A prominent portion of the Southern California coastline has been closed for more than 1,000 days because of sewage pollution flowing across the border from Mexico.

Beaches on the Imperial Beach coastline, in the southern part of San Diego County, have been closed since Dec. 8, 2021, Assemblymember David Alvarez, who represents the Imperial Beach area, said in a news release. While occasional dirty-water warnings are common in California, a multiyear closure is certainly not.

In the past five years, more than 100 billion gallons of contaminated sewage have flowed from the Tijuana River into the Pacific Ocean.

The California Legislature recently passed a resolution calling for the federal government to declare a state of emergency for the ongoing sewage crisis. This isn’t even the first time Imperial Beach has had to deal with such contamination issues. According to Assembly Joint Resolution 12, the pollution has gone on for decades.

The water quality along the Imperial Beach coastline has been linked to 34,000 annual illnesses, and approximately 76% of those illnesses are related to sewage pollution, the resolution said, citing research from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Assemblymembers said the contaminated waters have caused health problems, such as headaches, rashes, infections and breathing problems, for some in the area. The continuous flow of untreated sewage has also decreased tourism, hurt local business and lowered property values, according to the legislation.

City officials in San Diego and Imperial Beach have declared a state of emergency several times over the years and are asking the United States Congress and President Joe Biden to provide more funding for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s plan, which was implemented to address the crisis.

Last month, federal officials approved a $600 million project that would fund the repairs and rehabilitation of the main wastewater treatment plant for the sewage. The sewage is supposed to be filtered through the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant in San Diego County, which filters the water from Tijuana, Mexico, before it’s pumped into the Pacific Ocean.

The repairs, though, on the nearly three-decade-old plant could take up to five years.

In a letter addressed to Calif. Governor Gavin Newsom, Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre said that timeline is “unacceptable.” Aguirre asked Newsom’s office to assist in proposing a solution to the sewage crisis and declarea state of emergency.

“Imperial Beach and residents in south San Diego County are slowly being poisoned by this crisis, and our voices are not enough,” Aguirre said in a news release. “We need the state to stand with us and demand a comprehensive solution.”

Sep 4, 2024 Photo of Madilynne Medina

Madilynne Medina is a news reporter for SFGATE. Born and raised in the Bay Area, she earned a B.S. in journalism from San Jose State, where she served as executive editor for the Spartan Daily, and has also worked at NBC Bay Area. When she’s not out in the field reporting, she’s likely trying a new workout or listening to The Weeknd. You can contact her at madilynne.medina@sfgate.com.

California cities, counties may need to consider wildlife connectivity in development plans A haggard and scruffy looking mountain lion.

The famed and now deceased mountain lion known as P-22 developed mange after eating rat poison in 2014, and was captured and treated for the illness. One of two bills approved recently by the California lawmakers would place restrictions on the use of certain rat poisons.

(National Park Service)

California lawmakers have passed a pair of bills aimed at making the landscape safer for wildlife threatened by habitat fragmentation and ubiquitous rat poison.

AB 1889, known as the Room to Roam Act, directs cities to consider and protect wildlife connectivity in their land-use plans. Meanwhile, AB 2552, dubbed the Poison-Free Wildlife Act, puts restrictions on certain types of rat poison, including removing them for over-the-counter purchase and limiting their use in wildlife areas.

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“Our wild neighbors should have the freedom to find food, mates and shelter, and should not be sickened or killed by reckless use of poisons, and so we owe it to ourselves and California wildlife to find ways to coexist,” said J.P. Rose, urban wildlands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity, which sponsored both bills.

The bills, which now go to the governor’s desk for final approval, were authored by Assemblymember Laura Friedman (D-Glendale). They cleared the state Legislature late last month and build on previous laws she spearheaded.

Cars, lack of connectivity and poison are the top threats to imperiled mountain lions in Southern California’s Santa Monica Mountains. The late, famed cougar P-22 was struck by a car toward the end of his life a few blocks south of Griffith Park and a subsequent exam revealed an old injury that may have been caused by another collision. He was also exposed to rat poison and developed mange.

Efforts to boost wildlife connectivity in the Golden State have gained momentum in recent years. What’s billed as the largest wildlife crossing in the world is rising over a 10-lane freeway near Los Angeles, while last month saw the launch of an initiative seeking to leverage public and private resources to build more safe passages for critters across the state.

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Room to Roam arrived about two years after the passage of a law that directed the California Department of Transportation to explore wildlife connectivity when it builds or expands roadways. (As required by that law, Caltrans recently released its wildlife connectivity report.) The new bill “addresses the land-use side of the coin,” Rose said.

Mari Galloway, California program director for the Wildlands Network, a co-sponsor of both connectivity bills, said there was concern that a local government might allow development in an area where Caltrans invested taxpayer money to make it passable for animals.

The new bill aims to avoid that headache by fostering coordination among various agencies and requiring local leaders to consider how development affects the movement of wildlife and habitat connectivity.

“The intention of the bill is to try to get everybody moving in the same direction in trying to identify where these landscapes need to remain permeable to ensure that we can continue to have this biodiversity,” Galloway said.

Cities and counties decide where development goes through long-term planning documents, known as general plans. This bill would mandate that local leaders “identify where these wildlife connectivity areas are in their general plan and then avoid, minimize and mitigate impacts to that area to be a functional linkage for wildlife,” Galloway said.

Proponents say wildlife movement isn’t currently considered until the end of the planning process — missing the opportunity to view the issue from a regional standpoint.

“What this bill seeks to do is front-load consideration of wildlife connectivity, so planners, builders and communities have a clearer picture of which areas are safer to build for both people and wildlife,” Rose said.

Although the bill does not require wildlife crossings to be built or set aside land, Friedman’s office said it was expected to result in the creation of passages, wildlife-safe fencing and reclaimed land or water.

In a statement, Friedman underscored the potential benefits to people: “Preserving wildlife connectivity and restoring degraded habitat and open space also helps ensure that all Californians have equitable opportunities to experience the physical and mental health benefits of nature.”

If passed, the soonest local governments would need to comply with the directives is Jan. 1, 2028.

Rose said the California Building Industry Assn. initially opposed the bill unless it was amended, and withdrew the opposition after its concerns were addressed.

Although previous laws have limited the use of certain rat poisons, others remain widely available. The Poison-Free Wildlife Act would place restrictions on additional types.

“This bill is an attempt to get some of those off the shelves so that people aren’t going to Home Depot and buying these super toxic rodenticides and unknowingly poisoning wildlife,” Rose told the Times earlier this year.

The poisons being targeted — chlorophacinone and warfarin — are known as first-generation anticoagulant rodenticides. They stop a rat’s blood from clotting and stay in the animal’s system after it dies. When an unsuspecting mountain lion or owl gobbles a dead or sick rat — or another animal that ate a tainted rat — the toxic substance is passed on.

Rose called the effects “really heartbreaking.” He said poisoned predators don’t always die right away; sometimes they “slowly bleed to death from the inside.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom has until Sept. 30 to sign the billls.

Under California law, anyone caught diverting water in violation of a state order has long been subject to only minimal fines. State legislators have now decided to crack down on violators under a newly approved bill that sharply increases penalties.

Assembly Bill 460 was passed by the Legislature last week and is among the water-related measures awaiting Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature. Other bills that were approved aim to protect the state’s wetlands and add new safeguards for the water supplies of rural communities.

Supporters say increasing fines for violations will help the State Water Resources Control Board more effectively enforce its orders to curtail water use when necessary.

“It helps the water board enforce the laws that they have on the books,” said Analise Rivero, associate director of policy for the group California Trout, which co-sponsored the bill.

The bill, which was introduced by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda), is intended to prevent the sort of violations that occurred in 2022 in the Shasta River watershed, when farmers and ranchers who belong to the Shasta River Water Assn. defied a curtailment order for eight days and diverted more than half the river’s flow, flouting requirements aimed at protecting salmon.

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The state water board fined the association the maximum amount for the violation: $4,000, which worked out to about $50 for each of its members. Those small fines didn’t deter farmers and ranchers from reducing the river’s flow to a point that threatened salmon and affected the supplies of downstream water users.

The case in Siskiyou County led to widespread calls for larger fines and stronger enforcement powers.

The legislation increases fines for violations of state water curtailment to as much as $10,000 per day, plus $2,500 for each acre-foot of water diverted. (An acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, or enough to cover one acre a foot deep.)

“This bill closes that loophole and makes the existing law stronger, and it’s an important step in disincentivizing water theft,” Rivero said.

Rivero said being able to impose larger fines is important as California grapples with the effects of climate change on water supplies.

Leaders of a coalition of environmental groups urged Newsom to sign the bill. In a letter, they said enforcing harsher penalties for violators is crucial for the state water board to “fulfill its mission of protecting fish, water, and people.”

Bauer-Kahan said that for too long, breaking the law and paying the fines have been seen as the cost of doing business by some illegal water diverters.

“Although we did not go far enough in ensuring that our water rights system functions in times of scarcity, we did take an important step,” Bauer-Kahan said.

The legislation raises penalties to “better hold those who steal water accountable,” she said. “Water is a precious resource, and we must do everything possible to ensure its protection.”

Proponents of the bill made some sacrifices to secure sufficient support in the Legislature, dropping a provision that would have given the state water board authority to act faster in emergencies to prevent “irreparable injury” to streams, fish or other water users.

The result was a relatively modest reform, but one that serves an important purpose, said Cody Phillips, staff attorney for the group California Coastkeeper Alliance.

“Being able to get the California Legislature to agree to increase fines in water is a major deal for the practical consequences of preventing water theft, but also to show that we can change these important details about our water rights system, and the sky doesn’t fall,” Phillips said.

Other proposals have recently encountered strong opposition from agricultural groups and water agencies.

Phillips and other environmental advocates supported another bill, AB 1337, which sought to clarify the state water board’s authority to issue curtailment orders for all diverters, including senior rights holders that use a large portion of the state’s water. But that bill didn’t secure enough support to pass this year in the Senate Natural Resources and Water Committee.

“Water is often referred to as the third rail in California politics, and we’ve seen that any changes, even modest changes, like 460 and frankly 1337, are met with ferocious pushback,” Phillips said. “But we can’t avoid these issues — climate change, overallocation, they’ve all led to a system where the way that we deal with water just doesn’t work.”

Some legal experts said the bill is a step in the right direction.

“We know that water is the single most important resource in the state, and yet we do not have a clear understanding of who uses it, where, and when, and we do not have a robust system for correcting unlawful use,” said Jennifer Harder, a professor at University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law.

Harder said the state needs to continue improving collection of water use data and should adopt measures to improve oversight of water rights. She said she is optimistic that “local water suppliers will come to understand that state-level standards can support and enhance local management.”

One of the other water-related measures passed by the Legislature included a bill intended to protect California’s wetlands after the rollback of federal protections under a Supreme Court decision last year. The court’s ruling in Sackett vs. EPA rewrote the federal definition of wetlands and removed federal protections for many streams that do not flow year-round, leaving ephemeral streams vulnerable to development and pollution.

If signed by Newsom, the bill, AB 2875, will codify an executive order that then-Gov. Pete Wilson issued in 1993 establishing a state policy of “no net loss” of wetlands and calling for a long-term increase in the acreage of wetlands. Despite that policy, the state has continued to lose more wetland acres to development during the last three decades.

“We have wetlands that only flow certain times of year, and they are seasonal, ephemeral streams that were stripped of protections, and yet they are really, really important biologically and for habitat,” said Assemblymember Laura Friedman (D-Glendale), who introduced the legislation.

Wetlands and a riparian forest are sustained by groundwater at the National Audubon Society’s Kern River Preserve.

Friedman and other supporters of the measure have stressed that because more than 90% of California’s original wetlands have already been drained and destroyed, strong protections for those that remain are vital. They say since the Supreme Court has scaled back the Clean Water Act’s federal protections for wetlands, the state will need to play a bigger role.

“We care about our state’s natural resources here in California, and it’s a shame that we right now have a Supreme Court that doesn’t seem to be very concerned about the kind of destruction that we’re seeing to our environment,” Friedman said. “It falls on states to really play whack-a-mole and catch up, because we have relied for a long time on existing, long-standing federal regulations.”

Scientists have documented major declines in North American bird populations since the 1970s, and they cite causes including the loss of habitats and warmer, drier conditions driven by climate change, among other factors.

The bill was sponsored by leaders of Audubon California, who called the measure an important step toward protecting wetland habitats that birds need to survive.

The bill doesn’t create a new regulatory framework but does make “a strong statement that California will protect and add wetlands,” said Mike Lynes, Audubon California’s director of public policy. “We’ve already lost so much of our natural wetland habitat. We’ve seen a decline in biodiversity, and there’s a ton of benefits by creating wetlands, not only for ecosystems, but also for flood control and for recreational opportunities, whether it’s birding, hunting, just hiking out in wetland areas.”

Another bill that was approved, AB 828, is aimed at improving safeguards for managed wetlands that are sustained by groundwater pumping, as well as rural communities that depend on wells. The bill, introduced by Assemblymember Damon Connolly (D-San Rafael), would allow these managed wetlands and small communities to temporarily continue to pump amounts of water in line with historical averages without facing mandatory reductions or fees imposed by local agencies under the state’s groundwater law.

Supporters said they proposed the change after several local agencies proposed groundwater allocations that would excessively limit supplies for communities or wildlife areas while also limiting pumping by agricultural landowners who are the largest water users.

“It sets a pause on pumping restrictions for small community water systems and managed wetlands, and on some fees, until those issues and their needs are considered,” Lynes said.

Some communities in the Central Valley have faced unworkable requirements to cut water use dramatically and start paying high fees for exceeding those limits, said Jennifer Clary, state director for the group Clean Water Action.

“We wanted a long-term exemption, but there was a lot of concern in the Legislature about that,” Clary said.

In California, it’s relatively easy to recycle aluminum cans, newspapers or glass bottles. But for one of the most commonly used household products — clothes — options are few.

