UPDATE: The Governor VETOED this bill!
Imagine that like many people, your options on your living space arrangements are limited due to various factors such as income level, marital status, job or school location, or many others that make apartment living the best choice. Unfortunately, the most vulnerable, a single woman, going to college or trade school may unknowingly have a rapist move into her complex. A single Mom with young children living with her also must contend with the lack of protections for their safety from a known child molester moving in and living next door.
A bill, AB 2712, by Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, another Late Night Special passed in the Assembly creates a policy that flies in the face of the strides we’ve made in passing and strengthening Megans Law. Instead this bill takes California backward in the fight to disclose to innocent citizens where these predators are. 2712 creates immunity from civil liability for landlords that rent to sexual predators, should one of these offenders harm one of their tenants, a true disincentive for apartment owners to use the Megans Law database in determining who to rent to. It received ZERO Republican support, all voting "no" on the floor with 4 Dems voting no, including even Nicole Parra disavowing her co–authorship of it and voting no, but it ultimately scraped by with 41 Dem "aye’ votes.
The bill language states:
No duty shall arise for a lessor solely for renting or leasing residential real property to a person
who is registered or who is required to register under Section 290 of the Penal Code, or who is a person who has been convicted as a sex offender in another state or foreign jurisdiction.
AB 2712 does not allow the authority to refuse to rent to known offenders, instead it takes California in the opposite direction of the will of the public by reducing the responsibility for the actions of these offenders. The California Apartment Association, representing more than 2 million rental units, is firmly opposed to this bill. In the view of Megans law and the overwhelming bi-partisan support for Prop 83, Jessica’s Law, on November’s ballot, we must turn back this effort with the Governor’s veto.
Instead of the Public Safety Committee of the Assembly or Senate, [we commonly refer to them as the Public Endangerment Committees] coddling these offenders with enabling legislation like this, we should be legislatively continuing the fight of allowing landlords to have the legal discretion to keep these known offenders out of their complexes. We all have a duty to point out hazards to other people in our everyday lives. Landlords need the legal ability to exclude sexual predators from living amidst their vulnerable tenants, such as "latchkey kids," not more ways to allow them to be separated by only a common wall from your young children or be a "neighbor" to your daughter away at college.
AB 2712 deserves Governor Schwarzenegger’s veto.