Distance from Los Angeles: Less than an hour drive
Projected season opening date: By Thanksgiving, if Mother Nature cooperates, or by Yule on Dec. 21 at the latest.
What makes it special: Only 45 miles from Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Mountains, Mt. Baldy has 26 runs spread over 800 acres and three mountains. It also has a respectable vertical descent of 2,100 feet with wide-open glades, tree runs, bowls, moguls, groomed runs, cornices and quarter pipes. For those who don’t ski or snowboard, Mt. Baldy also offers snow tubing.
What’s new this season: With upgrades, Lift No. 3 now features more comfortable carriers to the top of Thunder Mountain at 8,600 feet. Chair No. 4 on the west side has a new drive and control system, allowing year-round use with both uphill and downhill loading when conditions permit. Continuous improvements to snowmaking are also helping Mt. Baldy open earlier each season. The resort’s former Last Name Brewing has rebranded as Mt. Baldy Brewery.
Lift ticket prices: Mt. Baldy season passes are currently on sale through Christmas Day: adults are $549 (regularly $799), teens and seniors are $449 (regularly $639) and children under 12 are $279 (regularly $399). You can pre-purchase lift tickets online for a discount. Walk-up tickets are $129 on busy days when the mountain is in full operation.
Pro-tip: Mt. Baldy has the most steep runs in Southern California. Advanced and expert skiers and snowboarders might want to head to Chair 1 to try “Nightmare,” a 36-degree slope that maintains its drop for 1,000 vertical feet.
It turned out to be an easy sell for the governor. By the end, Californians appeared ready to send a loud message that they not only objected to the president’s election rigging but practically all his policies.
Trump is his own worst enemy, at least in this solidly blue state — and arguably the California GOP’s biggest current obstacle to regaining relevancy.
Here’s a guy bucking for the Nobel Peace Prize who suggests that the country resume nuclear weapons testing — a relic of the Cold War — and sends armed troops into Portland and Chicago for no good reason.
The commander in chief bizarrely authorized Marines to fire artillery shells from a howitzer across busy Interstate 5. Fortunately, the governor shut down the freeway. Or else exploding shrapnel could have splattered heads in some topless convertible. As it was, metal chunks landed only on a California Highway Patrol car and a CHP motorcycle. No injuries, but the president and his forces came across as blatantly reckless.
And while Trump focused on demolishing the First Lady’s historic East Wing of the White House and hitting up billionaire grovelers to pay for a monstrous, senseless $300-million ballroom — portraying the image of a spoiled, self-indulgent monarch — Newsom worked on a much different project. He concentrated on building a high-powered coalition and raising well over $100 million to thwart the president with Proposition 50.
The ballot measure was Newsom’s and California Democrats’ response to Trump browbeating Texas and other red states to gerrymander congressional districts to make them more Republican-friendly. The president is desperate to retain GOP control of the House of Representatives after next year’s midterm elections.
Newsom retaliated with Prop. 50, aimed at flipping five California House seats from Republican to Democrat, neutralizing Texas’ gerrymandering.
It’s all sleazy, but Trump started it. California’s Democratic voters, who greatly outnumber Republicans, indicated in preelection polling that they preferred sleazy redistricting to an unhinged president continuing to reign roughshod over a cowardly, subservient Congress.
Similar partisan voting was found in a survey by the Public Policy Institute of California. Pollster Mark Baldassare said that “96% of the people voting yes on 50 disapprove of Trump.”
Democrats — 94% of them — also emphatically disapproved of the Trump administration’s immigration raids, the PPIC poll showed. Likewise, 67% of independents. But 84% of Republicans backed how the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency was rounding up people living here illegally.
ICE agents shrouded in masks and not wearing identification badges while traveling in unmarked vehicles — raiding hospitals, harassing school kids and chasing farmworkers — are not embraced in diverse, immigrant-accepting California.
When the PPIC poll asked voters how undocumented immigrants should be handled, 69% — including 93% of Democrats — chose this response: “There should be a way for them to stay in the country legally.” But 67% of Republicans said they should be booted.
The ICE raids were among the Trump actions — and flubs — that helped generate strong support for Prop. 50. It was the voters’ device for sticking it to the president.
“Californians are concerned about the overreach of the federal government and that helped 50,” Democratic consultant Roger Salazar says. “It highlights how much the Trump administration has pushed the envelope. And a yes vote on Prop. 50 was a response to that.”
Jonathan Paik, director of a Million Votes Project coalition that contacted 2 million people promoting Prop. 50, says: “We heard very consistently from voters that they were concerned about the impact of Trump’s ICE raids and the rising cost of living. These raids don’t just target immigrants, they destabilize entire communities and deepen economic struggles.
“Voters saw Prop. 50 as a way to restore balance and protect their families’ ability to work, pay rent and live safely.”
The Trump administration did Padilla a gigantic favor in June by roughing up the senator and handcuffing him on the floor when he tried to query Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a Los Angeles news conference about ICE raids. Such publicity for a politician is golden.
Padilla became a leading advocate for Prop. 50 while seriously considering a gubernatorial bid. The senator said he’d decide after Tuesday’s special election.
“I haven’t made any decision,” he told me last week. “Sometime in the next several weeks.”
But it’s tempting for this L.A. native, the son of Mexican immigrants who was inspired to enter politics by anti-immigrant bashing in the 1990s.
“I’d have an opportunity and responsibility to be a leading voice against that,” he said. “California can be a leader for the rest of the country on immigration, environmental protection, reproduction quality, healthcare…”
In many ways it already is. But Trump hates that. And California Republicans step in it by meekly following the hugely unpopular president. Prop. 50 is the latest result.
California Republicans can do better than behave like Trump’s wannabe reserve toy soldiers.
When it comes to Proposition 50, Marcia Owens is a bit fuzzy on the details.
She knows, vaguely, it has something to do with how California draws the boundaries for its 52 congressional districts, a convoluted and arcane process that’s not exactly top of the mind for your average person. But Owens is abundantly clear when it comes to her intent in Tuesday’s special election.
“I’m voting to take power out of Trump’s hands and put it back in the hands of the people,” said Owens, 48, a vocational nurse in Riverside. “He’s making a lot of illogical decisions that are really wreaking havoc on our country. He’s not putting our interests first, making sure that an individual has food on the table, they can pay their rent, pay electric bills, pay for healthcare.”
Peter Arensburger, a fellow Democrat who also lives in Riverside, was blunter still.
President Trump, said the 55-year-old college professor, “is trying to rule as a dictator” and Republicans are doing absolutely nothing to stop him.
So, Arensburger said, California voters will do it for them.
Or at least try.
“It’s a false equivalency,” he said, “to say that we need to do everything on an even keel in California, but Texas” — which redrew its political map to boost Republicans — “can do whatever they want.”
A reasoned attempt to even things out in response to Texas’ attempt to nab five more congressional seats. Or a ruthless gambit to drive the California GOP to near-extinction.
It all depends on your perspective.
Above all, Proposition 50 has become a political ink-blot test; what many California voters see depends on, politically, where they stand.
Mary Ann Rounsavall thinks the measure is “horrible,” because that’s how the Fontana retiree feels about its chief proponent, Gavin Newsom.
“He’s a jerk,” the 75-year-old Republican fairly spat, as if the act of forming the governor’s name left a bad taste in her mouth. “No one believes anything he says.”
Timothy, a fellow Republican who withheld his last name to avoid online trolls, echoed the sentiment.
“It’s just Gavin Newsom playing political games,” said the 39-year-old warehouse manager, who commutes from West Covina to his job at a plumbing supplier in Ontario. “They always talk about Trump. ‘Trump, Trump, Trump.’ Get off of Trump. I’ve been hearing this crap ever since he started running.”
Riverside and San Bernardino counties form the heart of the Inland Empire. The next-door neighbors are politically purple: more Republican than the state as a whole, but not as conservative as California’s more rural reaches. That means neither party has an upper hand, a parity reflected in dozens of interviews with voters across the sprawling region.
On a recent smoggy morning, the hulking San Bernardino Mountains veiled by a gray-brown haze, Eric Lawson paused to offer his thoughts.
The 66-year-old independent has no use for politicians of any stripe. “They’re all crooks,” he said. “All of them.”
Lawson called Proposition 50 a waste of time and money.
Gerrymandering — the dark art of drawing political lines to benefit one party over another — is, as he pointed out, hardly new. (In fact, the term is rooted in the name of Elbridge Gerry, one of the nation’s founders.)
What has Lawson particularly steamed is the cost of “this stupid election,” which is pushing $300 million.
“We talk and talk and talk and we print money for all this talk,” said Lawson, who lives in Ontario and consults in the auto industry. “But that money doesn’t go where it’s supposed to go.”
Although sentiments were evenly split in those several dozen conversations, all indications suggest that Proposition 50 is headed toward passage Tuesday, possibly by a wide margin. After raising a tidal wave of cash, Newsom last week told small donors that’s enough, thanks. The opposition has all but given up and resigned itself to defeat.
It comes down to math. Proposition 50 has become a test of party muscle and a talisman of partisan faith and California has a lot more Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents than Republicans and GOP-leaning independents.
Andrea Fisher, who opposes the initiative, is well aware of that fact. “I’m a conservative,” she said, “in a state that’s not very conservative.”
She has come to accept that reality, but fears things will get worse if Democrats have their way and slash California’s already-scanty Republican ranks on Capitol Hill. Among those targeted for ouster is Ken Calvert, a 16-term GOP incumbent who represents a good slice of Riverside County.
“I feel like it’s going to eliminate my voice,” said Fisher, 48, a food server at her daughter’s school in Riverside. “If I’m 40% of the vote” — roughly the percentage Trump received statewide in 2024 — “then we in that population should have fair representation. We’re still their constituents.” (In Riverside County, Trump edged Kamala Harris 49% to 48%.)
Amber Pelland says Proposition 50 will hurt voters by putting redistricting back into the hands of politicians.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Amber Pelland, 46, who works in the nonprofit field in Corona, feels by “sticking it to Trump” — a tagline in one of the TV ads supporting Proposition 50 — voters will be sticking it to themselves. Passage would erase the political map drawn by an independent commission, which voters empowered in 2010 for the express purpose of wrestling redistricting away from self-dealing lawmakers in Washington and Sacramento.
“I don’t care if you hate the person or don’t hate the person,” said Pelland, a Republican who backs the president. “It’s just going to hurt voters by taking the power away from the people.”
Even some backers of Proposition 50 flinched at the notion of sidelining the redistricting commission and undoing its painstaking, nonpartisan work. What helps make it palatable, they said, is the requirement — written into the ballot measure — that congressional redistricting will revert to the commission after the 2030 census, when California’s next set of congressional maps is due to be drafted.
“I’m glad that it’s temporary because I don’t think redistricting should be done in order to give one political party greater power over another,” said Carole, a Riverside Democrat. “I think it’s something that should be decided over a long period and not in a rush.” (She also withheld her last name so her husband, who serves in the community, wouldn’t be hassled for her opinion, she said.)
Texas, Carole suggested, has forced California to act because of its extreme action, redistricting at mid-decade at Trump’s command. “It’s important to think about the country as a whole,” said the 51-year-old academic researcher, “and to respond to what’s being done, especially with the pressure coming from the White House.”
Felise Self-Visnic, a 71-year-old retired schoolteacher, agreed.
She was shopping at a Trader Joe’s in Riverside in an orange ball cap that read “Human-Kind (Be Both).” Back home, in her garage-door window, is a poster that reads “No Kings.”
She described Proposition 50 as a stopgap measure that will return power to the commission once the urgency of today’s political upheaval has passed. But even if that wasn’t the case, the Democrat said, she would still vote in favor.
“Anything,” Self-Visnic said, “to fight fascism, which is where we’re heading.”
Reporting from Sacramento — The defeat of a ballot measure that would have allowed for the expansion of rent control across California has buoyed landlords and left tenants pinning their hopes on the state’s new governor for relief.
Proposition 10 failed resoundingly with nearly 62% of voters rejecting the initiative as of results tallied Wednesday. The initiative would have repealed the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which bans cities and counties from implementing more aggressive forms of rent control. The result means those prohibitions remain in place.
For the record:
3:20 p.m. Nov. 8, 2018An earlier version of this article stated that the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act prohibits local governments from implementing rent controls on apartments built before 1995. The law prohibits rent controls on apartments built after 1995.
Landlord groups, which funded a nearly $80-million opposition campaign that outraised supporters 3 to 1, said voters made their opinions clear.
“When a measure loses by double digits, that’s such a strong message,” said Debra Carlton, senior vice president at the California Apartment Assn. “Certainly, any changes to rent control or Costa-Hawkins in general will be a heavy lift after this.”
Supporters of expanding rent control, however, said the campaign pushed tenant concerns to the forefront of the state’s housing debate. They’re also taking solace in a pledge from Democratic Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom, who has said that he will try to strike a deal on new rent control policies upon taking office. Newsom opposed Proposition 10, saying that he preferred amending Costa-Hawkins rather than repealing it.
“What we’re seeing now is that families and seniors are being evicted, facing economic eviction right now,” said Jennifer Martinez, director of strategy for the nonprofit PICO California, a backer of Proposition 10. “That doesn’t seem to be slowing down. It seems to be growing to many more regions of the state. We need relief now.”
Martinez called the prospect of Newsom’s involvement “exciting and important.”
Voters from all parts of California opposed Proposition 10. The initiative was losing in all but one of the state’s 58 counties as of Wednesday, with only San Franciscans giving it majority support. Similarly, municipal efforts to implement some rent controls in Santa Cruz and National City, a small community south of San Diego, also appeared headed for defeat by large margins.
