Tottenham‘s Djed Spence a target for Juventus, Real Madrid put Mauricio Pochettino on managerial shortlist, Liverpool consider move for French winger Moussa Diaby.
Liverpool are giving serious thought to signing 26-year-old Al-Ittihad and France winger Moussa Diaby, with the former Aston Villa man keen to leave the Saudi Pro League club this summer. (Teamtalk), external
Real Madrid have the USA head coach and former Tottenham boss Mauricio Pochettino on the shortlist of candidates to replace Alvaro Arbeloa in the Bernabeu hot seat ahead of next season. (ESPN), external
Argentina midfielder Alexis Mac Allister, 27, is not planning to hold talks with Liverpool over a new contract this summer but is happy at Anfield despite links with Real Madrid. (Mundo Deportivo – in Spanish), external
West Ham striker Callum Wilson has verbally agreed terms on a new one-year contract despite Celtic’s interest in the 34-year-old Englishman. (Sky Sports), external
In the same bracket as Fernandes is Semenyo. Keeps starting, keeps scoring.
Every Manchester City player carries a slight question mark as they enter a period that also involves Newcastle away in the FA Cup, two legs against Real Madrid and the Carabao Cup final against Arsenal.
But it’s also impossible to second-guess Pep Roulette so start Semenyo with confidence – Fernandes is my vice-captain if he doesn’t play.
Another player returning from gameweek 28’s team and, at this price, how can you resist?
A team-high four shots last week and a big chance created, Tavernier ended up with bonus points and an assist.
He has a lot of routes to points for a £5.3m midfielder and faces a Brentford side that conceded three – and should possibly have been more – at Burnley.
KDH is the forgotten budget gem after his long injury, but he’s got three returns in four games and is always a good shout for defensive contribution points.
This home match against Burnley is too good to pass up.
Death in Paradise detective Mervin Wilson was kidnapped in a cliffhanger after travelling to Antigua to visit his brother Solomon
Has Mervin Wilson been kidnapped?(Image: BBC)
In the latest episode of Death in Paradise, Detective Mervin Wilson (portrayed by Don Gilet) revealed he was taking a temporary leave from Saint Marie.
After cracking another case with his team, Mervin decided to take his colleague Naomi Thomas’s (played by Shantol Jackson) advice and travel to Antigua to visit his brother, Solomon (Daniel Ward).
Mervin’s relationship with his brother got off on the wrong foot when Solomon raided his shack and nicked his belongings. Following this incident, Solomon returned to Antigua, leaving Mervin uncertain if they would ever cross paths again.
However, towards the end of Friday’s episode, Mervin informed Naomi that he wouldn’t be at work the next day as he was heading for Antigua.
“DS Thomas, I am just letting you know I won’t be coming in tomorrow,” Mervin announced over the phone, reports the Express.
For the latest showbiz, TV, movie and streaming news, go to the new **Everything Gossip** website.
“I am actually taking your advice as it goes, I am going to see Sol. Yeah, well, I mean, I don’t even know if he wants to see me, but hey, what is the worst that could happen?”
Immediately after, Naomi rushed to inform her colleagues, expressing worry about the detective.
“Sir,” Naomi said urgently, to which the Commissioner (Don Warrington) responded, “DS Thomas, what is it?”
“I think something has happened to the inspector,” she added.
The episode ended on a cliffhanger, with Mervin bound and kidnapped by an unknown assailant – but who could be responsible?
“What the hell is going on?” The detective demanded as he attempted to escape.
As he glanced up, it seemed Mervin recognised who his abductor was as he raged, “You!”
Death in Paradise is available to stream on BBCiPlayer.
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Today it’s an Italianate apartment building wedged between an Indian restaurant and a Target. But what stood half a century ago at 1454 5th Street in downtown Santa Monica was the Beach Boys’ Brother Studio, a former porn theater turned recording complex where the preeminent American rock band of the 1960s sought to coax its resident genius, Brian Wilson, back into the fold after a long stretch in the wilderness.
Nobody would consider the albums the Beach Boys made at Brother in the mid-70s — among them “15 Big Ones,” “The Beach Boys Love You” and the long-shelved “Adult/Child” — the band’s most successful. (Well, nobody except for Wilson, who frequently cited the synthed-up “Love You” as his fave.) A decade after 1966’s “Pet Sounds,” which so blew the Beatles away that they had to answer with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the burly, bearded Beach Boys were far from the center of pop music; Wilson, in particular, had largely withdrawn from public life as he struggled with the effects of drugs and his fragile mental health.
