The Brief

It was supposed to be easier than this.

When the Affordable Care Act was passed in March 2010, the goal was to help more Americans get health insurance. And, indeed, the establishment of online marketplaces and a broadening of the eligibility guidelines for Medicaid accomplished that.

Fifteen years later, however, that system is anything but user-friendly.

Young adults looking for health insurance will likely benefit from talking with so-called navigators who work for the online marketplaces. But if you want to go it alone, here are some tips about shopping for a plan, based on the advice of policy experts and people who have spent hundreds of hours helping others navigate this unwieldy set-up.

Buckle up.

Start here

Begin your search at least two months before your 26th birthday. In some cases, you can sign up for a plan in advance so that it takes effect on your birthday.

First, find out if your family plan ends on your birthday or at the end of your birthday month. A few states allow young adults to stay on their family plan until they are 29, with certain conditions and, generally, higher costs. A navigator will know more.

You may have the option to stay, for a limited time, on your family’s plan under COBRA, a federal program that allows those with group health plans to extend their coverage past age 26. Odds that you will be approved for an extension are even higher if you can claim a disability.

Be aware, though, that this option will involve a considerable expense, since you will be required to pay the entire premium (the employer will no longer pay what is usually a substantial share). Those who claim a disability can often stay on the family plan after age 26, depending on the type of insurance the family holds.

If you’re undergoing medical treatment and can’t change hospitals or doctors, paying this premium may be your best course. You don’t have this option, however, if your family is insured through an Obamacare plan.

Before you start your search, make a list of the medicines and physicians you rely on, and highlight those you can’t do without. Rank them, even.

It’s quite likely that you will have fewer choices on the marketplace than you had on a parent’s plan. Be prepared to make some switches and trade-offs.

Find the right marketplace

Thirty-two states have adopted the federal marketplace as the place residents can go to compare and buy insurance policies. The rest run their own online marketplaces. You can find out here where to shop for insurance policies in your state.

Make sure you land at an official ACA website. There are many look-alikes run by private insurance brokers. The federal marketplace is found at healthcare.gov and nowhere else.

Note that official state marketplaces sometimes have unusual names. The New York State of Health, Kynect (Kentucky), Covered California, and CoverMe (Maine) are examples.

In states that use the federal marketplace, shoppers can find assistance here. On the state-based marketplaces, there is often a “find local help” button or a tab that directs you to a person who can help you find a good plan.

You will generally be asked to choose a broker, who is paid a commission if you sign up, or an “assister,” who provides the service at no cost. Assisters have received special training in the marketplace they serve, and, because they provide the service free, they have no financial incentive to steer you to a plan that pays a commission to the seller.

Assisters are often navigators who are funded by the marketplace, but in some cases they work for hospitals, health plans, or local nonprofits. You’ll have to ask.

While navigators are generally a surefire option for sound advice, they may become harder to find now that the Trump administration has cut funding for them in states that rely on the federal marketplace. (States that run their own marketplaces are unaffected.)

Many nonprofits and states run excellent programs that offer free assistance. And if, for example, you’re in the middle of cancer treatment, an assister affiliated with your hospital may offer better advice on picking a plan, since they will know which ones have contracts that may cover more of your expenses.

Ideally, these experts will walk you through the process and know which buttons to push to ensure you get the best coverage for your needs at the best rate for which you are eligible.

Sign up

Once you’re on an official website that markets plans under the ACA, you will be asked to enter your personal information as well as an estimate of your income.

Forty states and the District of Columbia cover single young adults with no children under Medicaid if their income is low enough to qualify. If you’re eligible, you should be redirected to the Medicaid website to start the enrollment process, or you may enroll directly on the marketplace site.

But be aware that the Republicans’ recently passed domestic policy bill has increased the requirements and the paperwork required to get on, and stay on, Medicaid.

Medicaid, a joint federal and state program that provides health insurance to low-income Americans, does not charge its members a premium, and it covers medications at a nominal cost or free. The caveat is that those enrolled in the program have a smaller number of in-network doctors and hospitals to choose from.

If your income is above the threshold for Medicaid, you will need to shop on the marketplace for a policy.

On most sites, a search tool allows you to check whether your doctor or hospital is in a particular plan’s network. But beware: The directories on which this search relies are notoriously inaccurate, despite federal laws mandating otherwise.

So, before you select a plan, call the doctor or hospital to confirm they accept the insurance plan you’re considering purchasing.

Do the math

When it comes to the math, it’s better to work on a computer than a phone. Generally, you can compare the costs of, and coverage offered by, only three plans at a time.

