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| County Supervisors Weigh Near Half Billion Dollar Spend on Major Infrastructure and Public Safety Initiatives – Pasadena Now | | The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors will meet Tuesday to address critical infrastructure, public safety, and social services initiatives, including a major emergency debris removal program and expansion of mental health facilities. [Article] | | by , . 2024-10-21 | | | | South LA needs more tree cover, but residents say it’s more complicated than just planting them | LAist | | It’s no secret that South L.A., like many parts of the city, faces a major equity issue when it comes to tree coverage. Roughly 13% of South L.A. is covered by a tree canopy compared to 23% across the rest of the city, contributing to higher temperatures, more air pollution, and reduced shade, among a host of other health and safety concerns.
While the data are important to understanding the disparity, a new study from researchers at the University of Southern California tackles the issue through a different lens, compiling interviews with stakeholders and community members in South L.A. about what they would like to see as trees are planted in the area. [Article] | | by , . 2024-10-21 | | | | Climate action plan draft set for county discussion – Times-Standard | | The overwhelming majority of Humboldt County's emissions — 73% specifically — come from on-road transportation, while 13% comes from building natural gas and everything else in the single digits. The new draft of the plan adds several new public-comment inspired tweaks, such as noting the need for funding actions in several areas, such as for rural transportation and road repair. The draft also includes more definition for what's an "urban area" in Humboldt County using data from the 2020 census designating the county's populations centers. A previous public comment addressed the definition of urban areas excluded communities in the greater Eureka area like Cutten and Myrtletown. [Article] | | by , Eureka Times-Standard. 2024-10-21 | | | | US overdose deaths are dropping. Is California following? | LAist | | Overdose deaths around the nation appear to have dropped as much as 13%, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In California, the numbers reveal a slower drop. From May 2023 to May 2024, state overdose deaths seem to have decreased by around 9%.
However, the projection is based on preliminary data that’s far from finalized.
Local experts say it’s too early to tell what the drop means for the state and more specifically for Los Angeles. [Article] | | by , . 2024-10-21 | | | | Why Won’t Officials in Two OC Cities Video Livestream Their Public Meetings? | | Rancho Santa Margarita and La Palma officials still won’t allow residents to watch public meetings online in real time – where critical decisions about quality of life issues are decided. [Article] | | by , Voice of OC. 2024-10-21 | | | | 'People are still dying on PCH': Malibu fights to make its iconic roadway less dangerous - Los Angeles Times | | Just over a year ago, four Pepperdine University students were killed by a speeding car on a section of Pacific Coast Highway known to Malibu locals as “Dead Man’s Curve.”
The tragic deaths of Niamh Rolston, Peyton Stewart, Asha Weir and Deslyn Williams brought the number of fatalities on the 21-mile stretch of PCH to 61 in just the last 15 years and put the highway’s dangers at the top of officials’ agendas like never before.
Amid the outcry from the community, California Highway Patrol officers were added to enforcement efforts, the governor approved speed cameras, Caltrans expedited road improvements and the city launched a public safety campaign. But a year later, some say it’s not enough.
“[Dead Man’s Curve] is the area where it’s the most dense; it’s the highest number of pedestrians, cyclists, people, tourists,” said Damian Kevitt, a member of the local coalition Fix PCH and founder of the nonprofit Streets Are for Everyone. “And there’s a high degree of houses and commercial area [where there] shouldn’t be a speed limit of 45 miles an hour.”
On the one-year anniversary of the crash Thursday night, Malibu residents returned to the area to remember the four students.
Gathering at the Ghost Tire Memorial, they left flowers and small lights near tires set up like gravestones with the names of crash victims.
In 2023, there were 220 crashes on PCH, including 93 involving injuries and three that killed seven people, according to local officials.