Yet Brother offered the setting for a creative reflowering — arguably the band’s final moment of unity before the start of years of more serious infighting.
“It was like we all got back together and became Beach Boys again,” says Al Jardine, who founded the group in suburban Hawthorne in 1961 with Wilson, Wilson’s brothers Dennis and Carl and the Wilsons’ cousin Mike Love. Now, eight months after Brian Wilson’s death in June at age 82, a new box set looks back at the era as an expressive outpouring led by the band’s rejuvenated visionary.
“We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years” collects 73 tracks from 1976 and ’77, including outtakes, demos, a remastered version of the “Love You” LP and the first official release of the widely bootlegged “Adult/Child,” which puts Wilson’s touchingly emotive singing amid orchestral arrangements in a glossy big-band style. Among the set’s highlights are a voice-and-piano rendition of “Still I Dream of It,” which, according to legend, Wilson wrote in the hopes that Frank Sinatra would perform it, and a majestic take on “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” that shows how brilliant a record-maker Wilson remained despite all the well-documented turmoil.
“Brian was healing from his personal life, and he was ready to go in the studio again,” says Jardine, 83, whose latest tour with the members of Wilson’s road band will stop Friday night at L.A.’s United Theater on Broadway for a complete performance of “The Beach Boys Love You.” With quirky but heartfelt tunes about Wilson’s daughter Carnie (“I Wanna Pick You Up”) and Johnny Carson (uh, “Johnny Carson”) — not to mention the propulsive “Honkin’ Down the Highway,” on which Jardine sang lead — “Love You” has become something of a cult classic among Wilsonologists.
Says Jardine of the LP: “Brian’s spirit — his songwriting soul — is really strong on that one.”
The Beach Boys opened Brother Studio around 1974 near the corner of 5th Street and Broadway, just a few blocks from the beach. They’d traveled to the Netherlands to record their most recent album, “Holland”; before that, they cut several records at Wilson’s home on Bellagio Road in Bel-Air, though the group’s erstwhile mastermind spent as much time upstairs in his bedroom as he did recording music with his bandmates.
Wilson’s retreat after the flameout of his notoriously ambitious “Smile” project made space for the other Beach Boys to shape the band’s music, as on 1970’s fondly remembered “Sunflower.” But the lack of hits eventually took its toll: With a laugh, Love, 84, says one reason they started up Brother was that Wilson’s wife, Marilyn, eventually “threw in the towel after years of having her house flooded with people” to less-than-spectacular returns. “It was sort of like a self-preservation thing,” he adds.
The Beach Boys backstage at New York’s Central Park in 1977.
(Richard E. Aaron / Redferns)
In “We Gotta Groove’s” liner notes, engineer Stephen Moffitt, who designed Brother after working earlier at L.A.’s Village Recorders, recalls clearing out “all the porn crap” from the building and installing a circular stained-glass window to establish the right vibe. A vintage magazine ad boasts of the studio’s high-end gear as well as its “large screen video lounge” and “a playroom with pong, pinball and bumper pool.”
“It was a respite,” Love says. “A place to go and be creative.”
Just as the band was getting Brother up and running, the Beach Boys scored an unexpected smash with 1974’s “Endless Summer,” a double-LP compilation of the group’s early material — “Surfin’ Safari,” “Don’t Worry Baby,” “California Girls” — that topped the Billboard album chart on its way to sales of more than 3 million copies. A similar hits collection issued in the U.K., “20 Golden Greats,” did just as well there. “An enormous success,” says Love. “One in every five families had it.”
Suddenly, having more or less ignored group-minded efforts like “Holland” and “Carl and the Passions — ‘So Tough,’ ” the world remembered what it loved about the Beach Boys, and that was songs written and produced by Brian Wilson.
The band got to work at Brother recording “15 Big Ones,” which featured a mix of Wilson originals and covers of oldies like “Chapel of Love” and “Blueberry Hill.” The first Beach Boys album since “Pet Sounds” to carry a solo production credit for Wilson, it came accompanied by an aggressive marketing campaign known as “Brian Is Back!”; Wilson appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone — “The Healing of Brother Brian,” the cover line read — and took part in a Beach Boys television special that showed his return to the concert stage at Anaheim Stadium.
