These are the bills that OC legislators are trying to pass

For now, they’re just bills.

Orange County legislators alone have proposed nearly 700 bills this legislative session. They deal with housing issues and education, transportation and healthcare, taxes and public safety, and much, much more.

Sacramento Snapshot

Want to find out more about what your Orange County legislators are working on in Sacramento? Check out our weekly Sacramento Snapshot series here.

It’s an arduous process getting a bill before the governor. Legislation must be vetted by party leaders, approved by various committees and OK’d by both the Assembly and the Senate. And then the governor has to give his stamp of approval still before legislation becomes the law of the land.

And there’s another, more prominent wrinkle, in bills’ roadmaps this year: a massive state budget deficit.

California is grappling with an estimated deficit between $38 billion to $73 billion, depending on who you ask. Fewer tax collections, for a variety of reasons, are to blame for the deficit.

But that means even more scrutiny is on legislation this year that could carry a price tag for the state — especially as California is set to hit a major deadline for the 2024-25 budget.

Crafting the state budget is a multi-faceted process that technically begins in the summer or fall as state departments prepare proposals. The governor releases the first proposed budget by Jan. 10, legislators and other groups weigh in with thoughts and proposals, and by May, 14, the governor puts forth an updated budget proposal.

This is called the “May revise” version of the budget, and it includes a more current look at the state’s economic status and budget estimates. It’s what legislators and the governor — and all their staff — work off of to hammer out any remaining issues before the June 15 deadline for lawmakers to pass the budget.

By this point in the legislative process, many bills have already died.

But some, including those with estimated fiscal impacts for the state, are still working their way through the process.

For the rest of the legislative session this year, track about two dozen OC legislator-led bills here. You can find where the bills are at in the legislative process, who the authors are and stories we’ve written about them. And keep checking back; we’ll continue to update the tracker as more work is done on these bills in Sacramento this year.