SACRAMENTO — House Judiciary Committee Chair and Assemblymember Mark Stone (D-Monterey) says the legislature does not currently have any draft proposals dealing with legal liability protections for health care workers.
"There are no legislative proposals to do anything like that," Stone said in an interview with the Northern California Record. "The governor’s office has talked about potentially an executive order, but they’ve received a little bit of pushback and they’ve slowed down."
Stone said he is glad they're being thoughtful and careful in how they will move forward with that. He said because of COVID-19, priorities have shifted as lawmakers came back to session.
"There is more of an emphasis on policies that are necessary because of the pandemic and looking forward to the recovery," Stone said. "But, also, our time here has been severely cut short now to hear bills through the committee process and budget process so each committee is looking at their workload and finding ways to pare it down."
Stone said they simply don't have enough time to hear everything that was previously planned.
"A lot of legislators are voluntarily pulling bills that they don’t feel are that important or they don’t fit with the times," Stone said. "Then, policy committees are looking at what their capacity is and adjusting bills based on that."
Stone indicated that the state's legislative agenda is shaped by the pandemic's impact.
"It has changed the priorities that I think members are interested in," Stone said. "It has reduced the amount of bills that each committee is going to hear. A lot of that has to do with the capacity to hear bills. We only have a couple of hearings now instead of the many hearings that we’d had before. That has really cut back our ability to hear various bills."
Stone said the legislature should be focusing on the kinds of policies that are affected by the current situation.
"Anything that’s related to the disease, anything related to the other emergencies that we may find ourselves in, like wildfires, are things that the legislature is focused on," Stone said. "We will also be looking at recovery. A lot of that is going to be simple and will be done through the budget committee, but obviously, one of the things we don’t know yet is the scope, the impact on the state’s budget and our ability to raise revenue."
Stone said since they haven't seen the full impact of what the coronavirus has done to costs, they don't know how that will pan out yet.
"We haven’t seen what the receipts are going to be," Stone said. "That will dictate what we will be able to do with respect to assisting people coming out of this crisis."