In the latest salvo in the war between the Trump administration and California, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy jr. said Tuesday that his agency withheld $867.5 million in Medicaid payments to the state over concerns about fraud.
Kennedy also said his agency defered $199 million in Medicaid payments to Minnesota over similar concerns.
“If Gov. Gavin Newsom or Gov. Tim Walz wants this funding released, all they have to do is provide basic documentation showing that these services are legitimate and not fraudulent,” Kennedy said at a news conference.
Just under half of the funds withheld from California were in connection with in-home health services.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said California’s spending on in-home health services went up by more than double the national average over the last two fiscal years.
“That doesn’t make sense,” he said.
About a quarter of the funds withheld involved care provided to individuals with “unsatisfactory immigration status,” whose eligibility to be in the country and receive these services is in question, which Oz characterized as an “ongoing massive problem for California.”
The announcement by Kennedy and Oz on Tuesday comes two months after Vice President JD Vance announced that the administration would be deferring $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments over fraud concerns, largely connected to hospice services and in-home healthcare.
Newsom’s office, in a social media post, called the announcement a “recycled political stunt.”
“California isn’t being targeted because Trump has evidence of fraud,” the post said. “We are being targeted for political reasons — and because Dr. Oz doesn’t understand that we are *SAVING* taxpayers money by keeping seniors and people with disabilities out of far more expensive nursing homes!”
Newsom’s office also said that the state stands “ready to collaborate” with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services “in good faith efforts to combat fraud.”
The office of California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said it is reviewing the deferral of payments and allegations of fraud.
“We have not hesitated to challenge unlawful actions by the Trump administration, and we will continue to act whenever Californians’ rights or access to critical services are threatened,” Bonta’s office said.
Despite Newsom’s claims that the accusations are political, the California state auditor has repeatedly flagged Medi-Cal eligibility discrepancies that have exposed the state to billions of dollars in questionable payments.
California Department of Healthcare Services spokesperson Anthony Cava noted, however, that a 2020 state audit of in-home care found “no program integrity concerns” and encouraged expansion of the program to reduce spending on institutional care.
Cava also pointed out that the federal government had previously approved California’s approach to in-home care.
Newsom and Oz have clashed before.
Newsom filed a civil rights complaint in January against Oz, after Oz posted a video to social media from Van Nuys in which he accused the “Russian Armenian mafia” of being a leading driver of $3.5 billion in fraud in hospice and home-care services.
Newsom said that Oz’s claims were “baseless and racist.”
The announcement by Kennedy and Oz on Tuesday is the latest effort by the Trump administration to crack down on suspected Medicaid fraud in numerous states across the country.
SACRAMENTO — California has spent millions of dollars to combat sex trafficking, and yet it can still be found in every city and town, hiding in plain sight.
Whether it’s online, on places such as Figueroa Street in L.A. or Stockton Boulevard in Sacramento, or even in the hotel rooms where our World Cup guests stayed, there are thousands of women and girls being sexually exploited in California right now, despite all that money and all the resources it has purchased.
“The reality is that few threats to a woman’s safety are as brutal or as overlooked as sex trafficking,” First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom said Monday, sitting with her husband, the governor, in a tiny second-floor dance studio built for survivors of trafficking.
Siebel Newsom was there to watch Newsom sign an executive order that was driven by her work as an advocate for survivors of trafficking. On its surface, the order may not sound like much and isn’t likely to make the news. It calls for most of the major state agencies to come up with a plan within 60 days to work together to curb trafficking and help survivors.
Hardly an earth-shattering demand. But believe it or not, one of the biggest barriers that our state faces, in this great age of technology and always-on connection, is that there is little collaboration between the folks fighting traffickers.
Yes, we have about 35 task forces statewide working on this issue and sometimes they run joint operations. But more often, those fighting trafficking live in their own silos, doing their own work, and often failing or refusing to share even scant details with other jurisdictions.
The same holds true for the many organizations that work with survivors, most of which have come on the scene only in the last few decades as sex trafficking morphed from a crime in which children were viewed as complicit to one in which we understand that they are victims.
Those organizations often do great work, but they too often do it alone. A survivor — or a girl being trafficked and looking for escape — has no easy way to find someone to help her. It’s largely luck, the right outreach person in the right place at the right time, or a cop who has taken the time and care to know what the resources are.
“We are so fragmented,” Sharmin Bock told the governor. She’s a former prosecutor in Alameda County who tried the first sex trafficking case in the U.S. Now, she’s advising the first partner on how California can do a better job fighting the predators — traffickers and buyers alike — who daily trade cash for the use of a human body, willing or not.
Bock points out that while those fighting against trafficking lack collaboration, the opposite is true of the criminals. Up and down the state, they are organized. A trafficker might pick up his victim in one city, only to transport her to another city to meet buyers. Victims are moved often, and even sold or traded to other traffickers.
Once a victim crosses a jurisdictional line, everything that happened on the other side of it too often gets lost in the nowhere land of bureaucracy and red tape. A move from Los Angeles to Riverside, and the girl might as well be in Taiwan, as Bock puts it.
“We need to stop asking whose case is this, and rather ask how do we solve this case together? How do we solve the problem together?” Bock said. “Collaboration recovers children sooner, links investigation, dismantles trafficking organizations and holds traffickers accountable. A trafficker should never escape accountability because critical information was sitting in another agency’s database.”
So while Newsom’s demand for a 60-day plan might not sound like much, it goes to the heart of what ails the system.
“Traffickers collaborate every day,” Bock said. “Traffickers have built networks to exploit children. We must build stronger networks to protect them.”
Newsom drew a parallel to the plague of retail theft that captivated the state not long ago, and which the state has successfully combated. Though careful to draw the obvious line that stealing a tube of toothpaste is a far cry from sexually exploiting a child, he pointed out similarities — online platforms that turned a blind eye, a lack of coordination between agencies, criminals that knew how to exploit not just victims, but systems.
Now he’s looking for that kind of “momentum,” to solve this most stubborn of abuses.
“For the last few years, I thought I could buy my way out of this,” Newsom said with a shocking bit of honesty, pointing to all that budget money that has been invested. But, he said, he’s clear now that it’s not a money problem. It’s a people problem.
“How is that possible? “ the governor wondered. The executive order, he said, is about saying “enough of just good intentions … we’re not delivering fundamental results.”
A report at the end of 60 days isn’t results. But it’s an acknowledgment that California needs to do better, and a road map to get there.
That’s crucial. Like Siebel Newsom and the governor, I’ve got two teenage daughters and I know just how vulnerable girls are, in the best of circumstances.
With all our resources and good intentions, California can’t continue to let predators win simply because they’re more organized.
California has some of the nation’s toughest gun laws, but state lawmakers are concerned that a new technology is allowing criminals to obtain firearms by building them from scratch. By using 3-D printers, they warn, lawbreakers are able to make key components of untraceable “ghost guns” with the press of a button.
Ghost guns, which authorities say make it more difficult to investigate shootings because they lack serial numbers, have been a growing problem for law enforcement nationwide. According to federal data, the number of privately made firearms recovered in crimes surged from more than 1,600 in 2017 to nearly 27,500 in 2023. California leads the nation in recoveries over that period.
In response, legislators are seeking to mandate that all 3-D printers sold in the state come equipped with software that prohibits users from making triggers and other gun parts. A bill passed the Assembly in May and is advancing through the Senate.
But the proposal has drawn opposition from a diverse coalition, which includes civil liberties groups, tech companies and 3-D printing enthusiasts as well as Hollywood effects studios, who argue that “firearm blocking software” will also prohibit legitimate designs and expose makers to government or corporate surveillance.
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Inside a San Fernando workshop, Samuel McBride makes movie monsters come to life for the camera. One of his latest creations, an animatronic hand, clutches when he pulls a trigger that he built using a 3-D printer.
McBride says the technology has transformed the work at Legacy Effects, where he is a lab manager, but he’s worried it will soon be off-limits because of a proposed change in California law.
McBride fears the law would interfere with the making of devices like the one that activates his lifelike hand.
“If I just took apart this trigger and put it on a printer, how is anyone, computer or human, going to tell me how I intend to use it?” he asked.
Backers of the proposed law say it has the potential to help save lives.
“As gun violence continues to devastate our communities, we cannot allow 3-D printing technology to become a new pipeline for untraceable weapons,” said Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, the bill’s author.
Critics of the proposed California law note that 3-D printed guns represent a small subset of ghost guns recovered by law enforcement at crime scenes. According to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, most “privately made firearms” recovered by police are assembled from mail-order kits or unfinished parts rather than printed at home.
Jorge Perez of Monster City Studios holds a sculpture made with a large, industrial 3-D printer.
(Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times)
“This fight is not over whether ghost guns are dangerous,” said David Tobin, an independent creator leading the coalition. “It is over whether the state can or should require a consumer tool to surveil a person’s designs before they are allowed to make something.”
Everytown for Gun Safety, a national nonprofit that advocates for gun control and has pushed for the passage of California’s bill, pointed to rising 3-D printed firearm recoveries across 20 major cities and warned that homemade plastic parts can help people bypass background checks or turn handguns into automatic weapons.
Krystal LoPilato, who advocates for policy at Everytown, said the group has successfully guided a similar bill through the New York state Legislature.
A handgun frame made using a 3-D printer is held for display at the office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)
LoPilato said the policy aims to be proactive, rather than allowing more violence to take place before regulating the problem. Opponents counter that California already bars unlawful firearm manufacturing with 3-D printers, and that ghost gun recoveries have declined since the state adopted a series of new laws and enforcement efforts.
A June 1 letter to lawmakers, signed by a group of 3-D printing companies, stagecraft and prop-making studios and industry stakeholders, argued that AB 2047 raises 1st Amendment concerns and would harm businesses. The letter was signed by a wide variety of companies and individuals, including Prusa Research, a prominent 3-D printer manufacturer.
“To an algorithm, a gun barrel and a piece of pipe are the same grooved cylinder,” Jakub Kmošek, head of public affairs at Prusa, said in a statement to The Times. “This bill will only make it harder to build, repair, experiment, and innovate in California.”
Alan Scott, Legacy Effects’ co-founder, said 3-D printing has become central to the company’s survival in an industry where budgets are tighter and deadlines are shorter.
“Everything’s just got to be done faster these days. You don’t get to reduce the quality. We couldn’t stay in business if we weren’t 3-D printing,” Scott said.
To solve this problem, Bauer-Kahan put an entertainment industry exception in the bill, exempting “printers manufactured for and sold exclusively to entertainment industry stagecraft and propmaking studios” from the software requirement.
McBride, Legacy’s 3-D lab manager, said those printers do not really exist.
Legacy uses the same general-purpose machines available to other businesses willing to invest in the equipment, and no printers are marketed exclusively for Hollywood, he said.
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1.A 3-D printed sculpture concept at Monster City, a special effects studio in Santa Clarita.(Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times)2.3-D printing advocate David Tobin showcases a robotics kit at Monster City.(Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times)
Legacy also worries about privacy. Major studios require strict secrecy before a movie or show is released. To accommodate this, the company shares design files through encrypted servers and protected internal systems.
“We’ve invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring all that technology here under the umbrella of our NDAs and our IP protection,” McBride said.
Bauer-Kahan noted at a Senate hearing that she is working to address concerns raised by 3-D printing users and industries that rely on the technology.
Paul Powers, chief executive of Physna, a company whose technology could be used to block gun parts on 3-D printers, said the strongest criticisms of AB 2047 “misunderstand how the software works.”
“Something that vaguely looks like a gun part is not considered to be a match,” he said.
Powers also responded to surveillance concerns by clarifying that his company’s software only blocks the printer from making prohibited parts — it doesn’t flag them to authorities or log users’ intellectual property.
“There’s no communication with anyone; it doesn’t go anywhere,” he said.
But Marleen Vogelaar, chief executive of Thangs3D, a platform for independent creators to share and sell 3-D printable designs, said that answer does not resolve her broader concerns about how AB 2047 would work in practice.
“These databases will always lag behind innovation and can be easily circumvented and generate false positives that block legal designs and wrongly flag everyday makers,” she said at a Senate hearing this month. “The bill also creates serious privacy and security risks by giving third parties access to analyze designer’s files. That threatens intellectual property and adds digital surveillance in a state that values data privacy.”
If the bill passes, the state’s Department of Justice would publish a roster of compliant printers. Printers not on the list would be banned from sale or transfer in California beginning in December 2029.
Aubrey Rodriguez, a legislative advocate with American Civil Liberties Union California Action, an advocacy organization formed by the ACLU’s three affiliates in the state, said the bill would ask ordinary users, schools and businesses to accept a new layer of control based on software they still do not trust.
Rodriguez said the proposal risks creating “a permanent back door into the privacy of our own homes, ripe for exploitation.”
“Once this new infrastructure exists, it is a simple software update away from tracking political dissent or preventing 3-D printing designs deemed inappropriate,” Rodriguez said.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Justice civil rights division was created in 1957 with an initial focus on combating racial inequality and protecting voting rights.
But in the first two years of President Trump’s second term, its mission has been reimagined.
Now, the division is focused on combating diversity initiatives, rolling back pro-transgender policies and rooting out allegations of election fraud.
It had for decades investigated police departments for using excessive force. Now it investigates police departments with excessive delays in approving gun permits.
California has served as the division’s laboratory for all of these changes, or, as one former civil rights staffer put it, its “punching bag.”
The civil rights division has been involved in twice as many cases in California as in any other state, according to a Times analysis of cases brought by the Justice Department.
And an examination of press statements by the civil rights division shows that California has accounted for a higher proportion of actions in the second Trump administration than during the same time period in the Biden administration.
The division is led by Harmeet Dhillon, a Californian and a conservative legal crusader, who made her name bringing legal challenges against many of the state’s institutions and once served as the chair of the San Francisco Republican Party.
