The Brief

It’s the day after Thanksgiving. Most people are usually sleeping in, but 79-year-old Don Kehl has two ladders out and is directing his two sons, three grandkids and granddaughter-in-law on how to string up an elaborate Christmas light design.

“None of my family will let me on the roof anymore,” Kehl said, with a smile. “I'm just kind of down here telling them what they did wrong.”

The Kehl family decorates their home to welcome visitors to "Candy Cane Lane" in El Segundo.

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His decor, he said with a bellowing laugh, is “whatever was on sale at Home Depot on the 26th of December last year.”

Kehl lives on East Acacia Avenue in El Segundo, dubbed “Candy Cane Lane” every holiday season. The neighborhood has its own Yelp page and has been decorating as a group for the holidays since 1949. Starting Dec. 9, thousands of visitors will descend to enjoy the holiday light displays. This year, the neighborhood is expecting a bigger crowd, after the street inspired the upcoming holiday film Candy Cane Lane starring Eddie Murphy and Tracee Ellis Ross.

The film will be released on Amazon Prime Video on Dec. 1. You can watch the trailer here.

Kehl thinks the film will bring more visitors, “but that's fine,” he said. “The reason we put these up is to attract people so the more people, the better.”

For the Kehl family, decorating each year is a treasured family tradition that now stretches to three generations. Don Kehl’s two sons, Tom and Russell Kehl, remember when their kids — now in their 20s — were young and would watch them put up lights with their dad.

“It's been fun to watch the kids go from, ‘Can I please go on the roof, can I please go on the roof, can I please go on the roof’ to running the show now,” Russell Kehl said.

Don Kehl instructs his grandson and granddaughter-in-law on how to string the Christmas lights around the window.

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Scott Brunnenkant, who has lived on the street for 34 years, was also busy putting up decorations Friday.

“The movie looks like a lot of fun,” he said, adding that the film’s screenwriter Kelly Younger used to live up the street. “He's a friend of ours, nice guy.”

Scott Brunnenkant with his decorations pulled out of storage ready to be put out.

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In addition to lights around the roof line, Brunnenkant’s decorations also include LED icicles, window garlands with lit-up wreaths and ornaments, fairy lights on the bushes, four electric trains on one side of the yard and teddy bears and elves on the other side.

He knew about the neighborhood’s tradition when he bought the house back in 1989 as the open house was held during Christmastime. Friends ask him all the time if holiday decorations are allowed as part of the HOA, he said.

“And I tell them, oh yeah, it's the Santa clause,” he chuckles. Technically there’s no requirement to participate, but neighbors joke that peer pressure gets just about everyone involved.

A community effort to pay the bills

Brunnenkant said his home’s electricity bill triples during the month of December and because the neighborhood decorates the cul-de-sac at the end of the road, that part of the neighborhood has its own address under Southern California Edison.

The "Candy Cane Lane" plaque.

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“There's a bill that comes with that,” he said, explaining that the neighborhood sets up a Santa tent at the end of the block that takes donations. “Some of that money is used to pay the electric bill for the end of the block and get the Santa suit cleaned and things like that.”

The rest of the money is donated to different causes like St. Jude’s Hospital, said Jennifer Turnbull, another neighbor who has co-chaired the Candy Cane Lane committee for around 15 years.

“It's a labor of love, worth every penny, worth every minute,” Turnbull said. “It's a lot but it brings joy to a lot of people.”

The Turnbull family stands in front of their home on "Candy Cane Lane."

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The neighborhood typically gets about 8,000 visitors on opening night and 3,000 to 4,000 a night through Dec. 25 — the last day of the light show, Turnbull said.

With the movie release, Turnbull said, they are ready for additional visitors. To help things run smoothly, she asks that people use waste bins for trash.

What to expect on opening night

On opening night, Turnball said, people line up behind police barricades at the beginning of the block on California Street. Santa Claus arrives on a fire truck and “Candy Cane Lane” is pitch black.

“He will wave his hand at each street, or each home, screaming Merry Christmas or ho ho ho, and those lights turn on and it's oohs and ahhs all the way ‘till he gets to the cul de sac where his sleigh is,” she said.

Jennifer Turnbull wraps Christmas lights in front of her home. Her display features thousands of lights.

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Turnbull’s home is one of the houses decorated with thousands of lights, she said, and Looney Tunes characters, all custom and made by hand.

