fire

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s Noah Goldberg, with an assist from David Zahniser, giving you the latest on city and county government.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez does not run. As in, she is not a runner.

So why did she post an Instagram reel on a new personal account Tuesday of herself inside a Foot Locker, asking a salesperson for recommendations for a running shoe?

“I am an avid precinct walker,” Rodriguez said in an interview with The Times on Tuesday, hours after she posted the reel. “I needed a pair of new shoes — good supportive shoes for my run, and the announcements will be imminent.”

The North Valley councilmember bought the Cloud 6 On running shoes highlighted in the video. Now, rumors are flying around City Hall about what she may be considering running for — if not a marathon.

The three options being bandied about are a run to challenge Mayor Karen Bass in the upcoming 2026 election, a possible run for controller against Kenneth Mejia, or just a cheekily mysterious announcement of her reelection bid for her own council seat.

“It’s clear she’s weighing options which may include running for mayor against Mayor Bass,” said Sam Yebri, a lawyer who is board president of Thrive LA, a moderate PAC focused on quality-of-life issues in the city. (Yebri commented with a clapping hands emoji on Rodriguez’s Instagram post, and Thrive LA responded, “We’re ready!”)

Rodriguez would not say what her plans are for 2026, though she said that more social media posts will be forthcoming and that she is definitely running for something.

The councilmember has been a sharp critic of the mayor for years now. She has lambasted the mayor’s signature Inside Safe homelessness program, arguing that it lacks transparency. She has also repeatedly called for the council to end the mayor’s state of emergency on homelessness, even though she voted for it when it was first passed.

“We were supposed to get reports on what money was spent on. It took until 2024 that we were finally told how much Inside Safe was costing per room, per night,” Rodriguez said in an interview.

Rodriguez said she and other councilmembers had to fight to even get information released on where Inside Safe was conducting cleanup operations and where homeless residents were sent after the operations.

The councilmember also opposed the mayor’s ousting of Fire Chief Kristin Crowley following the January wildfires, saying that Bass used Crowley to deflect criticism of her own absence in Ghana at the start of the conflagrations. She also called on the mayor to reinstate Crowley.

“On Jan. 7, she was praising the fire chief and her response,” Rodriguez said at the time. “And then it appears, as the heat kicked up [over] her absence, she continued to try and attribute blame to someone else.”

Rodriguez was first elected in 2017 to the seventh district and was reelected in 2022.

If she were to announce a mayoral run, she would be Bass’ first major opponent.

There has also been speculation about Rick Caruso, the billionaire owner of the Grove shopping mall, potentially running against Bass again after losing to her last time, though he is also considering a bid for governor. Both he and Rodriguez are more conservative than Bass.

Rodriguez still has not filed for a reelection campaign for her seat, even as two others have joined the field.

“I know there were rumors she was considering a run for mayor. … So more or less, I’m seeing if she is going to run [for her council seat] or if she isn’t,” said Michael Ebenkamp, a former president of the North Hills Neighborhood Council who has filed to run for the District 7 council seat.

Rick Taylor, a political consultant, said that Rodriguez is interested in running for mayor but not likely to do it.

“She’s intrigued, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t think she’s going to pull the trigger,” he said.

A serious mayoral campaign is expensive, and Taylor said he doesn’t believe that Rodriguez can easily raise the $8 million to $10 million necessary to be a viable candidate.

“Monica is not Rick Caruso. She can’t put $100 million of her own in,” Taylor said. “I think most likely she will be councilwoman of the seventh district at the end of it all, but I think she’s keeping her options open.”

State of play

— SUPREME DECISION: The Supreme Court ruled Monday that U.S. immigration agents can stop and detain anyone they believe is in the country illegally, even if that suspicion is based solely on a person’s job, the language they speak or the color of their skin. The justices voted 6-3 to lift an L.A. judge’s order that had barred “roving patrols” from grabbing people off SoCal streets.

— FLAME OUT: It was a late night surprise: L.A.’s mayor, working with former State Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg, persuaded several lawmakers to carry a bill rewriting Measure ULA, the so-called mansion tax. Bass and Hertzberg said the changes would boost housing production while also cutting off support for an anti-tax measure being prepared for the ballot next year. But just as suddenly, Bass pulled the plug, saying the proposal needed more work. The plan is to bring it back in January.

— TAKE A (WAGE) HIKE: The business group seeking to repeal the hotel and airport workers’ minimum wage hike via a ballot measure failed to gather enough signatures, city officials said. The L.A. Alliance for Tourism, Jobs and Progress hoped to get voters to roll back the ordinance passed by the City Council in May but fell short of getting the measure on the ballot by 9,000 signatures.

— HOUSING BILL MARCHES ON: The controversial housing bill that would override local zoning laws and allow high-density buildings near public transit continued its march toward law Thursday. The California Assembly passed SB79 in a 41-17 vote. On Friday, the Senate approved it, 21 to 8. Now, it needs only the governor’s signature to become law.

— CHIEF UPDATE: Bass has hired Mitch Kamin to be her third chief of staff in just under three years. Kamin, a lawyer who has fought the Trump administration and provided legal services for underserved communities, will replace Carolyn Webb de Macias.

— UNCONVENTIONAL PRICE: The price tag for renovating the Los Angeles Convention Center has ballooned again. The City Council was informed this week that the project will cost $2.7 billion — an increase of nearly $500 million from six months ago.

— SaMo MONEY MO’ PROBLEMS: The city of Santa Monica could soon declare a fiscal emergency due to an ongoing budget crisis, due in part to more than $200 million in legal payouts related to an alleged sexual abuser who worked for the Police Department.

— LESS ‘LESS-LETHAL’: A U.S. district judge extended restrictions Tuesday that block federal agents and LAPD officers from targeting reporters and nonviolent protesters with crowd control weapons often known as “less-lethal munitions.”

— CLERKED IN: Bass appointed Patrice Lattimore to be the new city clerk. Lattimore has been a chief management analyst for the Office of the City Clerk since 2018, overseeing administrative, budget and personnel functions.

— LEADERSHIP MERGER: Two leadership programs that have produced civic leaders across the state are merging. Coro Southern California and Coro Northern California are becoming, simply, Coro California. Alumni include former Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Sen. Alex Padilla and L.A. City Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky.

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program was in Council District 9 this week, near the Brotherhood Crusade and an elementary school, clearing an encampment that was a safety concern for people in the area, the mayor’s office said.
• On the docket next week: A report from the mayor on Lattimore’s appointment as city clerk will go before the government operations committee on Tuesday.

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.

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.

Now here, let me give you my email address. It’s [email protected].

And why am I telling you that?

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.

Why do you think so many employers avoid using the federal E-Verify system to weed out undocumented workers? Because they don’t want to admit that many of their employees are undocumented.

In Texas, Republican lawmakers can’t stop demonizing immigrants, and they can’t stop introducing bills by the dozens to mandate wider use of E-Verify. But the most recent one, like all the ones before it, just died.

Why?

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.

[email protected]

Less than 24 hours after a bullet whizzed across a Utah college campus and claimed the life of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, polarizing figures from across the political spectrum swiftly canceled public events.

Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) decided to postpone a North Carolina stop on the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour this weekend, while Trump allies Stephen K. Bannon and Rudolph W. Giuliani reportedly nixed plans for a New York gathering due to “increased security concerns.”

Popular leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who was set to debate Kirk at Dartmouth College later this month, told Politico he would “wait for the temperature to lower” before holding in-person events again.

Kirk’s assassination comes amid a spate of attacks on high-profile political figures — including two assassination attempts on President Trump — that security experts say will change the way large-scale political events are held, with open-air venues increasingly seen as risky.

“In the current threat environment, outdoor venues for political events should be avoided at all costs,” said Art Acevedo, the former head of the Houston and Miami police departments.

Even with a security apparatus as powerful as the U.S. Secret Service, experts say it is incredibly difficult to establish a firm perimeter at outdoor rallies with a large number of attendees. The gunman who opened fire on Trump in Butler, Pa., during the 2024 presidential campaign did so from more than 400 feet away. Kirk was shot from a distance of more than 400 feet with a powerful bolt-action rifle.

The suspected gunman, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, was arrested Friday morning, authorities said. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said ammunition recovered and linked to the shooting had anti-fascist engravings on it.

A PBS/Marist Poll conducted last year found that 1 in 5 Americans believe violent acts would be justified to “get the country back on track.”

Democratic lawmaker Melissa Hortman was killed alongside her husband at their Minnesota home in June by a gunman allegedly motivated by conservative politics. In April, police arrested a man who allegedly tried to set fire to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence while the Democrat slept inside with his family.

Politicians aren’t the only ones being targeted. The killing in December in Manhattan of a healthcare industry executive turned suspected gunman Luigi Mangione into an object of public fascination, with some applauding the act of vigilantism.

With Americans increasingly viewing their political foes as enemy combatants, researchers who study extremist violence and event security professionals say Kirk’s killing on Wednesday could mark a turning point in how well-known individuals protect themselves.

“The bottom line is, for public political and other figures, it is increasingly difficult to protect them anywhere, but even more so in an outdoor environment because it’s getting harder to screen people and devices in those open spaces,” said Brian Levin, a former New York City police officer and professor emeritus at the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino.

Kirk was being protected by roughly a half-dozen Utah Valley University police officers and a handful of private security guards Wednesday, according to campus security officials. While that kind of presence might deter a close-quarters threat, snipers and other assailants with long-range capabilities would not be affected.

Typically, security professionals seek to create three “rings of protection” around the focus of a public event, according to Kent Moyer, founder of World Protection Group, an international security firm.

The inner ring often consists of barriers and security personnel meant to separate Kirk from the crowd immediately in front of him, not someone hundreds of yards away. In the middle ring, security guards positioned farther from the focus of the event monitor the temperature of the crowd and try to clock individuals acting strangely or becoming aggressive. An outer ring would serve to search bags and screen individuals before they enter the event.

It did not appear there was any screening of attendees at the event where Kirk was killed, and it is legal to openly carry firearms on a college campus in Utah.