The following factors include premiums (taking account of any subsidy you get based on your income), as well as other expenses you’ll have to pay, called collective cost sharing:

• The deductible — the amount you generally have to pay out-of-pocket before your insurance kicks in. (You may get a few “covered” visits with a primary care doctor; these won’t count against the deductible.)
• Copayments — a fixed payment that you owe for any visit to a doctor or emergency room.
• Coinsurance (this one can break the bank) — a percentage of the total bill, generally applied to hospital bills, that you have to pay. The plan may make it sound small, say, 10% to 30%. But if you have, for example, the common 80-20 split (in which the insurer pays 80% and you pay 20%), that can add up to a substantial sum. A single day in the hospital can cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and 20% percent of that is a large amount.
• The out-of-pocket maximum — the most you’ll have to pay out in a year, so long as you stay in network and pay the deductible.

Doing the math means looking at this holistically, balancing what you can pay in a premium against what you can afford for the above charges. If the deductible is over $3,000 and the out-of-pocket maximum allowed yearly is $9,200 — do you have that much money on hand?

Generally, the lower the monthly premium in a plan, the higher the share of costs you’ll have to pay should you need medical care. Note that an insurer may offer very different plans on the same marketplace, with different payment policies and networks.

People with incomes up to 2½ times the poverty level may gain some relief from cost-sharing charges, but only if they sign up for silver plans. Plans are typically labeled bronze, silver, gold, and platinum; each tier reflects the percentage of your medical expenses that your plan pays overall. Bronze plans offer the least amount of coverage.

Choose wisely

Once you’ve narrowed your choices to a few plans, study each closely.

A plan with a low deductible might require a $1,000 daily copayment, or 50% coinsurance (you pay 50%) for hospital stays. A plan that lists your desired hospital system as in-network may include only some of its locations, and not necessarily the ones close to you or that offer the type of care you need.

When looking at a plan’s details, make sure to scroll down and read its “summary of benefits and coverage” for examples of the plan’s coverage of common medical needs. Pay close attention to which services require preauthorization and, for example, how many physical therapy visits they’ll cover each year. Preauthorization can be a long and cumbersome process.

Generally, the lower the premium, the more preauthorization will be required and the more limited the coverage will be. And check what drugs the plan covers (called the formulary) to see if yours are included, as well as its network of providers, to see whether your doctors are in it.

Marketplace plans tend to have limited offerings compared with job-based insurance; there aren’t as many doctors and hospitals to choose from. Click on the “provider directory” to see if an insurer’s network includes doctors and specialists you’re most likely to need, and hospitals that are acceptable and accessible to you.

Check to see if the policy offers any coverage for out-of-network providers. Some will pay, say, 60% or 70% of approved charges. It’s a useful perk if you need to see an out-of-network specialist, or if the wait for an in-network appointment is too long.

One study found that patients with marketplace plans have access to only 40% of doctors near their home, on average, and in some areas that figure was as low as 25%. It’s quite likely even lower for mental health providers.

A backstop

If you’ve tried to choose a plan and you’re still confused, look for one of the “easy pricing” or standard plans. These conform to certain basic standards laid out by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which oversees the marketplaces for the federal government. These plans offer some primary care appointments before you have to start paying the deductible.

The government says these plans must carry the label “easy pricing” on federal marketplace sites. But they may be identified differently on state-run marketplaces. In New York state, for example, they are simply marked with an ST (for standard).

Still, funding for premium subsidies is in place for this year at least, and free expert assistance is still out there, so don’t delay. There are good deals to be had, if only you put in the work.

Good luck.

An L.A. county employee who allegedly had “a long history of sleeping on the job” was in charge of emergency workers sending evacuation alerts during critical moments of the Eaton Fire, according to a whistleblower complaint filed with the county.

The complaint was filed late last year by Nick Vaquero, an associate director in the county’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) since 2023. The county’s Chief Executive Office confirmed to LAist that it received the complaint.

Vaquero reiterated the details of his written whistleblower complaint in interviews with LAist. He said he was speaking out now because he believes OEM’s leadership decisions about staffing during the emergency were shortsighted, and he was upset that his oral complaints to his bosses and to the team working on a major after-action report released in September were ignored. He filed his written whistleblower complaint in October.  

Vaquero said he saw Steve Lieberman, a nearly 40-year county employee, asleep at work more than a dozen times in two years prior to Lieberman supervising OEM’s overnight shift from the evening of Jan. 7 through the morning of Jan. 8, 2025. The whistleblower complaint alleges Lieberman was “sleeping in his office” during his overnight shift.

By the time Lieberman’s shift began, the Palisades Fire had devastated whole neighborhoods, multiple new fires had started, including the Eaton Fire, and the National Weather Service had the region under critical fire weather warnings. That night, the Eaton Fire went on to devastate Altadena, killing 19 people. The lack of any evacuation alert for West Altadena before 3:25 a.m. Jan. 8 has spurred state and local investigations.

LAist spoke with several witnesses to Lieberman’s on-the-job sleeping who corroborated Vaquero’s account about Lieberman’s history. LAist is not naming these sources, who said they fear their careers and reputations could be seriously harmed by speaking out publicly.

Lieberman told LAist in a phone interview that he was not asleep on the overnight shift from Jan. 7 to 8. He acknowledged that he may have fallen asleep at work at times over the years.