Storage issues

Richard and Judy Doukakis, who have lived on “Candy Cane Lane” since 1986, begin decorating their home for Christmas after Halloween ends. They don’t decorate for Halloween because they just don’t have room for decorations, Richard Doukakis said.

Just some of Richard and Judy Doukakis' Christmas decor in storage.

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“There's probably 75 boxes,” Richard Doukakis said — of their Christmas decor — stored in multiple closets, the attic and the garage.

“I bought him a storage shed last year for Christmas, so that's helped,” Judy Doukakis said. “But storage is a problem.”

Richard and Judy Doukakis in the storage shed Judy bought Richard last Christmas to house some of their Christmas decor.

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New this year: Custom made Bluey characters

That did not stop them from ordering custom made Bluey characters decked out in holiday fare for this year’s holiday decorations.

The custom Bluey decor Richard and Judy Doukakis ordered for their holiday display.

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“I thought it'd be nice. It's so popular. My grandkids love it. So I had somebody make me those characters so they're going to be on my lawn now,” Richard Doukakis said.

Bill and Debra Mitchell also custom make their decor. Their blue front door is flanked by two candy canes on either side. After spotting them in a mail order catalog, the couple decided they could make them cheaper, so they did.

Bill Mitchell stands beside two candy canes he custom made with his wife Debra.

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Over the years, they have also made penguins and flamingos which will come out in the next few days leading up to opening day.

Back when the pair moved into the neighborhood in 1995, they didn’t know about the tradition.

“Right before it happened. I met a friend down the street and she said, ‘What are you doing for ‘Candy Cane Lane?’ And I said, ‘We know nothing about it,’” Debra Mitchell said. “And then he pops up with, ‘Oh, that explains the big manger animals, farm animals, that were in the garage when we looked at the house.’”

And they have been decorating it ever since.

Topline:

Key topics: The candidates each had about 45 minutes to individually answer questions from Erin Stone, an LAist senior reporter focused on climate and environment.

Here are some of the topics they covered:

• Extreme heat
• Emergency preparedness and recovery
• Protecting communities from pollution
• Water
• Public transit

About the organizers: The event is organized by a coalition of local environmental and environmental justice groups including: Los Angeles League of Conservation Voters, SCOPE-LA, Sierra Club, Clean and Healthy California, Neighborhood Council Sustainability Alliance and Communities for a Better Environment

LAist will have more coverage and analysis of the conversations Friday morning.

The Trump administration is taking steps to advance a mysterious and unprecedented project to compile state-by-state lists of people it has decided are eligible citizens over the age of 18 who can vote in the upcoming midterm election. But it will no longer meet its own deadline to publish that information on a portal on Friday, which is 60 days before Election Day.

Department of Justice attorneys told opposing counsel in two separate lawsuits that instead of meeting the Sept. 4 deadline, they would give 48-hours notice to plaintiffs' counsel before the state citizenship portal was launched, according to recent court filings.

The U.S. has never attempted to create a comprehensive list of American citizens before this administration. Maintaining voter lists is the responsibility of states, not the federal government, as the Constitution dictates that states control elections. But President Trump has repeatedly taken steps to try to exert executive control over elections.

The basis for the federal government creating state citizenship lists is an executive order Trump signed on March 31. A lower court had blocked implementation of key parts of that executive order in 23 states and Washington, D.C., but the Supreme Court stayed that injunction late last month, opening the door for the plan to be implemented after all.

The March 31 executive order directs U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Social Security Administration to create "State Citizenship Lists" of individuals the agencies believe are citizens in each state, and send those lists to state officials "no fewer than 60 days before each regularly scheduled Federal election."

The next section of the executive order says the U.S. attorney general will prioritize investigating and prosecuting state and local officials who issue federal ballots to anyone not eligible to vote.

"States here have a strong incentive to actually use these lists to try to avoid federal investigation," said Jules Torti, counsel at the nonprofit Protect Democracy, in an interview with NPR. "But we know that these lists are going to be based on really inaccurate data. So the risk of disenfranchisement here is really, really palpable."

The privacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center, along with individual voters, filed a motion Thursday asking a federal judge in Maryland to block the administration from creating the citizenship lists and publishing them on a portal. Specifically, they seek to block a June 8 implementation memo authored by USCIS director Joseph Edlow that outlines the plan.

