“This is an addictive product and we shouldn’t be selling them for these prices, but they aren’t doing anything wrong at this stage.”
Campaigners We Vape said it showed the new law will create a black market and is “impossible to enforce”.
Disposable vapes will be banned across UK by next summer to stop Britain’s kids from getting hooked
Ministers have brought in the rule as part of a drive to deter children and teenagers, who often use single-use vapes in fruity flavours, with flavours also set to be banned.
They also acted on environmental concerns about huge amounts of plastic and lithium batteries being thrown out, with an estimated one million vapes binned every day.
2
With the ban on disposable vapes coming into force at the weekend, retailers are selling stock at hugely reduced pricesCredit: Getty
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When tenant rights attorney Ysabel Jurado ran for Los Angeles City Council last year, she positioned herself as a potential fourth vote against Mayor Karen Bass’ plan to hire more police officers.
While she was waging her campaign, the council’s three-member super progressive bloc — Eunisses Hernandez, Nithya Raman and Hugo Soto–Martínez — voted against the mayor’s budget, decrying the amount of money allocated for the Los Angeles Police Department. Jurado, who went on to unseat Councilmember Kevin de León, said she would have joined them, turning the 12-3 budget vote into an 11-4.
Turns out it none of that was necessary.
On Thursday, the council approved a $14-billion annual budget that would cut police hiring in half, while sparing hundreds of other city workers from layoffs. Jurado, now on the council, praised the spending plan, then voted for it.
And this time around, the council members on the losing end of a 12-3 vote were those who occupy the body’s more moderate wing: Monica Rodriguez, Traci Park and John Lee.
The shift in budget votes from last year to now offers perhaps the strongest evidence of the political pendulum swing under way at City Hall. When other recent votes are added to the equation, the council chamber might even be undergoing a permanent realignment.
The council also voted 12-3 last week to hike the city’s minimum wage for hotel employees and private-sector tourism workers, boosting it to $30 per hour by 2028. Park, Rodriguez and Lee were in the minority on that issue as well, arguing that hotel and airport wages were rising too much and too quickly, jeopardizing the financial health of L.A.’s tourism industry.
The three ultra moderates also voiced alarm at their colleagues’ decision to scale back the mayor’s plan for increasing hiring at the fire department. Rodriguez, who gave a long and passionate speech against the budget, said in an interview she thinks “there’s clearly a shift in the politics of the council.”
“We have different ideology with respect to how we need to be making sure that the city is safe,” she said.
Soto-Martínez, who represents an Echo Park-to-Hollywood district, wouldn’t pin the political shift on any one vote, arguing instead that “the realignment has been happening for quite some years now.” The move to the left at City Hall, he said, has been driven by the election of candidates — including himself — who have sworn off contributions from corporations and real estate interests.
Because this year’s financial situation was so dire, and the list of proposed cuts so large, the council had no sacred cows when preparing the 2025-26 spending plan, he said. That paved the way for the council to scale back the recruitment of new police officers, he said.
“For many years, including the first two years that I was here, that issue was untouchable. No one would touch it or go near it,” said Soto-Martínez, who was elected in 2022. “And this year, we were realistic about police hiring.”
The realignment is in part of the product of years of campaigning and grassroots advocacy from the hotel workers’ union, LA Forward, Democratic Socialists of America-Los Angeles and many other organizations. But it also reflects the choices of Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who is still in his first year in his leadership role.
Harris-Dawson reshuffled the council’s committee assignments last year, offering plum spots to the newest arrivals. Hernandez, who promised during her 2022 campaign not to hire any additional police officers, landed a coveted spot on the budget committee. She then forged a strong working relationship with Councilmember Heather Hutt, another new appointee to the budget committee, who broke into tears on Thursday as she described Hernandez’ contributions to their deliberations.
Over the course of the budget committee’s nine meetings, Hernandez worked with her colleagues to restore funding for programs that help day laborers, an LGBTQ+ liaison in the city’s civil rights department and $1 million for the legal defense of immigrants facing deportation. She also fought for core services, such as street light repairs, graffiti removal and crews that address illegal dumping.
By contrast, Rodriguez, Park and Lee made clear they felt excluded from key decisions, particularly the budget committee’s vote to shift management over certain homelessness initiatives out of the office of City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo and into the Los Angeles Housing Department.
After a lengthy debate, the three moderates picked up two votes in their effort to delay those changes, not enough to win the day. Instead, their biggest victory — one that took multiple tries — was securing the votes to restore $376,961 at the fire department, which will allow the city to send 45 firefighters to paramedic training.
Park, whose district includes the fire-scarred Pacific Palisades, sounded furious by the time the entire budget came up for a vote.
“I don’t think we should agree to spend another penny on homelessness until we as a full council — not just the few of you who get invited into the conversation — have the chance to chime in,” she said, adding: “But instead of fixing that mess, what did we decide to go after? The increase [Bass requested for] our fire department, after all we literally just witnessed in January.”
One day after the budget vote, Councilmember Bob Blumenfield acknowledged that the pendulum had swung left at City Hall, pointing to the results of several recent elections. Still, he cautioned against reading too much into a single budget, saying a pendulum can swing in opposing directions.
Blumenfield, who represents part of the west San Fernando Valley, said he voted to slow down police hiring as part of a compromise to protect civilian jobs at the LAPD and elsewhere. “I hate seeing the lower number of police recruitment,” he said.
Blumenfield, who occupies the terrain between super progressive and ultra moderate, said he’s still hoping the council will find additional funds later in the budget year to allow the LAPD to hire more officers beyond the 240 that received funding from the council.
“I don’t like to look at the council as a spectrum. I don’t see myself on that spectrum,” he said. “On different issues, I feel like I’m on different parts of it.”
State of play
— SEEKING A VETO: Business groups pressed Mayor Karen Bass to veto the measure hiking the minimum wage of tourism workers, saying hotels and other businesses cannot afford to wage hikes of 50% between now and 2028. Bass, appearing Tuesday at the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, sounded sympathetic to their complaints but stopped short of stating her opposition.
“I’m concerned about the hit to tourism and just the hit in general, especially with downtown, but citywide, because downtown was already suffering,” she told the audience. She also raised doubts that she would intervene, calling the initial wage vote “veto proof.”
— BAD CALL: Former deputy Mayor Brian Williams struck a plea deal with federal prosecutors, admitting he called in a fake bomb threat to City Hall late last year that was blamed on anti-Israel sentiment. Williams, who handled public safety issues for Bass, falsely stated that he had just received a call on his city-issued cellphone from an unknown male caller who made a bomb threat against City Hall, according to his plea agreement.
— HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD: L.A.’s mayor promised to reduce barriers to filming in Los Angeles this week, signing an executive directive aimed at streamlining city permit processes and increasing access to legendary L.A. locations, such as Griffith Observatory and the Central Library. “We’ve taken the industry for granted,” Bass said. “We know that the industry is a part of our DNA here. And sometimes, if you think it’s a part of your DNA, you can think it’s always going to be here.”
— ZOO STORY: The elephants Billy and Tina were whisked out of the Los Angeles Zoo this week, relocated to a zoo in Tulsa over the fierce objections of animal advocates. The late night relocation drew complaints from Blumenfield and an array of activists, who argued that the pachyderms needed a much larger expanse of land for their health and well being.
— PUBLIC PAYOUTS: Two fired employees who received a combined $800,000 in legal settlements from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority had accused the agency’s chief executive, Va Lecia Adams Kellum, of hiring cronies for top jobs, attempting to destroy records and being “extremely inebriated” at an out-of-state conference, according to two settlement demand letters released this week. LAHSA “strenuously” denied the allegations, saying the agency “made a business decision” to pay the fired workers and resolve the employee dispute.
— PUSHBACK OVER PCH: Officials from city and state government tussled this week over plans for reopening an 11-mile stretch of Pacific Coast Highway. Nancy Ward, who leads the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, complained that her office had been kept “in the dark” about the city’s security plan for the fire-ravaged Pacific Palisades area. A Bass spokesperson pushed back on that claim, saying the city would deploy 112 officers to staff 16 checkpoints 24 hours a day in the Palisades. Either way, traffic was flowing Friday afternoon.
— COUNTY CRIME: A veteran emergency management official with Los Angeles County has been arrested on charges of murdering his mother. Robert Barreras, 42, was suspended without pay, and had been on leave when the crime took place, a county official said.
QUICK HITS
Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to address homelessness carried out operations in two locations: the area around Lankershim Boulevard and Strathern Street in Councilmember Imelda Padilla’s San Fernando Valley district and the area around Vermont Avenue and 73rd Street in Harris-Dawson’s South L.A. district. Outreach workers also returned to other parts of South L.A. and Hollywood, according to the mayor’s team.
On the docket for next week: The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is scheduled to take up appointees to its new governance reform task force, which will help oversee the implementation of Measure G, last year’s voter-approved measure to overhaul county government.
Stay in touch
That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to [email protected]. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.
