One question I've been wondering is why the California legislature writes such specific bills (e.g. AB1154 https://cayimby.org/legislation/ab-1154/), rather than writing more general bills giving state agencies the power to write rules themselves. Is it perhaps because state agencies have so many constraints on regulation-writing that it's easier to just legislate?
Yeah. It's a very odd pathology of CA governance. Maybe it's a relic of the Schwarzenegger era, when the state legislature didn't trust the gubernatorial administrators to properly implement broadly worded statutes, and so wrote excessively detailed bills to tie the agencies' hands.
One question I've been wondering is why the California legislature writes such specific bills (e.g. AB1154 https://cayimby.org/legislation/ab-1154/), rather than writing more general bills giving state agencies the power to write rules themselves. Is it perhaps because state agencies have so many constraints on regulation-writing that it's easier to just legislate?
Yeah. It's a very odd pathology of CA governance. Maybe it's a relic of the Schwarzenegger era, when the state legislature didn't trust the gubernatorial administrators to properly implement broadly worded statutes, and so wrote excessively detailed bills to tie the agencies' hands.
That makes sense, especially since state agencies can be very slow and often seem to come up with "split the baby" type solutions
Bold assumption that we can build gulags in sufficient numbers to solve this problem!
(For real: great piece. Thank you!)