Newsom Doesn't Have to Sign the Smoke-Damage Bills. He Has to Veto Them by Sept. 30.

AB 1642 and AB 1795 each become operative only if the other does, so a single veto kills both.

Two bills cleared the California Legislature on August 31 that would put a number on something no state has numbered before: how clean a smoke-damaged house has to be before anyone is allowed to live in it. The number is five micrograms of lead per square foot on the floor. The rest of the list — asbestos, cyanide, dioxins, seventeen heavy metals — is scheduled to arrive between July 2027 and the last day of 2029.

Gov. Gavin Newsom's part in this is smaller than the coverage around it suggests. Article IV, Section 10(b)(2) of the state constitution handles a bill the Legislature passed before September 1 and left in the governor's hands after it: one "not returned" by September 30 becomes a statute. He doesn't have to sign these. He has to send them back, by the end of the month, or they are law without him.

What he can't do is take them one at a time. Each bill was drafted to switch on only if the other one does.

What the two bills do

AB 1642, by Assemblymember John Harabedian, is the standards half. It writes a new Section 13981 into the Health and Safety Code, and that section carries the sentence everything else hangs from. A home, school, workplace or other structure counts as safe for human occupancy after a wildfire only if lead measures at or below 5 micrograms per square foot on floors and at or below 40 on window sills. The bill calls that a "nonrebuttable presumption," which is the load-bearing word: an insurer or a contractor cannot argue around the number with a second opinion.

Lead is the only contaminant the bill numbers itself. The others it hands to agencies with deadlines attached. The Department of Toxic Substances Control gets until July 1, 2027 for emergency regulations on lead and asbestos testing and removal; until December 31, 2028 for permanent ones, plus guidance on the CAM 17 heavy metals, cyanide, lithium, manganese, dioxins, furans and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons; and until December 31, 2029 for everything after that. The Air Resources Board owes indoor-air guidance by the end of 2028. The Department of Education owes schools their own version by July 1, 2028. For asbestos the bill sets no number of its own and instead points remediation back at "applicable standards in the California asbestos standard."

AB 1795, by Assemblymember Mike Gipson and titled the Smoke Damage Recovery Act, is the insurance half, and it moves the argument rather than the science. Its new Insurance Code Section 2060.1 sets up a rebuttable presumption: find "smoke, ash, soot, char" or combustion byproducts in a house that survived a fire inside the impact zone, and the law assumes that fire put them there. Today the homeowner argues the smoke came from the fire. Under the bill, the insurer argues it didn't.

Three other provisions in that bill do quiet, practical work. The insurer must inspect as soon as practicable and "no later than 30 calendar days" after being told about the claim. The insurer, not the homeowner, pays for the sampling and testing the restoration requires. And it may not cut off additional living expenses — the money that pays for the rental while a house is unlivable — until the property is restored to preloss condition and cleared for human occupancy. Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, announcing the bill with Gipson on February 11: "Wildfire survivors are being told to return to homes coated in toxic residue and that is unacceptable."

Five micrograms is not a new number

Harabedian, quoted by LAist, calls what the pair builds "first-in-the-nation testing and remediation standards based on science." The figure inside the standard is not new at all, and knowing where it comes from is the difference between reading the bill and reading the announcement. We compared it against the federal rule: on November 12, 2024 the Environmental Protection Agency set its dust-lead action levels — the amounts allowed to remain after a lead-paint abatement — at 5 micrograms per square foot on floors, 40 on window sills and 100 in window troughs. AB 1642 takes the first two figures verbatim. It does not carry the third; the word "trough" does not appear anywhere in the bill.

So what California would actually be doing is lifting a federal clearance number written for old paint and making it the legal test for a house full of wildfire smoke. That is a real and defensible move — the dust is dust either way — and it is also the reason the standard could be written this fast while asbestos, dioxins and the metals wait years. There was already a number to borrow for lead. There isn't one for the rest.

One switch, two bills

We read the current text of both bills, and the last section of each is the same instruction pointed in opposite directions. AB 1642's Section 4 says that act becomes "operative only if" AB 1795 is enacted and takes effect on or before January 1, 2027. AB 1795's Section 10 says the same thing about AB 1642, word for word, with the names swapped.

Neither carries an urgency clause, so both would take effect in the ordinary course under Article IV, Section 8(c): a statute enacted at a regular session goes into effect on the January 1 following a 90-day period from enactment, which for a bill enacted this month is January 1, 2027. Each bill's condition closes on the last day it possibly could.

The drafting is not an accident. A cleanup standard without an insurer obliged to pay for the cleanup is a pamphlet; an insurance mandate with no standard to measure against is a lawsuit. Tied together, they pass or fail as one object, and the governor's choices reduce to two: both, or neither.

The claims already fighting are not covered

This is the part a survivor of the January 2025 fires should read twice. AB 1795's own applicability clause, Section 2060.2(j), reads: "This section applies to all residential property insurance claims that occur on or after the operative date of this section." The operative date is January 1, 2027 at the earliest. Nothing in the bill's text applies the presumption backward, to the Eaton or Palisades claims, or to a claim already open.

The state keeps the scoreboard for what sits outside that line. The California Department of Insurance's wildfire claims tracker, last updated March 3, 2026, counts 41,800 claims filed from the two fires, 40,377 of them at least partially paid, and $23.7 billion paid out. All of them arise from fires that burned in January 2025.

Harabedian told LAist that with standards in place "a lot of the survivors now… would be back in their homes," and the two things are not in conflict: AB 1642's occupancy presumption is written into the Health and Safety Code and carries no claim-date limit of its own, while AB 1795's presumption — the one that shifts who has to prove what to an insurer — carries an explicit one. Dawn Fanning of Eaton Fire Residents United, describing the current process to the same outlet: "Being constantly gaslit and delayed and denied, it's just an absolute nightmare." Whatever these bills fix, they do not by their own terms end that argument for the people already having it.

29–2, and then 28–10

The two halves did not travel together in the vote count. On August 31 the Senate passed AB 1642 by 29 ayes to 2 noes and AB 1795 by 28 to 10, and both went to engrossing and enrolling the same day, which is where the Legislature's own record still showed them on Wednesday afternoon — passed, not yet formally in the governor's hands. Setting a number for lead was close to unanimous. Telling an insurance company what the number costs it drew five times the opposition.

Insurance industry groups, the California Association of Realtors and San Diego Gas & Electric opposed the package on the argument that it takes oversight away from the Department of Insurance, LAist reported. The department is the same agency whose commissioner stood up with the bill's author in February to announce it.

What happens by September 30

September 30 is a deadline to act, not a deadline to decide. LAist, reporting the bills' passage this week, put the question in its own headline — will he sign them — and that is the ordinary way to ask it. The constitution asks it the other way. On these two, silence signs them.

If they become law, the next date that matters is not January. It's July 1, 2027, when the Department of Toxic Substances Control owes the emergency regulations that turn a sentence about lead into a testing protocol somebody can hand an adjuster. The standard the survivors have been asking for is the one arriving last.