Four people, a 43-year-old woman and three boys, aged 15, eight and four, have been killed in a house fire in Brent, north-west London.
The emergency services were called to the blaze in Tillett Close, Stonebridge, at about 01:20 BST.
A 41-year-old man was arrested at the scene in connection with the fire and remains in custody, the Met Police said.
A further two people were taken to hospital by the London Ambulance Service, the Met said. Their conditions have not been disclosed.
Supt Steve Allen, from the force’s local policing team in north-west London, said: “This is an extremely tragic incident and our thoughts are with everyone involved… we continue to work alongside investigators from the London Fire Brigade to establish the cause of the fire.”
May 22 (UPI) — The Supreme Court ruled Thursday in favor of President Donald Trump‘s firing of two Democratic board members of independent oversight agencies as litigation over their removal continues.
The conservative-leaning high court ruled 6-3 in support of the government’s request for an emergency order staying several lower-court rulings that had ordered the reinstatement of Gwynne Wilcox to the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris to the Merit Systems Protection Board.
All three liberal justices dissented.
Wilcox was removed from the labor board by President Donald Trump on Jan. 27, with no cause given. Harris was fired by the president on Feb. 10, also without reason.
Both sued the government in response. District courts ruled that they were unlawfully dismissed by the president, arguing Trump exceeded his power in doing so. The courts pointed to a 1935 Supreme Court decision, Humphrey’s Executor, that permits Congress to limit the president’s ability to fire officials from independent agencies.
Both Wilcox and Harris were appointed by President Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate. Wilcox has three years remaining in her term, and Harris has four. The boards were also created by Congress as bipartisan and independent.
They were removed as Trump fired thousands of government workers, including heads of independent agencies, in a federal government overhaul to consolidate power under the executive branch.
In the majority ruling on Thursday, the Supreme Court cited the Constitution, which vests executive powers in the president, including the authority to remove officers without cause who “exercise considerable executive power.”
The justices did not rule on the merits of the case, explaining that their stay is does not determine whether either the NLRB or MSPB exercise executive power, and that question is better left to ongoing litigation in the case.
The ruling added that the government faces “greater risk of harm” by allowing the fired board members to resume their positions and exercise executive power than a wrongfully removed officer faces from being denied reinstatement.
“A stay is appropriate to avoid the disruptive effect of the repeated removal and reinstatement of officers during the pendency of this litigation,” the majority wrote.
The Supreme Court also cooled concerns raised by Wilcox and Harris in the case about implications their removals might have on removal protections for other independent agencies, specifically the Federal Reserve Board of Governors or the Federal Open Market Committee.
“The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States,” the majority said.
In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, writing on behalf of the other two liberal justices, accused the president of effectively disregarding Humphrey’s, saying he either wants it overruled or confined and is acting on that belief by taking the law into his own hands.
“Not since the 1950s (or even before) has a President, without a legitimate reason, tried to remove an officer from a classic independent agency — a multi-member, bipartisan commission exercising regulatory power whose government statute contains a for-cause provision,” she wrote.
“Yet now the President has discharged, concededly without cause such officers, including a member of the NLRB (Gwynne Wilcox) and a member of the MSPB (Cathy Harris). Today, this court effectively blesses those deeds. I would not.”
She continued by stating that the decision in this case was an easy one to make, and was made correctly by the lower courts.
Trump, she said, has no legal right to relief, and Congress, by statute, has protected members of the NLRB and MSPB from removal by the president except for good cause.
To fire Wilcox and Harris without good cause is to upend Humphrey’s, she argued.
“For that reason, the majority’s order granting the President’s request for a stay is nothing short of extraordinary,” she said.
“And so the order allows the President to overrule Humphrey’s by fiat.”
Pregnant women have been evacuated from a maternity hospital after a large fire broke out.
Black smoke was seen over St Michael’s Hospital on Southwell Street, in Bristol shortly before 16:30 BST. Firefighters from Avon and Fire and Rescue Service are attending and say the fire has now been extinguished.
Pregnant women and babies were moved outside of the building, supported by midwives who brought out milk and fruit.
Jess Hutchinson, 22, whose waters have broken, said it was “scary” hearing the fire break out on the roof – where a number of solar panels have been destroyed by the flames.
The public has been asked to avoid the area where possible.
Matthew Burden has spoken to his partner who is safe inside the hospital
Matthew Burden, from Weston-super-Mare, was inside the maternity unit with his wife when the fire broke out.
He said she was in labour with their third baby and he was “really eager to get back” to her.
“I went out to get some food, came back and obviously the alarm went off,” he said.
“They said all partners had to leave. Everyone was going down the fire exit quite fast.
“When we came out I saw black smoke, all up in flames.”
He said he has spoken to his partner on the phone and said she is safe inside.
Some of the women have been taken to the Bristol University Life Sciences building.
Avon Fire and Rescue Service are on site
A spokesperson for the fire service said: “We can confirm that the fire has safely been extinguished.
“The cause of the fire will be investigated.”
Avon and Somerset Police said it was supporting the fire service at the scene.
In a statement on X, the force said: “St Michael’s Hill is closed to vehicles and pedestrians and people are urged to avoid the area if at all possible.”
A spokesperson for University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust, which runs the hospital, said the trust is responding to “an incident” and will “provide a further update shortly”.
Emergency services are at the scene and pregnant women are being helped by midwives
Israeli soldiers were captured on video firing towards a group of foreign diplomats on a visit to Jenin in the occupied West Bank, forcing them to run to their vehicles and flee the area. The military claims the group deviated from an “approved route” and the shots were only a “warning.”
Edison International officers and directors misled the company’s investors about the effectiveness of its efforts to reduce the risk of wildfire in the months and years before the devastating Eaton fire, a shareholder lawsuit claims.
The lawsuit, filed last week in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, points to repeated statements that the utility made in federal regulatory reports that said it had reduced the risk of a catastrophic wildfire by more than 85% since 2018 by increasing equipment inspections, tree trimming and other work aimed at stopping fires.
The complaint also raises doubts about news releases and other statements that Edison made soon after the start of Eaton fire, which killed 18 people and destroyed thousands of homes and businesses in Altadena.
“We take all legal matters seriously,” said Jeff Monford, a spokesman for Edison. “We will review this lawsuit and respond through the appropriate legal channels.”
The lawsuit claims that Edison’s early statements on the Eaton fire — in which it detailed why it believed its equipment was not involved in the fire’s start — were wrong.
“Edison obfuscated the truth by making false and misleading statements concerning its role in the fire,” the lawsuit claims.
More recently, Pedro Pizarro, the chief executive of Edison International, said the leading theory for the fire’s start was the reenergization of an unused, decades-old transmission line in Eaton Canyon.
The investigation by state and local fire investigators into the official cause of the deadly fire is continuing.
The lawsuit was filed as a derivative action in which shareholders sue a company’s officers and directors on behalf of the company, claiming they had breached their fiduciary duties. It seeks financial damages from Pizarro, Chief Financial Officer Maria Rigatti and members of the company’s board of directors. Money recovered would go to the company.
It also directs Edison “to take all necessary actions” to reform its corporate governance procedures, comply with all laws and protect the company and its investors “from a recurrence of the damaging events.”
The lawsuit was brought by Charlotte Bark, a shareholder of Edison International, the parent company of Southern California Edison.
“Prior to the outbreak of the Eaton Fire, the Company had a long history of not prioritizing the safety of those who lived in the areas it serviced, and paying fines as a result,” the lawsuit states. Since 2000, it says, Edison has paid financial penalties of $1.3 billion for violating utility safety regulations.
The complaint points to an October regulatory report that was the focus of a Times report. In the article, state regulators criticized some of Edison’s wildfire mitigation efforts, including for falling behind in inspecting transmission lines in areas at high risk of fires.
The lawsuit lists the major destructive wildfires that investigators said were sparked by Edison’s equipment in recent years, including the Bobcat and Silverado fires in 2020, as well as the Coastal and Fairview fires in 2022.
“The recurring wildfire incidents connected to the Company display that the Board has repeatedly failed to mitigate a risk that materially threatens Edison,” the complaint states.
The lawsuit accuses Pizarro, Rigatti and the company’s board of directors of “gross mismanagement” and claims that the defendants “unjustly enriched” themselves.
“Because the Individual Defendants failed to carry out their respective duties, the compensation they received was excessive and undeserved,” the suit states.
It asks the court for an order that would require the officers and directors to pay restitution, including returning the compensation they received that was tied to how well the company performed.
May 20 (UPI) — Authorities in Britain have arrested a third suspect in connection with a fire set at a home owned by Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
The unidentified 34-year-old was arrested Monday morning in Chelsea on suspicion of conspiracy to commit arson with intent to endanger life, Metropolitan Police said in a statement.
The arrest comes after a 26-year-old was arrested Saturday and a 21-year-old was arrested May 13.
The 21-year-old suspect has since been identified as Ukrainian national Roman Lavrynovych, of Sydenham, London.
