BILL ANALYSIS �
Senate Appropriations Committee Fiscal Summary
Senator Christine Kehoe, Chair
SB 1099 (Wright) - regulations.
Amended: April 25, 2012 Policy Vote: GO 9-1
Urgency: No Mandate: No
Hearing Date: May 7, 2012 Consultant: Bob Franzoia
This bill may meet the criteria for referral to the Suspense
File.
Bill Summary: SB 1099 would do the following:
- Revise the dates that a regulation or order of appeal is
effective.
- Require the Office of Administrative Law (OAL) to provide on
its Web site a list of, and a link to the full text of, each
regulation filed with the Secretary of State that is pending
effectiveness.
Fiscal Impact: One time cost of up to $5,000 to revise the OAL
Web site related to contracting with the California Technology
Agency to set up and train OAL staff (up to three staff).
Annual, likely minor ongoing cost to maintain the rotating
list on the OAL Web site.
One time cost of $10,000 to contract with a vendor to
reprogram OAL's database.
Unknown reduction in contract revenue (General Fund).
Background: OAL is charged with ensuring that agency regulations
are clear, necessary, legally valid, and available to the
public. OAL is responsible for reviewing administrative
regulations proposed by over 200 state agencies for compliance
with the standards set forth in California's Administrative
Procedure Act (APA), for transmitting these regulations to the
Secretary of State and for publishing regulations in the
California Code of Regulations (CCR). OAL oversees the
publication and distribution, in print and on the Internet, of
the CCR and the California Regulatory Notice Register.
Staff Comments: This bill will likely cause OAL to
re-negotiate the contract it currently has with the publisher
(Thomson West) of the CCR. The current contract requires OAL to
overnight a copy of the final version of the regulation the day
SB 1099 (Wright)
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it is filed with the Secretary of State. If the regulation does
not go into effect for up to another four months as provided in
this bill, the publisher will need to reconfigure its procedures
for handling the received regulation. This may require creating
another database to store the pending regulations and creating a
new method for integrating the pending regulations, once the
four-month period passes, into the current CCR. It may also
require a staff person to keep track of the regulations should
an intervening regulation be filed that affects the same
regulation, such as an emergency filing that goes into effect
immediately. This tracking and storing will be on-going for the
publisher for each quarter specified in the bill on a daily
basis because regulations are filed with the Secretary of State
nearly every business day.
During re-negotiations, the publisher may want to vary the terms
of the contract that currently states the state receives
$400,000 annually, plus royalties, for the privilege of
publishing the CCR. Because of the down turn of the economy and
the wide availability of law on the Internet, subscribers are
less likely to purchase a subscription for the hardcopy of the
CCR. Thus, the publisher may offer to pay the state much less
for publishing the CCR. Many states pay publishers to print or
maintain on the Internet their state's code of regulations. In
the prior contract between OAL and the publisher, the publisher
paid California $600,000 annually, plus royalties. The
publisher will likely consider the additional burden this bill
imposes.
This bill adds Government Code 11344 (b) to require OAL to
provide on its Web site a list of, and a link to the full text
of each regulation filed with the Secretary of State that is
pending effectiveness pursuant to the quarterly dates in
Government Code 11343.4. This language is problematic because
it does not state where the full text will be located in order
for OAL to provide the link. There is no requirement for a
state agency to post the final version of the regulation because
OAL is charged with the responsibility to maintain online the
Official CCR. Most state agency websites link to the Official
CCR, which is available through OAL's Web site, to inform the
public of its regulations.
Staff recommends amending this bill to clarify how a state
agency gets a copy of regulation filed with Secretary of State.
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A regulation submitted to OAL for review is not necessarily the
same as the one filed with the Secretary of State. Changes to
the regulation text often occur during OAL's review. Because
state agencies are not required to post the final version of the
regulation, the posting should be required as well as when and
for what period of time. Once the pending regulation is posted
on the state agency Web site, the agency should be required to
send the link to OAL. Otherwise, OAL will not know when this
occurs. There will be additional workload for OAL to track,
monitor, and maintain this information on a daily basis because
regulations are filed nearly every business day.
Recommended Amendments: A more cost effective approach to
posting regulations in a timely manner may be to utilize the
Small Business Advocate within the Governor's Office of Business
and Economic Development. At
http://business.ca.gov/Programs/SmallBusiness.aspx the office
has a page entitled "Regulations" (left column) which has a list
of state agencies that adopt regulations that may affect small
businesses. The Small Business Advocate even recommends that
people check this page regularly. (Government Code 11346.7
already requires OAL to maintain a link on its website to the
website maintained by the Small Business Advocate that also
includes the telephone number of the Small Business Advocate.)
It is unclear if the concern this bill is attempting to address
is with the lack of being informed about new regulations rather
than the actual effective date of regulations. One option may
be for the Small Business Advocate could maintain a list of
emails of small businesses and generate a notice of an adopted
regulation that affects a small business every time a notice is
filed with the Secretary of State. (The notice could include a
link to the Official California Code of Regulations.) This
information would be readily available to the Small Business
Advocate from the OAL Web site because OAL maintains a list of
"Recent Action Taken" on regulations on its Web site.