The Brief

During wildfire season in the western US, soot-clogged skies have long triggered public alerts with advice like: Shut the windows and stay indoors. For those who can afford it: Use an air filter. As Canadian wildfire smoke curled down to Kentucky this year, officials began to do the same thing.

On alert days, “smoke’s there when you wake up in the morning, it’s there when you’re going to bed at night,” said Michelle King, the assistant director of the Louisville metro air pollution control district.

She and other regulators say they’re working on how to communicate about smoke — something she anticipates doing more often.

“We collectively are seeing, more and more, the very real impacts of climate change, and no reason to think that is slowing down or going away,” King said. “I think that this is a new normal.”

From the midwest to the mid-Atlantic, more U.S. states are laboring to understand how and when smoke will make meeting federal health standards harder.

“The best advice a Boy Scout will give you is, ‘Don’t stand downwind of the campfire,’” said Frank Steitz, an assistant director at the New Jersey department of environmental protection.

“But what if you can’t? What if you can’t avoid it?”

An obscure part of the Clean Air Act grants regulators an opening to “forgive” air pollution from wildfires, meaning that it doesn’t count against air-quality goals. After wildfires flourished across North America this year, more U.S. states east of the Mississippi may use this exceptional events rule to subtract smoke from the record, if not from the air we breathe.

But these exceptional events are no longer exceptional, and the requests to obscure them from air-quality records are more common, according to an investigation from the Guardian, The California Newsroom and MuckRock. Without reform, the exceptional events rule is likely to become a regularly used tool, one that experts warn may divert resources or distract from addressing the growing problem of wildfire smoke.

Finding common ground to change U.S. clean air law is rare. But on wildfire smoke, academics, environmental advocates and some regulators agree: it’s time to reconsider our approach.

A cyclist rides under a blanket of haze partially obscuring the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 8, 2023.

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“We’re going to have to think bigger when it comes to solutions. We’re just getting there,” said Jodi Bechtel, the assistant director for the department of environment and sustainability in Clark County, Nevada. “I cringe at the idea of amending the Clean Air Act because that is such a heavy lift. But I think we’re at the point where the way it’s written and the expectations in it almost aren’t working anymore.”

This year, said Michael Benjamin, the air quality and planning chief at the California Air Resources Board (Carb), he and his western colleagues “felt really bad” for eastern cities affected by Canadian fires. “But part of us, especially when it was impacting Washington D.C., we said, well, good,” he remembered. “Now the policymakers really understand what it means to be exposed to wildfire smoke. And maybe they’ll start to think seriously about how to mitigate it.”

A growing problem

The Salt Fire burns in Shasta County, as seen from I-5 June 30, 2021. Photograph:

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Smoke from wildland fires is reversing a continent-wide, decades-long trend toward bluer skies, according to recent Stanford University studies.

A warming climate has helped to set the stage for wildfires to burn hotter and bigger. “Stopping them or making them less severe is going to be very hard and going to involve intervention on a scale that we’re just currently not prepared or able to do,” said the environmental scientist Marshall Burke, one of the leaders of Stanford’s work.

At the same time the likelihood of wildfires grows, the U.S. is considering making stricter goals for ground-level ozone and fine particulate, pointing to an avalanche of studies documenting health impacts. The Biden administration has delayed plans to take action on ozone until after next year’s election. On fine particulates, a contentious public rule-making is expected to yield a more strict standard any day now.

Yet in the face of growing risk, and in anticipation of tighter limits on these types of pollution, state and local governments have been clear: they will turn to exceptional events for relief more often, even if the process is arduous.

“Lowering the annual standard will require more exceptional event demonstrations, resulting in a significant increase in workload for the state of Arizona and Maricopa County, with no benefit to air quality or public health,” wrote that county’s department of air quality, commenting on the EPA’s proposed soot standard.

Dave Jefferis hands a flag he rescued from burning to his neighbor, Jim Marchio. Both stayed behind to defend their homes from the River Fire Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2021.