The Crown Prosecution Service on Thursday authorized Lavrynovych to be charged with three counts of conspiracy to commit arson with intent to endanger life.
Authorities accuse the three suspects of being involved in three fires set at north London residences.
The first fire was set on May 8, another on May 11 and the third on May 12.
The most recent fire was lit at a residence in Kentish Town that is owned by the prime minister, who is currently living at his official 10 Downing Street residence with his family. The targeted home was being rented out at the time of the incident.
No injuries were reported in connection with any of the fires.
May 18 (UPI) — The federal government will allow the sale of devices that enable standard rifles to operate like machine guns, a move that angered gun control groups.
“This Department of Justice believes that the Second Amendment is not a second-class right,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement. “And we are glad to end a needless cycle of litigation with a settlement that will enhance public safety.”
There are two ways to speed the firing of bullets. Bump stocks use the recoil of the weapon to repeatedly bump the trigger, while trigger devices are aftermarket items that directly engage the trigger.
During the first Trump administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives banned bump stocks, which mimic rapid trigger pulls to fire rapidly in a way similar to a machine gun. In 2017, the gunman in a mass shooting killed 58 people in Las Vegas while firing from his hotel room window using bump stocks.
In 2022, ATF included specific trigger devices under the National Firearms Act of 1934. The ATF determined that the devices allow a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle to fire as fast as a military M-16 in automatic mode.
In 2023, the Justice Department, as part of the Biden administration, brought a lawsuit in New York against Rare Breed Triggers.
The National Association of Gun Rights filed a separate lawsuit in Texas challenging the ban and a judge there ruled the ban was unlawful.
In June 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 6-3 vote in Cargill v. Garland, ruled ATF exceeded its statutory authority by issuing a rule classifying a bump stock as a “machine gun.”
The Court’s majority found that bump stocks do not meet the definition of a machine gun because they didn’t allow for automatic fire with the single pull of a trigger.
The next month, the Northern District of Texas applied the case to a device called a “forced-reset trigger” and concluded that they also cannot be classified as a “machine gun.”
DOJ is avoiding additional legal action against Rare Breed Triggers in appeals and related cases concerning the similar issue, Bondi said.
The settlement with Rare Breed Triggers includes agreed-upon conditions that significantly advance public safety with respect to FRTs, including that Rare Breed will not develop or design them for use in any pistol and will enforce its patents to prevent infringement that could threaten public safety.
Rare Breed also agreed promote the safe and responsible use of its products.
“The cuffs are off. As of May 16, 2025, we’re free! Expect the website to be updated on Monday, May 19,” the company posted on its website.
The decision was condemned by Vanessa Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for Giffords, the national gun violence prevention group led by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in 2011 while meeting with constituents in her hometown of Tucson, Ariz.
“The Trump administration has just effectively legalized machine guns. Lives will be lost because of his actions,” Gonzalez said. “This is an incredibly dangerous move that will enable shooters to inflict horrific damage. The only people who benefit from these being on the market are the people who will make money from selling them, everyone else will suffer the consequences.”
The national gun control advocacy group Brady United said in a press release that “highly dangerous weapons of war can now be purchased anonymously” and without a background check.
“The Trump Administration’s secret settlement with the gun lobby to permit the sale of Forced Reset Triggers will turn already deadly firearms into weapons of mass destruction,” Kris Brown, president of Brady United, said in the release.
“Machine guns are weapons of war that have absolutely no place in our communities. This dangerous backroom deal is not only an astonishing abuse of power, but undermines decades of sensible government gun safety policy and puts whole communities at immediate serious risk,” he said.
Brady previous was called the National Council to Control Handguns and founded in 1974 by Dr. Mark Borinsky, whose son was shot and killed in 1974.
In 1981, White House Press Secretary Jim “the Bear” Brady suffered a bullet to the head, and the organization now bears his name.
The state law that shielded Southern California Edison and other utilities from liability for wildfires sparked by their equipment came with a catch: Top utility executives would be forced to take a pay cut if their company’s safety record declined.
Edison’s safety record did decline last year. The number of fires sparked by its equipment soared to 178, from 90 the year before and 39% above the five-year average.
Serious injuries suffered by employees jumped by 56% over the average. Five contractors working on its electric system died.
As a result of that performance, the utility’s parent company, Edison International, cut executive bonuses awarded for the 2024 year, it told California regulators in an April 1 report.
For Edison International employees, planned executive cash bonuses were cut by 5%, and executives at Southern California Edison saw their bonuses shrink by 3%, said Sergey Trakhtenberg, a compensation specialist for the company.
But cash bonuses for four of Edison’s top five executives actually rose last year, by as much as 17%, according to a separate March report by Edison to federal regulators. Their long-term bonuses of stock and options, which are far more valuable and not tied to safety, also rose.
Of the top five executives, only Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of Edison International, saw his cash bonus decline. He received a cash bonus of 128% of his salary rather than the planned 135% because of the safety failures, the company said, for total compensation including salary of $13.8 million.
The cash bonuses increased for the other top four executives despite the safety-related deductions because of how they performed on other responsibilities, said Trakhtenberg, Edison’s director of total rewards. He said bonuses would have been higher were it not for safety-related reductions.
“Compensation is structured to promote safety,” Trakhtenberg said, calling it “the main focus of the company.”
Consumer advocates say the fact that bonuses increased in spite of the decline in safety highlights a flaw in AB 1054, the 2019 law that reduced the liability of for-profit utility companies like Edison for damaging wildfires ignited by their equipment.
AB 1054 created a wildfire fund to pay for fire damages in an effort to ensure that utilities wouldn’t be rendered insolvent by having to bear billions of dollars in damage costs.
In return, the legislation said executive bonus plans for utilities should be “structured to promote safety as a priority and to ensure public safety and utility financial stability.”
“All these supposed accountability measures that were put into the bill are turning out to be toothless,” said Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network, a consumer advocacy group in San Francisco.
“If executives aren’t feeling a significant reduction in salary when there is a significant increase in wildfire safety incidents,” Toney said, “then the incentive is gone.”
One of the executives who received an increased cash bonus was Adam Umanoff, Edison’s general counsel.
Umanoff was expected to get 85% of his $706,000 salary, or $600,000, as a cash bonus as his target at the year’s beginning. The deduction for safety failures reduced that bonus, Trakhtenberg said. But Umanoff’s performance on other goals “was significantly above target” and thus increased his cash bonus to 101% of his salary,
So despite the safety failures, Umanoff received a cash bonus of $717,000, or 19% higher than he was expected to receive.
“If you can just make it up somewhere else,” Toney said, “the incentive is gone.”
The utility recently told its investors that AB 1054 will protect it from potential liabilities of billions of dollars if its equipment is found to have sparked the Eaton fire on Jan. 7, resulting in 18 deaths and the destruction of thousands of homes and commercial buildings.
The cause of the blaze, which videos captured igniting under one of Edison’s transmission towers, is still under investigation. Pizarro has said the reenergization of an idle transmission line is now a leading theory of what sparked the deadly fire.
The 2019 legislation was passed in a matter of weeks to bolster the financial health of the state’s for-profit electric companies after the Camp fire in Butte County, which was caused by a Pacific Gas & Electric transmission line.
The wildfire destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people, and the damages helped push PG&E into bankruptcy.
At the bill-signing ceremony, Gov. Gavin Newsom touted its language that said utilities could not access the money in a new state wildfire fund and cap their liabilities from a blaze caused by their equipment unless they tied executive compensation to their safety performance.
In April, Edison filed its mandatory annual safety performance metrics report with the Public Utilities Commission as it seeks approval to raise customer electric rates by more than 10% this year.
In the report, Edison said that because its safety record worsened in 2024 on certain key metrics, its executives took “a total deduction of 18 points” on a 100-point scale used in determining bonuses.
“Safety and compliance are foundational to SCE, and events such as employee fatalities or serious injuries to the public can result in meaningful deduction or full elimination” of executive incentive compensation, the company wrote.
Edison didn’t explain in the report what an 18-point deduction meant to executives in actual dollar terms, another point of frustration with consumer advocates trying to determine if executive compensation plans genuinely comply with AB 1054.
“Without seeing dollar figures, it is impossible to ascertain whether a utility’s incentive compensation plan is reasonable,” the Public Advocates Office at the state Public Utilities Commission wrote in a 2022 letter to wildfire safety regulators.
To try to determine how much the missed safety goals actually impacted the compensation of Edison executives last year, The Times looked at a separate federal securities report Edison filed for investors known as the proxy statement.
In that March report, Edison detailed how the majority of its compensation to executives is based on its profit and stock price appreciation, and not safety.
Safety helps determine about 50% of the cash bonuses paid to executives each year, the report said. But more valuable are the long-term incentive bonuses, which are paid in shares of stock and stock options and are based on earnings.
The Utility Reform Network, which is also known as TURN, pointed to those stock bonuses in a 2021 letter to regulators where it questioned whether Edison and the state’s other two big for-profit utilities were actually tying executive compensation to safety.
