Please support SB-623 Veterans' bond act of 2026

Dear Members of the Assembly Committee on Housing and Community Development,

I am writing to urge your support for Senate Bill 623, the Veterans' Bond Act of 2026, and to ask that it pass as its own independent measure, not attached to any other bond measure.

I am a California resident, and I am asking you to protect a program that has kept a promise to this state's veterans for more than a century. SB 623 would place a $1.25 billion general obligation bond on the November 2026 ballot to continue funding the CalVet Farm and Home Loan Program. CalVet was built specifically for California veterans, and unlike a conventional lender it keeps and services its own loans, which lets it work with a veteran who hits a temporary hardship instead of moving to foreclosure. That is why it carries the lowest foreclosure rate of any lender in the country, and why not one veteran in the program lost a home during the pandemic.

This program costs the state nothing. Veterans repay their loans through their monthly mortgage payments, those payments retire the bonds, and the program has operated at zero net cost to the General Fund for its entire history. It has helped nearly 500,000 California veterans and their families buy homes, and it currently serves about 4,800 active loans totaling $1.2 billion. Demand is rising, not falling: in the last fiscal year CalVet funded more than $245 million in loans, a 22.5 percent increase over the year before.

The program is running out of room. CalVet's remaining bond authority will be fully depleted by the fall of 2027. Once it is gone, CalVet cannot issue new loans, and a benefit California has honored for a hundred years stops reaching the next generation of veterans, just as demand is climbing. The only way to keep it going is to let the voters decide in November 2026.

That is why this measure has to stand on its own. Since 1921, California voters have approved every single veterans' bond placed before them, 27 in a row, a 100 percent record, because they trust a clean, dedicated veterans' measure. Folding SB 623 into a larger general obligation bond would tie that perfect record to unrelated and contested spending, expose it to the fatigue voters feel when a ballot is crowded with bonds, and let an unrelated controversy drag the whole package down. If a combined measure fails, the veterans' bond cannot return to the ballot for two years, long after CalVet runs dry. A program with a flawless record at the ballot box should not be forced to carry that risk.

I respectfully urge your aye vote on SB 623, and I ask that it advance as a standalone Veterans' Bond Act so California's voters can decide it on its own merits this November.

Respectfully,

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