Levin said he expects to see drones deployed at similar events in the future, an assessment seconded by Acevedo.

“If you’re going to do an outdoor event you better make sure you have some kind of surveillance of rooftops,” Levin said.

When doing risk assessments, Levin said, police and security professionals need to be cognizant that politicians themselves are no longer the sole targets for political violence.

What Levin called “idiosyncratic actors” are increasingly likely to lash out at those connected to political and policy positions they find unjust. While Kirk was not a politician himself, he was a beloved figure in Trump’s orbit, and his activist group, Turning Point USA, has often been credited with driving younger voters to support the president.

“It’s not just elected officials. It’s pundits, it includes corporate people, people involved in policy and education,” said Levin.

But a heavy security detail doesn’t come cheap.

While elected officials are guarded by a range of federal and state law enforcement agencies, political influencers like Kirk must rely on their own vendors as well as security personnel hired by the venues where they speak.

Levin warned that law enforcement assigned to political events should be on high alert for retaliatory attacks in the near future, given the “dehumanizing” rhetoric some have taken up in the wake of Kirk’s killing.

Specifically, he pointed to Trump’s Oval Office remarks late Wednesday blaming Kirk’s death on “the radical left,” despite the fact that Kirk’s killer had not been identified at that time and federal law enforcement officials had not disclosed a motive in the shooting.

Trump also rattled off a number of attacks on Republicans during his remarks, while making no mention of Hortman’s slaying, the 2022 attack on the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, or the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — all violent incidents carried out by people who espoused right-wing political values.

“More and more people across the ideological spectrum, though more concentrated on the far hard right, think violence is justified to achieve political outcomes,” Levin said.

CHICAGO — A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot a man who officials said tried to evade arrest Friday in a Chicago suburb by driving his car at officers and dragging one of them.

The shooting just outside the city follows days of threats by the Trump administration to surge immigration enforcement in the nation’s third-largest city and less than a week into an operation labeled “Midway Blitz” by federal officials targeting the so-called sanctuary policies in Chicago and Illinois.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a news release that the officer was trying to arrest a man who had a history of reckless driving, but he refused officers’ orders and instead drove his car at them. An ICE officer who was hit and dragged by the car felt his life was threatened and opened fire, the department said.

ICE said both the officer and the driver from the shooting in the Franklin Park suburb, about 18 miles west of Chicago, were taken to a hospital, where the driver was pronounced dead.

“We are praying for the speedy recovery of our law enforcement officer. He followed his training, used appropriate force, and properly enforced the law to protect the public and law enforcement,” said spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, said he is aware of the shooting and demanded “a full, factual accounting of what’s happened today to ensure transparency and accountability.”

Video from the scene shows police tape and traffic cones blocking off parts of the street where a large food distribution truck and gray car can be seen from a distance. Multiple law enforcement vehicles were surrounding the area.

Erendira Rendón, chief program officer at a local advocacy group called the Resurrection Project, said the shooting “shows us the real danger that militarized enforcement creates in our neighborhoods.”

“A community member is dead, and an officer was injured,” Rendón said in a statement. “These are outcomes that serve no public safety purpose and leave entire communities traumatized. … When federal agents conduct unaccountable operations in our communities, everyone becomes less safe.”

Chicagoans, meanwhile, have been preparing for weekend Mexican Independence Day celebrations that include parades, festivals, street parties and car caravans, despite the potential immigration crackdown.

McLaughlin said that “viral social media videos and activists encouraging illegal aliens to resist law enforcement” have made the work of ICE officers more dangerous.

Santana and Fernando write for the Associated Press. Santana reported from Washington.

Reality TV star Spencer Pratt joined two Republican senators on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to bring attention to a newly launched congressional investigation into the response to the Palisades fire in Los Angeles.

“I feel like this is going to be so powerful for all of the United States because there shouldn’t be disasters that are preventable,” Pratt, who lost his home during the fire, told reporters.

Sen. Rick Scott of Florida said the main goal of the investigation is to figure out why the fire happened, why the state and local governments were unable to prevent it and how officials are helping the victims recover.

“We are going to get answers,” Scott said. “We are going to do everything we can to help the victim and we’re going to do everything we can to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

The congressional investigation, which launched on Monday, is focused only on the Palisades fire, but Scott said the probe could expand to other destructive fires that have taken place in Los Angeles County.

“We are going to start with this,” Scott said. “We’ll just let the facts take us where they are.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has welcomed the congressional investigation. At the news conference, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin warned that if officials fail to cooperate, the panel is ready to issue subpoenas to compel them to do so.

“We don’t want to use it and we hope we don’t have to,” Johnson said. “It is a good sign Gov. Newsom is willing to do so, and that’s the best way of doing it. But if they don’t, you’ve always got that backstop of compelling testimony, compelling documents, and that’s what we’ll do if we have to.”

“But I don’t think we will have to, quite honestly,” he added.

Two Senate Republicans have opened yet another investigation into the deadly Palisades fire, adding to a long list of ongoing probes aimed at determining whether local officials prepared sufficiently for the emergency.

The investigation will look at whether emergency preparations were sufficient, including an examination of whether there was enough reservoir water to respond to the deadly wildfire.

Sens. Rick Scott of Florida and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin announced Monday that they were leading the congressional investigation, which they said is necessary to “uncover and expose the truth” about how the state and local governments responded to the major blaze, which broke out amid hurricane-force winds and quickly overwhelmed firefighting resources.

“Families in this community deserve answers and accountability,” Scott and Johnson wrote in a joint statement.

The new probe is the latest in a string of ongoing investigations into the start of the fire and how officials responded. It comes almost nine months since the fire broke out on Jan. 7, killing 12 and largely destroying Pacific Palisades. That same day, the Eaton fire erupted in Altadena, killing 19 people and devastating the foothill community.

The congressional investigation appears to focus only on the Palisades fire, and will look specifically at what water resources were — or weren’t — available, and why.

The Times first reported that the Santa Ynez Reservoir, located in the heart of Pacific Palisades, was empty when the fire broke out, and remained that way as firefighters experienced dry hydrants and water pressure issues. The 117-million-gallon water storage complex had been closed for repairs to its cover for nearly a year, officials said.

After The Times’ reporting on the reservoir, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered an investigation into the city’s water system and how it may have hampered firefighting efforts.

Times reporting also exposed poor preparation and deployment by the Los Angeles Fire Department, even as city officials were repeatedly warned about life-threatening winds and red flag conditions. Top brass at the agency decided not to deploy roughly 1,000 available firefighters and dozens of water-carrying engines in advance of the Palisades fire.

The announcement of this federal investigation comes a few weeks after Scott — the former governor of hurricane-prone Florida — met with former reality star Spencer Pratt to tour some of the areas destroyed by the Palisades fire. At the time of their meeting, Pratt, who lost a home in the fire, was demanding a congressional investigation — an action that Scott said he would do his “best to make sure it happens.”

Pratt has also sued the city, alleging it failed to maintain an adequate water supply and other infrastructure.

In recent weeks, Scott has sent letters to several agencies seeking answers about how California used federal funds for wildfire management and response. In an August letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Scott said it appeared that the state and the city of Los Angeles had not used the agency’s funds “wisely or appropriately.”

The response to the January firestorm, particularly in the Palisades, has become a polarizing topic — and rife with misinformation —among national and local political leaders, from President Trump to developer Rick Caruso, a former mayoral contender against L.A.’s current mayor, Karen Bass. Caruso, who owns Palisades Village mall, became an immediate critic of the city’s response, blasting officials for struggling to meet water demands during the fire fight.

But fire and water experts have repeatedly said that the conditions during the fire were unprecedented, and one that no urban water system could have been properly prepared.

Still, understanding what, if anything, went wrong during the Palisades fire appears to have struck somewhat of a bipartisan note. Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday said his team will “absolutely welcome” this additional review.

“It complements the thorough investigations already taking place — including by the federal government, the state, and an independent review by the nation’s leading fire experts,” Newsom said in a statement. “From day one, we’ve embraced transparency because Californians deserve nothing less.”

Los Angeles officials last month delayed releasing one of those reports, so as not to interfere with a federal investigation into the cause of the Palisades fire.

The new congressional investigation, which will be led by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, will give senators the power to issue subpoenas and seek documents for the committee’s review.

Exposing years-old concerns about California’s resilience to wildfires, a government whistleblower and other witnesses in a recent state trial alleged that cleanup operations after some of the largest fires in state history were plagued by mismanagement and overspending — and that toxic contamination was at times left behind in local communities.

Steven Larson, a former state debris operations manager in the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, failed to convince a jury that he was wrongly fired by the agency for flagging those and other issues to his supervisors. After a three-week trial in Sacramento, the jury found Larson was retaliated against, but also that the agency had other, legitimate reasons for dismissing him from his post, according to court records.

Still, the little-discussed trial provided a rare window into a billion-dollar public-private industry that is rapidly expanding — and becoming increasingly expensive for taxpayers and lucrative for contractors — given the increased threat of fires from climate change.

It raised serious questions about the state’s fire response and management capabilities at a time when the Trump administration says it is aggressively searching for “waste, fraud and abuse” in government spending, proposing cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and clashing with state leaders over the best way to respond to future wildfires in California.

The allegations raised in the trial also come as FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers are overseeing similar debris removal work — by some of the same contractors — following the wildfires that destroyed much of Pacific Palisades and parts of Altadena in January, and as fresh complaints arise around that work, as The Times recently reported.

Steve Larson poses for a portrait at Elk Grove Park on Sept. 1. Larson, who was a former state debris operations manager in the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, is a whistleblower alleging widespread problems in California fire cleanups.

(Andri Tambunan / For The Times)

During the trial, Larson and other witnesses with direct knowledge of state fire contracts raised allegations of poor oversight and sloppy hiring and purchasing practices by CalRecycle, the state agency that oversaw multiple major cleanup contracts for CalOES; overcharging and poor record-keeping by contractors; toxic contamination being left behind on properties meant to have been cleared; and insufficient responses to those problems from both CalOES and FEMA officials.

