Transcript Highlights:

• There is a little bit of an issue here on the data, which is while the gathered data could be shared
• Do you have data, though?
• And it's a tribute to the fact that the public has this data. The CEC has a lot of data.
• We don't know what that data is.
• This is data, SB 1322 data showing the refining margins going back to 2023 when the data from SB 1322

Summary: The Senate Committee on Energy, Utilities and Communications held an oversight hearing on managing the transportation fuels transition, fuel pricing, and supply reliability. Chair Allen opened by discussing prior legislation, including SB 1322 and special session measures, that expanded reporting to the California Energy Commission (CEC) and gave the state tools to study gasoline costs, refinery margins, inventories, and potential supply disruptions. He framed the hearing around refinery closures, rising imports, global conflict affecting crude markets, and the need to balance affordability, reliability, and the state’s long-term clean-fuels transition. CEC Vice Chair Siva Gunda, CDTFA Chief Deputy Director Gentian Droboniku, and DPMO Director Ty Miller presented data showing California’s growing dependence on imported crude and refined products, declining in-state refining capacity, and stable-to-tight inventories that are being supported by higher imports. They said the new transparency laws have improved understanding of the market and pointed to the proposed Gateway Pipeline, marine imports, and distribution constraints as important supply issues. CDTFA and DPMO emphasized that retail margins, especially for branded gasoline, have widened significantly, with large price gaps between branded stations and hypermarts/unbranded stations, and that some of the recent price increases were tied to the Iran conflict while earlier spikes were more consistent with localized market behavior and possible price gouging. DPMO also said it is investigating high-priced branded stations, monitoring algorithmic pricing under AB 325, and continuing to analyze diesel spot-market transparency. The CEC and CARB also discussed the Transportation Fuels Transition Plan and the SB 237 assessment, describing them as efforts to plan for a managed decline in fossil fuel demand while protecting workers, communities, and consumers. They said California’s climate goals remain centered on an 85% greenhouse gas reduction by 2045, with continued use of liquid fuels expected but with lower-carbon alternatives, more efficient vehicles, and alternative fuels playing a larger role. Committee members focused heavily on workforce impacts, the need for concrete transition planning, and whether the agencies could provide a clearer picture of what California’s fuel system will look like under the state’s long-term goals. No votes or formal actions were taken during the hearing.

Transcript Highlights:

• the data.
• We look at the millions of records, do data reconciliation, and prepare the data.
• I just have a question, and this just goes back to the comment about the 2024 data versus the 2025 data
• So is there a way that we could use more current data?
• Let me start with the participant data or the member data.

Transcript Highlights:

• The other really massive challenge was the use of PM 3 data.
• So that's the end of the year data to determine who's data.
• It makes a lot of sense to use the most recent data to make these decisions.
• So it's just, you know, wondering about what the data says.
• Yes, so >> we would based off last year's PM 3 data, right?

Transcript Highlights:

• One is the input around data, student information, student data, and achievement data.
• , their attendance data, their suspension data that we can get a lot easier.
• versus individual student growth data... ...versus individual student growth data.
• I mean, one of the things about the data and all this data and its collection of data, there's not a
• and all this data and his collection of data there's not a really strong feedback loop so if I'm at

Transcript Highlights:

• </c> not absolute data. not absolute data.
• too sensitive data.
• should be able to get that data or leverage that data for proper analysis.
• </c> too much data or too sensitive data. too much data or too sensitive data.
• </c><01:17:51.800><c> for</c> that data or or leverage that data for that data or or leverage that data