After last year’s crash, the city declared an emergency to quickly free up funds and get to work upgrading the highway. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2024-10-21 | | | | Long Beach plans to host eight Olympic events, will spend $933 million on infrastructure - Los Angeles Times | | From the outdoor terrace on the 11th floor of Long Beach City Hall, Mayor Rex Richardson looks upon the skyline of an imperfect downtown.
Below is a vacant lot where the old city hall was torn down two years ago, now sprouting weeds as it awaits development. In the distance, the 24-story Landmark Square towers above office buildings that last year reported a 24% vacancy rate. Under the eaves of the Billie Jean King Main Library, a few unhoused people huddle.
But Richardson is energized. He is talking about the Los Angeles Olympics.
“I think 2028 is a huge opportunity for our entire region,” he said.
In four years, the Games will arrive in Southern California. Long Beach plans to host eight events — and an unannounced number of Paralympic events — mostly within walking distance of City Hall. (Los Angeles is hosting 16.)
Once again, Long Beach — formerly known as Iowa by the Sea, partly for the Midwesterners who settled here and partly for its provincialism — will step out on the world stage, much as it did for the 1932 and 1984 Olympics.
Two existing facilities, the Sports Area and Marine Stadium, will host handball, rowing and canoe sprints.
Water polo and artistic swimming (the latter still not finalized) will be staged in a temporary pool in a parking lot near the waterfront. Marathon swimming and sailing will take place just offshore, as will the opening leg of the triathlon. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2024-10-21 | | | | Judge orders VA to build housing on UCLA baseball parking lot - Los Angeles Times | | In a matter of months, if a federal judge’s order holds up, the parking lot for UCLA’s Jackie Robinson Baseball Stadium will be filled with modular housing.
U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter on Friday ordered the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to select a vendor within a week and have a contract three weeks after that.
Thirty-two of them would occupy the parking lot of the baseball complex that Carter ordered shuttered in September and the rest would be placed on two other parcels of the VA’s West Los Angeles campus.
After pressing VA officials to produce some temporary housing in a mere 90 days, before the rainy season, Carter relaxed his timeline Friday after VA officials agreed to the endeavor but pleaded that the contracting, site development and installation could not be done that soon.
The order is Carter’s opening gambit — in the judge’s words, an “icebreaker” to cut through bureaucratic malaise — toward an ambitious goal. He’s ordered the VA to create up to 750 units of temporary housing in 18 months on its West Los Angeles campus and an additional 1,800 permanent units over six years.
Carter laid out that goal in early September at the conclusion of a four-week civil trial, when he also nullified leases of VA land to private entities including UCLA and the private Brentwood School because they failed to meet the legal standard of service to veterans.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of veterans by the nonprofit Public Counsel, the Inner City Law Center and two private law firms, alleged that the VA failed in its fiduciary duty to provide housing for disabled and homeless veterans on the campus.
In the weeks since his ruling, Carter has wrestled with a tangle of unresolved questions about how this all would play out. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2024-10-21 | | | | In L.A., Street Psychiatrists Offer the Homeless a Radical Step Forward - The New York Times | | In a downtown Los Angeles parking lot, a stretch of asphalt tucked between gleaming hotels and the 110 freeway, a psychiatrist named Shayan Rab was seeing his third patient of the day, a man he knew only as Yoh.
Yoh lived in the underpass, his back pressed against the wall, a few feet from the rush of cars exiting the freeway. He made little effort to fend for himself, even to find food or water. When outreach workers dropped off supplies, he often let people walk away with them.
He could barely converse, absorbed by an inner world that he described in fragments: a journey to Eden, a supersonic train, a slab of concrete hanging in space.
But here he was, seated on a stool in the parking lot, talking to his psychiatrist. Two weeks earlier, Dr. Rab had persuaded Yoh to start an oral antipsychotic medication. Now the doctor wanted to go further.
“One thing that can make your life a little bit easier,” he said. “We have the same medication that comes as a monthly injection, so you only have to take it once. Is that something you’d be interested in? It’s better for you.”