The claims were buttressed at trial by the introduction into evidence of a previously unpublished audit of cleanup operations for several large fires in 2018. They were mostly rejected by attorneys for the state, who acknowledged some problems — which they said are common in fast-paced emergency responses operations. They broadly denied Larson’s allegations as baseless, saying he was an inexperienced and disgruntled former employee who was fired for poor performance.

The allegations were also dismissed by CalOES and by Burlingame-based Environmental Chemical Corp., which was the state’s lead contractor on the 2018 fires and is now the Army Corps of Engineer’s lead contractor on cleanup work for the Palisades and Eaton fires, which is nearing completion.

Anita Gore, a spokeswoman for CalOES, defended the agency’s work in a statement to The Times. While acknowledging some problems in the past, she said the agency is “committed to protecting the health and safety of all Californians, including in the aftermath of disasters, and is unwavering in its desire to maintain a safe and inclusive workplace where everyone can feel respected and thrive.”

In its own statement to The Times, ECC said it followed the directives and oversight of state and federal agencies at all times, and “is proud of its work helping communities recover from devastating disasters.”

“We approach each project with professionalism, transparency, and a commitment to delivering results under extraordinarily challenging conditions,” the company said.

Maria Bourn, one of Larson’s attorneys, told The Times that while her client lost at trial — which they are appealing — his case marked a “win for government accountability and the public at-large” by revealing “massive irregularities by wildfire debris removal contractors” who continue to work in the state.

“The state’s continued partnership with these companies when such widespread irregularities were identified by one of its own should alarm every taxpayer,” Bourn said.

A Malibu home lies in ruins after the Woolsey fire. Many questions were raised about the response.

(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

Camp, Woolsey and Hill fires

The allegations centered in large part around the state-run cleanup efforts following the Camp fire in Northern California, which killed 85 people and all but erased the town of Paradise in November 2018, and the contemporaneous Woolsey and Hill fires in Southern California, which ripped through Malibu and other parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

FEMA has reimbursed the state more than $1 billion for costs associated with those cleanup efforts.

In a July 28, 2019, email entered as evidence in the trial, Larson wrote to CalOES chief of internal audits Ralph Zavala that he wanted to talk to him about “potential fraud” by Camp fire contractors, including ECC.

“I cannot say for sure, but something sure smells fishy,” Larson wrote in the email. “Either their contract was not in fact the lowest bid or they are creating fraud in the way they collect debris.”

Larson wrote in the same email that ECC was “supposedly the lowest bidder” but was “costing more” than the lower bids, which he wrote “doesn’t make sense.” At trial, Larson and his attorneys repeatedly claimed that instead of properly investigating his claims, his supervisors turned against him.

Other current and former state officials testified that they had raised similar concerns.

Todd Thalhamer, a former Camp fire area commander and operations chief who still works for CalRecycle, testified during the trial that he’d told Larson he believed ECC had low-balled its bid to win the work, then overcharged the state by millions of dollars. He said he had “dug very deep into the tonnage cost that they were charging, how they were charging, how they were cleaning it up,” and believed that ECC had been able to “game the system” by reporting that it was hauling out more of the debris types for which it could charge the most.

ECC denied manipulating bids or overcharging the state, and said that “all debris types and volumes are 100% inspected by and determined by CalRecycle and its monitoring representatives and systems, not by ECC or its subcontractors.”

Thalhamer testified that he’d sent an “email blast” out to top CalOES and CalRecycle officials telling them of his findings. He said that led to internal discussions and some but not all issues being resolved.

Further concerns were raised in records obtained by Larson’s attorneys from the prominent accounting firm EY, formerly known as Ernst & Young, which the state paid nearly $4 million to audit the Camp, Woolsey and Hill fire cleanup work.

According to those records, which were cited at trial, EY found that CalRecycle was “unable to produce documentation that fully supports how the proposed costs were determined to be reasonable when evaluating contractor proposals,” and didn’t appear to have “appropriate controls or oversight over the contractor’s performance.”

EY flagged $457 million charged by the contractors through 89 separate “change orders” — or additional charges not contemplated in their initial bids. It said the state lacked an adequate approval process for determining whether to accept such orders, couldn’t substantiate them and risked FEMA rescinding its funding if it didn’t take “immediate corrective action.”

EY specifically flagged $181 million in change orders for the construction of two “base camps” near the burn areas, from which the contractors would operate. It said the state only had invoices for $91 million of that spending, and that even those invoices were not itemized. EY executive Jill Powell testified that the firm believed such large contract changes were likely to be flagged as questionable by FEMA.

ECC — one of two contractors EY noted as having made the base camp change orders — defended its work.

The company said change orders are a necessary part of any cleanup operation, where the final cost “depends on the final quantities of debris that the Government directs the Contractors to remove and how far the material has to be transported for recycling or disposal.”

Such quantities can change over the course of a contract, which leads to changes in cost, it said.

As for the base camps, ECC said the state had explicitly stated in its initial request for proposals that it would “develop the requirements” and negotiate their cost through change orders, because details about their likely location and size were still being worked out when the bids were being accepted.

“Bidders could not know at the time of bid, which area of Paradise they would be assigned, how many properties would be assigned to the bidder, and therefore the exact size of the workforce that the Government would want housed in a Base Camp,” ECC said.

ECC said it “submitted invoices with supporting documentation in the format requested” by CalRecycle for all expenditures, and was “not aware of any missing invoices.”

“We cannot speak to what EY was provided from the State’s files or how the State provided those materials for EY’s review,” the company said. “Any gap in what EY reviewed should not be interpreted as meaning ECC failed to submit documentation.”

ECC said state officials only ever complimented the company for its work on the 2018 fires. And it said it continues to work in Southern California “with the same professionalism and care we bring to every project.”

SPSG, the second contractor EY flagged as being involved in the base camp change orders, did not respond to a request for comment.

Attorney James F. Curran, who represented the state at trial, said in his closing arguments that the work was not “running perfect” but was coming in on schedule and under budget. He said state officials were not ignoring problems, just cataloging non-pressing issues in order to address them when the dust cleared, as is common in emergency operations.

Curran said many of Larson’s complaints were based on his unfamiliarity with such work and his refusal to trust more experienced colleagues. He said Larson was fired not for flagging concerns, but because of “misconduct, arrogance, communication style problems, and performance problems.”

Gore, the CalOES spokeswoman, said CalRecycle awarded the contracts “through an open, competitive procurement process with oversight from CalOES and FEMA,” and that CalOES worked to address problems with contractors before Larson ever voiced any concerns.

Gore said CalOES hired EY to identify any potential improvements in the contracting and reimbursement process, and changed its policy to pay contractors per parcel of land cleared rather than by volume of debris removed in part to address concerns about potential load manipulation.

She said the agency could not answer other, detailed questions from The Times about the debris removal process and concerns about mismanagement and alleged overcharging because the Larson case “remains pending and subject to appeal,” and because CalOES faces “other, active litigation” as well.

The EY audit also flagged issues with several other contractors, including Tetra Tech and Arcadis, according to draft records obtained from EY by Larson’s attorneys and submitted as evidence at trial.

The EY records said Tetra Tech filed time sheets for unapproved costs, without sufficient supporting information, with questionable or excessive hours, with digital alterations that increased hourly rates, and without proper supervisor approvals. It said it also charged for work without providing any supporting time sheets.

The EY records said the company also used inconsistent procedures for sampling soil and testing for asbestos, used billing rates that were inconsistent between its contract and its invoices, charged for “after hours” work without supporting documentation, filed questionable, per-hour lodging costs, appeared to have digitally edited change orders after they were signed and dated, and relied inappropriately on questionable digital signatures for approving change orders.

Tetra Tech did not respond to a request for comment.

The EY records said Arcadis filed change orders for costs that appeared to be part of the “normal course of business,” filed invoices for work that began before the company’s state contract was signed, and relied inappropriately on digital signatures.

Arcadis referred all questions to CalRecycle. CalRecycle provided a copy of its own “targeted” audit of Arcadis’ work, which found the company had complied with the requirements of its nearly $29-million contract with the state. CalRecycle otherwise referred The Times back to CalOES.

A recovery team searches for human remains after the Camp fire.

(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

North Bay fires

Concerns about cleanup work following major fires in Sonoma, Santa Rosa and other North Bay counties in 2017 — under both CalOES and the Army Corps of Engineers — also arose at the trial.

Sean Smith, a former 20-year veteran of CalOES and a prominent figure in California debris removal operations to this day, alleged in an email submitted at trial that ECC and other contractors hired to clear contaminated debris and soil from those fires over-excavated sites in order “to boost loads to get more tonnage and money.”

ECC denied Smith’s claims, saying it “does not perform excessive soil removal” and that it followed “the detailed debris removal operations plan requirements” of the Army Corps of Engineers, which had its own quality assurance representatives monitoring the work.

In a deposition, Smith also testified that, in the midst of spending more than $50 million to repair that over-excavation, state officials identified lingering contamination at “what would be considered hazardous waste levels.”

“They hadn’t finished the cleanup in all spots, and we found it, and we recorded it,” he said.

Smith testified that those findings were presented to high-ranking CalOES and FEMA officials during a meeting in San Francisco in October 2018. At that meeting, CalOES regional manager Eric Lamoureux laid out all the state’s contamination findings in detail, “but nobody wanted to hear it,” Smith said.

During his deposition, Smith alleged that the “exact words” of one FEMA attorney in attendance were, “We have to find out how to debunk the state’s testing” — which he said he found surprising, given the testing was based on federal environmental standards.

“I don’t know how you’d debunk such a thing,” Smith said.

FEMA officials did not respond to requests for comment. CalOES also did not answer questions about the alleged meeting.

ECC said that Smith, who managed and signed its contracts with CalOES, gave ECC “a very positive performance review” when it completed the Sonoma and Santa Rosa work — describing its work as “exceptional.”

