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| Sober home rules don’t discriminate against addicts, court reaffirms – Orange County Register | | Columnist Teri Sforza writes that Costa Mesa's trials-by-fire have paved the way for others trying to bring order to what has sometimes been chaos. [Article] | | by , Orange County Register. 2025-04-30 | | | | New affordable housing complex for families opens in Central Long Beach – Press Telegram | | Dozens of families are moving into Long Beach’s newest affordable housing complex along Long Beach Boulevard in the city’s midtown area.
The grand opening of the housing project, Harbor Yard Apartments, was celebrated by city leaders and partners on Monday, April 28, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Harbor Yard Apartments was developed by Meta Housing, an affordable housing developer that has built several projects in Long Beach already. [Article] | | by , Long Beach Press Telegram. 2025-04-30 | | | | California, other states sue Trump administration to block cuts to AmeriCorps - Los Angeles Times | | California joined a coalition of states Tuesday in suing the Trump administration over massive cuts to AmeriCorps, the federal program that each year deploys hundreds of thousands of volunteers to natural disaster sites and needy communities nationwide, state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said.
Bonta said the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency were acting unlawfully by unilaterally axing a program established and funded by Congress to support devastated parts of the country at their greatest time of need, such as Los Angeles after its recent wildfires.
“By abruptly canceling critical grants and gutting AmeriCorps’ workforce and volunteers, DOGE is dismantling AmeriCorps without any concern for the thousands of people who are ready and eager to serve their country — or for those whose communities are stronger because of this public service,” Bonta said in a statement.
“California has repeatedly taken action to hold the Trump administration and DOGE accountable to the law,” he said, “and we stand prepared to do it again to protect AmeriCorps and the vital services it provides.”
Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement to The Times that AmeriCorps has repeatedly failed audits in recent years, with millions in improper payments identified last year alone, and that the president “has the legal right to restore accountability to the entire Executive Branch.” [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2025-04-30 | | | | Governor Newsom supports bill to put LGBTQ helpline number on student ID's | | Gov. Gavin Newsom expressed support for LGBTQ suicide hotline measures for K-12 students in direct response to recent reports that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s., plans to cut funding for the national nonprofit that provides the resource to LGBTQ people. [Article] | | by , . 2025-04-30 | | | | UCLA protestors arrested a year ago are now getting their phones back - Los Angeles Times | | For nearly a year, the UCLA Police Department has kept the cellphones of 40 UCLA students they arrested during last year’s mass demonstrations over the war in Gaza.
Without their phones students faced extreme hardship, according to attorneys affiliated with the National Lawyers Guild. At least one student lost her job when her employer couldn’t reach her, a student journalist with the Daily Bruin said it made reporting for the newspaper difficult, and one student missed a shift at an internship. Some students had trouble staying in touch with family, attorneys said.
On Monday, the university’s police department said it would give phones back to the students.
Acting Police Chief Scott Scheffler wrote in an email to The Times that the decision stemmed from Los Angeles City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto’s announcement last week that she was not filing charges against most of the UCLA and USC students arrested in April and May 2024.
“As of this morning the phones are no longer being held as evidence,” Scheffler wrote. “Individuals who have not yet picked up their phones will be notified and can make an appointment with our Property Unit to do so.”
But students will only have two weeks from the date they receive written notification from the department to retrieve their phones before they are destroyed, said Cynthia Anderson-Barker, an attorney with the lawyers guild.
It’s a timeline she says is unfair for the many students who no longer live in Los Angeles. She’s requested that an attorney be permitted to collect the phones on behalf of the students.
She said students would need to bring identification and show proof they own the phone. They will also require a notarized letter if someone else wants to pick up the device.
The police department keeps more than 3,000 items of evidence, found property and property being held for safekeeping, according to the department’s website. Generally, items stored as evidence are held until a case is completed.
Sabrina Darwish, a criminal defense attorney based in Santa Ana, said she and Anderson-Barker began to request the phones from the police department after the May 6 arrests of more than 40 students inside a parking structure at UCLA.