“Yeah,” said Yoh, dreamily. His hair was matted, his ankles caked with dirt. He hadn’t slept well, he said, because he had been visited by a poltergeist.
“OK,” Dr. Rab said. “We’ll get that organized for you.” Yoh wandered back to his spot in the underpass, and the doctor climbed into his car, off to the next appointment. He was pleased. “That was a huge milestone,” he said.
Driving away, Dr. Rab passed tent after tent after tent. Around 75,000 people are homeless in Los Angeles County on any given night; in 2022, 2,374 of them died while homeless, mostly because they overdosed, or their hearts failed, or they were hit by cars. Officials are desperate to move them inside. [Article] | | by , . 2024-10-21 | | | | Hollywood Farmers' Market needs the public's help to stay afloat | LAist | | Years before Whole Foods was a household name, or Erewhon became an paragon of influencer cool, there was the Hollywood Farmers' Market on Ivar and Selma avenues. Like so many of Southern California staples, this venerable institution is struggling to stay afloat.
When the Hollywood market started in 1991, there was just a handful like it in California. The intervening three decades saw explosive growth in people's appetite for clean, healthy food — and the places that cater to the new outlook. Last year, nearly 700 farmers markets were certified by the state, according to data cited by The Press Enterprise. [Article] | | by , . 2024-10-21 | | | | Latino residents slam 'trust fund hipsters' in L.A. gentrification battle that is getting personal - Los Angeles Times | | For the young and upwardly mobile hipsters of Northeast L.A., the Frogtown Flea Crawl was the hot new event of their perfectly Instagrammable dreams.
For many residents of the historically working-class Latino community, it was their breaking point.
This fall, the event became an unexpected flash point in L.A.’s debate over gentrification as long-simmering neighborhood tensions exploded and a vocal group of residents ultimately pushed the ultra-popular flea market out of town.
The twice-monthly crawl consisted of around eight minimarkets with clothing, food and jewelry vendors scattered along the L.A. River in the Elysian Valley, which is also known as Frogtown. It was launched in spring 2023 and quickly became one of the trendiest places to be, with the help of social media and vintage-fashion influencers.
By the spring of 2024, the event routinely attracted hundreds of “trust fund hipsters” who created traffic jams, blocked driveways, left behind trash and even urinated in public, according to Elysian Valley Riverside Neighborhood Council President Arturo Gomez.
Residents weren’t simply frustrated by the nuisance created by the crawl, he explained; many also believed that the venture was emblematic of the economic forces that are gradually erasing the tight-knit community they grew up in. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2024-10-21 | | | | L.A. Archdiocese has spent $1.5 billion over molestation by priests - Los Angeles Times | | Clergy sex abuse scandals have rocked Catholic churches across the world, but few places have seen the financial toll of the Los Angeles Archdiocese.
With a record $880-million settlement with victims announced this week, the Los Angeles Archdiocese has now paid out more than $1.5 billion.
The bill reflects its rank as the largest archdiocese in the nation, with more than 4 million members, and a California law that gave accusers more time to file suit.
But attorneys and others who have been involved in more than two decades of litigation say it also is an indication of the failures of church leaders to identify molesting priests and prevent them from committing more crimes.
Some of those priests, after undergoing treatment at residential centers, were shuffled to new parishes, frequently in immigrant neighborhoods where the abuse would continue.
With the latest settlements, the number of people alleging abuse now stands at nearly 2,500.
But the true number could be much higher, lawyers say.
One reason for the size of L.A.’s payout is that the California Legislature in 2019 opted to give adults more time to file lawsuits over childhood sexual abuse, which prompted more survivors to come forward. This extended the amount of time available for litigation compared with other states, which were also roiled by abuse scandals. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2024-10-21 | | | | Los Angeles investigating lead-tainted drinking water - Los Angeles Times | | Days after the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency visited a Los Angeles public housing project with lead-contaminated water, the agency ordered drinking water systems nationwide to replace every lead pipe within 10 years.