Every year, tons of unwanted shirts, jeans, dresses, jackets and other garments end up in landfills across the state. Almost none are recycled. Some are donated to thrift stores, but thrift stores often re-sell to companies that ship them to developing nations, such as Ghana and Chile, where they are piled in mountains as high as 50 feet in deserts and along rivers.

On Friday, state lawmakers sent a bill to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk that would require companies to set up the nation’s first mandatory take-back program for unwanted clothes.

If Newsom signs the bill, SB 707, as expected, companies that make clothing and other textiles sold in California, including drapes, sheets and towels, will be required to create a non-profit organization by 2026 that would set up hundreds of collection sites at thrift stores, begin mail-back programs and take other steps in all of California’s 58 counties to take back and recycle their products by 2030.

“All across America, there are closets full of clothing that never gets worn,” said Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste, an environmental group based in Sacramento that supports the bill. “It is surrounding us. Look around your house. It’s the biggest waste problem that we’re ignoring.”

The accumulation of clothing waste is being made worse by “fast fashion,” a trend in which clothing companies make low-cost clothes intended to be worn only a few times as fashions shift.

“We have no use for things that aren’t in fashion, or don’t fit, or are worn out, and they often have no place left to go but the landfill,” Murray said.

The numbers are daunting.

In 2021, roughly 1.2 million tons of clothes and textiles were disposed of in California, according to the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, known as CalRecycle. While 95% of them are reusable or recyclable, only 15% currently are.

The bill is the latest in a trend of California lawmakers requiring companies that make difficult-to-dispose-of products to take responsibility for recycling and reusing them, rather than leaving the cost and challenge up to local city and county governments.

One example: Under state law since 2018, consumers are charged $10.50 when they buy a new mattress in California. That money helps fund an industry-led program, the Mattress Recycling Council, that has opened 240 collection sites and now recycles 85% of old mattresses in the state.

Similar “extended producer responsibility” programs with paint and carpet have been put in place in recent years. Newsom signed a landmark law in 2022 that will require the packaging industry to take back plastic packaging in the next few years.

The idea is to shift the burden away from consumers and government — which have to pay to expand and build landfills — to industry, which profits from selling the products in the first place, said State Sen. Josh Newman, a Fullerton Democrat, who wrote the clothing recycling bill.

“If I produce something as a manufacturer, I have a responsibility to participate in the full life cycle of that product, with the goal of minimizing the impact on the environment,” Newman said.

! Lawyer Paulin Silva shows clothes dumped in the desert, in La Pampa sector of Alto Hospicio, about 10 km east of the city of Iquique, Chile, on November 11, 2022. – Hills of clothes from the United States, Asia and Europe; used cars from Japan or Korea and thousands of tires contaminate extensive areas of the immense but vulnerable Atacama desert in northern Chile, which has become the planet’s “backyard”. (Photo by MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP via Getty Images)

France, center of the world’s fashion industry, already has a mandatory clothing recycling program. Other states around the U.S. are watching California to see if this one will work.

Industry groups at first opposed the bill, led by the California Chamber of Commerce and the American Apparel and Footwear Association, which represents more than 300 large clothing companies. After negotiating some changes with Newman, including allowing the industry group to do an assessment and work with CalRecycle to set recycling targets, they shifted to neutral.

“The biggest challenge is that apparel brands are not waste-management providers,” said Chelsea Murtha, the association’s senior director of sustainability. “This isn’t their area of expertise. Building out a system that doesn’t exist in a state this big is going to be a challenge. It’s ambitious. We are hopeful we can rise to the challenge.”

Murtha said the nonprofit group the industry is required to set up will likely operate in or alongside thrift stores in big counties and set up collection bins in rural counties. The costs will be passed on to consumers in the price of the clothing, she said, adding that it’s too early to provide an estimate.

Newman said he expected the law will only add “pennies” to the cost of new clothing.

Murtha said clothes in good condition will probably be resold or recycled. Damaged or worn garments can be recycled fairly easily if they are made of wool, cotton or other natural fibers. The fibers can be reused and spun into new fabrics.

Some old clothes will be shredded and used to stuff pillows or provide insulation for other products, she said. Garments made of mixed fabrics, such as polyester and spandex, can be broken down by a chemical process in which the basic materials are recycled.

The industry has not been pleased to see many old clothes ending up in landfills or waste piles in African and South America, Murtha added.

“That’s not something that any designer or sustainability team at an apparel brand wants,” she said.

UCLA, riven by violent protests over the Israel-Hamas war last spring, on Thursday unveiled a plan to rebuild campus trust and connections with enhanced safety measures, broader dialogue across differences, free speech guidelines and stronger efforts to support diversity.

UCLA drew global attention in April, when video footage captured a violent nighttime attack on a pro-Palestinian encampment by counterprotesters armed with metal pipes, wooden planks, fists and fireworks. Law enforcement forcibly dismantled the encampment shortly afterward, arresting 231 people, including about 90 students. The security lapses prompted UCLA to reassign the police chief. Faculty members outraged by the police actions held votes to censure and express no confidence in then-Chancellor Gene Block, which failed.

Meanwhile, a congressional committee summoned Block to grill him on his handling of antisemitism and three Jewish students sued UCLA for failing to protect their access to campus walkways and buildings, which they said Palestinian supporters blocked after asking if they were Zionists.

In an effort to move forward, Hunt said his four-point plan would aim for a “safer, stronger UCLA” featuring reviews of policing practices, campuswide efforts to build community and updated guidelines on free speech activities.

“As a campus that promotes inclusive excellence, we must protect the ability for Bruins of all backgrounds and identities to feel safe, welcome, respected and able to participate fully in campus life,” Hunt wrote. “We may not always see eye-to-eye on important and topical issues, but if we engage one another with respect and empathy, we can both grow as people and maintain a healthy academic environment for everyone.”

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UCLA’s new free speech guidelines are in line with strict new University of California guidance on protest management. All 10 UC campuses have been directed by UC President Michael V. Drake to post rules around free speech and notify students about them before their fall terms begin, a move to comply with a state legislative mandate. UCLA and six other UC undergraduate campuses begin instruction the week of Sept. 23; UC Berkeley and UC Merced started last month.

UCLA’s policies, issued Wednesday, are effective immediately as interim rules until they are finalized after a 60-day public review process. They specify approved free speech zones, omitting Royce Quad as one of them. The quad was a major conflict zone last spring as the site of both the Palestine Solidarity Encampment and a pro-Israel area featuring a massive jumbotron that projected video loops of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants on southern Israel.

The free speech zones include Bruin Walk and Plaza outside the student union and Pauley Pavilion, along with the east lawn area next to the Janss steps.

The rules prohibit tents, campsites and other temporary structures on UCLA property without prior approval and blocking of access to walkways and buildings. Amplified sound will be banned during marches but otherwise generally allowed with some restrictions. Concealing one’s identity while breaking laws or rules will be prohibited. In addition, the rules detail procedures for holding campus events and reiterate that the campus will be closed from midnight to 6 a.m. for activities with limited exceptions.

In addition to new free speech policies, the plan includes a renewed focus on campus safety and well-being. After the melee overnight on April 30, UCLA created a new Office of Campus Safety, hired former Sacramento Police Chief Rick Braziel to head it and moved all policing and emergency management programs to that office. The office, along with the University of California, is reviewing the safety protocols and police response to the protests last spring.

But Hunt said the office will expand its responsibilities beyond protest management. A 2022 report on campus safety noted that students, faculty and staff expressed concerns not only about campus policing but also mental health, protection from COVID, racism and sexism, active-shooter and earthquake preparedness and sexual assault. UCLA will include such broader issues in the expanded charge as it continues with listening sessions, Hunt said.

UCLA will also launch several programs aimed at building understanding between those who disagree. Across the UC system, many students, faculty and administrators say the differences over the Israel-Hamas war have ripped their campuses apart in unparalleled ways. Hunt said a first step in healing those divides is “seeing one another as real people shaped by complex backgrounds and experiences — not as simple stereotypes.”

UCLA will roll out a new speaker series this fall offering “challenging but empathetic conversations” on topical issues. The first event will feature Yasmeen Abu Fraiha, an Israeli Bedouin physician and fellow with the Middle East Initiative at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

“Speaking Across Conflicts” workshops will aim to strengthen skills for constructive conversations across charged political differences. New programs for student internships and teaching fellowships about effective dialogue are also planned. Many of the expanded programs will be housed in the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute and headed by David Myers, a professor of Jewish history who has long been involved in bridge-building efforts.

“In a diverse community such as ours, part of our learning and growth comes from engagement with viewpoints we may not agree with or readily understand,” Hunt wrote. “While this may be uncomfortable, it is also what helps us deepen our thinking, weigh different approaches and consider new ways of looking at an issue. Ultimately, it advances truth, knowledge and understanding.”

Hunt also said UCLA would continue to look for ways to foster greater support for its diverse community. Its Office of Civil Rights, for instance, is currently reviewing reports of antisemitism, along with anti-Arab and Islamophobic discrimination, to understand how that affected student experiences.

“UCLA is a spectacular place but it is by no means perfect,” Hunt said. “A commitment to rigorously studying the challenges we have faced and how we have addressed them — and making changes based on those findings — is essential if UCLA is to best serve its important academic mission and meet the needs of its students, faculty and staff.”

Election Day is Nov. 5.

In early October, vote-by-mail ballots will sent to voters in California. The voter registration deadline is Oct. 21 for vote-by-mail.

Election Day is two months away, but some important California election dates and deadlines are just around the corner.

One of the milestones on the path to Nov. 5 is in early October when county elections offices begin mailing vote-by-mail ballots. The voter registration deadline arrives later next month with vote centers open for early voting in the weeks prior to Election Day.

When it's all over, some time after Nov. 5, voters will have decided statewide ballot propositions, county and city office races and who will be the next President of the United States.

Here are some important election dates and deadlines to know.

Aug. 29: Voters can start using the My Voter Status tool to confirm their mailing address and voting status. Anyone planning to vote should verify and, if needed, update their voter registration. Re-registration is required if you've moved or changed your address, changed your name, or would like to change your political party affiliation.

Sept. 26 to Oct. 15: This is when the California Secretary of State and county election officials will mail voter information guides.

Oct. 7: County elections offices will begin mailing vote-by-mail ballots. California mails every active registered voter in the state a vote-by-mail ballot, a practice that began during the COVID-19 pandemic. You can check on your ballot here. Early voting sites also open.

Oct. 8: County elections officials will open ballot drop-off locations by this date. Find a location here. The locations will stay open through Election Day.

Oct. 21: The voter registration deadline for vote-by-mail. As of July 5, there were 26.8 millions eligible voters in California, 22.1 million of whom are registered to vote.

Oct. 22 to Nov. 5: Same day voter registration will be available, including on Election Day. Voters who choose this option are "conditionally" registered and cast a provisional ballot.

Oct. 26: Voter's Choice Act counties open vote centers.

Nov. 5: Polls open throughout California from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Election Day. After Election Day 2024

The work is far from done for elections officials in California's 58 counties on Election Day.

After polls close Nov. 5 at 8 p.m., county elections officials begin reporting results. The county offices conduct a semifinal official canvass of votes with totals reported to the California Secrety of State every two hours until the process is complete.

Nov. 12: Ballots returned by mail must be postmarked on or before Election Day and received by a county elections office to be counted.

Dec. 3: Counties send a statement of results in the race for U.S. President to the Secretary of State.

Dec. 5: This is the last day for county elections offices to certify election results.

Dec. 6: County elections officials send electronically a complete copy of the general election returns to the Secretary of State.

Dec. 7. This is the last day for the Secretary of State to analyze votes given for presidential electors and certify to the governor the names of the candidates having the highest number of votes.

Dec. 13: The statement of vote is certified by the Secretary of State. Southern California county elections offices

Your county elections officer is the go-to source for information on voting in the 2024 General Election. Find a link to your county office below.

Los Angeles County

Orange County

Riverside County

San Bernardino County

Ventura County

All California county elections offices

All too often, there are reports on children in the foster care system are abused, or worse. But there are success stories as well, many of them thanks to non-profit agencies that find good homes for kids.

But those agencies are facing a crisis that could force them to shut down.

There are nearly 45,000 children in the California foster care system, the vast majority have been separated from their parents due to neglect or abuse. Roughly 9,700 of those kids are placed in resource family homes supported by nonprofit foster family agencies (FFAs) like Five Acres in Altadena.

"FFAs are a critical component in the continuum of care in the child welfare system. They do the work that the counties are simply not set up to do," explained Jodi Kurata, the CEO of the Association of Community Human Service Agencies.

Working with foster children exposes FFAs to liability risks that requires insurance coverage.

Currently, a single insurer provides coverage in California for 90% of ALL FFAs - 26 in just L.A. County. But in spite of pending legislation in Sacramento intended to resolve liability concerns, that insurer recently announced it will no longer provide coverage to FFAs.

Kurata says the impact could be devastating,

"Foster family agencies cannot operate without insurance and today we understand the problem to be an availability problem not a cost problem."

Chanel Boutakidis is the CEO of Five Acres, and like other FAAs, can only wait to see what happens in Sacramento.

"It's heartbreaking for us to think that our programs would be in jeopardy alongside all the others in California who operate foster care agencies, but without us you're gonna see a lot of families who really never find their way to a child," said Boutakidis.

Families such as Erich Schneider and Alana Gentry, who found their daughter with the help of Five Acres.

"There's something in me that knew, 'oh, you're going to find your daughter here'," Alana said as she held back tears of joy.

Gentry and Schneider came to Five Acres when they wanted to learn about adoption and were inspired through the Five Acres orientation program.

"It was like, full body chills when they were talking. It just felt like this is where we we're meant to be," Gentry said.

"We also didn't know about the need for it... just in L.A. County alone how many children needed homes," Schneider added.

Initially, they were a foster family before adopting their now 3-year-old daughter.