Smith said he quit his post working on those fires after the San Francisco meeting, though he continued working for the agency in other roles for a couple more years. Smith more recently formed his own debris removal consulting firm — which has been involved in soil testing for the state after other recent fires.

CalOES did not respond to questions about Smith’s claims or separation from the agency.

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s Dakota Smith giving you the latest on city and county government during a short week.

When Los Angeles hosted the Olympics in 1984, the San Fernando Valley refused to take part.

Valley homeowners, fearing traffic and development, successfully blocked any Olympic competitions from taking place in the Sepulveda Basin. Environmentalists also objected to using the basin, a 2,000-acre flood plain that’s home to an array of birds.

Business owners, who had hoped for a surge from international visitors, lost out. Many tourists didn’t come across the hill, and some Valley locals stayed home to watch the Olympics on television, rather than shop, The Times reported in August 1984.

Now, the Olympics are coming to L.A. and the Valley, with BMX, skateboarding, 3×3 basketball and modern pentathlon planned for temporary venues at the Sepulveda Basin.

L.A. City Council members and business leaders are planning for a flurry of activity, including Olympics watch parties, youth sports clinics and pin-trading parties where athletes and fans swap pins and other Olympics memorabilia.

They are also hoping that stores, restaurants and other businesses in the Valley can benefit from the Games.

“During ’84, I remember being this young girl in the Northeast San Fernando Valley and feeling completely disconnected [from the Olympics],” said Councilmember Monica Rodriguez at a Greater San Fernando Valley Chamber of Commerce event Thursday.

Rodriguez and four other council members who represent San Fernando Valley neighborhoods (Bob Blumenfield, John Lee, Nithya Raman and Adrin Nazarian) weighed in on Olympics planning and other city issues during the panel, hosted by journalist Alex Cohen. (Councilmember Imelda Padilla, who represents the central and eastern Valley, was absent.)

Rodriguez said her father worked at a Los Angeles Fire Department station near USC and the Olympic Village, and would come home with stories about the festivities.

Blumenfield, whose district includes Reseda, Woodland Hills and Tarzana, recalled sneaking into a men’s gymnastics final in 1984 by walking the wrong way through an exit door. (His seats were very good: actor John Travolta was a few rows in front of him, he told The Times.)

During the 2028 Games, Blumenfield is planning watch parties in his district, with locals and visitors enjoying the Games on a big screen. He hopes visitors will take the G Line to Olympic events at the basin, and stop at stores and restaurants along the way.

“We want the Olympics to be part of the whole city, including the West Valley,” Blumenfield said in an interview.

Resistance to the ’84 Olympics wasn’t isolated to the Valley: Many Angelenos feared traffic from swarms of visitors and the threat of terrorism following the murders of 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team by a Palestinian militant group at the 1972 Munich Summer Games.

Still, the pushback by Valley residents traced to another event: Mayor Tom Bradley‘s effort in 1978 to move the Hollywood Park racetrack from Inglewood to the Sepulveda Basin. Dozens of homeowners and business groups fought the proposal, and Bradley eventually dropped it.

The same opponents coalesced again when Bradley supported swimming, archery, rowing and biking events in the basin.

Renee Weitzer was president of the Encino Homeowners Assn. during planning for the ’84 Games and helped fight the Hollywood Park project. But she later broke with those opponents and backed Olympic venues in the Valley.

Peter Ueberroth, head of the committee that brought the Games to Los Angeles in 1984, also lived in Encino at the time and told Weitzer that the committee couldn’t afford a long fight over Valley venues.

Ueberroth said, “ ‘I don’t have time for this. I am pulling out of the Valley,’ ” Weitzer said in a recent interview.

Ueberroth also claimed that anti-Olympic Valley residents threw poisoned meat to his dogs at his home.

Today, Weitzer thinks the Valley lost a big opportunity to transform the Sepulveda Basin with swimming pools and other venues that the committee would have paid for.

“It would have been fabulous, and it would have served the Valley well,” she said.

Bob Ronka, then a city council member from the northeast San Fernando Valley, led the effort to put a charter amendment on the ballot in 1978 to ensure that taxpayers didn’t foot the bill for the Olympics.

In the end, the ’84 Games generated a profit of more than $250 million dollars.

“He thought it would be a financial disaster for Los Angeles,” said Rich Perelman, former vice president of press operations for the L.A. Olympic organizing committee that Ueberroth chaired.

“So we didn’t put anything [in the Valley]. Why row the boat uphill?” said Perelman, who today runs The Sports Examiner, an online news site dedicated to Olympic sports.

Nor did Bradley want a fight with Valley council members over Olympic venues, recalled Zev Yaroslavsky, who was a council member representing the Westside and part of Sherman Oaks at the time.

“The Valley was left out of any part of the Games,” said Yaroslavsky. “Most people would probably say it was a mistake.”

While the Valley didn’t host any events, Birmingham High School in Van Nuys got a new synthetic-surface running track so Olympic athletes could train. (The school is now called Birmingham Community Charter, and the neighborhood is referred to as Lake Balboa.)

Nailing down venues in the Valley isn’t the only pressure faced by LA28, the private committee paying for and overseeing the Games.

Like other parts of L.A., the Valley today is far more ethnically, racially and culturally diverse than in 1984. Rodriguez, whose district includes Mission Hills, Sylmar and Pacoima — neighborhoods with large Latino populations — has repeatedly questioned whether Latinos will be adequately represented.

LA28’s “Los Angeles” portion of the closing ceremonies and handover event at the Paris Olympics included Billie Eilish, H.E.R., Red Hot Chili Peppers and Snoop Dogg, as well as appearances by Tom Cruise and Olympic athletes, sparking criticism on social media about the lack of Latino participants.

A coalition of Latino and Asian organizations also highlighted the dearth of diversity in a September 2024 letter to LA28 chair Casey Wasserman and Mayor Karen Bass.

At last week’s Ad Hoc Committee for the 2028 Olympics, Rodriguez asked LA28 leaders about the “glaring omission of the Latino community in the flag transfer ceremonies” during the 2024 Paris Games.

“I’ll be damned if that happens again with these Games, especially in light of what our community is going through,” Rodriguez said last week, referring to the recent federal immigration raids in L.A. that have overwhelmingly targeted Latinos.

State of play

— SETBACK FOR TRUMP: Mayor Karen Bass and other California political leaders cheered a federal judge’s decision Tuesday barring soldiers from aiding in immigration arrests and other civilian law enforcement in the state. The 9th Circuit or the Supreme Court could reverse the order.

— UP, UP, AND AWAY?: The price tag for the proposed Los Angeles Convention Center expansion keeps rising and is now an estimated $2.7 billion — an increase of $483 million from six months ago. The project would connect the two existing convention halls with a new building and add massive digital billboards, including some facing the freeways.

—BAD OWNER: City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto announced that the city is settling several lawsuits over alleged illegal short-term rentals and party houses in Hollywood. Among them is Franklin Apartments, a rent-stabilized building that turned 10 units into short-term rentals, and later, an underground hotel.

— MEET THE TRASHERS: Bass launched Shine LA to clean city streets in time for the 2028 Olympics. Meet the San Fernando Valley group whose members — mostly retirees in their 60s and 70s — are already volunteering their time.

— PADILLA TARGETED: A group of residents in City Councilmember Imelda Padilla‘s district on Tuesday filed a notice of their intention to seek her recall. The residents — some of whom have a connection to the Lake Balboa Neighborhood Council — didn’t respond to requests for comment. Padilla’s chief of staff, Ackley Padilla, told The Times that her office is “focused on the work at hand, improving the quality of life in our neighborhoods, keeping our youth, seniors and families safe.”

—GARCETTI REEMERGES: Former Mayor Eric Garcetti, in an email fundraising pitch for U.S. House of Representatives candidate Eileen Laubacher, who is trying to unseat Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, confirmed that he is now a Valley resident after returning from India, where he served as U.S. Ambassador. Garcetti, who spent some of his childhood in Encino, wrote that it’s “great to be home in our house in the San Fernando Valley (where my LA story began).”

Zine exits. Who didn’t see this coming?

Former City Councilmember Dennis Zine last week abruptly withdrew from consideration to serve on the commission tasked with changing L.A.’s charter.

Zine, a former LAPD sergeant who is now a reserve officer, served on a similar charter commission in the late 1990s. He is known as a bomb thrower who regularly skewers some city council members by referring to them as the “Crazy Train” in his CityWatch column.

Zine wrote in CityWatch that he met with two council members, including Ysabel Jurado, ahead of his nomination hearing and concluded that he could not work with a “hostile and anti-LAPD body of elected officials.”

In an interview, Zine said he has no ill will toward Jurado — who is among the council’s most progressive members — and plans to have lunch with her. Other council members relayed to him that the full council wouldn’t support his nomination, Zine said.

“I didn’t want to see a split vote on the council floor,” he said. “I didn’t want to see a dogfight.”

Zine, who represented the West Valley when he was a council member, said he is staunchly against some proposals pushed by advocates, including expanding the size of the City Council.

Blumenfield, who nominated Zine for the commission, mistakenly told him that the appointment didn’t need council approval, Zine said.

Blumenfield said he hadn’t anticipated the “difficult process” and said the former council member would have added “immense institutional memory and experience regarding how the city works.”

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? Inside Safe, Bass’ program to shelter homeless people, visited Skid Row this week, a Bass spokesperson said.
• On the docket next week: The City Council is expected to consider a vote on the Convention Center expansion. On Sept. 10, the council’s Transportation Committee will hear an update on transit plans for the 2028 Olympics.

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.

After Los Angeles police officers shot at people on three consecutive days late last month, the LAPD’s civilian bosses turned to Chief Jim McDonnell for an explanation.

The Police Commission wanted to know: What more could the department be doing to keep officers from opening fire?

But in his response at the panel’s meeting last week, McDonnell seemed to bristle at the notion his officers were too trigger-happy.

“I think what we’re seeing is an uptick in the willingness of criminals within the community to assault officers head-on,” he said at the Aug. 26 meeting. “And then officers respond with what they have to do in order to control it.”

