Buffy Wicks lays out more big housing targets

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We’ve got just 12 days until Nov. 3. Candidates and office-holders are in the thick of campaigning, and it’s impossible to watch college football or the World Series without a heaping dose of political ads. 

This week also saw intense escalations in the fight between the state and the federal government over California’s election processes, and whether its protocols allow for rampant fraud, as the Trump administration has charged.

That’s the highly charged backdrop for the latest news from the Capitol.

Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, is one of the Legislature’s biggest housing advocates. At a housing-focused event with gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra on Monday, Wicks offered a preview of which bills she plans to focus on next. And her list includes some politically charged subjects, to put it mildly, including Prop 13 reform and the return of redevelopment.

Wicks said she’s prepared to take another shot at reforming construction defect liability law. After getting AB1903 to “the one-yard line,” earlier this year, “we had some interhouse dynamics that prevented that bill from moving forward,” she said. Her measure would have reformed the process for resolving disputes between homeowners and builders when homes have defects as a result of shoddy construction.

Wicks also said she wants to make inclusionary zoning – in which developers are required or incentivized to include a certain amount of affordable housing units in their projects – work better. “I think we need to have a real hard conversation about impact fees. And when you pull the impact fee thread, you end up at the reality that we need Prop 13 reform. That's a much bigger conversation.” That’s putting it lightly. Prop 13, passed by voters in 1978, is a sort of third rail in California politics, though some reforms have passed. It requires that properties be assessed at market value at the time of sale, meaning that Baby Boomers who purchased their homes in the 1970s or 1980s pay wildly less in taxes than people who bought homes later, at far higher prices.

Wicks also casually dropped this bomb: “Is there a conversation for Redevelopment 2.0? I think it’s something we should be entertaining.” California killed off its hundreds of local redevelopment agencies in 2012, under Gov. Jerry Brown. The agencies were tasked with cleaning up urban blight and building affordable housing, but often became vehicles for corruption or mismanagement. 

Finally, Wicks unleashed some anger at the state’s major utilities, which can take up to two years to connect new projects, a delay that she called “so infuriating.”

Prop 2 would double the state’s mandated “rainy day fund” maximum from 10% to 20% of general fund revenues. 

The measure was placed on the ballot via ACA20, by Assembly Member Jesse Gabriel, D-Encino, and supported by Democratic lawmakers. It would amend Prop 2, passed in 2014, which increased the maximum reserve ceiling to 10%. 

It would also change a decades-old Gann Rule that categorizes deposits into the rainy day fund as government spending – something Democratic lawmakers, and some Republicans, have long bemoaned. Under Prop 2, this rule, also known as the state appropriations limit, would only categorize withdrawals from the fund as spending. 

The idea is that this reclassification could encourage lawmakers to fill up the rainy day fund in years of economic boons, since the state Constitution requires California to pass a balanced budget each year.

The Gann Limit, however, is also where opposition to the measure hinges.