“Good financial performance does not necessarily mean that the utility prioritizes safety,” TURN staff wrote in the letter.
Trakhtenberg disagreed, saying the company’s “long-term incentives are focused on promoting financial stability.” A key part of that is the company’s ability “over the long term to safely deliver reliable, affordable power,” he said.
Trakhtenberg noted that the state Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety had approved the company’s executive compensation plan in October, saying it met the requirements of AB 1054, as well as every year since the agency was established in July 2021.
The Times asked the energy safety office if it audited the utilities’ compensation reports or tried to determine how much money Edison executives lost because of the safety failures.
Sandy Cooney, a spokesman for the agency, said that the office had “no statutory authority … to audit executive compensation structures.” He referred the reporter to Edison for information on how much executive compensation had actually declined in dollar amounts because of the missed safety goals.
A committee of Edison board members determines what goals will be tied to safety, Trakhtenberg said, and whether those goals have been met.
Even though five contractors died last year while working on Edison’s electrical system, the committee didn’t include contractor safety as a goal, according to the company’s documents.
And the committee said the company met its goal in protecting the public even though three people died from its equipment and there was a 27% increase in deaths and serious injuries among the public compared to the five-year average.
Trakhtenberg said most of the serious injuries happened to people committing theft or vandalism, which is why the committee said the goal had been met.
Edison has told regulators that if its equipment starts a catastrophic wildfire, the committee could decide to eliminate executives’ cash bonuses.
But the company’s documents show that it hasn’t eliminated or even reduced bonuses for the 2022 Fairview fire in Riverside County, which killed two people, destroyed 22 homes and burned 28,000 acres.
In 2023, investigators blamed Edison’s equipment for igniting the fire, saying one of its conductors came in contact with a telecommunications cable, creating sparks that fell into vegetation.
Trakhtenberg said the board’s compensation committee reviewed the circumstances of the fire that year and found that the company had acted “prudently” in maintaining its equipment. The committee decided not to reduce executive bonuses for the fire, he said.
In March, the Public Utilities Commission fined Edison $2.2 million for the fire, saying it had violated four safety regulations, including by failing to cooperate with investigators.
Trakhtenberg said the compensation committee would reconsider its decision not to penalize executives for the deadly fire at its next meeting.
TURN has repeatedly asked regulators not to approve Edison’s compensation plans, detailing how its committee has “undue discretion” in setting goals and then determining whether they have been met.
But the energy safety office has approved the plans anyway. Toney said he believes the responsibility for reviewing the compensation plans and utilities’ wildfire safety should be transferred back to the Public Utilities Commission, which had done the work until 2021.
The energy safety office has rules that make the review process less transparent than it is at the commission, he said.
“The whole process, we feel is rigged heavily in favor of utilities,” he said.
Carol Parks, the chief of Los Angeles’ Emergency Management Department, sat before a budget committee last year and painted a dire picture.
Although tasked with responding to crises in the nation’s most disaster-prone region, her department had received just a tiny fraction of the city’s budget and was getting by with a staff of roughly 30.
There was no staffer devoted full-time to disaster recovery, which meant that if an earthquake or major wildfire struck, the city would have to scramble.
But the City Council and Mayor Karen Bass balked at devoting more money to the department.
Seven months later, flames tore through Pacific Palisades and nearby communities, destroying more than 6,000 structures and displacing tens of thousands.
Now, the Emergency Management Department is in charge of coordinating the monumental task of recovery — but with a budget smaller than what the city’s Police Department uses in roughly two days.
To supplement the bare-bones emergency management team, Bass turned to an Illinois-based disaster recovery firm, Hagerty Consulting, inking a yearlong contract for up to $10 million. She also brought a former EMD general manager, Jim Featherstone, back from retirement to serve as the de facto recovery chief.
More than four months after the fire, Palisades residents and some of their elected officials are increasingly frustrated, asking: Who is in charge? What have they been doing? How is Hagerty spending its time? And what is the plan to restore the Palisades?
L.A. brings on Hagerty
As flames chewed through the Palisades on Jan. 7, EMD assigned a mid-level staffer to take on the recovery. Soon, Featherstone — a former firefighter who once served as interim LAFD chief — arrived at the emergency operations center.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, left, and her disaster recovery czar Steve Soboroff, right, at Palisades Recreation Center in January.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
In practice, Featherstone — a self-described “operator” and “tactical person” — assumed the recovery director role, helping to choreograph a massive, multiagency response.
Zach Seidl, a spokesperson for Bass, disputed that characterization and said the two men had different roles. Featherstone’s “role is largely internal to the City,” while Soboroff, whose term ended last month, “worked externally with the community along with other engagement teams within the Mayor’s Office,” Seidl said in an email.
While the city code puts EMD in charge of coordinating disaster recovery, it operates with fewer resources than similar departments in other large California cities. A 2022 audit found that L.A. spent $1.56 per resident on emergency management — far less than Long Beach at $2.26 and San Francisco at $7.59.
With such a small team for a 469-square-mile city, EMD has struggled to staff its emergency operations center in crises, prepare for events like the 2028 Olympics and help residents recover from smaller-scale calamities like building fires, storms and mudslides.
Parks told the City Council in a 2024 memo that her department “lacks the experience and dedicated staff to oversee long-term recovery projects.” After recent emergencies, EMD handled recovery duties “on an ad hoc basis,” yielding “delays, postponements and possible denial of disaster relief funds,” she wrote.
To boost EMD, Bass in early February tapped Hagerty after hearing proposals from firms including AECOM and IEM. Her reasons for choosing Hagerty were unclear, although the firm had already signed a wildfire recovery contract with L.A. County’s emergency management office and had long worked with the state Office of Emergency Services.
It’s not unusual for a state or local government to retain a recovery consultant after a disaster, even if it has a recovery arm of its own. Hagerty has routinely been hired to help with hurricane recovery, including managing billions of dollars in funding after Superstorm Sandy in New York in 2012.
Because Bass hired Hagerty under her emergency authority, the city has also solicited bids for a longer-term recovery contract worth $30 million over three years, with Hagerty among the companies vying for it.
Initially, Hagerty spent “a significant amount” of time compensating for the lack of a city recovery team, said Featherstone, who supervises Hagerty’s work, at a budget hearing last month.
By contrast, L.A. County had a dedicated recovery operation that consultants could plug into — and the muscle memory from recent disasters like the Woolsey fire.
“The structure had to be built out,” Featherstone told council members at the budget hearing. “Folks were pulled out of their regular day-to-day functions … to start to build out a recovery capability.”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass speaks with Pacific Palisades residents at a debris removal town hall on Jan. 26 in Santa Monica.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
That structure is a series of tactical teams focused on issues including infrastructure, economics, health and housing. Under each umbrella are multiple working groups composed of several city departments working with federal and regional agencies.
Under the infrastructure team, for example, is a debris removal group, a utilities team and a group for hazards such as mudslides, according to a recording of a recovery meeting reviewed by The Times. The housing team, meanwhile, brings together the Department of Building and Safety and the city Planning Department to streamline the permitting process.
Debris removal was one of the first orders of business — so that group was among the first to be organized and has been the “busiest,” as one EMD staffer said in a recording of an internal March meeting.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has the primary responsibility for clearing debris from lots, with most expected to be done by Memorial Day and the rest largely due to be finished this summer. The city, with Hagerty, helped explain the debris removal process to residents, including the decision to opt in to the Army Corps cleanup or do it on their own.
With Hagerty’s guidance, the Emergency Management Department also created a dashboard showing the progress of debris removal, with real-time maps tracking the status of each lot.
Tracey Phillips, a Hagerty executive, told City Council members in March that her firm was organizing these tactical teams and holding weekly meetings so that “we can develop a short-term and mid-term operational framework.”
“This is the first step to that: [determining] who the players are, getting them in the room, getting them trained up and developing that operational cadence,” Phillips explained. “It’s already happening — it’s just not being reported and it’s not kind of coalesced yet.”
As of mid-March, Hagerty had about 22 employees working on Palisades fire recovery, billing the city at hourly rates ranging from $80 to nearly $400 per employee.
City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez is among those who say that some of the money used for Hagerty would have been better spent bolstering the Emergency Management Department’s rank and file — as Parks had requested last year.
“I don’t understand their purpose. I don’t need another contractor,” Rodriguez said in an interview. “What my city staff needs is staff to do the work.”
Asked whether funding for Hagerty would be better spent on EMD, Seidl, the spokesperson for Bass, said most of the firm’s work is reimbursable by the federal government, a point that Featherstone made at a March budget hearing. Featherstone also suggested that Hagerty’s guidance could yield more funding in the long run because of the firm’s expertise with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Hagerty and Featherstone declined interview requests from The Times. Joseph Riser, a spokesperson for EMD, provided written responses to questions.