The commission has heaped praise on McDonnell for his performance since taking over the department in November. But the exchange over the recent cluster of police shootings — part of an overall increase that has seen officers open fire in 31 incidents this year, up from 20 at the same point in 2024 — marked a rare point of contention.

Commission Vice President Rasha Gerges Shields told the chief that she and her colleagues remained “troubled by the dealings of people both with edged weapons — knives, other things like that — and also those who are in the midst of a mental health crisis.”

During a radio appearance earlier this year, the chief brushed aside questions about shootings, saying officers are often put into dangerous situations where they have no choice but to open fire in order to protect themselves or the public.

“That is something that’s part of the job unfortunately,” he said. “It’s largely out of the control of the officer and the department as far as exposure to those types of threats.”

Such remarks have left some longtime observers worried that the department is backsliding to the days when department leaders tolerated pervasive and excessive use of force. McDonnell’s defense of aggressive tactics during this summer’s pro-immigration protests, critics argue, sends a dangerous message to the rank-and-file.

The LAPD sits at a “pivotal” crossroads, according to Jorja Leap, a professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

The federal consent decree that followed the Rampart gang scandal of the late 1990s pushed the LAPD into becoming a more transparent and accountable agency, whose leaders accepted community buy-in as essential to their mission, said Leap.

Out of the reforms that followed came its signature outreach program, the Community Safety Partnership, which eschews arrests in favor of bringing officers together with residents to solve problems at some of the city’s most troubled housing projects.

Leap said support for the program has in recent years started to wane, despite research showing the approach has helped drive down crime. “The LAPD has now evolved into an inward-facing organization,” she said.

McDonnell was not available for an interview this week, an LAPD spokeswoman said.

Others faulted the chief for his response to the Trump administration’s immigration raids in Southern California, taking issue with the local police presence at federal operations and the aggressive actions of LAPD officers toward protesters and journalists during demonstrations in June.

Fernando Guerra, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount University, said McDonnell seems unwilling to acknowledge how the sight of riot-gear-clad officers holding off protesters created the impression that police were “protecting the feds and the buildings more than the residents of L.A. who pay for LAPD.”

McDonnell has repeatedly defended his department’s response, telling reporters earlier this year that officers were forced to step in to quell “direct response to immediate, credible threats.”

He also issued an internal memo voicing his support to officers in the Latino-majority department and acknowledging the mixed feelings that some may have about the immigration raids.

After his public swearing-in in November, McDonnell acknowledged how much had changed with the department since he left in 2010, while saying that “my perspective is much broader and wider, realizing that we are not going to be successful unless we work very closely with the community.”

At the time, his appointment was viewed with surprise in local political circles, where some questioned why a progressive mayor with a community organizing background like Karen Bass would hitch her fortunes to a law-and-order chief. Others argued that McDonnell was an appealing choice: A respected LAPD veteran who also served as the chief in Long Beach and later as Los Angeles County sheriff.

After numerous scandals in recent years, McDonnell’s selection for the job was widely seen as offering stability while the city prepared for the massive security challenges of the upcoming World Cup and Olympic Games.

With an earnest, restrained manner, McDonnell has won over some inside the department who were put off by his predecessor Michel Moore’s micromanaging leadership style. After his much-publicized union battles during his tenure as sheriff, McDonnell has courted the powerful Los Angeles Police Protective League by putting new focus on police hiring and promising to overhaul the department’s controversial disciplinary system.

By some measures, McDonnell has also delivered results for Bass. Violent crime numbers continue to drop, with homicides on pace for 50-year lows.

But the two leaders have taken starkly different positions on the White House’s indiscriminate raids and deployment of National Guard troops.

McDonnell took heat during a City Council hearing in June when he described federal law enforcement officers participating in immigration operations as “our partners.”

Andrés Dae Keun Kwon, policy counsel and senior organizer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said that McDonnell’s record on immigration was one of the reasons the ACLU opposed his selection as chief. Since then, Kwon said, the chief seems out of touch with the message of Bass and other local leaders rallying around the city’s immigrants.

“Given that we’re three months into this Trump regime siege of Los Angeles you’d think that the leader of this police department” would be more responsive to the community’s needs, Kwon said.

In a statement, Clara Karger, a spokeswoman for Bass, said that “each leader has a different role to play in protecting Angelenos and all agree that these indiscriminate raids are having devastating consequences for our city,” she said.

McDonnell’s relationship with the Police Commission has been cordial, but several department insiders — who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose private discussions — said that behind the scenes some commissioners have started to second-guess the chief’s handling of disciplinary cases.

The tensions were evident at the recent meeting when the issue of officer shootings led to a public dressing-down of the chief.

Echoing the frustrations of LAPD critics who flood the commission’s meetings on a weekly basis, board members questioned how it was possible that officers needed to fire their weapons on back-to-back-to-back days last month.

Commissioner Fabian Garcia called the three shootings “a lot.”

He and his colleagues told McDonnell they expected the LAPD to present a report on the shootings at a future meeting.

McDonnell responded, “Great, thank you,” before launching into his regular crime and staffing updates.

After 10 months of dissent, protests show no signs of dying down as fury at alleged government corruption grows.

Serbia’s police have fired tear gas and stun grenades at antigovernment protesters in the city of Novi Sad who are demanding snap elections and an end to President Aleksandar Vucic’s 12-year government.

Thousands gathered on Friday at the city’s state university campus for yet another demonstration after 10 months of persistent dissent prompted by the fatal collapse of the Novi Sad train station roof last November, which killed 16 people.

The tragedy became a flashpoint for frustrations with the government, with many Serbians saying it had been caused by alleged corruption and negligence in state infrastructure projects and calling for Vucic’s departure.

“Vucic leave,” the crowds chanted, repeating their calls for early elections as they marched towards the campus, where police attempted to disperse them with tear gas and stun grenades.

The Beta news agency reported that protesters had earlier thrown flares and bottles at the police.

In an address late on Friday evening, President Vucic said that 11 policemen were injured. There was no information on how many protesters have been injured.

“We are not going to allow destruction of the state institutions,” Vucic told reporters. “Serbia is a strong and responsible state.”

He accused foreign security services of being behind antigovernment protesters and said his supporters would hold rallies in cities across Serbia on Sunday.

The months of nationwide protests have largely passed off peacefully, but took a more violent turn on August 13, when dozens of civilians and police officers were injured in clashes in a number of locations.

The violence, which protesters blamed on heavy-handed tactics by government loyalists and police, was repeated on Monday at a march in Novi Sad to mark the 10-month anniversary of the tragedy.

Authorities have rejected allegations of brutality, despite videos showing officers beating unarmed protesters, and accusations that activists were assaulted while in custody.

Students, opposition groups and anticorruption watchdogs accuse Vucic and his allies of ties to organised crime, using violence against political rivals and suppressing media freedoms.

Vucic denies the allegations and has remained defiantly in office at the helm of a reshuffled administration. His nationalist Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) has responded to protests by staging its own rallies around the country.

Federal prosecutors on Thursday sued Southern California Edison over its alleged role in the deadly Eaton fire, a blaze that killed 19 people and destroyed more than 9,000 homes and other structures in Altadena and the surrounding area.

In a civil complaint, prosecutors allege that the Eaton fire was ignited by “faulty power infrastructure or by sparks from faulty power infrastructure owned, maintained, and operated” by Edison.

The results of the official investigation of the fire by the Los Angeles County Fire Department and California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection have not yet been announced. The government’s lawsuit notes that the investigation into the fire remains ongoing.

The government also sued Edison on Thursday for its alleged role in the Fairview fire, which burned near Hemet in 2022. Prosecutors are seeking tens of millions of dollars in damages from Edison, alleging the company’s negligence caused both fires.

Together, the fires burned tens of thousands of acres of National Forest System lands, killed 21 people and destroyed thousands of buildings, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles.

Acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli said “there’s no reason to wait” for the results of the investigation into the Eaton fire. During a Thursday morning news conference, Essayli cited evidence and “Edison’s own statements … that there’s no other apparent cause for the fire.”

“We believe that the evidence is clear that Edison is at fault,” he said. “The reason not to wait is because fire season is coming up again. We want Edison to change the way it does business. It does not maintain its infrastructure in a way to prevent fires. We do not want another fire igniting.”

Essayli stressed that the intention is for the utility company and “not the ratepayers” to bear the burden of the costs.

“Innocent hardworking Californians who pay their electricity bills should not have to pay for Edison’s negligence by incurring higher utility rates,” he said.

Jeff Monford, a spokesman for Southern California Edison, told The Times that the company is reviewing the lawsuits “and will respond through the appropriate channels.” It is “committed to wildfire mitigation through grid hardening, situational awareness and enhanced operational practices.”

In addition, he said, “our thoughts are with the community affected by the Fairview fire. We continue our work to reduce the likelihood of our equipment starting a wildfire.”

Although the cause of the Eaton fire is still under investigation, Monford said, it “was heartbreaking for so many of us who live and work in the Los Angeles area.”

In April, Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of Edison International, the utility’s parent company, said that “a leading hypothesis” of Eaton fire investigators was that a century-old transmission line, last used during the Vietnam War, somehow became reenergized and sparked the fire.

The government’s lawsuit cites a July Edison filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, in which the utility company stated it was “not aware of evidence pointing to another possible source of ignition” for the Eaton fire.

In March, the California Public Utilities Commission fined Edison $2.2 million for the Fairview fire, which killed two people and destroyed 36 homes and other structures in Hemet.

The commission said the utility violated state regulations by failing to cooperate with investigators and not safely maintaining its electrical equipment.

State investigators concluded that the 2022 Fairview fire was ignited when Edison’s equipment came in contact with a cable owned by Frontier Communications.

The government is seeking more than $40 million in damages tied to the Eaton fire. For the Fairview fire, the government is seeking to recover about $37 million in damages incurred by the Forest Service, including approximately $20 million in fire-suppression costs, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in L.A.

