southern california

With the blink of an eye, years go by so fast covering high school athletes. It seems like only yesterday Jake Bauers was a senior at Marina High collecting 48 hits with a .571 batting average. Thirteen years later, Bauers has a beard, tattoos and is in his seventh major league season as the first baseman for the Milwaukee Brewers.

The last time I saw him was the Division 1 championship game at Dodger Stadium. His team lost 1-0 to Harvard-Westlake and Jack Flaherty at Dodger Stadium.

Fast-forward to Tuesday afternoon. He’s in the visiting clubhouse at Petco Park preparing to face the San Diego Padres, the team that drafted him in the seventh round in 2017. He’s as levelheaded and as comfortable as he was living in Huntington Beach. He has 21 home runs this season. Not bad for someone who didn’t get to play varsity baseball until his junior season.

Wearing No. 11 on her cheek at Marina games was his girlfriend, Lauren Carr, now his wife and mother of his two children.

“Same one,” he said of his biggest fan.

Not playing varsity until junior year is now considered a little unusual for top players, but Bauers said it’s nothing to think deeply about.

“We had a good team,” he said. “Maybe it was frustrating at the time. In hindsight, it doesn’t really matter. If you’re a good player, you’ll keep playing.”

The Brewers can call themselves the best team with the most Southern California natives. Trevor Megill, a high school teammate of Bauers, joins Joey Ortiz (Garden Grove Pacifica), Brice Turang (Corona Santiago), Garrett Mitchell (Orange Lutheran) and Christian Yelich (Westlake) as the SoCal group.

“We got a lot of guys from Southern California,” Turang said. “It’s cool. A lot of guys played against each other in high school.”

The Brewers also drafted in the last two years the Ebel brothers from Corona, Brady and Trey, so when they make visits to Dodger Stadium, it’s a big deal.

“Crazy,” Turang said of the Southern California players getting asked for tickets.

Bauers, 30, certainly hasn’t lost his passion for fun. He was playing two Brewers in a video game before heading out to the field.

He said people change as they get older.

“Years of experiences, you gain perspective if you’re willing to look at yourself,” he said.

Turang was asked what high school kids today need to do to succeed in their journey to major league baseball.

“You have to practice every day. This doesn’t come easily,” he said.

Television City, one of the most famous studios in the entertainment industry where generations of TV shows have been created, is expected to hit the market again as its owner grapples with debt.

It’s the latest sign of distress in Hollywood as the film and TV industry struggles from a sharp falloff in production activity across Southern California.

Television City’s owner, Hackman Capital Partners, is already in the process of selling the historic Radford Studio Center, which gave L.A.’s Studio City neighborhood its name. Hackman defaulted on a $1.1-billion mortgage in January and investment bank Goldman Sachs took over the property, which is now escrow for a sale to Netflix.

The sprawling Television City property is one of the most desirable locations in Los Angeles, sharing fences with the Original Farmers Market and the luxury Grove outdoor shopping center, each of which attracts millions of visitors every year.

If the studio at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue where “American Idol,” “All in the Family” and scores of other shows were filmed becomes available as expected, the owners of the Grove and the Farmers Market would be among the likely contenders for the property for potential expansion of their businesses, said sources familiar with the matter who were not authorized to comment.

Grove owner Rick Caruso was among the bidders for Television City, formerly known as CBS Television City, last time it was on the market and could emerge as a possible bidder.

The highest bid when broadcaster CBS sold the studio in 2019 came from Hackman Capital Partners, an international movie studio operator and commercial property landlord that paid $750 million for the 25-acre site that is near Hollywood, Beverly Hills and and the Sunset Strip.

Hackman Capital’s plan to recoup its investment included continuing to operate Television City as a studio for rent while adding new revenue-generating features.

Last year the city approved Hackman Capital’s $1-billion plan to add 980,000 square feet of offices, sound stages, production facilities and retail space.

The original studio designed by famed Los Angeles architect William Pereira erected in 1952 has city landmark protections, but newer structures on the property do not and there are acres of surface parking that could be converted to other uses.

Both Caruso and Farmers Market owners A.F. Gilmore have sued to limit the planned expansion of the studio, calling it a “massively scaled” development that “would overwhelm, disrupt, and forever transform the community.”