In L.A. County, 1,700 children are being cared for by FFA resource families - who are trained and supported by an FFA social worker, who can visit families every week because the case load is roughly half that of a county social worker.

Laura De La Cruz, who is a program supervisor for Foster Care and Adoption, explained why that matters.

"The child fell and scraped their knee, they call us. The child got suspended from school today, they call us. We answer the phone. We know what's happening at all times. Oversight is very important to keep kids safe and that's what a foster family agency can offer."

Without a solution, FFAs will begin losing insurance as early as October and it will likely cascade across the industry through the fiscal year of 24-25.The risk to the foster care system is hard to imagine.

"If 90% of FFAs were to go away in the coming year, counties would face severe crises in finding safe family settings for children and so there would be a number of children without anywhere to go," said Kurata.

Boutakidis echoed that sentiment.

"I would say I'm very concerned that, should agencies like us not exist, you're gonna get children who never find permanency and end up just rotating from family to family and emancipating out, and then who knows what system they enter and I think that's one of the greatest worries I have with this."

Schneider says he hopes something will be done to keep foster family agencies protected.

"The road was rough getting to this point, but at this point it feels meant to be... like, she was always our daughter and Five Acres is a huge part of that," Schneider said.

SAN FRANCISCO -- California lawmakers are urging Governor Gavin Newsom to sign a bill that would allow rental car companies to use GPS technology sooner to find stolen rental cars faster.

San Francisco leaders say this would also prevent the cars from being used for theft and trafficking.

When a rental car isn't returned on time, as California state law stands today, companies are required to wait 72 hours to use GPS to find it.

"It doesn't make a whole lot of sense," Matt Haney, a California Assemblymember said.

Haney authored a bill that would shorten the window down to 24 hours instead.

And now, he's urging Governor Newsom to sign the bill.

"Many of these rental cars, when they're stolen, are actually used in other crimes," he said. "Someone doesn't want to use their own car in a crime because it can be traced so they take a rental car, they steal it and they go commit other crimes."

He claims over the past three years, rental car companies have reported a 266% increase in rental car thefts.

San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins says those stolen rental cars are frequently used to commit other crimes like organized retail theft.

"Often times, they are driving vehicles through the front doors of business stores, they're not driving their own vehicles through those doors. They're driving stolen rental cars because they don't mind damaging those cars," Jenkins said.

She claims cutting the time down will make it easier for police to do their jobs.

"Once that car is entered into the system as stolen, we will have another technological way to make sure that SFPD can do what it needs to, to pull over that car and make an arrest in that situation if necessary," she said.

"This information officers will be using to immediately apprehend suspects," Derrick Jackson, the acting San Francisco Deputy Police Chief said.

Jackson says if the change is made, it would also make the city's 400 newly installed license plate readers more effective.

"With the ability to better track stolen rental vehicles, we can be more effective in identifying criminal suspects and continue to keep driving down crime," he said.

Governor Newsom has until the end of September to sign or veto the bill.

When officers of the state Department of Cannabis Control swooped in on a neighborhood in the Bay Area city of Antioch this spring, they found what they were looking for — about $1 million in illegal marijuana — and one surprise.

One of the three houses they raided was owned by an officer of the Oakland Police Department.

In an email, the department confirmed that it “is aware of the allegations made against one of our members and is cooperating with outside law enforcement agencies on the case.”

The officer was placed on administrative leave April 30, and the matter is under investigation, the statement said.

Citing an ongoing personnel matter, the Police Department declined to name the officer.

CNN, which first reported the raid, identified the officer as Samson Liu, 38.

Real estate records show that a Samson Liu purchased a 2,800-square-foot house in Antioch in 2020 for $608,000.

The raid highlights the extent of illegal pot operations and the recent entry of Chinese organized crime into the industry that California voters legalized in 2016, the cannabis control agency told the news outlet. Law enforcement officials said the operations were sophisticated and coordinated and showed evidence of “the Chinese criminal syndicate” but declined to further elaborate due to ongoing investigations.

The agency did not immediately respond Tuesday to The Times’ request for comment.

A recent investigation by the Los Angeles Times looked at another facet of illegal cannabis in California. Based on confidential state records, public files, online sales and social networks, The Times found that in the last three years, the use of contraband pesticides on cannabis farms has spread across California.

Such pesticides have shown up now in at least six California counties, at both illegal and licensed growing operations. The poisons were present on half of 25 illegal farms in Siskiyou County raided by a state task force during a July 2023 sting operation that saw three officers require medical treatment after suffering exposure.

In a continuing investigation, The Times found chemicals tied to cancer, liver failure, thyroid disease and genetic and neurologic harm in marijuana sold in licensed dispensaries.

Links:cnn [[[[LATimes](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-06-14/california-doesnt-test-legal-weed-for-pesticides-so-we-did)](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-06-14/a-new-threat-to-cannabis-safety-smuggled-pesticides)](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-08-30/how-is-michigan-selling-more-weed-than-california)](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-07-17/cannabis-firearms-seized-illegal-grow-sites-california-state-parks)

themarijuanaherald.com

Aug 23 2023

Legislation to legalize marijuana cafes in California has been amended in the second and ordered to a second reading.

In June the California Senate passed a bill to legalize marijuana cafes through its second reading, moving it to its third and final reading. Yesterday the Senate amended the bill and ordered it back to its second reading. The proposal has already been passed by the full Assembly, but will need to go back for one final vote if it’s passed by the Senate through a third reading, given it was amended.

Assembly Bill 374 would authorize locations where marijuana and marijuana products, as well as other food and drink products, can be purchased and consumed. The measure would also allow marijuana stores to hold live entertainment events.

The measure was approved in an overwhelming 64 to 9 vote on May 31 through the California Assembly.

According to its legislative digest, this bill would authorize a local jurisdiction “to allow for the preparation or sale of noncannabis food or beverage products, as specified, by a licensed retailer or microbusiness in the area where the consumption of cannabis is allowed, to allow for the sale of prepackaged, noncannabis-infused, nonalcoholic food and beverages by a licensed retailer, and to allow, and to sell tickets for, live musical or other performances on the premises. of a licensed retailer or microbusiness in the area where the consumption of cannabis is allowed.”

“Cannabis cafes in the Netherlands capitalize on the social experience of cannabis by offering coffee, food, and live music, all of those opportunities are currently illegal under California law,” says Assembly Member Matt Haney, the bill’s prime sponsor. “AB 374 will allow struggling cannabis businesses to diversity away from the marijuana-only ‘dispensary’ model and bring much needed tourist dollars into empty downtowns.”

Haney says “Lots of people want to enjoy legal cannabis in the company of others. And many people want to do that while sipping coffee, eating a scone, or listening to music. There’s absolutely no good reason from an economic, health, or safety standpoint that the state should make that illegal.”

Under current California law cannabis consumption lounges are not allowed to sell freshly prepared food, a rule that many call arbitrary and unnecessary. A November 2022 rules change allowed lounges to offer prepackaged food and beverages on a limited basis, but nothing freshly made or beverages ready to be consumed without opening.

Assembly Bill 374 would change this by explicitly allowing licensed marijuana consumption sites to that sell freshly made foods and beverages and host live events such as concerts and seminars. Some are dubbing this the “cannabis café” bill, as it would introduce Amsterdam-style locations that allow for marijuana to be consumed and food and beverages to be purchased such as coffee, tea and sandwiches.

The full text of Assembly Bill 374 can be found by clicking here.

themarijuanaherald.com/2023/06/california-senate-passes-bill-to-legalize-marijuana-cafes-allow-live-performances-at-marijuana-stores/

https://themarijuanaherald.com/2023/06/california-assembly-passes-bill-to-allow-marijuana-cafes/

www.latimes.com

Congressman nominates 27 Latino films for National Film Registry

Films by and about Latinos have often been left out of historical conversations including the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. But Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), along with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, has been trying to change that.

Castro has been working for years to help increase Latino representation in multiple industries across the U.S., including entertainment. Last week he sent a letter to Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and the National Film Preservation Board listing 27 Latino films that should be considered for this year’s selection.

The goal of the registry is to select films that showcase a variety of range and diversity of American film heritage.

“This is my attempt and the Hispanic Caucus’ attempt to celebrate their contributions so that people will rightfully see us for something other than just the stereotypes,” Castro said. “As an industry that is purported to be incredibly culturally progressive in all kinds of causes, [the entertainment industry] has in fact been regressive and detrimental to the development of new voices, and the Latino community has paid the price of that exclusion.”

Castro said that the lack of representation on the registry is harmful not only to the Latino community, but also to other marginalized groups. He said he carefully selected films that break common stereotypes placed on the Latino community.

“Given the film industry’s continued exclusion of Latinos, we must make a special effort to ensure that Latino Americans’ contributions to American filmmaking are appropriately celebrated and included in the National Film Registry,” Castro said in his letter.

Every year the registry adds 25 films from the list of nominees and in recent years has increased emphasis on films by people of color and women. Even with this increase, out of the 850 titles on the registry, only 24 of them are Latino films.

Ana-Christina Ramón, the inaugural director of the Entertainment and Media Research Initiative at UCLA, has dedicated much of her work to researching access and equity in the entertainment industry. She said that including Latino films on the list of nominees and in the registry is crucial.

“Latinx people have been living here since before it was the United States and they are part of the American experience, and so for them not to be included, I think it would be a travesty,” Ramón said.

Ramón also said it is not only about the types of diverse stories that are being told, but also who is getting the jobs to play those roles.

“These films not only tell the story about Latin culture, but they influence American culture as well,” Ramón said.

Castro said the film industry seems to be more exclusive with the diversity of its lists than the music industry because it’s “layered with more gatekeepers.”

“That’s what this work is about. It’’s a celebration of the culture, but also a reminder to Hollywood that we’re here, that our contributions matter, and that they are worthy of recognition,” Castro said.

One of the films on the Library of Congress’ nomination list is “Sleep Dealer” by director Alex Rivera, which was released in 2008. The Sundance award-winning film is a sci-fi thriller about a young man, Memo Cruz, played by Luis Fernando Peña, in near-future Mexico who tries to survive a “misguided drone attack.”

Cruz tries to find safety near the U.S.-Mexico border but finds out migrant workers are unable to cross the border. He then tries to connect his body to a robot in the U.S. to help find a better future.

For over two decades, Rivera, who is a MacArthur “Genius Grant” winner and professor at Arizona State University, has dedicated his career to telling adventurous Latino stories. He said that Latino stories are not given adequate support to be successful. He said there is no shortage of Latino stories, but the problem is that there is not enough interest in Latino stories from decision makers.

“It’s so important that someone like Rep. Castro is using his platform and his power to highlight the simple reality of our community as part of this country,” Rivera said.

The official list of films added to the registry will be announced in December.

Here are the films nominated by Castro:

“... and the Earth Did Not Swallow Him” (1994) “Blood In Blood Out” (1993) “Raising Victor Vargas” (2002) “Frida” (2002) “I Like It Like That” (1994) “Walkout” (2006) “Mosquita y Mari” (2012) “The Milagro Beanfield War” (1988) “Under the Same Moon” (2007) “American Me” (1992) “Tortilla Soup” (2001) “Mi Vida Loca” (1993) “Instructions Not Included” (2013) “Maria Full of Grace” (2004) “Girlfight” (2000) “La Mission” (2010) “Sleep Dealer” (2008) “Alambrista!” (1977) “Our Latin Thing” (1972) “Cheech & Chong’s Up in Smoke” (1978) “A Better Life” (2011) “Gun Hill Road” (2011) “In the Time of the Butterflies” (2001) “Roberto Clemente” (2008) “The Longoria Affair” (2010)

https://irle.ucla.edu/emri/

latimes.com/genius-fellows-latinx-files

asu.edu/20221027-genius-grant-fellows-launch-latino-filmmaking-lab-asus-poitier-film-school

latimes.com

The Supreme Court is being urged to weigh whether homeless people have a constitutional right to sleep on public sidewalks and camp in parks.

Judge Marsha Berzon, a senior liberal on the appeals court, cited Supreme Court decisions from the early 1960s which said that drug addicts and alcoholics may not be punished simply because they have an addiction. She said the same principle applies to the homeless.

“Just as the state may not criminalize the state of being homeless in public places,” Berzon wrote, “the state may not criminalize conduct that is an unavoidable consequence of being homeless — namely sitting, lying or sleeping on the streets.”

Four years ago, a wide array of California business groups and cities, including Los Angeles, joined appeals that urged the Supreme Court to review that ruling in a case from Boise, Idaho.

To their surprise and dismay, however, the justices turned down the appeal without a comment or dissent. They may have done so because Boise officials had repealed part of a key ordinance after losing in a lower court. The appeal may have been seen as moot.

But the non-decision left the constitutional dispute untouched, and the issue is now back before the high court in a new appeal from a small city in southern Oregon.

Grants Pass has a population of about 38,000, of whom 50 or as many 600 are homeless. Shortly after the 9th Circuit’s ruling in 2018 case from Boise, lawyers sued on behalf of several homeless people in the city who said they were harassed by police and ticketed for sleeping in a park.

In response, a federal judge ruled the city cannot enforce a strict ban on camping in its public parks, and that ruling was affirmed by the 9th Circuit in a 2-1 decision.

Writing for the majority, Judge Roslyn Silver said she was obliged to follow the circuit court’s precedent in the Boise case, which held “the 8th Amendment prohibits the imposition of criminal penalties for sitting, sleeping, or lying outside on public property for homeless individuals who cannot obtain shelter.”

That in turn launched the new appeal to the Supreme Court.

Lawyers who worked on the case are optimistic the court will take it up because the homeless problem — and its impact on cities — has gotten much worse.

Their appeal filed late Tuesday argues that the 9th Circuit’s ruling and the federal judges who have applied it “have erected a judicial roadblock preventing a comprehensive response to the growth of public encampments in the West. The consequences of inaction are dire for those living both in and near encampments: crime, fires, the reemergence of medieval diseases, environmental harm, and record levels of drug overdoses and deaths on public streets....Only this [Supreme] Court can end this misguided project of federal courts dictating homelessness policy under the banner of the 8th Amendment.”