“I’m not going to say that never happened in 38 years,” Lieberman said. “I’m 63 years old. I’ve got some health issues. We worked a lot of overtime.”

He said he didn’t sleep at work “as a general rule, hell no.”

Lieberman, who retired two months after the fires, told LAist he had no specific recollections from the night he was on duty during the fires. He denied he would have been sleeping during a major disaster, calling Vaquero’s assertion “bogus” and saying it’s “amusing” that this issue is coming up more than a year later.

Kevin McGowan, OEM’s director, said in a statement: “It is unacceptable for anyone in the midst of an emergency response to fall asleep, and during the night in question, both I and my deputy only saw Steve [Lieberman] fully awake and doing his job. For LAist to imply otherwise is irresponsible and unsupported by the facts.”

A county response — sent via email from an OEM address and labeled “County Response to Media Questions” — stated McGowan and his deputy, Leslie Luke, said they “do not believe that Steve Lieberman regularly slept on the job.”

The county response also noted Lieberman had successfully served in the same role “during numerous prior disasters, including during the pandemic.”

Instead, they pointed to the McChrystal Group’s findings in an after-action report released last year that the extreme and chaotic nature of the Eaton Fire exacerbated long-running systemic challenges at the office, including a small staff and a lack of training and formalized procedures.

Vaquero, for his part, said he worries that despite recent and proposed changes at OEM, the public remains at risk. In his complaint and in interviews, he said systems and leadership in OEM aren’t ready for the next major emergency.

“There is an entrenched pattern of mismanagement within the Office of Emergency Management,” Vaquero wrote in the complaint.

“The agency’s [OEM’s] ability to perform its emergency management mission and safeguard county residents” has been “materially degraded,” he wrote.

The days leading up to the fire

In the week before the Eaton and Palisades fires sparked, Vaquero said he was acutely aware the weather forecast could present a nightmare scenario. At the time, his job included creating a staff roster spelling out OEM staffers’ roles in an emergency, he said.

He said he put together a roster in case a fire started and the Emergency Operations Center needed to activate, meaning they’d need to staff up to monitor and respond to the situation 24/7.

Vaquero was already concerned the office was stretched thin. The office had 37 staffers. Last year’s budget was about $14.5 million. Its mandate is to comprehensively plan for, respond to and recover from “large-scale emergencies and disasters” in a county of more than 10 million residents.

The McChrystal after-action report noted significantly larger departments in other metropolitan areas. New York City, with a population of about 8.5 million, has some 200 staffers in its emergency management department and a budget of about $88 million. San Diego County, with 3.3 million people, has an emergency department of 43 people with a budget over $12 million.

There were additional factors at play in L.A. County at the time of the fires. Vaquero said coming out of the holiday season meant available staff was thinner than usual.

He said his initial plan for staffing, which he shared with leadership Jan. 3 after warnings about dangerous fire weather coming, is not the one implemented. The initial plan drafted by Vaquero and documented in emails reviewed by LAist had him taking on daytime director duties at the Emergency Operations Center. That would put him in person at the building in East L.A., where OEM staff and partner agency representatives can monitor disasters, coordinate and send alerts to the public. He said he assigned McGowan, his boss, as lead on public communication.

The National Weather Service forecast on Jan. 2, 2025.

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National Weather Service/Fire Safety Resource Institute report

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For the night shift, the emails show Vaquero scheduled Luke, the department’s No. 2, as the center’s director. In both shifts, Vaquero said he assigned staff who he believed to be best trained on the county’s new alerts and warnings systems in the relevant roles. According to the McChrystal report, only two OEM staff were fully trained on the new systems.

One staffer fully trained on the new Genasys system was scheduled to be in Mississippi the week of Jan. 6 for a pre-approved training.

Vaquero said he suggested invoking OEM’s practice of canceling trainings in case of a potential major emergency to argue for keeping that staffer in L.A. He said he was told leadership had fought too hard for the person to go to the training to cancel.

“Everything that was lining up showed that this was going to be the most catastrophic wind storm that we'd ever had, like even worse than the 2011 windstorm,” Vaquero told LAist. “So the fact that we were kind of going back and forth about, ‘Oh, well who's available?’ No, every person should have been available.”

In its statement to LAist, the county wrote that at the time of the fires, there was no official policy to cancel all trainings in the case of significant weather forecasts and that staffing and activation decisions “scale to the incident.”

“OEM has to balance those with the tradeoffs of having a very small staff and having the staff trained and capable of performing very complex tasks,” the county statement said. They noted that one of the recommendations from the McChrystal Group after-action report “is to establish clearer staffing protocols and greater surge capacity so those decisions can be made more consistently in future events, and that work is underway.”

They added that the staffer left for the training Jan. 5 and that the following day, the National Weather Service issued its warning of a “particularly dangerous situation.”

“Had that rare forecast been issued before her departure, the training would have been canceled,” the county said.

