Retrospective on the California SB 1308 Campaign

I am no prophet, and here’s no great matter.

— T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

This post is a personal account of a California legislative campaign I worked on March-June 2024, in my capacity as the indoor air quality program lead at 1Day Sooner. It’s very long—I included as many details as possible to illustrate a playbook of everything we tried, what the surprises and challenges were, and how someone might spend their time during a policy advocacy project.

History of SB 1308 Advocacy Effort

SB 1308 was introduced in the California Senate by Senator Lena Gonzalez, the Senate (Floor) Majority Leader, and was sponsored by Regional Asthma Management and Prevention (RAMP). The bill was based on a report written by researchers at UC Davis and commissioned by the California Air Resources Board (CARB). The bill sought to ban the sale of ozone-emitting air cleaners in California, which would have included far-UV, an extremely promising tool for fighting pathogen transmission and reducing pandemic risk. Because California is such a large market and so influential for policy, and the far-UV industry is struggling, we were seriously concerned that the bill would crush the industry.

A partner organization first notified us on March 21 about SB 1308 entering its comment period before it would be heard in the Senate Committee on Natural Resources, but said that their organization would not be able to be publicly involved. Very shortly after that, a researcher from Ushio America, a leading far-UV manufacturer, sent out a mass email to professors whose support he anticipated, requesting comments from them. I checked with my boss, Josh Morrison,^[1] as to whether it was acceptable for 1Day Sooner to get involved if the partner organization was reluctant, and Josh gave me the go-ahead to submit a public comment to the committee. Aware that the letters alone might not do much, Josh reached out to a friend of his to ask about lobbyists with expertise in California politics, and arranged a call with a lobbyist that his friend recommended. During this period, I made a list of possible amendment strategies and ranked them by preference, and discussed possible amendments with two partner organizations. I also sent a call script to a friend at her request to disseminate to her Berkeley network, encouraging Berkeleyites to call Senator Nancy Skinner’s office. (I understand the call script was disseminated through effective altruism/coworking space Slack channels; for weeks afterward, people were telling me they had heard about the effort through that initial call script.)

The committee hearing (for the first committee in which the bill would be heard) was on April 3. With the help of Josh and our comms director, I produced a public statement for our website before the hearing, requiring an extremely close review of the CARB report. During this period, I also relied on a technical analysis of the report’s shortcomings by a researcher at a partner organization. Although multiple partners were supportive of our efforts, they were wary about public association with political action; 1Day Sooner was the only nonprofit willing to produce a public statement. I then went to Sacramento on April 2-3 to meet with Senate staffers and share our concerns, and to attend the committee hearing and present a public comment from 1Day Sooner. On April 2, I met with the committee consultant who wrote the bill analysis, as well as the team behind the bill and two other staffers. The team behind the bill included a staffer for Senator Gonzalez, a representative from RAMP, and an engineering researcher from UC Davis. The researcher was the primary speaker on the call, with some support from the RAMP representative, and was entirely focused on ozone production and asthma, with no consideration for infectious disease. The team was also unsympathetic to the idea that the industry was struggling and the bill could crush it; they said it might be a good opportunity to shape an emerging industry from the beginning, as it would force far-UV companies to build in ozone scrubbers by design. The argument was potentially reasonable, but given the precarious state of the industry, lack of clarity in the regulation about whether built-in ozone scrubbing would allow lamps to meet the limit, and my own lack of understanding about the possibilities for ozone scrubbing, I did not think that it was a clear path forward. In addition, I was frustrated by the team’s adversarial attitude toward industry and their lack of consideration for infectious disease or cost-benefit analysis. I notified our partner organizations, one of whom had also had a meeting with the team, and was told that their earlier conversation had gone similarly.

The committee consultant was the most approachable person I spoke with. Of the policy staff, he was the most interested in the technical details, explained the committee process to me, and welcomed a new face, saying that it was unusual for a layperson to come to Sacramento—typically the committees only heard from the same 50 lobbyists representing every group. All of the legislative staffers indicated that I was beginning the conversation very late for this stage of the process, and that nothing would go differently at this point. I asked a staffer in Senator Hurtado’s office whether it was useful for me to talk to any further staffers, and he said no, our best chance was to draft amendment text and bring it to the relevant committee members in the Assembly during the next stage of the process. Many elements of the California legislative process that we learned about over the course of that week surprised the 1Day Sooner team:

1. That the bill author was the only person who could amend a given bill.
2. That the legislators tended to be extremely collegial and avoid fighting each other in committee or proposing amendments.
3. That the process moved very quickly once started (potentially due to the seniority of the author and the previous lack of contention around the bill).
4. The legislators’ frustration with being surprised.