The debate over the development has played out amid a serious downturn in the region’s entertainment industry, with studios shifting film and television production to Georgia, New Mexico and other out-of-state locations.

L.A.’s entertainment industry also suffered a series of blows including the COVID-19 shutdown, strikes by writers and directors in 2023 and cutbacks at studios that reduced demand for sound stages.

A group of Hackman Capital’s lenders led by Deutsche Bank filed a notice of default last month, saying they’re owed more than $357 million. Hackman Capital is still trying to renegotiate its debt.

“The studio market is evolving, and the financing environment for studio assets remains complex,” Chief Executive Michael Hackman said in a statement. “We are engaged in active discussions with our lending partners and are carefully evaluating all of the alternatives.”

A person familiar with the process but not authorized to speak about it publicly said Hackman Capital will be hard-pressed to pay its debt in light of challenges facing the industry. The notice of default is “the baby step to put Television City in play” for new buyers, the source said, “and it is in play.”

Already in play is Manhattan Beach Studios, another Hackman Capital property encumbered by a $240-million loan from Deutsche Bank that the lender is in the process of selling. A buyer could foreclose on the property and potentially change its use to advanced manufacturing such as aerospace or defense, which is in high demand in Southern California.

Brokerage Cushman & Wakefield, which is managing the sale, emphasized in marketing materials that the 22-acre site has “significant available power capacity” and “offers flexible uses” on “some of the most irreplaceable underlying land in the South Bay.”

For my 50th birthday, I bought a Toyota Corolla. Wait. Is my midlife crisis car really a Corolla, the best selling and most boring model of all time?

Well, yes. And no.

I have “modded” it, or in layman’s terms, modified the stock components and tuned the engine. This is not your aunt’s Corolla. When I hit the gas, the car pulls hard and the engine buzzes as if it’s powered by a hive of killer bees.

I get thumbs-ups from Mustang drivers and cool head nods from Challenger owners. My favorite is when kids at red lights ask me to rev the engine like I’m F1 driver Lewis Hamilton.

Probably a lot of my drive-by admirers are fans of the movie “The Fast and the Furious,” which was released 25 years ago this month. Fans of modified Japanese import cars, like me, have a love-hate relationship with the $7 billion “Fast and Furious” franchise. On one hand, the movies helped popularize modified Japanese cars. People all over the world fell in love with them and the import car culture they publicized.

On the other hand, the movies left out so, so much of the story.

In Southern California in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, people lived, for the most part, phone-free. The internet was nascent — a repository for flyers and ’zines — and most websites looked like Tetris.

The fashion was baggy everything for guys and short shorts, midriffs and little backpacks for girls. The hair was outrageous. And the cars, especially Japanese import cars, had reached the pinnacle of automotive engineering.

During this era, I was in college at UCLA. I saved up and bought a red 1989 Honda CRX Si. It also had a slick five-speed manual transmission, peppy engine and nimble steering. That car got me to work and through college, and from the mountains of California to the border of Oregon. It probably helped me get girlfriends. It consoled me through breakups. It helped me move to the San Francisco Bay Area for my first grown-up job.

And then, stupidly, I sold it, and all the precious memories it carried.

Now when I hit a loopy freeway interchange at night and my GR Corolla carves through the turns, it’s 1996 and I’m cruising in my CRX, getting pho in San Gabriel or rushing to a flyer party at Naga in Long Beach. That’s the magic of certain cars. A regular car takes you from place to place. A special car takes you back in time.

To be completely honest, I bought the CRX to fit in.

The ’90s import car scene was as diverse as Southern California. But there’s no doubt it started with Asian Americans (specifically Japanese Americans in the South Bay city of Gardena) who were influenced by modified car culture in Japan. Soon, Asian American kids all over the region were taking their inexpensive, underpowered four-cylinder, front-wheel-drive Honda Civics (our parents preferred Japanese reliability over American muscle) and turning them into street rockets.

Not only were they building race cars from scratch, they were also building one of my first experiences with a collective Asian American identity: one that wasn’t overtly about politics and activism, or immigration and assimilation. It was about Asian American joy. It was Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino and Vietnamese Americans building cool-looking, fast cars. It was kids stereotyped as nerds going to parties where the awful stereotype of Long Duk Dong from “Sixteen Candles” was shredded into rubber and obliterated by exhaust blasts.