Vaquero told LAist that after he made the initial schedule, McGowan and Luke told him to take them both off the Emergency Operations Center staffing roster altogether. Instead, he said they told him to designate them as agency administrators, meaning they could be at incident command posts with county sheriff and fire officials. The county told LAist assigning those roles to top leadership has become a common practice, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020.

Vaquero said Luke told him to put Lieberman, another associate director, on the night shift.

Vaquero told LAist he expressed his concerns about Lieberman being on the night shift to OEM leadership. In his whistleblower complaint, Vaquero wrote: Lieberman “was a known liability that was allowed to continue leading OEM as an Associate Director despite years of documented disregard for the work. Steve [Lieberman] sleeping in meetings became a running joke in the office, with Kevin [McGowan] even acknowledging the issue, and little action had been taken against him leading up to this incident."

Nick Vaquero's 12-hour shift at the county Office of Emergency Management was ending as the Eaton Fire began on the evening of Jan. 7, 2025. He awoke to what he called "the doomsday scenario" in Altadena.

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Carlin Stiehl

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For LAist

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Vaquero described one instance a few months before the fires, in which he said Lieberman fell asleep during a meeting led by McGowan. Vaquero told LAist that McGowan asked the sleeping Lieberman a question, then joked to those in the room that he’d ask again when he woke up.

In another instance in early 2024 when Vaquero said he witnessed Lieberman asleep in a meeting, Vaquero told LAist he approached McGowan afterward to express his frustration, and he said McGowan joked that Vaquero didn’t understand the context. Vaquero said McGowan told him that in the past Lieberman would sleep all day, not just a few hours.

Others with knowledge of the situation told LAist they also witnessed Lieberman asleep during meetings on at least three occasions, as well as in his office.

McGowan declined an interview request but said in a written statement that “no performance concerns of that nature were raised through supervisory channels.”

Lieberman was assigned to the Office of Emergency Management after county supervisors merged his previous department, the Office of Public Safety, with the county Sheriff’s Department in 2009. Lieberman retired in March 2025.

Lieberman told LAist that in the months before his retirement, he was “burning time,” using up sick days, vacation and holidays.

When asked about sleeping at work, he said he thinks it’s not uncommon for people to occasionally sleep at work.

“It’s the reality of being human,” Lieberman said in a phone call. “When you’re sitting in a chair, I might close my eyes, doesn’t mean I’m asleep. I think that’s true for a lot of people.”

The firestorm 

The day before the 2025 fires sparked, the National Weather Service upgraded its warning. The upcoming fire weather conditions were “life-threatening,” forecasters said, and they warned of a “particularly dangerous situation,” or PDS — a term reserved for only the most worrisome weather.

The county’s Emergency Operations Center in East L.A. was officially activated by Tuesday, Jan. 7.

Vaquero was set to be on duty from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Lieberman would take over for the next 12 hours.

Vaquero said he arrived early Jan. 7 — about 6 a.m. At about 10:30 a.m., the WatchDuty app — a volunteer-led disaster monitoring service that emergency managers have also come to rely on for eyes in the field — was surfacing reports of a fire near Pacific Palisades. Soon after, Vaquero said, he and his team had a call with the city of L.A. and started to prepare evacuation alerts for nearby unincorporated areas. McGowan headed to the incident command post on the Westside.

Throughout the day, Vaquero said, he managed the OEM staffers on duty — including those whose job was to ensure areas in the county’s jurisdiction got timely evacuation warnings and orders.

At 6:23 p.m., the first reports of the Eaton Fire starting began to ping in Watch Duty.

Vaquero sent an agency representative to the newly established incident command post at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, he said. The county would be in charge of alerts for the Eaton Fire because the fire started in an unincorporated area.

Vaquero said he stayed past the end of his shift, helping with the transition to night shift staff. Vaquero said he watched as a night shift staffer gave a crash course on how to use the new alerts software to the person Vaquero had assigned, with leadership’s approval, to alerts and warnings. The first advisory alert for the Eaton Fire was sent to eastern parts of Altadena, as well as parts of Pasadena, a little before 7:30 p.m.

Vaquero told LAist that at that point he passed off his duties to Lieberman and headed home around 8 p.m. He said he was exhausted.

The next day

Vaquero woke up before dawn on Jan. 8 and immediately turned on the news.

“ I'm like, ‘Oh shit, this is the doomsday scenario,’” Vaquero told LAist in a recent interview.

He rushed to work, arriving a little before 5:30 a.m. and went to find Lieberman for a briefing.

“ And the first thing he says is, ‘I don't know why we're activated. Nothing's even happening,’” Vaquero recalled to LAist. “So I went off. ... I was just absolutely pissed.”

In the whistleblower complaint, Vaquero wrote that Lieberman “was making inflammatory comments like ‘why are we even activated!?’ for all in the room to hear.”

By his own account, Vaquero said, a colleague had to calm Vaquero down because he was visibly upset with Lieberman.

In his whistleblower complaint, Vaquero said he then talked to the other night shift staffers, who told him Lieberman “was sleeping in his office.” A person in the office early the morning of Jan. 8 also told LAist they witnessed Lieberman asleep in his office before the end of his shift.