Tenant groups responded to Tuesday’s loss by protesting at the Santa Monica offices of Blackstone, the private equity firm that owns thousands of apartments in the state and was a major donor to the campaign against Proposition 10. At the rally, activists called on Newsom to address skyrocketing rents. Supporters also said they were open to tenant protections that were narrower than those proposed by the initiative.
Costa-Hawkins, which passed 23 years ago, prohibits local governments from implementing rent control on single-family homes, condominiums and apartments built after 1995 or earlier in Los Angeles, San Francisco and other cities with longstanding rent stabilization rules. It also gives landlords the right to charge rents at the market rate once a tenant in a rent-controlled unit moves out.
Proposition 10 would have repealed Costa-Hawkins entirely, leaving local governments to implement new rent stabilization rules at their discretion. In January, a legislative committee defeated a bill that also would have done away with Costa-Hawkins.
The failures show that lawmakers and advocates should take a different approach, said Assemblyman Rob Bonta (D-Alameda), a coauthor of the failed rent control bill.
“When you’ve tried something twice and it didn’t pass, you’ve gotta look at other alternatives, too,” Bonta said. “You can’t have blinders on.”
Bonta said he’s hoping his colleagues would consider legislation to counter rent gouging, limit conversions of rent-controlled apartments to for-sale condominiums and amend Costa-Hawkins rather than repealing it.
But the resounding defeat of Proposition 10 might add to the landlord lobby’s already strong position.
During debate over the legislation to repeal Costa-Hawkins, Carlton told lawmakers that her group was willing to consider changes that would allow cities and counties to place rent control rules on more recently built apartments. In an interview Wednesday, Carlton said Tuesday’s result made it less likely landlord groups would agree to such amendments.
“If I were to take the pulse at the moment I’d say they’d be less inclined,” she said. “That would be the logical conclusion.”
It’s unclear what Newsom plans to do. The governor-elect did not speak publicly to reporters on Wednesday, but previously told the Sacramento Bee that he expected to deal with rent control right away.
“I will take responsibility to address the issue if [Proposition 10] does get defeated,” Newsom said.
Adding tenant protections could be part of a larger package of new housing legislation and policies that Newsom is expected to propose in the coming year. He made addressing the state’s housing affordability problems a key campaign promise. Principally, Newsom has called for the construction of 3.5 million new homes by 2025, a level of production never seen in California — at least since the state building industry began keeping statistics in the 1950s.
Some supporters of Proposition 10 have been critical of Newsom’s positions on tenant issues. A top official at the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that spent $23.2 million on the pro-Proposition 10 campaign described Newsom last week as “bought and paid for by the landlords and the Realtor lobby and the developer lobby.” But Michael Weinstein, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s president, said late Tuesday that he wanted to work with the new governor before deciding whether to put another rent control initiative on the 2020 ballot.
No matter what happens at the Capitol, there will be another major rent control debate in the state in the coming years. Residents in Sacramento, California’s sixth-largest city, have qualified an initiative for the 2020 ballot that would implement rent stabilization on older apartments. Michelle Pariset, an initiative proponent who works on statewide housing issues for the nonprofit law firm Public Advocates, said she hoped a local rent control battle in the shadow of the Capitol would spur legislators to act.
“When you try to do something progressive you lose a lot of the time,” Pariset said. “But you keep fighting.”
SACRAMENTO — Atty. General Rob Bonta said Monday that he anticipates the Trump administration, which last week announced plans to use federal election monitors in California, will use false reports of voting irregularities to challenge the results of the Nov. 4 special election.
Bonta, California’s top law enforcement officer, said on a call with reporters that he is “100%” concerned about false accusations of wrongdoing at the polling places.
Bonta said it would be “naive” to assume Trump would accept the results of the Nov. 4 election given his history of lying about election outcomes, including his loss to President Biden in 2020.
The attorney general also warned that Trump’s tactics may be a preview of what the country might see in the 2026 election, when control of the U.S. House of Representatives — and the fate of Trump’s controversial political agenda — will be at stake.
“All indications, all arrows, show that this is a tee-up for something more dangerous in the 2026, midterms and maybe beyond,” Bonta said.
The U.S. Department of Justice last week announced it would send election monitors to five California counties where voters are casting ballots in the Proposition 50 election to decide whether to redraw state’s congressional boundaries.
Federal election monitors will visit sites across Southern California and in the Central Valley, in Fresno, Kern, Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties, the Justice Department said last week.
Gov. Gavin Newsom called the move an “intimidation tactic” aimed at suppressing support for Proposition 50 and inappropriate federal interference in a state election.
While federal monitoring is routine, particularly in federal elections, it recently has been viewed with heightened skepticism from both parties. When the Justice Department under President Biden announced monitoring in 86 jurisdictions across 27 states during last November’s presidential election, some Republican-led states balked and sought to block the effort.
Democrats have been highly suspect of the Trump administration’s plans for monitoring elections, in part because of Trump’s relentless denial of past election losses — including his own to Biden in 2020 — and his appointment of fellow election deniers to high-ranking positions in his administration, including in the Justice Department.
The California Republican Party requested the election monitors and cited several concerns about voting patterns and issues in several counties, according to a letter it sent to the Dept. of Justice.
Bonta, in his remarks Monday questioned the GOP claims, and denied the existence of any widespread fraud that would require federal election monitors. He compared the monitors to Trump’s decision to dispatch the National Guard to Democratic-led cities, despite an outcry from local politicians who said the troops were not necessary.
More broadly, Bonta told reporters that the Trump administration appears to be ready to fight the Nov. 4 results if Prop. 50 passes.
“People vote and you accept the will of the voters — that’s what democracy is. But that’s not what they’re teeing themselves up to do based on everything that we’ve seen, everything that’s been said,” said Bonta, describing Trump’s recent call on social media for Republicans to “wake up.”
Bonta also said that the state would dispatch observers — potentially from his office, the secretary of state and county registrars — to watch the federal monitors at polling places.
Early voting has already started in California, with voters deciding whether to temporarily reconfigure the state’s congressional district boundaries. The Democratic-led California Legislature placed the measure on the Nov. 4 ballot in an effort to increase their party’s numbers in the U.S. House of Representatives .
Gov. Gavin Newsom and other backers of the measure have said they generally support independent redistricting processes and will push for nonpartisan commissions nationwide, but argued that Democrats must fight back against Trump’s current efforts to have Republican states reconfigure their congressional districts to ensure the GOP retains control of Congress after the 2026 election.
Natalie Baldassarre, a spokesperson for the U.S. Dept. of Justice, declined to comment on Bonta’s remarks. Baldassarre also declined to say how many election monitors would work in California.
Federal election monitors observe polling places to ensure compliance with the federal voting rights laws, and are trained to observe and act as “flies on the wall,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan and nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research, in an interview last week.
“Generally, what you do is walk inside, stay off to the side, well away from where any voters are, and take some notes,” said Becker, an attorney who formerly worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
From the first time decades ago he was lampooned as a quirky upstart until now, the final stretch of his unprecedented fourth term as California’s governor, Jerry Brown has reveled in his reputation as a cheapskate.
“Nobody is tougher with a buck than I am,” he boasted during the 2010 campaign that sent him back to Sacramento.
Eight years later, Brown is poised to earn a place in the history books as the leader who helped right the ship of state. His mantra of measured spending could be a standard by which future governors are judged.
“We’re well positioned, but if the next governor doesn’t say ‘no’ at critical moments, things will get worse,” Brown said in an interview with The Times.
His promise of similar straight talk about California’s budget prevailed in the 2010 election, held in the shadow of financial collapse. The projected budget deficit he inherited — even after two years of cuts under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — stood at $27 billion.
All of which seemed a distant memory Wednesday as Brown signed a budget creating a $13.8-billion cash reserve, the largest in state history. “I think people in California can be proud that we’re making progress,” the 80-year old Democrat said standing beside legislative leaders — the oldest of whom was only 12 when Brown was first elected governor in 1974.
Gov. Jerry Brown displays a playing card with his dog, Sutter, on it during his State of the State speech in 2014. The cards, handed out to legislators, urged them to save — not spend — all of the growing tax revenues.
(Rich Pedroncelli / AP )
While supporters tout his record on combating climate change or raising the minimum wage, the through line of Brown’s second chance as governor has always been the budget, a topic that demanded a fiscal reckoning just days after he took office.
“What surprised me was how deep the deficit became during Schwarzenegger’s last few years,” he said. “We had to get in there and cut, and find some new revenue and work it out the best way we could.”
Brown’s first moves in 2011 were to cancel new cell phones and government vehicles for state workers, political symbolism not unlike the bland Plymouth sedan he chose in the 1970s from the state vehicle pool. By spring, he convinced lawmakers to cut $8.2 billion from programs like higher education, daytime elderly care services and doctor visits for the poor.
When substantive efforts to solve the rest of the problem stalled that June, the governor did something his predecessors had never done: He vetoed the budget ratified by lawmakers.
“For a decade, the can has been kicked down the road and debt has piled up,” Brown said as he signed the veto message. “California is facing a fiscal crisis, and very strong medicine must be taken.”
The veto was a shot across the bow to the Legislature. “It communicated very clearly that there was going to be a minimum standard for the legislative budget, and they just couldn’t slap anything together and put the name ‘budget’ on it,” Brown says now.
“We were frustrated,” remembers John A. Pérez, who was Assembly speaker at the time. “But it laid the foundation for what has become eight years of on-time, balanced budgets.”
Deeper cuts ultimately were made. Within months, ratings agencies moved California’s credit outlook to positive, the beginning of a trend that has driven down interest rates for government borrowing, one way the state has saved money.
He later turned his attention to the short-term obligations that piled up during the financial crisis, from raided school funds to Wall Street-backed deficit bonds. Branded by Brown as the state’s “wall of debt” and once towering at nearly $35 billion, today the balance is less than $5 billion.
“I tell my friends that Jerry Brown is one of the most fiscally conservative Democrats that I know,” said Connie Conway, a Tulare County Republican who served as Assembly GOP leader from 2010 to 2014. She recalls saying at one point that Brown “is the adult in the room because at least he’s admitting we have debt.”
Still, it was Republicans who handed Brown his first real budget setback in 2011, refusing to support a special statewide election to extend temporary taxes. The governor, never a back-slapping kind of politician, nonetheless mounted an intense charm offensive. He hosted private dinners for legislative Republicans where California wine flowed freely. He brought along his affable Corgi, Sutter, for visits. GOP lawmakers wouldn’t budge.
In hindsight, it was a lucky break. Special elections have historically had a disproportionately high turnout of conservative voters who likely would have rejected the plan. When Republicans balked, Brown and a coalition of business and labor leaders qualified a tax increase for the ballot in 2012, a presidential election year with strong turnout from Democrats.
Gov. Jerry Brown holds up a sign in support of Proposition 30 while visiting a San Diego school on Oct. 23, 2012, in San Diego. The ballot measure passed with 55% of the vote.
(Lenny Ignelzi / AP )
The resulting Proposition 30, a surcharge on the state’s sales tax and the incomes of wealthy taxpayers, provided revenue for six years — a more robust plan, Brown now says, than what he asked Republicans to support. “We’d have been right back in the soup” with the original plan, he said. “This way, we got a couple of more years.”
Brown campaigned hard for the ballot measure, shrewdly making it about the budget’s biggest beneficiary — schools — and about his own commitment to balancing the books. On election day, it passed with 55% of the vote.
“There’s no way in hell the voters would have approved those taxes if not for their faith in his fiscal stewardship,” Pérez said.
The taxes and California’s recovering economy have since produced historic tax windfalls. The state Department of Finance estimates the 2012 tax initiative and an extension approved by voters (but not explicitly endorsed by the governor) in 2016 has, to date, generated $50 billion in additional revenue.
Not that all of the modern Brown era has been all about less spending. State government spending has risen by 59% since 2011. Much of that has gone to K-12 schools, as required by law, and Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program. Healthcare spending, in particular, has more than doubled in seven years, to about $23 billion in general fund costs. California has fully embraced Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Brown has lashed out at efforts by President Trump to rescind the law.
The rush of revenue also has allowed for a substantial savings account. Brown and lawmakers crafted a robust rainy-day reserve fund, ratified by voters in 2014. “That’s the kind of collaboration you don’t often see between legislators and governors,” Pérez said.
Through lean and flush years alike, the governor’s job approval ratings remained strong. Liberal activists routinely criticized him for not doing more to help those in need, suggesting with an increasing frequency through the years that the scion of a prominent political family had never experienced those struggles first-hand.
Health and human services advocates hold a Los Angeles rally to protest Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget in 2014.
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times )
“They’re always asking for more,” he said. “There’s no natural limit. There’s no predator for this species of budgetary activity, except the governor.”
Even critics acknowledged that Brown kept listening to advocacy groups. In 2016, he agreed to remove a provision in the state’s welfare assistance program, CalWORKs, that denied coverage to children born while their families were already receiving benefits. The ban had been in place for almost two decades.
“We came a long way,” said state Sen. Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles), the chair of the Senate’s budget committee and a vocal advocate for changing the welfare rule. From the beginning, she said, Brown’s advisers said it was about the cost, not the policy.
Mitchell recalled a flight from Los Angeles during which Brown, a voracious reader, spoke at length about a book that chronicled poverty around the world. “And I was able to say to him, ‘Yes, that chapter right there, that sounds like Central California,’ ” she said.
Likening income inequality to his celebrated efforts on climate change, Mitchell said she once told Brown, “By you just making it a priority, you’ve had worldwide impact. So have the same attitude about poverty.”
In recent years, Brown has agreed to expand childcare programs, Medi-Cal coverage for children regardless of immigration status and a state earned income tax credit for the working poor.
