Michael Belote, Esq.

By Michael Belote, California Advocates, UTA California Lobbyist

The California Legislature has been described as operating a bill factory, an assembly-line operation where the “product” is new laws. There is some truth to that: each year the Assembly and Senate introduce 2000-2500 new laws, of which slightly less than half are eventually enacted and signed into law by the governor. For better or worse, California’s lawmakers are considered among the nation’s most, well let’s say, affirmative.

By the time the legislature adjourned for the year at approximately 4:00 a.m. on August 30, a total of 769 bills were passed and forwarded to Governor Brown for signature or veto. By September 30, the deadline for signing and vetoing bills, Governor Brown had vetoed approximately 150, signing the balance of the bills sent to him at the end of August. When added to the bills signed throughout the earlier part of the year, the grand total for new laws is over 900. A busy group, indeed.

Final actions by the governor closed out the legislative year for 2014, the second year of the 2013-2014 session. As this is the second year of the two-year session, the slate is wiped entirely clean for 2015: nothing carries over from this year to the next and all bills not signed by Governor Brown would have to be reintroduced in the next session. It is likely that at least one bill opposed by UTA during this year will be reintroduced next year, relating to liens on real and personal property for unproven allegations of unpaid wages.

The “wage lien” bill described above is one of two significant bills opposed by UTA (and many others) which were not passed by the legislature. The other was SB 391, which would have imposed a $75 dollar surcharge on recording virtually all real estate documents, including nonjudicial foreclosure documents, in order to fund the development of affordable housing. While the author of the wage lien bill will be returning to the legislature for 2015, and is thus in a position to reintroduce the bill, the author of the recording surcharge bill will be going to Washington D.C. to serve in Congress, so someone else would have to reintroduce the bill next year.

There also is a strong possibility that legislation will be introduced in 2015 making further changes to HOBR. In particular, there were discussions near the end of the legislative session relating to the so-called “widows and orphans” issue. The question here is what sorts of HOBR rights a survivor who is not on the note possesses when the actual borrower dies. After extensive discussions in July and August, legislative leaders decided to not attempt any legislation in this area for 2014, but new attempts next year are quite possible.

The following very briefly summarizes a number of bills signed by Governor Brown of interest to UTA. The content of each of the bills and accompanying committee analyses, etc. are available through the UTA website.

• AB 1393 (Perea): Mortgage Debt Forgiveness. Conforms state tax law to federal law on the subject of mortgage debt forgiveness.
• AB 1698 (Wagner): Falsified Public Records. Gives criminal courts the authority to void ab initio false or fraudulently recorded documents, upon a criminal conviction for fraud, but also provides for deferral by criminal courts to civil courts to conduct quiet title actions in appropriate cases.
• AB 1700 (Medina): Reverse Mortgages. Prohibits taking an application for a reverse mortgage until at least seven days after the applicant has been provided with counseling and reverse mortgage work sheet.
• AB 1710 (Dickinson): Date Breaches. Imposes requirements to provide twelve months of credit monitoring services to victims of specified data breaches.
• AB 2039 (Muratsuchi): Real Property Auctions. Applies California’s auction law to real property auctions, permitting bids placed on behalf of sellers if properly disclosed to auction participants, but exempts from the provisions of the bill credit bids placed by beneficiaries in nonjudicial foreclosure.
• AB 2100 (Campos): CIDs-Yard Maintenance-Drought. In combination with SB 992 (Nielsen), prohibits CIDs from imposing fines for not watering lawns during periods of drought, but exempts from the fine prohibition circumstances where the CID uses recycled water for landscaping.
• AB 2231 (Gordon): Property Tax Postponement. Reinstates the Senior Citizens and Disabled Citizens Property Tax Postponement Program, which has been unavailable since 2009, commencing in 2016.
• SB 827 (Liu): Los Angeles County Notices of Recordation. Extends for five years from January 1, 2015 to January 1, 2020 the existing Los Angeles County program for mailing notices to homeowners when deeds of trust are recorded against properties.
• SB 1050 (Monning): Notaries. Adds language to notary acknowledgement and jurats taken after January 1, 2015, that notaries verify only the identity of persons executing documents, and not the accuracy, truthfulness or validity of those documents.