At the time, the Asian Americans we saw in the mainstream media were negligible or offensive, especially for Vietnamese Americans like me. But in import car culture, I saw, for maybe the first time, Asian guys and Asian girls in a centered and even glamorous light.

We made our own cars and our own car shows. We raced each other and then got fast (with turbos, superchargers and nitrous oxide) and raced others. And we won. We published our own magazines, built our own automotive businesses and, for good and bad, promoted our own outlaw street racer image and our own beauty standard. In those 1990s clubs and car shows, you could see and feel that Asian Americans weren’t assimilating culture. We were creating it.

“The Fast and the Furious” picked up on that. Based on a 1998 Vibe magazine article about street racing import cars in New York, the film was transplanted to Southern California. But it got so many details glaringly wrong. Its street races looked like street raves on major, four-wide roads packed with pedestrians. The races of our scene were clandestine, underground events in industrial, under-policed areas, where cars faced off two at a time.

But the most egregious and inexcusable Hollywood crime to me is that “The Fast and the Furious” whitewashed Asian Americans, the creators of this world, out of starring roles. The Korean American actor Rick Yune appears in the movie, sure — but he plays the villain, Johnny Tran, a guy who hates Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto for a crime deal gone bad (understandable) and for sleeping with his sister (ditto). Of course, in a tradition that goes back to “Madame Butterfly” and “Miss Saigon,” Tran dies at the end, shot dead by the blond-haired, blue-eyed hero, Paul Walker’s Brian O’Conner.

A few months ago, seeking a mechanic to mod my Corolla, I was referred to an auto shop in Garden Grove aka Little Saigon. The guy who sent me asked me, “Do you even know who’s working on your car?”

“No,” I replied.

He told me the name, and I Googled it.

Apparently, back in the ’90s, this Vietnamese American mechanic from Orange County had one of the fastest Honda Civics in the world. A true OG of the import car scene modified my car with his own hands. What an honor, and what a connection to the past.

This import car story ends in a full poetic justice circle. As a pioneer and legend of the real-life import car scene, my mechanic wasn’t the villain. He was the hero. He was the fastest, and his car was the most furious.

That’s the heart of my GR Corolla journey. Asian Americans created import car culture. We all deserve to be the hero of our own story.

Ky-Phong Tran is a Vietnamese American writer from Long Beach. He is a professional artist fellow with the Arts Council for Long Beach. This article was produced in partnership with Zócalo Public Square.

A month away from its closure, onetime gambling oasis Primm, Nev., located along the state border with Southern California, has a new lease on life.

The Primm family, owners of the land that includes three casino resorts and other businesses along the 15 Freeway, announced Tuesday a partnership intended to save the struggling state-line strip and hundreds of jobs.

The deal allows Las Vegas-based Terrible’s, owned by the Herbst family and perhaps most famous for a string of gas stations and convenience stores, to operate the properties.

“What we saw with them is the same energy that we had in rebuilding Primm,” said Cory Clemetson, describing the new deal with Terrible’s in an interview with The Times. Clemetson is president of Primm South Real Estate Co. and a grandson of Primm founder Ernie Primm, who made a name for himself in Southern California in the 1930s and ’40s with his Gardena card rooms.

In the summer of 2025, signage blocks an entrance at Primm Mall, a once-popular site along with the trio of casinos at the California-Nevada state line.

(Bridget Bennett / For The Times)

“Primm has long been one of Nevada’s most recognizable destinations,” said Tim Herbst, president of Terrible’s, in a statement. “This partnership reflects our commitment to preserving that legacy while creating new opportunities for growth, investment, and tourism for decades to come.”

Terrible’s takes over for Affinity Gaming, owned by private equity company Z Capital Partners, in the full-circle world of southern Nevada gaming. In 2010, Herbst Gaming declared bankruptcy and saw Primm taken over by Z Capital Partners.

An email to representatives for Affinity Gaming was not immediately returned.

The process for the return of Terrible’s to Primm kick-started May 5, when Affinity confirmed the closure of Primm Valley Casino Resorts.