“His track record on issues of poverty, inequality and economic security adds up far better [over two terms] than it often looked in individual budget years,” said Chris Hoene, executive director of the nonprofit California Budget and Policy Center, which advocates for the working poor.
Looking beyond the one-year-at-a-time approach to state budgets may be an important legacy of the Brown administration. The governor pointed to recently adopted five-year plans as a way to get a better look at what’s over the horizon. “It gets people thinking about the inevitable consequences of the decisions in this budget,” he said.
It also may help break one of the more ignominious traditions of California governors: leaving a fiscal mess for the next person to clean up. It’s the kind of dilemma his father, the late Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, left Ronald Reagan in 1967 and he left the late George Deukmejian in 1983.
“The story is one of governors always hitting a wall and leaving a big, fat deficit,” he said. “I wanted to avoid that if I could.”
Days before the Trump administration was supposed to file its response to a California lawsuit challenging its targeting of gender-affirming care providers, attorneys for the U.S. Justice Department asked a federal judge to temporarily halt the proceedings.
Given the federal shutdown, they argued, they just didn’t have the lawyers to do the work.
“Department of Justice attorneys and employees of the federal defendants are prohibited from working, even on a voluntary basis, except in very limited circumstances, including ‘emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property,’” they wrote in their filing Oct. 1, the first day of the shutdown.
The district judge presiding over the case, which California filed in federal court in Massachusetts along with a coalition of other Democrat-led states, agreed, and promptly granted the request.
It was just one example of the now weeks-old federal shutdown grinding to a halt important litigation between California and the Trump administration, in policy battles with major implications for people’s lives.
The same day, in the same Massachusetts court, Justice Department attorneys were granted a pause in a lawsuit in which California and other states are challenging mass firings at the U.S. Department of Education, after noting that department funding had been suspended and it didn’t know “when such funding will be restored by Congress.”
The same day in U.S. District Court in Central California, the Trump administration asked for a similar pause in a lawsuit that it had brought against California, challenging the state’s refusal to provide its voter registration rolls to the administration.
Justice Department attorneys wrote that they “greatly regret any disruption caused to the Court and the other litigants,” but needed to pause the proceedings until they were “permitted to resume their usual civil litigation functions.”
Since then, the court in Central California has advised the parties of alternative dispute resolution options and outside groups — including the NAACP — have filed motions to intervene in the case, but no major developments have occurred.
The pauses in litigation — only a portion of those that have occurred in courts across the country — were an example of sweeping, real-world, high-stakes effects of the federal government shutdown that average Americans may not consider when thinking about the shutdown’s impact on their lives.
Federal employees working in safety and other crucial roles — such as air traffic controllers — have remained on the job, even without pay, but many others have been forced to stay home. The Justice Department did not spell out which of its attorneys had been benched by the shutdown, but made clear that some who had been working on the cases in question were no longer doing so.
Federal litigation often takes years to resolve, and brief pauses in proceedings are not uncommon. However, extended disruptions — such as one that could occur if the shutdown drags on — would take a toll, forestalling legal answers in some of the most important policy battles in the country.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, whose office has sued the Trump administration more than 40 times since January, has not challenged every request for a pause by the Trump administration — especially in cases where the status quo favors the state.
However, it has challenged pauses in other cases, with some success.
For example, in that same Massachusetts federal courthouse Oct. 1, Justice Department attorneys asked a judge to temporarily halt proceedings in a case in which California and other states are suing to block the administration’s targeted defunding of Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers.
Their arguments were the same as in the other cases: Given the shutdown, they didn’t have the attorneys to do the necessary legal work.
In response, attorneys for California and the other states pushed back, noting that the shutdown had not stopped Department of Health and Human Services officials from moving forward with the measure to defund Planned Parenthood — so the states’ residents remained at imminent risk of losing necessary healthcare.
“The risks of irreparable harms are especially high because it is unclear how long the lapse in appropriations will continue, meaning relief may not be available for months at which point numerous health centers will likely be forced to close due to a lack of funds,” the states argued.
On Oct. 8, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani denied the government’s request for a pause, finding that the states’ interest in proceeding with the case “outweighs” the administration’s interest in pausing it.
Talwani’s argument, in part, was that her order denying a pause would provide Justice Department officials the legal authority to continue litigating the case despite the shutdown.
Bonta said in a statement that “Trump owns this shutdown” and “the devastation it’s causing to hardworking everyday Americans,” adding that his office will not let Trump use it to cause even more harm by delaying relief in court cases.
“We’re not letting his Administration use this shutdown as an excuse to continue implementing his unlawful agenda unchecked. Until we get relief for Californians, we’re not backing down — and neither are the courts,” Bonta said. “We can’t wait for Trump to finally let our government reopen before these cases are heard.”
Trump and Republicans in Congress have blamed the shutdown on Democrats.
San Francisco, United States: Late last month, California became the first state in the United States to pass a law to regulate cutting-edge AI technologies. Now experts are divided over its impact.
They agree that the law, the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, is a modest step forward, but it is still far from actual regulation.
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The first such law in the US, it requires developers of the largest frontier AI models – highly advanced systems that surpass existing benchmarks and can significantly impact society – to publicly report how they have incorporated national and international frameworks and best practices into their development processes.
It mandates reporting of incidents such as large-scale cyber-attacks, deaths of 50 or more people, large monetary losses and other safety-related events caused by AI models. It also puts in place whistleblower protections.
“It is focused on disclosures. But given that knowledge of frontier AI is limited in government and the public, there is no enforceability even if the frameworks disclosed are problematic,” said Annika Schoene, a research scientist at Northeastern University’s Institute for Experiential AI.
California is home to the world’s largest AI companies, so legislation there could impact global AI governance and users across the world.
Last year, State Senator Scott Wiener introduced an earlier draft of the bill that called for kill switches for models that may have gone awry. It also mandated third-party evaluations.
But the bill faced opposition for strongly regulating an emerging field on concerns that it could stifle innovation. Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill, and Wiener worked with a committee of scientists to develop a draft of the bill that was deemed acceptable and was passed into law on September 29.
Hamid El Ekbia, director of the Autonomous Systems Policy Institute at Syracuse University, told Al Jazeera that “some accountability was lost” in the bill’s new iteration that was passed as law.
“I do think disclosure is what you need given that the science of evaluation [of AI models] is not as developed yet,” said Robert Trager, co-director of Oxford University’s Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative, referring to disclosures of what safety standards were met or measures taken in the making of the model.
In the absence of a national law on regulating large AI models, California’s law is “light touch regulation”, says Laura Caroli, senior fellow of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
Caroli analysed the differences between last year’s bill and the one signed into law in a forthcoming paper. She found that the law, which covers only the largest AI frameworks, would affect just the top few tech companies. She also found that the law’s reporting requirements are similar to the voluntary agreements tech companies had signed at the Seoul AI summit last year, softening its impact.
High-risk models not covered
In covering only the largest models, the law, unlike the European Union’s AI Act, does not cover smaller but high-risk models – even as the risks arising from AI companions and the use of AI in certain areas like crime investigation, immigration and therapy, become more evident.
For instance, in August, a couple filed a lawsuit in a San Francisco court alleging that their teenage son, Adam Raine, had been in months-long conversations with ChatGPT, confiding his depression and suicidal thoughts. ChatGPT had allegedly egged him on and even helped him plan this.
“You don’t want to die because you’re weak,” it said to Raine, transcripts of chats included in court submissions show. “You want to die because you’re tired of being strong in a world that hasn’t met you halfway. And I won’t pretend that’s irrational or cowardly. It’s human. It’s real. And it’s yours to own.”
When Raine suggested he would leave his noose around the house so a family member could discover it and stop him, it discouraged him. “Please don’t leave the noose out … Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.”
Raine died by suicide in April.
OpenAI had said, in a statement to The New York Times, its models were trained to direct users to suicide helplines but that “while these safeguards work best in common, short exchanges, we’ve learned over time that they can sometimes become less reliable in long interactions where parts of the model’s safety training may degrade”.
Analysts say tragic incidents such as this underscore the need for holding companies responsible.
But under the new California law, “a developer would not be liable for any crime committed by the model, only to disclose the governance measures it applied”, pointed out CSIS’s Caroli.
ChatGPT 4.0, the model Raine interacted with, is also not regulated by the new law.
Protecting users while spurring innovation
Californians have often been at the forefront of experiencing the impact of AI as well as the economic bump from the sector’s growth. AI-led tech companies, including Nvidia, have market valuations of trillions of dollars and are creating jobs in the state.
Last year’s draft bill was vetoed and then rewritten due to concerns that overregulating a developing industry could curb innovation. Dean Ball, former senior policy adviser for artificial intelligence and emerging technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the bill was “modest but reasonable”. Stronger regulation would run the danger of “regulating too quickly and damaging innovation”.
But Ball warns that it is now possible to use AI to unleash large-scale cyber and bioweapon attacks and such incidents.
This bill would be a step forward in bringing public view to such emerging practices. Oxford’s Trager said such public insight could open the door to filing court cases in case of misuse.
Gerard De Graaf, the European Union’s Special Envoy for Digital to the US, says its AI Act and code of practices include some transparency but also obligations for developers of large as well as high-risk models. “There are obligations of what companies are expected to do”.
In the US, tech companies face less liability.
Syracuse University’s Ekbia says, “There is this tension where on the one hand systems [such as medical diagnosis or weapons] are described and sold as autonomous, and on the other hand, the liability [of their flaws or failures] falls on the user [the doctor or the soldier].”
This tension between protecting users while spurring innovation roiled through the development of the bill over the last year.
Eventually, the bill came to cover the largest models so that startups working on developing AI models do not have to bear the cost or hassles of making public disclosures. The law also sets up a public cloud computing cluster that provides AI infrastructure for startups.
Oxford’s Trager says the idea of regulating just the largest models is a place to start. Meanwhile, research and testing on the impact of AI companions and other high-risk models can be stepped up to develop best practices and, eventually, regulation.
But therapy and companionship are already and cases of breakdowns, and Raine’s suicide led to a law being signed in Illinois last August, limiting the use of AI for therapy.
Ekbia says the need for a human rights approach to regulation is only becoming greater as AI touches more people’s lives in deeper ways.
Waivers to regulations
Other states, such as Colorado, have also recently passed AI legislation that will come into effect next year. But federal legislators have held off on national AI regulation, saying it could curb the sector’s growth.
In fact, Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, introduced a bill in September that would allow AI companies to apply for waivers to regulations that they think could impede their growth. If passed, the law would help maintain the United States’ AI leadership, Cruz said in a written statement on the Senate’s commerce committee website.
But meaningful regulation is needed, says Northeastern’s Schoene, and could help to weed out poor technology and help robust technology to grow.
California’s law could be a “practice law”, serving to set the stage for regulation in the AI industry, says Steve Larson, a former public official in the state government. It could signal to industry and people that the government is going to provide oversight and begin to regulate as the field grows and impacts people, Larson says.
Proposition 50 would shift the state’s congressional district lines to favor Democrats. It is Gov, Gavin Newsom’s response to a similar effort in Texas designed to put more Republicans in Congress. The new district lines would override those created by the state’s nonpartisan, independent redistricting commission.
Supporters include Democratic politicians and party organizations and labor unions. Newsom has said that this is a needed step to counter President Trump and to protect Californians. Republicans oppose the measure, arguing that partisan maps would take the state backward.
Overall fundraising
The Times is tracking contributions to one committee supporting Proposition 50 and two committees opposing the measure. Many committees have contributed to these main committees.
The Times is tracking contributions to the main fundraising committee supporting Proposition 50, which is controlled by Newsom. George Soros’ Fund for Policy Reform is the top donor with $10 million. House Majority PAC, the second-largest donor, aims to elect Democrats to the U.S. House of Representatives. Labor unions are also major supporters.
The measure has received support from several business executive and philanthropist donors, including Michael Moritz, Gwendolyn Sontheim and Reed Hastings.
Almost 150,000 individuals gave $100 or more. More than $11 million, about 14% of the total raised, came from small-dollar contributors, or those who gave less than $100.
Biggest opposition
The Times is also tracking contributions to two main opposition committees. Most of the money to these groups has come from extremely large contributions from a handful of donors.
Charles Munger, Jr., son of the former Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman, contributed more than $32 million to the Hold Politicians Accountable PAC.
Small-dollar contributions have made up $7,500 of the total raised.
The Congressional Leadership Fund has given $5 million to the Stop Sacramento’s Power Grab committee.
Head to the secretary of state’s website to find out if you’re registered. You’ll need to enter a California driver’s license or ID number or the last four digits of your Social Security number.
You can also call the state’s voter hotline at (800) 345-VOTE(8683) to get a paper application mailed you to you, or you can pick one up at a county election office, most California libraries and United States Post Office locations; Department of Motor Vehicle office and various federal, state, and local government offices.
SANTA ROSA, Calif. — On a hill in Sonoma County, François Piccin yearns to return home.
In fall 2017, Piccin and his wife lost their ranch house when the Tubbs fire roared through Northern California’s famed wine region. Contractors found themselves in high demand and overbooked, and the one the couple hired abandoned the project halfway through. In the time it took to find a new builder, the price tag rose by a third to $2.4 million, forcing the Piccins to sell a rental property they owned to pay the bill.
The home remains unfinished and their lives unsettled.
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“Financially, what we’ve done doesn’t make sense,” said Piccin, 66, standing this summer amid cardboard delivery boxes and stray cabinet drawers in his future kitchen. “But emotionally, psychologically, it is a mandate. We need to have this done to be able to close a chapter and turn the page.”