EMD was “very pleased” with Hagerty for building out recovery teams “where they did not previously exist,” Riser said, noting that the firm has improved coordination and provided “high-level briefings” to City Hall and department general managers, among other duties.
Seidl emphasized that the mayor has taken steps to preserve EMD’s budget, “even in difficult budget times like this year.” He also touted steps the city has taken to hasten the recovery, like a one-stop permitting and rebuilding center, measures to allow for the re-issuance of permits for homes built in recent years, and restoring water and power in two months compared to the 18 months it took in Paradise after the 2018 Camp fire.
“Despite one of the worst natural disasters in recent history, L.A.’s recovery effort is on track to be the fastest in modern California history,” Seidl said.
Palisades residents strike back
Some Palisades residents say that Hagerty and EMD — and ultimately, Bass and her team — have done a poor job of communicating what their plan is going forward.
Citing the cornucopia of government agencies involved in the rebuild, City Councilmember Traci Park, whose district includes the Palisades, said, “Sometimes it feels like there are so many people in charge that no one is in charge.”
Maryam Zar, who runs the Palisades Recovery Coalition, said that at times, “we feel like we are doing this ourselves.”
Pacific Palisades residents attend a town hall on the L.A. Fire Health Study featuring leading scientists on post-fire health in the backyard of a private residence on Tuesday in Los Angeles. The study is a 10-year effort to study the exposures to dangerous substances and consequent health effects.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Zar and her group have been among the most vocal advocates for a logistics plan governing how thousands of homes will be rebuilt in a community with narrow streets and already-snarled traffic.
The group has circulated ideas that include a concrete plant in the Palisades, short-term housing for construction crews and one-way roads to ease congestion.
Zar said that Hagerty has “shown up to community meetings, and they have been so unable to deliver any kind of information.”
In an interview, Park said that “for weeks and weeks now,” she also has been asking Hagerty and city departments for “a logistics and operations plan” for moving people, vehicles and materials in and out of the Palisades.
Park has visited Lahaina, Hawaii, which was devastated by a wildfire in 2023, and studied other communities rebuilding from fires. She said those areas had consultants who were “very, very engaged” with communities in identifying priorities and solving problems. She wants the city and Hagerty to push forward on a longer-term recovery plan that establishes criteria for fire-safe rebuilding and a timeline for restoring parks, schools, libraries and businesses.
“I know that those things can take significant time to develop. But this is Los Angeles, and this is the Pacific Palisades, and we are not waiting around,” she said, adding that she and her constituents were “moving at warp speed.”
Riser, the EMD spokesperson, said that traffic and logistics were not handled in a “single, static, formal plan,” but that problems were being addressed in coordination with city and state agencies. He also said EMD has brought in traffic experts to “structure this work more effectively.”
“Recovery is dynamic and complex and changes daily as debris is cleared, infrastructure is repaired, and reentry phases evolve,” Riser said.
Frustration with Hagerty boiled over at an April 10 meeting of the Palisades community council, where Hagerty representative Harrison Newton touted recovery as “a chance to become more resilient to the next disaster.”
Residents could barely contain their fury, criticizing Newton for an abstract presentation that seemed divorced from their real needs around rebuilding, permitting and traffic control.
“It feels extremely generic,” said Lee Ann Daly, who then turned her ire toward City Hall. “You need to know that we have a trust issue with the people who are paying you. … We have a trust issue, and it’s huge.”
Palisades resident Kimberly Bloom, whose home burned in the fire, pressed Newton to provide a “concrete example” of Hagerty’s work in a prior disaster “that is not just another layer of bureaucracy, because that’s what it feels like at the moment.”
Newton referred residents to Hagerty’s website and spoke of how his firm provides “augmentation support,” prompting residents to interrupt and criticize his use of jargon.
After some back and forth, Newton emphasized that he and his team were trying to accelerate the city’s response to the issues raised by residents. Hagerty, he said, was “bringing more people to bear so they’re less thinly stretched, and you’re achieving work faster.”
What lies ahead
So far, more than 1,500 parcels in the Palisades have received a final sign-off from L.A. County that they are cleared of debris, paving the way to begin rebuilding.
As of this week, 54 construction permits for 40 addresses have been issued in the Palisades, said Seidl, who noted that hundreds of permit applications are now under review.
The burden will increasingly shift onto city agencies like the Department of Building and Safety to serve thousands of homeowners and businesses seeking plan checks, permits, inspections and certificates of occupancy.
The logistics of whole neighborhoods undertaking simultaneous construction projects on hillside streets, with only a few major arteries in and out, will test the recovery framework that EMD and Hagerty have been working to erect.
In the coming weeks, Bass is expected to name a new chief recovery officer, and her team is “currently interviewing … qualified candidates,” Seidl said. Featherstone, who was initially hired on a 120-day appointment, is now serving as an assistant general manager at EMD, and Parks, the EMD chief, has asked for funding in the coming fiscal year’s budget to keep him.
Hagerty could be replaced by a different firm if it loses the competitive bidding process for the multi-year recovery contract. One of the many “deliverables” for that contract is developing a long-term recovery plan.
That type of overarching plan governing the rebuilding — and direct communication about the plan — is what residents and local officials say they have been pleading for.
“We have more debris clearing to do, but we are also breaking ground on new buildings,” said Councilmember Park. “If we don’t get those plans under control and in place, this is going to turn into ‘The Hunger Games’ very quickly.”
For anybody confused about whether Gov. Gavin Newsom planned to come to Los Angeles’ rescue Wednesday when he announced his May revision to the state budget, a clue could be found on the front page of his spending plan.
In an AI-generated image, the budget cover page featured the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco skyline, along with office workers who appear to be chatting it up in a forest glade next to an electric vehicle charging station. Not a hint of Los Angeles was anywhere to be seen.
Deeper in the budget proposal, no salvation was found for L.A. And at a news conference Wednesday, Newsom said flatly that he did not plan to provide cash to help dig the city out of its budget hole. The city is facing a $1-billion shortfall due to inflated personnel costs, higher than ever liability lawsuit payouts and below-expected revenues.
“The state’s not in a position to write a check,” Newsom said. “When you’re requesting things that have nothing to do with disaster recovery, that’s a nonstarter … I don’t need to highlight examples of requests from the city and county that were not related to disaster recovery and this state is not in a position, never have been, even in other times, to address those requests, particularly at this time.”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass delivers her State of the City address at L.A. City Hall on April 21.
(Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)
The governor made sure to remind reporters Wednesday that the state had been more than willing to help with fire recovery efforts, but said that was the limit of its generosity. Newsom said that of the $2.5 billion offered to Los Angeles after the fires, more than $1 billion remained unused. That funding helped with emergency response and initial recovery from the January wildfires.
Despite Newsom’s edict, Bass didn’t appear ready to throw in the towel. She said she and the governor were “in sync” and in regular contact about the situation. State money to help with the budget crisis would be fire-recovery-related, Bass insisted.
“We had to spend a great deal of money of our general fund related to the wildfires. If we are able to get that reimbursed that relieves some of the pressure from the general fund,” Bass said in an interview with The Times. “We submitted a document to him where we are asking him if the state would be willing to give us the money up front that FEMA will reimburse — so we are requesting 100% fire-related.”
Bass visited Sacramento in March and April. She and L.A. legislators first requested $1.893 billion in state aid to help with the budget crisis and disaster recovery. The mayor has since pared down the request, but the amount she is now requesting is not public.
In the initial request, they asked for $638 million for “protecting city services under budgetary strain.” That request is likely dead. But the $301-million request for “a loan to support disaster recovery expenses pending FEMA reimbursement” still stands.
Bass said she most recently met with the governor two weeks ago, and he informed the mayor that the state’s financial situation was not looking good.
The revision is just a starting point for final budgetary negotiations between the governor and the Legislature, and the state budget won’t be completed until at least mid-June, weeks after the deadline for the City Council to approve its own budget.
“We have 36 members of the L.A. delegation fighting for the city and we’ll just have to wait and see what happens in June,” said Assemblymember Tina McKinnor, who chairs the Los Angeles County Legislative Delegation.
McKinnor said she is confident that the state budget will have money not just for fire recovery, but also to help the city manage its broader financial woes.
“We will not fail L.A.,” McKinnor said.
With the state lifeline in serious doubt, the cuts the city will have to make to balance its budget took another step toward reality.
While Bass is still hopeful for state aid, the council seemed less hopeful.
“We expected and planned for this outcome, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating. The governor’s decision to withhold support from California’s largest city after we experienced the most devastating natural disaster in the state’s history is a serious mistake, with consequences for both our long-term recovery and the strength of the state’s economy,” said Katy Yaroslavsky, who chairs the council’s budget committee.
“This will not be a ‘no-layoff’ budget,” Yaroslavsky said on May 8 at a budget hearing.
Bass stressed that she is still trying to avoid any layoffs. The city plans to avert further layoffs by transferring employees to the proprietary departments, like the harbor, the airport and perhaps the Department of Water & Power.
