Legislation

The CSAP GA Committee considered the following bills, and made recommendations to the Board, as follows. The Board concurred on all the GA Committee’s recommendations.  

AB 1668 (Patterson): This bill would urge the Governor, in making appointments, to consider ensuring geographic representation among the 10 regions of California defined by the 2020 census. – SUPPORT
 
AB 1692 (Voepel): This bill would require the Department of Veterans Affairs to establish a program to fund, upon appropriation by the Legislature, an academic study of mental health among women veterans in California. The department would be required to submit a report summarizing the findings and recommendations of the study to the Legislature no later than July 31, 2024. – SUPPORT
 
AB 1921 (Jones-Sawyer): This bill would allow a correctional officer employed by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to receive a confidential mental health evaluation every calendar year to determine if he/she possesses mental health conditions that may be detrimental to performing one’s duties. The bill would specify the training and experience required for those conducting the evaluations. If a detrimental condition is identified, the officer must be notified and offered mental health services. The results of the evaluation may not be shared without the officer’s permission and the officer may not be penalized by his/her employer for seeking mental health services. – SUPPORT
 
AB 1988 (Bauer-Kahan): This bill would change the name of the Warren-911-Emergency Assistance Act to the Warren-911-Emergency Assistance Act and Miles Hall-988-Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Lifeline. – SUPPORT
 
AB 2023 (Bennett): This bill would require, by the start of the 2023-24 school year, each school site in a school district, county office of education, or charter school, serving pupils grades 6 to 12, to create a poster that identifies approaches and shares resources regarding pupil mental health. The poster must be displayed prominently at each school site. The bill would ensure previously mentioned school entities would be exempt from civil liability for any damages that are a result of compliance or failure to comply with these requirements. – SUPPORT
 
AB 2055 (Low): This bill, as of April 1, 2023, would transfer the responsibility for the administration of the CURES database from the Department of Justice to a department specified by the Governor. – WATCH
 
AB 2122 (Choi): This bill would authorize each campus of the California State University, the California Community Colleges, and the University of California to establish a mental health hotline for students to access mental health services remotely. CSUs and CCCs would be required to print the phone number for the hotline on student ID cards issued on or after January 1, 2023. This would be “requested” of the UC schools as well. Campuses without such a hotline would have to print a city/county hotline number on their student IDs. – SUPPORT
 
AB 2178 (Bloom): This bill would revise the definition of “academic medical center” by removing the requirement that the fellows trained by the facility be postdoctoral, by removing the requirement that the research of the foreign medical graduates be clinical, and by requiring the facility to instead offer clinical observer experiences. – SUPPORT
 
AB 2951 (Salas): This bill would require the State Department of Health Care Services to establish a 5-year statewide pilot program to provide grants to cities to create mobile mental health crisis response teams. Cities that receive a grant would have to ensure a mobile mental health crisis response team is a dispatch option when city employees respond to mental health emergency calls within the city. The response teams funded by a grant would be staffed by licensed clinicians who have the legal authority to take, or cause to be taken, a person into custody pursuant to the described provisions. Cities that receive grants would have to submit annual reports to the department. These provisions would be repealed on January 1, 2029. The bill will ultimately include a $50,000,000 appropriation. – WATCH
 
SB 903 (Hertzberg): This bill would require the California Rehabilitation Oversight Board to examine the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations’ efforts to address the housing needs of incarcerated persons, including those who are identified as having serious mental health needs, who are released to the community as parolees or subject to post-release community supervision and to include specified data on homelessness in its reports. – SUPPORT
 
SB 1143 (Roth): This bill would establish the California Acute Care Psychiatric Hospital Loan Fund to provide loans, upon appropriation by the Legislature, to qualifying county applicants for the purpose of building acute care psychiatric hospitals. The application for county applicants must be developed by January 1, 2024. Initial preliminary applications for projects must be submitted to the authority and must be approved by the authority. The authority would provide the number of projects receiving loans, their geographic distribution, and more in a report to the Department of Finance and the Assembly and Senate budget committees. – PUT OVER TO NEXT MEETING

The following bills were also on the agenda; however, time did not allow for discussion.  These bills will be taken up at the April 21st GA Committee and Board meetings. At these meetings, the GA Committee and Board will also consider bills on conservatorship and LPS reform introduced by legislators other than in the eight bill package by Senator Eggman (that CSAP is co-sponsoring; see more below), as well the now fleshed out CARE Court bills.

SB 964 (Wiener): Among other things, this bill, as introduced would have required an analysis and provide recommendations to the Legislature regarding specified topics relating to behavioral health professionals, including the scope of practice laws for behavioral health workers, license requirements and clinical training requirements for behavioral health professionals, and requirements for renewing the license of a behavioral health professional who has an expired license. This language has been temporarily removed but it could resurface in a reworked form (see below under Workforce / Scope).
 
SB 999 (Cortese): Changes the definition of “generally accepted standards of mental health and substance use disorder care” so that it only applies to “generally accepted standards of mental health care.” “Generally accepted standards of substance use disorder care” now means the patient placement criteria established by the American Society of Addiction Medicine. Entities acting on an insurer’s behalf may not use criteria beyond the generally accepted standards of substance use disorder care to make a medical necessity determination, or for utilization review criteria of health care services related to substance abuse disorders.
 
SB 1184 (Cortese): This bill would authorize a provider of health care or a health care service plan to disclose medical information to a school-linked services coordinator. A school-linked services coordinator is defined as an individual that holds a services credential with a specialization in pupil personnel services, as specified, located on a school campus or under contract by a county behavioral health provider agency for the treatment and health care operations and referrals of students and families.
 
AB 1954 (Quirk): This bill would prohibit a physician and surgeon from denying treatment or medication to a qualified patient based solely on a positive drug screen for THC or report of medical cannabis use, except when the patient’s use of medical cannabis is found to be medically significant such that it interferes with treatment. Medical cannabis use recommended by a licensed physician shall not constitute the use of an illicit substance in such an evaluation. This bill would prohibit the punishment of a physician or surgeon who administers treatment or medication to a patient qualified under this bill.
 
AB 2096 (Mullin): This bill would authorize a chemical dependency recovery hospital to exist within a building that houses a distinct part acute psychiatric hospital, an acute psychiatric hospital, or a general acute care hospital, and wherein other services of the hospital are provided if the chemical dependency recovery hospital meets other applicable building standards and is separated by a wall, floor, or other permanent partition, but may share an elevator, stairs, or stairwell, and need not be freestanding. Especially for NCPS members, this bill pertains to circumstances encountered over the last several years by the Mills Peninsula Medical Center in San Mateo County.
 
AB 2761 (McCarty): This bill would require a certificate of death to reflect when the decedent died through use of force by a peace officer, while in custody of a peace officer, or while in the custody of state or local law enforcement, including a city or county jail or state prison. This bill would require an agency with jurisdiction over a state or local correctional facility to post specified information, including the facility in which the death occurred and the decedent’s age, race, and gender, on its internet website within 10 days after a death occurs while the person was in custody. This bill would provide that, if the Commission on State Mandates determines that the bill contains costs mandated by the state, reimbursement for those costs shall be made pursuant to the statutory provisions noted.