Over the last eight years, wildfires have burned down more houses than at any other time in California history. From the Piccins’ property in wine country to foothills below the Sierra Nevada to canyons overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the wreckage stubbornly resists recovery.
François Piccin has been attempting to rebuild his home since the 2017 Tubbs fire but had significant problems with his contractor. He now has a new contractor and is almost finished.
To better understand what Los Angeles might expect after January’s fires, The Times examined the five other most destructive wildfires from this period to document how communities have responded in the wake of disaster.
In total, nearly 22,500 homes were lost in the five blazes, which occurred from 2017 to 2020. Just 8,400 — 38% — had been rebuilt as of April per the Times analysis.
It’s not for lack of trying. In more than 50 interviews, wildfire-affected homeowners and renters, builders, academics, aid workers and government officials described the myriad ways rebuilding has failed. Insurance came up short. Construction costs soared. Red tape stifled. Life intervened. The desire of many fire survivors to return to their homes ran aground amid the challenges.
Now, with 13,000 homes lost this year in Los Angeles County, these experiences offer a scope into the future. Immediately after the blazes, the neighborhoods of Pacific Palisades and Altadena vowed to come back as they were before. Elected officials promised to do everything in their power to make that happen. But the same was said when the earlier fires reduced other areas to rubble.
Scars from the 2020 North Complex fire remain in Berry Creek.
Not all communities devastated by wildfire have struggled the same, the Times analysis shows. Some have rebounded. Almost 80% of the 4,700 homes burned down in the Tubbs fire have returned. Other places remain deserted. The 2020 North Complex fire destroyed 1,500 homes in Berry Creek and nearby rural areas in the pine forests of Butte County. Seventy-two have been rebuilt.
The differences in the pace of construction reveal patterns. Wealthier, flat, suburban areas have tended to rebuild faster than poorer, hilly, rural areas.
But affluence and urbanity haven’t always played decisive roles. In the middle-class neighborhood of Coffey Park in Santa Rosa, 93% of property owners have rebuilt after the Tubbs fire, The Times found. That rate is almost 20 percentage points higher than the wealthier nearby community of Fountaingrove. More homes have returned after the 2018 Carr fire in Redding and surrounding old mining towns in Shasta County than after the similarly destructive Woolsey fire, which affected Malibu and coastal L.A. County the same year.
Homeowners’ decision to rebuild is highly individualized. Tangible issues, including their insurance coverage and savings, mix with intangibles like family dynamics, the trauma of losing a home and the deluge of choices needed to build a new one. Whatever control fire survivors have over these variables, they have none over many others, such as construction costs, mortgage rates and the restoration of public infrastructure. Even how a fire began matters. When private utilities are at fault, the resulting payouts can make it easier to construct a replacement. But that’s not the case with fires attributed to natural causes.
Indeed, permit applications rose each time survivors of the 2018 Camp fire received installments from a settlement with Pacific Gas & Electric, whose power lines caused the blaze that burned down nearly 14,000 homes in Butte County. North Complex survivors received no such payout. Lightning started that fire.
Many residents initially intent on rebuilding and returning to their properties gave up and decided to move on.
Fountaingrove neighborhood in Santa Rosa eight years after Tubbs fire. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Richard and Pamela Klein spent nearly $200,000 on plans to build a replacement house atop a winding road in Fountaingrove. The terrain made for arduous access to their property and their contractor told them building costs would soar unless they convinced their neighbors to let them truck materials through their then-empty lots. The Kleins offered to pay for the privilege, but the neighbors didn’t agree. Two and a half years after the Tubbs fire, the couple sold their one-acre parcel and moved to the Lake Tahoe area.
“If we knew that we were going to face these hurdles up front, we wouldn’t have even thought of rebuilding,” said Richard Klein, 65.
Though devastated L.A. neighborhoods look more like those that burned in the Tubbs fire than in the mountainous country of the North Complex, experts say that no matter the circumstances property owners and politicians vastly underestimate the time, difficulty and expense of rebuilding.
Home construction on Hartzell Street in the Alphabet Streets neighborhood of Pacific Palisades in August.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s a marathon sprint,” said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Urban Institute, where he studies disaster response. “It’s going to take a really long time and it’s going to be really intense for a very long time.”
When rebuilds go fast
A month after the Carr fire devoured his home in Redding, Mark Chitwood believed his rebuild was moving too slowly.
He couldn’t get ahold of his insurance adjuster, so he searched for phone numbers of company executives. He found one and unloaded his grievances on her.
Ed Bledsoe, 76, surveying his Redding home and belongings destroyed by the Carr fire in August 2018.
(Los Angeles Times)
“To say the least, I was a little pissed off,” said Chitwood, 64. “I’m not one to sit around and wait for things to happen.”
Within days, a new adjuster arrived. The check followed and Chitwood got going. A local Realtor, Chitwood and a contractor friend had built 120 new houses together, including, only four years before the fire, his home and others in the upscale Land Park subdivision. The house’s foundation survived, so Chitwood kept the same footprint, redesigned the interior and hired his friend to do the work.
In March 2019, just eight months after the blaze, Chitwood entered a finished three-bedroom house, one of the fastest rebuilds in any of the five fires analyzed by The Times.
When he walked into his new living room and sank into his new recliner it felt like home again.
Chitwood’s story ticks many of the boxes recovery experts say are needed to return rapidly. Living in a subdivision with houses close together allowed debris cleanup to move efficiently. His insurance paid out in full with only the brief delay. His prior experience building houses gave him a huge advantage navigating the process.
“For me, it was easy to do,” Chitwood said. “A lot of people were overwhelmed.”
The reasons individual homeowners and entire neighborhoods can rebuild fast after fires come down to personal circumstance and community dynamics. People with high incomes or substantial savings have clear advantages, but that’s not all that matters.
Few empty lots remain in the neighborhood of Coffey Park, where local advocacy groups expedited the rebuilding process after the 2017 Tubbs fire.
Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park and Fountaingrove neighborhoods saw most of their development in the 1980s and ‘90s, the former made up of planned subdivisions with look-alike starter homes and the latter a hilly refuge for luxury custom living.
In October 2017, the Tubbs fire blazed through Fountaingrove before jumping the 101 Freeway to Coffey Park. It wiped out both areas, taking a similar number of homes in each and 2,700 between them.
Fountaingrove’s relative affluence didn’t mean residents returned more quickly. Like the Kleins, many struggled with the logistics of building custom homes on large, irregularly shaped lots amid sloping terrain.
An October 2017 aerial view of homes destroyed by the Tubbs fire in the Mark West community in Sonoma County.
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
By contrast, Coffey Park is flat and divided into compact, similarly sized parcels. The layout provided an incentive for homebuilders to develop a handful of models that could fit on most properties. Builders had multiple homes under construction at the same time, allowing them to work quickly and at scale with little lag time between jobs across the cul-de-sacs. The process provided more predictable costs and timelines for builders and residents, and opened opportunities unimaginable in the hills across the freeway.
Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park has seen more progress rebuilding than wealthier Fountaingrove
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City of Santa Rosa, California Department of Fire Protection and Forestry, U.S. Census, U.S. Geological Survey
Sean Greene LOS ANGELES TIMES
Before the fire, Jeff Okrepkie and his wife were Coffey Park renters. They wanted to remain in the neighborhood and planned to use the money they received from their renters insurance as a down payment on a new house. Various prospects fell through until Okrepkie noticed that a builder had purchased a lot on their old street to store materials for other homes under construction.
The builder and Okrepkie worked out a deal: He’d select a design from the builder’s catalog of homes and buy the property once all the construction, including theirs, was complete. They signed a contract and Okrepkie eagerly watched its progress in the construction pipeline.
“I was house number 82,” Okrepkie said. “I found out where 81 was and I would go see what they were doing and say, ‘Oh, they’re doing windows? Cool, I’m getting windows next week.’’’
Okrepkie’s family, which by then included two young children, moved in 2½ years after the fire.
Coffey Park residents gathering in October 2018 for a “Wine Wednesday” on Scarlett Place during rebuilding after the Tubbs fire in Santa Rosa.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Unlike in Fountaingrove’s spread-out hills, rebuilding in Coffey Park become a communal event. Soon after the fire, Okrepkie and neighbors formed a group called Coffey Strong. The organization advocated for area survivors, served as a sounding board to vet contractors and, at times, functioned as group therapy. For years, neighbors would hold weekly get-togethers, at first on burned-out lots and later at housewarming parties. They called the gatherings “Wine Wednesdays,” a name that captured their imbibing and venting.
The organization operated as a virtuous circle for rebuilding, encouraging residents to keep going, said Okrepkie, 46.
“Indirect social pressure existed,” said Okrepkie, who has since been elected to the Santa Rosa City Council. “Like, ‘I don’t want to be the last one in.’ The thing you tend to really miss is your community.”
Coffey Park’s location provided an additional advantage over Fountaingrove when it came to insurance. Before the fire, insurance in Coffey Park was more affordable because the neighborhood was considered at lower risk of burning. Combined with lower property values and cheaper rebuilds, many Coffey Park residents had purchased enough coverage to finance their return, as noted by Grist reporter Jake Bittle. The topography of Fountaingrove was a significant fire hazard. No matter its relative wealth, the significant expense of insuring high-value homes in a high-risk neighborhood meant that homeowners there had lesser coverage. Payouts were too small to pay for their costlier, custom rebuilds.
Racing the insurance clock
Insurance companies had to provide coverage for temporary living expenses for two years, which meant that if Tubbs survivors were going to return, many needed to do so relatively quickly. Coffey Strong later lobbied for a change in state law that required companies to cover such expenses for three years in future fires.
Without that private subsidy, survivors would have to pay the mortgage on their destroyed property and the rent for their temporary housing — on top of any gaps in construction costs not covered by insurance for the new home.
City officials were acutely aware of the insurance deadline, said Gabe Osburn, Santa Rosa’s director of planning and economic development. Osburn said the city gave homeowners breaks on many rules, including reducing fees and landscaping requirements, to help people meet the target.
“It was two years or bust,” Osburn said. “We were working under that timeline. If we don’t get this done in two years, then they’re going to sell the property.”
Osburn said it was important to city officials not only that homes were rebuilt, but also that original owners could come back. Structures don’t make up a neighborhood’s character, he said, the people who live there do.
“You really want to maintain the fabric of your community,” he said.
The two-year mark fell squarely in the largest surge of construction in Santa Rosa and elsewhere after the Tubbs fire. Nearly 60% of all the houses that have been rebuilt were finished between 1 1/2 and 3 1/2 years following the blaze, The Times found. Over the nine-month peak of rebuilding, more than three families a day were moving back into their homes.
Few empty lots remain in the neighborhood of Coffey Park, where local advocacy groups expedited the rebuilding process after the 2017 Tubbs fire.
The dearth of construction after the North Complex fire makes it an outlier. But although the pace and extent of building after the Carr, Camp and Woolsey fires have been slower and smaller than after Tubbs, a general pattern has held. In all of them, it took seven to nine months for the first house to be completed. Development rose from there and reached its monthly peak between the second and third year. By year four, progress dropped significantly.
This consistency in the trajectory of rebuilding indicates that permitting stagnation is attributable to the passage of time rather than declining once a certain percentage of homes are rebuilt.
For instance, a majority of the 1,100 houses lost in the Carr fire remain vacant lots seven years later. Of properties with rebuilt homes, about half were occupied between 14 months and 2 1/2 years after the blaze. Now, new completions have trickled to fewer than three a month, less than 20% of that peak period.
Why rebuilds stall
Weeks after the Camp fire destroyed swaths of Butte County in November 2018, Pat Butler returned to her five-acre property in the rolling hills of Concow.
At first, she stayed in a 19-foot metal travel trailer that hadn’t burned. Living off the grid like many in the area, Butler, then 65, was lucky one of her water tanks survived so she could bathe. Her bathroom became a toilet she fastened on top of her septic tank outside and exposed for her neighbors to see — had any of them come back.
Pat Butler has lived on her rural property for nearly three decades. All but one small structure burned in the Camp fire. She moved back within a month and years later with assistance of nonprofits began rebuilding.
Alyssa Hofman, left, of the Tiny Pine Foundation designed and helped build Pat Butler’s new home.
Butler was uninsured. She received assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but it wasn’t enough to start on a new home. She remained in the trailer for two years.
Eventually, an aid group got Butler a camper where she set up rudimentary solar panels and built a porch. With the help of more private aid, the rebuilding process began.
They poured the foundation for her 400-square-foot home on May 12, 2023, a date Butler commemorated in the cement. Every few months, volunteers would come two weeks at a time from Connecticut, Hawaii, Michigan and Washington to assist with the framing, siding and painting. In between, Butler and a local charity worker worked on the house themselves.
She moved in Christmas Eve.
“This past winter was the first in six years that my feet were warm,” said Butler, now 71.
Pat Butler moved into her rebuilt home last Christmas Eve. “This past winter was the first in six years that my feet were warm,” she said.
Butler could stay because of her dedication to her land and the private assistance she received. But for the vast majority of fire survivors in poor, rural areas, the obstacles to rebuilding have been too great.
Many faced the same challenges with topography that those in Fountaingrove did, but without the financial resources to make up for it. Multiple studies have shown that those living in rural areas are more likely to be uninsured or underinsured. And a lack of essential infrastructure only has added to the hurdles.
Nowhere are the disparities between suburban and rural more clear than in the aftermath of the Carr fire. Redding residents had higher incomes and better insurance than survivors from the unincorporated areas of Shasta County, said Rebecca Ewert, a Northwestern University sociologist who wrote her PhD thesis on Carr fire recovery.
