•Gov. Gavin Newsom approved Assembly Bill 1448—authored by Assemblymember Gregg Hart (D-Santa Barbara)—on Sept. 29. This legislation prohibits the use of existing oil infrastructure in state waters to support new offshore oil drilling in federal waters. Hart’s office described the bill as the product of two years of collaboration with community stakeholders and statewide ocean advocates to strengthen California’s “line of defense” as the Trump administration “advances unprecedented challenges” to the state’s authority to protect its coastline. “While Donald Trump looks for ways to hand public lands to private developers and roll back the safeguards that protect our parks, wildlife, and coastal communities, California is doing the opposite,” Newsom said in a statement. “We are conserving more land than ever before, protecting our iconic coastline from new offshore oil and gas drilling, revitalizing wildlife habitat, and ensuring every Californian can experience the natural treasures that make the Golden State extraordinary.”
•On Sept. 30, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law new standards for how insurance licensees and their third-party vendors collect and share personal information. Authored by State Sen. Monique Limón (D-Santa Barbara), the Insurance Information and Privacy Protection Act “gives consumers control of their most sensitive data and holds insurers and their vendors accountable for protecting that data,” Limón stated in a release. Among the new standards set to take effect in July 2028, the legislation prohibits the sale of consumers’ personal information and requires that consumers be notified and permitted to opt out of uses of sensitive personal information that are not required for an insurance transaction.
•U.S. Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Santa Barbara) and U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) co-introduced the Ocean Protection and DDT Reduction Act on Oct. 1. The legislation aims to establish a federal study to assess the damage of industrial waste to Southern California’s marine ecosystem and develop comprehensive solutions to clean up that waste, disposed of in ocean dump sites for decades. “As the representative of California’s Central Coast, I know firsthand how much our communities depend on a healthy ocean—from our fishermen and maritime workers to our tourism and coastal economies,” Carbajal stated in a release from his office. “We have a responsibility to protect these waters.” If adopted, the Ocean Protection and DDT Reduction Act would direct the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to monitor waste sites in the San Pedro Basin, while studying how toxic chemicals like DDT spread into the ocean food web and developing new scientific tools to track ocean dumping. “By putting NOAA’s scientists and our leading research institutions to work mapping the contamination, tracking how it moves, and exploring cleanup through bioremediation, we can finally address this problem head-on,” Padilla said in an Oct. 1 statement. “Our communities deserve to know what’s in the water off of the coast of San Pedro and what it means for our health, our fisheries, and our future.” The bill would authorize $6 million annually, from fiscal year 2026 through fiscal year 2032, for NOAA, in coordination with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Defense, to award grants to academic and research institutions to study spatial mapping of contamination and other data. “For decades, we used the ocean as a dumping ground for all manner of wastes including deeply concerning industrial byproducts from DDT manufacturing,” David Valentine, UCSB professor of earth and marine science, said in a statement. “This proposed legislation takes an important step to address fundamental issues around the disposition, impacts, and remediation options for those wastes.”