“We’ve known for decades that lead exposure has serious long-term impacts for children’s health. And yet, millions of lead service lines are still delivering drinking water to homes,” EPA Director Michael Regan said.
But in Los Angeles — where the discovery of contaminated water in public housing in Watts has shocked officials — the EPA mandate is unlikely to result in immediate change.
When Regan joined Mayor Karen Bass on a visit to the 700-unit Jordan Downs complex this month, he suggested the brain-damaging element could be from household plumbing — a critical risk in older homes.
It’s a possibility that highlights the difficulty of eliminating the threat of lead in California drinking water.
Although the new EPA rule targets lead service lines connecting homes to water mains, it doesn’t address plumbing inside the building that can still pose a risk, such as lead soldering, brass fixtures and interior mains.
“If you can outlaw lead in fuel, for God’s sake, why can’t we outlaw lead in drinking water?” asked Timothy Watkins, president of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee. “And in all plumbing components, faucets, valves, pipes — you name it.” [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2024-10-21 | | | | Here are six ballot measures proposed to reform and improve LA city government – Daily News | | During the 2021 redistricting process to redraw Los Angeles City Council district maps, a closed-door conversation between three council members and a leading labor official about how they wanted district boundaries redrawn in their favor was secretly recorded, then released to the public a year later.
Even before the audio leak, L.A. City Hall had been battered by a series of scandals that sent former City Councilmembers José Huizar and Mitchell Englander to prison. But the explosive conversation heard in that recording appeared to be the final straw, leading to widespread demands for reforms to improve government transparency and to strengthen ethics oversight. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Daily News. 2024-10-21 | | | | Alternatives emerge amid concerns over silicosis and engineered stone - Los Angeles Times | | Companies that manufacture slabs of engineered stone, a popular choice for kitchen and bathroom countertops, are developing and marketing new products amid mounting concerns about stonecutters being sickened with a deadly lung disease.
The new alternatives boast reduced levels of crystalline silica, a mineral that can cause an incurable disease called silicosis if workers inhale tiny particles of dust from cutting and grinding stone.
Doctors have linked a global eruption of severe silicosis among young stonecutters to the booming popularity of engineered stone, which can contain upward of 90% crystalline silica. In California, health officials have confirmed 180 cases of silicosis among countertop cutters in less than six years, resulting in at least 13 deaths.
Engineered stone manufacturers say their slabs can be cut safely with proper precautions and that shoddily run workplaces — not their products — are to blame. But amid legal battles and calls to ban engineered stone, some companies have also begun offering newer products that are lower in crystalline silica.
Such alternatives have rapidly hit the market in Australia, where government regulators recently banned the installation of engineered stone. Dr. Ryan Hoy, senior research fellow at Monash University’s Centre for Occupational and Environmental Health in Melbourne, said that many of the new products are made with a form of silica from recycled glass that is “far less toxic than the crystalline form.”
He cautioned, however, that such slabs may still have other dangerous elements. “There is definitely urgent need for further toxicological testing,” Hoy said, but in light of the known harm that workers have suffered from crystalline silica, “I think transition to these is reasonable rather than delaying it.” [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2024-10-21 | | | | The high risks of sharing your DNA with online companies - Los Angeles Times | | Turmoil at 23andMe, a company offering popular at-home DNA testing, has upset the industry. Following the resignation of every independent member of the company’s board of directors, its chief executive, Anne Wojcicki, expressed openness to selling the company and its database of around 15 million customers, raising concerns about the misuse of genetic data.
Although Wojcicki has since said she is focused on taking 23andMe private, the data-sharing risks raised by DNA testing and matching companies are already here. A class-action lawsuit filed in August alleges that the operator of GEDmatch.com, a genealogy site that claims to have a database of more than 1 million members, has been sharing users’ information with Facebook. This revelation should alarm us all.