“The lawsuits filed today allege a troubling pattern of negligence resulting in death, destruction, and tens of millions of federal taxpayer dollars spent to clean up one utility company’s mistakes,” Essayli said in a written statement Thursday.

“We hope that today’s filings are the first step in causing the beginnings of a culture change at Southern California Edison, one that will make it a responsible, conscientious company that helps — not harms — our community.”

Edison is facing dozens of lawsuits from people who lost their homes or businesses in the Jan. 7 Eaton fire. A study by UCLA estimated that losses from the fire could be $24 billion to $45 billion.

State officials say damage claims from the Eaton fire could wipe out a $21-billion fund California created to shield utilities from the cost of blazes sparked by their electrical lines.

Sept. 4 (UPI) — The Justice Department has asked the Supreme Court to allow President Donald Trump to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission without cause, a direct challenge to a 90-year-old precedent that limits political influence on such agencies.

Trump attempted to fire to Democratic commissioners, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya in March. Both challenged the move, but Bedoya later dropped out of the case.

Solicitor General John D. Sauer said in the most recent court filing that the commission has more power now than it did at its inception, implying support for Trump’s ability to fire Slaughter by exercising his presidential authority under Article 2 of the Constitution.

“In this case, the lower courts have once again ordered the reinstatement of a high-level officer wielding substantial executive authority whom the President has determined should not exercise any executive power, let alone significant rulemaking and enforcement powers,” Sauer wrote.

Sauer asked the high court to expedite the case, sidestepping any more action by lower courts.

Slaughter remains listed as an active commissioner on the FTC’s website.

This move is the latest in a series of efforts by Trump to remove members of other independent federal agencies, which the Supreme Court has approved.

A 1914 law that established the agency said members of independent commission can only be removed from “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

Slaughter was appointed to the commission in 2018. Bedoya was originally appointed by Trump the same year. President Joe Biden re-appointed her in 2024.

The missile attack comes amid Houthi pledges to target Israel-linked shipping over its ongoing war in Gaza.

Yemen’s Houthi movement has claimed responsibility for a missile attack on a tanker in the Red Sea, days after Israeli air strikes killed its prime minister and several senior officials.

The group on Monday said it directly hit the Liberian-flagged Scarlet Ray, which is Israeli-owned, according to the maritime security company Ambrey.

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) agency, which monitors shipping in the region, disputed the claim, reporting the missile missed its target on Sunday.

“The crew witnessed a splash in close proximity to their vessel from an unknown projectile and heard a loud bang,” UKMTO said, adding all staff were unharmed and the tanker had resumed its voyage.

The attack is the latest in a string of Houthi operations in the Red Sea. The group sank two tankers in July and has pledged to continue targeting Israel-linked shipping as part of its declared support for Palestinians and opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

On Saturday, the Houthis announced that Prime Minister Ahmed Ghaleb al-Rahawi and other top officials had been assassinated in Israeli strikes on Thursday. A funeral for the prime minister and other slain officials is scheduled on Monday.

Houthi leader Abdel-Malik al-Houthi hailed them as “martyrs of all Yemen” and accused Israel of “savagery” against civilians. “The crime of targeting ministers and civilian officials is added to the criminal record of the Israeli enemy in the region,” he said.

Tensions escalated further on Sunday when Houthi fighters raided United Nations offices and detained at least 11 staff members, accusing them of espionage.

The UN has rejected the allegations and called for their “immediate and unconditional release”. The group is already holding 23 other UN employees, some since 2021.

In May, Oman brokered a ceasefire between the United States and the Houthis, leading Washington to halt its daily bombing campaign in Yemen. However, Houthi chief negotiator Mohammed Abdulsalam said the agreement does not cover operations against Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to retaliate, warning the Houthis they will “pay a heavy price” for attacks on Israeli territory and shipping.

The Houthis, who control much of northern Yemen, have launched dozens of drone and missile strikes against Israel and its allies since October, disrupting international trade through the Red Sea.

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s David Zahniser, with an assist from Dakota Smith and Julia Wick, giving you the latest on city and county government.

L.A.’s political leaders are facing a daunting and possibly insurmountable deadline. If they blow it, they could face all kinds of headaches — legal, financial and otherwise.

By June 2026, they must show a federal judge that they have removed 9,800 homeless encampments from streets, sidewalks and public rights of way. That means 9,800 tents, cars, RVs and makeshift structures — those created out of materials like cardboard or shopping carts — over a four-year period.

The city’s strategy for reaching that goal has become a huge source of friction in its long-running legal battle with the LA Alliance for Human Rights, which sued the city in 2020 over its handling of homelessness.

In recent months, the encampment removal plan has also become the subject of a second lawsuit — one alleging that the City Council approved it behind closed doors, then failed to disclose that fact, in violation of a state law requiring that government business be conducted in public view.

The encampment removal plan was “drafted and adopted without any notice to the public (which includes the owners of these tents, makeshift encampments, and RVs that the City has agreed to clear), let alone any public debate or discussion,” said the lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles Community Action Network, the homeless advocacy group also known as LA CAN, which is an intervenor in the LA Alliance case.

Lawyers for the city say they followed the Ralph M. Brown Act, which spells out disclosure requirements for decisions made behind closed doors by government bodies. In one filing, they said their actions were not only legal, but “reasonable and justified under the circumstances.”

As with everything surrounding the LA Alliance case, there is a tortured backstory.

The LA Alliance sued the city in 2020, alleging that too little was being done to address the homelessness crisis, particularly in Skid Row. The case was settled two years later, with the city agreeing to create 12,915 new shelter beds or other housing opportunities by June 2027.

After that deal was struck, the city began negotiating with the LA Alliance over an accompanying requirement to reduce the number of street encampments, with quarterly milestones in each council district.

The LA Alliance eventually ran out of patience, telling U.S. District Judge David O. Carter in February 2024 that the city was 447 days late in finalizing its plan. The group submitted to the court a copy of the encampment removal plan, saying it had been approved by the City Council on Jan. 31, 2024.

Two months later, City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto’s office also told Carter that the plan to remove 9,800 encampments, and the accompanying milestones, had gone before the council on Jan. 31.

The council “approved them without delay,” Feldstein Soto’s team said in a filing submitted jointly by the city and the LA Alliance.

Video from the Jan. 31 meeting shows that council members did in fact go behind closed doors for more than two hours to discuss the LA Alliance case. But when they returned, Deputy City Atty. Jonathan Groat said there was nothing to report from the closed session.

The encampment removal plan is a huge issue for LA CAN, which has warned that the 9,800 goal effectively creates a quota system for sanitation workers — one that could make them more likely to violate the property rights of unhoused residents.

At no point during the council’s deliberations did the public have the opportunity to weigh in on the harm that would be caused by seizing the belongings of thousands of unhoused people, said attorney Shayla Myers, who represents LA CAN. Beyond that, she said, the public was never told who supported the plan and who opposed it.

“The narrow exception in the Brown Act that allows a legislative body to confer with their attorneys in closed session was never intended to allow the City Council to shelter these kinds of controversial decisions from public view,” the lawsuit states.

LA CAN now wants a Superior Court judge to force the city to disclose any votes cast by council members on the encampment removal plan. The group also wants recordings and transcripts of those proceedings, as well as a declaration that the city violated the Brown Act in its handling of the matter.

Beyond that, the group alleges that the council violated the Brown Act a second time, in May 2024, by failing to disclose its approval of an agreement with L.A. County — again reached behind closed doors — over the delivery of services to homeless residents.

Assistant City Atty. Strefan Fauble pushed back on LA CAN’s assertions, saying “no settlement or agreement was voted on or approved” by the council on Jan. 31, 2024. In a letter to LA CAN last year, Fauble also said the agreement with the county was not disclosed at the time because it had not been finalized in federal court.

“The City has always complied with its post-closed session disclosure requirements under the Brown Act when a settlement or agreement is final,” he wrote. “It will continue to do so.”

Meanwhile, the fight over the encampment removal plan is getting messier.

Two months ago, Judge Carter spelled out restrictions on the types of tents that can be counted toward the 9,800. In a 62-page order, he said a tent discarded by sanitation workers could be counted toward the city’s goal only if its owner had been offered housing or a shelter bed beforehand.

The city is weighing an appeal of that assertion. In a memo to the council, Feldstein Soto said the judge had “reinterpreted” some of the city’s settlement obligations.

An appeal would be expensive, and Feldstein Soto is already in hot water over legal bills racked up in the LA Alliance case.

On Wednesday, the council balked at Feldstein Soto’s request for a $5-million increase to the city’s contract with the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, LLP, which would include work on an appeal and other tasks. The council sent the request to the budget committee for more review.

Some councilmembers voiced dismay that Gibson Dunn billed $3.2 million in less than three months, after the council had allocated an initial $900,000 for a two-year period.

State of play

— VA VOUCHERS: Los Angeles County housing authorities have more than enough federal rental subsidies to house all of the county’s homeless veterans. Yet chronic failures in a complicated bureaucracy of referral, leasing and support services have left those agencies treading water. About 4,000 vouchers are gathering dust while an estimated 3,400 veterans remain on the streets or inside shelters, The Times reported.

— TAKE THE STAIRS: Could new apartment buildings with only one staircase help solve L.A.’s housing crisis? Councilmember Nithya Raman favors such a change, saying it can be done without sacrificing safety.

— FILM FACTOTUM: More than two and a half years after taking office, Mayor Karen Bass fulfilled a longstanding campaign promise, announcing the selection of a new film liaison between City Hall and the entertainment industry. Steve Kang, president of the Board of Public Works, will serve as the primary point person for film and TV productions looking to shoot in L.A. He’ll be assisted by Dan Halden, who works out of the city’s Bureau of Street Services, and producer Amy Goldberg.

— VALLEY SHUFFLE? City Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who faces term limits next year, told The Times he’s considering a run for state Senate in 2028. If he gets in the race, the former state lawmaker would compete for the North Hollywood-to-Moorpark district currently represented by state Sen. Henry Stern, who faces term limits in 2028.