Affinity’s subsidiary, Primadonna Co. LLC, sent termination notices to more than 300 employees effective July 4.

The closure was devastating, Clemetson said.

“It felt like a gut punch,” he said. “I mean, you’ve got to be kidding me that they would announce something like that for the Fourth of July. Laying off in excess of 300 Nevadans who are mostly paycheck to paycheck with nowhere to go didn’t sit well with my family.”

Primm Valley was the last of three resorts built between 1977 and 1994 at the site that remained in full operation.

Buffalo Bill’s, the largest of the three resorts, closed 24-7 operations in July 2025, after Whiskey Pete’s, the original casino, shuttered in December 2024.

Affinity Gaming declined multiple requests from The Times to speak about Primm’s struggles.

In a letter presented at a Clark County Board of Commissioners meeting, Erin Barnett, Affinity’s vice president and general counsel, wrote in October 2024 that “traffic at the state line has proved to be heavily weighted towards weekend activity and is insufficient to support three full-time casino properties.”

Scott Butera, Affinity’s chief executive and president, offered a few comments about the closure at the May 21 Nevada Gaming Commission meeting.

“As a tenant with a difficult lease and an expensive property and increased competition every day in California … it just became a very difficult thing,” he said, “and we’ve been losing money for years there.”

Clemetson said that Affinity asked for help over the years, such as potential rent reductions, but that the Primm family was unaware of Affinity’s finances.

As for the future, Clemetson said Terrible’s was in the process of reacquiring a gaming license for Primm, which he hoped would happen in the next three weeks.

He also said it was the goal of the Herbst and Primm families to try to keep all workers who received a termination notice employed.

Clemetson said he was excited about Primm’s future under Terrible’s and chalked up its bankruptcy in 2010 to the Great Recession.

“They suffered a similar fate of many big brands like MGM and Caesar’s,” Clemetson said.

“They’re very well thought of in Nevada and they’re a very successful family who’s done well,” he added.

Speaking of Primm’s chances of regaining its former glory, Clemetson reached back into his own past as a young sports agent for players on the L.A. Galaxy soccer team.

“I can’t tell you how many people told me I was dumb to get involved representing soccer players because soccer would never make it here,” he said. “Now, Major League Soccer has a few franchises over a billion dollars.”

As for Tim Herbst and his family, “we believe Primm’s best days are still ahead.”

WASHINGTON — The congressman returned home last Fourth of July to startling stories in Southern California as immigration patrols swept through communities, and one constituent told him about starting to carry a passport as proof of the right to be in the country.

Rep. Mark Takano, whose American-born parents were both incarcerated as young children with their families during the forced relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II, could not help but see the parallels between that chapter of American history and this one.

“I do feel like there’s a similarity of circumstance of my own 2-year-old father and my 1-year-old mother being labeled as enemy aliens and they’re considered a danger to national security,” the Riverside Democrat told the Associated Press in a recent interview.

“They’re put into these incarceration camps,” he said. “Similar arguments have been made by this administration — that immigrants pose a grave danger to our country and it’s for the security of our country that we’re doing this.”

Echoes of history

President Trump’s campaign to achieve the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history is at an inflection point. Americans are seeing what it looks like to round up, detain and deport thousands of people, particularly in the aftermath of the deaths this year of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, U.S. citizens protesting the federal crackdown in Minneapolis.

The White House changed the leadership at the Department of Homeland Security as it reframes its approach. New Secretary Markwayne Mullin promised to keep the department off the front pages.

But Trump is also under mounting pressure from conservative groups not to let up on the goal of deporting 1 million people a year. The president’s Republican allies in Congress are fueling the immigration and deportation actions with billions of dollars in special funds.

Takano, the ranking Democrat on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, has drawn from his own family history — and the country’s eventual redress to Japanese Americans who were detained — to challenge Trump’s approach.

“We look back on that era of history as a shameful one, as a time when our political leaders failed the Constitution, failed the American people,” he said.

One family’s story among many

A high school history teacher before being elected to Congress in 2012, Takano grew up in Southern California and came to understand the family stories.

His grandfather Isao Takano arrived in the U.S. from Hiroshima and married Kazue Takahashi, a U.S.-born citizen. Together they settled in Bellevue, Wash., and started a business growing tomatoes, strawberries and chrysanthemums for the marketplace in Seattle.