Earle Mankey, an engineer at Brother in the mid-70s, says “15 Big Ones” was less Wilson’s attempt to relight the flame than it was “everyone else’s attempt to relight the flame.” He recalls Wilson looking like a “scared rabbit” when he walked into the studio to find some of the session musicians who’d worked with the Beach Boys back in the old days. (This was the time of Wilson’s first dalliance with the psychologist Eugene Landy, who would reenter Wilson’s life to much controversy in the early ’80s.)
Fans watch the Beach Boys perform at Anaheim Stadium on July 3, 1976.
(Tony Korody / Sygma via Getty Images)
Even Love admits that “Brian Is Back!” was a little overblown. “Brian was back to some degree,” Love says now. “One hundred percent? Perhaps not.”
Yet the campaign worked: “15 Big Ones” went to No. 8 on the Billboard 200 — the highest for a Beach Boys studio album in more than a decade — while the LP spun off the band’s first Top 5 single since “Good Vibrations” with a rendition of Chuck Berry’s “Roll and Roll Music.”
More important, the commercial success set up Wilson for a true artistic comeback with “The Beach Boys Love You,” which can still startle you with the purity of its emotion and the strange textures of Wilson’s production. Check out the beautifully lopsided groove of “Mona,” which Dennis sings with a bleary smoker’s rasp, or the lonely-sounding electric-guitar lick floating over the Wilson brothers’ harmonies in “The Night Was So Young”; listen to Brian and Marilyn trading marital assurances in their almost painfully guileless duet, “Let’s Put Our Hearts Together.”
“Of all Brian’s stuff, I’d say it’s his most personal album after ‘Pet Sounds,’ ” says Darian Sahanaja, who played with Wilson for the last couple of decades of his life. “Maybe even more than ‘Pet Sounds,’ because Tony Asher wrote most of the lyrics on ‘Pet Sounds’ and Brian wrote most of the lyrics on ‘Love You.’ The Brian that I knew is very much living and breathing in these songs.”
Unlike “15 Big Ones,” “Love You” was not a hit, peaking at No. 53 — even lower than “Holland.” As much as he adores the album, Sahanaja finds it amusing that anyone in the Beach Boys’ camp might have expected Wilson to try to give rock fans what they wanted.
“He wasn’t listening to the Top 40 at the time,” he says. “He just wrote whatever came out of him. There was no, ‘I wonder what Fleetwood Mac’s up to…’ ”
Indeed, Wilson went even further out with “Adult/Child,” for which he commissioned orchestral arrangements by Dick Reynolds, who’d worked in the ’50s with Wilson’s beloved Four Freshmen. Both Love and Jardine say they can’t quite remember why the album didn’t come out; Love says “it may not have suited the record company at the time” and points out that even “Pet Sounds” got the group’s A&R rep wondering “if maybe we could do something more like ‘I Get Around.’ ”
Whatever the case, “Adult/Child’s” mothballing led to another withdrawal by Wilson, who had far less to do with the band’s next few records and who eventually turned to a solo career. In 2012, Wilson produced a so-so Beach Boys reunion record — minus Dennis, who died in 1983, and Carl, who died in 1998 — but for much of the ’00s he and Jardine toured under Wilson’s name while Love toured as the Beach Boys. (Love’s band will play three shows at the Hollywood Bowl in July.)
Asked what it’s been like performing with Wilson’s band since his death, Jardine says, “I just feel like he’s still around.” Sahanaja says he’s seen Jardine tear up as they’ve been working up songs from “Love You” on the road ahead of Friday’s show. But he’s also been gratified to see the excitement among younger fans regarding what he views as the Beach Boys’ last great album.
“The reaction has been more insane than I’ve ever seen for any of the shows we ever did with Brian,” he says. “It’s like they feel they found this secret thing that they really identify with.” He laughs. “I’m telling you, these kids are freaking out — jumping up and down, singing along to all the words. They’re, like, pogo-ing.”
Editor’s note: Although there will be references to the Eaton fire in this newsletter, there won’t be any images of active fire or burned buildings.
The Mt. Wilson Trail in Sierra Madre recently reopened after being damaged last January by the Eaton fire and subsequent flooding.
When the city of Sierra Madre announced the trail was fully open again, I was initially eager to return to this stunning trek in the San Gabriel Mountains.
But part of me felt anxious. What if the fire had killed everything I remembered so fondly from time spent on the trail?
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Shortly after the Eaton fire, I scoured maps to discern which trails likely burned in the blaze. I remember my heart sinking when I saw the fire had scorched the entire Mt. Wilson Trail. It’s an area of Angeles National Forest with a significant amount of local history.
