BOMA California 2010 - Legislative Session Ends on a Positive Note for the Industry

BOMA San Francisco Members:

Please take a moment to review some of the successes your tireless BOMA California staff has achieved in Sacramento for the commercial, industrial, retail real estate industry from this past year:

Legislation – Engaged on more than 500 pieces of Legislation in the California State Capitol.   49 bills “High Priority”.  31 Opposed – 15 of those killed, 16 vetoed.  8 supported bills signed by the Governor.  0 bills opposed by CBPA signed into law.

Split-Roll Property Tax – In the past year, BOMA California stopped two serious efforts to eliminate protections of Prop. 13 for commercial real estate.  The first, pushed by several public employee unions, proposed an initiative to enact an immediate 55% increase in all private non-residential state property taxes.  The second was a legislative bill that would have automatically reassessed all corporate commercial properties every three years.  It is likely that more proposals will be back in the New Year.

Like-Kind Exchanges – BOMA California led an effort to stop two separate bills that would have taken away the ability of California companies to use 1031 Like-Kind Exchanges.  Bills such as this that take California out of conformity with federal law as a way to raise additional revenue for the state are extremely harmful to any company that owns properties in multiple states.

Mandatory Commercial Building Benchmarking – Have led the statewide effort and put together a commercial real estate workgroup to help the CA Energy Commission to write the rules implementing the states mandatory building benchmarking law.  Because of this effort, issues related to multi-tenanted building and shopping centers have been highlighted and given priority to resolve.

Repeal of Business Tax Incentives – Defeat SB 1272 (Wolk; D – Davis), which would require the state to automatically repeal any new tax incentives after seven years. This bill would have applied performance metrics to private companies receiving tax funds, which the state was unwilling to apply to state agencies, taxes, or regulations.

Stopped Increased Water Fees – Defeated ACA 18 (Liu; D-Torrance), which would have authorized stormwater and urban runoff management fees or charges to be exempt from 2/3’s voter approval requirements.

Green Building Codes – BOMA California lead an industrywide effort to engage our experts in the public process and helped shape the nation’s first statewide “green building code” (known as CALGreen).  These codes balance environmental issues with economic feasibility and technological achievability to provide industry with a standard it can successfully meet.

Code Adoption – BOMA California sponsored legislation, AB 1693 (Ma; D – San Francisco), which modifies the interim code adoption cycle and extends it to an 18 month process.  This will give the industry and local governments additional time to understand and adopt energy and building code changes that impact both new construction and tenant improvements.

CEQA and AB 32 – BOMA worked very hard to see AB 1846 (V. M. Pérez; D-Coachella) pass.  This bill streamlines the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) approval process for certain projects by allowing industries subject to compliance with greenhouse gas regulations under AB 32 to go through an expedited environmental review using a focused environmental impact report.

Financing for Energy Efficiency – BOMA California worked to see AB 1873 (Huffman; D-San Rafael) pass.  This new law makes it more attractive for local governments to offer Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs and lower the interest rate of loans to business owners for energy and water efficiency improvements to existing buildings.