More recently, she was a leading legal figure in challenges to COVID-19 mandates and has shown steadfast support for Trump; her firm represented him in his successful 2024 fight to remain on the ballot in Colorado.
The Times spoke with a dozen former attorneys in the division, nearly all of whom said that the division has taken on a more partisan approach under Dhillon’s leadership and that the changes in the second Trump administration are far more dramatic than anything that occurred during Trump’s first term.
“It is an ideological civil rights division in a way that we’ve never seen before,” said Regan Rush, the former chief of the division’s special litigation section, which largely focused on investigations into police departments and prisons.
Rush is now director of the Red Line for Civil Rights at Democracy Forward, a nonprofit group that tracks the division’s activities.
In response to questions from The Times, Dhillon wrote that the division’s actions aren’t political.
“This Department speaks plainly and directly when we identify violations of federal law. Being clear about violations of federal civil rights law isn’t political or combative — it’s transparent,” Dhillon said. “I stand behind the work we’ve done since I took over the Civil Rights Division.”
While California produced President Reagan — a hero on the right who as governor frequently sparred with UC Berkeley, as Dillon does today — the state has now become, in conservative circles, a symbol of everything wrong in America.
“If there’s any state that is the antithesis of the Trump administration, it’s California,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at UC Berkeley.
Dhillon said the division brings cases wherever it sees violations of federal law.
“California is where some of the most significant violations of federal civil rights law have occurred, as our enforcement actions demonstrate,” she said.
Former attorneys in the division said the desire to target California was obvious to them.
As one example, the division has announced more than a dozen actions involving universities in California, largely focused on allegations of antisemitism — the subject of an earlier Trump executive order — at University of California campuses and alleged racial preferences in hiring in the UC system and in the admissions practices at several medical schools in the state.
The division concluded that the medical schools at UC Davis and UCLA racially discriminated against white and Asian applicants and that UCLA failed to adequately respond to complaints of antisemitic harassment of Jewish and Israeli students. Other investigations are ongoing.
A pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA in 2024.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
“We were never explicitly told that California institutions are of a particular interest, but it was something that was very easy to notice,” said Ejaz Baluch, a former Justice Department attorney who worked on the employment litigation team that looked into allegations that antisemitism at UC campuses had created a hostile work environment.
Trump’s priorities
Dhillon told podcast host Michael Malice in May that she was in “constant contact” with the White House on a “daily, sometimes several-times-a-day basis.”
That represents a major shift from how the division previously operated, said her predecessor, Kristen Clarke, who was the assistant attorney general overseeing the division during the Biden administration.
“There was a fairly sturdy and necessary wall between the Justice Department and the White House,” Clarke said. “This is a complete 180.”
Dhillon has said she sees her job as enforcing civil rights law through the lens of Trump’s executive orders, which took aim at diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, immigration and pro-transgender policies, among other conservative priorities.
She said that while the division “operates within the administration’s law enforcement priorities … investigative and prosecutorial decisions, including which matters to pursue and how, are made by the Division based on the law and the facts.”
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, said that the division’s changes under Dhillon represent a stark shift from how it operated in the past.
“It is now very much the anti-civil rights department,” Schiff said. “We’re living in this upside-down world where departments that were set up for one purpose are acting in a way that’s antithetical to the purpose of the department.”
Dhillon said that under her leadership, the division “enforces federal civil rights laws evenhandedly, on behalf of all Americans.
“That includes protecting religious liberty, Second Amendment rights, and women’s and girls’ spaces, standing against illegal race-based policymaking and DEI, and defending parents’ fundamental right to direct their children’s upbringing and education.”
Her reorientation of the division led to a mass exodus of career staff — nearly three-quarters of the roughly 400 attorneys who were there at the beginning of 2025, by Dhillon’s telling.
That’s far more departures than in the first Trump administration.
“I said, ‘My way or the highway,’ and my way isn’t my way, it’s President Trump’s way,” Dhillon told Malice.
Dhillon told The Times that the division has added 100 new lawyers and staff in the last 15 months and plans to hire 100 more.
Prisons and police
As the division has shifted its focus to align with the priorities laid out in Trump’s executive orders, it has shut down a number of cases brought during prior administrations.
Former attorneys in the division worry that other preexisting cases are languishing.
In March, the division opened an investigation into two women’s prisons in California — California Institution for Women in Chino and the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, 35 miles northwest of Fresno — over whether they had violated the rights of other female inmates by housing transgender women in the facilities.
“There have been allegations of sexual assaults, rape, voyeurism and a pervasive climate of sexual intimidation due to the presence of males in the women’s prison,” the Justice Department said in announcing the investigation, misgendering transgender inmates.
Former attorneys in the division said that leadership also sought to open an investigation into the impact of transgender housing policies on juvenile institutions in California, but didn’t find sufficient evidence to warrant opening an investigation.
The investigation into transgender inmates at the women’s prisons came as a prior investigation into the same two prisons remains unresolved over reports from hundreds of women that they had been sexually abused by guards, even as evidence supporting the allegations mounts.
Separate from the civil rights investigation, one of the former guards at the Chowchilla facility was found guilty in January 2025 of more than 60 counts of sexual abuse of inmates and sentenced to 224 years in prison.
“We haven’t seen any kind of relief,” said Megan Marks, former deputy chief in the division’s special litigation section and the deputy director and managing editor for the Red Line for Civil Rights at Democracy Forward.
Dhillon said both investigations into the two women’s prisons are “being pursued vigorously and simultaneously.”
For the last three decades, the division has investigated allegations of police misconduct, authority it was granted by Congress after the 1991 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles Police Department officers.
But in the second Trump administration, the division has closed a number of active police investigations and moved away from what Dhillon characterized to Malice as a “standing order to persecute police departments and impose nonsense restrictions on them.”
Instead, the division has brought actions against law enforcement agencies deemed to have failed to protect the rights of gun owners.
California was the first target.
The division filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit in September 2025, alleging that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had systemically denied people their 2nd Amendment rights because of long delays in approving concealed carry permits.
Last month, it filed a second gun rights lawsuit in California, this time against the state and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, over the state’s ban on Glock pistols, which acting U.S. Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche characterized as a “blatant trampling of our rights by the California government.”
Changing tone
Former attorneys in the civil rights division say the pugnacious tone in press releases, such as the one announcing the lawsuit opposing the Glock ban, and in numerous social media posts by Dhillon announcing her intent to open investigations, represents a major shift from how the department has operated in the past.
“What really stands out more than any other civil rights division is how much they demonize and personalize,” said Christy Lopez, a former attorney in the division who is now a professor at Georgetown Law. “We tried to build rapport with the jurisdiction.”
Dhillon defended the approach she and the division have taken.
“Our job is to enforce the law and ensure compliance,” Dhillon said. “That includes public messaging to ensure the public is both aware of what the law requires and knows when others violate the law. We’ve designed our messaging strategy with this goal in mind, and we are pleased with the effect it’s had.”
Numerous former lawyers in the division also said that the current leadership has put its thumb on the scale at the outset of investigations.
“We were basically fed an answer before we conducted an investigation, which is the total antithesis of how these investigations are supposed to be conducted,” said one former Justice Department attorney who worked on the investigation into allegations of antisemitism in the UC system and requested anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Attorneys visited UC Berkeley and UC Davis, but found enough evidence only at UCLA to bring a lawsuit on claims that antisemitism created a hostile work environment.
One of Dhillon’s early top deputies, former Huntington Beach City Atty. Michael Gates, denied that politics played a role in decision-making in his time in the division.
“We evaluated every case on a case-by-case basis,” he said. “There was nothing about politics that influenced any of that.”
Gates, who left the department in November, is now the Republican candidate challenging Bonta to be state attorney general.
Dhillon said to The Times that she is “proud of the record we’ve built” and believes the division has been “active and effective.”
But its former leaders worry that with the exodus of attorneys and the changing nature of the division’s approach, it has lost the ability to fulfill its mission.
“Where does it leave the division today?” said Clarke, its former leader. “It’s a broken agency not able to adequately stand up and defend the civil rights of all Americans.”
Corporate flight from the Golden State has increased in recent years, with many California-based companies fleeing for lower taxes and more lax business regulations. For the first time this year, California was not the state with the most Fortune 500 companies, after Texas dethroned it in June.
In a July 2 letter to Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison, Tennessee Deputy Gov. Stuart McWhorter pitched a relocation of the studio’s Hollywood headquarters to the Volunteer State. In the middle of a brutal legal battle with California regarding the proposed Warner Bros. merger, Tennessee may appear more appealing to Ellison. Paramount relocated its headquarters from New York to Los Angeles in August of last year.
“As Paramount Skydance writes its next chapter, Tennessee offers a compelling proposition: a state where creativity and technology converge, where talent is developed intentionally, and where innovation is embraced,” said McWhorter in the letter viewed by The Times. “We would welcome the opportunity to share our vision for how Tennessee could help shape the future of Paramount Skydance and its talented team.”
Though many in Hollywood have giggled at the idea of a major studio moving to the South, it isn’t totally ridiculous.
Ellison has backing from his father, tech billionaire and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. Oracle, once a California-based company, is now moving its headquarters to Nashville.
In December of 2020, the software tech company left California, where it was founded in 1977, to relocate to Texas. In April 2024, it chose Nashville as the home for Oracle’s “world headquarters,” which began construction in February.
Have other companies moved to Tennessee?
Oracle isn’t the first company to set up in Tennessee. Nissan, which had operated its U.S. headquarters out of Gardena since 1960, left the state in 2005 for Franklin. Nissan chose Tennessee for its drastically lower operational costs.
Mitsubishi Motors also moved its headquarters to Franklin from Cypress in 2019. Mitsubishi moved for lower operational costs and to be in a state with less-strict business regulations than California‘s.
Two beloved California burger chains moved to Tennessee.
In 2018, CKE, the parent company of Los Angeles-founded Carl’s Jr., also left California for Tennessee. CKE consolidated Carl’s Jr. and its St. Louis chain, Hardee’s, under its headquarters in Franklin.
In-N-Out — arguably California’s most iconic burger spot known for its animal fries and double doubles— began a transition out of California in 2023. It established a corporate office in Franklin, and last summer, owner and Chief Executive Lynsi Snyder announced her own move to Tennessee.
Last year, Snyder said pandemic-era restrictions and California policy motivated her decision to leave, but she has no plans for In-N-Out to expand farther East. The majority of In-N-Out locations are still in California.
“There’s a lot of great things about California, but raising a family is not easy here. Doing business is not easy here,” Snyder said.
What is so special about Tennessee?
The southern state’s highly business-friendly tax incentives make it an extremely desirable location. Businesses and billionaires are drawn to Tennessee by its lack of state income and property taxes. Instead, the state relies on a 7% sales tax as its main source of tax revenue. Tennessee also offers a number of tax credits and grants for businesses, including many designed to support newly relocated businesses, cover costs of training new employees, and construction.
Tennessee’s central location and well-connected infrastructure support supply chain logistics. Seven interstate highways run through Tennessee, and six of the United States’ class 1 rail lines operate there, allowing companies to cut transportation costs dramatically. Memphis is also home to the busiest cargo airport in the country.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee attributes the success to the state’s competitive tax policy, workforce, and quality of life.
“Companies choose Tennessee because they recognize the strength of our workforce, our strategic location and our ability to support long-term growth,” Lee said in an emailed statement. “Tennessee’s success comes from our commitment to helping businesses thrive.”
It pains me to say that most of us are missing the point when it comes to President Trump’s rambling election fraud speech. Which is exactly what he wants.
Within minutes of its airing Thursday night, the internet and pundits were abuzz debating whether voting machines were secure and whether the federal government has a right, or even a duty, to oversee voter rolls (it has neither). Long posts were written condemning voter identification efforts, and more posts written attacking those condemnations.
This, friends, is exactly what the speech was meant to accomplish — myopic bickering.
To be specific, myopic bickering about the past, as a dark future creeps ever closer — like, say, Nov. 3.
The question is will we allow Trump to sow just enough doubt in the minds of average Americans that what comes next seems inevitable and even necessary?
Trump falsely claimed that he was revealing “an election system so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.”
“This cannot be allowed to continue,” he said.
Those are ominous words, ones we should take seriously.
“This is a very sad thing to be able to say about the president of the United States, but I think it’s quite clear,” said Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy, a nonpartisan research facility. “This is about a certain set of political goals, and using this misinformation to achieve those political goals.”
Trump knows that the midterms present a threat to his power and he, and those around him, have been working for years to create a strategy to invalidate our election results just in case they don’t fall in his direction. Whether the overall outcome favors Democrats or Republicans in the midterms, the wins and losses are going to be close, giving him the chance to attack Democratic wins.
On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump learned from the unlikely teacher Mike Pence the difficult lesson that plans work only when people are in place to implement them. As vice president, Pence, you may recall, refused to stop the election certification process that legally, rightfully, fairly allowed Joe Biden to take office.
Since then, Trump has purged dissenters from top roles, instead putting in flat-out sycophants, election deniers and conspiracy theorists — more than one of whom has been associated with the racist Great Replacement theory that Democrats are secretly helping Black and brown people to illegally cross the border in exchange for these folks illegally voting for Democrats, thereby replacing the “true” America of conservative white people.
So the apparatchiks are in place, Soviet-style. There will be no Penceian savior on the inside this time around.
More than one election expert I have spoken to in recent months fear that because there is no one left on the inside to object, we could see post-election turmoil like this: Republicans lose one or both houses of Congress. Trump calls fraud. The Department of Justice or outside lawyers, or both, sue to overturn results. Congress, the Republican one still in place, refuses to seat newly elected Democrats until the court cases are resolved.
A constitutional crisis is at hand. Democrats say they were elected. Republicans won’t let them serve. No one is clear who is in Congress and who isn’t. In effect, the body is frozen and it’s legitimacy undermined. Into that vacuum, Trump pushes his already great power even further.