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“There’s going to be much more pressure on regulatory agencies to take advantage of exceptional events,” added Carb’s Benjamin. “Sometimes people don’t understand what attainment means, and under the Clean Air Act, it’s not necessarily that you’re breathing clean air, it’s that you’re meeting these requirements that are defined by the federal government.”

Meanwhile, public agencies and other air policy observers argue that the exceptional events rule effectively undermines one of the few tools states have to combat wildfires: beneficial or “prescribed” burns.

Originated by Native Americans, controlled application of fire to wildlands reduces the risk of catastrophic infernos by clearing underbrush, pine needle beds and other fuels that make forests prone to burning. Federal and state agencies say that increasing this “good fire” is a priority. The EPA modified exceptional events guidelines in 2016, in part to do just that. But not a single prescribed fire has been forgiven under the exceptional events rule since then.

A group of 86 western scientists, researchers and advocates say that local regulators are not permitting prescribed fires because they fear they could create too much smoke – the kind that warrants exceptional events. “The current statutory scheme is selecting for the very worst type of fire when it comes to public health,” they told the EPA.

Near the California-Oregon border, the Mid Klamath Watershed Council advocates for a healthy ecosystem, which the director, Will Harling, said includes the return of beneficial fire. Obstacles to such planned burns, coupled with forgiveness offered wildfires, he said, are why his children “have smoked the equivalent of about 20,000 packs of cigarettes while they’re in their teens."

“Just because they scrub that out of the record doesn’t mean that smoke isn’t in their lungs,” he said.

EPA spokesperson Khanya Brann, responding to our questions in writing, confirmed that exceptional events “could result in the removal of event-influenced data from the data set used to make certain regulatory decisions."

Brann wrote that local air regulators must meet requirements in the exceptional events process, such as taking “appropriate and reasonable actions to protect public health."

Pathways to reform

A prescribed fire in Hayfork, California, on April 10, 2019. Advocates for the practice of setting planned burns to manage lands and minimize wildfire risk say the exceptional events rule gets in the way.

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Across the political spectrum, experts, advocates and states say it’s time to change the exceptional events rule. They offer vastly different ideas about what that change should look like.

States and their advocates generally seek liberation from regulatory paperwork. Republican senators, led by Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, recently introduced legislation aimed in part at making filing for exceptional events easier.

Similarly, the Western Governors’ Association has argued for greater state flexibility, complaining both that “the rule is resource intensive, costly, and place[s] a significant burden on strained state resources,” and that regulators are slow to act on it. The nonpartisan association suggested to lawmakers that rules should permit more complicated multistate exceptions.

We can’t fix it, goes the reasoning, so why should we be punished for it?

The EPA, for its part, maintains it is following the law. “The Clean Air Act requires the agency to address emissions from natural events such as wildfires differently than emissions from industrial or mobile sources that EPA and Tribal, state and local air agency regulations can control,” Brann wrote.

Independent clean-air watchdogs emphasize instead that the mission of the Environmental Protection Agency is to protect public health.

People take the tramway to Roosevelt Island as smoke from Canadian wildfires casts a haze over the area on 7 June 2023 in New York City.

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That could mean stepping up enforcement, said Eric Schaeffer, the executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, a non-profit that advocates for transparency. Plenty of controls already on the books could work better, he said, including more frequent inspections and better monitoring systems for known polluters. “There’s always more that can be done,” he said.

Michigan attorney Nick Leonard, who represents fence-line communities where Canadian smoke has mingled with routine local pollution, called the exceptional events rule a “misapplication” of the Clean Air Act, and pointed out that local air regulators could simply stop using it. “It’s sort of creating this alternative reality,” he said.

Though the EPA strips exceptional events-related data from regulatory use, epidemiologists and health experts continue to analyze air quality using unmodified data, which remains available. In its annual State of the Air report, the American Lung Association has always included pollution exceedances that exceptional events would leave out, said Will Barrett, a clean-air expert for the group.

“Those are unhealthy air days,” Barrett said. “Ultimately, your lungs don’t care if the pollution is classified as an exceptional event under an obscure federal law.”

