A pair of bills to assess fees on fossil fuel companies for damages from climate change are on hold after the second bill author pulled her legislation from a committee hearing Tuesday.
What happened: Assemblymember Dawn Addis (D) pulled her AB 1243 from the Assembly Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday afternoon, as backers waited in the Capitol hallway prepared to express their support.
POLITICO reported Monday that state Sen. Caroline Menjivar’s (D) SB 684, a parallel effort, wouldn’t come up in the state Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, the committee’s last planned hearing before Friday’s deadline for bills to pass policy committees in their houses of origin.
The bills can still come up for hearings past Friday’s deadline, thanks to an exemption for measures imposing new taxes or fees that require supermajority votes. But the fact that committees in both houses were not ready to pass the bills as they stood points to heightened scrutiny over the legislation, which made it to the state Senate floor last year before dying amid opposition from labor and industry.