Although the case remained open, no criminal charges were filed against the students. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2025-04-30 | | | | 14 arrested during massive LA County workers rally as 48-hour strike enters final day – Daily News | | Tens of thousands of Los Angeles County workers will wrap up a 48-hour work stoppage Wednesday night, remaining off the job for another day following a massive rally in downtown L.A. that snarled traffic and saw 14 arrests. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Daily News. 2025-04-30 | | | | Los Angeles $2.4 Billion Rail Project Put on Hold - Newsweek | | A$2.4 billion rail project that would have been a key part of Los Angeles' 2028 Olympic infrastructure has been scrapped after local opposition.
The Inglewood Transit Connector Project replaced plans for a suspended light-rail system with a shuttle bus network after a series of consultations with businesses and communities in the area. [Article] | | by , . 2025-04-30 | | | | Trump’s executive order targeting ‘sanctuary’ laws called ‘extortion,’ xenophobic – Daily News | | The Trump administration’s latest efforts following his tough immigration agenda are targeted at jurisdictions that declare themselves “sanctuaries” for undocumented immigrants. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Daily News. 2025-04-30 | | | | LA County approves $4 billion sexual abuse settlement for claims reaching as far back as 1980s – Daily News | | The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday unanimously approved a $4 billion settlement of more than 6,800 claims of sexual abuse allegedly perpetrated in juvenile facilities or foster care as far back as the 1980s, billed as the “costliest” such payout in county history. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Daily News. 2025-04-30 | | | | Contributor: The 'abundance agenda' will fail without tax reform - Los Angeles Times | | A growing chorus of policymakers representing right and left has correctly diagnosed the country’s deepest self-inflicted wound: We don’t build enough. The so-called “abundance agenda” urges us to cut red tape, streamline permits, overhaul zoning codes and remove government-made bottlenecks that limit affordably creating more of the things we need, such as homes, energy infrastructure, healthcare services, innovation and opportunity.
It’s a compelling vision with a critical blind spot: tax policy.
If the United States is serious about abundance — not just as a slogan, but as a strategy — we need to pair regulatory reform with fiscal reform. A country will not build significantly more if the tax code punishes those who try.
The logic is simple. Even if a housing development survives the permitting maze, the developer may walk away if the after-tax return doesn’t justify the risk. A clean-energy entrepreneur with regulatory green lights and a breakthrough idea will still struggle for investors if taxes threaten to soak up the rewards. Permission to create and produce is not enough; we need capital to flow to new ideas and profits to reward their execution.
Today’s tax code and multitrillion-dollar federal budget deficit work against the abundance agenda. We tax investment returns at every stage — once at the corporate level, again on dividends and capital gains and still again at death. Inflation quietly raises the tax burden on savings and investment even further, boosting effective tax rates on some investments above 100%.
Tax policy is about more than tax rates. Getting the tax base right — what is subject to taxation — is just as important. For example, recent changes prohibit immediate deductions for research-and-development expenditures and investment in equipment. Instead, firms must spread those deductions out over years — sometimes decades — raising effective tax rates and eroding domestic investment. That’s hardly innovation-friendly.
The result? A slow bleed of investment away from precisely the sectors that abundance champions want to grow. The timing couldn’t be worse. From artificial intelligence to energy infrastructure to biopharmaceuticals, delivering abundance depends on mobilizing unprecedented levels of private capital. Instead, current policy often deters it.
The empirical evidence is clear and nonpartisan. A landmark study from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development once ranked corporate income taxes as the most harmful to economic growth. The International Monetary Fund has shown that foreign direct investment is highly sensitive to tax rates. Research by the former chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers shows that tax increases reduce economic growth by two to three times the revenue they raise, driven primarily by cratering investment.
The most recent U.S. experience bears this out. Provisions in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, including lower corporate taxes and temporary full expensing of capital outlays, spurred significant increases in business investment. One study found that firms benefiting from the changes boosted investment by about 20% compared with firms that didn’t. President Trump’s first-term tariffs, a particularly costly tax hike, pushed in the other direction, blunting what could have been an even larger economic response.
Many of those pro-growth provisions are expiring just as policymakers speak of accelerating construction, manufacturing, energy development and innovation. Instead of modernizing the tax code to seek abundance, we risk slipping back to a structure that penalizes investment and rewards stagnation. Full expensing, in contrast to tariffs, is one of the most effective policies to encourage investment in the U.S.