As movie-terrible as that sounds, that internal structure is in place and this scenario is far less impossible or even improbable than we could hope.
“What we’re talking about is just misinformation and what could be used as a justification for potentially interfering with seating of elected officials,” Romero said. “Particularly Congress.”
Now, with the internal stuff squared away, Trump’s focus is neutralizing outside dissent. That’s you and me, and that’s what this speech was about. Sowing doubt, tossing seeds of chaos into the soil to see what grows. Letting us know it’s coming, so we as Americans have time to bicker, argue, and tear away at our trust in elections so that by the time we vote, we expect the worst to happen.
“Unfortunately, there are some members of the public that are going to believe what they’re being told and when they hear election results, question it,” said Chad Dunn, legal director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project. “This kind of communication misleads Americans and does a disservice to our democracy.”
Dunn told me he’s “as worried as I’ve been in my life” about the next election.
Trump’s far right is wasting no time on this effort. After Trump’s speech, the Department of Homeland Security sent out a letter to California and three other states claiming California has more than 190,000 non-citizens registered to vote, and demanding the state “confirm their intentions to collaborate with DHS in order to ensure free, fair, and honest elections.”
This is a misleading, erroneous count and does not include the obvious fact that there is no evidence that undocumented people actually voted in any California election in any noticeable numbers.
But it creates that chaos and doubt. California isn’t going to share its voter rolls willingly with the federal government because elections — according to the Constitution — are state affairs. And there is no evidence that the federal government has a better way of vetting citizenship than California does. So it becomes one more point of bickering.
But what Dunn, Romero and other honest elections experts want Americans to know is that our elections are free and fair and all is not lost. Far from it.
The answer to the propaganda and lies is to remain aware of it, remain above it. Spread truth and refute falsehoods.
Dunn said that Americans should demand that any voter fraud be taken to the courts — where it belongs, and where we can determine the validity of the evidence.
“If you’re concerned about this, if you’re inclined to believe the president, demand proof, demand resolution in court at trial with the the showing of evidence,” he said. “And reserve judgment until you see that.”
Romero has her own advice — never underestimate the power of the vote.
“Show up and to participate,” she said. “Regardless of how [you’re] going to vote — Democrat, Republican, otherwise — just to show up and participate.”
Because in the end, we only lose democracy if we willingly let it go.
Thirty years ago this fall, a Republican politician cried electoral fraud after losing a close race.
Orange County Rep. Bob Dornan couldn’t accept the most logical explanations for why Loretta Sanchez beat him in a historic upset: that voters had tired of his polarizing politics. That his Latino-majority district wanted one of their own to represent them. That he was an ideologue who never brought anything back from D.C. for his constituents.
Instead, Dornan and his supporters settled on the craziest excuse of them all: Illegal immigrants.
California voters were passing anti-immigrant laws by the boatful, so Dornan’s fevered tales about nonprofits registering noncitizens to vote and take him down landed with Republicans. A compliant Congress investigated Dornan’s claims, while local lawmakers proposed bills that would force voters to show government-issued identification every time they cast a ballot — a voter suppression tactic going back to the segregationist South.
The congressional investigation flopped like a soccer player fishing to draw a red card, finally concluding in 1998. Yes, noncitizens did vote for Sanchez, but only an infinitesimal number — less than 1% of the total votes tallied and not enough to overturn the results. No one was charged for illegally voting on purpose or improperly registering noncitizens to vote.
When Dornan ran again in 1998, with volunteers vowing to pursue any election irregularities, Sanchez walloped him, and he was swept into the dustbin of political history.
I teach this episode in my O.C. history college classes as a case study in what happens when political parties succumb to the spell of a vindictive demagogue who blames everyone for their failures except themselves. I also point out that Dornan had the last laugh: the idea that illegal immigrants regularly vote in elections, throwing them toward Democrats, has become gospel for many Republicans.
And here we are.
Republican U.S. Congressional candidate Bob Dornan speaks to a group of young adults at the Orange County Conservation Corps. in Anaheim, California in 1998. He was seeking to regain his old seat from Democratic incumbent Loretta Sanchez, who beat him in a historic 1996 upset.
(John Hayes/Associated Press)
On Thursday, President Trump’s obsession over losing to Joe Biden in 2020 reached a phlegmatic nadir with a speech on debunked election fraud theories that weaved in everything from communist China to deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro to — who else? — alleged noncitizen voters.
The tirade was so pathetic and noneventful that most networks didn’t bother to air it. Even Fox News host Sean Hannity — whose tongue is probably two parts shoe polish after spending the last decade as Trump’s personal spit shine — moved on just minutes after Trump finished.
The president insisted that the U.S. Senate pass a bill ahead of this November’s midterms, mandating in the name of election integrity that voters show proof of citizenship before casting a ballot.
In California, a clown car of MAGA loyalists — state Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, state Senator Tony Strickland, wannabe Southern California U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli — are pushing something similar. Proposition 39 would require California election officials to verify the citizenship of registered voters and require voters to show government-issued identification when they cast a ballot.
By law, voters in federal elections must be U.S. citizens. Only a handful of municipalities allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. Despite Trump’s trumpeting of supposed evidence that 278,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada, actual instances of them casting a ballot are as rare today as in Dornan’s time.
That hasn’t stopped Trump and his lackeys from claiming, as Dornan and his supporters did, that they are trying to restore faith in a system corrupted by liberals and their undocumented puppets. But, just like back then, this amounts to a dog whistle for people freaked out about changing demographics and massive GOP midterm losses.
It’s the last, most dangerous gasp of a wheezing political movement whose supporters are clinging to power at all costs and just can’t understand why more and more voters are tired of Trump’s flailing foreign policy and failing economy.
These people are so delusional that they point to last month’s California primaries as proof of election fraud, arguing that the results in two prominent races should have been different.
No Republican has won a statewide election in 20 years, so it’s not surprising that Republican Steve Hilton finished second to Democrat Xavier Becerra in the gubernatorial primary, with both advancing to the general election. Nor was it a shock that in the primary for Los Angeles mayor, progressive incumbent Karen Bass and democratic socialist City Councilmember Nithya Raman finished first and second over Republican reality television star Spencer Pratt.
That didn’t stop Trump from insisting that both Republicans should have won outright and crying conspiracy when they didn’t. The president continued his laughable tune in his White House speech.
“Took a month to count the votes,” he whined about California’s sloth-like approach to counting ballots. “I wonder what they were doing. This is worse than any third world country. There’s no third world country that has elections like we have.”
Actually, many third world countries elect despots like Trump — but that’s neither here nor there.
A May poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found that Prop. 39 was in a statistical dead heat, with 49% of voters favoring it and 51% opposed. All Prop. 39’s opponents have to do is cite Trump’s stark-raving mad comments about electoral fraud, and support for the ballot initiative will melt faster than the Sierra snowpack.
The Republican crusade against imaginary noncitizen voters may pay off in the short run but will inevitably, spectacularly backfire.
Look at what happened in my native Orange County. Sanchez’s victory was the first ripple in a blue wave that eventually turned O.C. purple. Our once-mighty GOP is now increasingly isolated to wealthier pockets of the county and no longer commands national attention — hell, they couldn’t even deliver O.C. to Trump in any of his elections.
The crazy thing is, when Republicans put in the work to appeal to immigrant and Latino voters instead of obsessing about how they’re supposedly anti-democracy invaders, it pays off. Just look at 2024, when a record number of Latino GOP legislators won seats in California and Trump won a larger share of the national Latino electorate than any Republican presidential candidate ever had.
That happened because the party largely stayed quiet on noncitizen voting and focused on what swing voters wanted to hear: a promise to clamp down on unchecked migration and too much wokeness, while fattening average Americans’ pocketbooks.
Trump’s success with Latino voters seemed to represent a tectonic shift in American politics. Now, it feels like an aberration.
Trump still doesn’t seem to get how desperate the situation is for Republicans, just four months before Election Day, and how much of it is of his own making.
Near the end of his speech, he sputtered, “The only reason you wouldn’t do [mandated voter ID] is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad, and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get away or can’t get elected any other way.”
It’s a rare day when you cannot hike somewhere in Los Angeles.
But as I write this, L.A. County is under an extreme heat warning through Thursday evening. California recently saw its first storms of monsoon season, which I learned is the reason I found myself earlier this week whining about the humidity. We’ve now entered the period of summer when you need to plan your trips with heat in mind.
In this week’s edition of The Wild, our weekly outdoors newsletter, I will highlight three hikes around L.A. where, if you go early, you can enjoy a quick, shady jaunt in nature. But first, let’s talk summer trail safety.
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How to hike safely in L.A. in summer
⌚Avoid hiking in the hottest part of the day. This will vary by day and region, but I typically plan to leave the trail by 11 a.m. in summer, or hike in the evenings, around 6 p.m.
🫗Pack more water than you normally need. Dehydration is a major reason that adventurers out on a day hike need to be rescued. It’s generally recommended to drink at least 1 quart every two hours (the amount in your typical Nalgene bottle). In summer, you will need to increase that. During summer, I also like to carry electrolyte powder and gummies.
🌤️Check the weather forecast of where you’re heading. If headed to Angeles National Forest, which includes the San Gabriel Mountains, take a look at the “Current Conditions” tab to find relevant weather information. The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area has a similar page here. If hiking in an L.A. park, remember that, because the region has several microclimates, temperatures can vary widely across the county.
😎 Wear sun protection. This includes a sun hoodie, wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses. I also recently started regularly carrying the hiking umbrella that I reviewed in last year’s Times Gift Guide.
🥵 Know the signs of heat illness. Heat cramps can be the first signal from your body that something is amiss, usually presenting as painful spasms in your legs and/or abdomen. Next comes heat exhaustion. Symptoms include clammy skin, nausea, cramps, vomiting and headache. “Don’t ignore a headache when hiking in hot weather!” the American Hiking Society cautions. “This is serious stuff. Stop. Drink. Rest.”
📲 Tell someone where you’re going. Complete this form (or something similar) and share it with a friend or family member. Place an additional copy on your vehicle’s dash if driving to the trailhead. The last thing you want is to be injured without anyone knowing where you are.
3 shady hikes around L.A.
As I’ve said many times, the best hike is where you are. The three hikes below all feature early-morning shade, but if they’re farther than you can drive or reach by transit, check out this guide I wrote about how to find shady hikes near you. I returned to it when writing this piece to remind myself of my own tips!
OK, let’s imagine the air blowing from your office fan or air conditioner is actually a light mountain breeze as we explore these three great hikes. Adventure awaits!
Sycamore trees cast shade over a trickling creek in Sullivan Canyon near Brentwood.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
1. Sullivan Canyon Trail
Distance: 8.8 miles out and back Elevation gained: 1,200 feet Difficulty: Moderate Dogs allowed: Yes Nearest to: Brentwood and the Pacific Palisades Accessible alternative:Inspiration Loop Trail at Will Rogers State Historic Park
The Sullivan Canyon Trail is an 8.8-mile out-and-back trek along a seasonal creek, shaded by tall sycamores (easy to identify because of their mottled bark) and thick old coast live oaks. There are a few options to explore the canyon, including a loop, but that will include a more exposed route.
To start the most shaded option, you’ll walk past a green gate on Queensferry Road and head down a short, steep paved road. (The walk back up will be the hardest part of the entire hike.)
After about a fifth of a mile, you’ll head northwesterly onto the trail, a wide dirt and gravel road. I immediately felt like I’d been transported into a fairy-tale scene where someone in a carriage would come heading down the trail toward me. Instead, it was a mountain biker, which was less enchanting, but fine nonetheless.
Quickly, I noticed there’s a tree swing builder who loves this canyon. I spotted two swings, one of which I stopped and enjoyed because, why not?
I was surprised to see that the Sullivan Canyon creek, which is about 6.2 miles and starts (per this map) near San Vicente Mountain Park, was still flowing. You will cross the creek and its offshoots a few times, an easy enough task in the summer months when the water is lower.
As you navigate the creek, you’ll notice tadpoles swimming about. I was charmed when I noticed one of these larval amphibians use a leaf to camouflage its movements as it darted to and fro in a shallow pool. That’s one way to trick a bird looking for a snack!
A gopher snake lounges on the trail in Sullivan Canyon.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
I was admiring the chaparral growing up the canyon walls and the late-blooming wildflowers when I gasped. A few feet ahead, a snake sunned itself on the trail. I used iNaturalist, a citizen science app, to photograph the reptile. The app AI identification system informed me it was 82% sure this was a gopher snake. I laughed to myself, thinking about telling the rescuers after I was struck, “I was 18% sure it wasn’t a rattlesnake!” I passed without issue, but will note that both species are common sights in the canyon.
You do not have to hike the entire length of the trail to enjoy Sullivan Canyon. Because the first 2 miles in are fairly flat, this is a great hike for when you’d like to walk and talk with a friend. Or you could bring a child who needs to frolic, as there are multiple large old trees with thick branches low to the ground, tempting even an older millennial outdoors journalist to try to climb them.
The only downside to this hike is the parking situation. When I arrived, I quickly realized my first task would be to solve a bureaucratic riddle. There were signs noting parking was prohibited from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and then other signs with just arrows pointing in various directions.
Puzzled, I asked a driver in an REI shirt who was standing nearby, as I figured they were probably outdoorsy. They confirmed that amid the arrows, there were gaps where people are allowed to park. As I packed up my bag to head on the hike, feeling semi-confident that my car wouldn’t be towed, a mountain biker pulled up next to my car and asked where he could park. I laughed to myself, suddenly a newfound expert on where to park on Queensferry Road! (And if you want the history of how and when these parking restrictions went into place, you can read this 1998 Times story.)
But even with the parking headaches, Sullivan Canyon remains a treasure worth exploring for the shade, light breeze and beauty it offers to early-morning hikers.