Following the committee hearing, we began to discuss the possibility of hiring a lobbyist, and what we should do if the manufacturers’ coalition, led by Ushio, needed us to co-fund a lobbyist. The first lobbyist we spoke with had initially quoted us $15,000 per month for about 5 months of work, so we applied to the Long-Term Future Fund. We also drafted an open letter in support of our position, intending to get it signed by researchers who could provide a counterpoint to the researchers supporting Senator Gonzalez, and requested review from an engineering professor that we had worked with previously. She had been willing to post our public statement to social media, but was not willing to sign the letter.

The head of one partner organization put me in touch with a policy staffer, who was working for one of the sponsors on a different bill. The staffer was in regular communication with Senator Scott Wiener’s legislative director, but it was unclear how much influence their office could have over SB 1308. Senator Wiener did not sit on the Environmental Quality Committee, and although he chaired the Budget Committee, the bill would not affect the state budget. However, the staffer did request that the legislative director speak to the Gonzalez office, and indicated that the Gonzalez team was open to a briefing from California researchers. We reached out to a Stanford professor that we knew to be sympathetic to far-UV, and arranged for him and some of his lab members to speak to the Gonzalez office.

Over the next couple of weeks, we continued discussions with Ushio about hiring a lobbyist. The first lobbyist we spoke with was hired by a group that would have caused a conflict of interest had she also worked with Ushio, but recommended a different lobbyist, Cara Martinson. Ushio hired Cara with co-funding from the startup Myna. Over the course of the next month, there were several conversations with the coalition, led by Cara, to hammer out the details of our advocacy process and phrasing:

• We discussed advocating for an exemption for “far-UV” versus “GUV” in the text of our proposed amendment; I favored “GUV” in order to reduce the appearance of favoritism toward one industry, while the Ushio and Myna representatives favored “far-UV” in order to maintain narrow focus.
• The Ushio representative briefly brought up the poor design of the safety standard UL 2998 as applied to far-UV; this line of argument was not ultimately pursued, as it did not really address the Gonzalez coalition’s concerns.
• The Myna team focused on hospital-acquired infections and emphasized the use of far-UV for cleaning surfaces; my concern was that the senator would take that argument to mean that an exemption only for use in medical spaces would be sufficient.
• The Ushio and Myna representatives initially did not believe the senator's team and the opposing researchers had good intentions. Cara emphasized repeatedly that when meeting the senator’s team, our coalition’s presentations needed to be straightforward and informational, leaving personal feelings aside.
• When discussing the possibility of integrating ozone scrubbers with far-UV lamps, the Ushio representative seemed unaware of ozone scrubbers. My understanding was that a mutual partner organization was actively in the process of building a lamp with an integrated ozone scrubber. This confusion was eventually resolved, but the Myna representatives were still confident that ozone scrubbers would interfere with the functionality of far-UV lamps.
• Exact phrasing in the open letter was contentious, and although Cara was enthusiastic about 1Day Sooner owning the open letter, it was difficult to create the perception of ownership with the manufacturers. One industry representative was extremely opposed to any language implying that far-UV might need to have standards revisited after some period of time. Additionally, the manufacturers sought sign-on from other manufacturers, while 1Day Sooner staff favored having only academics sign the letter.

Simultaneously with these conversations with the manufacturers, I had discussions with several other concerned people in the field. One partner tried to put me in touch with people who might have experience with the California legislature, although those connections didn’t pan out. A civil servant in an executive branch agency indicated that he would be able to have backchannel conversations; as a federal employee, he could not intervene directly, but he contacted people he had spoken with at the California Department of Public Health to ask them to speak with their legislative affairs staff. Due to the delicacy of the situation, he was not able to keep me updated or put me in touch directly.