It’s time to make fiscal policy a central pillar of the abundance agenda. Just as lousy regulation blocks supply from coming online, lousy tax policy blocks capital from showing up in the first place. The two go hand-in-hand.
What would this look like?
It would restore and make permanent full-expensing so businesses can deduct the cost of new research, equipment and structures entirely in the year when they invest. It would reduce the double taxation of savings and investment by lowering rates on capital gains, dividends, interest and business income. And it would treat these reforms as a starting point toward more neutral, more consumption-based taxation that eventually allows full deductions for savings and investment.
To keep taxes low, we cannot forget the other side of the fiscal coin: government spending. Without spending restraint, the push for higher taxes is inevitable — and with it, the convoluted tax distortions and disincentives that undermine growth.
Many in the abundance coalition support large-scale public subsidies and redistribution. But in the long run, an economy weighed down by debt and taxes will struggle to deliver broad-based prosperity fueled by innovation and capital. An abundant economy will do more for lower-income Americans than redistribution ever could.
The abundance agenda has given us a powerful new vocabulary to describe what’s holding America back. When businesses invest, workers gain better tools and higher wages. When capital flows, housing gets built, energy gets delivered and innovation scales. But unless we extend the agenda to fiscal reform, we risk stopping halfway.
Building is about more than permits. It’s about making sure the incentives — and the capital — are there to finish the job. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2025-04-30 | | | | Monster quake could sink swath of California, dramatically heightening flood risk, study says | National | union-bulletin.com | | LOS ANGELES — A long-feared monster earthquake off California, Oregon and Washington could cause some coastal areas to sink by more than 6 feet, dramatically heightening the risk of flooding and radically reshaping the region with little to no warning.
Those are the findings of a new study that examined the repercussions of a massive earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone, which stretches from Northern California up to Canada's Vancouver Island.
The study, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that in an earthquake scenario with the highest level of subsidence, or land sink, the area at risk of flooding would expand by 116 square miles, a swath that's 2½ times the size of San Francisco. [Article] | | by , . 2025-04-30 | | | | Southern California Edison likely to incur costs related to Eaton fire - Los Angeles Times | | The chief executive of Southern California Edison’s parent company said Tuesday that the company was likely to suffer “material losses” related to the deadly Eaton fire, which ignited on Jan. 7 and burned more than 14,000 acres.
Investigations into the cause of the fire are continuing and have not concluded that Edison’s equipment sparked the blaze, Edison International Chief Executive Pedro Pizarro said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call.
But Edison’s investigation into the start of the fire has not revealed any other possible sources of ignition, Pizarro said.
“Absent additional evidence” and “in light of pending litigation, it is probable that Edison International and Southern California Edison will incur material losses in connection with the Eaton fire,” Pizarro said. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2025-04-30 | | | | 50 years later, the legacy of Black April haunts us – Daily News | | It was on this date, half a century ago, that Saigon fell to the communist North Vietnamese.
While it brought an end to a brutal war in which millions of people lost their lives, the Vietnam war left a lasting impact on the millions more who were displaced, traumatized and who have remained under one-party rule of the Communist Party of Vietnam.
Indeed, while the horrors of communist regimes often seem like a relic of a time long ago, the people of Vietnam are still deprived of the basic liberties we all take for granted in America.
“Vietnam suppresses citizens’ basic rights to freedom of expression, association, peaceful assembly, movement, and religion,” reports Human Rights Watch. “Independent labor unions, human rights organizations, independent media, and political parties remain prohibited. The judiciary is not independent, and courts routinely deny defendants their due process rights. Police patrol the internet and arrest those they deem threatening to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.” [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Daily News. 2025-04-30 | | | | Mixed-use project pitched for 400 E. Anaheim St. in Long Beach | Urbanize LA | | A small commercial building with parking near the A Line's Anaheim Street Station in Long Beach is slated to give way to housing, according to a proposal under consideration by city officials. [Article] | | by , . 2025-04-30 | | | | L.A. lifeguards taking mental health leave as beach algae bloom takes toll - Los Angeles Times | | Spencer Parker has never seen so many dolphin strandings in his more than 20 years as an L.A. County lifeguard.