The first known trail to Mt. Wilson was established by Indigenous people, a trail they used to carry wood down the mountains when Spanish missionaries forced them to build the San Gabriel Mission in 1771, according to the Mt. Wilson Trail Race.
Then, in 1864, Benjamin D. Wilson built the first version of the current Mt. Wilson Trail. He was “following an ancient Tongva footpath,” according to a sign near the trailhead. It is the oldest trail in the San Gabriel Mountains, according to former Times hiking columnist John McKinney.
Water rushes through Little Santa Anita Canyon near the Mt. Wilson Trail north of Sierra Madre.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
The hike from Sierra Madre to Mt. Wilson is a suffer fest: It is a 14½-mile out-and-back journey where you climb just over 4,800 feet in elevation. It’s thrilling, though, once you’ve completed it, because you can look up at the towers at Mt. Wilson from L.A. and know you climbed that whole mountain.
It’s a hike that every L.A. hiker interested in upping their game should try at least once. Pro tip: I don’t consider it cheating if you hike from the trailhead in Sierra Madre to the top — and then get your nonhiker friend to pick you up where the trail ends in the Mt. Wilson Observatory parking lot. If it’s open, you could even treat them to a meal at the Cosmic Cafe!
On Saturday, I had planned to hike to Orchard Camp, a 7.2(ish)-mile journey that gains about 2,200 feet. It is one of my favorite places in the San Gabriel Mountains, and I was eager and anxious to see how it was doing.
Plants with blooms along the Mt. Wilson Trail, including, from clockwise, Menzies’ baby blue eyes, a poppy, longleaf bush lupine, streambank spring beauty and western wallflower.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
The site has a lengthy history. It was first home to Half-Way House, a repair station and rest stop built by the trail’s builder Don Benito Wilson in 1864. He named his establishment as such because Orchard Camp was the halfway point between Sierra Madre and Mt. Wilson.
The site was converted in the 1890s to Orchard Camp, “a resort named after the groves of apples, plums, cherries and chestnuts whose harvest was sold to travelers using the camp and trail,” according to a sign at the site.
In an advertisement published in The Times in 1908, Orchard Camp Resort told prospective guests it offered furnished tents and a “fine stream of water runs through camp.” By 1920, the accommodations had improved mightily, with the camp advertising “tennis, dancing, croquet and hiking,” and groceries, baked goods and meats at the camp store. (I can confirm the stream, hiking and, should you choose, dancing are all still available.)
To begin your hike, you’ll drive north through Sierra Madre. You’ll find the trailhead near the aptly named Mt. Wilson Trail Park, a small stretch of grass with a playground and, a rare luxury for hikers, a flush toilet. You will park on the street, close to the park if you arrive with the early birds.
Next to the park, you’ll find Lizzie’s Trail Inn and Richardson House, which the Sierra Madre Historical Preservation Society operates as living museums. Inside, you can learn more about the trail and other local history. They’re open most Saturdays from 10 a.m. to noon.
Two hikers head up the first mile of the Mt. Wilson Trail near Sierra Madre.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
Head north onto Mt. Wilson Trail, a paved road, which will take you behind homes before reaching the large Mt. Wilson Trail entrance sign. It’s only up from here!
The first part of the trail is in direct sunlight until late afternoon and has minimal to no shade. The upside is that it offers incredible views of the San Gabriel Valley and beyond. I quickly spotted Santiago Peak, the highest point in Orange County, which was about 43 miles southeast from where I stood. The snow-covered Mt. San Jacinto, which was 82 miles away, came into clearer view as I gained elevation.
In the first two miles of the trail, I was delighted to discover several blue, purple and pink wildflowers blooming, including wild Canterbury bells, stinging lupine (don’t touch it!) and chia. These plants are known as “fire followers,” as they quickly sprout after an area burns. Later in my hike, I also noticed baby blue eyes, cardinal catchfly, lots of coast morning glory and exactly two poppies.
Two hikers consider the best path across a water crossing along the Mt. Wilson Trail.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
I was also surprised by just how many waterfalls I could see from the trail, including one just under a mile in that was gushing down the rocky canyon.
My first stop was First Water, which you’ll reach at just over 1½ miles in. You’ll find a short path at First Water that will take you off the main trail and next to the Little Santa Anita Creek.
If you’ve hiked this trail before, you will notice substantial differences in the trail to reach First Water. It is steeper and a bit more technical, but still an easy enough jaunt down to the creek.