Last month, the 9th Circuit Court’s conservatives blasted their liberal colleagues for refusing to reconsider their past rulings on the rights of the homeless.

“Homelessness is presently the defining public health and safety crisis in the western United States. California, for example, is home to half of the individuals in the entire country who are without shelter on a given night,” wrote Judge Milan Smith in a dissent joined by eight others.

“In the City of Los Angeles alone, there are roughly 70,000 homeless persons. There are stretches of the city where one cannot help but think the government has shirked its most basic responsibilities under the social contract: providing public safety and ensuring that public spaces remain open to all,” Smith wrote. “One-time public spaces like parks — many of which provide scarce outdoor space in dense, working-class neighborhoods — are filled with thousands of tents and makeshift structures, and are no longer welcoming to the broader community.”

The 9th Circuit’s active judges split 14-13 over whether to re-hear the case from Grants Pass, just short of the needed majority. But such a broad divide on the nation’s largest U.S. appeals court often appears to trigger a review by the Supreme Court.

Under the court’s rules, the lawyers who represented the homeless plaintiffs have 30 days to file a response to the appeal in City of Grants Pass vs. Johnson. If that schedule holds, the justices could decide in late fall whether to hear the case and issue a ruling early next year. scotusblog.com/cases/city-of-boise-idaho-v-martin

latimes.com

When Adel Hagekhalil speaks about the future of water in Southern California, he often starts by mentioning the three conduits the region depends on to bring water from hundreds of miles away: the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the Colorado River Aqueduct and the California Aqueduct.

Southern California urgently needs to buttress its water resources, he says, by designing the equivalent of a “fourth aqueduct” — not another concrete artery to draw water from distant sources, but a set of projects that will harness local water supplies and help prepare for more intense extremes as temperatures continue to rise.

“The organization is going through a transformation,” Hagekhalil told employees during a recent visit to a water treatment plant. “It’s all about us adapting,” he said, and the water district must prepare for hotter and drier times as global warming continues to undermine the region’s water lifelines in the coming decades. Our climate change challenge

If the Golden State is going to lead the world toward a better, safer future, our political and business leaders — and the rest of us — will have to work harder to rewrite the California narrative. Here’s how we can push the state forward.

For Southern California to adapt, Hagekhalil said, it will need to recycle more wastewater, capture stormwater, clean up contaminated groundwater, and design new infrastructure to more nimbly transport and store water, taking advantage of wet years such as this one to prepare for longer and more severe droughts.

Whether he is ultimately able to deliver on these ambitious goals could be determined in part by the actions of the board that hired him. The MWD’s 38-member board has a history of contentious politics, and resistance to change among some leaders might slow Hagekhalil’s efforts to revamp priorities at the district, where he oversees more than 1,900 employees and more than $2.2 billion in annual spending. Adel Hagekhalil speaks at Weymouth Water Treatment Plant in La Verne.

Adel Hagekhalil, general manager of the MWD, speaks at Weymouth Water Treatment Plant in La Verne.

But Hagekhalil, who previously managed sewer systems and street services for Los Angeles, has a reputation for being an affable, diplomatic manager who isn’t afraid to take on difficult tasks and values hearing from all sides. He has made headway building alliances to advance his goals. And he also has a disarming demeanor, with a playful streak and a knack for using slogans to market his priorities.

He took the job in 2021 after a bitter debate among board members, some of whom said they saw him as too inexperienced in Western state water politics. After the board narrowly voted to hire him, Hagekhalil sought to emphasize unity, and began wearing a blue lapel pin with the slogan “We Are One.”

He regularly hands out the pins to board members, employees and others.

“I’m a believer in branding,” Hagekhalil said. “And I believe that I probably am pretty good at doing it.”

Tracy Quinn, an MWD board member and chief executive of the environmental group Heal the Bay, said she thinks Hagekhalil is succeeding in bringing people together around a vision of holistic water solutions.

“Adel is a convener,” Quinn said. “It’s been really impressive to watch him do what he’s known for: building a bigger tent, bringing people in, getting buy-in.”

Hagekhalil earns $465,000 a year as general manager. The 58-year-old engineer regularly talks with top state leaders and members of Congress. He has built rapport with environmental activists by joining them in virtual meetings to hear their concerns about the climate crisis, conservation efforts and proposed infrastructure projects. Adel Hagekhalil listens during a meeting at the Diemer Water Treatment Plant.

Hagekhalil’s openness to listening is a welcome change and a sign that he is trying to take the MWD in a new direction, says Charming Evelyn, who chairs the Sierra Club’s water committee in Southern California.

Adel Hagekhalil, wearing glasses and a large gray suit, shakes hands with a man wearing a red T shirt while at a presentation

Hagekhalil, who has a reputation for being an affable, diplomatic manager. greets employees during a safety fair at the Diemer Water Treatment Plant in Yorba Linda.

His openness to listening is a welcome change and a sign that he is trying to take the agency in a new direction, said Charming Evelyn, who chairs the Sierra Club’s water committee in Southern California. She said she sees him as a “people pleaser,” who knows what each camp wants to hear and is careful not to antagonize anyone while trying to strike a balance.

“He is walking a tightrope,” Evelyn said, “trying to please the folks that have been there a very, very long time, that don’t like change, and trying to see how he can implement change in increments.”

She said she expects Hagekhalil’s campaign will be a difficult test, a “rough road.”

Hagekhalil is optimistic.

“I think it’s a great opportunity to really reshape the future and build the infrastructure for the next hundred years,” he said. “Time is not on our side. We cannot act with anything less than urgency.”

Hagekhalil said California’s current water challenges demand ambitious innovations on the scale of the works planned more than a century ago by William Mulholland, who led L.A.’s water department and oversaw the construction of the aqueduct that took water from the Eastern Sierra and enabled the rise of Los Angeles. Now, he said, Southern California needs a new “Mulholland moment,” but one based on a new ethic of developing solutions to withstand climate change. Adel Hagekhalil addresses employees during a safety fair at the Diemer Water Treatment Plant.

Adel Hagekhalil says Southern California needs a new “Mulholland moment,” but one based on a new ethic of developing solutions to withstand climate change.

:::

On a recent morning, Hagekhalil met with workers at the Robert B. Diemer Water Treatment Plant in Yorba Linda, where he spoke about the importance of workplace safety and the changes he is prioritizing. He talked about the climate adaptation plan the district is preparing to become more resilient and more self-reliant on local sources.

“What we did the last hundred years was great, but we know that the Colorado River is drying up,” Hagekhalil said. “The future is ensuring that everyone has safe, reliable water across the region, with no one left behind.”

After taking questions, Hagekhalil handed out raffle prizes, including water bottles and earbuds.

Then an employee drove him to the MWD headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. Walking into his office, he passed a wall with rows of black-and-white portraits of the 13 other men who have led the agency since its founding in 1928, followed by a color photo of Hagekhalil smiling.

He has used his office window, which overlooks the 101 Freeway, as a whiteboard of sorts, with a list of five bulleted words written in black marker on the glass: Empower. Sustain. Protect. Adapt. Partner.

Hagekhalil said he distilled his goals into these five categories, which he calls “anchors” to guide the organization. Five 'strategic priorities' written on the window of Adel Hagekhalil's office overlooking Los Angeles

Adel Hagekhalil has written his five “strategic priorities” in marker on his office window overlooking downtown Los Angeles.

In a series of meetings with managers, Hagekhalil discussed a project in the Antelope Valley that will store water underground, efforts to work with partner agencies to bank water elsewhere, and the district’s plans to rework its system to provide redundancy in areas that now rely solely on imported water from Northern California via the State Water Project.

He chatted by phone with Assemblymember Laura Friedman (D-Glendale) about a bill the district is supporting to prohibit the use of drinking water for grass that is purely decorative along roads and outside businesses.

Hagekhalil received an update on a planned project in Carson called Pure Water Southern California, which is slated to become the country’s largest wastewater recycling facility, at a cost of $5 billion to $7 billion. It’s scheduled to deliver its first water as soon as 2028, and later reach full capacity in 2032, treating 150 million gallons a day, enough to supply about half a million homes.

That recycled water is intended to help offset declines in supplies from the shrinking Colorado River — a goal that agencies in Nevada and Arizona have supported by contributing money for the planning work.

Hagekhalil said he expects the share of water that Southern California gets from imported sources, now about 50%, to shrink in the coming decades to roughly 30%. He said that will be driven by expected long-term declines in available supplies from the Colorado River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a gap that will need to be filled with other supplies.

The district also must prepare for more of the heat-supercharged “climate whiplash” conditions that California has been experiencing, he said, including the driest three-year period on record from 2020-2022, followed by one of the wettest winters in decades.

Even with the state’s reservoirs now nearly full, Hagekhalil said it’s crucial not to lose momentum on building infrastructure projects such as the water recycling facility, because the state could soon be dealing with even more severe bouts of dryness.

Last year, the drought situation was so dire that the district imposed mandatory water restrictions in areas that depend on the State Water Project, affecting nearly 7 million people and leading to a dramatic reduction in water use. Hagekhalil said the shortages could have worsened if the drought had persisted, and he intends to prevent a repeat of — or any scenarios like — the crisis of 2017-18 in Cape Town, South Africa, when residents lined up to fill jugs as declining reservoirs approached a feared “Day Zero.”

“I don’t want people ever to be in a place where they do not have water,” Hagekhalil said. “This cannot happen here.” Stripes of color representing the rising temperatures in California between 1850 to 2020

Hagekhalil’s values and views were partly shaped by his experiences growing up during the civil war in Lebanon, where his Palestinian family lived through bloodshed, hardships and water shortages. For a time in 1982, after Israeli troops invaded, they had no running water at home, so Hagekhalil would line up to fill two jugs at a communal spigot.

“When that water came out and you filled your jugs, you’re coming home, you’d have a big smile,” Hagekhalil said. “I know what the value of water is.”

Later, as fighting raged between the Lebanese military and militia fighters in 1984, his family was living in a second-story apartment when a rocket hit, ripping through the home and exploding on the floor below, killing many neighbors. Hagekhalil, who was then 19, said he remembers his mother had him lie in a bathtub and covered him so he wouldn’t be wounded.

When the family fled to an underground shelter, Hagekhalil carried his grandmother, who was ill. He also carried two suitcases and remembers stepping past dead bodies as he fled.

After a stint living in a hotel, Hagekhalil and his parents took a cab to Syria and boarded a flight out of the country. They moved to Houston, where Hagekhalil’s older brother was living, and embraced their new home.

“Deep inside, when you go through this trauma, it stays with you. And that’s why I don’t like to see people who are traumatized,” Hagekhalil said. “I want to help people.”

He said he isn’t particularly religious, but he follows the teachings of Islam in seeking to care for others. Early in life, Hagekhalil wanted to become a doctor to help save lives. Even though he ended up studying engineering, he said he sees his current work of ensuring people have clean water as being, in a way, about saving lives.

“To me, I’m the top surgeon now,” he said with a chuckle. “So it starts from my dream of being a doctor, to now probably being a water doctor.”

Continuing with the analogy, he said he’s working to “help heal this patient that we’re dealing with because of climate change, to make it continue for the future and live long.”

Doing that requires shifting the agency’s focus from being purely a water importer to being more of a regional steward and caretaker of water, he said, “a co-op to build this reliability system for everyone.” He said the transformation also requires changing the financial model from one that depends on selling imported water to member agencies, to one that will support investments in local infrastructure.

“ ‘How are we going to pay for it’ is going to be the biggest discussion that the board should take on,” he said.

While the agency’s former leaders helped spearhead a controversial state proposal to build a water tunnel in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, Hagekhalil has taken a different approach, saying he hopes to see more analysis of the long-term water-supply benefits that the project would bring.

“We can’t put all our eggs in that one basket. In the past, everyone was focused on the delta as the solution for our future,” he said. “We need to diversify. We need to look at other options.” Hagekhalil seen from behind looking out at a circular rotunda inside a building.

Hagekhalil takes in a view of the lobby at MWD headquarters. He says he’s working to “help heal this patient that we’re dealing with because of climate change.”

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

At the same time, Hagekhalil sees one of his key tasks as addressing the organization’s internal woes, including issues of discrimination and harassment of women, which last year led to a scathing state audit showing the district failed to commit resources to properly investigate complaints of misconduct, among other failings. Hagekhalil tells his managers they are crucial in “creating this culture of inclusion.”

This isn’t the first time Hagekhalil has campaigned for change. In his previous work for the city of L.A., he led various efforts, including reducing sewer spills and experimenting with efforts to cool streets by painting pavement a light shade to reflect sunlight.

At times, he showed his playful side. In the early 2000s, when the city launched a campaign urging restaurants to stop dumping grease into sewers, Hagekhalil dressed up as a superhero called the Grease Avenger, appearing at community events wearing a blue leotard, mask and purple cape. He said the gimmick worked, helping to raise awareness.

Now, his goals are bigger and his responsibilities are weighty. But he said he’s simply building on an approach he has always taken in his work: never saying no to a difficult task.

He said his style as a manager draws on a bit of wisdom he gleaned years ago from the title of a book about stress and spirituality by Brian Luke Seaward: “Stand Like Mountain, Flow Like Water.”

Hagekhalil said he thinks about being strong to face challenges but being “flexible, adaptable and welcoming like water.”

“You can move around the challenges you’re facing, and not be stopped in that effort,” he said.

California produces millions of tons of hazardous waste every year — toxic detritus that can leach into groundwater or blow into the air. It’s waste that can explode, spark fires, eat through metal containers, destroy ecosystems and sicken people. It’s dangerous material that we have come to rely on and ignore — the flammable liquids used to cleanse metal parts before painting, the lead and acid in old car batteries and even the shampoos that can kill fish.

It all needs to go somewhere.

