State Senate

California's legislative season is heating up, and both the Assembly and the Senate are beginning to read and discuss the bills wending their way though the session. Here's Streetsblog's weekly highlight of events and legislation related to transportation at the capitol.

Now that State Senator Leland Yee has been arrested on charges of accepting bribes to facilitate trafficking of illegal firearms from a militia group in the Philippines, it's probably a safe bet that his political career is over. State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg has called for Yee's resignation in light of the FBI's charges.

A series of hearings in Sacramento have been revisiting California's Global Warming Solutions Act, Assembly Bill (A.B.) 32, which calls for a statewide reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) to 1990 levels by 2020. Two recent hearings have opened discussions of Governor Jerry Brown's proposed spending plan for the revenue received so far from the state's cap-and-trade program, implemented as part of A.B. 32, and another recent Senate hearing discussed the program's impacts to date.

The deadline to introduce new bills to the California legislature was Friday, so a slew of new legislation is currently being assigned to committees for hearing. Some of them are so-called “spot” bills, as in “hold a spot in line for me, bub,” containing a bare minimum of information, with the plan being to shape them in legislative discussion. All of them are likely to be amended before reaching a vote, and they must go through two voting processes (one in each house) before being passed on to the governor to be signed. Meanwhile, they give some clues about what our lawmakers are thinking about.

CA Senator Darrell Steinberg proposed a change yesterday to California's nascent cap-and-trade program that would replace next year's cap on fuel emissions with a per-gallon carbon tax. Steinberg called it a “broader, more stable, and more flexible” way to reduce emissions from fuels than cap-and-trade.

With a recent report calling out the need for Caltrans to focus less on building highways and more on letting cities build people-friendly streets, state legislators have an eye trained on the agency's progress towards reform.

Last week was a busy one in Sacramento as lawmakers scrambled to compromise and pass important pieces of legislation while others will have to “wait ’til next year.” Streetsblog offers the following scorecard for some of the most important pieces of legislation that will impact the drive to create livable streets.

Steinberg's hasty press conference held after the passage of SB 743

Note: This post originally appeared at Climate Plan.