The motion, which was brought by Protect Democracy, along with another nonprofit legal group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, argues the administration's plans to share Americans' personal data between agencies and then disseminate the data to states violates multiple federal laws, including the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act and the Administrative Procedures Act. Under the Privacy Act, federal agencies must give the public 30 days notice and the opportunity to comment before they collect and disseminate Americans' personal data for a new purpose.

The EPIC lawsuit also argues the government does not have access to accurate, up-to-date information on American citizens, especially those who move frequently, have changed their names, or are foreign-born. For example, Social Security's citizenship data often isn't updated when people naturalize, and the SAVE data system, operated by USCIS, frequently doesn't include records for people who became citizens as minors when their parents naturalized.

Torti said it is "deeply concerning" that the administration is still planning to go ahead with the creation of citizenship lists but is no longer going to meet the deadline, since that means the lists will be completed even closer to Election Day.

"It means additional chaos, additional confusion for the state election officials and just for voters," Torti said. "And I think that's the point. The point here is to create chaos in advance of the election."

Neither the Department of Justice, nor the Department of Homeland Security, which is tasked with compiling the citizenship lists, responded to NPR's request for comment.

The June 8 implementation memo stated that the portal for state election officials would be available around June 30 and a second portal where citizens could check their information would be available at a later date – but that deadline passed without further updates.

The federal government has secured a domain for the state citizenship lists portal. While the portal is not currently online, it was briefly live in recent days with a landing page that said "Coming Soon," according to court filings.

Lawyers representing Democratic party groups that had challenged the March 31 executive order in a separate lawsuit filed in April, accused the administration in a recent filing of failing to notify the court or the parties about its plans to move forward with the state citizenship portal. They asked the judge to require the federal government to give immediate updates about their plans to implement the executive order.

This latest legal battle over the administration's plans to compile state citizenship lists comes as the Department of Homeland Security is ramping up its efforts to analyze state voter rolls with the goal of identifying potential noncitizens who are registered to vote. Previous audits have found instances of noncitizens casting ballots to be incredibly rare. 

Additionally, last week, ICE published a request for information on a federal procurement site seeking vendors who can compile public voter rolls and voter history files from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and U.S. territories, "to support Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) fraud detection and data segmentation activities."

NPR's Hansi Lo Wang contributed reporting to this story. 
Copyright 2026 NPR

A group of California lawmakers called on federal officials to halt and reject a proposed land exchange in Yosemite National Park that would allow a private developer to take control of a strip of land in the park for an access road to the park’s main attractions.

The letter to Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on Wednesday was signed by a bipartisan group of 61 state legislators led by Assemblymember Greg Wallis, a Republican who represents Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

“Republicans and Democrats from both houses of the Legislature are standing together because some things are bigger than politics,” Wallis said in a statement. “Yosemite is not a subdivision. It is not a bargaining chip. And it is not for sale. Secretary Burgum and the administration should put an end to this proposal.”

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum (center) visited the Tunnel Tops in San Francisco in 2025 after he and then-Attorney General Pam Bondi toured Alcatraz ahead of their announcement to reopen the former federal prison.

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The group argued that the proposed land exchange is counter to the mission of the National Park Service and the founding of Yosemite in 1864, which set aside the start of the park for public use and protection for the first time in the history of the federal government.

“What is being proposed now runs directly against that founding principle, more than a century and a half later,” the letter states.

It continues later: “Our national parks belong equally to every American. They are not the Department’s to trade away, and they are not for sale.”

The proposal was first reported by news outlet NOTUS, which published a story last week alleging that members of the Trump administration were meeting with representatives of Kingsbarn Realty Capital, a private equity group that owns an 83-acre parcel next to the park. In an email to KQED, Kingsbarn’s lawyer Lanny J. Davis confirmed the group is pursuing the land exchange to build a new access road from its property to the park.

Previous owners have pushed for the same deal since the early 2000s and failed in court.

State Assemblymember Marc Berman (D-Menlo Park), who signed on to the letter, called the proposal “indefensible,” and said he’s looking at state laws to ensure a similar proposal could never slip through.

“If the Trump administration can’t defend this publicly in broad daylight, then they shouldn’t be doing it,” he said.

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Marin) told KQED’s Forum on Wednesday that he’s worried there isn’t enough opposition among his Republican colleagues in Congress to stop the Trump administration’s efforts.