Lieberman told LAist that as director of the Emergency Operations Center, he would not have been involved in the details of every alert and warning and denied that he would sleep during an active emergency.

“If [L.A. County Fire] sent OEM something about the alerts, that would’ve been handled immediately,” Lieberman said. “I seriously doubt that anything that was sent to the EOC wasn’t acted upon.”

In its statements to LAist, the county reiterated that the Emergency Operations Center director is not typically directly involved in sending or approving alerts and warnings.

During the night shift, evacuation warnings and orders were sent to areas of Altadena east of Lake Avenue between 7:55 and 9 p.m.

Meanwhile, around 11 p.m., radio and 911 dispatch calls indicated that the fire was moving in multiple directions, including westward, according to a timeline produced by the Fire Safety Research Institute at the California governor’s request. Multiple reports of fires west of Lake Avenue were reported just before midnight.

Notably, the McChrystal after action report’s timeline differs, citing the first reports of flames west of Lake at 2:18 a.m. on Jan. 8.

The county sent the first evacuation order to West Altadena at 3:25 a.m. An evacuation warning, alerting people to prepare to leave, was never sent.

According to the L.A. County statement to LAist, both McGowan and Luke were at the Emergency Operations Center at “various times” throughout that night, “including during the consequential period when emergency notifications for west Altadena were issued during the Eaton Fire.”

“Steve Lieberman was actively working throughout the times Director McGowan and Deputy Director Luke saw him and there aren’t observations that Steve Lieberman’s performance impacted the execution of alert and warning,” the county wrote.

People work in the L.A. County Emergency Operations Center in December 2024 during the Franklin Fire.

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L.A. County Office of Emergency Management

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Ultimately, the decision to order evacuations, and the responsibility to communicate that need, rested with the L.A. County Fire Department that night. The county statement said that incident command notified the Emergency Operations Center to send an evacuation order to West Altadena at 3 a.m., about 25 minutes before the alert officially went out. The 25-minute turnaround time was noted in the McChrystal report as an improvement from previous emergencies. L.A. County Fire did not respond to a detailed list of questions from LAist, citing ongoing independent investigations into the response.

According to the McChrystal after action report, L.A. County firefighters recalled suggesting to incident command around midnight that an evacuation alert be sent to the foothill areas of Altadena and neighboring communities, as far west as La Cañada Flintridge, but staff at the command post did not recall this request.

The report pointed to the overall chaos of multiple fires and extreme conditions, as well as general concern at this time of the catastrophic impacts if the fire overcame the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, home to materials that could cause “toxic fumes if ignited.”

“No official form or documentation was used by LACoFD [the L.A. County Fire Department], LASD [the Sheriff’s Department] or OEM to jointly and formally record which zones should receive evacuation orders or warnings, the time the decision was made, or the time the zones were communicated to OEM staff at the EOC,” the report states.

All but one of the 19 Eaton Fire deaths occurred west of Lake Avenue.

The morning of Jan. 8, Vaquero said he angrily told McGowan about his experience with Lieberman. “I immediately requested that Kevin [McGowan] remove Steve [Lieberman] from the incident operations and this change took place,” Vaquero wrote in his whistleblower complaint.

The county’s statement to LAist attributed the change to another factor. It said Lieberman “was in the process of retiring and requested leave based on accrued leave and compensatory time, which was approved in connection with his retirement.”

The aftermath

Vaquero said he believed the details he laid out in his complaint should have been a part of the McChrystal after action report. He told LAist he shared the same details in his interviews with the McChrystal group.

He also said OEM could have acted sooner and been better prepared.

It’s not the first time OEM’s response to a disaster has come under criticism. In 2023, OEM’s own internal after action report about the response to Tropical Storm Hilary identified "opportunities for improvement.” That report, which LAist reviewed, documented confusing and inconsistent information sharing from management to staff, a lack of “established and codified processes” for activating the county’s Emergency Operations Center, lack of staff training on alert and other systems, and that leadership should have a roster of personnel with credentials “to allow for better staffing decisions.”

Since the McChrystal report was released in late September 2025, OEM has publicly acknowledged these “systemic weaknesses.”

“OEM faces challenges related to limited organizational autonomy, fragmented authority, resource constraints, and insufficient staffing and technology for a jurisdiction as large and complex as Los Angeles County, while facing catastrophic disasters,” the county’s statement to LAist said.

Since the fires, the office said it has restructured staff and is working to increase personnel, as well as expand training and joint exercises with the fire and sheriff’s department, and modernize its technology systems.

The Office of Emergency Management has been reorganized, officials said. County supervisors are also considering a proposal to add 44 positions to the office, increasing its size to about 80, as part of the first phase of a three-year expansion plan in response to the recommendations in the McChrystal Group after action report.

Nearly a third of the budget has historically come from federal grants, the Washington Post has reported, and that “pot is shrinking” under the Trump administration, said the county Chief Executive Office’s acting chief, Joe Nicchitta, at a recent budget hearing. So the county is largely looking to fulfill the McChrystal Group’s recommendations to expand the office via limited local funding.

Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who represents Altadena and some of the most disaster-prone unincorporated areas of the county, said, among other things, the county has shifted the OEM to report directly to the Chief Executive Office, instead of another branch within that office.

“Since last year’s fires, my priority has been strengthening our emergency management system so it is better equipped to respond to increasingly complex disasters,” Barger wrote in a statement. “I believe this change will help streamline decision-making, strengthen accountability, and position OEM to evolve in a way that meets the 21st century emergency management needs of Los Angeles County.”

Helen Chavez, a spokesperson for Barger, added that the supervisor “is not aware of Mr. Lieberman. Personnel performance management is a duty that falls to county department leadership and typically does not rise to the attention of the Board of Supervisors.”

Vaquero says he worries that if he doesn't speak out, nothing will change at the Office of Emergency Management.

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Carlin Stiehl

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For LAist

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Why speak out now?

Vaquero was born in Lancaster and raised in Santa Clarita, he said, and today lives there with his family in a hillside neighborhood near wildfire-prone wilderness.

“ We could easily be Altadena next,” Vaquero said.

He said that speaking publicly could put his career and reputation at risk, but he’s worried nothing will change if he doesn’t sound the alarm.

“My kids, I always teach them the most important thing is to have integrity, to be kind and to do the right thing,” Vaquero told LAist. “And if I'm not going to live by that example, then I'm just a hypocrite. And I hate hypocrites.”

Long Beach resident Kelsey Wise has been asking for a speed bump on her street for months. After multiple close calls on Orange Avenue just north of Seventh Street, she spent hours building a PowerPoint to lobby her City Council member to get behind the idea. Her efforts earned her a meeting with the Long Beach Public Works Department, which manages street safety improvements. Soon, she’ll make her case to them as well.

Few people go to the lengths Wise did, but she’s far from the only person with frustrations about how difficult it is to make local streets safer.

With fatal traffic collisions at their highest point in more than a decade, that dissatisfaction bubbled over last week at a Long Beach City Council meeting, where members and residents took turns voicing their irritation.

Council members told city staff to come up with a plan to speed up safety measures, but it raised the question for us: What’s taking so long to begin with?

We put those questions to City Traffic Engineer Paul Van Dyk. Here’s what we found out.

What happens when residents ask for a new safety measure?

When the city receives a request to evaluate a street for a potential measure to influence traffic behavior, Long Beach sends out city staff to observe drivers along that section of roadway.

In general, a street must clear three specific benchmarks for the city to begin designing a measure to impact traffic behavior. More than 26% of drivers must be observed speeding on a certain stretch of roadway, that stretch must have at least one crash per year and the street must average more than 2,000 vehicles per day.

There are outliers to these rules. For example, Sixth Street between Almond and Orange avenues averages 790 cars per day on less than a tenth of a mile. Fewer than 2% of drivers speed on that stretch, but it’s seen a half dozen collisions recently. City traffic engineers are lowering the speed limit on that stretch from 25 mph to 15 mph to limit future crashes.

Asking for a change is no guarantee that something will happen quickly.

Public Works is dealing with a backlog of requests. It received 220 over the past two years and still has 40 it needs to evaluate, and new requests are rolling in, with this year already outpacing prior ones.

And of the 180 requests Public Works finished evaluating, only 17 were selected for new traffic-calming measures. Once a road is selected for a traffic-calming measure, it takes anywhere from two to four months to install, according to a Jan. 20 presentation from Public Works.

Residents can submit a request for a traffic evaluation here.

The state has strict rules on where and when a stop sign can be installed. To meet the threshold, an intersection must have five or more reported crashes in 12 months. Furthermore, it has to be clear that a stop sign would directly prevent similar crashes from occurring, and there must be a minimum vehicle and pedestrian volume through the area.

Stop Signs

Stop signs are effective when “there’s an equilibrium” in traffic flow, said Van Dyk. If someone pulls up to a four-way stop sign and there’s never anybody at any of the three other directions, it makes the driver less likely to obey the sign, he said.

“The hard part is not putting up a sign,” Van Dyk said. “It’s convincing people to actually listen to the sign. To follow what the sign says and make it make sense to them.”

Speed Bumps

Speed bumps are different than speed humps. Speed humps can include speed tables and raised crosswalks, while speed bumps are concrete mounds that require drivers to slow down to cross.

“Typically, speed bumps are most effective if we’re seeing significant amounts of people going at high speed,” Van Dyk said.

If people typically travel between 25 and 30 mph down a street, speed bumps “really aren’t going to make a noticeable difference in behavior,” he said.

They are reserved for areas where people typically travel at 35 to 40 mph, Van Dyk said. However, even if a traffic engineer deems it a viable solution to slow speeding traffic, Long Beach requires a petition signed by neighbors to install them. The approval percentage ranges from 50-75%, depending on the type of speed hump or bump the neighborhood is seeking.