GEDmatch stands apart from companies such as 23andMe. It’s an open, crowdsourced database that anyone can search. Founded in 2010, it emerged as a tool for genealogy enthusiasts to upload DNA results and connect with relatives. It gained notoriety when law enforcement officials announced in 2018 that they had used the service to identify the Golden State Killer.
Initially, the site’s users consented to share DNA to solve only cases of murder and rape. However, GEDMatch co-founder Curtis Rogers unilaterally made an exception to the policy for an assault case. The resulting backlash led to Rogers and his partner making users unsearchable to law enforcement by default; they could opt in to searches if they chose. But later that year, the line between hobbyist’s tool and crime-solving platform blurred further when Verogen, a for-profit forensic sequencing company with government ties, acquired GEDmatch. (Verogen has since been acquired by the multinational company Qiagen.) And last year, reports surfaced that a loophole gave law enforcement agencies access to GEDmatch users who did not consent to those searches.
The August lawsuit alleges that GEDmatch has been secretly sharing users’ genetic information using Meta Pixel, a tracking code embedded in websites, essentially wiretapping users’ interactions. If the allegations are true, that means Facebook could see whether you have taken a genetic test — and could track links you click on to learn more about your DNA, such as, “Are your parents related?” or a comparison tool detailing chromosome matches, or a tool to explore DNA segments linked to physical traits and medical information. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2024-10-21 | | | | $11.5M California program to resettle sexually violent predators faces stiff opposition – Daily News | | Public opposition is making it difficult to reintroduce sexually violent predators into California communities even though they have undergone post-prison treatment that makes them much less likely to reoffend, according to a new state audit.
The 57-page audit released last week said it can take months or even years to find community housing for SVPs, as sexually violent predators are called, after they have finished treatment through California’s conditional release program. [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Daily News. 2024-10-21 | | | | New California law offers in-state tuition for San Diego community colleges to Mexican residents in border region | KPBS Public Media | | When Christopher Garcia first started taking classes at Southwestern College in Chula Vista in 2021, one of the hardest parts was being away from his family for weeks at a time. [Article] | | by , KPBS - San Diego. 2024-10-21 | | | | Back-to-office orders have become common. Enforcement not so much - Los Angeles Times | | Since Cynthia Clemons’ employer announced last month that she was required to be in the office two days each week, the switch from remote work hasn’t been smooth.
The self-described extrovert, who works as an organizer for the nonprofit Abundant Housing LA, said she so far hasn’t “gotten into a rhythm of being productive at a desk again.”
“I feel like I’m back in grade school and being forced to sit down and do my homework,” she said. “Maybe it’s a matter of getting used to it.”
More than four years after the COVID-19 pandemic scrambled work culture by closing offices and forcing people to work from home, friction between bosses and their employees over the terms of their return shows no signs of abating.
About 80% of organizations have put in place return-to-office policies, but in a sign that many managers are reluctant to clamp down on the flexibility employees have become accustomed to, only 17% of those organizations actively enforce their policies, according to recent research by real estate brokerage CBRE.
“Some organizations out there have ‘mandated’ something, but if most of your organization is not following that mandate, then there is not too much you can do to enforce it,” said Julie Whelan, head of research into workplace trends for CBRE.
So, for many employers, setting rules for how often workers must come to the office has turned into a tricky search for a Goldilocks formula that will keep both bosses and workers reasonably happy — or at least not in open conflict. Managers may yearn for the days when daily attendance was a given, but their employees have moved on to a new normal and appear to be in no mood to go back.
The tension “is due to the fact that we have changed since we all went to our separate corners and then came back” from pandemic-imposed office exile, said Elizabeth Brink, a workplace expert at architecture firm Gensler. “It’s fair to say that we have different needs now.” [Article] | | by , Los Angeles Times. 2024-10-21 | | | | They Can’t Vote Yet, But San Diego Youth Are Trying to Save the Planet | | They’re too young to vote. But they’ll inherit a much warmer and dangerous planet. I thought I should give them a platform for once. [Article] | | by , . 2024-10-21 | | |
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