The far-UV coalition met with the technical consultant for the relevant General Assembly committee, the Committee on Natural Resources, as well as the Republican party consultant. The technical consultant seemed sympathetic to our case, but shortly afterward, the Gonzalez office emailed Cara to state definitively that the Gonzalez team was totally opposed to an amendment.

A Berkeley friend I’d reached out to had indicated that Scott Alexander was interested in writing an item about the bill in one of his Open Threads, but when she initially let me know (during our exchange about the Berkeley call campaign), the sympathetic policy staffer had advised us to maintain a relatively low profile. After we heard from the Gonzalez office, and seeing that Assemblymember Buffy Wicks was on the Committee on Natural Resources, I spoke with Scott at an ACX grantees’ meetup during LessOnline and requested that he include an item encouraging people to call their representatives, assuming a strong readership among the Wicks constituency. The reference on his blog impressed some of my personal friends, although it is unclear how many people called or how much of a difference this made. At one point, a reader tweeted an out-of-context screenshot, inviting ridicule of the California legislature, which disappointed and worried me.

Cara and the manufacturers were excited to see Vox’s previous publications on far-UV, and Cara requested that I ask a Vox journalist for guidance and potentially put us in touch with journalists at relevant outlets. The Vox journalist I contacted was extremely sympathetic and directed me to the California Politico. A researcher in the Stanford lab sent the actual email to Politico, under the assumption that a Stanford email address would help draw the journalist’s attention. A Politico journalist called us to ask for background on the bill. Even though the researcher had been the initial point of contact, I handled the majority of the call, due to greater experience with speaking to journalists.

The Gonzalez office eventually followed up with a note that Senator Gonzalez had amended the bill only to allow the use of far-UV in medical settings, with a limit of 10 ppb. This language confirmed my and partners’ concerns about Myna’s focus on hospital-acquired infections.

I met with staffers from the Committee on Natural Resources during June 11-14, and in particular went in person to Sacramento and handed out packets on June 13. The packets included our proposed amendment language and the experts’ letter. These meetings were two business days before the committee hearing, and some of the staffers had not yet read the bill—but in the previous committee discussions, when I spoke with committee staffers the day before the hearing, I was informed that it was too late to do anything!

On June 14, a partner organization introduced me to an experienced and influential California policy advocate, and asked that I provide him with details of the bill’s progress.

The far-UV conference ICFUST was held June 19-21 in St. Andrews, Scotland. In order to get to ICFUST on time, I needed to leave San Francisco for Scotland on Monday, June 17, the same day as the committee hearing. One of my colleagues, Enlli Lewis, went to Sacramento in my place, along with other members of our coalition. During my layover on June 17th, I called the policy advocate to brief him on the situation and request his intervention. He was interrupted by another call, and during that interruption, Enlli texted me from Sacramento that the bill hearing had been postponed at the last minute until the committee meeting the following week. I alerted the policy advocate when he called me back, and he asked to stay informed. He briefed Assemblymember Jim Wood on June 19th; Cara had already informed us that Asm. Wood was likely to be among the more sympathetic Democratic assembly members, as he was a moderate who would not be running for re-election.

SB 1308 was a popular topic of conversation during ICFUST, and 1Day Sooner was clearly well-regarded due to our role as a policy communicator and broker. A representative from the National Academy of Sciences was trying to raise funding and interest for a National Academy workshop on far-UV, and was concerned that if the bill passed unamended, the National Academy would demur from hosting such a workshop, even if funding materialized, as they would want to avoid being seen as political. The aforementioned civil servant raised the same concerns about discussions on far-UV within his agency.

One academic researcher was widely blamed, as his research on ozone production by far-UV was seen as a chilling factor for funding and an instigator for CARB’s concerns. However, over the course of my conversation with him, it became clear that he had no idea how badly things were going for the far-UV industry, and he, too, hoped the bill would be amended, although he supported a less permissive amendment than we did. He agreed to write to RAMP and advocate for a 10 ppb ozone limit for far-UV, although by that point, it was unclear how much good it would do—contrary to some of the other attendees, I did not believe that he had directly informed the design of the bill, even if his research had partially helped inspire it. By his account, RAMP had contacted him once briefly to ask if he thought the bill was a good idea, and he had said yes. One industry researcher had not been planning to speak to the academic researcher initially, regarding him strictly as an opponent, but after hearing my account of the conversation, got a beer with him and discussed the details in more depth. This phenomenon repeated a pattern I had previously seen in other instances, where staff at nonprofits were more inclined to assume goodwill and lack of information, and to take a more diplomatic approach, than industry engineers were.