Left, Millard Creek runs alongside this hike to the Dawn Mine; and right, a view of the San Gabriel Valley and beyond from the Millard Canyon area.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
2. Dawn Mine Trail
Distance: About 6 miles out and back Elevation gained: About 1,550 feet Difficulty: Moderate Dogs allowed: Yes Nearest to: Altadena Accessible alternative: Gabrielino Trail near NASA’s JPL
This 6-mile jaunt to the Dawn Mine offers hikers a shade-lined path along Millard Creek where it’s common to spot California tree frogs and newts, along with a host of native shrubs and trees.
To begin your hike, you can either parallel park nearNuccio’s Nurseries, taking care to obey all parking signage, or if those spots are all taken, park nearby and order a rideshare to drop you at the trailhead. I had cell reception with Verizon here, so it should be possible to order a ride back to your vehicle.
Millard Creek in Angeles National Forest.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
From here, you have two options to reach the Dawn Mine trailhead.
1. Follow Chaney Trail road for a mile until you reach Mt. Lowe Motorway (called Mt. Lowe Road on some maps), where you’ll turn east. Chaney Trail road offers limited shade, so start early.
2. Walk about half a third of a mile north from Nuccio’s, and then near a bend in the road you’ll take the Chaney Trail, a winding dirt path north, for about half a mile where it’ll meet up with Mt. Lowe Motorway. (This option is also about a mile, although distance will depend on where you park.)
Headed northeast-ish on Mt. Lowe Motorway, you will walk just over a third of a mile before heading off the pavement and onto a trail. You’ll reach Millard Creek in about two-thirds of a mile.
You’ll head east and northeast until reaching Dawn Mine, which former Times outdoors writer John McKinney noted was a literal gold mine from 1895 through the 1950s. These days, it’s a figurative gold mine for local history buffs or those who want to take a cool selfie.
Millard Creek in the San Gabriel Mountains near Altadena, as seen in January.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
It is not safe to enter the mine, but you can enjoy the frigid breeze coming out of its mouth. Mountain air-conditioning!
I’d advise turning around from here. You might notice on your map that it’s possible to make a loop, and although that route offers great views, it’s exposed and not ideal on the hotter days of summer.
Franklin Canyon Reservoir north of Beverly Hills.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
3. Franklin Canyon Park loop
Distance: 1.2-mile loop with options to extend (see map) Elevation gained: About 200 feet Difficulty: Easier end of moderate Dogs allowed? Yes Nearest: The hillsides between Beverly Hills and Studio City Accessible alternative: Franklin Canyon Drive loop
Franklin Canyon Park is 605 acres of public land north of Beverly Hills that features chaparral and oak woodlands. The park has three bodies of water: the 3-acre Franklin Canyon Lake, Heavenly Pond and Wild Pond.
To reach the park, you’ll enter through either the northern or southern gate. (The northern gate was closed for months while the L.A. Department of Water and Power completed a project.)
Take good care as you drive into the park, as there are a few tight corners with low visibility.
Upon arrival, I’d recommend taking a 1.2-mile loop, which I’ve mapped out here, that will take you past the lake and ponds and up into the park’s hillsides. Whenever I’ve visited the park, I’ve found it to be cooler than the nearby neighborhoods, thanks to its water and abundant shade provided by oaks, sumac and other trees.
To begin your hike, you’ll park in the large dirt main parking lot. Head south on Franklin Canyon Drive, where you’ll quickly find a trail entrance with wooden steps that lead down near Franklin Canyon Reservoir. I hope you’re greeted by the sound of quacking waterfowl like I was!
Continue in the southerly direction, appreciating the gnarled coast live oaks and sound of shy red-eared sliders plopping off their logs into the water. This short trail will lead you back up to the road where you’ll walk south for just a bit before turning onto the gentle path that loops around Heavenly Pond. This is an especially good spot to find turtles and ducks.
A turtle rests on a hunk of wood in the Heavenly Pond in Franklin Canyon Park.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
From Heavenly Pond, continue south on the paved road, following it past the private residence to the wooden steps at the reservoir’s southern end. Take these stairs down onto Chernoff Trail. You’ll quickly spot toyon and pine trees, among other natural delights. Soon, you’ll bear right (or northeast) to take stairs onto the road. Cross the road and continue northeast onto the trail. Take the next set of steps up past thick bunches of black sage.
Continue north on Blinderman Trail, following as it bears east before it loops back around west. Along the way, you’ll pass well-maintained benches and bridges. If it’s already sunny out, please consider shortening your jaunt up these steeper trails in Franklin Canyon and consider repeating your excursion around the ponds.
At any point you need to refill your water bottle, there are water fountains near the Eugene and Michael Rosenfeld Auditorium, which is just southeast of the main lot.
***
Wild writer Jaclyn Cosgrove takes a turn on a tree swing attached to a sturdy coast live oak branch in Sullivan Canyon.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
We are so lucky to have an abundance of public land tucked throughout L.A. I hope you find blissful shade, trickling streams and the experience you need out there!
3 things to do
Hikers talking and connecting on a previous Better Future Club hike.
(Amanda Sayeg)
1. Make new friends on a hike in L.A. The Better Future Club will host a short hike at 9:30 a.m. Saturday in Griffith Park. Participants will gather at the Trails, a cafe in the park, before heading out. Register at luma.com.
2. Chill out with the mountain chickadees near L.A. The Antelope Valley Audubon Society will host a birding field trip from 8 a.m. to noon Saturday at Chilao Visitor Center in Angeles National Forest. All experience levels welcome. Society members will bring extra binoculars, but guests are encouraged to bring their own if they have a pair. Register at eventbrite.com.
3. Saunter down Santiago Creek in Orange The Santiago Creek Greenway Alliance will host a five-mile community bike ride from 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday in Orange. Riders will meet at the Sports Center at Grijalva Park parking lot (368 N. Prospect in Orange). The group will take the Santiago Creek Bike Trail to the Santiago Park ECO Center in Santa Ana. Register at eventbrite.com.
The must-read
The Hansen Dam Aquatic Center in Lake View Terrace is said to be the largest pool in America. The center features public swimming, its own beach, pedal boats, a large water slide and fishing.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
I personally love “Gray May” and “June Gloom,” the times when Los Angeles is overcast for several days in late spring and early summer. It makes choosing a hike easy, as I don’t need to exclude every single exposed path or fire road from the possibilities of where I will go on a particular day. We are now entering what I’ve laughingly dubbed, mostly in my head, “You Fry July!” Although the L.A. temperatures are nothing like what my friends and family back in Oklahoma are experiencing, our dry heat is getting hotter as we move more fully into summer. That’s why, instead of hiking, consider taking a dip at one of these 24 affordable L.A. pools. Or take a dip after a morning hike. Either way, stay cool, stay hydrated and stay safe, friends!
Happy adventuring,
P.S.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about great first-come, first-served campgrounds near L.A. where you can often find a spot, even when arriving last minute. A reader later commented on my story that Google Maps had taken them on a harrowing back road to reach Horse Flat Campground. My heart dropped, as I worried I had sent a Wild reader into danger. I quickly checked which route Google Maps was recommending — and I got big mad. Google Maps was showing that Angeles Crest Highway was closed just east of Red Box Picnic Area, which was inaccurate. I contacted Google (crickets from them) and the California Department of Transportation, who quickly corrected the route to accurately portray where the highway is actually closed. The best way to know about closures along Angeles Crest Highway is to check the California Department of Transportation’s QuickMap tool. Please be safe out there!
For more insider tips on Southern California’s beaches, trails and parks, check out past editions of The Wild. And to view this newsletter in your browser, click here.
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Two of the eight men indicted in an alleged drone and sniper plot to attack President Trump’s UFC cage-fighting show on the White House lawn pleaded not guilty Thursday to federal conspiracy charges.
Clothed in jail garb and shackled, Tycen Proper, 19, of Danville, Ohio, and Chandler Scaggs, 21, of Chapmanville, W. Va., entered the pleas before U.S. District Court Judge Edmund Sargus Jr. in Ohio, where the case has been consolidated. They and the other six defendants are each charged with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and conspiracy to commit murder on federal government territory and to murder a federal government official.
Sargus scheduled their trial to begin Sept. 14.
“What would have happened or could have happened, that’s never going to be clear, because, thank God, there was an intervention here and this thing was disrupted,” U.S. Attorney Dominick Gerace II told reporters last week as he detailed the group’s July 9 indictments. “But, in my view, when I look at what’s been alleged there, it seems pretty likely that someone or multiple people were driving to Washington, D.C., to do something.”
Attorneys for Proper and Scaggs declined to comment after the hearing.
According to the indictment, the plot began in May. Members of the group — citing grievances about government corruption, water-guzzling data centers and the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files — began amassing money, firearms, ammunition, body armor, explosives, drones, medical equipment, communications equipment and other items.
The attack was planned to take place at the cage-fighting show dubbed UFC Freedom 250, which was held on the South Lawn of the White House to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary. Law enforcement officials said they learned of the possible threat four days before the event was scheduled to take place.
One of the defendants told investigators that they planned to fly explosive-laden drones into the event and then shoot panicked crowd members as they fled, according to a federal affidavit.
The Justice Department announced charges against seven people from across the country last month, including from Ohio, Missouri, Washington, Nebraska and California. Officials said the suspects harbored fringe conspiracy theories and hoped the attack would destabilize the government.
Four alleged conspirators charged in Missouri, Nebraska and California the weekend of the event and two more charged about a week later in Washington and Missouri are still in the process of being moved to Ohio to face charges. They are likely to be tried as a group.
Scaggs was arrested separately later, but was brought to Ohio ahead of the other out-of-state defendants.
Employers are bracing for what could be the highest rise in health insurance premiums in 16 years in 2027, driving up the average cost of family coverage in California to more than $30,000 — the price of a new compact car.
Health insurance companies expect the cost of medical services and prescription drugs to soar by 9% in 2027, according to a new survey by PwC, the highest rise the researchers have found since 2011. Insurers use those expected medical costs to calculate the price of premiums in the coming year. Many employers require workers to pay part of that cost.
Experts say the escalating costs of employers’ premiums are reducing workers’ wages and take-home pay, while raising the prices of goods and services in California and across the country.
“It’s going to erode the standard of living for lots of California families,” said Glenn Melnick, a USC professor of healthcare finance.
Melnick said when employers are forced to spend more on health insurance, there is less money available for wages. The skyrocketing premiums, he said, are like a hidden pay cut for working families.
The higher cost also has small-business owners wondering whether they can continue paying for their workers’ health insurance.
Co-owner Camden Avery makes a sale at the Booksmith in San Francisco.
(Josh Edelson / For The Times)
This year, premiums for staff at the Booksmith, an independent bookstore on Haight Street in San Francisco, leaped by 17%, said Christin Evans, the store’s owner. Next year could bring even more pain. The monthly premium for four employees is $3,250.
To try to cope, Evans said, she has reduced staff hours by closing the store earlier.
“We have to absorb it,” she said. “We’re not paying the wages we want to pay or delivering the customer service we’d like to deliver.”
Seventeen million Californians receive health benefits from an employer. Those premiums have been rising faster in California than the national average.
Between 2022 and 2025, the average family premium for employers in the state rose by 24% to $28,397, according to a survey by KFF and the California Healthcare Foundation. That was nearly double the 12.2% increase in consumer prices during those years.
Hospital, pharmaceutical and other medical costs escalated even faster after 2025.
PwC’s annual survey of insurers last year found an expected rise of 8.5% in 2026, which its researchers later revised to 9%.
A key driver of the rising medical costs, according to experts, is prices charged by hospitals. In recent years, some health systems, including UCLA and Cedars-Sinai, have grown larger by buying nearby hospitals and expanding their clinics, becoming more dominant in the community and reducing competition.
Melnick said the expansion of some health systems into giant organizations means that they can “tell insurance companies what the price will be.”
A Cedars-Sinai spokesperson pointed to a 2022 paper that found that for-profit health system prices had escalated faster than those at nonprofit systems like Cedars. The paper was partly funded by Cedars.
“Cedars-Sinai Health System’s growth in recent years has expanded access to the highest levels of patient care and medical innovation across the Los Angeles region,” the spokesperson said.
UCLA did not respond to requests for comment.
Another factor is the rising cost of prescription drugs. Spending on cancer drugs, the most costly category, reached $143 billion in 2025, an annual increase of 12%, the PwC survey found.
The nation’s spending on obesity medicines, including GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy, soared by 81% last year, PwC said. A 30-day supply of the drugs lists for more than $1,000.
The obesity drug manufacturers say the medicines can reduce medical expenses by preventing other costly conditions such as diabetes and heart disease, but data don’t yet show such reductions, PwC said.
Researchers at the California Healthcare Foundation say a large part of the problem is that hospital operating costs, prescription drug prices and doctor fees have been allowed to grow unchecked for decades.
The foundation estimated in a report last year that 25 cents of every dollar spent in California — more than $73 billion each year — does nothing to help patients. Instead it goes to excessive profits for providers, administrative red tape and other waste, the foundation found.
California employer premiums are expected to rise next year for another reason: Gov. Gavin Newsom and lawmakers agreed in June to raise taxes on the private plans to help pay for the cost of Medi-Cal, which covers the medical costs for the poor, and to help balance the state budget.
The California Assn. of Health Plans said insurers will add the tax to next year’s premiums. The trade group estimates the higher tax will cost each insured person $100 next year or $400 for a family of four.
The higher tax must still be approved by the Trump administration. Republicans in the state Assembly wrote a letter to the administration this month, asking officials to deny the request.
Researchers also expect a jump in premiums for families without employer insurance who purchase policies on state marketplaces such as Covered California. Some of those families faced double-digit increases this year because of rising medical costs and the end of enhanced federal subsidies that Congress had approved as a temporary measure during the pandemic. Almost 400,000 Californians dropped their Obamacare plans this year as prices soared.
To deal with the higher premiums, some employers are changing the design of their health plans to shift more of the cost to workers by raising deductibles and co-pays.