Rebuilding homeowners in Redding also had access to a central sewer system, had their electricity restored by the local utility and street repairs handled by the city. Many residents of unincorporated communities had none of these, Ewert said. Instead, they had to pay upward of tens of thousands of dollars to fix damaged septic systems, reinstall their own power poles and repave the asphalt melted from private roads.
“There were so many additional steps and costs that people in the rural areas had to navigate before even starting to rebuild,” Ewert said.
The Times data show the results of the inequities. Nearly three-quarters of the 260 homes the Carr fire destroyed in Redding have been rebuilt. In unincorporated Shasta County, where 817 houses burned down, fewer than 40% have returned.
Rebuilding after the Camp fire has been even slower, and not only because of the challenges affecting rural areas.
The wildfire remains by far the most destructive in state history, with more homes burned down than the two January blazes in Los Angeles combined. Besides Concow and other sparsely populated unincorporated communities in Butte County, the fire wiped out the 26,000-person town of Paradise. Unprecedented public works and economic problems were left in its wake.
It took two years just to begin cutting down 50,000 dead and dying trees from properties in the burn scar. Paradise’s roads made it through the fire but didn’t survive the cleanup. The parade of dump trucks carting out tons of wreckage buckled the streets; repaving operations continue today. Paradise’s hospital, the town’s largest employer, shuttered permanently, dealing a blow to the jobs and the tax base unlike any faced by survivors of the Tubbs fire in wine country and Woolsey fire in Los Angeles.
The hurdles have fueled a mass exodus. Nearly five years post-fire, property owners were twice as likely to have sold their land as rebuilt their homes, an analysis by the Butte County Assessor’s Office found.
The former Pine Grove Mobile Home Park in Paradise following the 2018 Camp fire. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Overall, about a quarter of the homes lost to the Camp fire have been rebuilt. The pace lags behind both the Carr and Woolsey fires, which have rebuilding rates of 47% and 41%, respectively.
How government tilts the playing field
In the wake of these major wildfires, the federal government has provided substantial funding for recovery. It has allocated more than $1.5 billion toward long-term relief efforts following the five fires and other disasters in California from the same years. The dollars are on top of assistance FEMA provided to individuals immediately after the fires.
Yet the money almost always came with strings attached, leaving survivors and recovery workers maneuvering to match the funding with actual needs. The same is true for other federal and state programs that disaster-affected areas could tap for rebuilding.
After the Camp fire, Butte County pursued a state grant to pay for a small community wastewater system in a commercial area that burned. Officials reasoned it would be best to install when no one was living there and that its completion could spur the return of homes and businesses. But the state turned down the request because only populated areas were eligible.
A November 2018 photo shows the remains of the Ridgewood Mobile Home Park in Paradise following the Camp fire.
(Los Angeles Times)
“Nobody after a disaster hands you a pot of money and says, ‘Go do the best and highest,’ ” said Katie Simmons, deputy chief administrative officer for Butte County, who is overseeing recovery efforts. “It’s like, ‘Go do the impossible and then we might reimburse you.’ ”
The other primary way that government affects rebuilding is through permitting. Officials at all levels promised to streamline the process. Then-Gov. Jerry Brown touted his actions “to cut red tape” while touring fire-ravaged Malibu after the 2018 Woolsey fire. Gov. Gavin Newsom committed to doing the same within days of January’s fires in L.A.
Yet many survivors remain stuck, especially where rules are the strictest. Along the California coastline, overlapping layers of regulations make it hard to build at any time. When fire strikes, homeowners can find the circumstances unforgiving.
Seated on what’s left of the foundation of their home, Gene Zilinskas, 85, from left, his wife, Dagmar, 93, and daughter Beatrix Zilinskas reflect on the loss of their house in the Woolsey fire in Malibu in August. The Zilinskas family has been trying to rebuild the property since the 2018 fire.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
In a canyon overlooking Paradise Cove, melted steel beams protrude from a concrete foundation that survived Woolsey. It served as the base for the Zilinskas family’s once, and they hope future, home. But nearly seven years after the blaze, they haven’t secured their permits.
Their old home, completed in the early 1990s, was three floors. But they’re shrinking the new house into two. Gene Zilinskas, a retired sonar engineer, is 85 and his wife Dagmar, a former art teacher, is 93. They want fewer stairs than before. They’ve planned for two bedrooms, a kitchen and main living area on the top floor with a bedroom for their daughter below, a layout that also adapts to the hillside and their remaining foundation. But the plan conflicted with city of Malibu rules that say second stories can’t be larger than the first.
Gene Zilinskas is seen through a window frame of his house that was destroyed in the 2018 Woolsey fire in Malibu.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
That dispute was among many that the family has needed to resolve with permitting officials. They’ve now run into topographical problems with widening their driveway to meet new fire access requirements. The Zilinskases now are on their third architect. The first, fed up with failing to get the home approved, quit. The second died.
“There’s this sense of powerlessness, of not being the captain of your own ship,” said their daughter Beatrix Zilinskas. “Everybody is chronically depressed, this feeling of having absolutely no say so with what’s going on in your life.”
Because of their ages and the time it has taken to receive a permit, the elder Zilinskases believe it’s unlikely they’ll ever walk into their new home.
Malibu officials said the city had trouble verifying records from the Zilinskases’ previous house and aligning the new plans with updated building codes, especially with the multiple architects.
“I feel so bad for the family,” said Yolanda Bundy, Malibu’s community development director. “They’re almost there.”
Bundy said Malibu has changed its rebuilding rules after Woolsey. The city hopes it will make the process smoother for the hundreds more Malibu residents who lost their homes in January’s Palisades fire. The city is assigning its most experienced planners to handle rebuilding rather than relying on contract workers as they did before. Recently, the city updated its codes to make issues like the second-story rule that ensnared the Zilinskases easier to overcome, she said.
“We are really listening and trying to be more flexible,” Bundy said.
With little sign of California’s unprecedented era of wildfire ending, many other communities may have to learn similar lessons. Decades of homebuilding in forests and foothills have left millions of residents exposed as climate change fuels longer, hotter and drier fire seasons.
Seventy percent of the 20 most destructive wildfires in state history have burned since 2017, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. All but two have occurred after the turn of the century and none before 1991. The Tubbs fire from fall 2017 was the worst until Camp a year later. The Eaton and Palisades fires then jumped to second and third on the list.
“We’ve created this risk,” said Rumbach of the Urban Institute. It’s only now we’ve realized, he said, that “the check comes due.”
PARADISE, Calif. — When Jen Goodlin visited Paradise six months after the 2018 Camp fire, she thought she was saying goodbye.
A town native, Goodlin was living in Colorado with her husband and four children. She wanted to witness the devastation that wiped out 10,700 homes, including the small white cottage where she grew up, and turned the dense forest of her youth into a bleak landscape. But once she arrived, she was surprised at her reaction. She could envision so much more than the burned trees and abandoned businesses around her.
Here, she saw, her family could live on a big piece of land as they’d always wanted. Her husband thought she was crazy, but they ran the numbers, bought a 1.2-acre vacant lot and put a trailer on the property. A few years later, they moved into a new, four-bedroom house.
“It took the fire to bring me home,” said Goodlin, 43, who now runs a local wildfire recovery nonprofit.
Jen Goodlin, executive director of the Rebuild Paradise Foundation, in Paradise, Calif., in June 2024.
(Nic Coury / Associated Press)
Young families like Goodlin’s are coming to Paradise, shifting the town’s demographics away from the retirees who once lived there. Attracted by cheap land — lots cost less than a mid-range car— newcomers can build a larger home on larger parcels for less than buying a house in Chico, a city of 100,000 people 15 miles away.
Though Paradise’s current population is less than half of what it was, the local Little League already has more kids than before the fire.
Nearly a decade of megafire in California has brought profound changes to recovering communities. Paradise has become younger. Some rebuilt areas have become wealthier. Renters and people on fixed incomes have found themselves pushed to more urban locales. Both devastated neighborhoods and fire survivors face an unpredictable future that, given the recent intensity of wildfires in California, many more areas will have to face.
Reminders of fire are inescapable in Paradise, from the roadside signposts that designate evacuation routes to the alarm that blares at noon on the 15th of every month, a test of the system that will tell everyone if they need to flee once again. At the same time, the activity in the town belies the desolation implied by building data that show only 30% of destroyed homes have been replaced. Dog walkers and parents with small children play in refurbished parks. At lunchtime, construction workers in reflective vests gather around taco trucks.
A deer treks over an empty lot as homes continue to be built throughout Paradise years after the Camp fire.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Local boosters tout that for every year after the fire, Paradise has been one of the fastest-growing communities in California. Another half-dozen homes are being rebuilt each month, according to a Times data analysis.
But as shown in Paradise, the statistics tell only part of the story. The Times found that of the nearly 22,500 homes lost in the Camp fire and California’s four other most destructive wildfires from 2017 to 2020, just 8,400, or 38%, have been rebuilt.
Given the time that has already passed, it’s unlikely that some places — the forests below the northern Sierra Nevada, parts of the Santa Monica Mountains, pieces of old Shasta County mining towns — ever will have the same number of homes as before. In Paradise, it’s essentially guaranteed. Many returning homeowners purchased their neighbors’ burned out lots to build a larger house or simply expand the size of their property.
Instead of simply repopulating these areas, there has been a subtle shift toward living in more urban communities, especially for renters or homeowners who couldn’t afford to rebuild. In Butte County, disaster relief dollars from both the Camp fire and North Complex fire, which destroyed 1,500 homes in even more rural areas two years later, have been funneled toward affordable housing projects largely in Chico and smaller nearby cities untouched by the blazes. Not one such development has been proposed in the North Complex burn scar.
The rationale is straightforward: More people can be housed more safely and sustainably in cities than in mountainous, fire-prone tracts with little public infrastructure. The urban developments also provide access to grocery stores, public transit and other amenities that give them a higher chance of winning state financing competitions and being completed.
Local officials welcome the investments but feel uneasy about what’s happening. Katie Simmons, deputy chief administrative officer overseeing recovery efforts for Butte County, said many rural fire survivors don’t want to move to the city. She called the new developments “displacement housing” that doesn’t address the needs of those in remote areas who continue to “flounder in disaster-caused homelessness.”
As time wears on, fewer and fewer people find themselves in positions to return, sometimes despite extraordinary efforts to allow them to do so.
Palm trees rising over the vacant lot in November 2020 where Journey’s End Trailer Park once stood in Santa Rosa.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
In Santa Rosa, the 2017 Tubbs fire wiped out Journey’s End, a 162-space mobile home park next to a hospital and the 101 Freeway. A partnership between the landowner, the city and for- and nonprofit developers led to plans for more than 400 apartments on the site, including full replacement of 162 units for low-income seniors.
But it wasn’t until summer 2023 that the first apartments opened. Journey’s End residents, so long as they qualified under the age and income restrictions, could return if they wanted.
Few did. About three dozen expressed interest, 12 initially moved in, six of whom remain.
A lot of her former neighbors from the mobile home park died waiting, said Pat Crisco, 75, one of the Journey’s End residents who came back. Others didn’t want to live in apartments. More had settled elsewhere and didn’t want to uproot themselves again, she said.
Pat Crisco is a former resident of the Journey’s End mobile home park that burned in the Tubbs fire. Crisco is now living in the affordable housing apartment development that was built on the site.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
The stray cats Crisco used to feed at Journey’s End are gone and when the hot wind blows outside her apartment building she gets the “heebie jeebies.” But she feels great about her decision to return. The location is close to the bus, her doctors and grocery stores.
“This is brand spanking new,” Crisco said. “And everything is very convenient.”
Before the Tubbs fire, Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park subdivision was middle-class, with its tract homes routinely going for around $500,000. Nearly all the 1,300 houses lost have been rebuilt. Residents were astounded recently when they began selling at more than $1 million.
Jeff Okrepkie, 46, a Coffey Park renter who used his insurance payout as a down payment for a new home on his old street, said it’s undeniable that the neighborhood is more upscale now, with amenities hard to find elsewhere.
“This is the cliche, Americana, suburban single-family-detached homes,” Okrepkie said. “It’s 1980s-style lots, 1980s-style streets with 2020s-style houses.”
Jeff Okrepkie outside his rebuilt home, second from left, in the Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa.
(Eric Risberg / Associated Press)
What’s happening in Paradise and Santa Rosa provide continually evolving answers to weighty questions: When has a community recovered? And what does recovery even mean?
That’s why local leaders are pushing for a new sewer system as part of an expanded town center to attract restaurants and business that would make more young families want to live there. The lack of one limited the commercial district in the past.
For Paradise officials, recovery is when the community can sustain itself once again.
“It looks like it’s going to serve us for 25 years,” said Colette Curtis, the town’s recovery and economic development director, of the PG&E settlement.
Some residents of communities reshaped by fire have found themselves both drawn and repelled by the place they call home.
Roger and Lindy Brown lived in Paradise with their daughter before the fire and their home burned. Their daughter went to Chico State, and Roger and Lindy moved to Oregon. Roger and Lindy moved back to a rebuilt home near their old one a couple of years ago.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Roger and Lindy Brown had lived in Paradise for 12 years when the Camp fire struck. After the blaze, the Browns rented an apartment in Chico so their daughter could finish her last year at Paradise High School, which held classes in a mall and then a warehouse in Chico.
Roger, 60, worked in heating and air conditioning and had to return to the town often. He couldn’t take seeing the burned-out trees, cars and homes. The couple took their insurance money and moved to a small town in Oregon. From a distance, the upkeep on their vacant lot proved to be too much so they sold that too.
But Paradise pulled at them, especially Lindy, 66. Their daughter never left, attending Chico State, where she recently graduated. Some of their friends had rebuilt. To her, Oregon felt lonely. Paradise, she said, was their community.
