While we wait for someone to sue to preempt a November vote on the split-California-in-three initiative, two counties today took aim at a different ballot measure. The Los Angeles Times reports that San Francisco and Santa Clara Counties have petitioned the Supreme Court to strike a recently qualified initiative that would, by its terms, “provide funding for the remediation of structural and environmental hazards occurring in homes and schools.” The “funding” would amount to $2 billion.
The initiative was prompted by a November 2017 Court of Appeal opinion that left intact much of a superior court order requiring defendants to pay $1.15 billion into a fund to be used to abate a public nuisance created by interior residential lead paint. [Disclosure: Horvitz & Levy was counsel for one of the defendants.] Besides creating the $2 billion remediation fund, the initiative would also provide that “lead-based paint on or in private or public residential properties, whether considered individually, collectively, or in the aggregate, is not a public nuisance” and that the new law “shall apply to all cases pending on, pending on appeal on, or filed after, November 1, 2017, and to any injunctions, judgments, or other remedies issued in those cases.”
The California Supreme Court denied review — with two dissenting votes — of the Court of Appeal decision. The case is not over, however. The defendants have obtained an extension to mid-July to petition the U.S. Supreme Court for certiorari.
[June 27 update: The court has docketed the writ petition. There’s a decent chance the court will soon request a preliminary opposition, but that wouldn’t be a guarantee the court will ultimately do anything other than summarily denying the petition. (See, e.g., here.)]