‘A warning light on the dashboard for the Clean Air Act’

Hazy New York City skyline during bad air quality on June 7, 2023 due to smoke of Canadian wildfires brought in by wind.

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For the summer of 2023, more than 20 states so far, from Wyoming to Wisconsin to North Carolina, have flagged air-quality readings that were far higher than normal. Most of these days came in June, as skies in the midwest and eastern U.S. were blanketed with Canadian wildfire smoke.

Wildfire smoke knows no borders. Unlike refineries, wildfires have no scrubbers. You can’t shut them down. But the Clean Air Act, whose pollution controls have saved millions of lives, affords the agency responsible for healthy air no direct authority to manage lands that burn.

Instead, the EPA’s response to this fast-growing source of soot, ash and toxic chemicals has been “ad hoc” and muddled by a lack of coordination with other agencies, according to a Congressional watchdog’s report earlier this year.

EPA spokesperson Brann wrote that the agency “supports efforts by agencies across the federal government — including the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of the Interior, as well as interagency forums such as the Wildland Fire Leadership Council — to implement and further develop strategies to reduce wildfire risk, and to help communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from wildfires.”

The growing use of the exceptional events rule reveals “a poorer and poorer fit between the policy we have and the problems it’s trying to solve,” said Stanford University’s Michael Wara.

He called the rule “a warning light on the dashboard for the Clean Air Act."

To heed it, say experts, it’s essential to adapt the law to the conditions under which we already breathe.

“If fires are going to become more widespread and more predictable, then that changes the calculus for air-quality determinations,” said Schaeffer of the Environmental Integrity Project. “You have to assume that’s part of your baseline now.”

The landmark law protecting air quality wasn’t created to deal with global heating. But the policies of the past are colliding with the problems of the future.

“The Clean Air Act should really include climate,” said Benjamin of Carb.

“States who have tried to keep these things separate — to keep climate change and exposure to local air pollution as two distinct things — I don’t think they’re going to be able to maintain that indefinitely,” he said.

A key assumption of air pollution policy, said Wara, has been that we are in control: “Climate change is kind of making a mockery of that.”

The obligation to protect people from polluted air remains, he added: “That’s really what the Clean Air Act is supposed to do, is keep people safe.”

While he was in college, Moiz Mir lived under an orange sky in Sacramento for weeks because of the Camp fire; some of that pollution was forgiven in nearby Nevada county as an exceptional event. His neighbors didn’t understand the risks of smoke then, or know where to get masks. He began to warn them, to educate himself, and to learn from other fire-prone communities how to cope.

Smoke, he said, “made a permanent and lasting impact” on his psyche and life path. Now 26 years old and a grassroots climate activist, he points out that “in crisis, people look to authority for answers."

They’re still looking, as the smoke thickens.

“We were thinking like the impacts of climate change were distant,” Mir said. “But now, it’s quite literally the air that I breathe.”

Manola Secaira of CapRadio contributed to this report

A new NASA space telescope launched Sunday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida that will help scientists probe the nature of dark matter, dark energy and other mysteries of the universe.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is about the size of a tour bus, lifted off at 4:26 a.m. PT on SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. The 18,000-pound spacecraft is now on a million-mile journey that will take it to its new home in space.

"What a glorious dawn launch," NASA's Jackie Townsend, Roman telescope project manager, said at a press briefing soon after liftoff. "The ride was magnificent. It put us right where we wanted to be."

More good news came shortly after launch as the telescope began deploying its solar panels and other instruments. "Ground controllers at NASA Goddard have been receiving telemetry data from Roman, and apparently all systems are nominal," said NASA administrator Jared Isaacman.

The journey to Roman's new home

Roman has an unusual origin story: Initially designed as a spy telescope for the National Reconnaissance Office, the spacecraft was donated to NASA instead. The new telescope is named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer who was known as the 'Mother of Hubble' for her championing of the iconic Hubble Space Telescope. Her namesake telescope will have the sharpness of Hubble but a field of view that is at least 100 times larger, allowing it to image huge swaths of the sky at once.