On the evening of the 21st, our coalition had another call with Cara in which we discussed our strategy going into the hearing on the 24th. A professor in the coalition had discussed the amendment with RAMP and felt that RAMP was softening toward our argument, but it seemed that RAMP either did not have the influence with the Gonzalez team that they previously had, or that they were unwilling to exercise their influence. We also were aware that the committee chair’s office was interested in finding a compromise with the Gonzalez office. The professor wanted to find any number in between the previous limit and the proposed limit that might be well-founded on research, but no such limit exists. I asked a partner organization for their advice, and their representative asked if campaign contributions might help, which discomfited some of the academics.

On the 22nd (the Saturday before the hearing), the Gonzalez office emailed Cara to announce that Senator Gonzalez was moving forward with an amendment that changed the limit for far-UV to 10 ppb, and only in medical settings, bearing out my original concerns about Myna’s arguments. I emailed the legislative offices that Cara had indicated as being the most sympathetic to our case, and also reached out again to the policy advocate, who briefed Asm. Wood on Monday morning. (He later mentioned that he had made calls to other assembly members as well, although I was not sure at what point.)

Less than an hour before the hearing, Enlli texted to inform me that the bill had been withdrawn, meaning that it would not come to a vote during that legislative session at all. We couldn’t be sure what changed the senator’s mind so abruptly, but Cara’s guess was that we had swayed other committee members to express concerns and ask questions during the hearing that Senator Gonzalez was unprepared to discuss, and wanted more time to understand. If the bill had been heard, it likely would have passed either way—we do not believe that any votes were changed—but under the circumstances, a live committee discussion may not have been worth the cost to Senator Gonzalez’s political capital.

Key Takeaways

• This case study is one of the rare instances in advocacy work that had an immediate and readily identifiable impact. We know that the bill was withdrawn exclusively due to the actions of the far-UV coalition because there was no other opposition.
• States can have very different legislative cultures from each other, and from the federal government, in ways that affect advocacy strategies—my colleagues’ previous political advocacy experience was not fully informative about California politics, and we needed to develop our understanding of California politics through a Californian lobbyist. The California legislative culture is much more collegial and less directly confrontational than we anticipated.
• Windows of influence are tiny—legislative offices are trying to move bills quickly and a staffer may have a specific bill under consideration for a single day. It is almost irrelevant to speak with a staffer about a bill more than a week from that bill’s hearing. (I’m not sure if that’s the case in other legislative settings outside of California.)
• Lobbyists are paid highly because they have relationships with people in legislative offices. There is no substitute for the highest-bandwidth, highest-caliber direct contact available. (However, we do not know which of our coalition’s actions were key to achieving the bill’s withdrawal.)
• “Being nice” is a professional skill. Okay, really it’s more like, “making a clear case in a calm or conciliatory tone while you think about everyone else’s motivations” is a professional skill. Knowing insider information, like which assembly members are more flexible because they’re about to retire, isn’t trainable, but “being nice” professionally is totally trainable.
• Legislators are sensitive to internal politics not only with other legislators, but also with regulators/executive branch parties. It’s possible that the Gonzalez office was so resistant to amending the bill because they didn’t want to overstep into CARB’s territory by exempting a technology that CARB had not carved out.
• The largest time expenditure was probably toward coalition internal communications, not communication with external parties. Maintaining diplomacy and encouraging it in our partners was one of the more energy-intensive pieces of this effort.
• We didn’t have time to build trust with the team behind the bill, which contributed to an immediately adversarial relationship. It’s difficult for legislative offices to figure out whether to trust a given party, given their extremely limited time—from their perspective, our coalition popped up from nowhere and blindsided them with new, hard-to-assess information. (We contacted the office as soon as we found out about it, which was as soon as it was available for public comment.) My perception from those communication difficulties is that the way to get involved at the “right time” and to be seen as a trusted source is to be the party assisting with drafting and providing technical backing for a bill. By the time a bill actually gets into the legislative session, there’s much lower bandwidth to process outsider viewpoints, no matter how well-considered. A good reason to be proactive about policymaking/policy advocacy, even if you’re inclined to be cautious about it, is to ensure that you’re “in the room” and your perspective is considered.