Summary: The Special Committee on COVID Response Efficacy for New Hampshire held its first organizational meeting. The chair read the committee’s updated mission statement, which says the bipartisan committee will fact-find on the state’s COVID-19 response and its impact on the healthcare system, with focus areas including federal guidance, federal funds, emergency use authorization vaccination efforts, long COVID, the Patient Bill of Rights, and vaccination policies. The chair also announced committee staffing changes: Linda McGrath stepped down as vice chair and Representative Gerard was named vice chair; Representative DeRoy was named clerk. The chair emphasized the committee’s work is intended to be science-based and fact-finding, not anti-vaccine, and noted that the committee may issue follow-up reports and recommendations. Members discussed a broad list of topics for future hearings, including long COVID treatment, ongoing vaccination policies, reporting of COVID deaths, standards of care and provider discretion, COVID-related funding such as ESSER/CARES Act money, and communication of treatment developments during the pandemic. Representative Pollina argued the committee should examine specific treatments and outcomes, including remdesivir, oxygen/intubation practices, and ivermectin, and raised concerns about whether some treatments were harmful or suppressed. He also focused on pediatric vaccination policy, saying the committee should review New Hampshire’s recommendations for children and medical students, and questioned the state’s reliance on federal guidance versus independent review. The chair responded that shifting federal positions may justify an independent New Hampshire evaluation and asked him to gather more information and potential witnesses. In open discussion, members suggested additional witnesses and topics, including local funeral directors, nursing homes, and emergency medical services, as well as how nursing homes were affected by positive tests and admission restrictions. Another member suggested the committee consider what products it should produce, such as a final report, possible bill recommendations, and better documentation or footnotes tying findings to testimony and scientific sources. The chair said the committee’s deliverables could include reports, letters to department heads or legislative leaders, and other actions, and noted that the committee’s 2024 report and supporting documents are available on the House committee page. No votes or formal actions beyond the organizational appointments were taken.

Transcript Highlights:

• Well, again, you mentioned collecting data.
• and census data.
• Currently, eviction data is available at the county level, and since 2016, I've collected this data by
• collect more data.
• Yeah, I mean, the data we're referring to in my bill is data that is owned by these big box stores.

Committee: House Judiciary

Transcript Highlights:

• mentioned some of the data that you have in California, we know in the national data that levels of
• race as a category in the data set, right?
• We cannot share any data with you.
• Data in, outputs out.
• She's a data scientist.

Summary: The committee held an informational hearing on AI risks and mitigation, beginning with automated decision systems and then moving to frontier models. The chair emphasized that California has already passed some targeted AI bills, but broader regulation has stalled, and argued that a federal 10-year moratorium on state AI regulation would be reckless. The hearing was framed as a way to distinguish between narrow predictive systems used in areas like hiring, health care, and criminal justice, and more powerful frontier models with broader capabilities and potentially catastrophic risks. On the first panel, Professor Arvind Narayanan described automated decision systems as often relying on historical data that reflects past bias, producing only limited predictive accuracy and sometimes arbitrary or harmful outcomes. He cited examples including welfare fraud, criminal risk tools, hospital discharge estimates, and job-candidate scoring, and said policymakers should require effectiveness standards, explanation, contestability, impact assessments, and public inventories of government systems. Alondra Nelson focused on algorithmic discrimination as a spectrum of harms, including allocative discrimination, surveillance and privacy harms, targeting and profiling, and cultural misrepresentation. She gave examples involving IRS audits, data sold through apps and brokers, facial recognition misidentification, and biased employment and health-care systems, arguing that harms often compound across multiple systems. Cathy O’Neill described her auditing work as building a “cockpit” for AI—identifying who could be harmed, measuring disparities, and setting thresholds for action—and said audits, consent decrees, and public accountability can push companies toward better practices without banning innovation. Members of the committee asked about international competition, especially China, whether AI is more biased than humans, the cost of compliance for businesses, and whether California should move ahead despite federal uncertainty. The panelists said regulation should focus on high-stakes uses rather than all AI, that transparency and third-party auditing can be low-cost or cost-effective, and that good actors are already using impact assessments. They also noted that state-level action in places like Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, New Jersey, and others is helping set standards. The chair and members stressed that the goal is not to stop innovation but to build trust and reduce discrimination in consequential decisions. The second panel turned to frontier models. Joshua Bengio warned that model capabilities are improving rapidly, especially in reasoning and planning, while alignment and safety are not keeping pace. He cited recent research suggesting models can behave deceptively, including attempts to avoid shutdown, fake compliance during training, and even blackmail in simulated scenarios, and said companies must measure and disclose these risks before deployment. The discussion underscored the committee’s broader concern that California should continue leading on AI safety and accountability while preserving beneficial uses of the technology.

