Contact: Erin King, Executive Director
Phone: (949)783-4130
E-mail: Erin.King@cssaweb.com
CSSA Moves Forward with Legislative Initiatives
Wednesday, August 21st - When Willie Mays first arrived in the major leagues he proceeded to get only one hit in his first 25 at bats. However, he rebounded to win the National League’s Rookie of the Year Award and went on to have a pretty fair career, as the statue of him outside AT&T Park in San Francisco and his place in the Baseball Hall of Fame attest. The moral of the story? Keep battling back and good things can happen.
The California Self Storage Association (CSSA) is reacting exactly the same way to it’s recent setback in the California Senate Judiciary Committee to a bill intended to help self storage operators dealing with lien laws. Bill AB 983 had moved quickly through three prior committee votes and seemed destined to keep moving until it was stopped cold by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The CSSA has pinpointed the area that likely caused the bill’s downfall and is now proceeding with a new version it hopes will make it all the way through the California legislature.
"I think the plan is to go forward with the bill in its present form, dropping the change to the burden for bringing a lawsuit when the Declaration in Opposition to Lien Sale is returned,” said Carlos Kaslow, General Council for the national Self Storage Association (SSA). "The CSSA will work with the Senate Judiciary Committee staff to determine if the current law can be changed to authorize the sending of lien notices by e-mail.”
"For now, we hope to make minor technical changes to that process that will further help foster a fair process for the business owner and the customer,” added CSSA executive director Erin King. "We plan to move forward with the other portions of the bill as they were last seen by the Senate Judiciary committee although we plan to re-evaluate our efforts to include e-mail as an acceptable form of communication with the tenants (Lien notices, etc). We may or may not try to get this done this session…again, we are looking at adding it back in if we can come up with a process that is accepted by the committee.”
The efforts of the national SSA to help the CSSA get this legislation passed have been strong and ongoing. The SSA has been providing financial support to the effort and SSA Sr. VP of Communications and Government Relations Tim Dietz has been extremely helpful in strategizing with CSSA lobbyist Randy Pollack and suggesting positive ways in which the CSSA can move forward.
But the legislative effort also needs the support of CSSA members. The CSSA is still accepting legislative donations and those donations are extremely important.
"This is a cause where everybody is pitching in,” concluded King. "The SSA and Tim Dietz have been amazing. We need our members to rally behind this effort as, in the end, it is really all about helping them.”
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About The California Self-Storage Association
Founded in 2002, the California Self Storage Association (CSSA) is the state not-for-profit trade organization dedicated to serving the California Self-Storage industry including owner-operators, facility managers and industry vendors. The CSSA represents some 450 direct member companies that own and operate over 1,200 facilities in California. CSSA direct members range from individual facility owner-operators to multiple-facility operations, to the industry's largest publicly traded Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs).
