AB 306 (Schutz & Rivas): Building Standards Moratorium – Oppose (As amended June 10, 2025)

June 12, 2025

The Honorable Assemblymember Robert Rivas
Speaker of the California Assembly
1021 O Street, Suite 8330
Sacramento, CA 95814

The Honorable Assemblymember Nick Schultz
1021 O Street Ste. 5150
Sacramento, CA 95814

RE: AB 306 (Schutz & Rivas): Building Standards Moratorium – Oppose (As amended June 10, 2025)

Dear Assemblymember Schutz and Assemblymember Rivas,

On behalf of the Marin County Board of Supervisors, we respectfully write to reaffirm our opposition to Assembly Bill 306 (Building regulations: state building standards), as amended on June 10, 2025. We appreciate and share your goal of reducing barriers to housing production, and we applaud the urgency of your efforts in response to California’s severe housing crisis—one that we experience acutely in Marin. However, we remain concerned that this bill will undermine local and statewide efforts to not only achieve critical environmental, climate resilience, and sustainability goals, but also to carry out our own streamlining of local regulations that make housing more feasible.

Our Board has demonstrated its deep commitment to addressing the housing crisis. We have adopted a state-certified Housing Element that plans for more than 3,500 new units in unincorporated Marin, and our Board has committed over $49 million in General Fund funding to support local construction of affordable housing units. In our FY 2025–26 Budget, our Board renewed this commitment—continuing a $5 million/year ongoing allocation to the Affordable Housing Trust to support local projects. These dollars are critical to helping affordable housing developers leverage state and federal funds and advance projects throughout the county.

We are also actively reviewing our codes and permitting procedures to identify areas where streamlining and simplification can reduce project delays and uncertainty. However, that work often requires not fewer words on paper, but clearer and more functional regulations added. For example, revising outdated definitions (like what qualifies as a habitable floor or a multifamily structure), removing parking mandates, and updating fire egress standards to allow safe, single-stair multifamily designs. These changes reduce cost and complexity—but would still be frozen under AB 306.

While the June 10 amendments create a narrow exception for administrative changes—such as updates to permitting platforms, post-entitlement fee schedules, or enforcement procedures—they do not address these more substantive streamlining efforts. The types of updates Marin and other jurisdictions are undertaking to make housing more buildable remain restricted under the bill’s moratorium.

Further, AB 306 continues to explicitly exclude green building updates. This would severely constrain local governments’ ability to implement upgrades that support energy-efficient design, electric vehicle readiness, air quality protections, and climate adaptation. We share these concerns with a broad coalition of environmental and climate organizations.

Marin County, like many local governments, has adopted forward-thinking building standards that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, promote cleaner indoor air, and advance our climate action plans. These standards are a cornerstone of our long-term climate mitigation strategy and have been adopted with community input, rigorous analysis, and practical implementation timelines. Halting this progress risks not only our local targets but the State’s broader climate goals.

We urge you to work with local governments to craft a more balanced approach. A collaborative path forward could maintain the bill’s core aim of regulatory predictability while preserving essential flexibility for local innovation, streamlining, and environmental stewardship.

Thank you for your consideration of our input.

Sincerely, 

Mary Sackett, President
Marin County Board of Supervisors

CC:      Marin County Board of Supervisors
            Senator Mike McGuire
            Assemblymember Damon Connolly