The Brief

Millions of Californians don't have internet at home because it’s either too expensive, unreliable or not available where they live. The state is working to change that by 2026.

Construction is underway on a new “middle-mile” network that would make it easier and less expensive for service providers to connect to disadvantaged rural, tribal and minority urban neighborhoods. In many cases, those companies have been reluctant to provide service because it’s not seen as profitable.

While 91% of households have internet service, an estimated 3.5 million Californians remain disconnected.

Officials say that by providing competition to commercial providers, the state's network could also help bring down internet prices for everyone.

The $5 billion project is the largest of its kind in the U.S. About 10,000 miles of fiber optic cable is being installed throughout California, including more than 500 miles in Los Angeles County.

You may see construction happening around the region, although existing networks are also being used to avoid disruption.

“2024 is a year many of us have been working towards — to move from planning and design into construction,” said Mark Monroe, deputy director of the middle-mile broadband initiative during a recent Middle-Mile Advisory Committee hearing.

The state is building a new backbone network made up of high-capacity fiber lines that carry large amounts of data at high speeds over long distances.

(

California Department of Technology

)

“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to really provide connectivity where there hasn't been,” said Liana Bailey-Crimmins, the state’s chief information officer and director of the California Department of Technology.

The middle-mile broadband initiative is part of the Broadband For All plan, a $6 billion state and federal investment to close the digital divide. In 2021, the state allocated $3.8 billion of those funds for the middle mile. In January, the project received a $1.5 billion boost in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget proposal ($250 million in 2024-25 and $1.25 billion in 2025-26). A revised budget plan is due in May.

Advocates have raised questions about the state’s ability to fund the entire network, given the projected $73 billion budget deficit that was recently announced. They also sounded the alarm after low-income communities in South and Southeast L.A. were deprioritized last summer, while plans to build in wealthier areas like Beverly Hills moved forward.

But Bailey-Crimmins said the state had "always intended" to build the entire network by 2026, and that the governor is "very committed” to funding the project, even as rising inflation drove construction costs up by about 40%.

“Every budget process is unique, but we are hoping that things go the way they should," she said.

About 10,000 miles of fiber optic cable are being installed around the state.

(

Courtesy of the California Department of Technology

)

The middle-mile network does not reach individual homes and businesses, however. That will be done by a “last mile” connection, where internet companies, municipalities, nonprofits and others would pay the state to tap in and deliver broadband to residents who live within a certain distance.

The network will go online to the public in "phases or as they become available," according to Bailey-Crimmins.

Breaking ground

More than 80% of the middle mile is now under contract. Caltrans is building about 4,000 miles of new infrastructure throughout the state, but the remainder will be established through a mix of purchase and lease agreements.

About 10,000 miles of fiber optic cable are being installed throughout the state, including more than 500 miles in Los Angeles County.

(

California Department of Technology

)

The state estimates it will spend about $340 million to complete the network in L.A. County. Four companies were awarded contracts to build in the area:

• Lumen (lease)
• CVIN (lease)
• Arcadian Infracom (joint-build)
• HP Communications (standalone Caltrans construction)

Lumen won a $400 million contract to build network infrastructure throughout the state. The telecom company is set to begin construction on the project near Los Angeles International Airport later this spring.

"Digital inclusion is critical for the United States to maintain its leading position as a global economic and innovation powerhouse," said Lumen CEO Kate Johnson. "Bringing high-speed broadband to unserved and underserved locations will accelerate greater and more diverse participation in our education system, the world's digital economy and access to high-quality health care."

In December, Arcadian held a groundbreaking event in Boyle Heights for the California portion of its L.A. to Phoenix fiber route. The project will help serve residents in East L.A. and extend to communities in Barstow and Needles (the route totals 306 miles, but only 40 are within L.A. County limits).

Joint-build or construction projects require more time because workers have to dig into the ground and put fiber in. But areas with lease or purchase agreements could begin connecting people as early as summer 2025.

“You don't have to permit, you don't have to close down lanes of the freeway in L.A. And you can just get that into those communities as quickly as possible,” Bailey-Crimmins said.

All projects must be completed by December 2026.

Longer wait times for graffiti removal and streetlight repair. Fewer police officers per shift. Completely eliminating school crossing guards.

Those are just some of the service cuts the city of South Gate made earlier this year as it stared down a $9.4 million annual budget deficit and a looming fiscal emergency.

But none of that was enough to convince South Gate voters to approve an 8% utility user tax that would have been tacked onto a wide range of utility bills, including electricity, water, cable and phone service. Now, the city is gearing up for more cuts, including closing sports fields and the city pool for the winter months.

South Gate’s utility tax was just one of the many ways Southern California cities asked their residents to give them more money via local tax initiatives this November, with proposed taxes on everything from hotel stays to cannabis businesses.

And those early results suggest South Gate is an outlier: Of the 32 total local tax measures on the ballot in Los Angeles and Orange counties, all but six appear poised to pass, according to early results. (There are still several more days of vote counting to come.)

Eleven transient occupancy tax measures, which tax overnight stays in hotels or short-term rentals, passed in cities from Burbank to Los Alamitos. Most cities sought to increase their existing hotel taxes by anywhere from 1 to 5 percentage points, while Lynwood residents voted to establish a hotel tax for the first time.

Business-related taxes, such as taxes on business licenses or on certain businesses, also mostly passed, as did most parcel taxes in cities including Pasadena and Culver City.

But sales taxes saw more mixed results. Cudahy, San Gabriel, Orange, Santa Ana and Los Angeles all approved sales tax measures, while voters in Diamond Bar, Hermosa Beach and San Clemente all voted down their local sales tax proposals.