Before it can do that, the Roman Space Telescope will have to get to its new home in the sky about a million miles away. Roman will live at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point known as L2. There, the competing gravitational pulls of the Earth and the Sun help the telescope keep a steady orbit while using minimal fuel. The James Webb Space Telescope orbits at this point, which gives the spacecraft an unobstructed view of the sky.

"It takes us a good three-plus months to get out there, and we're spending that time checking everything out and doing a whole bunch of calibrations and making sure everything is working the way we know it can," said NASA's Jeremy Perkins, an integration and test scientist on the mission. "It's basically like our time to kick the tires and just make sure that the focus is right, the pointing is right."

Uncovering cosmic mysteries

Roman is on a kind of ghost hunt, searching for more evidence of dark matter — mysterious, invisible stuff whose gravitational influence appears to hold galaxies together and define the overarching structure of the cosmos. Roman will study how gravity subtly affects the path of light along great distances throughout a massive survey of the sky. By doing this, the telescope will help map both normal and dark matter, giving scientists a better understanding of just what this elusive substance might be.

Astronomers will also use Roman's observations to uncover dark energy, the strange force that is believed to drive the expansion of the universe. Scientists' understanding of dark energy comes from observations of a kind of exploding star known as a Type Ia supernova. These supernovas appear to shine at known and predictable brightness throughout the cosmos, giving them the nickname "standard candles." By cataloguing even more of these supernovas, scientists hope to develop a better understanding of how dark energy works, which could fundamentally change the way astronomers view the universe.

Roman will also search for planets outside our solar system. Since astronomers confirmed their existence in the 1990s, more than 6,000 exoplanets have been identified. With Roman, NASA expects to identify more than 100,000 of them by identifying dips in starlight caused by a planet passing in front of its own star. The telescope also hopes to find some 1,000 through microlensing — a technique that searches for tiny changes in background starlight caused by the gravity of a far-off planet.

"Why do we care so much about exoplanets? Because one of our main goals at NASA is answering the question: Are we alone in the universe?" Nicky Fox, NASA's associate administrator of the science mission directive, said at the Sunday morning briefing.

The spacecraft is poised to bring scientists a step closer to answering that question: It will demonstrate technology that can take a picture of a planet by selectively blocking out the light from its home star.

"We are going to make this giant leap forward with the coronagraph technology that is going to allow us to look at these distant worlds and start to really resolve the atmosphere around them to let us know if they could be habitable," she said.

A deluge of data

The telescope will beam back 1.4 terabytes of raw science data each day, using a refrigerator-sized high-gain antenna. The data will be available immediately to scientists and the public.

"Roman's database at the end of its prime mission after five years is going to be bigger than your standard music streaming platform," Perkins said.

Because of the massive amounts of data, NASA is making it available to anyone through a cloud-based system called Roman Nexus. For Perkins, that's what makes this mission unique — anyone can look at the raw data and find new discoveries.

"It's all the things that we are not expecting to see," he said. "It's all these one-in-a-million things that we're going to be able to see with Roman that really excites me."
Copyright 2026 NPR

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday backed off his proposal to reduce costs for electrical utilities after their equipment sparks wildfires, agreeing instead to a narrower deal after homeowners, insurers and fire survivors argued his original plan would have shifted those costs onto them.

Instead, Newsom and Senate and Assembly leaders agreed on a narrower package of wildfire policies, including prohibiting private equity groups from investing in wildfire claims and denying utility CEO bonuses in the years their companies cause fatal fires.

The deal is a victory for lawmakers who refused to reduce damages to victims and shift costs away from utilities. Opponents included insurance companies, consumer advocates and survivors of the January 2025 Eaton Fire caused by Southern California Edison equipment that killed 19 people in Altadena.

Under the agreement announced Saturday, the state would create a “fast-pay” program for survivors’ property loss, pain and suffering in the wake of a utility-caused fire. It would include deadlines for determining which claims are valid within 60 days of receipt, and settlement offers within 30 days after that, but survivors could still pursue the long process of suing utilities if they choose.

