By Ryan Sabalow | CalMatters
Californians for the past 54 years have relied on the state’s “lemon law” to fight back against car makers that sell them defective vehicles. Now, critics say Californians’ ability to recoup their money after buying a clunker could become more difficult, due to a hastily passed bill that lobbyists representing U.S. auto manufacturers and powerful attorneys groups drafted in secret.
Gov. Gavin Newsom hasn’t signed or vetoed Assembly Bill 1755. His spokesperson, Brandon Richards, on Friday said “the measure will be evaluated on its merits” before Newsom’s Sept. 30 bill-signing deadline.
But how the bill came to end up on his desk is the latest example of how influential lobbying groups write laws impacting millions of Californians behind closed doors — and how the measures are often passed with little time for public input or legislative debate.
“There wasn’t a single person who represents the people of California who knew about this and was a part of those conversations – for months,” Democratic San Ramon Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahantold her colleagues on the Assembly Judiciary Committee last month in the final days of the legislative session.
“They dropped this in our lap, and they expect us to buy an argument related to the urgency that feels, to be honest, not real. And we’re supposed to move this in a week’s time.”
The bill seeks to address a massive uptick in lemon law lawsuits clogging the state’s court system, but it started out earlier in the session as a measure dealing with child support.
Then on August 20, with less than two weeks left in the session, the bill was stripped through the secretive “gut-and-amend” process. Its language was replaced with a 4,200-word bill that seeks to reform how lemon law disputes are resolved. The bill is so complicated its legislative analysis, which lawmakers should read to fully understand a measure’s consequences, was more than 10,000 words.
Former Los Angeles Democratic Assemblymember Mike Gatto said it’s unlikely that lawmakers actually read all that in those final chaotic days of the session with hundreds of other consequential bills still pending.
“Unfortunately, when the Legislature makes complex policy like that with great haste, it increases the reliance on non-elected personnel,” Gatto said. “And it increases the reliance on special interest groups who tell the legislators what the legislation contains. It’s very hard during that chaotic last week of session to, you know, be able to review things of great length like that.”
Downey Democratic Assemblymember Blanca Pacheco, an attorney, told her Judiciary Committee colleagues she wasn’t comfortable voting for the bill because she wasn’t sure what it would do. “I want to make sure that consumers are protected as well,” she said. “Those are our constituents. And so that is what we really should be caring about. And I don’t know if consumers are really protected.”
Lawmakers acknowledge secret negotiations
The bill by two Democrats, Santa Ana Sen. Tom Umberg and San Jose Assemblymember Ash Kalra, nonetheless easily passed the Assembly committee, as well as …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