When the U.S. entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they were among some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, immigrants and those born in the U.S., forcibly relocated.

His father, William, was 2 years old when his family was sent in 1942 to the incarceration camp at Tule Lake in Central California. His mother, Nancy Tsugiye Sakamoto, born in California to American-born parents, was a year old when she was relocated to the detention facility in Heart Mountain, Wyo.

Then, as now, he said, people are being swept up in the anti-immigrant detentions.

“Will Americans generations from now visit ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ and think to themselves, how could our government do this?” Takano said during a House floor speech, referring to the Trump administration’s immigration detention facility in Florida.

“These future generations of Americans will look to us, the Congress, to see what we did to try to stop it.”

A Reagan-era law seen as model

Takano remembers his father taking him to see the land the family once owned. He learned about his great-uncles who served in the Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team of Japanese American soldiers; one was killed in action in Italy. He recalls his own father later collected donations for the national redress campaign.

In 1988 Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, which sought to apologize for the “grave injustice” that had been done and provide $20,000 to each person detained. President Reagan signed it into law.

Takano’s parents were among those who received a letter of apology from the federal government, he said, and a payment.

Talks are underway among some in Congress, he said, for a similar redress to the people who have had their car windows smashed in, their homes raided and livelihoods upended as part of Trump’s immigration enforcement operations.

“Remarkably the country did come to realize the mistake,” he said. “I believe we’re living through one of those eras of mistakes, and I believe we can come out of this moment stronger.”

Mascaro writes for the Associated Press.

As someone who has been covering high school baseball championship games in Southern California for six decades, the pitching performance seen on Friday night by Julian Garcia of St. John Bosco moves into the top five, if not a share for No. 1.

Garcia struck out 14, walked none and surrendered only a first-inning double to Codey Brown in a 2-0 victory over Norco in the Southern Section Division 1 final at Cal State Fullerton. His fastball was reaching 95 mph. He was blowing fastballs past top hitters all night.

Probably the No. 1 pitching performance continues to be Bret Saberhagen of Cleveland in the 1981 City Section championship game at Dodger Stadium when he threw a no-hitter against Palisades.

Others that come to mind:

No pitcher has been as overpowering as Garcia was under the lights. And he needed to be near perfect to beat Norco pitcher Jordan Ayala, who also was outstanding.

What a memory to add to Southern California’s great pitching moments in championship games.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.

The number of high school baseball and softball teams in Southern California not wanting to participate in the regional playoffs next week continues to grow. The question is: Next season, when there are state championships held in the two sports, will there be fewer opt outs?

“I would think so,” said Brian Seymour, associate executive director of the CIF.

The City Section Open Division baseball champion, Birmingham, and runner-up, El Camino Real, both passed on the regional playoffs. Three of the four Division 1 semifinalists — Norco, Harvard-Westlake and Sherman Oaks Notre Dame — also opted out. In Southern Section softball, the two Division 1 finalists, JSerra and La Mirada, are ending their seasons on Friday.

Travel ball begins in June, and that’s the big roadblock for softball, with many coaches and players participating. Next season, the state championships would be held the first weekend of June, the same dates as this year’s regional finals, so solving the softball dilemma remains uncertain.

“We’ve heard the comment from a number of different coaches [that] once we go to a state tournament, they were more inclined to make it work,” Seymour said. “Softball may take a little longer to come around. The power of representing your community and school is a little bit more than playing for your fifth travel team.”

But players invest thousands of dollars in club softball and coaches make good summer money in travel ball.

Seymour said multiple sites are under consideration in Southern California and Northern California to host the state championships.

He’s hopeful both will catch on like swimming did when the CIF first had state championships.

“We have everybody in swimming now, where the first year was hit and miss,” he said.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.

A coalition of conservation groups wants Southern California to get 85% of its water locally, up from the 50% it gets now, by 2045, and says a new plan shows how.

It’s urging state leaders to scrap plans for a 45-mile tunnel beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and consider asking voters to approve a bond measure to fund local water solutions. The 34-page strategy was released as critical decisions loom for local officials, California’s next governor and legislators.