— PROTESTER PAYOUT: A Los Angeles filmmaker and his daughter were awarded more than $3 million after a jury found Los Angeles County negligent for injuries the man sustained when a sheriff’s deputy shot him in the face with a projectile during a protest against police brutality in 2020.

— CRIME SPREE: Police announced the arrest this week of several alleged gang members accused of burglarizing nearly 100 homes and businesses, largely on the Westside. The suspects are believed to be part of a South L.A. group that called itself the “Rich Rollin’ Burglary Crew” and focused on the theft of high-end jewelry, purses, watches, wallets, suitcases and guns, LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell said.

— OFF THE BUS: Ridership on Metro’s network of buses continued to drop in July, weeks after federal immigration agents began a series of raids across L.A. County. Amid the decrease, Metro’s rail ridership grew by 6.5% over the same period.

— HOUSING WARS: After the L.A. City Council voted to oppose state Sen. Scott Wiener‘s new transit density bill, Councilmember Imelda Padilla joined Wiener and podcast host Jon Lovett (also a vocal supporter of the bill) to debate its merits on Pod Save America’s YouTube channel. The spirited conversation garnered more than 50,000 views, spawned numerous memes and sparked hundreds of replies on the r/losangeles subreddit.

At one point, Lovett appeared shocked when Padilla, who joined seven of her colleagues in opposing Senate Bill 79, boasted of getting a proposed six-story affordable housing project reduced to three stories. Padilla addressed her viral interview during Friday’s council meeting, saying she views the council’s role as one that seeks compromise “between the NIMBYs and the YIMBYs.”

— SHE’S (OFFICIALLY) RUNNING: L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis officially launched her campaign for a proposed new congressional district in southeast L.A. County, offering up a list of heavyweight backers, including Mayor Karen Bass, Sheriff Robert Luna, Supervisor Janice Hahn and civil rights icon Dolores Huerta.

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to combat homelessness went to Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, moving 10 people indoors, according to a Bass aide.
• On the docket for next week: The L.A. County Board of Supervisors will take up a proposed ordinance to streamline the process of rebuilding in Altadena in the wake of the Eaton fire.

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.

At least three people have been killed and several injured in a fire blamed on protesters in Sulawesi island.

At least three people have been killed and five were injured in a fire blamed on protesters at a regional parliament building in eastern Indonesia, as widespread demonstrations rock the Southeast Asian nation.

Indonesia’s disaster management agency, in a statement on Saturday, confirmed the deaths following the Friday evening fire in Makassar, the capital of South Sulawesi province, some 1,600km (994 miles) east of the capital, Jakarta.

“From last night’s incident, three people died. Two died at the scene, and one died at the hospital. They were trapped in the burning building,” the secretary of Makassar city council, Rahmat Mappatoba, told the AFP news agency on Saturday.

He accused protesters of storming the office to set the building on fire.

Indonesia’s official Antara news agency also said the victims were reported to have been trapped in the burning building, while the disaster agency said two of the injured were hurt while jumping out of the building.

Several people injured in the fire are being treated in hospital, officials said.

The fire has since been extinguished.

Indonesia has been rocked by protests across major cities, including Jakarta, since Friday, after footage spread of a motorcycle delivery driver being run over and killed by a police tactical vehicle in earlier rallies over low wages and perceived lavish perks for government officials.

In West Java’s capital city of Bandung, commercial buildings, including a bank and a restaurant, were also reportedly burned on Friday during demonstrations.

In Jakarta, hundreds of demonstrators massed outside the headquarters of the elite Mobile Brigade Corp (Brimob) paramilitary police unit that was blamed for running over motorcycle delivery driver Affan Kuniawan.

Protesters threw stones and firecrackers, and police responded with tear gas as a group tried to tear down the gates of the unit, which is notorious for its heavy-handed tactics.

On Saturday, a local online news site reported that young protesters had massed in Jakarta and were heading to the Brimob headquarters before they were stopped by a barricade.

Police said they had detained seven officers for questioning in connection with the driver’s death. The number of protesters injured in the violence is reported to be more than 200, according to the Tempo news site.

The protests are the biggest and most violent of Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s tenure, and are a key test less than a year into his presidency.

Prabowo has urged calm, ordered an investigation into the unrest, visited the family of the slain delivery driver, while also warning that the demonstrations “were leading to anarchic actions”.

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Many fled when wildfires devastated Los Angeles earlier this year, but Guillermo del Toro rushed back in, determined to save his lifelong collection of horror memorabilia.

It’s the same loyalty that finds him making another tough decision to protect the items he loves like family: letting some of them go.

Del Toro partnered with Heritage Auctions for a three-part auction to sell a fraction of a collection that is bursting at the seams. Online bidding for the first part on Sept. 26 started Thursday and includes over a hundred items, with more headed to the auction block next year.

“This one hurts. The next one, I’m going to be bleeding,” Del Toro, 60, said of the auction series. “If you love somebody, you have estate planning, you know, and this is me estate planning for a family that has been with me since I was a kid.”

Del Toro is one of the industry’s most respected filmmakers, whose fascination with monsters and visual style will shape generations to come. But at his core, the Mexican-born horror buff is a collector. The Oscar winner has long doubled as the sole caretaker of the “Bleak House” — which stretches across two and a half Santa Monica homes nearly overflowing with thousands of ghoulish creatures, iconic comic drawings and paintings, books and movie props.

The houses function not just as museums, but as libraries and workspaces where his imagination bounces off the oxblood-painted walls.

“I love what I have because I live with it. I actually am a little nuts, because I say hi to some of the life-size figures when I turn on the light,” Del Toro told The Associated Press, sitting in the dining room of one of the houses, now a sanctuary for “Haunted Mansion” memorabilia. “This is curated. This is not a casual collection.”

The auction includes behind-the-scene drawings and one-of-a-kind props from Del Toro’s own classics, as well as iconic works like Bernie Wrightson’s illustrations for “Frankenstein” and Mike Mignola’s pinup artwork for “Hellraiser.”

A race to save horror history

In January, Del Toro had only a couple hours, his car and a few helping hands to save key pieces from the fires. Out of the over 5,000 items in his collection, he managed to move only about 120 objects. It wasn’t the first time, as fires had come dangerously close to Bleak House twice before.

The houses were spared, but fear consumed him. If a fire or earthquake swallowed them, he thought, “What came out of it? You collected insurance? And what happened to that little segment of Richard Corben’s life, or Jack Kirby’s craft, or Bernie Wrightson’s life?”

An auction, Del Toro said, gives him peace of mind, as it ensures the items will land in the hands of another collector who will protect the items as he has. These are not just props or trinkets, he said, but “historical artifacts. They’re pieces of audiovisual history for humanity.” And his life’s mission has been to protect as much of this history as he can.

“Look, this is in reaction to the fires. This is in reaction to loving this thing,” Del Toro told the AP.

The initial auction uncovers who Del Toro is as a collector, he said. Upcoming parts will expose how the filmmaker thinks, which he called a much more personal endeavor. The auction isn’t just a “piece of business,” for him, but rather a love letter to collectors everywhere, and encouragement to think beyond a movie and “learn to read and write film design in a different way. That’s my hope.”

A house full of ‘unruly kids’

Caring for the Bleak House collection feels like being on “a bus with 160 kids that are very unruly, and I’m driving for nine hours,” Del Toro said. “I gotta take a rest.”

The auction will give the filmmaker some breathing room from the collection’s arduous maintenance. The houses must stay at a certain temperature, without direct sunlight — all of which is monitored solely by Del Toro, who often spends most of his day there.

He selects the picture frame for every drawing, dusts all the artifacts and arranges every bookshelf mostly himself, having learned his lesson from the handful of times he allowed outside help. One time, Del Toro said, he found someone “cleaning an oil painting with Windex, and I almost had a heart attack.”

“It’s very hard to have someone come in and know why that trinket is important,” he said. “It’s sort of a very bubbled existence. But you know, that’s what you do with strange animals — you put them in small environments where they can survive. That’s me.”

Each room is organized by theme, with one room dedicated to each of his major works, from “Hellboy” to “Pacific Rim.” Del Toro typically spends his entire work day at one of the houses, which he picks depending on the task at hand. The “Haunted Mansion” dining room, for instance, is an excellent writing space.

“If I could, I would live in the Haunted Mansion,” he said. “So, this is the second best.”

Building a mini Bleak House

In selecting which items to sell, Del Toro said he “wanted somebody to be able to re-create a mini version of Bleak House.”

Auction items include concept sketches and props from Del Toro’s 1992 debut film, “Cronos,” all the way to his more recent works, like 2021’s “Nightmare Alley.”

The starting bids vary, from a couple thousand dollars up to hundreds of thousands. One of Wrightson’s drawings for a 1983 illustrated version of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is the highest priced item, starting at $200,000.

The auction also includes art from legends like Richard Corben, Jack Kirby and H.R. Giger, whose work Del Toro wrote in the catalog “represent the pinnacle of comic book art in the last quarter of the twentieth century.”

Other cultural touchstones in illustration that are represented in the auction include rare images from the 1914 short film “Gertie the Dinosaur,” one of the earliest animated films, and original art for Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” by Eyvind Earle and Kay Nielsen.

“As collectors, you are basically keeping pieces of culture for generations to come. They’re not yours,” Del Toro said. “We don’t know which of the pieces you’re holding is going to be culturally significant … 100 years from now, 50 years from now. So that’s part of the weight.”

Luna writes for the Associated Press.

THIS is the terrifying moment a petrol station is engulfed in flames after a devastating fireball blast.

Four people died after a gas cylinder is believed to have caught on fire with footage showing a horror inferno as locals ran for their lives.

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Footage from Dagestan, Russia, shows the gas station up in flames with black clouds of smoke billowing through the air.

As the initial fireball raged on, a second, far more devastating blast erupted as the remaining gas cylinders and pumps all exploded.

Video filmed by a terrified local shows much of the village of Sulevkent in the Khasavyurt district attacked by a bright orange flash as the second blast hits.

The deafening sound of the inferno was met with the sight of debris flying through the air.