“We’re all working very, very hard with the same goal in mind and that is having a balanced, responsible budget that avoids laying off city workers,” she said Thursday.
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State of play
—MOURNING ONE OF CITY HALL’S OWN: Former chief of staff to Councilmember Kevin de León and longtime L.A. politico Jennifer Barraza Mendoza died Tuesday at 37 following a long battle with cancer. Barraza Mendoza began her career organizing with SEIU Local 99, helped lead De León’s Senate campaign and also served as a principal at Hilltop Public Solutions, among other roles. “In a political world of shapeshifters, she stood out as fiercely loyal and guided by principle,” De León said in a statement. “She never sought the spotlight — but when tested, she rose with unmatched strength to protect her team, her community, and what she knew was right.”
— MINIMUM WAGE WAR: The City Council voted Wednesday for a sweeping package of minimum wage increases for hotel workers and employees of companies at Los Angeles International Airport. One hotel executive said the proposal, which would take the wage to $30 in July 2028, would kill his company’s plan for a new 395-room hotel tower in Universal City. Other hotel companies predicted they would scale back or shutter their restaurant operations. The hotel workers’ union countered by saying business groups have made similar warnings in the past, only to be proved wrong.
— SECOND TIME’S A CHARM: Surprise! On Friday, the City Council had to schedule a do-over vote on its tourism wage proposal. That vote, called as part of a special noon meeting, came two days after City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto’s office warned that Wednesday’s vote had the potential to violate the city’s public meeting law.
Los Angeles Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez in December in Los Angeles.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
— READY TO RELAUNCH: Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez plans to host her campaign kickoff event for her reelection bid Saturday in Highland Park, where she was born and raised. She already has a few competitors in the race, including Raul Claros, who used to serve on the Affordable Housing Commission, and Sylvia Robledo, a former council aide.
The left-wing councilmember has already won the endorsements of Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson and from colleagues Heather Hutt, Ysabel Jurado, Hugo Soto-Martinez and Nithya Raman. Controller Kenneth Mejia also endorsed her.
— PHOTO BOMB: Recently pictured with Eunisses Hernandez: Political consultant Rick Jacobs — the former senior aide to then-Mayor Eric Garcetti who was accused of sexual harassment. Jacobs now works as a consultant for the politically powerful Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters. Per a post on Jacobs’ LinkedIn, Hernandez posed for a photo this week with Jacobs and several union members while presenting the group with a city certificate of recognition.
Jacobs has denied the harassment allegations, but the scandal bedeviled Garcetti in his final years in office and nearly derailed his ambassadorship to India. Jacobs has remained in the political mix — some may remember his controversial appearance at Bass’ exclusive 2022 post-inauguration Getty House afterparty. Also worth noting: The Carpenters are major players in local elections, and their PAC spent nearly $150,000 supporting Hernandez’s then-opponent Gil Cedillo in the 2022 election.
“Councilmember Hernandez was proud to stand with the carpenters who built the little library at North East New Beginnings, the first-of-its-kind interim housing site she opened in 2024. She was there to honor their craftsmanship and community contribution — nothing more. She did not choose who else appeared in the photo,” said Naomi Villagomez Roochnik, a spokesperson for Hernandez.
— PARK GETS AN OPPONENT: Public Counsel attorney Faizah Malik is challenging Councilmember Traci Park from the left, the tenants rights lawyer announced Thursday. Malik is styling her campaign in the mold of prior progressive incumbent ousters, she said, though she has yet to garner any of their endorsements. But she did get an Instagram signal boost from former CD 11 Councilmember Mike Bonin, who characterized her as “A Westside leader who will fight for YOU and your family.” Meanwhile, centrist group Thrive LA had a fundraiser for Park this week, and declared her its first endorsement of the 2026 cycle.
— FIREFIGHT: Active and retired firefighters blasted the council’s recommendation to nix 42 “Emergency Incident Technicians,” who help develop firefighting strategy and account for firefighters during blazes. In a letter to the council, the firefighters said the 1998 death of firefighter Joseph Dupee was linked to removal of EITs during a previous budget crisis.
“Please do not repeat the same mistake that was made in 1998 when EITs were removed and said removal was found to be a contributing factor in the death of LAFD Captain Joseph Dupee,” the firefighters wrote.
— EMPLOYMENT LAW AND ORDER: Some LAPD officers are hitting the jackpot on what are known as “LAPD lottery” cases. The city has paid out nearly $70 million over the last three years to officers who have sued the department after alleging they were the victims of sexual harassment, racial discrimination or retaliation against whistleblowers.
The massive payouts are not helping the city’s coffers. One of the leading causes of the current fiscal crisis is the ballooning liability payments that the city makes in settlements and jury verdicts.
— WATER OLYMPICS: L.A. County’s plan to run a water taxi between Long Beach and San Pedro during the Olympics paddled forward this week. Supervisor Janice Hahn introduced a motion, with co-author Mayor Bass, to launch a feasibility study assessing ridership demand, cost and possible routes.
“[The water taxi] would give residents, workers and tourists an affordable alternative to driving and parking at these Games venues,” Hahn said.
— ROBO-PERMIT: City and county residents submitting plans to rebuild their burned down properties could have their first interaction with an AI bot who would inspect their plans before a human. Wildfire recovery foundations purchased the AI permitting software, developed by Australian tech firm Archistar, and donated it to the city and county. The tech was largely paid for by Steadfast L.A., Rick Caruso’s nonprofit.
— TRUMP’S VETS MOVE: President Trump signed an executive order calling on the Department of Veterans Affairs to house up to 6,000 homeless veterans on its West Los Angeles campus, but even promoters of the idea are skeptical of the commander in chief’s follow-through.
“If this had come from any other president, I’d pop the Champagne,” said Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks), whose district includes the West Los Angeles campus. Trump, he said, follows up on “like one out of 10 things that he announces. You just never know which one. You never know to what extent.”
— ADDRESSING THE ELEPHANTS IN THE ROOM: A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge denied a motion for a temporary restraining order Thursday that sought to stop the L.A. Zoo from transferring elephants Tina and Billy to the Tulsa Zoo. The judge said the decision was out of the court’s purview. The zoo said Thursday that the “difficult decision” to relocate the pachyderms was made with the “care and well being” of the animals at top of mind.
“Activist agendas and protests are rightfully not a consideration in decisions that impact animal care,” the statement said.
— CHARTER SQUABBLE: Bass made her four appointments to the Charter Reform Commission this week. She selected Raymond Meza, Melinda Murray, Christina Sanchez and Robert Lewis to serve as commissioners. She also named Justin Ramirez as the executive director of the commission. Bass’s appointments came on the heels of reform advocate Rob Quan sending out mailers about the mayor’s delay in making appointments, which left the commission unable to get to work.
“Karen Bass wasted eight months. That was when her appointments were due. Eight months ago,” Quan said in an interview.
— WORKDAY TROUBLE: The Department of Water and Power is slated to adopt a new human resources software, Workday, in mid-June. But Gus Corona, business manager of IBEW Local 18, warned of “serious concerns” and the potential for “widespread problems and administrative chaos.” In a letter this week to DWP CEO Janisse Quiñones, which The Times obtained, Corona said there was a “consistent lack of clarity” about the new system, especially around union dues and benefit deductions, retroactive pay and cost of living adjustments. “The level of uncertainty so close to a planned launch date is deeply troubling,” Corona wrote.
Quick Hits
Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature homelessness program went to Councilmember Curren Price’s district: 37th Street and Flower Street, according to the mayor’s office.
On the docket for next week: The full City Council is scheduled to take up the proposed city budget for 2025-26 — and the mayor’s proposal for city employee layoffs — on Thursday.
Stay in touch
That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to [email protected]. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.
UNIFIL says incident first of its kind since Israel and Lebanese-armed group Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire last November.
Direct fire from the Israeli military hit the perimeter of United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon’s (UNIFIL) peacekeeping positions in south Lebanon, the mission said.
In a statement on Wednesday, UNIFIL added that the incident on Tuesday was the first of its kind since Israel and Lebanese-armed group Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire last November.
UNIFIL said one of its bases in the village of Kfarchouba in southern Lebanon was hit. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli army.
“In recent days, UNIFIL has also observed other aggressive behaviour by the [Israeli military] towards peacekeepers performing operational activities in accordance with Security Council Resolution 1701,” it said in a post on X, referring to a UN resolution originally adopted in 2006 to end hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah.
UNIFIL is concerned by the recent aggressive posture of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) involving UNIFIL personnel and assets near the Blue Line, including yesterday’s incident in which a direct fire hit the perimeter of a UNIFIL position south of the village of Kfar Shouba.
Tuesday’s incident occurred near the Blue Line, a UN-mapped demarcation separating Lebanon from Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, it added.
Any unauthorised crossing of the Blue Line by land or by air from any side constitutes a violation of Security Council Resolution 1701.