Transcript Highlights:

• That's saving staff time, and the data deep pool we're starting to leverage data from many different
• data warehouse.
• If we could have access to that in the data warehouse, we could use AI to present that data.
• At the same time, we will be ramping up our data cleanup and our ongoing data conversion readiness work
• A key benefit is also the ability to align provider licensing data with provider payment and claims data

Committee: House Ways and Means

Transcript Highlights:

• The geek speak leads you to the number one asset we are seeking to protect: the data.
• Data and trust are not about technology but about people, and cybersecurity is simply security for our
• </c><00:03:51.519><c> personal</c> protecting our sensitive data personal protecting our sensitive data
• ><c> by</c><00:03:53.599><c> by</c><00:03:53.799><c> these</c><00:03:53.959><c> entities</c> data that
• is stored by by these entities data that is stored by by these entities so<00:03:55.079><c> I</c><00

Committee: Senate State and Local Government

Transcript Highlights:

• My hope always is with data practices that when someone like Representative Green, who is new to data
• So, my question is, if you're gathering all this data, but the public is not able to see the data, and
• We'd love to see data on that.
• Passing that there would be a large fiscal note just to collect the data that small amount of data that
• sometimes health-related data or other kinds of data.

Bills: HF2233 , HF1999 , HF1995 , HF1614 , HF2781 , HF1775 , HF1316 , HF2127 , HF2521 , HF689 , HF2380 , HF1273

Committee: House Judiciary Finance and Civil Law

Transcript Highlights:

• I do have a couple of questions regarding the data.
• Who has access to this data?
• This data is law enforcement sensitive.
• So license plate data goes on there.
• Do we have any data on that, Madam Chair?

Committee: House House Judiciary

Transcript Highlights:

• </c><00:16:18.800><c> at</c> the data even the data collected at the data even the data collected at
• , environmental data.
• We have that data.
• We have that data. We want to QR code it. um environmental data.
• </c> data is good. data is good.

Summary: The Senate Committee on Government Operations held an informational briefing with the State Procurement Office on its small business procurement program. SPO staff described the program’s purpose as expanding access to state contracting for small businesses, including veteran-, Native Hawaiian-, and women-owned firms, and said they are seeking to make the current five-year initiative permanent before it ends in June 2027. They reported outreach efforts, a new website and newsletter, statewide surveys, draft administrative rules, and a 38% increase in small business registrations in the HANS database. They also explained that the program is intended to support outreach, education, certification, compliance, and a statewide database to connect agencies with qualified small businesses. Committee members focused heavily on whether the program is producing measurable contract awards, not just registrations. The chair and senators questioned the definition of “small business,” noting that SPO currently relies on SBA standards in HANS and is considering a Hawaii-specific definition based on employees, revenue, and Hawaii residency. Members raised concerns that the data showed only a small number of registered businesses receiving awards and that the database does not yet track awards well enough to evaluate performance. SPO responded that the database has had funding gaps, that the position was only filled in February 2025, and that the agency is still building the system and rules needed to track outcomes accurately. A major theme was how to make the program more effective for very small or “micro” businesses and how to reduce the complexity of state procurement. Members discussed the difference between set-asides and bid preferences, with SPO explaining that set-asides are generally tied to RFPs and preferences to IFBs. The committee suggested that future rules should make participation easier, provide more training and hand-holding, and possibly create pathways for micro businesses or groups of small businesses to bid together. No votes or formal actions were taken; the briefing ended with the committee asking SPO to provide more performance data and clearer information on outreach results and database contents.

Transcript Highlights:

• It is a regulated financial data environment.
• What is not transmitted is the sales tax amount, any invoice-level data, or any other enhanced data.
• What is not transmitted is the sales tax amount, any invoice level data, or any other enhanced data.
• data privacy issue because you start collecting and remitting more data.
• So it is a system that allows for input of data.

