Sacramento rolls back all-electric building law passed just years ago
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Sacramento City Council repealed its two-year all-electric building ordinance.
- Federal appeals court rulings against Berkeley prompted wider repeals and pauses.
- No citations were issued in the four months when the Sacramento ordinance was in effect.
Sacramento has formally repealed its short-lived all-electric building mandate, ending a climate policy once touted as central to the city’s clean-energy future.
The City Council approved on Tuesday night to remove the mandate as part of a vote to amend the city code. The proposal was featured on the council’s consent calendar agenda — typically reserved for non-controversial actions.
Sacramento’s move follows last year’s repeal of a landmark Bay Area climate rule and comes four years after the council overwhelmingly approved a plan to require residential and commercial buildings three stories or fewer to be all electric beginning in 2023. The ordinance applied to all new buildings by 2026.
City leaders, including then-Mayor Darrell Steinberg, branded the measure as key to combating climate change. At the time, Sacramento was the first city in the Central Valley to adopt such a law and had followed the lead of dozens of California cities.
“Climate change is not some esoteric issue,” Steinberg said in June 2021. “There are specific public health consequences now in our Sacramento community. If we are not aggressive about reducing the use of fossil fuels, we are leaving generations of children to live with the same impacts.”
But the city paused enforcement in April 2023 — just four months after the mandate took effect — when a federal appeals court sided with the California Restaurant Association in its challenge against the city of Berkeley. The Bay Area city was the first in the U.S. to approve a ban on installing natural gas in newly constructed buildings.
Berkeley ultimately repealed its ordinance in 2024 after the court refused to rehear the case. Many cities in California with similar measures have since reassessed their rules.
Sacramento never issued citations during its brief four-month enforcement period, said Sacramento city spokesperson Kelli Trapani in a written statement on Thursday afternoon.
“Any applications that were in review or subject to the ordinance during that short period of time were allowed to revert to mixed-fuel upon request,” Trapani said.
The city has no other electrification ordinances at the time, Trapani added. Instead, it will follow the 2025 California Building Standards code, which encourages shifting from natural gas by requiring electric options for space heating, water heating and cooking in many new buildings.
Under an Assembly Bill signed earlier this year, all cities in the state are barred until 2032 from adopting stronger building codes, including for electrification, unless they qualify for an exception.
Some California jurisdictions have continued to push for all-electric ordinances despite the Berkeley ruling. Earlier this year, San Francisco lawmakers fast-tracked a measure to close a loophole in its existing all-electric building code, according to Canary Media.
This story was originally published November 21, 2025 at 11:34 AM.