The Little Santa Anita Creek at First Water.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
One of the starkest differences, though, comes about half a mile north when Mt. Harvard comes into view. I was expecting more healthy green slopes, and instead, I spotted rows and rows of burnt, dried-out trees. As I neared Orchard Camp, I passed burned manzanita and other trees with blackened bark, but the majority of what I observed was nature in recovery.
One hiker had told me there wasn’t any shade at Orchard Camp, and while I was skeptical, I was prepared for the worst. Instead, I arrived just before 2 p.m. and found several oaks and other trees, still healthy and growing, and thick green grass and other plants. I laid down on a boulder near a wooden bench and basked in the sun like the happiest fence lizard in all of the forest — although there were plenty of shady spots where I could have laid down.
Orchard Camp, a shady stop along the Mt. Wilson Trail.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
I didn’t go past Orchard Camp because I knew I’d hit snow. I don’t own crampons, which are needed to hike safely in the snow on any sort of incline. (That said, Luis De La Cruz, the Vamos Hiking Crew leader, whose group hiked to the top Saturday, told me that the trail is in good condition from Orchard Camp although there is some erosion.)
Leaving the trail just before 5 p.m., I felt immense gratitude for the hundreds of hours that volunteers with the Mt. Wilson Trail Race put into restoring the Mt. Wilson Trail to its current glory. I spoke to several folks along the path who felt similarly.
A trail recovering.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
It’s a feeling this trail elicits. As a Times story noted in 1915 about this hike, “Once this trip is taken, a desire for a repetition clings to the lover of the outdoor life.” May we all be so lucky!
3 things to do
Attendees of a full moon hike at Elysian Park hosted by We Explore Earth.
(Chiara Alexa / For The Times)
1. Marvel at the moon in Elysian Park Outdoors nonprofit We Explore Earth will host a free sunset hike Tuesday from 5:30 to 8 p.m. in Elysian Park. After the hike, guests are invited to participate in yoga, a sound bath and music, all as the full moon rises over L.A. Register at eventbrite.com.
2. Connect with fellow humans in Ascot Hills Park Intermission, a community-focused wellness company, will host a free sound bath at 11 a.m. Sunday in Ascot Hills Park. Guests will need to take a short hike to reach the hilltop where the sound bath will be offered. Learn more at Intermission’s Instagram page.
3. Crunch along the trail in Orange Save Orange Hills, a local advocacy group, will host a bilingual 3-mile hike from 10 a.m. to noon Sunday through Irvine Regional Park in Orange. Barefoot Joel and Scott Keltic Knot will guide hikers along the Horseshoe Loop Trail, observing wildflowers and wildlife along the way. Guests might spot the locally rare Catalina mariposa lily. Tickets for participants 12 and older are $12.51 while children younger than 12 are free. Park entry is $5. Register at eventbrite.com.
The must-read
Ed LaRue, a longtime desert tortoise advocate and surveyor, looks for tortoise burrows in Johnson Valley.
(Ethan Swope / For The Times)
Desert tortoises are what scientists categorize as a “keystone species,” meaning other animals depend on them for their survival. In this case, it’s for the burrows that tortoises dig. Times staff writer Alex Wigglesworth wrote that that’s a key reason why U.S. District Judge Susan Illston recently ordered the federal Bureau of Land Management to shut down 2,000 miles of off-roading trails, saying the vehicles are “a significant ongoing cause of harm” to the tortoise population. And although climate change-supercharged droughts and large-scale solar development across the Mojave also threatened the tortoises and their habitat, off-roading trail use is different, biologist Ed LaRue said, because it’s “one of the threats that we could ostensibly control.”
I am not an off-roader, but I do want to acknowledge the outcome of this ruling: It is heartbreaking whenever you lose access to an outdoors space you love. “The vastness and the quiet and the peace you get here is unlike anywhere else you can find in California,” said Lorene Frankel, an off-roader who’d planned to launch an off-roading business with her husband. “It is devastating to realize a massive amount of land will be completely inaccessible.”
Even if you agree with the closure order’s purpose — protecting precious habitat for a critical species — it is important that we remain sympathetic to each other’s reasons for loving the outdoors.
Happy adventuring,
P.S.