Personal Reflections

My sense of victory in this process, and my experience in working on it, has been paradoxical and difficult to understand. If judged by productivity alone (not necessarily the preferable single mode of measurement!) I thrived on the speed of the work. I also faced burnout symptoms and feared that I would not find a pace of work that was sustainable for me and allowed us to accomplish all the necessary tasks.

Josh reasonably pointed out that this type of project was one of the very few times that anyone could be sure they were in the right place at the right time, doing something only they could do, and were thus indispensable. Furthermore, it was the only period of intense collaborative work I have had at 1Day Sooner, and I was often fizzing with energy. I have experienced almost no professional satisfaction as deep as strategizing with colleagues at ICFUST 2024, nor have I ever felt my intersection of technical and interpersonal skill to be as valuable as in meetings with the manufacturers or legislative staffers. On the other hand, I’d gotten ill from the pace of work during the first weekend, and was concerned to see the burnout symptoms that presaged my departure from graduate school. In the two weeks following the bill’s withdrawal, I felt incredible as my team celebrated and I received accolades from people I admired. Shortly afterward, I crashed, and experienced weeks of near-depression, knowing that I was back to working alone, with long feedback loops and unclear gains. Turns out withdrawal comes to us all.

Then there was the result itself—throughout the process, I felt the uncomfortable incongruity of standing in opposition to the air chemists and engineers that should have been natural allies on indoor air quality, and to a senator who had done her best to be scientifically informed. This outcome wasn’t our preference, but once we started, intra-governmental politics got in the way of our ability to steer the outcome toward our assumed ideal. I say assumed—at no point did I actually have time to do the math, I only felt confident that it would be harder to patch up a sinking ship than to fire a cannon in the first place, five years from now. But in five years, when the research is in, I could very well be on the other side of this issue, advocating for a strict ozone standard for ionizers and far-UV alike, if ozone scrubbers can successfully be integrated into far-UV lamps as one of our partner orgs claims. One of my friends asked, “So this is a situation where someone designed pretty good policy, and you were the annoying nerds going, ‘um, actually, there’s this one little nuance’ until the entire thing unraveled?” And yes, that did seem like the general tone of the situation. Our central thesis was: far-UV could be very important, and it’s too early to make policy that rules it out, but we still need the research that rules it in. I stand by that position, but it is difficult to frame policy and political communications around it unless the state is willing to spend money on research.

Furthermore, the actual impact on the far-UV industry and R&D, and the way to frame that impact, was always nebulous. One partner was initially very concerned about the bill but then decided it would not matter since their organization was building a lamp with an attached ozone scrubber that would hypothetically meet the CARB limits anyway. The team behind the bill had, in my conversation with them early in the process, made the point that if ozone scrubbers were a possible and practical solution, the bill might improve the far-UV industry and ultimately be good for them by creating the right expectations early in their pursuit of the consumer market. This point resonated fiercely; I had spoken to partners about the possibility of standard-setting that included ozone scrubbing requirements, and we may have pursued that avenue given more bandwidth. The only problem with the team’s argument was that we were not yet sure whether scrubbers were a possible and practical solution, and were much more concerned about the industry as a whole failing than they were. I was confused by different parties’ communication on the point and had no time to figure it out.

In addition, given the testing procedure, one way to meet the requirements might be to simply make weaker lamps and use more of them per installation. This concern was less important, as it was clearly impractical to try to save the floundering industry by requiring consumers to buy more of their already unwanted product, but this point was sometimes glossed over in presentation to a possibly dishonest degree, given the hard tradeoffs between concision and accuracy in a highly technical field with often-impatient listeners. In this and other small ways, I always felt strongly that I was doing the right thing, but simultaneously that I was not able to make my real case. Rather, I frequently needed to compress my position into one that was more concise but only 90% correct or reflective of my beliefs.