The state also commits to improving its local wildfire mitigation efforts and sharing more data on insurance coverage in areas with fire risk.

The final agreement, which lawmakers will vote on in Senate Bill 492, caps a contentious series of closed-door negotiations between Newsom’s office and legislative leaders on how much utility companies should pay after fires.

Newsom wanted utilities to have to pay less to insurance companies, some wildfire survivors, local governments and corporations claiming damages after a fire. His administration is concerned the mounting costs threaten investor confidence in the state’s three major for-profit utilities: Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric. He said that could lead to higher borrowing costs for the companies and higher electricity bills for Californians.

Newsom also argued his plan would prioritize paying survivors who lose their homes. In past fires, investors have funded lawsuits or claims have been sold to hedge funds, increasing the number of third parties seeking to profit from wildfire payouts, Newsom’s office has said.

SB 492 does not include most of the proposals Newsom wanted and does not substantially change how much utilities must pay after fires they cause. California’s $18 billion wildfire fund that utilities draw from to pay fire damages — and which would fund claims in the fast-pay program — is funded 50-50 by utility customers and shareholders. Proponents of Newsom’s proposals remain concerned that another catastrophic fire could drain that money, leaving utilities facing a mountain of costs and another round of potential bankruptcies.

Nine of the state’s 20 most destructive wildfires were caused by electrical equipment or power lines.

“This system needs full structural reform — not a partial one,” Newsom said in a statement Saturday morning. “I urge the Legislature to build on this progress next year and finish the work we started to secure the Wildfire Fund’s long-term durability, stabilize electricity rates, and ensure fire victims are never again turned into unsecured creditors in a bankruptcy proceeding.”

Negotiations may resume next year

Sen. Josh Becker, a Menlo Park Democrat who was closely involved in the negotiations, acknowledged that lawmakers would likely have to return to the issue of utility liabilities under a future governor.

“What I heard very clearly, certainly from senators, from the Assembly and even from all the stakeholders was that they’re willing to do that,” he said. “They’re willing to start getting around the table and looking at some of those structural issues. But that takes time. We ran out of time in this session.”

“We certainly stood with fire survivors,” said Sen. Ben Allen, a Democrat who represents Palisades Fire survivors. “Challenges with affordability of electricity (remain). That’s not going away.”

The utilities agreed and said there needs to be a long-term solution.

“While we appreciate the efforts made, we are disappointed that the state couldn’t develop comprehensive wildfire reform,” said Southern California Edison spokesperson David Eisenhauer.

San Diego Gas & Electric would not comment and referred questions to Wildfire Victims First, the utility-backed campaign whose priorities aligned with the governor’s wish list.

Campaign spokesperson Nathan Click said the state still needs to make urgent structural reforms “to ensure a fair recovery system.”

PG&E spokesperson Lynsey Paulo said the company is reviewing the bill and is “focused on helping wildfire survivors recover faster, making communities safer, and protecting customer utility bills.” Company stocks tumbled Friday after reports of a potential agreement that did not include any utility cost-shifts.

Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón, the Santa Barbara Democrat whose caucus opposed Newsom’s cost-shifting proposals, said in a statement the agreement “supports survivors in their recovery, curbs Wall Street practices that increase costs on consumers, and mitigates the destruction of these wildfires in the first place.”

Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, an Irvine Democrat who led negotiations for the Assembly, in a statement called the deal “an important step forward.”

“We held the line to protect the people who needed it most,” she said.

The biggest sticking point was the governor’s insistence on eliminating subrogation, which allows insurance companies to sue utilities to recoup their costs for wildfire claims. Lawmakers were staunchly opposed to eliminating that avenue out of concern that it would disrupt the state’s fragile insurance market, raise premiums and cause insurers to flee the state, and they rejected it.

“This outcome keeps costs with the parties responsible for wildfires and helps protect the progress California is making in stabilizing its insurance market,” said Denni Ritter, a vice president at the American Property Casualty Insurance Association.