Have you ever tried to reach Griffith Park without driving there? You probably discovered it wasn’t a straight-forward journey. Metro, our local transportation agency, is developing a plan to make it safer and easier to reach Griffith Park and the L.A. Zoo by transit, on foot and by bike. And you can give feedback on how to make that happen. Streets Are For Everyone will lead a workshop from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at the Autry Museum of the American West where the organization will gather feedback on these proposed improvements for reaching Griffith Park. Participants will discuss a proposed transit route to Griffith Park as well as pedestrian and biking connections between the Hollywood Bowl and the Ford. As a bonus, attendees will get free museum admission after the workshop. Register using this Google Form.
For more insider tips on Southern California’s beaches, trails and parks, check out past editions of The Wild. And to view this newsletter in your browser, click here.
SACRAMENTO — After months of partisan warfare and weeks of hard-nosed bargaining, Gov. Pete Wilson signed into law a historic reform package Monday transforming welfare in California into a program that provides only temporary aid to the poor and requires work in return for assistance.
With legislative leaders standing at his elbow, the Republican governor formally set into motion revolutionary changes in the welfare law that will affect 2.3 million people, mostly women and children, who depend on government assistance for the basic necessities of life.
“This was not an easy task, but in the end the effort produced a solution based on very sound and very equitable principles,” Wilson said. “From now on public assistance in California will be temporary, it will be a transition, it will be strictly time-limited.”
The new program, named CalWORKS and slated to take effect Jan. 1, 1998, will limit to 24 months the time that current recipients can be on aid. It also will provide community service positions for those who reach that limit and cannot find work, require recipients to participate in job searches and job training, and penalize those who refuse to accept a valid job offer.
Mirroring a federal welfare reform act passed almost exactly a year ago, the program sets a five-year lifetime limit for adults to receive aid, but at the same time it obligates the state to make massive investments in job training and child care to ease their movement into the work force.
In the first year alone, state officials estimate that $1.3 billion will be spent on child care and $530 million on employment.
Because of the investments in child care and training, the $7-billion-plus welfare program initially will not produce savings. And, in the first year, the legislative analyst estimates that welfare spending will increase by $223 million.
But the program–designed to comply with the new federal law–is expected to significantly reduce welfare rolls in the next five years and result in cost reductions.
“In a vibrant economy that creates jobs and enables entry-level workers to climb the ladder of success,” Wilson said, “we have a duty to encourage [welfare recipients] to escape from dependency to the independence and dignity of work.”
Smiling legislative leaders, many of whom only a week ago were exchanging barbs with the governor, praised the reform package as an example of compromise at its best.
“Today we put behind us politics and enacted a bipartisan welfare reform plan,” said Assembly Speaker Cruz Bustamante (D-Fresno). “CalWORKS is a tough and fair plan that makes welfare what those of us in the middle have always thought it should be–temporary help to let families get back on their feet.”
Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) said the high-level bargaining between legislators and the governor had forced them to find a middle ground that “appropriately combines the doctrines of personal responsibility, market discipline and humanitarian efforts to help those who are needy.”
But amid the enthusiasm, he sounded a cautionary note, warning that the real test of their compromise would come at the county level, where the reforms would have to be implemented in the next few years.
“We hope [these] efforts will survive the next economic downturn,” he said.
Left undone in the reform package, said Sen. Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena), one of the authors of the legislation, was any attempt to create the low-level jobs that welfare recipients will need if they are to leave welfare.
Even California’s current robust economy, he said, does not produce hundreds of thousands of jobs that will be needed in the coming years to provide employment for recipients who move out of the welfare system.
“I am struck by the fact,” said Assemblyman Roy Ashburn (R-Bakersfield), “that while this seems like the end, it is really but the beginning.”
In recognition of the new responsibilities that the law places on counties, Wilson flew later in the day to Los Angeles County, which has a welfare population that is larger than the entire populations of more than half the states.
“We have a lot riding on the success of this program,” said County Board of Supervisors Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky. “We have to place tens of thousands of people into jobs in the coming weeks and months, but it can be done.”
Calling the new reform act a “testament to what happens when both parties try to find out what they have in common,” Yaroslavsky said passage of the act should not be considered a belittlement of welfare recipients.
“People who are on public assistance should not all be painted with one negative brush,” he said. “Most of the people we have on public assistance today want to work. They are productive and talented. They just need a chance and, given a chance, they will perform.”
Herman Mancera, a single father of two who appeared at the news conference with Wilson and Yaroslavsky, said that, after receiving assistance for four years, he had been able to move into a job program sponsored by United Airlines for welfare recipients.
“It feels great being able to be part of the work force again,” Mancera said.
