Hello BOMA San Diego Community!
 

It has been an action-packed summer! I wanted to take a moment to shed light on one of the cornerstones of what we do: legislative advocacy. If you don’t know what legislative advocacy is, it’s the process of influencing the introduction, enactment, or modification of legislation. It’s about making your voice heard. You might be asking yourself why we would be involved in legislative advocacy, and it’s a fair question with a couple of answers. 
 

Building owners are often targeted as wealthy landowners with deep pockets to finance whatever is thrown at them. This comes in the form of threats to increase property taxes, impose transfer taxes,  pay for mandated retrofits, install EV chargers, increase water and waste fees, pretty much anything you can think of. Lately, it’s distilled down even further with SB 1103 to legislators attempting to mandate lease translations for tenants who negotiated in a non-English language, and prohibiting altering building operating cost allocations that increase a tenant’s share during tenancy. To put it simply, we care. We care because we understand that not every building owner has deep pockets – that’s why we see deferred maintenance and delayed capital improvements. We care because we understand that almost every additional cost to a building owner will in fact ultimately pass down to the tenant. 
 

Another reason why we practice legislative advocacy is even more simple. Our esteemed legislators have more than likely never had a job working in the commercial real estate industry. They simply don’t understand the financial costs or undertaking that is involved with meeting an arbitrary requirement that a legislator sits down and writes in Sacramento, or on Capitol Hill. It’s our job to educate them. It’s our job to say, no, this is what it will actually cost to the tenants if you put this into law. We need to be able to have candid discussions and we can only do that by building partnerships with our legislators. We want a chance to suggest meaningful modifications. We want to proactively participate in crafting the legislation that we will ultimately become beholden to. 
 

One of the ways we achieve this is with the assistance of our Legislative Advocate, Craig Benedetto of California Strategies. You might recognize him as the top billing in our monthly newsletter, or the monthly moderator of our Government Affairs virtual meetings. Craig has led every BOMA San Diego President for over 20 years through all our government affairs. He travels with the Executive Committee to Washington D.C. and Sacramento. He schedules visits with our local legislators in their federal and state offices so we can connect and converse over the plethora of assembly and senate bills, some of which we support and some that we oppose. Back in San Diego, Craig lines up our monthly Government Affairs committee with city, county and local officials that are getting in front of us to talk about what is coming down the pipeline. The efforts we make in this space are easily one of the most important things that we do. 
 

Most recently, Craig joined myself and Vice President Renato Vazquez, as well as former President Tom Magnussen in Sacramento last month for the California Commercial Real Estate Summit, hosted by the California Business Properties Association. We met with these state offices: 

Senator Catherine Blakespear 

Senator Brian Jones

Assembly Member Chris Ward 

Senator Toni Atkins

Assemblymember Brian Maienschein

Assemblymember Tasha Boerner 
 

And with each one, we reviewed the impact of AB 2904, AB 2996, AB 3068, AB 2243, SB 768, SB 1103, AB 2364, AB 2374, and the Retail Theft Bill Package. These are meaningful conversations that BOMA San Diego actively participates on behalf of our industry. 

Next month, we are honored to invite Senator Scott Peters as our keynote speaker for the October luncheon. We hope you will consider attending and taking an active role in the continued conversation of how legislation impacts our livelihood. Please be sure to register! 


Caption: BOMA San Diego and NAIOP San Diego featured with President Pro Tempore Emeritus Senator Toni Atkins.