'Gut & Amend': will we see last-minute legislation?

AuthorFox, Jason
PositionCapitolBeat

September marks the last month of first year in the two-year legislative cycle and is a time when legislators return to Sacramento after summer recess to debate and vote on pending legislation. With Sept. 15 being the last day for bills to be passed and sent to the governor this year, it's safe to assume there will be many long days with bills debated late into the night. Even though this has already been a year packed with major policy change and government reorganization, it's not uncommon to see new policy initiatives appear in the final days.

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A long used procedural process, known as "gut-and-amend," allows legislators to gut the entire contents of a bill, minus the bill number, and amend it with entirely new content and policy.

This tactic allows legislators to create a new bill without having to start at the beginning of the process. Mainly used during the last weeks of the legislative calendar, this practice is often used to clean up language in legislation passed earlier in the year, or to pass major policy quickly and without much debate or transparency.

With the passage of Prop. 54 in 2016, it's now required that any proposed amendments to bills be available to the public for 72 hours before they're voted on. While this limits the ability to move these bills quickly and allows greater transparency for public comment, it's still uncertain how much this will stop the gut-and-amend practice.

One relevant example of this process relates to the recent Board of Equalization reforms. As with all major public policy changes, it's safe to assume we will see clean-up language to the BOE reforms in gut-and-amend style. CalCPA continues to work with Legislative leaders and the administration to ensure CPAs continue to be able to represent taxpayers in front of the newly minted Office of Tax Appeals as they did before the BOE.

CPAs and Cannabis

The recent legalization of the recreational use of cannabis has brought a set of new challenges to California. Throughout the year, the state Treasurer's Office, legislative committees, independent research organizations and industry representatives have held meetings and informational sessions to discuss the administrative and policy challenges to the implementation of Prop. 64, which legalized the recreational use of cannabis.

Much of the discussion focuses on how the state can allow an industry to operate that is still federally illegal. Policy leaders are working to develop an...

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