Those higher out-of-pocket costs are just the beginning of the fallout. Twenty-two percent of chief financial officers surveyed by Mercer in February said the high price of health benefits had forced them to stop hiring or led to layoffs. Thirty-six percent of those executives said the rising premium costs have harmed workers’ wages and raises.
Candice Elliott, a human resources consultant in Santa Cruz, said smaller businesses such as restaurants struggle to find ways to cover the higher costs.
Many restaurants, Elliott said, already have a slim margin between their revenues and expenses. When premiums rise, she said, some restaurants have added a fee to the customer bill to help cover workers’ health costs. Others have hiked menu prices.
“That impacts affordability for the consumer,” Elliott said. “It makes inflation greater.”
Some small businesses have moved from so-called silver plans to the lower-priced bronze plans, she said, which cover less of the employee’s monthly premium. “It’s effectively a decrease in pay for the employee,” she said.
Others are hiring employees overseas, Elliott said. “You can pay someone in the global south half of what you pay an American and still afford them a good standard of living and benefits that are unaffordable in the U.S.,” she said.
Melnick, the USC professor, said many workers don’t realize how much they are losing as their employers’ premiums rise. He tells people to look at their W-2 tax form from last year, where employers are required to report the cost of the employee’s premium in box 12, under “Code DD.”
He said USC’s premium for his family of four is $45,000.
“The base is so high that even a small increase has a big impact,” he said. The continuing annual increases, he said, are “bad news for everybody.”
A federal judge has halted California’s groundbreaking “Truth in Recycling” law, which aims to reduce consumer confusion about which packaging can be recycled.
California’s recyclable packaging law prohibits manufacturers from using a “chasing arrows” recycling symbol on products or materials unless they are actually being recycled in a meaningful way, which the law quantifies. The bill was signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021 and was to go into effect on Oct. 4.
A coalition of farming, forestry, restaurant and packaging organizations sued the state in March, arguing the law violates their right to free speech. They argued that Senate Bill 343 operates as “government-imposed censorship.”
Judge William Hayes agreed that their challenge has merit, and on Tuesday ordered California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, the defendant in the case, to pause enforcement of the law “until further order of the Court.”
The industry trade groups, which include the Dairy Institute of California, the Flexible Packaging Assn. and the Western Growers Assn., applauded the decision.
The coalition “will continue to press the case that California can strengthen recycling without censoring truthful information on packaging and without adding unnecessary and significant costs for California families and businesses,” Californians for Affordable Packaging said in a statement.
The “ruling is a significant win, not just for our members, but for every business that wants to give consumers accurate information about the products they buy,” said Julie Landry, vice president of government affairs at the American Forest & Paper Assn. “The Court recognized what we’ve said from the beginning: California cannot fix consumer confusion by restricting truthful speech.”
Advocates of reducing the use of plastic disagreed.
“The court got it wrong, and I’m confident that the state will ultimately prevail,” said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste. “SB 343 does not violate the First Amendment; it requires companies to tell the truth when they make recyclability claims. Suggesting that the First Amendment protects misleading environmental marketing is inconsistent with the basic principles of consumer protection that states like California have implemented for decades.”
In January, CalRecycle, the state’s waste agency, issued a report showing that less than 10% of most single-use plastic materials in the state were being recycled.
Even yogurt containers and margarine tubs — made of ubiquitous polypropylene, or #5 plastic — are being recycled at a rate of only 2% in the state, the report said. Only 5% of colored shampoo and detergent bottles, made from polyethylene, or #1 plastic, are getting recycled.
Plastic materials that can’t be recycled are typically sent to landfills or sometimes illegally shipped overseas, where they are burned or end up in landfills, rivers and waterways.
A report by the Natural Resources Defense Council shows that nationwide, taxpayers, governments and businesses are spending between $9.8 billion and $13.3 billion per year cleaning up plastic litter, and almost $3 billion is spent by local governments on landfilling plastic.
According to one state analysis, 2.9 million tons of single-use plastic and 171.4 billion single-use plastic components were sold, offered for sale or distributed in California in 2023.
“It is a terrible decision which denies consumers basic information needed to make informed choices,” said Judith Enck, former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator and president of the nonprofit Beyond Plastics. “Given the long history of the plastics industry deceiving the public about plastics recycling, this is an especially bad outcome. It is a reminder that the plastics industry has enough money to fight even the most modest policy designed to protect people and the planet.”
By December of 2023, Paul Preston realized that his girlfriend Susan Huckle was a big fan of road trips and lists. So for Christmas, he gave her L.A. Times’ ”101 Best California Experiences” zine, a traveler’s bucket list highlighting my top destinations throughout my four decades of traveling the state.
The gift, I’m delighted to hear, was a hit.
Preston and Huckle went through it and checked off locations they’d seen already. Then they hit the road.
And now, after two and a half years of roaming the state between work assignments, they’re back to report that they’ve covered all 101 locations on that list. Though the two have also traveled beyond state lines, the quest to cover California “totally informed our lives for the last two or three years,” said Huckle, who sent me a note of thanks after ticking the last box.
After the note arrived, I was eager to call them and learn more. I caught the couple, of course, in the middle of a day trip.
Susan Huckle and Paul Preston set out to visit every spot on the L.A. Times’ 2023 list of “101 Best California Experiences.” Along the way, they got married in Yosemite Valley.
(Nick Wuthrich)
“We’re out exploring,” Preston said. “So you’re getting what we’re about.”
They’re also now married. That happened last July in Yosemite Valley, which, yes, was on the list.
Huckle, 41, an actress, a host on “L.A. This Week” on Channel 35, a Universal Studios performer and an author, grew up in Santa Maria on California’s Central Coast.
Preston, 56, is also an actor. He leads movie location tours and hosts podcasts, movie trivia nights and special events. He grew up and went to college on the East Coast, so he had fewer California miles under his belt when the couple met in 2020.
Their California 101 travels began in early 2024 with a trip to Paso Robles, where they saw the green slopes along Highway 46, Morro Rock and the elephant seals at Piedras Blancas near Hearst Castle.
“And then,” Preston said, “we just kept going.”
Some of their most satisfying stops, the two agreed, were places they hadn’t heard of, such as Orange Works in the Central Valley town of Strathmore and Angel Island State Park, sometimes known as the Ellis Island of the West. Huckle called Angel Island “a marriage of natural beauty with great, powerful, historic information.”
By early this year, there were only a few destinations left to check.
In April, they did the Indian Canyons and Sunnylands estate near Palm Springs, the Integratron near Joshua Tree and the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture in Riverside. In June, they rafted the South Fork of the American River, along with stops in Old Sacramento and, last of all, Columbia State Historic Park. Then they made their own favorites lists.
Susan Huckle’s top 10:
Yosemite Valley Badwater Basin Mammoth Mountain Angel Island State Park Cheech Marin Center Joshua Tree National Park American River South Fork The Marshall Store on Tomales Bay Santa Cruz Island Sunnylands
Paul Preston’s top 10:
Yosemite Valley Hollywood Bowl Griffith Observatory Catalina Mammoth Mountain American River South Fork Erick Schats’ Bakery in Bishop Huntington Library and Gardens Palm Springs Aerial Tramway Balboa Park, San Diego
Now that they’ve seen so much of the state, I had questions. For one, which spots not on the list would they have included?
“The Carmel Mission,” Huckle said quickly. “It’s beautiful and the missions are an important part of California history.” But she said the mission’s account of its own history seemed “whitewashed,” saying little about the Native loss and trauma that historians are increasingly recognizing in accounts of the missions.
Said Huckle: “I was like, ‘C’mon guys, nobody really thinks this any more, right?’”
Now that they’re done with the Times’ “101 Best California Experiences,” what what will shape their next trips?
They have a list for that. Huckle picked up an L.A. guide, Danny Jensen’s “Secret Los Angeles,” and the couple plans to start where the book does, with the Triforium, a many-colored sculpture that went up outside City Hall in 1975 (and once featured music).
After that? Maybe the Faces of Elysian Valley, a traffic circle sculpture that Huckle said “looks like Easter Island in the middle of Cypress Park.”
That will leave only about 138 more destinations in the book to cover.
A proposal to make daylight saving time the year-round default nationwide is once again coming before Congress.
And, as in the past in both California and nationally, proponents and opponents of the switch cite the potential effects (good or bad) on health, business and agriculture as reasons to support or oppose the plan.
The House is expected to vote on the Sunshine Protection Act this week, according to the office of Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.), the bill’s author.
The Senate version of the bill, SB 29, is sponsored by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.). In a statement last year he said, “More daylight after work means more business and more active, safer California communities.”
Most of the U.S. went on daylight saving time in the spring, moving clocks one hour ahead of standard time. The bill would end the “fall back” to standard time that typically takes place in November. The change would mean darker mornings and later sunsets. President Trump has indicated that he supports the plan.
It won’t be the first time the debate over timekeeping has made its way to Capitol Hill. In 2022, a bill to make daylight saving time permanent was approved by the Senate, but the effort stalled in the House.
“It’s clear that year-round daylight saving time is a popular, commonsense reform that will improve everyday life for millions of Americans,” Buchanan said in a statement to The Times. “Passing my bipartisan Sunshine Protection Act will bring us one step closer to ending the outdated and unpopular practice of changing our clocks twice a year.”
Areas that already do not observe daylight saving time would be able to stay on permanent standard time, according to the bill text. For example, Arizona and Hawaii do not move their clocks forward or backward.
Lawmakers in California and other states could opt out making daylight saving time permanent, but would need to decide before the law takes effect, Josh Gregory, a senior advisor to Buchanan, said in an email.
The effort has drawn support from both sides of the aisle. In California, Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Big Bear Lake), Ken Calvert (R-Corona) and Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills) are cosponsors of H.R. 139.
The proposal also has bipartisan opposition.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has also been a vocal opponent of permanent daylight saving time. In a speech last year, Cotton argued that while year-round daylight saving time might benefit some activities and areas — such as golfing in Florida and Alabama — residents of northern states and on the western sides of time zones might not see the sun rise until 9 a.m. in the winter.
Cotton raised concerns that students would need to walk to school in the dark and risk being struck by drivers, as was the case in 1974 when the U.S. briefly adopted year-round daylight saving time to combat an energy crisis.
“The darkness of permanent daylight saving time would be especially harmful for schoolchildren and working Americans,” Cotton said.
Rep. Nanette Diaz Barragán (D-San Pedro) told The Times in a statement that she plans to vote against the bill because “medical experts have warned that permanent daylight saving time is bad for our health.”
She supports a different proposal, the Sunshine for Our Kids Act, which seeks to make permanent standard time the default nationwide but gives states the option to opt out. The bill, HR 9638, has been endorsed by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
Stanford professor Jamie Zeitzer, a physiologist who studies circadian cycles and how humans respond to light, supports ending the twice-a-year time changes.
The “spring forward” shift results in a loss of sleep and has been associated with a number of negative health effects, he said. The spring clock change has also been linked to more car accidents and cardiovascular incidents, he added.
Zeitzer’s research found that the darker mornings and brighter evenings of permanent daylight saving time weaken the circadian clock for many people.
“The abundance of biological evidence is clear that permanent standard time is a better solution,” Zeitzer said. “When you have a more robust light signal early in the morning, that will help keep your internal circadian system synchronized to the day.”
A 2025 AP-NORC survey found that the current system of changing the clocks twice a year is unpopular. According to the poll of nearly 1,300 U.S. adults, only 12% of respondents favored the current system, while 47% were opposed and 40% were neutral.
In the business world, there’s no consensus on making daylight saving time permanent. Many chambers of commerce and businesses that want to lure customers later in the day generally support it, while agricultural interests and some industries oppose it.
As for making standard time permanent, that faces opposition too. Among the opponents: golf course owners.
Jay Karen, the chief executive officer of the National Golf Course Owners Assn., testified at a congressional hearing in November that losing extra evening daylight could cost the industry $1.6 billion in green fees alone because so many Americans tend to golf in the afternoon or evening.
Buchanan’s office said in a statement that the “well-documented benefits of having more sunshine later in the day after school and after work will be beneficial for millions of Americans’ health and well-being.”
There have been previous attempts to put an end to the twice-annual clock adjustments in California.
In 2018, California voters approved Proposition 7, which was supposed to give the Legislature the authority to impose year-round daylight saving time — but only if the federal government allowed states to do so. It has not yet led to any meaningful change.
Earlier this year, state Sen. Roger Niello (R-Fair Oaks) introduced SB 1197, which seeks to “ditch the switch” by moving the state to permanent standard time.
A spokesperson for Niello’s office said that because his previous efforts failed to gain traction, his current proposal includes a provision requiring California to conform if the federal government adopts permanent daylight saving time.
Despite being close to terming out of office, and also otherwise occupied with his ever-emerging presidential run, Gov. Gavin Newsom last week found time to announce a consequential, if controversial, move that has the potential to vastly improve educational outcomes for California kids: switching out an independent, voter-chosen leader for a hired gun.
In legislation signed last week, Newsom basically eviscerated the role of the elected superintendent of public instruction and instead shifted oversight of our K-12 schools to a newly created education commissioner — to be appointed by the governor.
It’s to Newsom’s credit that he’s setting up his successor to helm a system that at least has a chance at coherence, even if it raises the stakes for the next governor to deliver.
For years — decades, really — streamlining the governing structure of schools “has been proposed by Republicans and Democrats and bipartisan and nonpartisan commissions,” Linda Darling-Hammond told me. She’s a professor emeritus at Stanford University, an advisor to the governor and, by any measure, one of the preeminent education policy experts in the country.
“It’s not at all political. It is really about making the system run well,” she said. “The world is changing, the economy is changing. There’s just a need to be very efficient and effective in making policy and then implementing that policy.”
“Run well” is the key there. California operates the biggest and most diverse school system in the country. We’ve got roughly 10,000 regular schools (depending on how you count), including about 1,200 charter schools, around 1,00 school districts and 58 counties, each with their own slice of local control over those schools, according to the Department of Education.