New left-turn signals

From January 2023 through the end of 2025, Public Works received 133 resident requests to check the timing of existing traffic signals. When that happens, Public Works sends out a traffic engineer to “test all the different detectors around the light to make sure that they are accurately detecting when a car goes by.”

They check to make sure the magnetic sensors underground are working properly and observe traffic during rush hour to make sure the light is “flushing the left turn pocket every time,” Van Dyk said.

Van Dyk acknowledged the danger of trying to make a left turn at a green light instead of a green arrow. “All of the liability is on the driver in making sure that I’m doing this safely,” he said.

Vehicles make their way along Long Beach Boulevard as they pass a speed limit sign at Seventh Street in Long Beach on Thursday, December 1, 2022. Photo by Thomas R. Cordova. Long Beach is in the process of adding more left-turn arrow lights, but “traffic signals are probably one of the most expensive projects that the city undertakes” as far as traffic-calming measures, Van Dyk said.

Adding a signal at one intersection costs “more than half a million” dollars once you factor in the costs of building the light and making sure everything is hooked up properly underground without disturbing the existing utility lines, Van Dyk said.

“It’s a lot of steel, it’s a lot of engineering,” he said.

Low-cost fixes include changing the signal timing “to give pedestrians a head start” when crossing the street.

Crosswalks

Long Beach plans to install 39 new crosswalks throughout the city, including 25 with a button that activates rectangular rapid flashing beacons for pedestrians crossing the road.

Among those to be installed: two will go along Seventh Street, five will be installed on Anaheim Street and three will be installed on Atlantic Avenue.

Those with specialty beacons are placed on marked crosswalks that see elevated levels of speeding cars, traffic volume or crashes. They are also installed in areas that don’t have a marked crosswalk, but are on roadways where pedestrian deaths and injuries are common.

How do speed cameras and limits fit into this?

This fall, speeding drivers caught at 18 spots throughout Long Beach will begin receiving fines from automatic cameras. The program is part of a state pilot in seven cities that mandates the ticket revenue pay for new traffic-calming measures.

Proceeds from the fines “can’t be spent on enforcement, general police or fixing potholes. It’s spent on neighborhood traffic calming,” said City Manager Tom Modica.

In January, the City Council also approved lowering speed limits on 77 streets throughout the city. A majority of those reductions restored the state standard of 25 mph on streets with three or fewer lanes that had speed limits of 30 to 35 mph.

In nearly two dozen locations, speed limits were dropped to 15-20 mph to match “existing driver behavior. A dozen streets had speed limits dropped to 25 mph within 500 feet of a park playground.

Until 2021, state law limited a city’s ability to set its own speed limits. This round of speed reductions is the second the city has undertaken since the law changed. The city conducts speed surveys on its streets “on a rotating multiyear schedule” and adjusts speed limits based on that data.

To request a speed survey on your street, email goactivelb@longbeach.gov. You can also request a free yard sign saying “20 is plenty” in English or Spanish here.

As Los Angeles gears up for a surge of tourists for this year’s FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Olympics, vacation rental giant Airbnb is urging the city of Los Angeles to legalize thousands of new short-term rentals.

The company promises that the expansion will add more than $100 million in tax revenue to city coffers amid a severe budget crisis. But opponents say more short-term rentals will further strain an already limited housing supply.

In a report issued this month, Better Neighbors LA, a coalition of housing activists and labor groups that monitor short-term rentals, countered the Airbnb proposal with its own revenue generating idea: Enforce the city’s existing home sharing law, cite violators and bring in tens of millions of dollars in fines that the group says the city has simply failed to collect.

Beefed-up enforcement is a “simple fix for the city” that would “raise enormous amounts of money,” said Randy Renick, Better Neighbors LA executive director. “It’s also going to return thousands of affordable housing units to the market for long-term renters,” he said. (Disclosure: Renick’s law firm, Hadsell Stormer Renick & Dai, is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

Better Neighbors’ coalition includes the hotel workers union UNITE HERE Local 11, along with local organizations like Venice Community Housing and Strategic Actions for a Just Economy. (Disclosure: UNITE HERE is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

Last year, as Airbnb rolled out its “Save Our Services” campaign for short-term rental expansion, it poured $19 million into lobbying and political contributions at the state level, according to the California Secretary of State’s online database.

Also in 2025, the company spent $360,000 on lobbying at Los Angeles City Hall and made hefty donations to charity at the request of L.A. city councilmembers, Los Angeles Ethics Commission records show. The company donated $570,000 to the nonprofit Salvadoran American Leadership and Educational Fund at the request of L.A. City Councilmember Traci Park and $25,000 to the North Valley Family YMCA at the request of Councilmember John Lee.

California law places no limits on such donations, known as behested payments, but requires them to be disclosed to help the public identify attempts to influence public officials.

