Senator McNerney's

2025 Legislative Package

 

My 2025 legislative package is designed to help make California and our Senate district more affordable, ensure that we have clean water while protecting against future droughts, accelerate our transition to clean energy, and ensure that artificial intelligence (AI) is safe and beneficial and does not cause harm to our society.     

Below is a summary of the bills I have introduced in 2025 by the above topic areas. The summaries include links to more information about each bill.

 

Helping Make California More Affordable
 

  • SB 24 Protecting Ratepayers
    SB 24 helps protect Californians against skyrocketing utility bills by preventing investor-owned utilities like PG&E and others, from using ratepayer funds for lobbying, campaigning, political advertising, and fighting local efforts to create a municipal utility. SB 24 prohibits utilities from turning off people’s power on days when outdoor air pollution is unhealthy. For more information, email Brett.Hailey@sen.ca.gov
     
  • SB 225 Summer Meals for Families
    SB 225 fights hunger in CA by expanding the state’s free summer meals program to enable a parent or caregiver of children who participate in the free summer meals program to also receive a free meal, and allowing parents to eat alongside their children. For more information, email Aaron.Gilbert-O’Neil@sen.ca.gov
     
  • SB 69 Clean Cars 4 All
    SB 69 helps low-income communities impacted by air pollution, including in San Joaquin County, by directing more funding to programs helping lower-income consumers to trade in their older higher-polluting cars with newer and cleaner cars. For more information, email Brett.Hailey@sen.ca.gov
     
  • SB 279 Helping Farmers & Winegrape Growers
    SB 279 reduces costs for CA farmers and winegrape growers by allowing them to compost large amounts of green waste onsite during a biomass event, such as the removal of an orchard or vineyard. This follows California’s ban on nearly all agricultural burning. Also allows community composting programs, urban farms, and school farms to compost larger amounts of green waste onsite. For more information, email Lauren.Winn@sen.ca.gov
     
  • SB 543 Low-Cost Housing
    SB 543 helps address CA’s housing affordability crisis by streamlining the construction of new, low-cost housing known as accessory dwelling units (ADUs), also called backyard cottages or in-law units, and junior accessory dwelling units (JADUs), such as an attached garage converted into living space. For more information, email Nathan.Tran@sen.ca.gov
     
  • SB 711 Making Tax Filing Easier
    SB 711 makes it easier for CA taxpayers – especially tax payers with small businesses – to file their taxes by aligning several state requirements with federal requirements. For more information, email Heather.Caden@sen.ca.gov
     
  • SB 846 Protecting Farmworkers’ Wages 
    SB 846 protects farmworkers from wage theft by updating state law that holds agricultural employers accountable. For more information, email Lauren.Winn@sen.ca.gov

 

 

Ensuring Clean Water and Protecting Against Drought
 

  • SB 31 Expanding the Use of Recycled Water
    SB 31 helps drought-proof CA by boosting the use of recycled water. It also enhances the state’s fresh water supply by allowing businesses, homes, and agencies to expand their use of recycled water for irrigation and other uses, rather than relying on drinking water. For more information, email Lauren.Winn@sen.ca.gov
     
  • SB 454 Addressing PFAS Water Pollution
    SB 454 addresses PFAS pollution in CA’s water supply by creating a special state fund — the PFAS Mitigation Fund — that local agencies and cities could access to help pay for the cleanup of toxic PFAS in drinking water. Our district, including the city of Pleasanton, has a significant PFAS pollution problem. For more information, email Brett.Hailey@sen.ca.gov
     

 

 

Creating Clean Energy Jobs and Fighting Climate Change
 

  • SB 787 Strengthening Clean Energy Supply Chains
    SB 787 helps ensure more clean energy jobs will come to California by requiring state agencies, labor unions, environmental organizations, clean energy industries, and other sectors to coordinate CA’s supply chain development for three key clean energy sectors: batteries, offshore wind, and building-decarbonization technologies. For more information, email Lauren.Winn@sen.ca.gov
     
  • SB 86 Clean Energy Funding
    SB 86 creates clean manufacturing energy jobs in California by extending and expanding a key program providing tax incentives to CA green energy manufacturers that open up shop in California and hire California workers. Also adds nuclear fusion manufacturing to the tax incentive program. For more information, email Lauren.Winn@sen.ca.gov
     
  • SB 235 Critical Minerals  Recycling
    SB 235 helps ensure California is reducing its reliance on foreign countries and foreign supply chains by laying the groundwork for a state market for recycling and reusing critical minerals essential to clean energy applications, including batteries, electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines. Also would reduce CA’s reliance on critical minerals mined overseas in processes that harm the environment. For more information, email Robert.Gammon@sen.ca.gov
     
  • SB 327 Accelerating Fusion Energy
    Fusion energy has the potential to produce unlimited amounts of safe clean energy by mimicking the power of the sun to combine atoms. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in our district has been on the cutting edge of fusion technology. SB 327 boosts fusion energy by creating a fusion data center that would foster research and collaboration, and establish fusion data standards. For more information, email Brett.Hailey@sen.ca.gov
     
  • SB 698 Solar Equipment Standards 
    SB 698 modernizes and preserves CA’s world-leading solar equipment standards – which ensure that solar equipment installed in California is safe – and expands them to include bidirectional charging equipment standards and battery storage systems standards, which homeowners with rooftop solar are increasingly using in conjunction with their solar systems. For more information, email Brett.Hailey@sen.ca.gov


  

 

Ensuring Artificial Intelligence Is Safe and Beneficial
 

 

 

I am also joint author of the following legislation this year:

 

For updates on the above legislation and on the California state budget, please follow me on Facebook, X-Twitter, Instagram, BlueSky, or Threads.