Over the last century, Southern California has grown and thrived thanks to giant aqueducts it built to bring water from hundreds of miles away — the Eastern Sierra, the Colorado River and Northern California.

But with water costs rising and climate change jeopardizing these distant sources, there is growing interest in finding ways to get more water locally.

The allied groups are calling for recycling more wastewater, capturing more stormwater, improving efficiency and cleaning up contaminated groundwater.

“We have to prioritize our investments, and prioritizing them in local water makes the most sense,” said Bruce Reznik, executive director of the group Los Angeles Waterkeeper.

The coalition includes fishing groups, environmental organizations and Northern California’s Winnemem Wintu Tribe.

Its plan calls for a “new urban water renaissance” in California that prioritizes local water. This approach would reliably yield more and cost far less than Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed Delta Conveyance Project beneath the Delta.

The state estimated in 2024 the tunnel would cost $20.1 billion, but opponents say it could cost three to five times more.

“Local water is reliable, it’s more affordable, and it’s more flexible, so that we’re not committing California ratepayers to higher bills that they don’t need,” said Kyle Jones, a water expert and consultant who helped prepare the plan for the coalition.

Southern California imports about half of its water from other regions.

The coalition’s plan says the region can secure up to 2 million acre-feet of local water per year. It estimates the costs of more conservation and efficiency, more stormwater and groundwater cleaning, and more water recycling at $44 billion over two decades. The Delta tunnel, in contrast, could cost $60 billion to $100 billion, it says.

Whether the tunnel project is ultimately built may hinge on whether large water agencies, including the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, decide to participate and pay for it.

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1. Cranes rise above the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys. 2. When completed, Los Angeles will nearly double recycled water for 500,000 residents. 3. Storage tanks sit behind a fence before being placed in the ground at the plant. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

“Metropolitan Water District really does have a significant choice on it, that not just impacts their ratepayers but impacts every single person in the state,” said Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, executive director of the group Restore the Delta. “Are we going to spend $20, $60, maybe upward to $100 million on a tunnel? Or are we going to invest significant money in local solutions that provide water resiliency and sustainability for everyone in California? That is what is at stake right now.”

The Metropolitan Water District already is planning a large new facility in Carson to transform wastewater into purified drinking water. Los Angeles and San Diego are also building water recycling plants.

“At the same time, water imported from the northern Sierra and the Colorado River provides the foundation of water supply reliability for Southern California,” said Shivaji Deshmukh, the MWD’s general manager.

He noted that the MWD invests in water efficiency and capturing stormwater, and has helped reduce per-person water use by more than 40% since 1990.

The agency’s 38-member board last year adopted a climate adaptation strategy that sets goals for lining up additional water.

Los Angeles city leaders and L.A. County supervisors have also set goals for becoming more locally self-sufficient.

The advocates who wrote the policy plan said these efforts should accelerate and expand. They pointed out that the Colorado River’s reservoirs are falling to perilously low levels, and native fish in the Delta are in decline as the pumping of water takes an ecological toll.

“Climate change is exacerbating the challenges in those ecosystems, meaning that less and less water will be available to import,” said Ashley Overhouse, water policy advisor for the group Defenders of Wildlife. “All the while, the cost of water is continuing to rise.”

About 20 other environmental groups endorsed the coalition’s strategy.

“We have got to do a better job in the next 100 years than we did in the last 100 years, if we truly want to create a place of abundance once again,” said Frankie Myers, a member of the Yurok Tribe in Northern California. “This idea that we can steal … and divert water however we want with no consequences has got to end.”

Construction continues at the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys in October 2025.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

Benjamin Bass, a UCLA scientist who studies how climate change is affecting the Colorado River and other water sources, joined the group as they presented their proposal in an online briefing.

“Traditional sources for imported water are less reliable than they used to be,” Bass said. “The most reliable source of water in the future is local water.”

Other experts have reached similar conclusions.

Researchers at the Pacific Institute, a water think tank in Oakland, have examined improvements such as fixing leaks in pipes, switching out inefficient washing machines and toilets, and replacing thirsty lawns with plants suited to the state’s Mediterranean climate.

In a 2022 report, they found that a set of standard practices and technologies could reduce total urban water use by 30% or more.