But over the past four decades, California’s facilities to manage hazardous waste have dwindled. What’s left is a tattered system of older sites with a troubling history of safety violations and polluted soil and groundwater, a CalMatters investigation has found. Many are operating on expired permits. And most are located in communities of color, often ones with high rates of poverty, despite environmental justice laws meant to ensure that the most disadvantaged don’t also face the greatest pollution exposure.

“It’s difficult to permit a new toxic facility. There’s going to be a lot of resistance to building a new one,” said Bill Magavern, the Coalition for Clean Air’s policy director, who advised on a state report in 2013 that examined California’s hazardous waste permitting process. “So the path of least resistance is keeping some of the old ones going.”

This conflict is playing out in Santa Fe Springs, a city of about 19,000 people in Los Angeles County that houses one of the state’s biggest hazardous waste treatment and recycling facilities, called Phibro-Tech. Last year, state regulators issued a draft of a new five-year permit for the company, which has been running on an expired one since 1996. Community activists and environmental groups are opposed.

Phibro-Tech is one of only 72 permitted destinations for hazardous waste in a state that had more than 400 in the early 1980s. Shipping records show it handles as much as 23,000 tons of hazardous waste a year from some of the biggest West Coast companies, including tech giants Intel and TTM Technologies.

But Phibro-Tech is also a company with a lengthy record of violating laws meant to protect workers, the environment and its neighbors in a low-income Latino community, according to hundreds of pages of inspection reports CalMatters obtained through government databases and public records requests.

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In recent years, California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control inspectors cited Phibro-Tech for leaking containers and cracked containment barriers. They identified poorly maintained wells that might allow toxic waste to seep into the environment and they dinged the company for failing to address one area of contamination on the site in a timely manner.

Among the pollutants state regulators have documented in soil and groundwater under and near the plant are trichloroethylene and hexavalent chromium — the cancer-causing chemical made famous in the movie “Erin Brockovich.”

Other regulators also found problems in the past decade. The Los Angeles basin’s air pollution agency cited the company after its equipment released ammonia gas, which can burn lungs if inhaled. Sanitation system regulators cited the company for discharging wastewater with excess contaminants into sewers, including copper, a hazardous element that can be toxic to aquatic life.

And occupational safety regulators cited the company for unsafe working conditions. Among the more serious incidents: In 2015, a worker making $15.70 an hour slipped in a puddle of spilled acid and got second- and third-degree burns on his legs, feet and genitals, workers’ compensation case file records and inspection reports show. Last year a cracked valve sprayed hydrochloric acid in another worker’s face, leaving him with breathing problems, those documents reveal.

The company’s representatives, in meetings with CalMatters, defended Phibro-Tech’s record. They want the state to approve a new operating document and blamed many of their regulatory violations on what they deem to be an ambiguous and outdated permit. The company has entered into agreements to fix problems found during inspections, and has addressed issues on site. They said residents are in no danger from operations and that contamination on site was from other companies — the legacy of a century of industrial operations there and nearby. And they touted Phibro-Tech’s role in recycling waste that would otherwise be dumped and lead to environmental damage from mining. (Every 55 pounds of copper the company is able to recover from the waste that electronics manufacturers send them is 10,000 pounds of earth that doesn’t need to be excavated in the hunt for precious metals, they said.) A white industrial plant looms in the distance. In the foreground are homes, which don't look far from the plant.

A tower from an industrial plant is visible from the Los Nietos residential neighborhood on June 7, 2023. Part of the community abuts an industrial park in which Phibro-Tech Inc. is also located.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters) Two photos are side by side. On the left is a street-view photo of a Spanish-style house with plants along one of the walls. A mural of the Virgin Mary is on that wall, just above the shorter plants. On the right, a photo of a male street vendor with medium skin tone pushes a cart. He wears a baby blue t-shirt, black baseball hat and dark blue denim jeans.

Left: A Virgen de Guadalupe painted on a home near Norwalk Blvd. in the Los Nietos neighborhood on June 8, 2023. Right: A street vendor in Los Nietos on June 7, 2023. This part of the community abuts the industrial park where Phibro-Tech Inc. is located.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters)

But that’s little comfort to some residents of Los Nietos, in unincorporated Los Angeles County, where the nearest home is roughly 550 feet from Phibro-Tech’s warren of aging tanks and labyrinthine pipes. It’s one of the most environmentally vulnerable areas in California, according to a complicated scoring system the state devised to account for exposure to pollution and health risk because of factors such as poverty.

More than 20 sites generating hazardous waste sit within a mile of this neighborhood, including companies that do chrome plating, manufacture radiators and make batteries.

“We are not a rich people,” said Esther Rojo, whose house is a thousand feet — as the wind blows — from Phibro-Tech. “So they put all of them over here in this area.” An older woman with medium skin tone looks off-camera with a slightly worried look on her face. She has brown shoulder-length hair and wears a patterned shirt with a black and white sleeveless vest over it.

Esther Rojo at her home in the Los Nietos neighborhood on June 7, 2023.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters)

A 2015 state law was supposed to do something about that — by requiring regulators to consider the “cumulative impact” on communities when making permitting decisions. Yet officials never actually adopted the regulations that the law required. The Department of Toxic Substances Control — which refused to be interviewed for this story — is poised to finalize the draft permit for Phibro-Tech later this year.

“We don’t know what to do,” Rojo said. “(Phibro-Tech) got the money. They got the power to stay here.” California’s tattered system

The rules for handling dangerous waste date back to the 1970s, when state and federal officials began trying to define “hazardous.” That’s when they passed laws and started crafting regulations branding certain material with the label based on characteristics including ignitability (would it burst into flames?), corrosivity (could it eat through a metal container?), toxicity (are you more likely to get cancer if you’re exposed to it?) and reactivity (is it unstable and likely to explode?).

Those regulations generally require that hazardous waste go to a specially permitted facility that can treat, store or dispose of the material. But while just about everyone wants consumer products that lead to the creation of hazardous waste, no one wants that waste dumped in their backyard.

In the past 40 years, the number of California facilities that have permits to treat, store or dispose of hazardous waste has dropped by more than 80% — while the number of places that generate this waste grew by more than 70% since 2010, according to a state report released last month. Only 72 permitted facilities remain statewide to handle the waste of about 94,500 generators. As some companies turn to more sustainable practices, California’s volumes of hazardous waste have dropped a modest amount since the 1990’s, state analyses of shipping records show. For example, California shipped about 11% less hazardous waste in 2015 than it did in 1995.

Officials and experts have long recognized that there’s little political will to open new sites to take toxic material. A 2017 state report discussed California’s longstanding efforts to reduce the generation of hazardous waste because of the “difficulty in gaining consensus in the siting of new facilities.” A woman with dark skin tone looks off-camera with a slight smile. She has long braided black hair and wears sunglasses. She has on a black and white long cardigan. She is in front of a lot of plants with big leaves.

Angela Johnson Meszaros, managing attorney at Earthjustice, outside of their offices in downtown Los Angeles on June 8, 2023.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters)

It’s also expensive to try to open a new site. Permitting can take years and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for companies who also “must pay taxes and any other expenses to maintain the property throughout time the permit is being processed, despite receiving no revenue from the facility,” according to the July report.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, roughly half the hazardous waste generated in California winds up in other states — often ones with weaker environmental regulations, according to a Department of Toxic Substances Control analysis of shipping records. (California’s standards are tougher than the federal ones. So waste considered hazardous in California can sometimes be disposed of at regular landfills in states like Arizona and Utah.) The average distance from a California hazardous waste generator to a destination facility is 500 miles, according to the July report.

CalMatters asked the Department of Toxic Substances Control when it last received a permit application from a company trying to open a business in California to store, treat or dispose of federally defined hazardous waste. “Based on a review of available information,” there doesn’t appear to have been any permit applications for a new commercial facility since the early 1980s, according to the agency.

The toxic material that stays in California goes to a relatively small collection of aging facilities, many of which have a history of regulatory violations and safety lapses, a CalMatters review of permitting and enforcement records found.

Using a list of permitted hazardous waste businesses in California and a database of shipping records, CalMatters identified 41 commercial facilities in California that received at least one shipment of hazardous waste last year. (The rest are largely a mix of military installations and operations that treat their own toxic waste before sending it to another facility, records show.) Among those 41 sites, 24 have been the subject of “corrective action” to clean contamination on their site (some tracing back to earlier owners), 29 were the subject of enforcement action by toxics regulators since 2010, and 11 are operating on expired permits.

“It can’t be that a system that’s held together at best by bubble gum and baling wire is the thing that we’re doing in a developed nation to manage hazardous waste,” said Angela Johnson Meszaros, a managing attorney with the environmental law organization Earthjustice.

State and federal law allows hazardous waste facilities to operate on an expired permit so long as they’re working to get a new one. Companies need to apply six months before the expiration date. But it takes years to process a permit. A recent state law changed that timeline and beginning in 2025 companies will need to apply two years before the expiration date. Still, that’s not always enough time to get it done.

Phibro-Tech’s permit expired in 1996 — making it the oldest so-called “continued permit” in California, state records show.

Johnson Meszaros said outdated operating documents are a safety concern and need to be overhauled “because we understand that you have to go back and look and change permits to address changes to the world around a facility.”

The reasons experts give for the permitting delays are myriad. Complicated and highly technical decisions are being made by a state department that’s long struggled with staffing and turnover, interviews with former agency employees and industry insiders, and a state report on the issue suggest. The process also can require extensive public engagement including open meetings and formal comment periods.

And environmental activists question how motivated companies are to speed the process when they can keep operating without a current permit.

Some advocates and former agency employees also say the Department of Toxic Substances Control tends to push off tough decisions. Regulators can be hesitant to deny a permit because the state needs to have a place to send its hazardous waste.

“For too much of its history (the department) bent over backward to keep facilities open even when they should have been shut down,” said Bill Magavern, who advised on a state commissioned review of the agency’s permitting process a decade ago.

In a prepared statement the department said it “does not take into consideration the state’s hazardous waste capacity when reviewing permit applications.”

“Decisions are based on the facility’s compliance with laws and regulations, and whether operations can be conducted in a manner that is protective of public health and the environment,” the statement said.

The toxics department did deny an updated hazardous waste permit in 2020 to General Environmental Management in Rancho Cordova. It was one of four permit renewals the agency denied since 2010 but the only rejection for a commercial facility authorized to take federally defined hazardous waste, state records show. The company argued in court filings that it didn’t deserve such an “unprecedented administrative decision,” and that its services were “particularly important to Califomia’s safe and effective management of hazardous waste” because there were so few permitted commercial sites left in the state. The facility had been the site of three fires and an explosion since 2011 due to mismanagement, regulators alleged in their own legal filings.

“When your thing is literally on fire, even (the Department of Toxic Substances Control) has to acknowledge it,” said Johnson Meszaros, the Earthjustice attorney. Phibro-Tech’s troubled record An aerial view of the Phibro-Tech Inc. plant in Santa Fe Springs.

An aerial view of the Phibro-Tech Inc. plant in Santa Fe Springs on June 9, 2023. The Los Nietos neighborhood is visible in the distance.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters) Two photos are side by side. On the left is a photo of a train line leading to the Phibro-Tech Inc. plant in Santa Fe Springs. On the right is a photo of industrial tanks and equipment at the Phibro-Tech Inc. plant.

Left: A train line leads to the Phibro-Tech Inc. plant in Santa Fe Springs on June 7, 2023. Right: Industrial tanks and equipment at the Phibro-Tech plant.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters)

Phibro-Tech sits on a 4.8 acre triangle of land just inside the border of Santa Fe Springs.

The site’s industrial roots stretch back to the 1920s. It was a railroad switching station, a foundry and a chemical company before Phibro-Tech’s operations started in 1984. (The company, whose parent corporation is headquartered in New Jersey, had a different name but the fundamental control has been the same since 1984, Phibro-Tech’s attorney said.)

The company’s specialty is recycling the corrosive liquids that electronics manufacturers use to etch patterns on the surface of microchips and circuit boards. Company representatives say it’s the only site west of the Mississippi that recycles so-called “spent etchants.”

The company separates out the metals and cleans the liquid — selling the treated etching solution back to the tech industry and making copper products for manufacturers.

“If not for Phibro-Tech, the California electronics industry would need to send all of its spent etch to landfills or deep wells at a significant cost to the environment, or ship it across country, making the industry less competitive,” according to a letter from the electronics manufacturing trade group IPC to state regulators in 2017.

Phibro-Tech also takes giant bags of rust from steel mills and old metal cans from canneries and uses them to make ferric and ferrous chloride — which are used to clean drinking water and control odor at wastewater treatment plants. It recovers metals such as nickel from liquid waste and sends it to smelters. And it treats brine from water treatment operations contaminated with hexavalent chromium. Some of its operations use raw materials and aren’t regulated under the hazardous waste permit.

The California Water Service Company, a large investor-owned utility, told regulators in a letter that Phibro-Tech was a “vital service” provider.

But records show decades of problems at the site. The Department of Toxic Substances Control’s online permitting and enforcement database shows the agency’s inspectors have identified violations at 32 different inspections since 1996. In 19 of those inspections the company was cited for so-called “Class 1” violations — the most serious designation suggesting a significant threat to people or the environment.

Some of the violations were repeated through the years despite the company’s promises to change its behavior. In 1999 it committed to stop storing hazardous waste in unauthorized areas and yet inspectors found that “for at least 167 days following Respondent’s execution of the 1999 Consent Order, beginning within a week of that date, Respondent continuously stored hazardous waste outside permitted storage areas,” according to a 2003 consent order.

Enforcement records show regulators found waste stored in unauthorized areas again in 2005, 2008, 2011 and 2015.

“Phibro-Tech takes compliance very seriously,” said David Thaete, the facility’s environmental health and safety manager.

In a meeting with Phibro-Tech’s attorney, plant manager and Thaete as well as written responses to questions, company officials blamed some agency violations on ambiguities in the old permit and seemingly arbitrary or shifting enforcement.