That’s about 5.7 million students, nearly 300,000 teachers and $150 billion in costs (counting the new funding in the next budget).
To be kind, this system does not always run well. That’s in no small part because oversight and control are fragmented, overlapping and confusing. Currently, the State Board of Education sets policies, but the elected superintendent implements them through the Department of Education. Then control runs downhill to individual school districts, filtering through local school boards and even principals.
The board can’t control how the superintendent does their job, and vice versa. In fact, they don’t always agree, despite (or because of) the shotgun wedding nature of their relationship. At times, it can feel like they are working against each other. Never mind the complexities of local control.
This has been especially true in recent years as Newsom and the Legislature have pushed through big changes, such as the new prekindergarten grade, that have required massive coordination and effort. At the local level, administrators often complain there is little clarity on what is expected of them and, too often, outright conflict.
“The idea of having policy in one place and implementation in the other is really crazy,” Michael Kirst told me. He’s professor emeritus of education at Stanford and the longest-serving president of California’s State Board of Education, serving under both of Jerry Brown’s gubernatorial stints.
Newsom’s proposed system promises “much clearer, cleaner accountability,” Kirst said.
Expertise counts
It also has the benefit of putting an actual education expert in charge of schools. Because the superintendent role is elected, it has too often been coveted by career politicians looking for a landing spot. Its incumbent, Tony Thurmond, had a background in social work before running for various offices, but that kind of experience isn’t always the case. Neither is experience running a major organization with thousands of employees.
While Newsom’s plan leaves many, if not most, of the details to be ironed out later (a frustrating strategy he’s used more than once to keep the ball rolling on policy without having the drag of actual detail), it does promise to put in someone with the kind of high-level educational policy experience that should be required when managing this vast and important endeavor.
Kirst points out that this will be a “powerful position” charged with making sure our schools are indeed run well, and at the end of the day, it gives us one person to blame if they don’t: the governor.
So if schools don’t improve and our kids don’t learn, voters will know exactly who failed.
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More than three dozen California legislators are calling for Gov. Gavin Newsom to exempt the state’s film and TV production incentive program from a recently approved cap on corporate tax credits, warning that without action it will be “significantly kneecapped.”
Though the state’s budget has already been approved, the legislators say a solution must be devised before the end of the year so that production companies do not lose the “full value of tax credits they earned in exchange for creating middle-class entertainment industry jobs,” according to a letter dated Friday and addressed to Newsom, State Senate President Pro Tempore Monique Limón and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas.
“Tax credits earned for creating jobs in motion picture and television production are not the same as tax credits provided for research and development,” the letter states. The legislation “creates short-term budget savings by reneging on commitments made to the entertainment industry and the working families who depend upon it for their livelihoods.”
The letter comes shortly after Newsom signed his final state budget as California’s governor, a $351.7-billion spending plan that includes new limitations on corporate tax credits.
The budget includes a provision that restricts the maximum tax credit companies can claim in a given year to $5 million or 50% of a company’s tax state tax liability, whichever is greater.
Hollywood industry representatives had warned the governor’s office that the new restrictions could affect the state’s production incentive program, which was just bolstered last year to an annual cap of $750 million.
The film and TV industry in Southern California has struggled to rebound from the effects of the pandemic, the dual writers’ and actors’ strikes in 2023 and the exodus of production to other states and countries.
Members who voted for the budget bill had believed there was a carve-out for the film and TV tax credit program, said Assemblyman Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Los Angeles), chair of the Assembly Democratic Caucus.
“I don’t think that anyone understood what this cap was, what it did and that it effectively kneecapped and reverses the progress that we made last year,” Zbur, who co-authored last year’s bill, said in an interview. “We need to have people understand that these changes, which I think people believed were minor, are really significant and will result in significant job loss if we don’t fix them.”
The new changes to the state’s film and TV tax credit program, which included expanded eligibility for additional shows and films, came after intense lobbying from studios and industry workers, who argued that more funding was necessary to lure production back from other states and countries.
Last week, the California Film Commission said the expanded tax credit program was set to deliver $6.6 billion in direct production spending in-state and more than 34,000 cast and crew jobs across the 170 total film and TV shows that received production incentives this year.
The largest single piece of federal housing legislation to come out of Congress in at least a generation is is now law.
It happened in the middle of night early Saturday, without fanfare — or even President Trump’s signature — and it might be a while before many Californians notice its effects.
That’s because the bill, though politically monumental — both chambers approved it overwhelmingly — doesn’t do one big thing. Instead, it does a lot of little things. Individually, none of the bill’s 56 regulatory tweaks, pilot programs and low-cost loans and grants are likely to move the needle on the nation’s housing affordability woes, nor on California’s specifically.
Supporters hope that collectively, they just might.
Even the law’s path to enactment had an under-the-radar quality to it. The White House abruptly canceled a planned signing ceremony late last month, with Trump vowing not to sign the bill until Congress first passed his restrictive national voter ID proposal. That bill has stalled out in the Senate.
Still, Trump did not veto the housing package, so it automatically became law Saturday just after midnight, as per the Constitution.
For all that, supporters say this is still a big deal: a major, bipartisan piece of legislation aimed at boosting housing construction from a hyperpartisan legislative body that doesn’t typically touch the topic.
“We don’t often gather to celebrate federal housing legislation,” Stephen Russell, president of the San Diego Housing Federation, said at a news conference Thursday. “I think the last time Congress passed anything of this magnitude, many of you were not even alive. … It is almost a once-in-a-lifetime event.”
That’s thanks in part to a growing caucus of lawmakers aligned with the “Yes In My Backyard” movement that helped push the bill into law. Many hail from California, a state that has had more experience than most contending with wildly unaffordable housing. But the cause of making housing more affordable, and attributing high housing costs to a lack of sufficient supply, has become a national and bipartisan concern. Case in point: The bill originated as a joint proposal by Sens. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), an ardent conservative, and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), among the most liberal members of the Senate.
While the constituent parts of the bill are relatively narrow and none is specifically focused on California, experts highlight a few provisions that could leave a notable imprint on the state.
Build now (or else)
For high-cost cities that don’t build much housing, as in much of urban California, the federal bill includes a novel carrot and stick.
This portion of the bill would change the Community Development Block Grant, one of the largest sources of federal funding for affordable housing and local economic development. Pricey cities — defined through a variety of data benchmarks like median prices and vacancy rates — with a track record of under-building that continue to see below-average housing construction will have their grant funds cut by 10%. The savings will go to their municipal counterparts that build at a faster clip.
That’s likely to have “real implications for cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco that have traditionally lagged behind” in adding housing supply, said David Garcia, the deputy director of policy at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation.
The city of Los Angeles received $48.4 million in its last award from the block grant program in 2024, according to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development data. San Francisco received $18.9 million.
Those numbers aren’t enough to make or break the budget of either city.
“I think this will be a small nudge,” said Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action, in an email. “Which taken across the country could still have a good impact! Little nudges add up.”
More dramatic than the number of dollars involved may be the precedent the policy sets. Even in California, where the state government has aggressively incentivized cities to plan for more housing development and penalized those that don’t, lawmakers have never punished municipalities for failing to actually grow — an outcome that may not always be under a city government’s control.
Such an idea would have been “inconceivable in previous congresses,” Garcia said.
Despite that, the provision hasn’t engendered much public opposition from local government groups yet. In an online summary, Michael Wallace, a lobbyist with the National League of Cities, applauded the overall housing bill as an example of the federal government “choosing partnership with local governments over preemptions.” He singled out other provisions of the bill that provide expanded flexibility for Community Development Block Grant spending, new incentive programs for adding supply, and new supports for local urban planning.
Chassis change
Manufactured housing units are often colloquially referred to as mobile homes, but they don’t tend to move around much. Built on assembly lines and shipped to where they’re needed, these naturally affordable houses — the likes of which lawmakers across California and the United States claim we need in droves — are often placed upon permanent foundations where a fewer than 1 in 10 ever move again.
Even so, the federal building code applied to manufactured housing includes a costly, vestigial reference to its mobile origins: a permanent chassis.
A giant steel frame with removable axles and wheels, the chassis ostensibly exists to make it easier to pick up and move a manufactured house by truck. In practice, it serves as a 10- to 12-inch-thick floor beneath the floor. Because it cannot be removed upon delivery, it just serves as “dead space and wasted money,” said Jess Maxcy, president of the California Manufactured Housing Institute, the industry’s trade group. Aside from adding thousands of dollars in added costs per unit, it also makes it harder for manufactured units to be stacked into double story homes or multifamily apartment buildings.
The federal housing bill removes the permanent chassis requirement, something that manufacturers and some housing policy experts have been pushing for since the mid-1980s.
“That relatively minor change will expand access to one of the most affordable forms of home ownership available,” Rep. Scott Peters (D-San Diego) said at the Thursday news conference. Maxcy said he doesn’t expect the end of the chassis requirement to trigger an overnight building boom in the manufactured home industry. But especially in California, where, due to the high price of land, new single-family homes are more likely to be built stacked on small lots, the regulatory change “provides more opportunities and helps us reduce the price.”
Recovering after disaster
In the months after a natural disaster, long after emergency federal dollars have come and gone, Congress has provided communities with long-term rebuilding grants through the Community Development Block Grant—Disaster Recovery program. Over the last three decades, the program has spent more than $100 billion on the long-term work of recovery, like home construction, infrastructure repair and rental and relocation assistance. That money tends to be reserved for low-income people and communities “who are not going to bounce back without the funds,” said Marion McFadden, who used to run the program under the Biden administration and now works at the disaster preparation and recovery consulting company IEM.
Unfortunately for California, the program only kind of exists. Since the mid-1990s, it’s been stood up and funded on an ad hoc basis, one appropriation bill at a time. That presents a challenge for communities planning in the middle of post-disaster planning. It also means the rules that govern the program — when the money goes out, to whom, under what conditions and for what purposes — are redrafted with each political administration. That’s had the effect of slowing things down considerably. No program funding has gone to Los Angeles in the wake of the 2025 fire storms, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Congress has yet to appropriate any.
The new housing bill would officially write the program into law for at least three years.
“It creates the ability for HUD to have money on hand before a disaster and then make a decision within 15 days about whether they’re going to provide funding,” McFadden said.
What the housing bill doesn’t do: provide fresh funding. Disaster-prone communities will need to wait for Congress to take that up later.
A ‘bottleneck’ removed
For the last two decades, public housing authorities in Los Angeles and the Bay Area have been turning to the federal Rental Assistance Demonstration program to help repair and upgrade their aging stock of increasingly dilapidated public housing. The program works by switching up funding sources in a way that gives locals more flexibility to borrow money and attract private investment dollars.
Until the new law took effect this weekend, the federal government was only authorized to permit 455,000 of these conversions. The law raises the cap by an additional 100,000.
“This has been a bottleneck in California for years and that bottleneck just got removed,” said Russell with the San Diego Housing Federation. Not all affordable housing advocates are cheering the development. The National Low Income Housing Coalition has consistently opposed expansion of the program on the grounds that the change in funding source could weaken existing tenant protections. It’s unclear whether and to what extent that might be true. A study from last year found no evidence that conversions under the program lead to more evictions.
Wall Street out of suburbia
If you’ve heard only one thing about this housing bill, it’s that it bans “large institutional investors” from buying up more single family homes.
Caveats apply in the final version of the law. The bill defines “large” as any of a number of business structures with control over more than 350 single-family homes. It doesn’t apply retrospectively, so current investors with portfolios brimming with houses need not divest. Exemptions exist for new construction, renovations and senior housing. In California specifically, where corporations and other major investors do not play a significant role in the housing market, the effect is likely to be muted.
The measure “takes a hyper-salient issue for lots of people across the country and does a pretty modest intervention to address it,” said Chad Maisel, a fellow at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress and a former housing policy advisor to President Biden.
Even so, the provision has plenty of bipartisan appeal. Earlier this year, Trump called for an even stricter crackdown on so-called corporate landlords. Gov. Gavin Newsom followed suit the same week.
The anti-investor language was considerably watered down from earlier this year, when a related provision threatened to undermine “build-to-rent” projects: well-financed subdevelopments of single-family homes reserved for renters. That prompted a revolt by many developers and YIMBY activists who had otherwise enthusiastically supported the bill, who argued that such communities are one of the fastest growing sources of the U.S. housing stock and provide some of the few opportunities for renters to live in suburban-style, family-sized housing.
After the build-to-rent provision was left on the cutting room floor of Congress, state Sen. Aisha Wahab, a Fremont Democrat who is now running for Congress, introduced a bill that picked it back up again. SB 880 would have banned the bundled sale of multiple single-family homes, striking at the heart of the build-to-rent business model. That bill died in the Assembly Judiciary committee in late June.
The Trump administration finalized a rollback of the Endangered Species Act on Friday, paving the way for drilling, mining and other human development across protected wildlife habitats.
The move redefines “harm” under the Endangered Species Act, the landmark conservation law that protects threatened and endangered plants and animals. For years, “harm” meant actions that injure or kill wildlife, as well as actions that destroy protected habitats.
Under the new rule, destroying those habitats is no longer illegal.
The decision aligns with the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to slash regulations in the name of economic growth. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose department finalized the move, said the prior definition of harm “interfered with private property rights” and “turned routine activity into a regulatory trap.”
Environmental groups called the decision a disaster, saying it puts protected species on a path to extinction.
The move seems especially poised to hit California, the most biodiverse state in the country, where more than 6,700 species are spread across mountains, forests, deserts and oceans. Of the roughly 2,300 species protected by the Endangered Species Act, nearly 300 are found in California.
These species include amphibians such as tiger salamanders and Yosemite toads; birds such as California condors and northern spotted owls; fish such as Little Kern golden trout and Santa Ana suckers; insects such as Franklin’s bumble bees and Mission blue butterflies; mammals such as gray wolves and Santa Catalina Island foxes; and reptiles such as desert tortoises and green sea turtles.
