Dear CALBO Friends and Colleagues,

It was a pleasure to see and meet many of you at recent CALBO training events. With the large attendance at the Newport Beach and San Ramon Education Weeks, and registrations coming in for the upcoming Ontario and Burlingame Education Weeks, it is clear that training and education is a top priority for building departments and industry professionals statewide. Code changes and code adoption will continue to be a significant part of our schedules in the next several months. Thank you to the entire membership – whether you are a course attendee, instructor, course developer, or you are performing the code adoption – for all of your commitments, which demonstrate our membership’s dedication to the profession. 

As the first legislative session under Governor Newsom comes to a close, CALBO, along with many other organizations, are looking at which bills he signs into law to set his policies and priorities. The Governor has until October 13 to sign or veto bills passed by the legislature.  This will help us prepare for the second year since many bills that CALBO monitored this year have become two-year bills. This year, CALBO’s legislative priorities focused on seismic resiliency, accessory dwelling units, and disaster recovery. Through the CALBO Board, membership, and staff’s active efforts with state legislators and partnership organizations, like the League of California Cities, CALBO’s positions centered on the impact on building departments that include code implementation, administration, staffing, and funding.

One of CALBO’s focus this year is the seismic inventory bill, AB 429, by Assembly Member Nazarian. After CALBO opposed the bill in 2018, which identified local funds as a possible funding source for the program, this year CALBO collaborated with the Assembly Member on a bill that would require the Seismic Safety Commission to identify funding (that may include state funds and federal grants) and develop a process for a third party to create an inventory of potentially seismically vulnerable buildings. The bill was also amended to apply only to the most seismically vulnerable counties. Since the bill was moved to the Inactive File, it is now a two-year bill and will continue to be a focus for CALBO in 2020.

The state legislature put forth numerous housing bills this year ranging from housing production to tenant protection; among the housing bills is SB 13 (Wieckowski), a bill on Accessory Dwelling Units. CALBO closely monitored this bill and actively engaged with the author’s office throughout the year to address our concerns.  To read about the details of CALBO’s legislative advocacy, please see the thorough legislative update from Katie Almand, CALBO’s Director of Public Affairs, in this CALBO Newsletter.  

Several exciting opportunities to advance and promote our building-safety profession are just around the corner. At the League of California Cities Annual Conference and Expo in Long Beach this month, CALBO and the International Code Council (ICC) are partnering to host a speaker series on seismic safety and resiliency at an expanded booth in the Expo Hall. Right after this League Expo is the ICC Annual Conference, Expo, and Code Hearings in Las Vegas. For the Code Hearings, given that there are many regional or local ICC Chapter code committees actively working on code development, CALBO has created a webpage to post the Chapter committees’ coordination of code change proposals.  We hope this will provide a valuable tool for those attending the Code Hearings. With the shorter travel distance to the League of California Cities Annual Conference and ICC Annual Conference, I encourage CALBO membership to have a strong presence at these events.

With so many educational and conference events ahead of us, I am looking forward to seeing and catching up with many of our members. See you soon!

Sincerely,

Sharon Goei, P.E., C.B.O
Director of Building and Housing
City of Milpitas