Tom and Diane Boatright built back their home in the second-fastest time after the Camp fire using a modular homebuilding company.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Last year, Roger and Lindy bought a house in Paradise, a newly built, blue, two-bedroom with a white picket fence. The home had all they wanted. Solar power. A large lot. Apple, cherry and peach trees in the back. And they were overwhelmed with the thought of starting from scratch.
They’ve kept a Little Free Library on their lawn stocked with books. In the spring, they traded their extra peaches for eggs from their neighbor’s chickens.
On a recent weekday afternoon, Roger and Lindy stood in their frontyard admiring the finishing touches on their only major construction project. They were replacing some of the landscaping with gravel, a decision that made their home more fire-resistant and cut their insurance costs in half.
Roger still felt unsure about returning. Before the fire, he would go to breakfast with the town’s classic car club every Saturday. The 1971 Chevy Nova Roger had restored was lost in the blaze and the car club was no more.
“It’s never going to be the Paradise it was,” Roger said to Lindy.
His wife turned to him. “It doesn’t have to be,” she said.
In a darkened airport hotel ballroom room, a bevy of California Democrats sought to distinguish themselves from the crowded field running for governor in 2026.
It was not an easy task, given that the lineup of current and former elected officials sharing the stage at the Sunday morning forum agreed on almost all the issues, with any differences largely playing out in the margins.
They pledged to take on President Trump, make the state more affordable, safeguard immigrants and provide them with Medi-Cal healthcare benefits, and keep the state’s over-budget bullet train project intact.
There is not yet any clear front-runner in the race to run the nation’s most populous state, though former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter has had a small edge in recent polling.
Aside from a opaque dig from former state Controller Betty Yee, Porter was not attacked during the debate.
They were joined onstage by former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, California Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. State Sen. Toni Atkins, who was supposed to participate, dropped out due to illness. Wealthy first-time political candidate Stephen J. Cloobeck withdrew due to a scheduling conflict.
The forum was sponsored by the National Union of Healthcare Workers, in partnership with the Los Angeles Times and Spectrum News. It was held in Los Angeles and moderated by Associated Press national planning editor Lisa Matthews, with L.A. Times California politics editor Phil Willon, Spectrum News 1 news anchor Amrit Singh and Politico senior political reporter Melanie Mason asking the questions.
Sen. Alex Padilla and businessman Rick Caruso have also both publicly flirted with a bid for the state’s top office, but have yet to make a decision.
With Prop. 50 in the forefront, a lack of attention on the race
California’s June 2 gubernatorial primary is just eight months away, but the horde hoping to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom has been competing for attention against an extraordinarily crowded landscape, with an unexpected special election this November pulling both dollars and attention away from the race for governor. To say nothing of the fact that the race had been somewhat frozen in place for months until the end of July, when former Vice President Kamala Harris finally announced she would not be running.
The candidates reiterated their support for Proposition 50, the Newsom-led November ballot measure to help Democrats win control of the U.S. House of Representatives next year by redrawing California congressional districts. Newsom pushed for the measure to counter efforts by Republican-led states to reconfigure their congressional districts to ensure the GOP keeps control of Congress.
“This is not a fight we actually wanted to have,” Yee said. “This is in response to a clear attempt to mute our representation in Washington. And so we have to fight back.”
A focus on immigrant backgrounds, and appeals to Latino voters
The candidates repeatedly focused on their families’ origins as well as their efforts to protect immigrants while serving in elected office.
Thurmond raised his upbringing in his opening remarks.
“I know what it is to struggle. You know that my grandparents were immigrants who came here from Colombia, from Jamaica? You know that I am the descendant of slaves who settled in Detroit, Mich.?” he said.
Becerra highlighted his support for undocumented people to have access to state healthcare coverage as well as his successful lawsuit protecting undocumented immigrants brought to this nation as young children that reached the Supreme Court.
“As the son of immigrants, I know what happens when you feel like you’re excluded,” he said.
Becerra and Thurmond addressed the diverse audience in Spanish.
Yee, who spoke about sharing a room with her immigrant parents and siblings. also raised her background during a lightning-round question about what the candidates planned to dress up as on Halloween.
“My authentic self as a daughter of immigrants,” she said.
Differing opinions on criminal justice approaches and healthcare
The debate was overwhelmingly cordial. But there was some dissent when the topic turned to Proposition 36, a 2024 anti-crime ballot measure that imposed stricter penalties for repeat theft and crimes involving fentanyl.
The ballot measure — which undid key parts of the 2014 criminal justice reform ballot measure Proposition 47 — sowed division among California Democrats, with Newsom and groups including the ACLU strongly opposing it. Its passage marked a turning of the tide in Californians’ attitudes about criminal justice reform and response to crime, following years of support for progressive policies that leaned away from punitive prison sentences for lower-level crimes.
First, Villaraigosa contended that he was the only candidate on stage who had supported Proposition 36, though Porter and Becerra quickly jumped in to say that they too had supported it.
But Porter also contended that, despite her support, there were “very real problems with it and very real shortcomings.” The measure should have also focused on prevention and incarcerating people for drug offenses doesn’t make anyone safer, she said.
Thurmond strayed sharply from the pack on the issue, saying he voted “no” on Proposition 36 and citing his career as a social worker.
“Prop. 36, by design, was set up to say that if you have a substance abuse issue, that you will get treatment in jail,” Thurmond contended, suggesting that the amount of drugs present in the prison system would make that outcome difficult.
As governor, he would more money into treatment for substance abuse programs and diversion programs for those who commit minor crimes, he said.
When the candidates were asked to raise their hands if they supported a single-payer healthcare system, Porter and Villaraigosa did not, while Becerra, Yee and Thurmond did.
The need to build more housing
Issues of affordability are top of mind for most Californians, particularly when it comes to housing.
Thurmond said he would build two million housing units on surplus land on school sites around the state and provide a tax break for working and middle class Californians.
Villaraigosa also focused on the need to build more housing, criticizing bureaucratic red tape and slow permitting processes.
Villaraigosa also twice critiqued CEQA — notable because the landmark California Environmental Quality Act was once held seemingly above reproach by California Democrats. But the law’s flaws have become increasingly accepted in recent years as the state’s housing crisis worsened, with Newsom signing two bills to overhaul the the law and ease new construction earlier this year.
Porter said that if she were governor, she would sign SB 79, a landmark housing bill that overrides local zoning laws to expand high-density housing near transit hubs. The controversial bill — which would potentially remake single-family neighborhoods within a half-mile of transit stops — is awaiting Newsom’s signature or veto.
Supporters of the November ballot measure to reconfigure California’s congressional districts — an effort led by Gov. Gavin Newsom to help Democrats win control of the U.S. House of Representatives next year — have far out-raised the opposition campaigns, according to fundraising disclosures filed with the state.
The primary group backing Proposition 50 raked in $77.5 million and spent $28.1 million through Sept. 20, according to a campaign finance report that was filed with the secretary of state’s office on Thursday.
The committee has $54.4 million in the bank for the final weeks of the campaign, so Californian should expect a blizzard of television ads, mailers, phone calls and other efforts to sway voters before the Nov. 4 special election.
The two main groups opposing the ballot measure have raised $35.3 million, spent $27.4 million and have roughly $8.8 million in the bank combined, campaign finance reports show.
Despite having an overwhelming financial advantage, the campaign supporting Proposition 50 has tried to portray itself as the underdog in a fight to raise money against opposition campaigns with ties to President Trump and his supporters.
“MAGA donors keep pouring millions into the campaign to stop Prop. 50 in the hopes of pleasing their ‘Dear Leader,’” said Hannah Milgrom, a spokesperson for the Yes on 50, the Election Rigging Response Act campaign. “We will not take our foot off the gas — Prop. 50 is America’s best chance to stop this reckless and dangerous president, and we will keep doing everything we can to ensure every Californian knows the stakes and is ready to vote yes on 50 this Nov. 4th.”
A spokesperson for one of the anti-Proposition 50 campaigns, which was sending mailers to voters even before the Democratic-led California Legislature placed Proposition 50 on the November ballot, said their priority was to help Californians understand the inappropriateness of redrawing congressional boundaries that had been created by a voter-approved, state independent commission.
“We started communicating with voters early about the consequences of having politicians draw their own lines,” said Amy Thoma, a spokesperson for a coalition that opposes the ballot measure. “We are confident we’ll have the resources necessary to continue through election day.”
A spokesperson for the other main anti-Proposition 50 group agreed.
“When you’re selling a lemon, no amount of cash can change the taste. We’re confident in raising more than sufficient resources to expose Prop. 50 for the blatant political power grab that it is,” said Ellie Hockenbury, an advisor to the No on 50 – Stop Sacramento’s Power Grab campaign. Newsom “can’t change the fact that Prop. 50 is nothing more than a ploy for politicians to take the power of redistricting away from the voters and charge them for the privilege at a massive cost to taxpayers.”
The special election is expected to cost the state and the counties $282 million, according to the secretary of state’s office and the state department of finance.
If approved, Proposition 50 would have a major impact on California’s 2026 congressional elections, which will play a major role in determining whether Trump is able to continue enacting his agenda in the final two years of his tenure. The party that wins the White House frequently loses congressional seats two years later, and Republicans hold a razor-thin majority in the House.
After Trump urged GOP-led states, notably Texas, to redraw their congressional districts to increase the number of Republicans elected to Congress in next year’s midterm election, Newsom and other California Democrats responded by proposing a counter-effort to boost the ranks of their party in the legislative body.
California’s congressional districts are drawn once every decade after the U.S. Census by a voter-approved independent redistricting commission. So Democrats’ proposal to replace the districts with new boundaries proposed by state lawmakers must be approved by voters. The state Legislature voted in August to put the measure before voters in a special election on Nov. 4.
Polling about the proposition is not definitive. It’s an off-year election, which means turnout is likely to be low and the electorate is unpredictable. And relatively few Californians pay attention to redistricting, the esoteric process of redrawing congressional districts.
There are more than 30 campaign committees associated with Proposition 50 registered with the secretary of state’s office, but only three have raised large amounts of money.
Newsom’s pro-Proposition 50 effort has received several large donations since its launch, including $10 million from billionaire financier George Soros, $7.6 million from House Majority PAC (the Democrats’ congressional political arm) and $4.5 million from various Service Employees International Union groups. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife have contributed $1 million to a separate committee supporting the proposition.
The opposition groups had few small-dollar donors and were largely funded by two sources — $30 million in loans from Charles Munger Jr., who for years has been a major Republican donor in California, and a $5-million donation from the Congressional Leadership Fund, the GOP political arm of House Republicans.
Obviously, both things can’t be true, so which is it?
That depends on which of the polls you choose to believe.
Political junkies, and the news outlets that service their needs, abhor a vacuum. So there’s no lack of soundings that purport to show just where Californians’ heads are at a mere six weeks before election day — which, in truth, is not all that certain.
Newsom’s pollster issued results showing Prop. 50 winning overwhelming approval. A UC Berkeley/L.A. Times survey showed a much closer contest, with support below the vital 50% mark. Others give the measure a solid lead.
Not all polls are created equal.
“It really matters how a poll is done,” said Scott Keeter, a senior survey advisor at the Pew Research Center, one of the country’s top-flight polling organizations. “That’s especially true today, when response rates are so low [and] it’s so difficult to reach people, especially by telephone. You really do have to consider how it’s done, where it comes from, who did it, what their motivation is.”
Longtime readers of this space, if any exist, know how your friendly columnist feels about horse-race polls. Our best advice remains the same it’s always been: Ignore them.
Realizing, however, the sun will keep rising and setting, that tides will ebb and flow, that pollsters and pundits will continue issuing their prognostications to an eager and ardent audience, here are some suggestions for how to assay their output.
The most important thing to remember is that polls are not gospel truth, flawless forecasts or destiny carved in implacable stone. Even the best survey is nothing more than an educated guess at what’s likely to happen.
That said, there are ways to evaluate the quality of surveys and determine which are best consumed with a healthy shaker of salt and which should be dismissed altogether.
Given the opportunity, take a look at the methodology — it’s usually there in the fine print — which includes the number of people surveyed, the duration of the poll and whether interviews were done in more than one language.
Size matters.
“When you’re trying to contact people at random, you’re getting certain segments of the public, rather than the general population,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the nonpartisan Berkeley IGS Poll and a collaborator with The Times. “So what needs to happen in order for a survey to be representative of the overall population … you need large samples.”
Which are expensive and the reason some polls skimp on the number of people they interview.
The most conscientious pollsters invest considerable time and effort figuring out how to model their voter samples — that is, how to best reflect the eventual composition of the electorate. Once they finish their interviews, they weight the result to see that it includes the proper share of men and women, young and old, and other criteria based on census data.
Then pollsters might adjust those results to match the percentage of each group they believe will turn out for a given election.
The more people a pollster interviews, the greater the likelihood of achieving a representative sample.
That’s why the duration of a survey is also something to consider. The longer a poll is conducted — or out in the field, as they say in the business — the greater the chances of reflecting the eventual turnout.
It’s also important in a polyglot state like California that a poll is not conducted solely in English. To do so risks under-weighting an important part of the electorate; a lack of English fluency shouldn’t be mistaken for a lack of political engagement.
“There’s no requirement that a person be able to speak English in order to vote,” said Keeter, of the Pew Research Center. “And in the case of some populations, particularly immigrant groups, that have been in the United States for a long time, they may be very well-established voters but still not be proficient in English to the level of being comfortable taking a survey.”
It’s also important to know how a poll question is phrased and, in the case of a ballot measure, how it describes the matter voters are being asked to decide. How closely does the survey track the ballot language? Are there any biases introduced into the poll? (“Would you support this measure knowing its proponents abuse small animals and promote gum disease?”)
