CPF Pro-Firefighter Bills Signed by Governor 2024
Following a busy two-year session, CPF is proud to report on the bills from the 2023-2024 Legislative session that were signed into law by Governor Newsom. These bills cover areas important to firefighters and their communities including EMS, workers’ compensation presumptions, local government financing, and pension security. Below is a summary of the measures that are now law.
CPF-sponsored legislation signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom
2023
AB 40 (Rodriguez): Wall time
This effort holds hospitals accountable for excessive ambulance patient offload time (APOT) through two methods: ensuring every LEMSA has adopted an APOT standard, followed by remedies if the standard is not met. The measure requires each LEMSA to establish a standard that does not exceed 30 minutes, 90% of the time, and requires hospitals to establish protocols for reducing APOT when it exceeds the adopted standard for more than one month.
SB 623 (Laird): PTSI presumption extension
This bill extends the sunset of the post-traumatic stress presumption created under SB 542 from January 1, 2025, until January 1, 2029. Additionally, it includes a study on the need to expand the presumption to cover sworn public safety dispatchers.
AB 700 (Grayson): Cancer prevention research
This bill, in coordination with the $7 million budget augmentation passed in June, establishes a fire service community based participatory research program examining bio-markers of carcinogenic exposure and effect in order to identify the biological mechanisms that cause cancer in firefighters and to reduce the incidence of cancer among California firefighters. The University of California will collaborate with the FIRESCOPE Cancer Prevention Subcommittee and collaborate with partner fire agencies and local unions to perform the research.
AB 1020 (Grayson): 1937 Act Disability Retirement
This measure ensures that when a firefighter is seeking a disability retirement for an injury that is covered under a workers’ compensation presumption, that the burden of proof for a county retirement system to determine the service connected disability retirement is consistent with the presumption.
AB 621 (Irwin): Worker’s compensation: Special death benefit for state safety members.
Under current law, only survivors of local safety members and CHP members are eligible to receive both the special death benefit from CalPERS and the death benefit from the workers’ compensation system. This bill achieves parity for CAL FIRE Firefighters and California Correctional Peace Officers Association members, ensuring their families can be awarded both the CalPERS special death benefit and the workers’ compensation benefit.
ACA 1 (Aguiar-Curry): Local government financing: affordable housing and public infrastructure: voter approval.
This measure placed Proposition 5 as a constitutional amended on the November 2024 ballot. The Constitutional Amendment was later amended to reduce the vote threshold for specified bonds from 2/3 to 55%. Among the authorized expenditures are public infrastructure, including “public safety buildings or facilities, equipment related to fire suppression, emergency response equipment, or interoperable communications equipment for direct and exclusive use by fire, emergency response, policy, or sheriff personnel.”
2024
SB 1180 (Ashby): CP/TAD/MIH Reimbursement
SB 1180 directs health care service plans that are issued, amended, or renewed on or after January 1, 2025, to provide reimbursement coverage for the services that are provided by a community paramedicine, triage to alternate destination, or mobile integrated health program.
AB 3025 (Valencia): 1937 Act Disallowed Compensation Protection
AB 3025 ensures that retirees in 1937 Act Retirement Systems will still receive their bargained and paid for benefits in retirement and will not be penalized if pensionable compensation is disallowed and a correction needs to be made. This measure ensures parity for retirees of 1937 Act Systems with retirees of CalPERS.
AB 2284 (Grayson): Grade definition
This bill grants 1937 Act retirement systems that have not yet defined “grade” as it applies to the calculation of pensionable compensation the ability to define “grade” as a number of employees that share job duties, schedules, work location, collective bargaining unit, or other logical groupings that are related to their work.
SB 1240 (Alvarado-Gil): Diamond Springs Fire Protection District/El Dorado County Fire Protection District Consolidation
When two districts or fire departments consolidate, it often requires state legislation to identify the successor agency for the purposes of the CalPERS retirement system. In 2020, CPF worked on AB 1140 (Stone) which helped facilitate the consolidation of Aptos/La Selva Fire Protection District and Central Fire Protection District. This legislation facilitates the consolidation of the Diamond Springs Fire Protection District and the El Dorado County Fire Protection District and establishes a successor agreement for the purposes of the retirement contract.
AB 2813 (Aguiar-Curry): ACA 1 Clean-up Measure
ACA 1 (Aguiar-Curry, 2023), which if passed by the voters will lower the vote threshold for taxes and bonds for projects including safety infrastructure and equipment, passed the Legislature in 2023 and is currently scheduled to be on the ballot in November 2024. During the passage of the measure in the Legislature, the author committed to addressing various stakeholder requests in a clean-up bill