Recovery from a state of emergency.

New Section 8608.3 requires DHCD to convene a workgroup by July 1, 2028 to review the California Building Standards Code and recommend provisions that should be suspended for rapid, safe, disaster-resilient rebuilding in any future state of emergency. The workgroup must update its report after every release of a new edition of the Building Standards Code.

The bill now adds three sections (8608.2, 8608.3, and 8608.4) to the Government Code instead of two. The electronic submission requirements previously in Section 8608.3 are renumbered as Section 8608.4 with no substantive content changes.

New Section 8608.2(a)(3) explicitly excludes building standards adopted by the State Fire Marshal that relate to panic safety and fire safety from being considered for suspension during wildfire recovery.

The exemption language in the electronic submission section (now 8608.4) was cleaned up to remove garbled text from the prior version, clarifying that counties under 100,000 population, cities within those counties, and cities under 50,000 population are exempt.

The document changed from a formal enrolled bill format (with Secretary of Senate, Chief Clerk, and Governor receipt blocks) to a web page layout with navigation menus, version history, and status panels. The underlying legislative text of Sections 8608.2, 8608.3, 8608.4, and Section 4 is identical in both versions.

A new triggering condition requires the Office of Emergency Services to make a written determination within 10 days of the Governor's wildfire emergency declaration that the wildfire caused 'substantial structural damage requiring significant rebuilding efforts,' defined as the destruction of 25 or more residential or commercial structures. Without this determination, the permitting review and building code suspension provisions do not apply.

All reporting deadlines in Section 8608.2 (the 30-day permitting report, the 60-day building code review, and the 60-day local coordination report) now run from the date of the Office of Emergency Services written determination rather than from the state of emergency declaration itself.

Section 8608.3 (electronic submission requirement) removed 'local agency' as a separate term, now applying only to 'state agency or political subdivision.' This may narrow the explicit scope of the e-filing mandate depending on how these terms are defined in Section 8557.

A new provision allows the Department of Housing and Community Development to incorporate by reference any report prepared by a governmental entity, in whole or in part, into its own reports under this section.

References throughout the bill were changed from 'state of emergency wildfire' to simply 'wildfire,' clarifying that the triggering event is the wildfire itself rather than the state of emergency declaration as a combined concept.

The 30-day and 60-day reporting deadlines in Section 8608.2(b), (c)(1), and (d) were changed from being triggered by 'a state of emergency declared by the Governor relating to a wildfire, written determination made pursuant to subdivision (a)' to simply 'a written determination made pursuant to subdivision (a).' This removes the redundant reference to the state of emergency declaration as a separate trigger, making the Office of Emergency Services determination the sole clock-starting event.

Section 8608.2(c)(1) now requires recommendations for 'rapid, safe, wildfire-resilient, and cost-effective rebuilding and recovery' instead of just 'rapid, safe, and cost-effective rebuilding and recovery.' This adds an explicit wildfire resilience standard to the Building Standards Code suspension review.

Senator Rubio was added as a coauthor of the bill.

Subsection (e) of Section 8608.2 was reorganized: the provision about incorporating reports by reference and the provision about compliance with Government Code Section 9795 were renumbered from a single subsection (d) into two paragraphs under new subsection (e).

New subdivision (g) in Section 8608.3 exempts counties with a population of less than 100,000 and any city within those counties from the requirement to accept electronic submissions for disaster recovery applications, forms, plan sets, appeals, or requests for agency action.

Section 8608.3(a) now explicitly includes 'political subdivision, as those terms are defined in Section 8557' alongside state agencies and local agencies, broadening the class of entities subject to the electronic submission mandate.

The exception clause in Section 8608.3(a) was updated from 'except as provided in subdivision (c)' to also reference subdivision (g), incorporating the new small-county exemption into the operative provision.

Throughout Section 8608.3, references to 'agency' were updated to 'state agency or political subdivision' to align with the expanded scope definition.

A new operative date of January 1, 2028 was added for the electronic submission requirement (new subsection (h)). Previously the requirement would have taken effect immediately upon a Governor's wildfire emergency declaration.

The exemption from the electronic submission requirement was expanded. Previously only counties under 100,000 population and cities within those counties were exempt. Now cities with a population under 50,000 are also exempt regardless of their county's size, creating a broader carve-out for smaller municipalities.

The coauthor list for Senators was reformatted to correct a duplication error (Ochoa Bogh appeared twice in the prior version).