It is not too late to join the advocacy effort!

•  Sign on to the Coalition letter by providing your agency name and logo here. We need to demonstrate strong support for these reasonable tort reform efforts.

• Contact your local State Senator and Assemblymember and urge them to support public agencies and victims by fixing a broken, unsustainable system. Please share the Coalition letter with them. Click here to find your local representatives.

The goal is to add dozens more to this important letter. Our voice is getting stronger and decision-makers are starting to understand the significant and damaging impact caused by the increased number and skyrocketing cost of the liability claims against public agencies.

Help keep the momentum going by signing on to the coalition letter today and supporting a better path forward.

• Defined benefits.
• Proportional (several) liability for economic damages.
• Heighted evidentiary and procedural standards.

It’s Time for California to Catch Up. See what other Democratic-led states do for public entity claims.

If you have any questions or need assistance, please reach out to staff@cajpa.org.

Other CAJPA Legislative Efforts

As the Legislature heads toward summer recess, CAJPA is tracking several bills important to our members.

AB 1961 (Ahrens) related to workplace violence restraining orders. CAJPA joined with other local government associations on a coalition letter to support AB 1961 scheduled to be heard in the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 16, 2026.

SB 1083 (Perez) deals with school employee conduct and a statewide database system. CAJPA signed onto a coalition letter  in opposition to SB 1083 which may undermine efforts to prioritize students’ safety and well-being, increased costs for local educational agencies and expose them to extensive new liability for decisions made outside of their control.

Identify Your Representatives: You may have more than one Assemblymember or Senator who represents your district. You can find them here by searching your school site or district office address at https://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov/.   

Pull Legislator Office Phone Number(s): Each member of the legislature has a Capitol office and at least one District Office. While the goal is to speak to policy staff in Sacramento, it is helpful to call the District Office as well.

Practice & Personalize the Conversation: Prepare yourself before you call your members’ offices. The call is more impactful if you incorporate your personal and professional perspective.

Be Kind and Courteous: The staff answering phones are typically young professionals who are responsible for answering phones and tracking constituent engagement.

Offer to Help: As an educator, public servant, or governing official, your expertise is invaluable. Offer your support for reforms by offering to help the member you are calling with additional details about local impacts. This may help you get into the door for a meeting with your legislator’s office if that is of interest.

FYIs: Legislative staff will ask you for your full name, title, phone number, and email, to document the interaction. Legislators will see your comment come time to vote for reforms.

Some talking points:

• We are asking the Legislature to enact meaningful tort reform for civil actions against public entities.
• Public entity liability costs have tripled in the last seven years, now exceeding $7 billion in known exposures. Costs are on pace to grow by another 70 percent by 2027-2028.
• Everyone shares a deep and unwavering commitment to ensuring that survivors of harm receive justice, support, and meaningful compensation. California’s public agencies are not asking for insulation from accountability.
• We seek to fix a system that, as currently structured, transfer enormous wealth tolaw firms, and threaten the financial solvency of the very public agencies tasked with protecting and serving our vulnerable community members.
• A comprehensive tort reform package for civil actions against public entities at a minimum must include:
  • Defined benefits including caps on damages,
  • Proportional several liability for economic damages,
  • Heightened evidentiary procedure standards for claims.

Be sure to include potential or real impacts to your school, city, county, special districts or other public agencies including both the skyrocketing liability insurance costs and nuclear verdicts creating severe financial strain for public agencies.

To help you prepare we are providing you with the Coalition letter and the recently released CAJPA/Polco data on claims trends and how tort caps can reduce the sky rocketing liability claims costs to public agencies throughout California.

If you have any questions or need assistance, please email staff@cajpa.org.

The coalition letter urged the Legislature to enact meaningful tort reform for civil actions against public entities. New data released by the California Association of Joint Powers

Authorities (CAJPA) “confirms what our members have been warning lawmakers about for years: public entity liability costs have tripled in the last seven years, now exceeding $7 billion in known exposure. Costs are on pace to grow another 70 percent by 2027–28. The fiscal trajectory is unsustainable, the structure of liability is fundamentally unfair to taxpayers, and the consequences are now measured in billions of dollars diverted away from classrooms, fire stations, roads, mental health services, and the essential programs Californians depend on every day.”

The letter lays out The Path Forward.

