Dear Assembly Appropriations Committee Member:

This letter is to express opposition to AB 1458 in its current form.

AB 1458 is the proposed legislation that will require a State-issued license to operate a powerboat in California waters. My understanding is that it comes before the Assembly Appropriations Committee sometime this month.

I participated in the last four stakeholders meetings at the Department of Boating and Waterways offices, and note that there are several serious problems with this bill that may be of importance to the Appropriations Committee.

RBOC, Recreational Boaters of California, has a long history of opposing any new regulatory or economic encumbrances to boating. However, RBOC is now the primary advocate of AB 1458. At first this might seem to be the best endorsement possible, considering RBOC's general opposition to boating regulation. But RBOC's real intent, clearly stated by RBOC representatives, is to preempt the imposition of federal regulation which would be both more effective and more economical for the State of California.

The most serious substantive flaw in AB 1458 as currently drafted is that it provides insufficient funding to safely implement the "rental exemption" now in the text (section e5).

This exemption in itself is questionable. It appears to be in the bill only because industry representatives insist that the new legislation must accommodate walk-up rentals of fast powerboats and PWC ("jetskis") to inexperienced operators.

Data prepared by Department of Boating and Waterways (and distributed at the stakeholders meetings) indicates that this kind of vessel operation is dramatically more dangerous than all other forms of boating.

See the accident rate chart at

http://www.well.com/user/pk/waterfront/1458/Boating-Accidents.pdf.

AB 1458 calls for the Department of Boating and Waterways to develop educational and testing materials to meet the specific requirements of rental operations. However the funding projections by DBW are severely inadequate to accommodate all the different scenarios of rental powerboats and still provide for safe same-day rental operation. The funding projections are also inadequate to properly validate that the test material is administered fairly by the rental operators, who have a strong interest in shortcutting the process.

To summarize, AB 1458 as currently drafted leaves two possibilities:

1) The Department of Boating and Waterways will need to spend significantly more money than projected in order to develop meaningful education and testing procedures for rental powerboats;

or

2) The "rental certificate" will be a fairly meaningless perfunctory briefing and check-off that will have virtually no effect on the high accident and fatality rate now suffered by PWC operators, especially by inexperienced renters, and by the other waterway users with which they sometimes collide.

Note that a similar bill (AB 1287, vetoed in 1999 by Gray Davis) only applied to powerboats over 15 HP and called for a renters certificate valid for 14 days. The current bill reduces the HP threshold to zero and allows the renters certificate to be valid for 30 days. This puts an even greater burden on DBW to develop appropriate testing materials for the greater variety of rental situations, yet they have projected only a small fraction of the funds necessary to accomplish this effectively.

Please send AB 1458 back to its authors so that these deficiencies can be addressed.

Thank you.

Paul Kamen
Forensic Naval Architect