For example, they pointed out that toxics regulators have known for years the site was treating material in certain equipment not permitted for handling hazardous waste and yet decades passed before regulators issued citations for some of those longstanding practices. (After inspectors cited the company in 2012 for operating one particular tank without a permit, the company got the tank — which had been in operation for years — permitted “and it now operates pursuant to the same procedures as before,” according to an email from the company’s attorney.)

Phibro-Tech representatives noted that after the company disputed certain violations, state officials reduced the severity of some and eliminated others from a scoring system the department created to hold troubled companies accountable. The reps also said the company has had fewer violations in recent years.

As for storing waste in unauthorized areas, a written statement from the company called the 1999 violation “a unique situation” when a competitor closed and Phibro-Tech suddenly got an influx of waste that exceeded its permitted storage capacity.

The later violations “can be considered to be ‘repeat violations’ only based on a very general characterization of storing hazardous waste in an unpermitted area, but the underlying facts do not compare,” according to the company.

It’s not just state toxics regulators who have found problems. Multiple cases of water sit in a house.

A stack of water bottles at Esther Rojo’s home, which sits near the Phibro-Tech Inc. plant, on June 7, 2023.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters)

The Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts identified 17 violations since 2015 including instances where Phibro-Tech’s wastewater had excess contaminants such as copper, and oil and grease, according to documents CalMatters obtained through a public records request. Most resulted in just a verbal warning and CalMatters found no evidence that the wastewater — which is treated before it’s released into the ocean — harmed the environment. In February, Phibro-Tech discharged nearly 7,300 gallons of wastewater with a copper concentration nearly 14 times the permitted limit, according to inspection reports. The sanitation districts didn’t issue a notice of violation for that release, which the company blamed on operator error. State toxics regulators did issue a citation.

Cal/OSHA, the agency that enforces workplace safety regulations, identified 13 violations in four inspections since 2015, its records show, though none of those violations were deemed “serious” — those that could cause a death, illness or serious injury and that the employer could have known about.

The company’s rate of worker injuries and illnesses has been worse than the industry average in recent years — more than double the average rate for hazardous waste treatment and disposal sites in 2019 — although it “has been trending downward,” according to an outside audit of Phibro-Tech that regulators required the company to file.

The company says it “takes occupational safety seriously,” rigorously trains workers and makes changes as necessary to keep them safe.

While workers can choose to leave the company, many residents nearby don’t have that choice. Neighbors to toxic waste recycler A man with medium skin tone poses for a photo, in front of the nearby plant. He is wearing a dark blue t-shirt and is holding a paper file box.

Jaime Sanchez of “Neighbors Against Phibro-Tech” near the processing plant in Santa Fe Springs on June 7, 2023.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters)

On a recent afternoon, several long-time Los Nietos residents gathered on Esther Rojo’s shaded patio to talk about the company. Sitting around a picnic table with instant coffee and pan dulce, talk often returned to the smells that come with living next to an industrial area — near hulking mystery tanks, rumbling tanker trucks and railroad cars.

Sometimes the odor that has wafted into yards and schools and bedrooms is chemical, like ammonia, and stings their throats when inhaled, they said. Sometimes, it’s like rotten eggs. It has come when kids are playing in the street on hot summer days. Parents call them inside where it becomes a game — running around, closing windows. The fortunate have air conditioners. The less fortunate sweat it out.

“Oftentimes the smells happen late in the evening or very, very early in the morning,” said Jaime Sanchez, 68, who has lived all his life in the community and is helping organize a loose collection of area residents calling themselves Neighbors Against Phibro-Tech.

Sanchez got involved in environmental activism around 2011. It was after Phibro-Tech pushed for an updated permit that would allow it to not only keep operating but also to start treating oily water in addition to the various chemicals already handled on site. His neighbor, Rojo, told him what was going on and he started attending community meetings.

“I was shocked and dismayed this was occurring in my own backyard,” Sanchez said. State regulators ultimately didn’t finalize a draft permit at the time, effectively allowing Phibro-Tech to keep operating on the expired one as the law allows.

His census tract has more of a “pollution burden” than 97% of the state, according to California’s CalEnviroScreen. That’s a tool the state developed a decade ago to begin tracking issues of environmental justice.

Sanchez’ Los Nietos neighborhood has more asthma, cardiovascular disease, unemployment and “linguistic isolation” than the majority of California, according to the scoring system. It also has greater-than-average smog, fine particles, traffic and risk from lead paint. The neighborhood scores 100 out of 100 for proximity to hazardous waste.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to blame the conditions — and certainly specific health problems — on any one company, environmental health experts say. Residents described mystery ailments, and can’t help but wonder if their industrial neighbors are to blame for what they experienced: asthma, itchy skin, rare liver cancer, a child with an autoimmune disease, a dog with seizures, dead birds. A row of blue (and one grey) semi-tankers parking on a lot.

Phibro-Tech Inc. semi-tankers at the Santa Fe Springs plant on June 8, 2023.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters) Two photos are side by side. On the left is a groundwater monitoring well at Phibro-Tech Inc. in Santa Fe Spring. On the right is an air quality monitor on a fence line at Phibro-Tech Inc. in Santa Fe Spring.

Left: A groundwater monitoring well at Phibro-Tech Inc. in Santa Fe Spring on June 8, 2023. Right: An air quality monitor on a fence line at Phibro-Tech.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters)

Phibro-Tech hired consultants to conduct several health risk assessments over the years, which the company submitted to regulators. The most recent filed with the toxics department are from 2015 and analyzed both ongoing operations as well as historical contamination on site. State regulators ultimately approved the assessments, which found no “significant health risk” to workers and nearby residents, according to the agency’s online permitting information site.

Company officials said they’re often unfairly blamed for sounds and smells from other industrial sites. They’re quick to cite the example of a resident complaining about a giant tower that was actually across the street from Phibro-Tech.

“We said ‘That’s not us.’ And she said ‘Yes, it is,’” the company’s environmental attorney Zachary Walton recounted.

But regulators have documented pollution in the soil and groundwater under the site, including trichloroethylene (TCE) and hexavalent chromium, chemicals that have been linked to cancer. Advocates said the company has been slow to clean up contamination — putting the nearby community at risk and calling into question the company’s commitment to health and safety. The state toxics department cited Phibro-Tech in recent years for failing to finish remediating one contaminated area in a timely manner that it — and regulators — had known about for decades, records show. (The company did clean the area and toxics regulators are assessing the results, records and interviews show.)

Phibro-Tech officials defended the company’s record on pollution. They say the toxic material found in soil on site was from other companies or locations. Groundwater contamination is part of a plume from an old chemical company nearby that migrated across the area, they contend, adding that there’s no evidence the current operations are causing any environmental damage.

Several long-time residents of Los Nietos said they only drink bottled water, fearing contamination. The community’s drinking water, which doesn’t come from the groundwater basin beneath Phibro-Tech, meets state and federal standards for contaminants, according to water agency data. Nonetheless its drinking water scores high for contamination compared to most of the state, according to CalEnviroScreen.

“We completely understand the concerns by the community,” said David Thaete, the facility’s environmental health and safety manager. The company has cleaned up historical contamination on site and continues to regularly monitor groundwater and inspect equipment, he said. He added risk assessments “have demonstrated that the conditions of the plant are completely protective of both our workers and the surrounding community.”

But given the environmental risks in the area and the company’s history of regulatory violations, residents don’t understand how the Department of Toxic Substances Control could let Phibro-Tech keep operating. There are five schools within a mile of the company.

“The Department of Toxic Substances Control’s mandate is to protect the public. In reality they do not,” Jaime Sanchez said. “They’ve maintained the status quo.” Systemic problems for hazardous waste watchdog A row of at least seven binders on the floor.

Binders with Phibro-Tech Inc.’s permit application at the Los Nietos Library, a Los Angeles County library in Whittier, on June 9, 2023.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters)

Officials have long tried to fix systemic permitting problems at the toxics agency, including the years-long delays.

In 2013 the department hired an outside consultant to review its permitting process. According to the consultant’s report, permit renewals averaged 4.3 years — and some took far longer. The report blamed staffing issues, a lack of standardized processes, unclear criteria for denial and poor management.

“As is readily apparent, there is a tension between monitoring existing facilities to ensure the protection of public health and the environment and ensuring that these existing facilities continue to operate so as to provide adequate capacity to prevent illegal disposal of hazardous waste,” according to the consultant’s report.

Among the concerns environmental groups raised to the report’s authors: lack of a clear standard for when to revoke or deny a permit. As a result, some companies limped along in a state of limbo.

Two years after that report, lawmakers crafted legislation to improve the permitting process and strengthen criteria for approval. The resulting law required that toxics regulators consider a company’s history of violations as well as environmental justice issues that a site’s operations might pose when deciding whether to renew a permit. The law required California to adopt regulations guiding how the Department of Toxic Substances Control would do that by the beginning of 2018.

But the agency has only partially complied with the law.

It created a scoring system to analyze companies’ past violations. A company with a certain number of serious violations — often those posing a significant threat to people or the environment — now needs to submit an audit and make changes as necessary. The most troubled risk being shut down. Phibro-Tech was required to submit an audit last year after posting one of the worst scores in the state. A photo of outside of the Phibro Tech office.

The entrance to the Phibro-Tech Inc. office in Santa Fe Springs on June 8, 2023.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters)

But more than five years after the deadline, California still hasn’t adopted another major piece of the law: regulations for considering “cumulative impact” on communities in permitting decisions. That means there’s no requirement to look at just how much risk residents in a place like Los Nietos are already facing when the state is deciding whether to allow a hazardous waste site to keep operating.

“It’s been frustrating because it’s been years already,” said Grecia Orozco, staff attorney at the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, an environmental advocacy organization involved in crafting the 2015 legislation.

Why does it matter? Every single one of the 16 commercial treatment or disposal sites permitted to handle federally defined hazardous waste and that received such shipments last year abuts a community of color with a high rate of poverty, state shipping records and demographic data shows.

“They’re the ones bearing the brunt of these harms,” Orozco said.

The Department of Toxic Substances Control refused to be interviewed for this story, but did email responses to a list of written questions.

“We acknowledge that there are industrial facilities too close to homes and schools, and that historic decisions made by governments and private industry have resulted in disadvantaged communities bearing the brunt of environmental harms,” according to the agency’s prepared response. “This is not fair, and we as a State have a lot of work to do to untangle and repair the damage that has been done.”

Asked about the status of regulations to make a review of environmental justice-related factors a requirement, the agency said in its statement that it plans to have a virtual meeting this summer to get more feedback from stakeholders.

Still, the future of those regulations is unclear.

The Department of Toxic Substances Control is also in the midst of a legislatively mandated effort to craft a statewide hazardous waste management plan. Its July report, part of that process, acknowledged the requirement for regulators to consider factors including “cumulative impact” when deciding where to let hazardous waste sites operate.

“While these are important regulations, as protection of our most vulnerable communities is paramount, their potential impact on the number of permitted hazardous waste facilities is an important consideration for the Plan to further examine,” the report stated. Officials should also consider whether the additional safeguards are “justified,” according to the report. Decision near for Phibro-Tech

Last summer, the Department of Toxic Substances Control released a draft of a new five-year permit for Phibro-Tech and solicited comments from the public.

“These new permit conditions would enhance protections and make them more enforceable,” according to a department statement.

Community and environmental activists met the proposal with heavy resistance. Earthjustice is now working with Neighbors Against Phibro-Tech to oppose the permit renewal.

Among the objections Earthjustice raised in its letter to state regulators were the pollution burden the low-income Latino community already faces, the company’s history of violations, the lack of a full environmental review for the new permit and that Phibro-Tech has been “very, very slow to address” soil and groundwater contamination on site.

The Los Angeles County Public Health Department also raised concerns, calling for more cleanup of contaminated soil at Phibro-Tech and more monitoring to ensure toxic chemicals don’t leave the site.

“Periodic monitoring for migration would provide crucial data to protect community health and safety,” according to a comment letter signed by Barbara Ferrer, the department’s director.

Phibro-Tech also submitted a letter to regulators. They asked for a 10-year permit, pointing out the agency recently approved new permits of that length for two facilities with an even worse record of violations than Phibro-Tech. “This establishes a precedent that requires a similar result for Phibro-Tech,” according to a letter signed by the facility’s health and safety manager, Thaete.

The toxics department expects to make a final permit decision in December. Given the history, many people expect further delays. And no matter the decision, an appeal seems likely. A photo of the outside of multiple homes. Telephone wires connect above their roofs.

Homes in the Los Nietos community visible from Esther Rojo's backyard on June 7, 2023.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters)

In the meantime, hazardous waste continues to arrive at Phibro-Tech. And Los Nietos residents continue to meet at the local library or in backyards to strategize ways to be heard.

“We will continue to fight and we will continue to challenge them,” said Jaime Sanchez, the local activist helping organize his neighbors.

He’s happy at least his adult daughter managed to get away from Phibro-Tech and has since moved to Hacienda Heights, a diverse community in unincorporated Los Angeles County.

But he learned recently that she now lives just four miles from another hazardous waste facility, the state’s last major recycler of old car batteries — Quemetco. That company has its own history of contamination and violating environmental regulations. The facility’s permit expired in 2015.

“It’s a reminder that the struggle for justice remains,” Sanchez said. How we did it

CalMatters earlier this year investigated the large volume of hazardous waste California sends to its neighbors. Roughly half the toxic detritus generated in California crosses the border — often to states with weaker environmental regulations. Some advocates and officials decried the situation and called on California to handle more of its own waste.

We wanted to understand more about the infrastructure that exists in the state and whether it’s up to the task of handling more of this toxic burden. To do that we used the Department of Toxic Substances Control’s permitting and enforcement database — called Envirostor — to research permitted hazardous waste treatment, storage and disposal facilities. The database shows whether sites have expired permits, have documented contamination and if toxics regulators have found violations during inspections.

