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California regulators have approved the sale of Cox Communications to cable giant Charter Communications — the final hurdle in a marathon review to clear the $34.5-billion cable consolidation.

With Thursday’s sign-off by the California Public Utilities Commission, the mammoth merger is expected to close next week.

The deal will make Charter’s Spectrum the dominant broadband internet and cable television service in Southern California, with millions of customers scattered throughout Santa Barbara, Bakersfield, Los Angeles, Palos Verdes Estates, Newport Beach, Irvine, Riverside and San Diego.

Charter’s acquisition of Cox, unveiled 15 months ago, will solidify Charter’s status as the nation’s largest cable company, eclipsing Philadelphia-based Comcast Corp., which serves San Francisco and other Northern California communities.

“This transformative deal will benefit millions of consumers who will soon have access to greater value and opportunities to save, including our fully converged mobile-broadband bundle savings guarantee, combined with our industry-leading Customer Commitment and the 100% U.S.-based sales and service employees Spectrum is known for,” Charter said in a statement.

After weeks of behind-the-scenes wrangling, the CPUC voted unanimously to approve two settlement agreements with Charter that allow the merger to move forward. The agency attached conditions that it hopes will protect consumers and expand broadband access.

“This decision secures significant commitments that will benefit Californians through expanded affordable broadband options, major infrastructure investments, improved customer protections, and meaningful support for digital inclusion,” Commissioner Matthew Baker, who helped negotiate the agreements, said in a statement.

Federal regulators approved the deal months ago, as had other state regulators.

“This proceeding was a heavy lift for everyone,” Commissioner Darcie L. Houck acknowledged during Thursday’s hearing, which was held in San Francisco.

Through the settlements, Houck said she hoped Charter would address a disparity in which low-income residents are often stuck with higher phone and internet bills than residents in more affluent areas. Higher-income neighborhoods often benefit from increased competition as multiple providers jockey for business.

“There are many areas of the state that do have low-income communities that are paying higher costs for telecommunication services,” Houck said. “I’m hopeful that the provisions in this settlement agreement will help ensure more equity in pricing.”

Atlanta-based Cox has long been viewed as a lucrative prize. In addition to serving coastal communities in Southern California, it also has customers in growing population hubs such as Las Vegas, Phoenix and Tucson.

To win CPUC approval, the Stamford, Conn.-based cable giant agreed to offer more affordable packages for low-income residents, including several tiers of the California LifeLine service, for up to five years.

Advocates had pushed for a longer commitment.

Charter promised to invest $30 million in education and awareness initiatives in California, including community outreach and digital literacy training. In addition, Charter agreed to spend at least $275 million on upgrades to its equipment in its existing Spectrum service area — including completing a 1-gigabit service buildout — within three years.

The company also must provide free broadband and Wi-Fi service for dozens of eligible community centers, including schools and libraries.

Spectrum will be required to provide automatic bill credits for customers for qualifying service outages that last at least two hours. And the company must honor eligible “price for life” service agreements held by some residential subscribers.

Charter Chief Executive Chris Winfrey has told investors that his firm was aiming to close the merger this month. Several commissioners noted the looming deadline as they opted for the settlement that Baker helped negotiate.

Regulators said the two companies generate more than $10 billion in revenue from their California customers. In addition to serving more than 5 million homes, they also provide telephone service to 1.5 million subscribers in the state.

California regulators have approved Charter’s $34.5-billion purchase of Cox Communications.

(Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)

After the deal closes, Cox customers will be switched to Spectrum service, most likely by mid-September. They should also get SportsNet LA — the Dodgers’ television channel — as part oftheir lineups.

For more than a decade, Cox has refused to carry the channel, owned by the Dodgers organization, due to its high license fee — leading to one of the television industry’s longest blackouts.

Benjamin Bycel, a civil rights attorney, law school dean and university president who took on the task of cleaning up Los Angeles politics as the city’s first ethics officer, died Aug. 2 in Santa Barbara. He was 84.