Since he started in 2002, only twice had he seen them come ashore before this year. But in just the last two weeks, there have been four.
Now, things have gotten so bad that L.A. County lifeguards have begun taking mental health days off to cope with the devastation as an algae bloom is poisoning and killing marine life from San Diego to Santa Barbara.
“We’re human beings and we have feelings and we care about marine life — that’s one of the reasons we chose this profession,” said Parker, a captain in the county Fire Department’s lifeguard division. “When these dolphins and sea lions come to shore and they’re still alive, we do our best to make them comfortable and sometimes it doesn’t work out and that takes a toll.”
The worst of the algae bloom’s damage appears to be in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, where some experts wonder if runoff from January’s firestorms has made the bloom worse. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the first effects of the bloom began to show up off the coast of Malibu around Feb. 20.
Since then, the bloom’s impact on wildlife including sea lions and dolphins has been “the worst thing we’ve ever seen and had to respond to ... and there’s no end in sight,” said John Warner, chief executive of the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2025-04-30 | | | | Trump targets California libraries for cuts - Los Angeles Times | | President Trump has made it clear since his first term that he’s no fan of libraries, or books for that matter.
In addition to attempting to cut their funding then, he created a frenzy over drag queen story hours that were hosted by some libraries, and backed book banning in school facilities.
Like so much of the Trump 2.0 agenda, it turns out that was just the warm-up. In the last month, Trump — mostly through the fine team at his Department of Government Efficiency, which is not an actual government entity — has gutted the Institute of Museum and Library Services, or IMLS, the federal organization that supports the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 35,000 museums, and demolished the congressionally approved grants that fund them.
California, along with two other states that dared mention diversity and equity in their grant applications, will be especially hard hit. But so will you and I, because for decades libraries have been more than just places to check out a book for free. They’ve evolved into a network of vital services and destinations that provide internet access for those who can’t afford it; literacy classes for kids and adults; in-home programs for vulnerable groups such as the elderly and so much more. Really, the list of what your local library offers is too long for this space.
But mostly, they offer this — to be a great equalizer between the haves and have-nots. So curtailing their work is another arrow aimed at the heart of democracy, as damaging as the attack on universities and the free press.
“Libraries are not icing on the cake. They’re not the cherry on top,” John Szabo, the city librarian of the Los Angeles Public Library, told me. “They really, really are essential.” [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2025-04-30 | | | | Raising awareness of fentanyl | News | avpress.com | | PALMDALE — The Antelope Valley had 345 fentanyl overdose deaths, including six victims ages 17 and younger, between 2016 and 2023, according to a report released last year by the Los Angeles County Department of Health. [Article] | | by , . 2025-04-30 | | | | Hiltzik: But let's remember that California is a state, not a country - Los Angeles Times | | Forget the wildfires, earthquakes, water shortages and all the other factors that place the California dream in doubt, according to pundits. Gov. Gavin Newsom has some good news, citing federal and international statistics: California has just moved up a notch to become the world’s fourth-largest economy.
That happened because the state’s gross domestic product was measured at $4.1 trillion as of the end of 2024, eclipsing Japan ($4.02 trillion). All that stands between California and the top spot are the United States ($29.18 trillion), China ($18.74 trillion) and Germany ($4.65 trillion).
“California isn’t just keeping pace with the world — we’re setting the pace,” Newsom declared in announcing the latest figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the International Monetary Fund. “Our economy is thriving because we invest in people, prioritize sustainability and believe in the power of innovation.”
Newsom made some good points in his announcement, citing the state’s national leadership in high technology, agriculture and access to venture funding, among other spheres. But he also voiced a cautionary note about the Trump administration’s “reckless tariff policies,” which are already pointing to a steep downturn in imports landed at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.
Word of California’s somersault over the fading Japan generated coverage in newspapers coast to coast, cable news and even as far afield as the BBC. None of this reportage, however, addressed the most pertinent question about the feat, which is: So what?
Some of the reports did qualify California’s ranking, by acknowledging that it would be germane if California were a country, not a state. But they didn’t go very deeply, if at all, into why that should make a difference. So let’s take a closer look.
