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Governor Newsom signed AB 1820 (Schiavo) yesterday as part of a six-bill package aimed at speeding up EV charger deployment in California. Green Water and Power supported the bill from early in the process — we filed a letter of support, met with the author’s office and legislators, contributed permitting data from our own project portfolio, and gave input on the bill language as it moved. Our name appears in the Assembly Local Government Committee analysis alongside the sponsors, the Coalition for Clean Air and the Electric Vehicle Charging Association.

We want to explain what the law does in its final form, why we backed it, and what it will and will not fix.

What AB 1820 does

The bill adds Chapter 7.7 (commencing with Section 66015.5) to the Government Code. It caps the permit fee a city, county, city and county, or charter city may charge for a Level 2 EV charging station installed at a new or existing multifamily housing development:

$500, plus $5 per kilowatt for each kilowatt between 51 kW and 250 kW, plus $2 for every kilowatt above 250 kW.

“Permit fee” is defined broadly — the sum of all charges levied in connection with the application, not just the line item labeled “permit.”

A jurisdiction can charge more than the cap, but not casually. It must make a written finding, supported by substantial evidence, of the reasonable cost to issue the permit, adopted by resolution or ordinance, including a calculation of its administrative costs—review, approval, issuance, and hourly site inspection and follow-up—and a description of its streamlined approval process.

The cap takes effect July 1, 2027, for jurisdictions with 200,000 or more residents and January 1, 2028, for everyone else. It repeals on January 1, 2036. The Legislature declared the standard a matter of statewide concern rather than a municipal affair, so it reaches charter cities.

What changed on the way through

Worth being straight about: the bill signed is narrower than the bill introduced. Earlier versions carried a separate residential fee cap — $100 plus $15 per kilowatt above 15 kW — and a broader commercial cap. The residential provision did not survive. Neither did general commercial scope. What passed is multifamily Level 2, full stop. DC fast charging and single-family residential installs are outside it.

That is how most of these bills go, and we would rather see a narrow law that holds than a broad one that collapses in committee. But if you are a property owner reading headlines about capped charger permit fees, the scope is the first thing to check.

Why we supported it

We have installed more than 15,000 chargers across 700 sites nationally, and we have tracked building department performance the whole time. We published a version of that dataset last year. The spread is not close:

Los Angeles, New York City and Washington State issue instant online permits for chargers under specified amperage conditions. Seattle, Chicago, Hillsboro and Beaverton run online permitting with clerical review only. Tucson and Miami come in under 35 days. Several California municipalities in the middle of Silicon Valley take the better part of a year.

Fees show the same dispersion. As Assemblymember Schiavo put it, the cost to permit a charger “can vary wildly county by county, sometimes far above the actual cost to issue the permit.” We see it in our own numbers: the same scope of work, priced by two neighboring building departments, does not produce two similar invoices.

That variance is the real problem AB 1820 addresses, and it is worth being precise about why it matters. An unpredictable fee is not primarily an affordability issue. It is a modeling issue. When we build a pro forma for a 20-port Level 2 site at an apartment complex, every line has to be estimated before the owner signs. Hardware, labor, service upgrade, utility interconnection, and rebate timing we can estimate with reasonable confidence. A permit fee that might be $600 or might be $9,000, decided after the owner has committed, is the line that makes a project look risky to the person paying for it. Standardizing it removes a variable, not just a cost.

What the opposition got right

AB 1820 was opposed by the League of California Cities, the California State Association of Counties, the Rural County Representatives of California, the California Building Officials, the City of San Mateo, and the Solano County Board of Supervisors. Their core argument deserves a fair hearing: the state constitution already requires a fee to reflect the reasonable cost of the service, a cap set below actual cost shifts the balance onto local taxpayers, and small rural jurisdictions processing a handful of charger permits a year cannot spread fixed costs the way a large city can. The findings process answers most of that — a jurisdiction whose costs genuinely exceed the cap can document them and charge accordingly. What it can no longer do is charge above the cap without showing its work.

Opponents also argued that permit fees are not the primary barrier to deployment, and that capital availability and grid capacity are the real constraints. On that point, they are substantially correct. Interconnection timelines and utility service upgrades delay far more of our projects than permit counters do. AB 1820 does not touch either, and never will.

What comes next

Two things to watch between now and July 2027. First, whether jurisdictions use the findings process as intended or as a workaround — the requirement has teeth only if someone reads the findings. We intend to track what jurisdictions adopt; the same way we track timelines. Second, whether fee certainty translates into schedule certainty. A capped fee at a counter that takes 355 days to issue the permit is still a 355-day permit. AB 1236, AB 970 and AB 2427 already set streamlining and timeline requirements, and compliance with them remains uneven. The companion bills signed today — SB 969 on inspection of manufacturer-tested chargers, and SB 1283 clarifying that streamlined permitting covers trenching, service upgrades, canopies and storage — address parts of that. The rest is enforcement and staffing, which no bill fully solves.

For multifamily owners who have been quoted permit costs that made a Level 2 project pencil out badly, the practical takeaway is simple: starting in 2027, the fee side of your estimate becomes predictable. Plan accordingly.