Airbnb wants the city to revive an idea that city councilmembers, including former councilmember Herb Wesson, the father of current Airbnb spokesperson Justin Wesson, first proposed eight years ago. The proposal would have allowed property owners to list second homes on platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo or booking.com. The current proposal would add up to about 31,000 units to the city’s short-term rental market. Under L.A.’s Home-Sharing Ordinance, which took effect in 2019, short-term rental hosts are allowed to list only their primary residences on vacation booking platforms. Neither Vrbo nor booking.com responded to Capital & Main’s request for comment about the proposal.

The Airbnb-backed coalition, Save Our Services, says on its website that the additional vacation rentals could generate more than $100 million for the city in “bed taxes,” a 14% levy on overnight stays paid by hotel and short-term rental guests, as well as $100 million in sales tax revenue from tourist spending.

Labor unions like the Teamsters Joint Council 42, the Los Angeles/Orange Counties Building and Construction Trades Council and the International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees, along with the Central City Association of Los Angeles and community groups like the Brotherhood Crusade and the Koreatown Youth and Community Center, back the effort.

Airbnb spokesperson Justin Wesson said in a statement, “By allowing a limited, regulated number of vacation rentals in the City of Los Angeles we can help stabilize funding for essential services, support neighborhood-based tourism, and prepare the city for upcoming global events in a way that benefits residents, visitors, and local businesses alike.”

Airbnb supports stronger enforcement of the city’s Home-Sharing Ordinance, Wesson wrote in a January 2026 letter to the L.A. City Council. The letter also urges the city to require all vacation rental platforms to share data with the city and remove illegal listings. Airbnb is the only company that currently does so voluntarily.

The Better Neighbors LA report dismisses Airbnb’s claim that expanding short-term rentals would generate more than $100 million in new hotel taxes as “fanciful” because the proposal wouldn’t necessarily bring additional tourists to the city. In 2020, as the City Council first considered an expansion of the short-term rental market, Los Angeles Director of City Planning Vince Bertoni was also skeptical that expanding vacation rentals would draw visitors to Los Angeles.

Still, the World Cup and the Olympics will bring an influx of visitors to L.A., and groups like Better Neighbors LA fear that the city will lose much needed housing to tourist rentals, especially if city officials permit additional vacation rentals.

This concern is heightened by the fact that the city has long struggled to enforce its existing Home-Sharing Ordinance.

Fully half of the Los Angeles vacation rentals listed on booking sites are illegal, according to data included in the Better Neighbors LA report. But only a tiny fraction of violators are cited; the city has collected a total of about $667,000 in fines under the 2019 home sharing law, Better Neighbors LA reports. The group estimates the city could immediately rake in $95 million in two months if it stepped up enforcement.

City Councilmembers Katy Yaroslavsky and Hugo Soto-Martinez, whose Hollywood-Silver Lake district has among the highest concentration of the city’s short-term rentals, support Better Neighbors’ plan to increase enforcement of the city’s current law.

“This report makes clear that the path forward is enforcing the home-sharing laws already on the books,” Soto-Martinez said in a statement. “If we fully implement the rules we passed, we can protect tenants and generate additional revenue for the city without sacrificing housing.”

L.A.’s Home-Sharing Ordinance generally allows individuals to list only their primary residences on sites like Airbnb and Vrbo for up to four months, although the city also makes exceptions, allowing year-round “extended home sharing” in many cases. Home sharing is not permitted in dwellings covered by the city’s rent control law or in affordable housing units, including those built with public funds.

But property owners have easily evaded the existing home sharing law, even amid a severe housing and homelessness crisis. In 2024, a Capital & Main and ProPublica investigation found that tourists could rent apartments in dozens of rent controlled buildings in apparent violation of the law. Owners of some of these buildings openly listed fabricated or nonexistent city registration numbers and were never cited.

For years, residents complained about loud parties in short-term rentals, parking problems and the loss of permanent housing in their neighborhoods. Last March, the City Council finally voted to pursue reforms, including requiring short-term rental platforms to use a computer system that would automatically block illegal transactions and giving individuals the right to sue suspected short-term rental law violators. But the reform effort hasn’t moved forward.

Last year as the City Council considered stricter oversight of short-term rentals, Los Angeles Housing Department officials said they lacked the staffing and resources to effectively enforce the ordinance. This month, Sharon Sandow, a spokesperson for the housing department, which is one of several city agencies overseeing the Home-Sharing Ordinance, said in an email that all of the departments would have to assess their “resources and capacity” for a coordinated enforcement effort.

Meanwhile, the Airbnb proposal has caught the attention of at least one city councilmember, Heather Hutt, who represents Koreatown and Mid-City. In January, Hutt requested that the chief legislative analyst and other city department staff brief the City Council’s budget and finance and planning and land use committees on the status of the ordinance.

Support for the Airbnb plan would represent a distinct shift for most members of the City Council: Last year, councilmembers put themselves squarely on the side of limiting short-term rentals in the city, voting 12-0 to strengthen oversight of the program. Three members — John Lee, Monica Rodriguez and Bob Blumenfield — were absent.

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