YOUR DUES DOLLARS AT WORK THE BUSIEST WEEK IN APRIL by CCA Vice President of Government Affairs Kirk Wilbur The month of April is perhaps the busiest in California’s full-time legislature. This early in the year, the Legislature has yet to weed out many of the more-than-2,600 bills introduced by the mid-February bill introduction deadline. And with an end-of-April cutoff for policy committees to consider and act upon any bill that might have a fiscal impact upon the state, there’s real urgency by the end of the month to hear each of those bills in increasingly-lengthy committee hearings. (The deadline for policy committees to act on non-fiscal bills is just one week later.) To put it simply, the last two weeks of April are a marathon for legislative advocates, including your CCA government affairs team. Fortunately for California’s cattlemen, the long hours and tireless efforts invested by CCA in late April have shown some promise for the Association’s legislative priorities. Below is a snapshot of CCA’s lobbying achievements in just one week in April, from Tuesday, April 18 through Monday, April 24. AB 1197 (Hart) Assembly Bill 1197, authored by Assemblyman Gregg Hart (D-Santa Barbara), would amend the Agricultural Protection Planning Grant Program, which provides planning grants to “Conserve California’s most productive farmlands and ecologically important rangelands.” Assemblyman Hart has described the bill as a “measure to identify and map local food producers that are doing the important work of supporting and feeding local communities” and to “support efforts to connect small family farms to…necessary resources” and bolster local economies. Unfortunately, AB 1197 defined a “local food producer” in part as an agricultural producer who “Farms on 500 acres or less across all properties,” effectively eliminating all commercial livestock producers from the grant assistance available under the bill. Heading into the April 19 hearing of the
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Assembly Agriculture Committee, CCA was the only organization to raise concerns about this limiting definition. Fortunately, in response to CCA’s advocacy Assemblyman Hart committed to the Committee that he would work with CCA to craft amendments which would address our concerns. In light of this commitment, AB 1197 passed out of the Agriculture Committee; CCA is in the process of working with the Assemblymember’s office to craft the amendment conceptually agreed to in committee. SB 485 (Becker) CCA was lobbying SB 485 weeks before Senator Josh Becker (D-San Mateo) even introduced the bill. As initially introduced, the bill sought to establish a program within the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to incentivize enteric fermentation emissions reductions from all livestock through the use of feed additives and directed CARB to set a regulatory target for adoption of such feed additives. Ahead of an April 24 hearing in the Senate Agriculture Committee, CCA and the Western United Dairies had secured several favorable amendments to the bill, including eliminating CARB’s ability to set a target for feed additive adoption because these initially non-binding targets are often used to justify subsequent legal mandates. The bill had also been shaped to establish a truly voluntary, incentives-based approach favored by dairy producers. CCA remained opposed to the bill, however, due to its inclusion of beef cattle on feed. Most research and development on methaneemissions-reducing feed additives has been focused squarely on dairy cattle, and emissions reductions achieved for dairy cattle do not directly translate to beef cattle due to differences in breed and diet. Additionally, there are market disincentives to enrolling in a CARB program, as many out-of-state beef processors will not accept