The Endangered Species Act is widely credited with saving the California condor, which almost went extinct in the 1980s due to several factors, including habitat destruction. Thanks to a recovery program under the act, the condor population has since soared to several hundred. But under the new law, the logging and human development that led to their near demise is now allowed.
A handful of California species recoveries have been championed as success stories under the Endangered Species Act, including southern sea otters, peregrine falcons, humpback whales, bald eagles and green sea turtles.
According to a report from the Center for Biological Diversity, the El Segundo blue butterfly lost 90% of its oceanside habitat due to the construction of LAX and beachfront housing developments. The population dwindled to about 1,000 butterflies in the 1970s, when it was named an endangered species. Now, the population has climbed above 120,000.
In California, the rollback could pave the way for more farming, mining, logging and drilling in areas that were once forbidden due to the potential for wildlife habitat destruction. A report from Earthjustice estimates that expanded oil drilling in California could threaten five marine species including humpback whales, sea otters, leatherback sea turtles, marbled murrelets and wild salmon.
Several environmental groups are planning legal challenges to the ruling.
“For the first time ever, a presidential administration now claims that species protected by the Endangered Species Act shouldn’t be safe from habitat modification that destroys where they live, raise their young, or search for food,” Kristen Boyles, attorney for the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice, said in a statement. “Let’s be clear: there is no support for the Trump administration’s rule — no scientific support, no legal support, no public support. We will see the Trump administration in court.”
Ben Greuel, wildlife campaign manager at the Sierra Club, called the decision “an unlawful attempt to open the door for corporate polluters to degrade vitally important habitats.”
“For more than four decades, the definition of ‘harm’ recognized a simple truth: if you destroy the places wildlife need to survive, you are putting species on a path to extinction,” Greuel said in a statement.
It’s not the first time Trump has taken aim at California environmental regulation.
Earlier this year, Gov. Gavin Newsom, along with the governors of Washington and Oregon, submitted a formal opposition to the Trump administration’s plans to expand drilling off the Pacific Coast, with Newsom saying it leads to “dead wildlife.” In June, the Trump administration ordered a review of the California Coastal Commission, claiming the state’s “environmental extremism” obstructs spaceport development and offshore oil production.
A day before the Endangered Species Act decision, the Trump administration signed off on a controversial plan to use an old oil pipeline to pump water from the Mojave Desert into cities. Environmental groups said the plan threatens springs and local wildlife, since six pumps would need to be built in desert tortoise habitats.
World Cup tourists are coming to L.A. for the soccer, but they’re staying for the $21 smoothies and Double-Doubles.
As the last Los Angeles FIFA World Cup event ended Friday, soccer fans were eating like locals and famous chains from the region were cashing in.
In the weeks that L.A. has hosted the World Cup, international soccer enthusiasts have flocked to big brands from the area, often in large groups wearing their countries’ jerseys.
It is a phenomenon seen at many of the host cities. In Dallas, giant gas station Buc-ee’s is the main attraction. For people visiting New Jersey, deli shops have been a hot ticket. In L.A., the place to be between matches was Erewhon.
Thirsty international sports fans gathered for pictures outside different Erewhons, wandered their aisles smiling, and, of course, picked up pricey smoothies.
While Erewhon would not comment on its business, mobility data company Arity, which uses phone data to track consumers, said Erewhon visits at the outlets around SoFi Stadium were quadruple what they were a week earlier on June 12, the day of the U.S. national soccer team’s opening match there.
Arity looked at what stores people visited within a 10-mile radius of SoFi that day and also found surges in visitors to nearby El Pollo Loco and Trader Joe’s.
Locals have spotted groups of people in Korea jerseys huddled together, trying to decide what to order at In-N-Out.
Some complained on social media that international tourists at Trader Joe’s were buying up all the mini canvas tote bags.
Soon after the Belgium vs. Spain quarterfinal ended Friday, the In-N-Out near SoFi had a long line of soccer fans stretching out the door in bright red and yellow and black jerseys and matching striped hats and scarves.
One of the workers said he had to explain “spread” and “animal style” to foreign football fans.
“I didn’t know this place existed,” a fan from Romania said while waiting in line.
Los Angeles and other cities and states that have hosted the event need the soccer fans to spend money to make the event worth all the time, effort and money it requires.
A rosy 2024 report projected the World Cup could bring more than $800 million to the L.A. region as 180,000 people converge on the area to sleep, eat and spend.
There were early concerns people weren’t turning up for the event because of the high ticket prices and the difficulty of obtaining visas for citizens of some countries.
However, at least for some L.A. hotels, there was a surge of last-minute visitors which pushed up occupancy and room rates.
While sports fans are not in the region to shop, they do make time for it.
World Cup customer spending is also apparent in beer sales. Andrew Heritage, the chief economist at the Beer Institute said beer purchases at entertainment and attractions in L.A. – outside of World Cup spaces – were up around 10% from normal.
“That tells me that fans in the L.A. area have decided to extend their stay and take in all the other things that the area has to offer, rather than just the match itself,” he said.
On social media, the purpose of these shoppers is clear: grab a quick souvenir or local specialty and take a selfie.
The data from Arity suggests that fans are very efficient when they spend at local spots, diving in, getting what they want and getting out as soon as possible, said Jeff Schlitt, a director at the company.
“Normally you’re there for an hour. They’re going to be there for 15, 18 minutes,” he said. “Why is that? Because they were purpose-driven shoppers.”
For some travelers, the more popular American chains aren’t unfamiliar. But some of the native L.A. fare still comes as a surprise.
As one Belgium-Spain matchgoer from the Netherlands stood taking a picture of the In-N-Out sign after the game, he said he’d never had a burger like the one he’d just tried.
“We only have McDonald’s and Burger King,” he said. “It’s way better.”
The Trump administration has signed off on a company’s plan to convert an oil and gas pipeline to pump groundwater from the Mojave Desert to thirsty California cities for the first time, a lucrative venture that critics say threatens natural springs and wildlife.
The federal Bureau of Land Management released documents Thursday saying that Cadiz Inc.’s plan to repurpose 162 miles of the pipeline to transport water “will not significantly affect” the environment.
“We’re excited to achieve this pivotal milestone. After many years of planning and environmental review, the project has now reached the construction stage,” said Susan Kennedy, chair and chief executive of Cadiz.
Environmental advocates and leaders of Native tribes, who have been fighting the project, criticized the decision.
“This groundwater mining proposal would drain the desert and rob the Mojave of its rare springs and wildlife habitat,” said Chance Wilcox, California desert associate director of the National Parks Conservation Assn. “It’s indefensible that the Trump administration would once again try to revive the pointless Cadiz project, by defying decades of scientific warnings and refusing to conduct an environmental review of the groundwater mining.”
The application for the federal authorization was filed by the Fenner Gap Mutual Water Co. The documents say the company plans to build seven pump stations, three of them located on federal land managed by the agency.
The 30-inch steel pipeline runs underground from Cadiz’s desert property, near the town of Amboy, northward to the town of Mojave.
The BLM said in its authorization that repurposing the pipeline for water “would comply with all applicable statutes and regulations.” The agency said it has “reasonably determined that the impacts of groundwater withdrawal associated with Cadiz’s groundwater extraction project are outside the scope of analysis.”
Cadiz’s attempts to export water from its property 200 miles east of Los Angeles have drawn controversy for decades.
In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation that requires the project to undergo scientific study and gain approval from the State Lands Commission before it can take water from the Mojave and sell it to California cities.
Activists opposing the company’s plans include civil rights leader Dolores Huerta.
“Cadiz spells destruction for water, sacred lands, and the desert economy,” Huerta said in a statement. “It is exactly this type of greed and injustice that I have dedicated my life to oppose.”
Leaders of nearby tribes have also objected to Cadiz’s plans to pump from the desert aquifer near the Mojave Trails National Monument and Mojave National Preserve.
“It is the living heart of the desert,” said Daniel Leivas, chairman of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe. “To drain it would be to drain the life out of the entire desert. No profit is worth such desecration.”
Chairman Timothy Williams of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe said the company’s plan “to pump and sell 25 times more groundwater each year than the aquifer can replenish would desecrate our traditional territories.”
“Pumping more groundwater than is sustainably replenished is not only negligent, but dangerous to the American Desert Southwest,” he said in the joint statement with other opponents of the project.
For years, while pursuing its plan to sell water far away, the company has been using wells on its property to irrigate nearly 2,000 acres of farmland growing lemons, grapes and other crops. It has drilled more wells in anticipation of being able to export water once the government approved its pipeline.
The company intends to pipe water to communities in San Bernardino County and says it’s “expected to provide one of the lowest-cost sources of new water in the drought-plagued Southwest.” It says the federal permit “marks a key milestone as we finalize project financing with prospective investors.”
Cadiz bought the 220-mile pipeline from El Paso Natural Gas in 2020. Once construction is completed, the company says the pipeline will be able to transport up to 25,000 acre-feet of water per year — about 5% of what Los Angeles uses each year.
The Los Angeles-based corporation is also seeking to build a new pipeline along a railroad right-of-way to transport water to the south.
Environmental groups have repeatedly filed lawsuits challenging the project.
Ileene Anderson, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, called the Trump administration’s decision “a green light for environmental destruction.”
She said six of the proposed pumping stations slated to be built are in the habitat of desert tortoises, a species in decline.
“We’ve successfully fended off this project before and we’ll continue to fight to stop this zombie from coming back,” Anderson said.
In 2021, the Biden administration reversed a Trump administration decision that had cleared the way for Cadiz to pipe water across public land. In 2022, a federal judge scrapped the pipeline permit that the Trump administration had issued.
But during President Trump’s second term, the company has again made headway on its plans. In February, Cadiz announced that the federal Environmental Protection Agency had invited it to submit an application for a $194-million low-interest loan for the northern pipeline project.
The company said in May that it reached an agreement with the federal Bureau of Reclamation to provide funding for a review of its potential role in “augmenting water supplies” along the shrinking Colorado River.
The company has also been lobbying the Trump administration. The group Public Citizen said in a recent report that Cadiz, through its nonprofit Fenner Gap Mutual Water Co., enlisted former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt’s new lobbying firm, the Bernhardt Group, and has spent at least $330,000 on lobbying in 2025 and 2026.
Records show lobbyist Luke Johnson has repeatedly accompanied Kennedy at meetings with Interior Department officials.
“The extensive influence of David Bernhardt’s boutique lobbying firm on the agency he formerly led highlights how insider firms staffed with former Trump officials have grown in recent years,” said Alan Zibel, a research director with Public Citizen. He said Bernhardt and his lobbyists “have learned how to master influence-peddling in the anything-goes era of Trump 2.0.”
Earlier this month, an Arizona water agency announced it signed an initial “memorandum of understanding” agreement to buy up to 10,000 acre-feet of water per year from Cadiz’s Mojave Groundwater Bank. The Central Arizona Irrigation and Drainage District provides water to farmlands in Pinal County, where growers are dealing with water cutbacks.
The company said that for this to happen, it would need to build pipelines and reach deals to exchange water across state lines.
Members of California’s congressional delegation have raised concerns. In a recent letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, California Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla called for a thorough environmental review, saying that federal agencies and peer-reviewed scientific analyses have “warned of the significant and irreversible impacts that Cadiz’s project could have on federal lands and surrounding communities.”
Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Indio) said in a letter to Burgum that he is concerned about the company’s long-standing effort to extract and export groundwater.
“The area I represent cannot afford to absorb the long-term costs of a commercially driven groundwater export scheme,” Ruiz said.
It’s a Tuesday evening, just before sunset, and I am in a meadow thrashing an air guitar with a dozen strangers in Griffith Park.
We take the lyrics to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” literally as we gyrate and bend to the song’s iconic guitar solo, which lasts almost 45 seconds. Huffing and puffing, we leave the meadow, laughing together at the beautiful end of the hourlong “silent disco” hike we completed along one of the park’s dirt trails.
I stay for an extra 45 minutes, talking to two other dancers whom I hope become future friends — and that we all dance together again soon.
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That night, I participated in Dance Quest’s silent disco hike, a new way to experience Griffith Park where participants shimmy and shake on a trail alongside L.A. improviser and comedian Kristen Smith.
For a suggested donation of up to $25 — Smith emphasizes that no one will be turned away for lack of funds — participants don headphones and hike as they listen to a playlist that Smith has curated. That Tuesday night’s playlist included Donna Summer, Madonna and Carly Rae Jepsen (whom Smith unapologetically stans).
Smith plans to host at least two night hikes a month, but will schedule more if those events sell out. She’s taking a brief pause, though, because her wife gave birth to their second child last Thursday.
Dance Quest leader Kristen Smith pumps her fists in the air on an overlook along a trail in Griffith Park.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
I’m kind of an experiential purist when it comes to hiking — never headphones, never music. I love putting my phone away and just being there with the trees and bees. I couldn’t help but wonder: Would this silent disco ruin or enhance the outdoors experience?
I was pleasantly surprised by the answer, but I think it largely depends on who leads the dancing.
Smith, a tribal member of the Chickasaw Nation who identifies as two spirit and uses she/they pronouns, said they were inspired to start Dance Quest while on a trip to Scotland in 2024 to celebrate their mother’s 70th birthday.
Kristen Smith of Dance Quest leads hikers on a silent disco trek through Griffith Park.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
While out and about, Smith and her mom spotted Guru Dudu, a character created by Melbourne-based performer David Naylor, leading a silent disco through the streets of Edinburgh.
“That looks fun,” Smith’s mom said.
They both signed up for a tour, led by Dudu, who wore a purple sequin jumpsuit.
“We danced through the very crowded streets of Edinburgh, and it was the most fun I’d had in such a long time,” Smith said.
