ religious or political values.

Died in Senate Appropriations: SB 1080 (Newman): Requires school sites to provide culturally appropriate halal or kosher food options if the share of a school’s student body is comprised of five percent or more of individuals adhering to these dietary restrictions.

Signed into law: *SB 1277 (Stern): Codifies the California Teachers Collaborative on Holocaust and Genocide Education as an official state program.

Signed into law: *SB 1287 (Glazer): Requires higher education institutions to strengthen code of conduct policies to better address incidents of violence, intimidation, and harassment.

Died in Senate Appropriations: *SB 1421 (Stern): Institutes an “Office of Civil Rights” at the California Department of Education, tasked with investigating incidents of hate in schools, including discrimination, harassment, intimidation, or bullying related to various factors such as disability, gender, nationality, race or ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion.

Signed into law: SB 1504 (Stern): Cyberbullying Protection Act – Requires social media platforms to consistently address instances of cyberbullying reported by children or their parents, and to either remove the content or explain why it is not in violation of their platform’s policies. The bill permits an aggrieved minor to bring a civil suit against a company that is in violation of the Act.

Supporting Vulnerable Communities

We aim to uphold the Torah’s most enumerated commandment – v’ahavta lere’acha kamocha (loving the stranger as yourself) – by working to combat hunger and poverty, expand access to healthcare, support vulnerable communities, and combat climate change.

Included in the budget ($79 reappropriation of unspent funds): *San Diego Rapid Response Network Funding Restoration – $150 million budget restoration: Restores funding for programs that support asylum seekers in the California border region, including Jewish Family Service’s Asylum Seeker Shelter and Services.

Died in Senate & Assembly Appropriations: ^AB 311 (Santiago) / SB 245 (Hurtado): Food4All – Provides state-funded nutrition benefits to all Californians who are income-eligible for CalFresh but cannot access the benefit due to their immigration status.

Died in Assembly Appropriations: AB 1914 (Grayson): Instructs the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges to develop a model curriculum for a certification program for providers of care for individuals with developmental disabilities, designed to be offered at community college campuses where there is sufficient student interest and a properly qualified faculty to sustain a certification program.

Vetoed by Governor: AB 1949 (Wicks): Enables a minor between 13 and 18, or the parent of a minor under 13, to opt-out of permitting social media platforms to collect, sell, or share their personal information. This helps avoid incentives for social media companies to use addictive features to keep minors on their apps to collect more data.

Died in Assembly Appropriations: AB 1968 (Jackson): Requires the Department of Social Services (DSS) to automatically enroll seniors age 60 years and older who meet qualifying income thresholds into Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), known in California as CalFresh.

Signed into law: AB 1986 (Bryan): Creates an oversight and review process for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s (CDCR) practice of banning books in prison.

Vetoed by Governor: AB 2263 (Friedman): Establishes a study to assess departmental infrastructure, funding strategies, and target populations for a statewide Guaranteed Income program. The study will be led by a newly formed Coordinating Council. This initiative is designed to reach California’s most socially and economically vulnerable populations, with a special focus on regions with a high cost of living.

Signed into law: AB 2432 (Gabriel): Creates the California Crime Victims Fund, to be funded by certain fines imposed by a court on corporations convicted of a white-collar crime. The Fund is intended to avoid cuts for domestic violence services programs impacted by federal funding cuts to the VOCA (Victims of Crime Act).

Died in Assembly Appropriations: AB 2459 (Wilson): Ensures foster youth are offered an opportunity to have a trauma-informed mentor through a qualified nonprofit mentoring organization like Big Brothers Big Sisters, by requiring social workers and probation officers to include information regarding mentoring services for the foster youth. Nonprofits will also be alerted if a foster youth is relocated to maintain continuity of care.

Died in Senate Appropriations: *AB 2507 (Friedman): Pilots an interest-free student loan program to benefit students from low-income, homeless, at-risk of homelessness, or food insecure families, supported by Jewish Free Loan Association. This bill would be a first step in moving us towards a state-wide interest-free student loan program.

