AB 2512 amends Government Code Section 56000 to remove a duplicated phrase in the statute’s short‑title provision. The bill replaces the current wording that repeats “known, and may be cited” with a single, properly punctuated citation line.
The change is editorial: it alters only the text used to cite the Cortese‑Knox‑Hertzberg Local Government Reorganization Act of 2000 and does not modify any substantive authority, procedure, or delegation in the Act. The practical impact is limited to cleaner statutory text and reduced potential for citation or search errors in legal databases and official codifications.
At a Glance
What It Does
The bill makes a one‑line textual correction to Government Code Section 56000 so the statute’s short title reads cleanly without a duplicated phrase. It does not add duties, change jurisdiction, or alter any substantive provisions of the Act.
Who It Affects
The change primarily affects codification and publication workflows: state code editors, legal research providers, and anyone who cites Section 56000. Local governments and special districts are unaffected in their powers or procedures under the Act.
Why It Matters
Even trivial textual errors can create mismatches in electronic search indexes, citation tools, and official publications; this bill prevents those frictions. For document managers, law librarians, and publishers the amendment reduces the risk of inconsistent citations and avoids a small but persistent source of confusion.
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What This Bill Actually Does
AB 2512 targets the short‑title line in Government Code Section 56000, which names the Cortese‑Knox‑Hertzberg Local Government Reorganization Act of 2000. The current printed text duplicates a short phrase; the bill deletes that duplication and leaves a single, properly worded citation.
There is no added text beyond the corrected short title.
Because Section 56000 only supplies a name for the statute, the bill creates no new rights, duties, procedures, or limitations. The Act’s substantive provisions — the procedures for local government reorganizations — remain unchanged.
Enforcement, review, and administrative responsibilities housed elsewhere in the Act are unaffected.Operationally, the amendment produces a single downstream task: update official electronic and print code texts and propagate the clean wording to commercial legal databases and citation services. For attorneys and agencies that reference the Act, the change should reduce citation mismatches; it does not create transitional obligations or retroactive effects.Legislatively, AB 2512 reads as a housekeeping measure.
It aligns the code text with standard drafting practice and helps maintain the integrity of statutory references in automated systems that depend on exact string matches.
The Five Things You Need to Know
The bill makes a single textual edit to Government Code Section 56000 to remove a duplicated phrase in the statute’s short‑title line.
Section 56000 continues to provide only the Act’s short title — the amendment does not alter substantive provisions of the Cortese‑Knox‑Hertzberg Act of 2000.
AB 2512 contains one section and does not create new duties, penalties, funding changes, or procedural requirements.
The Legislative Counsel’s summary explicitly characterizes the amendment as nonsubstantive editorial cleanup.
Practical effects are limited to updating official code publications and legal research databases to reflect the corrected wording.
Section-by-Section Breakdown
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Corrects the short‑title wording for the Cortese‑Knox‑Hertzberg Act
This section deletes the duplicated language and restores the short title to a single, properly punctuated citation line. Mechanically, that means the text that reads with the repeated words will be replaced by the standard short title formula used throughout the Government Code. For anyone maintaining statutory texts, this is the only operative change in the bill; it neither adds nor removes statutory authority or procedure.
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Who Benefits
- Legal research vendors and law publishers — they avoid inconsistent records and reduce the chance of mismatched search results or duplicated entries tied to a stray string in the statute.
- State codification and legislative staff — the corrected text simplifies maintenance of the official code and reduces editorial debt in the Government Code.
- Local government attorneys and law librarians — they get a cleaner citation to use in filings, memos, and guidance, lowering the risk of citation errors.
Who Bears the Cost
- State code editors and legislative staff — a small administrative task to update electronic and print versions of the Government Code and notify publishers.
- Commercial legal database providers — routine update work to sync the corrected wording into their databases and citation tools (minimal, one‑time engineering effort).
- Organizations that have automated workflows keyed to exact statutory text — they may need to validate or refresh scripts that relied on the prior typographical string (unlikely but possible).
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The central tension is between the value of keeping statutory text precise and searchable, and the transaction costs of making piecemeal editorial changes across a complex publication ecosystem; fixing the law’s wording improves clarity but imposes small coordination and update costs that accumulate if handled one bill at a time.
The amendment is functionally harmless but illustrates two recurring implementation issues. First, even clerical fixes require coordination across multiple publishers and platforms; without a single authoritative push, inconsistent versions can linger in secondary sources.
Second, small edits sometimes trigger disproportionate administrative attention when automated systems or cross‑referencing tools depend on exact text matches.
A residual legal risk is theoretical rather than practical: courts could, in an extreme and unlikely scenario, be asked to interpret whether a textual correction reflects a substantive legislative intent. Given that Section 56000 only provides a short title and the bill changes no operative clause, such a claim would be weak, but the possibility underscores why procedural transparency about housekeeping amendments matters.
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