His son, Josh Bycel, said the death was due to complications from Parkinson’s disease.

Born in Brooklyn in 1942, Bycel moved to Huntington Park when he was 5. The son of a boxing manager and a teacher, he spent much of his childhood accompanying his father to downtown boxing gyms and the Olympic Auditorium. After graduating from Huntington Park High School, he earned a master’s in history from San José State University.

Bycel served with the Peace Corps in Uganda, taught at Manual Arts High School in L.A. and reported for the Associated Press in New York. As a law student at UC Davis, he was a press aide for San Francisco Mayor George Moscone’s campaign for governor of California.

After earning his law degree, Bycel worked as an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union in Sacramento. As a civil rights lawyer in Santa Barbara, he successfully argued a landmark California Supreme Court case, which upheld the right of adults unrelated by blood, marriage or adoption to live together as a family. In 1986, Bycel took on the role of dean for the Santa Barbara and Ventura Colleges of Law, helping steer the ship after the former dean was accused of misappropriating funds.

Five years later, he took on his most high-profile role as founding director of the Los Angeles Ethics Commission.

The Times called it “a Herculean task.” The commission was created in 1990 after a wave of political corruption scandals engulfed Mayor Tom Bradley’s administration. When the City Council initially declined to pass tough anti-corruption laws, voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition H to create an independent watchdog tasked with enforcing a tough new set of regulations governing city officials’ conduct.

“The idea of getting paid to reform the system and make it better is a thrill,” Bycel told The Times when he was selected. He vowed not to “conduct any witch hunts.”

There was controversy from the get-go. In the commission’s first year, The Times reported, investigators raided the offices of City Attorney James K. Hahn after getting a tip that city workers were engaged in political activities. When the district attorney later dropped the investigation, citing lack of evidence, Hahn publicly condemned Bycel.

Zev Yaroslavsky, a former L.A. politician who served then as a City Council member representing district 5, said the new ethics role represented a “dramatic, profound cultural change in municipal government.” Bycel, he said, rose to the occasion.

“Institutionally, he was a new power, a new person with influence over the vitals of elected officialdom, and I thought he did an excellent job,” Yaroslavsky said, noting that Bycel did not go in with guns blazing. “He was very judicious and even-handed and he gave the new institutional credibility out of the starting gate.”

Still, some complained Bycel was a publicity hound, and he made powerful enemies. In 1995, Bycel told The Times that he feared for his job: Mayor Richard Riordan’s new appointee as the ethics commission president, UCLA law lecturer Raquelle de la Rocha, he said, had told him that she had decided he should be fired. De la Rocha denied his claim, but said that she had called a closed personnel hearing on Bycel’s status.

A few weeks later, the commission fired Bycel, taking a vote in closed session. They refused to say why.

“Though outspoken and at times overly aggressive, Bycel has made an important contribution to political reform here in Los Angeles,” The Times said in an editorial. “Under his tenure, the commission staff has worked rigorously to enforce the toughest local ethics laws in the nation, including a gift ban and restrictions on lobbyists.”

Josh Bycel said his father reveled in the challenge of cleaning up L.A. politics and was frustrated by his abrupt ouster.

“Even though he felt he made great progress and they were doing good things, I think he felt that the job was not done … There were forces that did not want him to do the job.”

In 1997, Bycel was appointed president of the University of West Los Angeles, and in 2001 he moved to Washington to serve as the vice president of Common Cause, the national advocacy group. Later, he served as the executive director of the Connecticut Office of State Ethics before moving back to Santa Barbara to practice law.

Bycel died at a memory center in Santa Barbara he had moved into just a few weeks earlier, Josh Bycel said. He was surrounded by his beloved longtime partner, children, grandchildren and dog, he said, in a room filled with photos and quotes of his longtime hero, boxing champion, Muhammad Ali.

“For good or for bad, my dad was a fighter and someone who would speak his mind,” Josh Bycel said, noting that was probably what got him in trouble at the ethics commission. “He always believed that you had to fight the righteous fight.”