CalMatters also looked at shipping manifest data in a separate database called the Hazardous Waste Tracking System. The system shows the volume and type of waste permitted facilities receive. And we used a third tool, called CalEnviroScreen, that shows the pollution burden and demographic characteristics of census tracts around the state.

Combining the three tools, we were able to see where waste is going in the state, the safety concerns at those facilities, and the communities burdened with these operations.

We found the company with the oldest expired permit is close to getting a new one. To research the company, we read more than 1,000 pages of inspection reports and regulatory filings obtained from government databases and public records requests. We visited Los Nietos, the community neighboring Phibro-Tech, in June to talk to residents and toured the Santa Fe Springs facility and met with company representatives.

The numbers in the overall analysis are sure to change over time. Regulators are continuously updating the various databases — sometimes to correct errors. For example, during the course of reporting the number of permitted facilities dropped slightly and shipping data changed as new manifests were added to the system or corrected. Still, the analysis revealed that the state’s system for handling hazardous waste has a history of contamination and violations, and the communities most burdened typically have more people of color and a high percentage of residents living in poverty.

A new powerful antibiotic, isolated from bacteria that could not be studied before, seems capable to combat harmful bacteria and even multi-resistant 'superbugs'. Named Clovibactin, the antibiotic appears to kill bacteria in an unusual way, making it more difficult for bacteria to develop any resistance against it. Researchers from Utrecht University, Bonn University (Germany), the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF), Northeastern University of Boston (USA), and the company NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals (Cambridge, USA) now share the discovery of Clovibactin and its killing mechanism in the scientific journal Cell.

Urgent need for new antibiotics

Antimicrobial resistance is a major problem for human health and researchers worldwide are looking for new solutions. "We urgently need new antibiotics to combat bacteria that become increasingly resistant to most clinically used antibiotics," says Dr. Markus Weingarth, a researcher from the Chemistry Department of Utrecht University.

However, the discovery of new antibiotics is a challenge: few new antibiotics have been introduced into the clinics over the last decades, and then they often resemble older, already known antibiotics.

"Clovibactin is different," says Weingarth. "Since Clovibactin was isolated from bacteria that could not be grown before, pathogenic bacteria have not seen such an antibiotic before and had no time to develop resistance."

Antibiotic from bacterial dark matter

Clovibactin was discovered by NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals, a small US-based early-stage company, and microbiologist Prof. Kim Lewis from Northeastern University, Boston. Earlier, they developed a device that allows to grow 'bacterial dark matter', which are so-called unculturable bacteria. Intriguingly, 99% of all bacteria are 'unculturable' and could not be grown in laboratories previously, hence they could not be mined for novel antibiotics. Using the device, called iCHip, the US researchers discovered Clovibactin in a bacterium isolated from a sandy soil from North Carolina: E. terrae ssp. Carolina.

In the joint Cell publication, NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals shows that Clovibactin successfully attacks a broad spectrum of bacterial pathogens. It was also successfully used to treated mice infected with the superbug Staphylococcus aureus.

A broad target spectrum

Clovibactin appears to have an unusual killing mechanism. It targets not just one, but three different precursor molecules that are all essential for the construction of the cell wall, an envelope-like structure that surrounds bacteria. This was discovered by the group of Prof. Tanja Schneider from the University of Bonn in Germany, one of the Cell paper's co-authors.

Schneider: "The multi-target attack mechanism of Clovibactin blocks bacterial cell wall synthesis simultaneously at different positions. This improves the drug's activity and substantially increases its robustness to resistance development."

A cage-like structure

How exactly Clovibactin blocks the synthesis of the bacterial cell wall was unraveled by the team of Dr. Markus Weingarth from Utrecht University. They used a special technique called solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) that allows to study Clovibactin's mechanism under similar conditions as in bacteria.

"Clovibactin wraps around the pyrophosphate like a tightly sitting glove. Like a cage that encloses its target" says Weingarth. This is was gives Clovibactin its name, which is derived from Greek word "Klouvi," which means cage. The remarkable aspect of Clovibactin's mechanism is that it only binds to the immutable pyrophosphate that is common to cell wall precursors, but it ignores that variable sugar-peptide part of the targets. "As Clovibactin only binds to the immutable, conserved part of its targets, bacteria will have a much harder time developing any resistance against it. In fact, we did not observe any resistance to Clovibactin in our studies."

Fibrils capture the targets

Clovibactin can do even more. Upon binding the target molecules, it self-assembles into large fibrils on the surface of bacterial membranes. These fibrils are stable for a long time and thereby ensure that the target molecules remain sequestered for as long as necessary to kill bacteria.

"Since these fibrils only form on bacterial membranes and not on human membranes, they are presumably also the reason why Clovibactin selectively damages bacterial cells but is not toxic to human cells," says Weingarth. "Clovibactin hence has potential for the design of improved therapeutics that kill bacterial pathogens without resistance development.."

www.latimes.com

The sea has long inspired a human attraction, perhaps even a compulsion, to be as close to the edge as possible. Its sheer power captivates us, even on its most turbulent days, and we can’t help but dream of calling the shore our own. To be out by the surf, to sense the very limits of where land can go, to feel the rise and fall of each wave like our own breath is to reckon with a force so alive it feels otherworldly. But the ocean is not “out there” beyond the shore, it is upon us, carving away at the coast each day despite our best efforts to keep the water at bay. We thought that with enough ingenuity we could contain the sea, but the rising tide is proving otherwise.

Studying this confluence of land, people and sea has kept Gary Griggs busy for much of his life. Seventy-six years old, with a shock of white hair and a long stride, Griggs has spent decades examining every inch of the California coast. An oceanographer, coastal geologist and longtime professor at UC Santa Cruz, he has a way of explaining erosion with the excitement of someone who’s seeing everything for the first time. The coast is always, has always been, changing, he likes to say. Every high and low tide brings new surprises.

On a quiet foggy morning in early March 2020, the tide was going out when Griggs set off for a stroll in Capitola. Reminiscent of an idyllic village on the Mediterranean, with pops of vintage California, this colorful little beach town on the northeast shore of Monterey Bay amuses him every time he swings by. The buildings and shingled cottages are bright pastel, the waterfront dotted with cafes and patio umbrellas. Palm trees and art galleries line the streets downtown, where tourists stop for trinkets and ice cream. On an old wooden wharf that juts 800-some feet into the water, kayakers can step from a tiny dock and paddle out to sea.

Griggs made his way to a set of townhouses that had been planted right on the sand, reportedly one of the first condominium complexes to have been built on the coast. Purple, pink and teal, with whimsical rococo plasterwork, the Venetian Court homes are an indelible snapshot of 1920s California. Steps from the wharf, they serve mostly as private vacation rentals today. A low concrete seawall — so low you could sit on it — is all that holds back the sea. Image of book cover for "California Against the Sea."

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He stooped down, placed his hand on the concrete and noticed it was damp. The ocean often surges over this wall and can flood the entire complex with debris. Poking around, he pointed to piles of sandbags and plywood propped against a number of front doors — humble defenses against the water that had already arrived. Patio chairs, also damp, were stacked into a corner next to a grill covered by a heavy-duty tarp. He pulled out a recent real estate advertisement and read it out loud:

Iconic home on the beach. 1st time on market in almost 50 years. 3 bed, 2, bath, offsite parking. Updated kitchen and baths. Stunning! Price Reduced | $4,800,000

“On the sand, on the sand, on the sand,” Griggs said. “Everybody wants to live on the sand.” He understands this pull to the water, a mark of wealth and well-being that goes hand in hand with today’s notion of the California dream. But by romanticizing the coast in all its vast and freeing splendor, we blind ourselves to the very forces that created this landscape in the first place.

He craned his head to inspect the colorful condo in front of him. Whenever the beach goes underwater and the waves move in, this corner building looks like the prow of a ship lost at sea. Griggs has photos of whitewash splashing halfway up the first row of windows. Next door, the aging wharf also braces against tempestuous surf. Big waves, just a few months prior, had shredded two pilings below the boat hoist. Even the concrete ballast broke. Officials scrambled together $25,000 for emergency repair work to keep the pier open. Rehabilitating the entire structure would cost on the order of $5 million to $7 million, and even that might not be enough to withstand the ocean in the hotter years to come.

In his more than 50 years of research, Griggs has examined every kind of human defense against the sea and documented both their successes and their many failures. When people seek his guidance on confronting the water, he has no easy answers. There are only so many ways to separate the ocean from what we want to call land, he said. And the true cost of forcing an unmoving line in the sand is proving to be magnitudes more than what California seems willing to pay. People walk through a storm-damaged section of a seaside grouping of buildings with facades of different pastel colors

People walk through a storm-damaged section of Capitola, Calif., in January, after a series of storms blasted the state.

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Just south of here, at Seacliff State Beach, an elaborate barricade built in 1926 was destroyed the very next winter and has since been rebuilt — and then damaged or destroyed — eight more times. The version in 1982 cost more than $1.5 million and lasted six weeks (it was designed to last 20 years). These cycles of wishful engineering and natural destruction have only continued to intensify. The observations Griggs jotted down on his walk, in fact, would become even more prescient than imagined. In less than three years’ time, barely a week into January 2023, huge swells, compounded by a series of record-breaking storms, would once again undermine the wall at Seacliff, pummel the Venetian condos and even tear Capitola’s wharf in two.

Griggs took another glance at all the plywood and sandbags in front of him and shook his head. Within just a few decades, Californians have managed to alter the shoreline in such a way that the realities of climate change seem unimaginably daunting. Collapsed buildings, flooded roads, shattered seawalls — all the problems that make the coast so fragile today are not by some fault of nature. A problem exists because our human-built world keeps getting in the way of the rising sea. But this current story of our coast does not have to end in disaster. We can choose to act, to reconsider, to determine a more sensible future. How we proceed can make all the difference, and it’s on all of us to forge a new ending. Stripes of color representing the rising temperatures in California between 1850 to 2020

There are only so many ways to face the rising sea. Seawalls are one option, but they come with hidden consequences. These hard-fought lines of defense force the sand before them to drown or wash away. For every new seawall protecting a home or a road, a beach for the people is sacrificed. Few issues today along the coast are as divisive and as misunderstood as seawalls, Griggs often explains. “All things being equal, responding to coastal erosion with a hard structure parallel to the shoreline is a decision or choice not to protect the beach at that location.”

Adding sand to disappearing beaches is another tactic. Dredges whir to life and idyllic coastlines from Santa Cruz to San Diego routinely turn into construction zones, with dump trucks and sand dozers pushing sediment for hours across the starving shore. This race against nature, however, lasts only so long as there’s money and enough sand. Elevating homes and roads is perhaps another option, but this, too, costs money — and requires reconfiguring entire communities in dramatic and unfamiliar ways.

Then there’s what scientists and economists and number-crunching consultants call “managed retreat”: move back, relocate, essentially cede the land to nature. These words alone have roiled the few cities and state agencies bold enough to utter them. Mayors have been ousted, planning documents rewritten, campaigns waged over the very thought of turning prime real estate back into dunes and wetlands. Many declared retreat un-American. To win, California must defend. Our climate change challenge

If the Golden State is going to lead the world toward a better, safer future, our political and business leaders — and the rest of us — will have to work harder to rewrite the California narrative. Here’s how we can push the state forward.

But at what cost? The California coast itself is a series of engineered landscapes — home today to almost 27 million people and all the ports, harbors and major cities that support a state that, if it were its own country, would be the fourth-largest economy in the world. There are limits, however, to this built environment, especially as the realities of sea-level rise force a more collective reckoning. Should California become one long wall of concrete against the ocean? Will there still be sandy beaches or surf breaks to cherish in the future, coastal road trips and oceanfront homes left to dream about? If business continues as usual and global temperatures continue to rise, more than $370 billion in property could be at risk of coastal flooding by the end of the century, the economic damage far more devastating than the state’s worst earthquakes and wildfires. Salt marshes — home to spawning fish, weary shorebirds and many of the world’s most endangered species — face complete extinction. Trapped between rising water on one side, pavement on the other, there’s little room left for these precious ecosystems. In just a few more decades, two-thirds of the beaches in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego — so deeply tied to the state’s heart and soul — could also be no more.

However you cut it, Griggs said, sacrifices lie ahead. In a world as finite as this one, every decision, big or seemingly small, is a choice to preserve one resource at the cost of another. So, when all that we treasure can no longer be saved, what becomes the priority? Stripes of color representing the rising temperatures in California between 1850 to 2020

Griggs still has to pinch himself sometimes, stunned by what he gets to do every day for a living. He’s often out examining the juts and crannies of the coast, usually with a binder of notes in hand. It still felt like winter that morning in March 2020 when he zipped up his Timberland vest, rolled up his sleeves, and went for a brisk walk to check out the shore. He had timed low tide just right at Capitola Beach, a flattened, manicured patch of sand along the mouth of Soquel Creek that is bookended by 90-foot cliffs. As the waves receded toward the fog-draped horizon, the water made room for a thin stretch of damp sand below the bluffs.

He walked past a red-lettered sign warning “DANGEROUS CLIFFS. Proceed at your own risk,” and hopped down to the wet, pebbled sand that had just emerged at low tide. He likes coming down here to see what new stories might be revealed in these ancient layers of rock. Inching his way toward the towering bluffs, Griggs explained how this area is a geologic microcosm of everything that could be possible on the coast. He paused at a large mound of broken sandstone and compacted mud. “This wasn’t here two weeks ago,” he said, craning his neck to see what section of the cliff must have collapsed. He pointed to a cavernous undercut that likely destabilized the bluff and noted the clusters of pampas grass, a fluffy, straw-colored weed that wedges its roots into the rocky cracks and joints. Whenever water makes its way into these cracks — from rain or big waves during high tide — the pressure builds until entire slabs of the cliff come crashing down.

He squatted down to take a closer look, brushing his hand over a slab of dark-gray mudrock embedded with a wallpaper-like print of white shells. These compacted layers of mollusk fossils always amaze his students, another humble reminder that everything California is standing and building on was underwater in a previous chapter of this planet’s history. He took a photo, then nudged aside another pile of sandstone. “Look,” he said, “these are all bone fragments. This one seems to be a piece of vertebra.”