L.A. artist Heidi Neilson, center, dances alongside other silent disco hikers in Griffith Park.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
Smith, who’d spent years performing on stages throughout L.A., had been stuck inside and away from people for much of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In summer 2021, just as vaccines were becoming available and it was becoming safer to gather with groups indoors, Smith was diagnosed with follicular lymphoma, a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Smith’s summer was soon full of surgeries and tests until they started chemotherapy that September, receiving a dose every three weeks until early 2022, when their doctors switched Smith to chemotherapy every three months.
Smith’s treatment was going well, but that didn’t mean an immediate return to normalcy was on the horizon. Her doctors said Smith and her family needed to assume Smith’s COVID-19 vaccine didn’t give her immunity to the virus.
As Smith watched her friends return to a semblance of their pre-pandemic lives, she worked inside at her Nickelodeon job, grateful for health insurance and employment in the entertainment industry, but missed the joy and connection that comes with performing.
Kristen Smith of Dance Quest is surrounded by silent disco dancers in Griffith Park.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
Smith kept wondering how they could find a way to remain active and connect with others. Plus, being outside remains the safest option for Smith to be around people, as the type of cancer they have is not considered curable and is managed like a chronic illness.
“I know that one of the things that I offer to the world is joy and sparkly effervescence,” Smith said. “I was like, ‘What can I do to be my own boss, is something that’s of service to people in this time of darkness and is also good for me as well?’”
During the silent disco in Edinburgh, Smith realized as they danced alongside others that they felt like they were performing and letting go in a way they hadn’t been able to do in a long time. “When we finished, I was like, ‘I can do this,’” Smith said.
Smith told their mentor at Nickelodeon about their idea to start Dance Quest and they immediately encouraged them to give it a shot. Smith bought the equipment the next week and launched Dance Quest, her company that hosts the silent disco hikes, earlier this year. After doing a test run with friends and family, they started hosting events in the park.
When I arrived to the silent disco, I quickly met my fellow dancers, a welcoming group of people ages 5 and older. I liked that I could adjust the volume on my headphones rather than listen to music all at the same volume.
Holly Gray, an L.A. event planner, throws her arms in the air alongside other dancers in Griffith Park.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
We took a wide dirt path in the park that’s not as popular as other routes, which allowed us to spread out and really do whatever we wanted. I quickly realized this was primarily going to be a lot of frolicking to a good beat, which was exactly what I wanted.
Along the way, Smith pointed out invasive plants like black mustard and native plants and animals that live in the park. Whenever a hiker headed our way, we made a tunnel of “spirit fingers” for them to pass through, which I detected 95% of people actually enjoyed. In today’s fast-paced and often negatively focused world, it’s kind of nice to turn a corner and find strangers cheering for you.
Smith, who taught improv to children, teenagers and business professionals, will not force participants to dance. That isn’t the purpose of Dance Quest.
Kristen Smith of Dance Quest, center, leads two children along a dirt path in Griffith Park.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
Rather, it’s to find joy with others and escape the harsh political environment that queer and BIPOC people face on a daily basis.
“When you put on the headphones, you forget how you look, and hopefully I provide a no-pressure environment where, however your body tells you to move, you move that way,” Smith said. “And there’s strength in numbers with the silent disco.”
3 things to do
Families play volleyball at an L.A. County overnight camping event at a local park.
(Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation)
1. Camp with family and friends around L.A. Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation will host family campouts on weekends in July and August at five of its parks. That includes campouts at Castaic Lake Recreation Area at 6 p.m. Friday; Frank G. Bonelli Regional Park in San Dimas at 6 p.m. Friday; Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area at 6 p.m. July 17; and 6 p.m. July 24 at Santa Fe Dam Recreation Area. Those parks, along with Whittier Narrows Recreation Area, will host additional family campouts in August. General admission is $15. Children age 13 and younger are free. To register, visit anc.apm.activecommunities.com.
2. Clear out streambeds in L.A. Friends of Griffith Park needs volunteers from 8:30 to 11 a.m. Saturday in the park’s Fern Dell hiking area. Participants will clean streambeds and trails, yanking weeds and restoring habitat. Learn more at friendsofgriffithpark.org.
3. Kayak the L.A. River near Van Nuys L.A. River Expeditions will host a two-hour kayak tour at multiple times Saturday through the Sepulveda Basin, a lush area of the Los Angeles River. Paddlers will move through the tree-lined, mud-packed riverbanks, observing local fish and birds. Trips are at 9 a.m., 12:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. Tickets are $53.74. Register at eventbrite.com.
The must-read
Mary Saba Tehran takes part in a Mindful Archery class at the Woodley Park Archery Range in Van Nuys.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
Times staff writer Deborah Vankin recently learned via a bow and arrow the importance and freedom that can come with literally letting go. Vankin wrote about her experiencing at Mindful Archery, a course led by spiritual counselor and archer Angie Fadel at Woodley Park Archery Range in Van Nuys. Fadel said her goal is to help female and BIPOC participants release something holding them back or take aim at a goal. “An archery range can be a very white, male-dominated space,” she said. “And the stance, with a bow and arrow in your hand, shooting — it’s very male. And [men] don’t have any problem, most of the time, taking up space. So it is a practice to remind ourselves, as a queer woman, a trans person, nonbinary person, anybody that’s kind of othered in our society, to be able to take up space. To adopt a power stance and be, like, ‘I’m allowed to be here.’”
Happy adventuring,
P.S.
Great news! State lawmakers have selected the California State Library park pass to receive ongoing funding in future budget cycles. Previously, lawmakers had to approve funding every year for the program to be added into the state’s budget, according to the California State Parks Foundation. This development means Californians will be able to check out a state parks pass for free at their local library for the foreseeable future, unless a governor or the Legislature announces otherwise. In L.A. County, participating parks include the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve, Leo Carrillo State Park, L.A. State Historic Park and Malibu Creek State Park. You can find out which library near you offers the pass by visiting this interactive map. Have fun out there!
For more insider tips on Southern California’s beaches, trails and parks, check out past editions of The Wild. And to view this newsletter in your browser, click here.
StubHub is getting a red card from some World Cup fans
Two World Cup customers are suing the New York-based ticket-selling company, alleging “false and misleading” advertising that left them without tickets or a refund for the World Cup games they paid to attend.
In federal court in New York last week, two Californians — Julia Reeker Moghal and Reuben Renteria — sued StubHub seeking monetary damages and a ban on the company selling World Cup tickets. The lawsuit aims to become a class action and comes after weeks of fierce criticism and complaints from customers regarding the company’s practices.
Throughout the World Cup, videos have emerged on Instagram and TikTok of StubHub customers describing their nightmare experiences with the ticket-selling platform.
Some said they had purchased tickets to World Cup games as early as November of last year, booked flights and hotels and arranged travel plans, then StubHub notified them days to weeks before the match of a refund for their tickets, which they never requested.
There were similar complaints about last-minute cancellations from people who bought Coachella tickets on StubHub.
In the lawsuit, Moghal said she had purchased three tickets for nearly $2,000 for the June 18 match between Switzerland and Bosnia-Herzegovina at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, which were then canceled by StubHub. Moghal said she was contacted by StubHub and told her tickets would remain canceled, then was later told the tickets would be available one hour before the game.
When the match began, Moghal said she was at SoFi Stadium, but the tickets never came.
Renteria said he paid around $2,300 for the June 18 Mexico versus South Korea match in Guadalajara, Mexico, but they were canceled
“Devoted soccer fans have traveled from around the world to attend World Cup matches — and they reasonably relied on StubHub to provide the tickets they paid for as well as on StubHub’s warranty,” Blake Hunter Yagman, the attorney representing the two, said in a statement. “Instead of rewarding their business, StubHub sold them World Cup tickets that they either could not provide or on speculation, only to be stranded, in many cases, at the stadium gates without any recourse.”
According to StubHub’s website, its Fan Protect Guarantee states the platform will deliver valid tickets or refund in the event of a ticket issue, and that it will “go out of our way to find replacement tickets” of a comparable value. The lawsuit alleges the replacement tickets many fans were given by StubHub were worse than their original tickets.
FIFA, the World Cup organizer, states in its terms and conditions that the FIFA Marketplace, its own ticket-selling platform, is the only authorized platform for World Cup tickets, and that only tickets purchased through it are guaranteed by FIFA to be valid.
Despite the risk of purchasing through a third-party platform such as StubHub, many fans opted to do so to avoid the 30% FIFA resale tax, believing that the Fan Protect Guarantee would safeguard their order.
Since World Cup tickets began selling on FIFA Marketplace last September, fans have expressed disappointment in the expensive price tag. FIFA utilized a dynamic pricing system for the sale, and as sales phases progressed leading up to the games, the cost of tickets increased tremendously. In March, the extreme cost of tickets prompted 69 members of Congress to write a letter to FIFA urging them to lower their prices.
Tickets for the upcoming Friday match between Spain and Belgium in Los Angeles are selling on StubHub for over $1,300.
StubHub said in various statements to the news and in legal proceedings that ticket cancellations were a result of transfer problems and issues with FIFA’s ticketing infrastructure.
StubHub did not respond to requests for comment.
A FIFA spokesperson responded to this accusation in a statement, saying, “FIFA has no visibility over, or control of, secondary market ticket transactions carried out on third-party platforms. The transactions facilitated on these platforms occur entirely independently of FIFA’s official ticketing platform. With reference to the reliability of the services available to fans on FIFA’s official ticket platform, FIFA rejects any suggestion that the functional issues being experienced by users of third-party platforms with respect to FIFA World Cup 2026 tickets are the result of FIFA’s ticketing infrastructure.”
In 2023, California regulators levied more than $100,000 in fines against the private operator of a federal immigration facility, kicking off a three-year battle over whether detainees who do work at the facilities should be considered employees.
The question went beyond semantics: If considered employees, the detainees would be subject to state worker protection laws.
A legal settlement announced this week now affirms that private immigrant detention facilities are subject to California’s workplace safety and health requirements.
“Every worker deserves a safe and healthy workplace and should be able to report workplace hazards without fear of retaliation,” said Denisse Gómez, spokesperson for the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health or Cal/OSHA.
“Individuals who perform work in these facilities are entitled to workplace safety protections, and this settlement reinforces Cal/OSHA’s commitment to enforcing those protections and safeguarding vulnerable workers,” she added.
Under the settlement between California and the GEO Group, a Florida-based private prison company, the company recently withdrew its legal challenges and agreed to pay more than $100,000 in the fines.
The GEO Group did not respond to requests for comment.
Back in 2023, Cal/OSHA issued $104,510 in fines against the GEO Group. The agency had found six violations of state code by the company after detainees complained about a lack of protective equipment and proper training while cleaning the facility for $1 per day.
Detainees alleged they routinely wiped black mold off shower walls at the facility, saw black dust spew from air vents and used cleaning solutions that lacked instructions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The biggest fine levied against the GEO Group was for failure to establish and maintain “effective written procedures to reduce employee risk of exposure to aerosol transmissible disease.”
Advocates viewed Cal/OSHA’S recognition of the detainees as workers as a victory that could pave the way for future labor rights fights at other detention centers in the state.
But the GEO Group appealed, arguing that detainees participating in ICE’s voluntary work program make their own schedules and aren’t employees, so hazard exposure couldn’t be “as a result of assigned duties,” as California law states. Plus, the company argued, there wasn’t enough evidence that detainees were exposed to any hazard.
The GEO Group sued, but three days before a California Superior Court hearing in May, the company and Cal/OSHA reached the settlement.
Along with paying the fines, the GEO Group agreed to draft plans for avoiding aerosol transmissions at 12 secure and reentry facilities in California, including five detention centers that hold immigrants.
“GEO ensures detainees are afforded the necessary tools, equipment, and personal protective equipment … to safely and effectively perform any necessary tasks,” the settlement states.
Gómez said the settlement also leaves intact the appeals board’s ruling that civil immigration detainees who participate in work programs can participate in proceedings anonymously, “acknowledging the potential for retaliation when individuals raise workplace safety concerns.”
But the question of whether detainees are employees and deserve certain protections isn’t entirely resolved — at least not for the federal government.
Last month, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement released new standards for detention facilities across the country. The revised guidelines “emphasize that detainee volunteers participating in the voluntary work program are not considered facility and/or government employees” and thus not entitled to labor regulations.
Attorney Mariel Villarreal said the timing of the new detention standards made her question whether the GEO Group had asked ICE to specify in its standards that detainees are not workers in response to its battle with Cal/OSHA.
“To me, it’s a reaction to this very settlement,” she said. Villarreal works for the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, which filed the original complaint on behalf of detainees who said they worked in unsafe conditions.
Villarreal pointed to a Washington Post report that GEO Group executives privately asked ICE to specify that detainees are not employees of the facilities where they work. Two top Trump administration officials, border czar Tom Homan and acting ICE director David Venturella, previously worked for the GEO Group.
New versions of ICE detention standards take effect as contracts are established or modified, so this year’s rules won’t immediately apply to every facility.
An ICE spokesperson did not comment about the settlement. The spokesperson, who did not provide their name in an emailed statement Wednesday, said the agency has begun transitioning detention facilities to meet the 2026 standards, “building on its longstanding commitment to safe, secure, and professional detention operations.”
“ICE has consistently implemented many of these best practices independently, reinforcing its role as the leader in detention operations,” the spokesperson added.
The GEO Group and other immigrant detention center operators have faced other legal battles over workers’ rights, including lawsuits in Washington, Colorado and California over the $1-per-day payment.
Villarreal said she’s confident that the Cal/OSHA settlement would continue to hold even if California facilities incorporated the new standards. But she said she believes the statements are an attempt by the GEO Group to “sidestep responsibility” and avoid the possibility of being fined under similar circumstances in other states.
“These statements in the new standards are a way for them to try and preserve profits as much as possible,” she said. “GEO and ICE are so intertwined at this point that they have the same motives.”