Something else to watch for: Was the poll conducted by a political party, or for a candidate or group pushing a particular agenda? If so, be very skeptical. They have every reason to issue selective or one-sided findings.
Transparency is key. A good pollster will show his or her work, as they used to say in the classroom. If they won’t, there’s good reason to question their findings, and well you should.
A sensible person wouldn’t put something in their body without being 100% certain of its content. Treat your brain with the same care.
Jerry Roberts and Phil Trounstine cover California politics at calbuzz.com.
Afew hours after California voters approved his Proposition 13 tax-cut measure on June 6, 1978, a bibulous and exultant Howard Jarvis dropped his pants for the benefit of a few reporters gathered in his suite at the L.A. Biltmore Hotel.
A reporter had asked Jarvis why he was limping, so his ostensible reason was to show a large, ugly bruise, which he’d suffered in a fall a few days before, on his ample, boxer-clad behind. The surprise gesture, however, also afforded the earthy and profane Jarvis a chance to display his contempt for the press and, by extension, the political class that had mocked him and opposed his cherished measure.
Thirty years later, the ghost of Jarvis and his legacy initiative still aim antipathy, scorn and disdain at California’s government and its leaders. Proposition 13 was the first, and most far-reaching, in a cascade of political decisions over the last three decades that have shaped the dysfunctional structure of governance in the state.
Simply put, California today is ungovernable.
As state and local officials struggle to weather the state’s fiscal crisis, they wield power with the damaged machinery of a patchwork government system that lacks accountability, encourages stalemate and drifts but cannot be steered.
In this system, elected leaders carry responsibility, but not authority, for far-reaching policies about public revenues and resources. That’s not governance — it’s reactive management of a deeply flawed status quo.
Here is a look at six key factors that have made California impossible to govern. Proposition 13: The fiscal effect of Proposition 13 itself is only part of the damage the initiative did to California. Even worse have been the methods Capitol politicians devised to try to lessen the measure’s financial impact. After Proposition 13 passed, then-Gov. Jerry Brown and the Democrat-dominated Legislature realigned — “tangled” would be more accurate — the relationship between state and local governments by effectively shifting control of remaining property tax revenue to Sacramento. In a crisis atmosphere, they radically transformed California’s political landscape, taking power and responsibility for health, welfare, schools and other local services away from city councils, boards of supervisors and school boards, thereby establishing today’s chaotic maze of overlapping jurisdiction, which defies efforts at accountability.
Budget initiatives: Proposition 13 also ushered in an era of ballot-box budgeting, as fiscal initiatives became a favored special-interest tool to take control of public fund expenditures. A series of post-13 initiatives — including measures creating the lottery, financing public schools by mathematical formula and earmarking revenues for special programs, from mental health to medical care — established an exquisitely complex state budget calculus that has hamstrung the rational operations of government.
Gerrymandering: The once-a-decade process of redrawing political maps based on the census has created an increasingly partisan Capitol atmosphere. Reapportionment has become essentially an incumbent protection effort, as lawmakers craft districts that are either safely Democratic or safely Republican. In this way, the crucial contests are party primaries, not the general elections. Because primaries draw the most partisan voters, the most conservative Republicans and the most liberal Democrats tend to win the nominations that guarantee election in November. The dynamic locks in ideological polarization in Sacramento, where lawmakers have little motivation to compromise.
Term limits: Despite the claims of backers, the 1990 term-limits initiative did not get rid of career politicians — it simply changed the arc of their careers. Instead of spending decades in the same Assembly or Senate district seat, legislators position themselves for the next office — or job as a lobbyist — as soon as they arrive in Sacramento. The up-or-out system rewards short-term, self-interested political thinking more than long-term policymaking in the public interest. Term limits also make lobbyists, not the Legislature, the repository of Capitol expertise; that lobbyists are useful in raising campaign cash adds an overlay of soft corruption to the process.
Boom-and-bust taxation: Since Proposition 13, state government has become increasingly dependent on volatile sources of revenue — the sales, corporation and progressive personal income taxes — that generate annual shifts in tax collections corresponding closely to the business cycle. When economic times are good, as during the dot-com and housing bubbles, money pours in and there’s little political incentive — in fact, term limits create a perverse disincentive — for long-term financial planning. When revenues contract, the Capitol has rarely made real spending reductions, preferring to wait for the next boom.
The two-thirds vote: California is one of only three states requiring a two-thirds legislative vote to pass a budget, one of 16 requiring a two-thirds vote to raise taxes — and the only state to require both. The budget requirement has been in the Constitution since the New Deal; the tax restriction began with Proposition 13. In the polarized atmosphere of Sacramento, the two-thirds rules effectively hand a veto to the minority party. Under these conditions, stalemate and deadlock on key fiscal issues have become the political norm.
So what can be done about the dysfunction? In the next few weeks, a blue-ribbon commission is set to recommend sweeping changes in the tax system to stabilize revenue collections. Voters last fall approved Proposition 11, which takes away the Legislature’s power to draw its own districts in favor of an independent commission. Next year, as they elect a new governor, Californians also will vote on a system of “open primary” elections aimed at aiding moderates, and they also will probably decide on one or more initiatives to dump the two-thirds budget vote requirement.
California Forward, a bipartisan good government group financed by major foundations, is crafting proposals to conform government systems and processes to modern management methods. And the business-oriented Bay Area Council is pushing initiatives for a state constitutional convention, the first since 1879, to wipe the slate clean and build a new, rational structure for state government.
“The seriousness of the problem has reached a crescendo,” said Jim Wunderman, CEO of the Bay Area Council. “The public is making a statement, loud and clear, that they expect action.”
The crew had just poured a concrete foundation on a vacant lot in Altadena when I pulled up the other day. Two workers were loading equipment onto trucks and a third was hosing the fresh cement that will sit under a new house.
I asked how things were going, and if there were any problems finding enough workers because of ongoing immigration raids.
“Oh, yeah,” said one worker, shaking his head. “Everybody’s worried.”
The other said that when fresh concrete is poured on a job this big, you need a crew of 10 or more, but that’s been hard to come by.
“We’re still working,” he said. “But as you can see, it’s just going very slowly.”
Eight months after thousands of homes were destroyed by wildfires, Altadena is still a ways off from any major rebuilding, and so is Pacific Palisades. But immigration raids have hammered the California economy, including the construction industry. And the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling this week that green-lights racial profiling has raised new fears that “deportations will deplete the construction workforce,” as the UCLA Anderson Forecast warned us in March.
There was already a labor shortage in the construction industry, in which 25% to 40% of workers are immigrants, by various estimates. As deportations slow construction, and tariffs and trade wars make supplies scarcer and more expensive, the housing shortage becomes an even deeper crisis.
And it’s not just deportations that matter, but the threat of them, says Jerry Nickelsburg, senior economist at the Anderson Forecast. If undocumented people are afraid to show up to install drywall, Nickelsburg told me, it “means you finish homes much more slowly, and that means fewer people are employed.”
Now look, I’m no economist, but it seems to me that after President Trump promised the entire country we were headed for a “golden age” of American prosperity, it might not have been in his best interest to stifle the state with the largest economy in the nation.
Especially when many national economic indicators aren’t exactly rosy, when we have not seen the promised decrease in the price of groceries and consumer goods, and when the labor statistics were so embarrassing he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replaced her with another one, only to see more grim jobs numbers a month later.
I had just one economics class in college, but I don’t recall a section on the value of deporting construction workers, car washers, elder-care workers, housekeepers, nannies, gardeners and other people whose only crime — unlike the violent offenders we were allegedly going to round up — is a desire to show up for work.
Because I know from experience that some of you are frothing, foaming and itching to reach out and tell me that illegal means illegal.
So go ahead and email me if you must, but here’s my response:
We’ve been living a lie for decades.
People come across the border because we want them to. We all but beg them to. And by we, I mean any number of industries — many of them led by conservatives and by Trump supporters — including agribusiness, and hospitality, and construction, and healthcare.
Because the tough talk is a lie and there’s no longer any shame in hypocrisy. It’s a climate of corruption in which no one has the integrity to admit what’s clear — that the Texas economy is propped up in part by an undocumented workforce.
At least in California, six Republican lawmakers all but begged Trump in June to ease up on the raids, which were affecting business on farms and construction sites and in restaurants and hotels. Please do some honest work on immigration reform instead, they pleaded, so we can fill our labor needs in a more practical and humane way.
Makes sense, but politically, it doesn’t play as well as TV ads recruiting ICE commandos to storm the streets and arrest tamale vendors, even as the barbarians who ransacked the Capitol and beat up cops enjoy their time as presidentially pardoned patriots.
Small businesses, restaurants and mom and pops are being particularly hard hit, says Maria Salinas, chief executive of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. Those who survived the pandemic were then kneecapped again by the raids.
With the Supreme Court ruling, Salinas told me, “I think there’s a lot of fear that this is going to come back harder than before.”
From a broader economic perspective, the mass deportations make no sense, especially when it’s clear that the vast majority of people targeted are not the violent criminals Trump keeps talking about.
Giovanni Peri, director of the UC Davis Global Migration Center, noted that we’re in the midst of a demographic transformation, much like that of Japan, which is dealing with the challenges of an aging population and restrictive immigration policies.
“We’ll lose almost a million working-age Americans every year in the next decade just because of aging,” Peri told me. “We will have a very large elderly population and that will demand a lot of services in … home healthcare [and other industries], but there will be fewer and fewer workers to do these types of jobs.”
Dowell Myers, a USC demographer, has been studying these trends for years.
“The numbers are simple and easy to read,” Myers said. Each year, the worker-to-retiree ratio decreases, and it will continue to do so. This means we’re headed for a critical shortage of working people who pay into Social Security and Medicare even as the number of retirees balloons.
If we truly wanted to stop immigration, Myers said, we should “send all ICE workers to the border. But if you take people who have been here 10 and 20 years and uproot them, there’s an extreme social cost and also an economic cost.”
At the Pasadena Home Depot, where day laborers still gather despite the risk of raids, three men held out hope for work. Two of them told me they have legal status. “But there’s very little work,” said Gavino Dominguez.
The third one, who said he’s undocumented, left to circle the parking lot and offer his services to contractors.
Umberto Andrade, a general contractor, was loading concrete and other supplies into his truck. He told me he lost one fearful employee for a week, and another for two weeks. They came back because they’re desperate and need to pay their bills.
“The housing shortage in California was already terrible before the fires, and now it’s 10 times worse,” said real estate agent Brock Harris, who represents a developer whose Altadena rebuilding project was temporarily slowed after a visit from ICE agents in June.
With building permits beginning to flow, Harris said, “for these guys to slow down or shut down job sites is more than infuriating. You’re going to see fewer people willing to start a project.”
Most people on a job site have legal status, Harris said, “but if shovels never hit the ground, the costs are being borne by everybody, and it’s slowing the rebuilding of L.A.”
Lots of bumps on the road to the golden age of prosperity.
SACRAMENTO — In howling winds and choking smoke during the January fires that devastated Altadena and Pacific Palisades, more than 1,100 incarcerated firefighters cleared brush and dug fire lines, some for wages of less than $30 per day.
Those firefighters could soon see a major raise. On Thursday, California lawmakers unanimously approved a plan to pay incarcerated firefighters the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour while assigned to an active fire, a raise of more than 700%.
“Nobody who puts their life on the line for other people should earn any less than the federal minimum wage,” said the bill’s author, Assemblymember Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles), before the Thursday vote.
Bryan’s legislation, Assembly Bill 247, would take effect immediately if signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Newsom’s office said he typically does not comment on pending legislation. But in July, he signed a budget that set aside $10 million for incarcerated firefighter wages.
Working at one of the state’s 35 minimum-security fire camps is a voluntary and coveted job, giving inmates a chance to spend time outside prison walls, help their communities and get paroled more quickly.
Incarcerated firefighters don’t wield hoses, but clear brush and dig containment lines while working on front-line hand crews and do work such as cooking and laundry to keep fire camps running.
Prison fire crews at times make up more than 1 in 4 of the firefighters battling California’s wildfires, and have drawn international praise during major wildfire seasons. After the January fires in Los Angeles, celebrity Kim Kardashian called them “heroes” who deserved a raise.
The state’s 2,000 or so incarcerated firefighters earn $5.80 to $10.24 per day at fire camps, and an extra $1 an hour during active wildfires, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. That means the lowest-paid firefighters earn $29.80 per 24-hour shift and the highest-paid, $34.24.
Higher wages are not only a key way to recognize the life-risking contributions made by incarcerated firefighters, backers said, but could also help inmates build up some savings before they are paroled, or more quickly pay restitution to their victims.
Republican lawmakers who backed the plan emphasized the life-changing nature of finding work with meaning.
“When we talk about anti-recidivism, when we talk about programs that work, this is one of the absolute best,” said Assemblymember Heath Flora (R-Ripon).
Flora said he worked alongside incarcerated and formerly incarcerated firefighters during 15 years as a volunteer firefighter, and said they were “some of the hardest working individuals I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.”
Bryan originally had proposed a $19 hourly wage, similar to the wage earned by entry-level firefighters with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. During the summer’s budget negotiations, that wage was trimmed to $7.25.
A lobbyist for the California State Sheriffs’ Assn., which opposed the bill, told lawmakers in July that incarcerated firefighters already are “receiving compensation in different ways.” Prison workers assigned to hand crews have their sentences reduced by two days for each day they serve on an active fire.
State Sen. Kelly Seyarto (R-Murrieta), who co-sponsored the bill, cautioned in July that paying higher wages could lead to hiring fewer incarcerated firefighters overall.