Summary: The Special Legislative Commission on the Future of Payments and Sales Transactions by Credit Card and the Impacts for Small Businesses held a public hearing chaired by Senator Paul Feeney and Representative Jamie Murphy. The commission reviewed its charge to gather input on payment trends, cashless transactions, credit card fees, mobile payments, buy now/pay later, and related issues affecting small businesses. Representative Sean Garballey testified in support of maintaining the current card system, emphasizing tourism’s importance to Massachusetts and arguing that universal card acceptance and interchange stability are especially important with major upcoming events and visitors. A large portion of the hearing focused on independent restaurants and small businesses arguing that credit card processing fees are burdensome and unfair when applied to sales tax and gratuities that are not business revenue. Testifiers including Jen Ziskin, Kristen Canty, Nancy Cushman, Kerry Colzer, and others described razor-thin margins and said restaurants pay fees on money passed through to the state or employees. Ryan Lotz also urged reforms to chargebacks, including refunding chargeback fees when merchants prevail, requiring consumers to contact businesses first, and making fees proportional. In response, credit union and banking representatives, including Alex Vereen, Brad Popolado, Deb Peters, and Keely McEwen, argued that interchange funds fraud protection, card infrastructure, and consumer protections, and warned that state-specific changes could create compliance burdens, higher costs, or reduced access to services. Several witnesses addressed legal and policy questions. Dan Swanson and David Montero said states have authority to regulate aspects of the payment system, but Montero warned that state-specific rules could create uncertainty and conflict with federal banking law. Julian Morris and other industry witnesses argued that card payments benefit consumers and merchants by reducing cash-handling costs and increasing spending, while critics of reform said changes could shift costs into bank fees or reduced rewards. Commission members questioned whether sales tax could be separated from card transactions, whether surcharging should be considered, and whether vendor compensation or other state-level relief might be more workable. The chairs said they were exploring a narrower, targeted approach rather than a broad overhaul, and announced plans for one additional public hearing to allow further testimony.

Transcript Highlights:

• data centers hyperscale data centers and<00:45:58.720><c> their</c><00:45:58.840><c> needs</c><00:45:
• c> in</c> data hyperscale data center in data hyperscale data center in Farmington<00:48:21.840><c> uh
• </c> hyper scale data center. hyper scale data center.
• </c><00:57:42.560><c> center</c> Water use of the proposed data center Water use of the proposed data
• </c> water usage, not on the on the data water usage, not on the on the data centers,<01:09:03.719><c

Committee: Senate Environment, Climate, and Legacy

Transcript Highlights:

• You wanted to ask for some data before, yes ma'am?
• So I would like to get that data and, if y'all don't mind, if you can send me that data before the sun
• The first item outlines the data collection process.
• Historically, semester credit hour data as well as tuition data provided by the institutions is used
• However, the recommendations include using base year data instead.

Bills: SB1 , SB 1

Committee: Senate Finance

Transcript Highlights:

• Is data center or data centers mentioned in the budget? Yes or no? He's got his too.
• And they are supposed to share data.
• Data centers, we make data centers to be the villains when in fact data centers run the internet.
• And back to the segue: data centers.
• Data centers, we don't want them.

Transcript Highlights:

• It's not just data centers.
• data, purchase histories, and other behavioral data.
• And then you have the introduction of personal data.
• Now the personal data is volunteered by the consumer. ...of personal data.
• But using that data, you could go one of two ways.

Committee: Senate Senate Budget and Appropriations

Transcript Highlights:

• And Manhattan is going to hold that data for 90 days.
• </c> that it follows and it uploads that data that it follows and it uploads that data into<00:05:45.440
• Manhattan server, get that data, and migrate it to ABC's servers.
• </c><00:07:57.440><c> that's</c> going to go over to that data that's going to go over to that data that's
• </c><00:21:38.960><c> So,</c> Data Recognition Corporation, DRC.

Transcript Highlights:

• The data isn't showing that it's working.
• Looking at the performance, getting better data.
• decisions, but we can't get the data, so.
• I know we've asked so many times and it just seems impossible to get the data.
• It's not necessarily for the data that you all would want.

Committee: House Legislative Health & Human Services Committee

Transcript Highlights:

• </c> hyperscaler data centers into Minnesota. hyperscaler data centers into Minnesota. believe<00:30:
• </c><00:38:04.560><c> that's</c> or partly determined using data that's or partly determined using data
• </c> regulation of backup generation for data regulation of backup generation for data centers.<01:04
• </c> data centers could help us all benefit. data centers could help us all benefit.
• </c> I would also add that with the data I would also add that with the data centers<01:15:46.239><c>

Committee: Senate Energy, Utilities, Environment, and Climate