“I have not seen a single Republican colleague willing to stand up to Donald Trump when he decides that he’s just going to do something,” Huffman said. “So that is my concern, that he just plows ahead with this — even if it has dubious legal authority, or even if it’s an open violation of the law. He’s doing stuff like that anyway. And in this Congress, there’s no one here to stop him.”

In a statement to KQED, state Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil (R-Modesto), whose district includes parts of Yosemite, said she will “keep pressing the Department [of the Interior] for a clear answer that this exchange will not proceed.”

Since the news of the deal broke late last week, it has sparked condemnation from a number of Democratic state leaders, including Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, as well as Attorney General Rob Bonta and Bonta’s predecessor, Xavier Becerra, who leads the race for California governor.

“The secretive backroom land-exchange scheme has gotten everyone’s attention,” said Neal Desai, senior Pacific regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association. “I can’t recall another issue — and I’ve been working in the conservation space for over a couple of decades — where the response has been this sharp and so one-sided that this is a terrible idea that should not happen.”

The backlash comes at a turbulent time for National Park Service employees, who have faced layoffs, staffing cuts and fear of retaliation for speaking up against Trump administration policies since the start of the second Trump administration.

Some former employees have also raised concerns about a potential reorganization of the National Park Service, according to a separate letter sent to Burgum’s office Wednesday. According to an email seen by KQED, park superintendents have been asked to attend in-person regional meetings in September — with no clear agenda beyond discussing “agency priorities, our FY 2026 outlook, and other matters important to the work ahead.”

The letter to Burgam, signed by 20 retired parks superintendents warns: “An ill-advised and hastily planned reorganization could dismantle that structure, putting our parks — and those who visit them — at great risk.”

Emily Thompson, executive director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, which organized the letter, said the email about regional meetings “raises some alarm bells.”

“The Park Service is already operating from a difficult place, from a place of crisis,” she said. “And any additional cuts, any movements or actions that would further jeopardize the capacity of the folks that are left, that’s concerning. It’s worrying, and it’ll have a devastating impact on the Park Service.”

Among the letter’s signatories is Don Neubacher, retired Yosemite superintendent, who has been a vocal advocate for parks amid the Trump administration’s changes.

Thompson said she’s worried parks leaders will be stretched even further than they already are, and local decision-making over parks could be in jeopardy.

“Morale is low,” Thompson said. “It’s a hard time to be a federal employee. Anything that … contributes to this culture of fear, it’s just not acceptable.”

This story first appeared on Long Beach Post.

Long Beach is offering up to $1,500 for local business owners and landlords to equip their storefronts with safety measures like cameras, floodlights, alarms and point-of-sale systems.

The grant program is accepting online applications now. You can apply here.

Businesses with storefronts of 1,500 square feet or less may receive grants of up to $750, while businesses between 1,500 and 5,000 square feet are eligible for up to $1,500.

Nonprofit organizations are eligible as well, and landlords can apply on behalf of commercial storefronts that are vacant or occupied. Franchises can also receive the grant.

To qualify, a business must:

• Have an active business license for a storefront within the city
• Be independently owned and operated (franchises are eligible)
• Be currently open and active for business
• Earn no more than $5 million in annual gross revenue
• Hold “active” status with the California Secretary of State for corporations, limited liability companies and limited partnerships

The funds will be provided as a reimbursement after eligible security improvements are installed. Grants will be given out until funds are exhausted.

It’s a great idea, according to Edwin Jara, who manages a pet store in Belmont Heights and was on the receiving end of a break-in earlier this year.

His store had security measures already in place — two cameras and an alarm system — but even that wasn’t enough to deter a masked burglar who grabbed $1,000 cash and a handful of dog treats.

Despite having footage of the burglar, Jara said police haven’t been able to catch the person and that a detective never responded after he filed a police report.

The grant program is being paid for with $350,000 from the city’s Redvelopment Agency along with $50,000 from Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn’s office.

“Our local small businesses are part of the fabric of our neighborhoods, and when business owners feel unsafe, the whole community feels it,” Hahn said in a statement.

In a statement, Mayor Rex Richardson said the program is a “direct investment in the hardworking business owners who make our commercial corridors vibrant and welcoming.”

Jara said he would consider applying for a grant if the city could send someone to help him and the store’s owner fill out the application.

He was offered a separate grant to replace a glass door the burglar smashed, but the store’s owner opted not to fill out the application.

“There was a lot of stuff that we needed to do, and I don’t have a lot of that information,” Jara said.