UNIFIL cited other alleged incidents it blamed on the Israeli army, including being targeted by lasers while it was performing a patrol with the Lebanese army in the southern border town of Maroun al-Ras on Tuesday.
“UNIFIL protests all such and we continue to remind all actors of their responsibility to ensure the safety and security of UN personnel and property and to respect the inviolability of UN assets and premises at all times,” it added.
Volatile ceasefire
Separately on Wednesday, Israel’s military said it killed a Hezbollah fighter in a strike on southern Lebanon.
“Earlier today [Wednesday], the [Israeli military] struck in the area of Qaaqaaiyet El Jisr in southern Lebanon, eliminating a Hezbollah terrorist who held the position of the commander of the Qabrikha area within the Hezbollah terrorist organisation,” a military statement said.
The November ceasefire ended a conflict in which Israel attacked Lebanon by air and invaded the country, devastating vast swaths of southern Lebanon. Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed in an Israeli attack in September.
The ceasefire terms require that neither Hezbollah nor any other armed group have weapons in areas near the border south of the Litani River, which flows into the Mediterranean some 20km (12 miles) north of the Israeli border.
They require Israel to withdraw troops from the south and the Lebanese army to deploy into the border region.
Although the truce officially ended hostilities, sporadic cross-border attacks have continued. Israel has regularly broken the truce and carried out air raids across southern Lebanon, also hitting neighbourhoods in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where Hezbollah retains strong support.
Israel still occupies five strategic hilltops along the border. While rockets have been fired into Israel from Lebanese territory on two separate occasions, Hezbollah has denied involvement.
Hezbollah’s leader, Naim Qassem, has maintained that the group no longer keeps weapons in the border zone, in accordance with the truce.
When survivors from January’s wildfires in Los Angeles County apply to rebuild their homes, their first interaction might be with a robot.
Artificial intelligence will aid city and county building officials in reviewing permit requests, an effort to speed up a process already being criticized as too slow.
“The current pace of issuing permits locally is not meeting the magnitude of the challenge we face,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said when announcing the AI deal in late April.
Some 13,000 homes were lost or severely damaged in the Eaton and Palisades fires, and many families are eager to return as fast as they can. Just eight days after the fire began and while it was still burning, the city received its first home rebuilding application in Pacific Palisades.
Wildfire recovery foundations purchased the AI permitting software, developed by Australian tech firm Archistar, and donated it to the city and county. When property owners submit applications, the software first will examine them for basic compliance with zoning and building codes, suggest corrections and provide a standardized report on the submission for human plan checkers to review.
L.A. County officials hope the software — believed to be the first large-scale use of such permitting technology nationwide after a natural disaster — will slice the time its employees now spend performing menial tasks, such as measuring building heights, counting parking spaces and calculating setbacks, said Mitch Glaser, an assistant deputy director in the county’s planning department.
“We see our planners doing things that are more impactful for our fire survivors,” Glaser said.
Disaster relief and government technology experts said they’re encouraged by the initiative. Municipal permitting is the type of highly technical, repetitive and time-consuming process that AI software could make more efficient, they said, especially as residents are expected to flood local building departments with applications to rebuild.
Still, they warned that for the AI software to be effective, the city and county would have to integrate the technology into its existing systems and quickly correct any errors in implementation. If not, the software could add more bureaucratic hurdles or narrow property owners’ options through overly rigid or incorrect code interpretations.
“This could be fabulously successful and I hope it is,” said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Urban Institute, where he studies disaster response. “But experimenting with technology in the context of people who’ve lost a lot is risky.”
Immediately after the fires, leaders at all levels of government pledged to waive and streamline rules for property owners to rebuild, promising that regulatory processes wouldn’t hold up residents’ return. Noting the pace of ongoing debris removal, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass has called the region’s recovery “on track to be the fastest in modern California history.” A mayoral spokesperson said that the building department is completing initial permitting reviews twice as fast as before the fire.
More than 200 Pacific Palisades property owners have submitted applications to rebuild or repair their homes, according to a Times analysis of city permitting data, with 11% approved. Last week, 24 property owners submitted applications, the highest amount since the disaster, the analysis shows.
L.A. County, which is responsible for permitting in Altadena and other unincorporated areas, has a separate system for tracking permits which the Times has not been able to independently verify. On Monday, the county listed 476 applications for zoning reviews on its data dashboard, with eight building permits approved. By Tuesday, the number of zoning reviews listed had increased to 486 while the number of building permit approvals dropped to seven.
Besides Newsom, architects, builders and homeowners have grumbled about the permitting process, expressing frustrations at what they say are confusing and inconsistent interpretations of regulations. Last week, actress Mandy Moore, whose family had multiple homes damaged or destroyed in the Eaton fire, blasted the county for “nonsensical red tape” that is making it difficult for her to rebuild.
The wildfire recovery nonprofit Steadfast LA, started by developer and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, took the lead on securing the Archistar software and is covering much of the up to $2-million tab for its implementation. LA Rises, the foundation started by Newsom after the fires, will pay Archistar’s $200 fee per application.
Caruso, who declined an interview request from The Times, has said that turning to AI was a no-brainer.
“Bringing AI into permitting will allow us to rebuild faster and safer, reducing costs and turning a process that can take weeks and months into one that can happen in hours or days,” Caruso said in the news release announcing the deal.
Archistar’s AI permitting software has been in development since 2018. The company has contracts with municipalities in Australia and Canada and is expanding to the United States. In the fall, after a successful pilot program in Austin, Texas, Archistar signed an agreement with the city to perform initial assessments of building projects, similar to its intended use in Los Angeles. Austin has not implemented the software yet, but city officials said they believe it could cut preliminary reviews there to one business day from 15.
Once Archistar’s program is online in L.A. County, Glaser said, officials hope it will reduce the first analysis for rebuilding projects to two or three business days from five.
It could save additional time for projects by minimizing revisions and corrections, said Zach Seidl, a Bass spokesperson.
“The biggest potential for reducing permitting time comes from improving the quality of initial plans that homeowners submit to the city,” Seidl said.
Land use consultants and architects in Los Angeles said they were happy with any technology that could hasten approvals of their projects. But they said that AI wouldn’t ease the hardest parts of the permitting process.
Architect Ken Ungar, who is working with roughly two dozen Palisades property owners who are rebuilding, said his biggest headaches come from needing multiple city departments, such as those that oversee fire safety and utilities, to sign off on a project. Applications can get stuck, he said, and even worse sometimes one department requires changes that conflict with another’s rules.
Artificial intelligence, Ungar said, “sounds great. But unless the city of L.A. changes its whole M.O. on how you get building permits, it’s not super helpful.”
The state’s Archistar deal allows the city of Malibu, where the Palisades fire destroyed more than 1,000 homes, to receive the donated software as well. Malibu officials say they’re still deciding on it, noting that the community has specialized building codes addressing development on coastal, hillside and other environmentally sensitive habitats.
Governments are right to look to technology for help in speeding up disaster permitting, Rumbach said, but they also should ensure that human plan checkers provide oversight to account for nuances in zoning and building codes.
“I hope there are people more seasoned in communicating with disaster survivors who are the face of this,” he said. “A lot of people could be frustrated because they don’t want to deal with AI. They want to deal with a person.”
Although L.A. city and county might be the first to use AI for permitting after a major disaster, experts expect the technology to become mainstream soon.
“I’m confident there is no way back,” said Sara Bertran de Lis, director of research and analytics at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence.
L.A. County expects to implement the Archistar software within six weeks after programming and testing, Glaser said. At a recent disaster recovery panel, Bass said the city will do so “in the next couple of months.”
To Los Angeles City Council members searching desperately for cuts amid a budget crisis, the Fire Department’s emergency incident technicians are “drivers” whose main role is chauffeuring battalion chiefs to emergencies.
But LAFD officials say the position is much more than that. Emergency incident technicians are firefighters who play a key role in coordinating the response to fires, and losing them would put lives at risk, according to LAFD interim Chief Ronnie Villanueva.
“This is going to come back and bite us. This is not a matter of them just being a driver. It is not a driver. You have to just take that out of your minds of transporting someone somewhere,” Villanueva said, addressing the City Council’s budget committee at a hearing on Thursday.
Five months after the Palisades fire destroyed thousands of homes and prompted questions about whether the Fire Department was equipped to fight such a massive blaze, the budget committee moved forward with a recommendation to cut the emergency incident technician positions.
Of the 42 positions, 27 are currently filled. Those firefighters would not lose their jobs but would be reassigned, saving the city more than $7 million in the next fiscal year and about $10 million every year after that, according to City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo.
The city is facing a nearly $1-billion budget shortfall largely due to rising personnel costs, soaring legal payouts and a slowdown in the local economy. Mayor Karen Bass’ 2025-26 budget proposal, which suggested laying off more than 1,600 city employees, did not include reassigning the emergency incident technicians.
The budget committee, which stressed that the overall Fire Department budget is increasing, also recommended nixing Bass’ plan for creating a new unit within the department that would have added 67 employees to address issues stemming from the homelessness crisis.