We urge the Legislature to advance a comprehensive tort reform package for civil

actions against public entities that, at minimum, include the following:

• Defined benefits including caps on damages in civil actions against public entities, ensuring survivors and other injured parties are made whole while preserving the capacity to deliver essential public services.           

• Proportional (several) liability for economic damages in civil actions against public entities, so that taxpayers pay only for the share of harm actually attributable to the public agency. This way the perpetrators bear the cost of their own conduct and not taxpayers.

• Heightened evidentiary and procedural standards for claims where witnesses, records, and evidence archives are absent or insufficient to assign culpability.

Signers of the letter restated their keep and unwavering commitment to ensuring that survivors of harm receive justice, support, and meaningful compensation. California’s public agencies are not asking for insulation from accountability. We do not seek to deny survivors their day in court. Instead, we seek to fix a system that, as currently structured, transfers enormous wealth to plaintiffs’ law firms and threatens the financial solvency of the very public agencies tasked with protecting and serving our vulnerable community members.

The letter was signed by our coalition partners including:

·        League of California Cities (CalCities)

·        California Association of School Business Officials (CASBO)

·        Association of California School Administrators (ACSA)

·        California School Boards Association (CSBA)

·        Rural County Representatives of California (RCRC)

·        California Laino School Boards Association

·        School Excess Liability Fund (SELF)

·        League of United Latin American Citizens

·        Los Angeles Unified School District

CAJPA will continue to strongly advocate with our coalition partners to make the Legislature act on this crucial reform!

If you or your JPA members are interested in signing onto this Coalition letter please email CAJPA Executive Director Catherine Smith at casmith@cajpa.org with your request to sign onto the letter, name and title of signer, electronic signature, and agency logo.

Questions on these legislative efforts can be directed to CAJPA Legislative Advocate Faith Borges at fborges@publicpolicypartnership.com.

Our partnership with Polco has been a part of CAJPA’s long, ongoing efforts to encourage tort reform through the State Legislature. CAJPA’s Legislative Action Day attendees met with legislators and staff in the Capitol. We can assist members with connecting at the local level. Calls, emails, and in-district meetings are the engines that move legislators. Members who would like assistance connecting with their legislator, or who have questions, are encouraged to contact CAJPA’s Policy Assistant, Brett Moore, at bmoore@cajpa.org.

CAJPA’s top priority is always to our members; tort reform will provide funding relief for all public entities and restore balance in the insurance market. Recent years, changes in public opinion, and landmark reports have set the stage for a time of change in the Golden State. 

Trial attorneys are reaping huge payouts. Trial attorneys are increasingly making massive profits from taxpayers, with the amount increasingly rapidly — estimated to cost nearly half a billion dollars in 2026-27 alone.

Communities are suffering the impacts of drained funding. When funds get drained from local governments and schools, it results in direct impacts to our communities — everything from worsening student literacy rates to higher child poverty rates. This is the result of causal analysis that already accounts for characteristics and trends that are occurring in a community — the chart below is the causal analysis of what happens in a community one year after a claim over $1M. 

“These lawsuit costs are not just numbers on a spreadsheet — they represent fewer teachers in classrooms, fewer firefighters saving lives and homes from wildfires, fewer road repairs, and fewer resources for the most vulnerable in our communities. Without reforms, these costs will continue to escalate and taxpayers will keep footing the bill.” — Marinda Griese, President of CAJPA

The report notes that these alarming trends persist even though the dataset excludes major self-insured jurisdictions like Los Angeles County and LAUSD — meaning the true statewide cost is even higher.

“Assume you have two sister cities with the same demographics and socioeconomics (income, education, race/ethnicity, poverty rates, K-12 Assessment rates, etc.), and one of them incurs a $1 million claim while the other does not — the city that incurred the claim will experience a 1% higher child poverty rate, higher inequity, a 10% increase in SNAP benefit utilization, accelerated degradation in K-12 pass rates, and much more. All within a single year. These are real effects, they are large, and many. Struggling pockets in public jurisdictions will struggle more due to that claim.” — Nick Mastronardi, PhD CEO of Polco and Director of the National Research Center

CAJPA and its members are calling for urgent, statewide action to reform the liability system and prevent long-term damage to California’s public institutions.

About CAJPA

The California Association of Joint Powers Authorities represents public risk-sharing pools across the state, working to protect taxpayer funds and maintain the delivery of essential public services.

For the full report, click here: Protecting Public Funds: The Rising Cost of Claims Against California Public Entities.