Finally, we still need to see how this unfolds with respect to showing how indoor air quality work should fit into 1Day Sooner. Our indoor air quality program started opportunistically, but there was a reasonable point to drop it after we published our field report in April 2023. Once we decided we were going to pursue indoor air quality further, there was a constant mode of searching for the breakthrough in our project. (There is a catch-22 here, where program expansion and hiring rely on each other in an inextricable loop.) The persistence of this mode elicits (for me) the overwhelming question of the continued pursuit of indoor air quality within 1Day Sooner—and yet, for what we accomplished, my background knowledge and Josh’s instinct toward transparency were necessary. Our partner nonprofits were unwilling to get involved publicly, and had we not continued work on indoor air quality for the past year, I would have been unaware of the bill in the first place, let alone able to say anything of value about it. Our partners certainly valued our speaking publicly on this subject, but ultimately, we will need to determine whether it is enough to say that we already have built the expertise, and we have proven our value, so we might as well continue—that is, the difference between opportunism and sunk cost.

Addendum: I wrote the majority of this document, including the paragraph immediately above, in July 2024, right after the conclusion of the project. Since then, the indoor air quality program at 1Day Sooner has returned to a focus on research design, which is more closely related to other programs at 1Day Sooner than the legislative work was. That change reduces the uncertainty about the program’s fit, but I wanted to keep the paragraph above to illustrate some of the considerations about the program’s direction that we discussed internally at the time.

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   Josh’s questions after reading this account

   How could we have learned about the ozone bill earlier?

   Unclear—our partner org told us about it, and didn’t remember where they had heard about it. The CARB report that the bill was based on was finalized in September of 2023 but it has been in progress for much longer than that, and it was not guaranteed to become relevant to legislation or regulation.

   Would the extra control around our paying for a portion of the lobbyist have been worth it?

   Unlikely, as Cara was actually supportive of our points and the balance of representing manufacturers’ interests would not have been able to change much had we paid a minority fraction. We may then have also appeared less disinterested as a result—it was probably quite valuable to be able to say that we were a financially disinterested nonprofit.

   Was there any route we could have taken that might have led to the amendment we wanted rather than the bill being rejected altogether?

   Unclear if anything would have helped, because it sounded as though ultimately Senator Gonzalez was concerned about appearing to overrule CARB. However, a technical staff member of one partner organization met with the UC Davis researcher after these events, and told me that perhaps their earlier involvement would have made a difference—the researcher was highly suspicious of academics who supported far-UV and manufacturers, but was able to find common ground with our partner org’s perspective. Perhaps the ideal setup would have been a) no manufacturer involvement, if we could convince them of that, and b) a technical nonprofit’s much earlier and more direct involvement in discussions with the bill’s supporting researchers, while a lobbyist and I did the Sacramento legwork.

   What mistakes do you think you made?

   1. I should have had a better understanding of ozone scrubbers before the meeting with the team behind the bill; I think they received conflicting or at least confusing information.
   2. If I had had a better understanding of ozone risks going into this process, I may have been able to convince that team that 1Day Sooner wanted to approach this process non-adversarially. (Time constraints were a major problem for my developing this understanding.)
   3. Even though the Politico article wound up being relatively friendly toward our position, it may be that speaking to Politico was a mistake in expectation. I worried about that for a while, although Cara seemed more excited about it.

   What strategic or tactical choices were most consequential where another option could have been possible? What might the outcome have been?

   It’s really hard to tell what other options were truly possible in hindsight, and what choices made a real difference. For example, we chose to maintain relatively close contact with the manufacturers, and therefore needed to defer to them on certain points of messaging. Had we split away from the manufacturers, we would have had less ability to rely on Cara’s insights, and likely would not have produced an additional open letter, but rather focused on direct advocacy to the Gonzalez team. In that situation, it is possible we could have relied on a technical partner organization more extensively, but we would not have known that for sure, so at the time, it seemed very important to maintain a close collaboration with the manufacturers—and it may not have mattered to the outcome anyway.

   We could easily have chosen not to attempt publicity—the Politico article may have helped us, if Senator Gonzalez had concerns about what Politico would write, but it may have been neutral and very easily could have hurt us.

   If we had lost, what would you wish we had done differently or additionally?

   Most of my answer to this is already covered in my answers to the questions above—it’s difficult to think about this question clearly, because the default was that we would lose, and I fully expected to lose until the minute I received the text saying the bill was withdrawn. I think we did basically the most sensible thing at each step, given our time constraints, and believed that this was a case where, even after choosing the best path at every fork available to us, we would still lose.