Griggs stood up and took a mental assessment of the jumble of rocks. This is all part of nature’s process, he explained. The next high tide will sweep this huge pile of geological history into the ocean, where it will be ground down and eventually returned to the shore as fresh sand. Cliff erosion, and the occasional collapse, helps replenish beaches, but modern coastal living has disrupted this ancient process. Griggs motioned to the row of homes and apartment buildings at the top of the bluff: Engineers have tried all sorts of ways to hold back these cliffs, he said, but it’s not easy slowing down the forces of coastal erosion. “There used to be two rows of pine trees and a sidewalk with benches. It was called Lovers’ Lane. There were all these pictures of people sitting out there,” he said. “Well, the trees are gone, the path’s gone, the road’s gone.” Several homes have also had to move over the years — from earthquakes, from coastal erosion, sometimes both — but the people still living up there want to hold on to as much time as possible.

Time is funny like that. It can take tens of thousands of years to cycle through a geological epoch, just a couple of hundred for industrialization to make a mess of the planet, and only a decade or two to delude people into making decisions based on flawed time frames — whether it’s a 30-year mortgage or a political term that resets every four years. And in this moment when inconvenient realities like climate change have become so politicized, shortsighted individualism has further clouded our ability to plan ahead. We seem to have both no time and too much time to act, and so we spiral into paralyzing battles over the why, who, when and how.

Scientists by now have a fairly firm grasp of the geologic and climate pressures looming over the shore. What’s less predictable, Griggs said, is how people will choose to respond.

All this engineering, all this sacrifice: How many times will we try to overcome a force as vast as the sea? People spend years fighting to maintain a wishful line in the sand, yet a few extra feet of water here or there is hardly a shrug for the ocean. When you look at the coast with wise enough eyes, you can almost see the high-water lines of floods and disasters past ... lines foretelling the history we’re doomed to keep repeating, if we keep closing ourselves off to change.

Ask a Reporter: Inside the project

What: Times reporters Rosanna Xia and Sammy Roth will discuss “Our Climate Change Challenge” during a live streaming conversation. City Editor Maria L. LaGanga moderates.

When: Sept. 19 at 6 p.m. Pacific.

Where: This free event will be live streaming. Sign up on Eventbrite for watch links and to share your questions and comments.

latimes.com/2023-01-06/california-storms-wreak-havoc

https://lookout.co/santacruz/civic-life/story/2023-01-05/capitola-wharf-taking-a-beating-esplanade-taking-on-water

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-06-05/amount-of-warming-triggering-carbon-dioxide-in-air-hits-new-peak-growing-at-near-record-fast-rate

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-salt-marsh-climate-change-20180221-story.html

Sciencedaily.com

A paper recently published in Nature Energy based on pioneering research done at Illinois Institute of Technology reveals a promising breakthrough in green energy: an electrolyzer device capable of converting carbon dioxide into propane in a manner that is both scalable and economically viable.

As the United States races toward its target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, innovative methods to reduce the significant carbon dioxide emissions from electric power and industrial sectors are critical. Mohammad Asadi, assistant professor of chemical engineering at Illinois Tech, spearheaded this groundbreaking research.

"Making renewable chemical manufacturing is really important," says Asadi. "It's the best way to close the carbon cycle without losing the chemicals we currently use daily."

What sets Asadi's electrolyzer apart is its unique catalytic system. It uses inexpensive, readily available materials to produce tri-carbon molecules -- fundamental building blocks for fuels like propane, which is used for purposes ranging from home heating to aviation.

To ensure a deep understanding of the catalyst's operations, the team employed a combination of experimental and computational methods. This rigorous approach illuminated the crucial elements influencing the catalyst's reaction activity, selectivity, and stability.

A distinctive feature of this technology, lending to its commercial viability, is the implementation of a flow electrolyzer. This design permits continuous propane production, sidestepping the pitfalls of the more conventional batch processing methods.

"Designing and engineering this laboratory-scale flow electrolyzer prototype has demonstrated Illinois Tech's commitment to creating innovative technologies. Optimizing and scaling up this prototype will be an important step toward producing a sustainable, economically viable, and energy-efficient carbon capture and utilization process," says Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy Program Director Jack Lewnard.

This innovation is not Asadi's first venture into sustainable energy. He previously adapted a version of this catalyst to produce ethanol by harnessing carbon dioxide from industrial waste gas. Recognizing the potential of the green propane technology, Asadi has collaborated with global propane distributor SHV Energy to further scale and disseminate the system.

"This is an exciting development which opens up a new e-fuel pathway to on-purpose propane production for the benefit of global users of this essential fuel," says Keith Simons, head of research and development for sustainable fuels at SHV Energy.

Illinois Tech Duchossois Leadership Professor and Professor of Physics Carlo Segre, University of Pennsylvania Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Andrew Rappe, and University of Illinois Chicago Professor Reza Shahbazian-Yassar contributed to this work. Mohammadreza Esmaeilirad (Ph.D. CHE '22) was a lead author on the paper.

latimes.com

It was a week of robotaxi mayhem in San Francisco for the Cruise driverless car company — by turns bizarre, comic and alarming.

As a result, the California Department of Motor Vehicles said Friday it’s investigating “recent concerning incidents” involving Cruise vehicles while tapping the brakes on the company’s ambitious expansion plans.

The DMV didn’t say which incidents it’s probing, but over a seven-day period the events included:

— The bizarre, when a group of Cruise robotaxis drove together into the city’s North Beach district on the night of Aug. 11, froze in place, sat for 15 minutes blocking an intersection, then drove on. Cruise blamed cellphone service.

— The comic, when a Cruise robotaxi ignored construction signs on Tuesday and headed into a stretch of cement. Stuck in the wet muck, it was removed later by workers dispatched by Cruise.

— The alarming, when a Cruise robotaxi entered an intersection on a green light even as a fast-moving fire truck, lights flashing and siren blaring, approached. The truck struck the car, occupied by one passenger, who was transported to a hospital. Cruise said the passenger sustained “what we believe are non-severe injuries.”

The day after the injury crash, the DMV announced its investigation and said Cruise agreed to halve the size of its fleet, to 50 robotaxis during the day and 150 at night. In a prepared statement, Cruise said it looks forward to working with the DMV and posted its version of events online.

The company plans to populate the city with thousands of robotaxis. Another company, Waymo, has similar plans. Cruise is owned by General Motors, Waymo by Alphabet, parent company of Google.

The DMV did not say how long its investigation might take. Another DMV investigation, into whether Tesla falsely advertises its driver-assist technology as “Full Self-Driving,” has been ongoing for two years and three months.

The latest robotaxi incidents occurred on the heels of a controversial California Public Utilities Commission vote Aug. 10 to approve massive expansion of robotaxis in San Francisco.

State legislators are becoming fed up with the state of driverless vehicle regulation in California. A bill is moving through the Legislature that would require human safety drivers in driverless trucks for at least the next five years. State Sen. Lena Gonzalez has expressed concern about the way the DMV regulates Tesla safety.

DMV Director Steve Gordon, a former Silicon Valley executive, was appointed to the post by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Meantime, city officials in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Santa Monica and elsewhere are frustrated at how little control they have over robotaxi deployment in their cities.

The CPUC voted 3-1 to approve robotaxi expansion. The no vote was cast by Genevieve Shiroma, who said she was not against robotaxis but that it made sense to solve safety issues such as interference with emergency vehicles before expansion is approved.

Voting in favor of expansion was John Reynolds, whose previous job was that of top lawyer at Cruise.

All five members of the CPUC were appointed by Newsom. Newsom’s office declined to comment.

latimes/2023-08-12/cruise-robotaxis-come-to-a-standstill forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/08/17/cruise-robotaxi-drives-into-wet-concrete abc7news.cruise-driverless-car-sffd-fire-truck-accident theverge/2023/8/18/23837217/cruise-robotaxi-driverless-crash-fire-truck-san-francisco https://getcruise.com/news/blog/2023/further-update-on-emergency-vehicle-collision/ latimes.com/2022-05-26/dmv-tesla-year-long-slow-walk latimes/2023-06-01/driverless-trucks-california-dmv-mistrust-safety-regulations latimes.com/2023-08-10/cpuc-vote-on-robotaxi cpuc.ca.gov/about-cpuc/commissioner-john-reynolds

www.vox.com

Guatemala is on the verge of electing Bernardo Arévalo, a former academic and diplomat whose campaign has focused on fighting corruption, giving many graft-weary Guatemalans hope that building strong democratic institutions could be possible in the Central American nation.

Arévalo’s Movimiento Semilla (Seed Movement in English) pulled out a surprise win in first-round elections in June and will face off against conservative establishment leader and former First Lady Sandra Torres on Sunday. But Arévalo’s path to the presidency has been fraught, as establishment politicians used the court system to disqualify or challenge anti-establishment candidates.

Indigenous leader Thelma Cabrera, businessman Carlos Pineda, and Roberto Arzú were all barred from running in June’s contest by the Constitutional Court, Guatemala’s high court. Prosecutor Rafael Curruchiche began investigating Movimiento Semilla in July, just before the June elections were certified, claiming that some 5,000 of the signatures on a petition to form the party were fake.

Guatemala’s Supreme Judicial Court granted an indefinite injunction against the effort to bar Arévalo from running, but the decision could still be appealed to the Constitutional Court. And the injunction hasn’t stopped Torres from launching specious attacks against Arévalo, including that Movimiento Semilla is trying to steal the elections and that Arévalo will make Guatemala a Communist country.

Arévalo’s support has remained significant, and the court’s decision to allow Movimiento Semilla a place in Sunday’s elections have brought cautious optimism to Guatemalans and observers alike. Arévalo, the son of the nation’s first democratic president Juan José Arévalo, was raised abroad after a military coup overthrew his father’s successor. He was polling at 61 percent as of Wednesday, compared to Torres’s 31 percent, according to Fundación Libertad y Desarrollo, an independent think tank focused on Latin America.

Torres is the head of the Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE) party, which has long been entrenched in Guatemalan politics, including, reportedly, the less savory side, like trading votes in congress for favors and jobs. This is Torres’s third bid for the presidency, after failed efforts in 2015 and 2019, and over the years she has more closely aligned with outgoing President Alejandro Giammattei, according to InSight Crime, an investigative outlet reporting on issues in Latin America.

Arévalo’s message is powerful in a deeply corrupt nation

Torres’s coziness with the political establishment, both as a legislator and as a confidant of the unpopular Giammattei, signaled that a Torres presidency would be much the same as Giammattei’s. In a country with unstable democratic institutions — a situation aided by US meddling in Guatemalan politics under progressive leftist President Jacobo Arbenz — as well as serious inequality and violence, Arévalo’s success seems like a revelation.

In the first round of elections, Semilla was the underdog; Torres was widely expected to be a frontrunner, as was Zury Ríos, a populist legislator and the daughter of General Efraín Ríos Montt, a right-wing military dictator who took over Guatemala in a 1982 coup. Many Guatemalans were also expected to avoid voting to protest the corruption in the process.

But Semilla and Arévalo — upstarts offering Guatemala the chance to “vote different” — resonated with voters for reasons beyond Arévalo’s political pedigree, primarily because of his message that corruption would not be tolerated under his watch.

Guatemala suffers from the serious, interconnected problems of violence, inequality, and government corruption. Powerful interests, and especially business interests, can easily persuade the government to cater to their demands — increasing inequality and setting up the government as a mechanism for enrichment.

There was, starting in 2007, an attempt to address Guatemala’s corrupt politics under the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala, or CICIG, which confronted and prosecuted criminal organizations as well as corruption in the government, as Vox previously reported:

Under CICIG, Guatemalan prosecutors were tasked with investigating crime at the highest levels, even bringing corruption charges against a former president and vice president, among others. It was enormously successful, providing a model for other Latin American countries where similar problems — state capture, organized crime, and graft — have been allowed to flourish with impunity.

Former President Jimmy Morales, himself dogged by accusations of corruption, refused to renew CICIG’s mandate in 2019. CICIG’s efforts were already under attack by corrupt and powerful forces within the country; under Morales and Giammattei, anti-corruption judges and officials have fled Guatemala following arrests and threats of prosecution.

Arévalo has made tackling corruption the centerpiece of his campaign, particularly speaking out against CACIF, the Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Financial Associations, which in June he accused of “underpinning the economy of privilege” — defined in Arévalo’s words as “the economy in which the success of a group or company depends on the level of contact or political clout it has with a powerful politician, with a minister.”

But his anti-graft message, as well as his clear-eyed view of what’s possible given powerful and antagonistic interests, has resonated in urban areas and, increasingly, smaller towns as well.

Arévalo faces obstacles, even if he wins

Guatemala’s democracy is young; it has a strong, entrenched history of dictatorship, civil war, and corrupt and weak institutions which are extremely difficult to overcome, especially in just one presidential term — the limit under Guatemala’s constitution.

Inequality and poor social services, a struggling economy, and a legacy of violence following a 36-year civil war and violent dictatorships have allowed multiple armed groups to terrorize Guatemalan society. Those groups, according to InSight Crime, comprise street gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18, but also involve former and current police officers, as well as members of the military and intelligence officers. The groups mostly engage in illegal drug smuggling, but also “human trafficking, kidnapping, extortion, money laundering, arms smuggling, adoption rings,” and other illegal businesses.

They are also entrenched in the government, with connections to powerful people “ranging from local politicians to high-level security and government officials,” Insight Crime reports.

Even if he wins, Arévalo could face renewed calls for prosecution or attempts to overturn the election, even after the results are posted. But in a Friday interview with El País, he remained positive that his ideals would win out.

“We believe that democratic institutions must be reestablished,” Arévalo said. “We have to re-found the process that this corrupt political class has hijacked from us.”

Many links in article

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/ci39645386/executive