Most of those sales taxes focused on maintaining basic city services in communities facing big budget deficits, driven by the rising costs of insurance, maintenance and infrastructure projects, and employee pensions, among other factors. But in San Clemente, the proposed 1% sales tax would have specifically funded sand replenishment and other beach projects, along with wildfire prevention work. That measure appeared to be headed for failure, with just 36% of voters in support as of Wednesday afternoon.

Voters in San Marino approved an extension of their utility tax, and increased it from 5% to 6%. Last year, the tax provided almost $2.2 million in revenue.

City officials in South Gate had hoped for a similar boon, and projected the utility tax would bring in an estimated $10.4 million per year in general fund revenue, while raising total utility costs by about $39 per month for a typical household.

Leading up to the election, the city of South Gate pointed to other neighboring cities that have their own utility taxes, including Downey, Lakewood and Norwalk, where the tax mostly hovers around 5%. “South Gate is the exception, not the rule,” noted one city presentation that pointed to these other taxes in a bid to coax voters to go along.

Voters weren’t convinced. “I’m extremely frustrated that you now want to do electricity, water, sewer, cable, cell phone, gas. ... That hurts us. You’re passing that on to us and that is absolutely not acceptable,” said one resident at a City Council meeting on the measure earlier this year.

LAist has reached out to the city of South Gate about what’s next for the city.

The city of West Hollywood has approved an ordinance to create a domestic partnership registry for people in polyamorous relationships.

The domestic partnership registry extends certain legal protections for people in the city, including visitation rights to hospitals and jails in West Hollywood and some tenant protections. The registry doesn’t replace the state’s marriage or the state’s domestic partnership laws.

“It's a landmark ordinance and really puts and continues to elevate West Hollywood as a city that is here to support queer people and queer families as they evolve in their needs,” said Chelsea Byers, a West Hollywood City Council member. “I think that's a real joy that we can bring to people — that they can live in a greater sense of being seen and understood.”

How it works

To file, people in a multi-partner relationship will submit a form in person that will be provided by the City Clerk’s office — all members of the relationship will have to provide identification to the clerk.

The ordinance also offers an option by mail, if the signatures are notarized.

The ordinance builds on historical precedent

In 1985, the city became the first city in the nation to create a similar domestic partnership registry for same-sex couples. Similar to that registry, people outside the city can also register.

“This new law not only gives polyamorous unions legal recognition, it also gives people permission to imagine a future together and to plan their lives openly,” said Christina Fialho, president and founder of Rewrite the BiLine, an advocacy group for bisexual people and nonnuclear families, who advocated for the ordinance.

Several cities in Massachusetts have also passed multipartner domestic partnership laws.

Among the sweeping victories by Democrats on Tuesday were wins in several congressional districts that Republicans had redrawn explicitly to boost their party ahead of the midterms.

Republicans were bracing for some losses this election cycle, so last year President Donald Trump urged his party to take the extraordinary step of engaging in mid-decade redistricting efforts.

As of Tuesday night, many of those efforts had failed.

That included in Florida, where multiple Democrats — Kathy Castor, Pia Dandiya and Jared Moskowitz — won in redrawn districts, according to race calls by the Associated Press.

In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Don Davis held on to his 1st District seat, even though Republicans in the state redrew it to be more competitive for the GOP. Trump would have won the redrawn 1st by nearly 12 percentage points, according to the Downballot.

Trump would have won by even more in Alabama's redrawn 2nd Congressional District, which Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures held on to, according to the AP race call.

Republicans in Alabama redid the state's congressional map after the U.S. Supreme Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act earlier this year.

And in Texas, which was the first state to redistrict at Trump's urging, a few of the redrawn districts had gone to Democrats.

Republicans redrew their maps with the expectation that the coalition of voters Trump won over in 2024 would support them this cycle. In Texas, Republicans were banking on gains made with Latino voters in new maps.

But many of those voters shifted their support to Democrats this year.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Nationwide election results came at a relentless pace Tuesday night, each more of a Democratic upset than the last. But you may not have known if you were attending the California Republican Party's election night event in Garden Grove.

In the dimly lit Hyatt ballroom where gubernatorial longshot Steve Hilton and his supporters gathered, the news channels were off, the music was turned up and “Don’t Stop Believin’” blasted throughout.

Minutes after the polls closed at 8 p.m., the Associated Press called the governor’s race for Democratic favorite Xavier Becerra.

Around the room, the occasional person glanced at their phone to sneak a peek at the growing GOP carnage. More of the crowd instead looked at each other or toward the empty stage, where a lectern stood in front of a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset.

Not long after, Hilton took the stage to concede the race — which had always been heavily favored against him in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1.

“Maybe this isn’t the best year to be running for office as a Republican,” Hilton told his supporters, alluding to the election results that would soon lead the Democratic Party to win so big in the House and the Senate that many dubbed it a blue tsunami. “We see what’s going on around the country.”

Hilton knew the odds were long. He’d tried a number of tactics to win over California, including a suggestive advertisement suggesting voters should “Just Try” voting for him. He’d done his best to separate himself from President Donald Trump, who backed his campaign. He also attacked Becerra for staying largely out of the limelight since making it out on top of a chaotic primary.

None of Hilton’s appeals made a significant mark on the result, which trailed at around 36% of the vote as of Wednesday afternoon.

Standing outside the ballroom, Matt Shupe, a spokesperson for the California GOP, conceded it was challenging terrain for Republicans this year across the country — and always in California.

“It’s pretty typical that the party that's not in power gains some seats, so I think that was pretty expected for the most part,” he said. “We'll plan on bringing the fight more intensely than ever in 2028.”

By 9:30 p.m., people were headed to their cars to go home.