Californians do take pride in the state’s economic potency. While I traveled around the state recently, giving talks to promote my newly published book about California’s history, it was a rare stop where I didn’t get a question about whether California should secede from the union in order to inoculate itself from the depredations of the Trump administration.
I gave a short answer and a longer one. The short answer is that the issue of whether a state can secede was settled, permanently, in 1865. The long answer is that California, for all its economic primacy, is not only tightly bound with the entire domestic U.S. economy, but its role in international trade is also dependent on federal trade policies — for good or ill. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2025-04-30 | | | | Can L.A. stop homelessness before it starts? An experimental program wants to find out - Los Angeles Times | | When the unknown number popped up on her phone, Jocelyn Escanuela was in the checkout line at Walmart. She still can’t explain why she picked up and then listened to a cold-caller’s pitch that sounded a lot like a scam.
She had been selected to receive a grant of $6,000, the caller told her. And she would have a personal assistant to help her get her through her “crisis.”
How did they even know she was in a crisis?
It turned out the caller was legitimate. She was from the Homelessness Prevention Unit, an experimental Los Angeles County program that is testing whether it is feasible to stop homelessness before it starts — one person at a time — by picking them out of mountains of data.
Escanuela’s crisis was detected not by a person but a predictive statistical model that was developed to solve a conundrum that has made homelessness prevention a tantalizing but underused strategy.
Despite sound evidence that services such as eviction defense and financial assistance can prevent people from becoming homeless, it’s impossible to know after the fact whether any given person would have become homeless without the help. Research has shown that only a small percentage would. The elusive goal of prevention is to identify that small percentage.
“With limited prevention resources to work with, there are real consequences to not getting them to the people who need them most,” said Steve Berg, chief policy officer for the National Alliance to End Homelessness, which has historically frowned on costly prevention programs.
But Berg said “it would be good news if these emerging technologies turned out to be effective at predicting who’s most likely to become homeless if they don’t get help.”
Attaining that elusive precision will be increasingly important as both the city’s ULA “mansion tax” and the countywide Measure A sales tax begin to direct millions of dollars into homelessness prevention.
The model that picked Escanuela as high risk is being tested to see how effective it is.
It was created by the California Policy Lab at UCLA, a research institute that has access to data from county agencies such as the departments of health and social services, which interact with people at their most vulnerable. The Policy Lab sifts through all that data, evaluating some 500 markers to generate a list of individuals and families that its model predicts to be at high risk of becoming homeless. It turns that list over to the Homelessness Prevention Unit and its Housing Stabilization Team.
“We meet people when they have just gotten out of the hospital, we meet people when they have just lost a job,” said Dana Rae Vanderford, associate director of the Homelessness Prevention Unit. “We meet people when they have lost a family member who was the sole provider. We meet people as they are receiving verbal eviction warnings from their landlord.” [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2025-04-30 | | | | New LAPD watchdog fought for immigrants; Trump vows to 'unleash' cops - Los Angeles Times | | As a young immigration lawyer in California’s Central Valley, Matthew Barragan cut his teeth defending the rights of indigent workers facing deportation.
Now a decade and a half later, he’s responsible for civilian oversight of the Los Angeles Police Department at a time when concerns are running high about stepped-up federal immigration enforcement.
Barragan, 39, was appointed last month as the LAPD’s inspector general. His office, which is independent of the 8,700-officer department, monitors misconduct complaints and conducts internal reviews of police shootings, along with audits and studies at the Police Commission’s request.
Activists have warned that sensitive data gathered by the LAPD’s license plate readers and other technologies could be accessed by the Trump administration, citing Chief Jim McDonnell’s past willingness to engage with immigration agents as further cause for concern.
On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order that the White House said will “unleash America’s law enforcement to pursue criminals” and direct federal agencies to publish a list of “sanctuary cities” that do not cooperate with immigration agents.
McDonnell, who served as L.A. County sheriff during Trump’s first term, has said he handed over only the most dangerous jailed criminals to federal authorities for deportation, in keeping with the laws. And he has pledged to honor long-standing LAPD rules that shield sensitive information about witnesses and crime victims, along with a policy that prohibits arrests solely for immigration reasons. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2025-04-30 | | |
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