A bill that would mandate that landlords and property managers receive training on fair practices and tenant rights is dead for 2018 after stalling in the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

AB 2618 by Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Oakland, sought to require the Department of Consumer Affairs to administer a certification program for the training. The bill also would have authorized the department to identify and approve providers of the educational coursework.

Further, AB 2618 would have mandated that landlords and property managers be certified every two years.

Under an earlier draft of the bill, anyone caught managing property without the certification would have faced a fine of $1,000, although Bonta later lowered the fine to $500.

An earlier version of the bill also would have provided just one year to implement the program, a timetable that CAA warned may be unrealistically aggressive.

“Outreach to these owners and managers – which could easily number in the millions — will be challenging, if not impossible, given the one-year period of time provided in the bill for the development and delivery of classroom or live webinar training,” CAA says in a letter to the author.

As CAA’s urging, Bonta pushed back the implementation date to 2020.