Residents who had left their homes to watch the initial explosion were quickly sent running for their lives as the second blast rang out.

The apocalyptic scenes were said to have been visible from several kilometers away, locals said.

Emergency services rushed to the scene to extinguish multiple fires which continued to burn for some time.

Four people were found and rushed to a nearby hospital with severe burns.

They all tragically died from their injuries.

Officials determined the initial explosion was caused by the depressurisation of a gas cylinder during refuelling operations, according to preliminary reports.

The gas station was left decimated alongside the adjacent service station and food vendors.

The Dagestan prosecutor’s office is now conducting an investigation into the incident.

It comes less than a year after another petrol station explosion killed 13 people and injured 23 just outside the Dagistani capital of Makhachkala.

Two children were among the casualties, authorities confirmed.

Horrifying video showed the enormous explosion – which then hurled a fuel tank 1,000ft towards a high rise block.

Locals claimed the blast was so strong that the ground shook like in an earthquake.

In August 2023, a third massive blast at a gas station in Dagestan killed 35 people and injured 115 more.

The fire started at a car repair shop before engulfing the nearby Nafta 24 filling station – sending it up in flames before triggering a giant explosion.

It took firefighters more than three and a half hours to put out the blaze as it spread to an area of 600 square metres, TASS reports.

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Architect Simon Ha was trying to squeeze an apartment building onto a 6,400-square foot lot in Hollywood.

The city of Los Angeles requires two stairways for such buildings, which limited the configurations Ha could use. After racking his brain, he finally came up with a solution.

“It was like designing a Swiss watch,” he said of the 2023 project.

Now, the L.A. City Council is on the brink of allowing just one stairway for buildings of up to six stories, making it easier and cheaper to build on smaller lots — but raising concerns about escape routes in a fire or earthquake.

Councilmember Nithya Raman, who introduced the single stairway proposal with Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, said she wants to speed up development to address the city’s housing crisis and to encourage the construction of apartments big enough for families. And she believes safety needn’t be sacrificed.

“We’re trying to say, ‘How can we build more safely — and build more overall?’” Raman said in an interview.

Los Angeles Councilmember Nithya Raman.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Until recently, New York, Seattle and Honolulu were among the few American cities that allowed single stairways in buildings of up to six stories. Since 2022, amid a nationwide affordable housing crunch, at least 16 cities and states have proposed or enacted single stairway regulations, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts study released in February.

The double stairway rule, in place in California since 1981, makes it harder to build apartments with more than two bedrooms, urban planners and architects said.

Apartments typically have to be laid out along a long hallway, with windows on only one side of each unit, resulting in less light and ventilation, said Stephen Smith, who is executive director of the Center for Building in North America and one of the single stairway’s biggest advocates.

“For small lots in particular, the second stairway can eat up a huge amount of the building’s footprint,” he said.

A single stair layout without a long hallway could mean more room for larger units

Based on design by Simon Ha

Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee LOS ANGELES TIMES

Under state law, L.A. can reduce the number of stairways it requires, as long as it implements other restrictions, such as high-end sprinkler systems. Raman and Yaroslavsky’s proposal for single stairway buildings would limit the number of units per floor to four.

But proponents of double stairways say they are a key safety measure, giving residents two options for fleeing a fire, along with a separate route for firefighters.

Frank Lima, a Los Angeles firefighter and general secretary-treasurer of the International Assn. of Fire Fighters, or IAFF, said the stairways are a life-and-death issue.

“[A single stairway] forces building occupants to go down a stairwell while firefighters go up a stairwell,” Lima said. “That delays fire attack, delays people getting out of a building — when seconds count.”

“When you try to cut corners to save money or make more units, it shouldn’t be at the price of children that die,” Lima said.

The IAFF, which represents firefighters and emergency medical technicians across the U.S. and Canada, has strongly opposed single stairway proposals — “I’d rather call it ‘only one way out,’” Lima said.

On Aug. 20, the City Council voted 13 to 1 to request that city staffers draft a single stairway ordinance.

In a memo to the council, City Planning Director Vincent Bertoni wrote that the single stairway proposal could make a “substantial contribution” to the city’s housing supply.

“The result is that family-sized units — a much needed segment of Los Angeles’ housing stock — are not being produced at the scale required to meet existing and projected needs,” he wrote of the double stairway requirement.

About 14% of rental units in the city are three or more bedrooms, according to the Planning Department.

Zachary Pitts, the Los Angeles director of YIMBY Action, which advocates for more affordable housing, said he had a hard time finding a three-bedroom apartment in downtown Los Angeles.

There were plenty of studios, one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms, but places big enough for his family of four cost a small fortune.

“We ended up buying a single-family home, since a mortgage was lower than the prices we were being quoted,” Pitts said.

Ha, the architect, said that ditching the double stairway requirement could enable developers to produce “East Coast-style” townhouses like those in New York — a contrast to the “podium-style” buildings now going up in L.A., which generally take up a half or whole block.

Ha has designed buildings from San Francisco to San Diego, though most of his work is in Los Angeles, where he is the architect of many micro-apartment complexes, which contain only studios.

Small parcels of 7,500 square feet or less, where a single stairway would make apartments easier to build, often sit empty for long periods, creating “missing teeth” in the city’s layout, Ha said.

Simon Ha stands inside one of two stairways at the Hollywood Premiere Apartments. Architects such as Ha are in support of single stairway reform that would make it easier and cheaper to develop on small lots.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

The Los Angeles Fire Department declined to comment on the single stairway proposal, saying it is under review by the city fire marshal. The councilmembers behind the proposal say the department has been consulted every step of the way.

Raman said she sees “no reduction in fire safety.”

“New fire safety standards in our building code have made it so new buildings are much safer overall,” she said.

Architect Simon Ha shows the two stairways at the Hollywood Premiere Apartments.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

The Pew Charitable Trusts study, co-written and researched by Smith of the Center for Building in North America, found that in New York, the rate of fire deaths in single stairway buildings was the same as in other residential buildings.

“This [double stairway] code originates from when people were cooking with open flames, when there were no sprinklers or fire alarms,” Smith said.

City Councilmember Adrin Nazarian voted yes on the Aug. 20 motion to draft a single stairway ordinance, though he had previously expressed reservations about earthquake safety.

Seattle has single stairways but “less than one-tenth the number of seismic activity we have in our region,” he said during a council meeting.

Councilmember Traci Park was the lone no vote.

“Generally in life, when you have more exits and evacuation routes, things are generally more safe,” she said.

Aug. 29 (UPI) — A federal judge has prohibited the Trump administration from dismissing Voice of America director Michael Abramowitz, handing President Donald Trump a defeat in his effort to dismantle the government-run and federally funded international news organization.

In his ruling Thursday, Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of D.C. stated that the Trump administration cannot fire Abramowitz without approval of the International Broadcasting Advisory Board.

“The applicable statutory requirements could not be clearer: the director of Voice of America ‘may only be removed if such action has been approved by a majority of the vote,'” Lamberth wrote.

“There is no longer a question of whether the termination was unlawful.”

Trump has sought to dismantle Voice of America, a decades-old soft-power tool for the United States that broadcasts news internationally, since returning to the White House in January, stating the broadcaster creates anti-Trump and “radical propaganda.”

On taking office, Trump fired six of the seven International Broadcasting Advisory Board members, and then in March placed Abramowitz and 1,300 other Voice of American employees on administrative leave.

On July 8, the U.S. Agency for Global Media informed Abramowitz that he was being reassigned as chief management officer to Greenville, N.C., and if he did not accept the position, he would be fired.

Before the end of the month, Abramowitz sued.

Then on Aug. 1, USAGM sent Abramowitz a letter stating he would be fired effective the end of this month if he did not accept the Greenville transfer.

The government had argued before the court that Abramowitz’s claims are not valid because he has not yet been fired, and that the rule dictating advisory board approval for hiring and firing a VOA director interfered with Trump’s executive authority.

In response, Lamberth, a President Ronald Reagan appointee, countered that whether USAGM fired Abramowitz or transferred him, he would still be removed from his position without the board’s approval, and if the Trump wished to have a vote on the matter, he could replace the board members he removed.

“To the extent the Board’s current lack of quorum institutes a practical barrier to removing Abramowitz, the Broadcast Act gives the President a straightforward remedy: replacing the removed members,” he wrote.

“The defendants do not even feign that their efforts to remove Abramowitz comply with that statutory requirement. How could they, when the board has been without a quorum since January?”

Southern Brave finished fourth in The Hundred with a four-run win over bottom side Welsh Fire in Southampton.

Chasing 168, Tom Kohler-Cadmore scored 84 from 46 balls, the third-highest score in this season’s competition, but was dismissed on the 98th ball of the innings as Fire fell just short.

Jason Roy powered Brave’s innings, striking 70 from 39 deliveries as the home side closed on 167-7, before Craig Overton had Fire openers Stephen Eskinazi and Steve Smith caught inside the first five balls of the chase.

Kohler-Cadmore, who struck seven sixes and three fours, dragged his side back into contention, putting on an 81-run fifth-wicket partnership with Ben Kellaway.

He cleared the ropes off Jordan Thompson to put his side in the box seat needing seven from three balls, but was bowled from the following delivery.

The Brave all-rounder only conceded singles from his remaining deliveries to close out the match.

The result means both Welsh Fire sides finish bottom of their respective standings, after the women’s side lost to the same opponents earlier in the day.

In the group stage’s final match, Brave lost openers Toby Albert and James Vince in the space of four balls after being put into bat, and saw James Coles bowled by Kellaway for seven to leave them 34-3 shortly after the powerplay.

However, Roy, who twice hit back-to-back sixes in an innings full of powerful strokeplay, put on partnerships of 55 with Leus du Plooy and 38 with Laurie Evans to push Brave towards a strong total.

Roy and Evans fell along with Michael Bracewell for the cost of just two runs as Brave wobbled, but Jordan Thompson and Craig Overton added 38 from the last 18 balls of the innings, runs that would prove decisive.