At Thursday’s budget hearing, Councilmember Tim McOsker, who has two children who are firefighters, argued for cutting the emergency incident technician position, calling it “basically an aide.”
When Villanueva asked McOsker to put a cost on a firefighter’s life, McOsker said, “Invaluable.”
“I can say the same thing about very many of the 1,300 positions we’re cutting, because we’re also going to not be doing sidewalks, streets, curbs, gutters, tree trimming, changing out lights, making our communities safe,” McOsker added. “The reality is we have to balance a budget.”
The budget committee has sent its initial recommendations to Chief Legislative Analyst Sharon Tso, the City Council’s top policy advisor, who on Friday will present the committee with a full menu of strategies for cutting costs while preserving as many services as possible. The committee is then expected to finalize its recommendations and send the proposed budget to the full council, which must approve a final budget by the end of the month.
On the way to a scene, a “command team” consisting of a chief and an emergency incident technician “might be responsible to provide direction to the rescue of a trapped firefighter or civilians, firefighter tracking, and handle the risk management of a rapidly escalating incident,” Capt. Erik Scott, an LAFD spokesperson, said in a statement.
“The more complex the incident, the greater the need for Emergency Incident Technicians to facilitate emergency incident mitigation,” Scott added, with the types of incidents including “structure fires, brush fires, multi-casualty incidents, earthquakes, train collisions, building collapses, active shooter, airport and port emergencies etc.”
Gregg Avery, who retired last year as a battalion chief after 37 years with the LAFD, said that during his career, emergency incident technicians were called aides, then staff assistants. But Avery thought of them more as partners. The four EITs who worked for him often helped him with strategic decisions, and he encouraged them to question his decisions and offer advice.
“The EIT happens to drive the car. But to call them a driver is a bit demeaning and a bit minimizing,” he said.
While an EIT drives a battalion chief to a fire or other emergency, both work the radios to develop strategies for tackling the situation, according to Avery and a video produced by the LAFD. They communicate with fire commanders, firefighters on the scene, police officers and agencies such as the Department of Water and Power and the U.S. Forest Service.
At the scene, they work with the incident commander to keep track of firefighters and other personnel — a crucial role in chaotic situations when forgetting a single firefighter’s location could be fatal, both Villanueva and Avery said.
But at the Thursday budget hearing, Villanueva struggled to articulate what EITs do when they aren’t responding to scenes.
“They visit fire stations and they deliver mail. They talk about the current events. If there’s any questions they need to be asked … the EIT will assist with those. They do staffing,” Villanueva said.
According to Avery, EITs act as liaisons between firefighters and battalion chiefs. Since they are firefighters themselves and members of the labor union, they can relate to the rank-and-file, Avery said.
The EIT positions were cut once before — in 2010, during another major budget crunch in the Great Recession. Since then, the department has been adding them back.
Avery remembers working without an EIT after the cuts.
“Emergency operations were profoundly different and not as good,” he said.
May 13 (UPI) — Police in Britain early Tuesday arrested a 21-year-old man accused of setting fires to three north London residences this month, including a home owned by Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
The most recent fire occurred at a residence in Kentish Town and was reported to the London Fire Brigade at about 1:35 a.m. local time Monday. Metropolitan Police did not identify the owner but said counter-terrorism officers were investigating due to the home’s connections “with a high-profile public figure.”
Local reports confirmed that the residence was owned by Starmer, who, as prime minister, was living at his official 10 Downing Street residence with his family and was renting out the north London home at the time of the incident. No injuries were reported.
The suspect, who was not identified, was arrested on suspicion of arson with intent to endanger life and remains in police custody.
Authorities said they are considering the man as a suspect in two other arson cases this month.
“All three fires are being treated as suspicious at this time, and enquiries remain ongoing,” Metropolitan Police said Tuesday.
Th police are investigating Monday’s fire as being potentially linked to a fire set Sunday in the entrance of a north London residence and a Thursday vehicle fire, also located in north London.
The prime minister, through a spokesperson on Monday, thanked emergency services for their work in responding to the incident.
In June, three activists were found guilty of public disturbance offenses for holding a pro-Palestine protest in front of Starmer’s home in April 2024.
May 13 (UPI) — More than two dozen West Baltimore residents were evacuated from their homes overnight as firefighters continued to battle a six-alarm blaze at a mattress warehouse that was sending plumes of smoke above the city.
The Baltimore City Fire Department confirmed in an early Tuesday statement on social media that at least 30 residents near the fire at Edmondson Avenue have been temporarily evacuated.
Officials were also working to restore Amtrak services by 2:30 a.m. EDT as overhead lines on tracks abutting the rear of the warehouse at Edmondson Avenue and Bantalou Street were de-energized due to the fire. Amtrak confirmed online that local municipal officials had placed “a hold on all tracks in West Baltimore.”
Firefighters were dispatched to the multi-story mattress warehouse shortly before 7 p.m. Monday to find what officials described as a “heavy fire,” which was upgraded to a four-alarm blaze 22 minutes later.
Some 200 firefighters were battling the blaze, officials said. No injures have been reported.
During a press conference on Monday night, Baltimore fire chief James Wallace said it had become a six-alarm blaze.
“This has become a bigger city operation now,” he said.
He said the building, which stands three stories above ground, also has two sub-level floors.
“It’s a large basement area. It’s the size of the building and we’re told it’s stacked full of mattresses,” he said.
He added that authorities are unsure of exactly what is fueling fire. While they’ve been told it’s mattresses, there were also informed at one point paint was also in the facility, concrete and brick.
“We’re fighting what we see,” he said.
In an earlier press conference, Wallace told reporters the challenge was they were fighting the blaze from the outside and they had yet to gain access to the large facility.
“Given the size of this building, the size of the fire, we’re having to be very cautious, very meticulous as we move in there,” he said.
The cause of the fire was under investigation, and the blaze was still uncontrolled early Tuesday.
Wallace said they are working to prevent it from spreading to other buildings.
Wind, he explained, which is usually a hindrance, was aiding firefighters by pushing the blaze toward the back of the facility where the train tracks were and away from nearby buildings.
“That’s what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to cut this off,” he said.
Several newspapers moved quickly late last night to get the news of counter-terrorism officers investigating a fire at the home of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer on their front pages. Among them, on a rare day with hard news on its front page, is the Daily Star – which pictures the scene behind the police barriers during the day as the inquiry got under way.
The same terror probe into the blaze at Starmer’s north London home also leads The Daily Telegraph, which has close-up photographs of the damage to the front door. The paper reports that police are investigating whether an arson attack at a second home in London linked to Starmer is related. Downing Street said they won’t comment further on a “live investigation”.
The Daily Mirror describes the fire as “a mystery blaze” in its front-page coverage and interviews neighbours who were “woken by loud noises in the early hours”.
Even before news of the fire, the PM was destined to be featuring on most front pages after a day in which he outlined his government’s new policy on immigration. The Daily Express, which often highlights the issue in its political coverage, shows it is yet to be convinced with the headline “We have it all before but now it is time to deliver”.
Care homes are “in despair”, reports the i Paper, as it highlights one of the new policy plans to stop recruiting workers from abroad. The paper reports pharmacies and the wider care industry are warning of “crippling effects” to services if visas for migrant care workers are scrapped.
The Daily Mail leads with the Conservative reaction as Tory politicians describe the prime minister as “Starmer Chameleon” for his plans. The paper’s sub-headline says the policy “goes against everything he’s ever believed in”, despite Starmer’s insistence to the contrary in his speech introducing the policy.
Starmer’s description of Britain as an “island of strangers” leads The Guardian, which reports his announcement has triggered a backlash from MPs that say his comments echo far-right rhetoric. Responding to The Guardian, the prime minister said he wouldn’t “denigrate” the contribution of migrants, but that they must “learn the language and integrate” once in the UK.
The Times is the only paper that covers the story with a picture of migrants, although it chooses three young men who have just been picked up in Dover after crossing the Channel rather than the legal migration that the PM ‘s policy is tackling. It also finds room to report for the latest in the US-China trade talks, saying that President Trump want to re-establish a “very, very good relationship” with China.
The US and China “have agreed a ceasefire in their trade war”, according to the Financial Times. It leads on the two superpowers slashing tariffs on each other’s goods for 90 days. US tariffs on Chinese imports will be cut from 145% to 30%. Chinese tariffs on US imports will be cut from 125% to 10%. “Markets are defaulting to assuming we’re now in a 10-30 world: 10% [tariffs] on most of the world, 30% on China,” says Ajay Rajadhyaksha of Barclays.
Meanwhile, Metro leads with the sentencing of a Bulgarian spy ring to a total of 50 years in jail. The six members, which the headline dubs ‘Putin’s Minions’, were “paid to plot the kidnap, murder of smearing of Vladimir Putins enemies in the UK”. For three years, the group passed intel to Russian agents from a home in Great Yarmouth.
