Senate to Vote on Easing Home Solar

The full state Senate is expected to vote soon on a bill designed to make it easier to use California’s community facilities district law to finance solar and other energy efficiency improvements for private homes.

The bill would allow general law cities to create such programs, which are modeled after a program in Berkeley, a charter city. That program allows individual property owners to join a community facilities district that would be used to finance solar panel installations, using special tax assessments to back the repayment of bonds.

The measure allows non-charter cities as well as charter cities and counties to issue the bonds to back solar installation and energy efficiency improvement bonds.

The bill’s sponsor, Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, carried a similar bill last year when she was in the state Assembly. The bill cleared both houses but was vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said he believed the bill represented a fundamental shift in the state’s Mello-Roos laws governing community facilities districts that he was unable to support.

According to a Senate staff report on Hancock’s bill, Schwarzenegger signed a bill last year allowing local governments to use contractual benefit assessments to provide public financing for the installation of renewable energy and energy-efficiency improvements on private property.

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