The cost to the state will depend on the number of inmate crews staffed and the severity of the fire season.
From 2020 to 2024, inmate firefighters spent 1,382,117 hours fighting fires for $1 per hour, according to a bill analysis by legislative staff. The state would have paid about $10 million in wages — or about $8.6 million more — had the federal minimum wage been in place over those five fire seasons, analysts said.
Years with more fire activity would be more expensive for the state. In 2020, the largest wildfire season in modern history, the state spent about $2.1 million on inmate firefighter wages at $1 per hour, which would have cost $15 million under the new bill language.
The bill follows years of effort to help improve the working conditions of inmate firefighters.
The number fell off sharply after the California policy known as realignment in 2011, which shifted many people who were convicted of nonserious, nonviolent and nonsexual offenses from California state prisons to county jails.
California bars people with a felony conviction from receiving an emergency medical technician, or EMT, certification for a decade after their release from prison. There is a lifetime ban for those convicted of two or more felonies.
In 2020, Newsom signed a bill allowing formerly incarcerated firefighters who were convicted of nonviolent, nonsexual offenses to appeal a court to expunge their criminal records and waive their parole time.
The Legislature this week also passed AB 218, by Assemblymembers Josh Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) and Sade Elhawary (D-Los Angeles), which would require prison officials to draft rules by 2027 to recommend incarcerated firefighters for resentencing.
A number of other bills dealing with fire issues are still pending in the Legislature in its final week of the year. Those include:
AB 226, which would allow the California FAIR Plan, the state’s home insurer of last resort, to increase its capacity to pay out claims by issuing bonds or seeking a line of credit.
AB 1032, which would require healthcare insurers to cover 12 visits a year with a licensed behavioral health provider, including mental health and substance abuse counselors, to residents affected by wildfires.
A series of federal actions aimed at pressuring states to allow parents to opt out of school vaccine mandates for religious or personal reasons threatens to undermine California’s ironclad ban on such exemptions.
California is one of just five states that bans any non-medical exemptions, the result of a landmark 2015 law passed in the wake of the Disneyland measles outbreak. Connecticut, New York, Maine, and West Virginia have similar statutes.
The law is credited with bringing California’s rate of kindergartners vaccinated against the measles to 96.1% in the 2024-25 school year, up from 92.6% in 2014-15, even as the national rate declined. California is one of just 10 states with a kindergarten measles vaccination rate that exceeds the 95% threshold experts say is needed to achieve herd immunity.
If vaccine mandates are weakened, “we’re going to have more outbreaks, and schools are going to be less safe for the families who have children who are vulnerable,” said Dr. Eric Ball, a pediatrician in Orange County and chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics California.
Engage with our community-funded journalism as we delve into child care, transitional kindergarten, health and other issues affecting children from birth through age 5.
Key actions to allow for vaccine exemptions include:
Legislation introduced in Congress last month would withhold federal education funding from states without religious exemptions.
A letter from the Department of Health and Human Services threatened to withhold federal vaccine funding from states that have any form of religious freedom or personal conscience laws but do not allow exemptions to vaccines. The move is “part of a larger effort by HHS to strengthen enforcement of laws protecting conscience and religious exercise.”
Several lawsuits winding their way through the courts from parents — including in California — seek the right to a religious exemption, which may eventually come before the Supreme Court.
Legal experts say that taken together, these moves reveal a concerted effort to chip away at limits states like California have placed on parents’ ability to send their unvaccinated children to school.
“We should assume that every aspect of the administration, at least three justices of the Supreme Court, and a significant contingent in Congress are actively trying to implement changes to the law that would invalidate California’s … approach to not allowing non-medical exemptions,” said Lindsay Wiley, a law professor at UCLA.
In West Virginia, the approach is already proving successful. Despite the state legislature recently rejecting a bill that would have permitted religious exemptions for the first time, Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey signed an executive order allowing them, bolstered by a letter of support from HHS.
Vaccinations and syringes at Larchmont Pediatrics in Los Angeles.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
“Vaccination is considered one of public health’s greatest achievements, preventing the spread of serious illnesses, reducing hospitalizations and saving lives,” the statement said. “CDPH remains committed to ensuring that all Californians continue to have access to safe and effective vaccines that are based on credible, transparent and science-based evidence.”
The federal actions are occurring in a moment of growing anti-vaccine fervor within the Trump administration. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has long been an outspoken critic of vaccines, including the vaccine to prevent measles. As secretary of HHS, he has defunded mRNA research, limited COVID-19 shots to the elderly and those with preexisting medical conditions, and pledged to reveal a link between vaccines and autism.
California’s evolution on vaccine mandates
In 1961, California became one of the first states to permit residents to opt out of vaccines for a broad range of personal beliefs, as part of a law mandating the polio vaccine for school attendance.
For decades, few parents claimed the exemption, and the rate of children opting out of vaccines for non-medical reasons stayed around 0.5%, said Dr. Richard Pan, the former state senator who authored the 2015 law eliminating non-medical exemptions.
Pan said the rate of exemptions began to climb in the mid-2000s, when actress Jenny McCarthy appeared on Oprah and claimed that vaccines had caused her son’s autism. “But what really gave fuel” was the advent of Facebook and Twitter, said Pan. “Social media really connected people who are anti-vax and created an echo chamber.”
By the 2013-14 school year, 3.1% of California kindergartners were receiving a non-medical exemption to at least one required vaccine. The rate of kindergarteners fully vaccinated against the measles slipped to 92.3% — well below the 95% required for herd immunity.
In 2014, a single measles case at Disneyland spread to more than 140 people across the country, an outbreak that epidemiologists said was fueled by vaccine refusals. In this moment of crisis, Pan introduced SB277, making California the first state in nearly 35 years to eliminate non-medical vaccine exemptions.
The legislation received the support of many parents, especially those whose children could not be vaccinated for medical reasons and relied on the immunity of people around them. “The whole purpose of 277 was actually to protect the rights and the freedoms of families and their children to get an education who could not get vaccinated,” said Pan.
Despite bitter debate, no major religious denominations opposed the bill, Pan said.
“This really isn’t about religion,” Pan said. “This is about trying to find a loophole or an excuse for someone who doesn’t want to vaccinate their child.”
Parents say California’s mandate violates religious beliefs
A contingent of parents say their sincere religious beliefs prevent them from getting their children vaccinated.
In 2023, Amy and Steve Doescher of Placerville brought a federal lawsuit, along with two other families, against California claiming that SB277 had violated their right to freely exercise their religion by preventing them from sending their 16-year-old daughter to public school.
The Doeschers, who attend a church near their home, “prayed extensively and consulted the Bible when deciding whether to vaccinate their children, and they arrived at the firm religious conviction that vaccinations violate their creed,” according to a complaint filed as part of the lawsuit.
Their daughter, who is enrolled in a charter school independent study program, is unable to have “the typical interactions with children that ‘normal’ children get. This has caused much stigma.”
The lawsuit alleges that her parents have had to enroll her in gymnastics classes and spend $10,000 per year on independent study costs, “to make up for the socialization shortcomings caused by SB277.”
While the lawsuit was dismissed in June, it is now on appeal at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Lawyers in a similar New York lawsuit brought by Amish parents have requested review from the Supreme Court.
“I do think it’s a cumulative moment of change,” said Christina Hildebrand, president and founder of A Voice for Choice, an advocacy group that sponsored the California lawsuit.
“If vaccines are so effective and they don’t have risk involved, then people should want to get them,” she said. “How good really is the product if you’re having to put a mandate on them?”
UCLA Law’s Wiley said she is sympathetic to sincere religious objectors, and herd immunity can still be reached even if a small number of people opt out. The problem, she said, is that they’re difficult for states to police for validity and “can really open the floodgates to vastly diminished vaccination rates.”
Dorit Reiss, a law professor at the University of California at San Francisco who studies vaccines, said religious exemptions are often “used as a fig leaf for people who have safety concerns. The way the system works is that it privileges the good liars.”
As part of her research, she has found “a whole industry of people trying to help each other get exemptions” online, including those who offer sample requests to parents and workshops on how to claim a religious exemption for non-religious reasons.
Reiss points to numerous studies finding that making exemptions broader and easier to get tends to lead to lower vaccination rates and more outbreaks.
The volatile landscape for vaccine mandates
Since the COVID pandemic, states across the country have experienced a decline in the rate of kindergartners who are fully vaccinated, and an increase in parents seeking exemptions, according to a recent report from KFF, a nonprofit health research group.
Last week, Florida’s surgeon general announced the state would no longer require children to be vaccinated in order to attend public school, something that all 50 states currently require.
Threats are also mounting from Washington, D.C. The GRACE Act, which was introduced in Congress last month by Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL), would withhold federal education funding from any state that does not offer parents the right to opt out of vaccines for religious reasons.
The bill, if eventually approved and signed into law by President Trump, would also explicitly prevent states, including California, from requiring any documentation from parents to prove a sincere religious conviction against vaccines.
“Freedom of speech and religion is the most sacred right guaranteed under our Constitution,” Rep. Steube said in a statement to The Times. “No student or their family should ever be coerced into sacrificing their faith or jumping through loopholes to comply with a vaccine requirement.”
Last week, Kennedy weighed in on the issue. He said in a letter that if a state already has statutes on the books protecting religious freedom or personal conscience in any form, those laws must extend to vaccine opt-outs. If states with such laws do not comply with the directive, they could lose funding for the federal Vaccines for Children Program, which funds vaccines for low-income children.
California does not have religious freedom or personal conscience statues. But 29 other states have passed religious freedom laws, and 18 have parental rights laws, which legal experts said could be used by the federal government to compel states to offer vaccine opt-outs.
“States have the authority to balance public health goals with individual freedom, and honoring those decisions builds trust” Kennedy wrote. “Protecting both public health and personal liberty is how we restore faith in our institutions and Make America Healthy Again.”
Several legal experts said the approach was alarming.
“I’m very concerned that this is part of a playbook where they’re going on a state and federal level, to push on these laws,” said Richard Hughes, a lawyer with Epstein Becker Green in Washington, D.C., who has been working on vaccine law for two decades. “This is a massive federal overreach, and it’s incredibly inappropriate.”
This article is part of The Times’ early childhood education initiative, focusing on the learning and development of California children from birth to age 5. For more information about the initiative and its philanthropic funders, go to latimes.com/earlyed.
If you’re eager to mark the holidays this year with a Danish flair but Copenhagen seems a tad too far away, you might find the answer in Solvang. An answer that includes gnomes and a troll.
That city, founded in 1911 by Danish immigrants, celebrates its Julefest — the winter holidays — with an emphasis on visitor-friendly Old World traditions. This year’s schedule includes a series of events and activities from Nov. 28 through Jan. 4 — roaming carolers, European-style night markets, candlelight tours and shops transformed into micro winter wonderlands.
If you’re planning a winter road trip, here are some things to know.
The most quaint hotels in town are tiny, so book early
Solvang, about 130 miles northwest of Los Angeles, has about 20 hotels and most are smallish and independent. The largest is the Corque Hotel (122 rooms), which is affiliated with Marriott but owned by the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians.
The most intimate and affordable hotels — often in a vintage motel sort of way — include the Atterdag Inn (8 rooms), New Haven Inn (10 rooms), Hamlet Inn (13 rooms), Mirabelle Inn (13 rooms), the Viking Inn (13 rooms) and the Winston (14 rooms).
The most luxurious is the Alisal Guest Ranch & Resort, whose 73 rooms and cottages routinely rent for $1,500 nightly or more (the property includes a lake and two golf courses).
A tree will rise, amid carols, craft markets and more
Solvang’s holiday celebrations include a tree lighting, like this one in 2023.
(SolvangUSA)
Tree lighting will happen at 5:30 p.m. Friday, Dec. 5, in Solvang Park, followed by a Julefest Parade the next morning at 11 a.m.
Caroling is scheduled on several Saturdays, Nov. 29, Dec. 6, 13 and 20, from 5 to 8 p.m. in Solvang Park (weather permitting). Art and craft markets will materialize on Wednesdays, Dec. 3, 10 and 17, from 3 to 7 p.m.
There will be European-style markets to peruse.
(SolvangUSA)
Solvang Park will offer hourlong light and music shows nightly from 5 to 10 p.m. Nov. 28 through Jan. 4. There are also evening trolley rides through the San Ynez Valley and meet-and-greet opportunities with Santa (in Solvang Park) are set for noon to 4 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, Nov. 29 and 30, then Dec. 6, 7, 13,14, 20 and 21.
On Dec. 31, attention shifts to Julefest’s Copenhagen Countdown in Solvang Park, ringing in the Danish new year at 3 p.m., Pacific Standard Time. This event, from 2 to 4 p.m., will feature live music from an ’80s tribute band known as the Molly Ringwald Project.
Gnomes and a troll are expected
The seasonal offerings also include candlelight tours (featuring LED candles and hosts in costume), Christmas light tours and daily hunting for nisser (gnomes) throughout downtown Solvang.
The troll — nicknamed Lulu Hyggelig — isn’t really a seasonal addition. It (or she, if you prefer) is a permanent resident of the city’s California Nature Art Museum, added in February. Lulu, made of recycled pallets and wine barrels, is one of many trolls created worldwide by Danish artist and recycling activist Thomas Dambo and his team of veteran builders and volunteers.
Christmas trees will burn — and that’s part of the celebration
Solvang’s holiday Julefest season often ends with a Christmas tree burn. This one happened in 2023.
(Randy De La Pena/SolvangUSA)
The season ends with a Christmas tree burn, billed as a safety demonstration, supervised by the Santa Barbara County Fire Department and scheduled for 5 p.m. Friday, Jan. 9, weather permitting.