Died in Senate Appropriations: AB 2728 (Gabriel): Improves the implementation of last year’s Jewish California-sponsored SB 4 that allows affordable homes to be built on land owned by synagogues and faith institutions. This includes incentivizing cities and counties to plan for and encourage the production of housing on faith institution-owned lands, expanding existing data tracking, and providing prospective developers and landowners with important information relating to building housing on SB 4-eligible land.

Died in Assembly Appropriations: AB 2956 (Boerner): Allows adults enrolled in Medi-Cal to keep their coverage for a full 12 months, amidst a huge number of unanticipated procedural disenrollments due to the rolling back of the flexibilities afforded during the Covid public health emergency. It also makes some federal flexibilities permanent, improving the Medi-Cal enrollment and renewal system for all.

Vetoed by Governor: AB 3160 (Gabriel): Makes permanent the enhanced state Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (housing credit). State housing credits fill financing gaps, expanding access to billions of dollars of federal housing credits, and creating tens of thousands of new affordable housing units.

Died on Senate Floor: AB 3172 (Lowenthal): Establishes liability for social media companies with design features that they know harm young users’ mental health. While the resultant costs of these harms are currently borne by families, educational institutions, and taxpayers, this bill would expand on protections in existing negligence law by specifically addressing social media platforms.

Vetoed by Governor: ^SB 37 (Caballero): Creates a rent subsidy program for older adults and people with disabilities to end and prevent homelessness.

Vetoed by Governor: *^SB 85 (Wiener): California Extended Case Management Act – Extends critical case management services for new refugees by three months beyond the federal government’s 90 days.

Vetoed by Governor: ^SB 227 (Durazo): SafetyNet4All – Creates an Excluded Workers Program for workers excluded from unemployment insurance due to their immigration status. Eligible workers would receive $300 each week for up to 20 weeks.

Signed into law: ^SB 242 (Skinner): Prohibits funds deposited and investment returns accrued in a HOPE trust fund account from being considered as income or assets when determining eligibility and benefit amount for any means-tested program until an eligible youth withdraws or transfers the funds from the HOPE trust fund account, as specified. To the extent this bill would expand county duties, the bill would impose a state-mandated local program.

Died in Assembly Appropriations: ^SB 294 (Wiener): Ensures health plan denials of care for mental health disorders for youth ages 0-26 are automatically reviewed, either through the grievance process for non-urgent cases or through the Independent Medical Review process for urgent/life-threatening cases.

Signed into law: ^SB 729 (Menjivar): Requires health care services to provide coverage for infertility and fertility services. Revises the definition of infertility to ensure same-sex couples are covered by health care insurance and are treated without discrimination.

Signed by Governor to appear on November ballot: ^SB 867 (Allen): Adds a $15.5 billion state general obligation bond to the 2024 ballot to address California’s need to protect communities and natural resources from the impacts of climate change.

Signed into law: SB 957 (Wiener): Enacts recommendations from last year’s state audit to close loopholes in existing law and ensure that the California Department of Public Health is collecting, analyzing, and reporting data on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) to improve LGBTQ+ health outcomes.

Signed into law: SB 976 (Skinner): Prevents social media platforms from providing “addictive feeds” to minors – i.e. algorithmically-driven content recommendations, as opposed to content specifically searched for by the user – unless they first obtain parental consent to do so. It also enables parents to restrict their child’s access to the platform at night and during school hours (or other times), limit the total daily hours on the platform, and prevent users not already connected with their child from viewing or responding to content they have posted. It does not give parents access to their child’s specific activities online or any additional controls over their account.

Signed into law: SB 1089 (Smallwood-Cuevas): Addresses food injustice by requiring advance notification to community stakeholders prior to the closure of a grocery store in underserved or at-risk communities. Specifically, it requires the county to provide resources for community members to access healthy food nearby and for employees to access jobs elsewhere.

Countering Antisemitism and Hate

With skyrocketing levels of antisemitism following October 7, 2023 – when Hamas committed its terrorist onslaught in Israel – Jewish California is putting forth a robust antisemitism bill package to ensure the safety of Jewish students, workers, and members of society.