California‘s FAST Recovery Act will likely be placed on hold until November 2024. 

The Save Local Restaurants coalition, a group composed of restaurant industry advocates, filed a voter referendum on September 7, 2022 to block the new law. California’s referendum process provides that opponents have 90 days from the date of a bill’s enactment to qualify a measure for the ballot by collecting enough signatures. Specifically, the group had until December 5, 2022 to submit 623,000 signatures in order for the law to be placed on the ballot.  Save Local Restaurants issued a statement on December 5, 2022 that it had gathered over one million signatures in opposition to the law.

Local counties will now have eight business days to provide a count of the signatures submitted to the California Secretary of State’s office. If the count meets or exceeds the required total, counties will thereafter have 30 business days to do a random sample verification of signatures as part of the Secretary of State’s quality control process. 

The referendum may be subject to legal challenges from the Service Employees International Union California, a union which co-sponsored the law and vigorously opposes the effort to overturn it. 

If the signatures are found to be valid, the FAST Act will appear on the November 2024 ballot for voters to decide.