While the deal is a win for the insurance industry, a senator who represents Eaton Fire survivors said it’s important to also hold insurers accountable.

“We know that in many cases, insurance companies delayed and denied fire survivors’ claims and payments, delaying recovery,” said Democratic Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez. “We need all industries to come to the table in a real way.”

State lawmakers also resisted the governor’s effort to limit survivors’ non-economic damages, an important victory for the Eaton Fire survivors who relentlessly campaigned against the proposal.

Fire survivors and consumer advocates credited the Senate, especially Limón, for pushing back on Newsom.

“In the face of extraordinary pressure from some of the most powerful interests in our state, they centered survivors and California families,” said Joy Chen, executive director of Every Fire Survivor’s Network.

Advocacy group Consumer Watchdog, which worked in concert with fire survivors, called the negotiations “an exercise in the democratic process.”

“(The Legislature) told (Newsom) they wouldn’t bend in closed-door negotiations,” said Jamie Court, president of the group.

Pérez commended survivors for pressuring lawmakers over the past couple of weeks.

“The fire survivors have shaped this entire conversation,” Pérez said. “They made a tremendous impact.”

For many millennials, '90s Nickelodeon shows such as Hey Arnold!, Doug, and Rocko’s Modern Life represent a golden age of animation, with theme songs and music scores often just as weird and offbeat as the characters and storylines.

Take the theme song of Hey Arnold! — an earworm that introduced a generation of young TV viewers to acid jazz, funk, hip-hop and more, even if they didn’t realize it at the time.

Hey Arnold! composer Jim Lang is taking the show's music on tour, with a few stops in SoCal.

LAist’s Robert Garrova caught up with Lang to talk about the show’s endearing music legacy.

On whether he and the other musicians on the show set out to introduce young people to new musical genres

Lang:  I wish I could take credit for being that intentional about it. But we weren't really hoping to introduce anybody to jazz. That was just a wonderful kinda side benefit of the way the show played out.

Was the music too good for a kids' show? Take for instance the theme music for the fan-favorite Pigeon Man episode

Lang:  I don't think there's any such thing as music that's too good for a kids' show. I think children have the hugest imagination for absorbing things that they've never seen before, for being delighted by the unusual.

Those things [music scores] all work because the writers and the animators and the background artists and everybody did such an incredible job before it ever showed up at my studio. That's it. You just kind of shut up and get out of the way and let the image kind of play through you in a way.

On what it felt like being at Nickelodeon in the '90s when the bosses were saying, 'Hey, yeah, let's do some acid jazz on a kids show'

Lang: Well, the women that started Nickelodeon and that ran that company in that era were a really unusual breed, and they were super adventurous. They didn't discourage, you know, people doing crazy stuff.

On what fans' reactions are at the live shows

Lang: Oh, it's just such a love fest. It is nostalgic. The music is meaningful to them because the show, after five seasons, there was a sound to it, and people found it relatable. So getting to hear a band actually play that stuff live, it sounds familiar to the audience in a way that I think people were just thrilled by.

Before the 1980s, tribal leaders of the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation were struggling to care for their people. That’s when, like many tribes, they decided to open a bingo hall on their reservation in San Bernardino County.

The enterprise eventually became the powerhouse Yaamava’ Resort & Casino, a place famous across the Southland for its snappy “you in?” slogan and roster of concert billboards, featuring the likes of Pitbull, Stevie Nicks and the Jonas Brothers.

The tribe is celebrating 40 years of gaming. But in between the high-limit gaming rooms, intimate performances and the  biggest gaming floor in the West — with over 7,500 slot machines — you’ll find a story of self-determination in the face of California bureaucracy.

A brief history

The Yuhaaviatam’s homeland is the San Bernardino mountains, valleys and high deserts. They were previously known as the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, but recently reclaimed their ancestral name, Yuhaaviatam (yu-HAH-vee-ah-tahm), which means “people of the pines.” According to the tribe, the community was forced to leave after decades of violence, colonization and displacement.

One big change came in the mid 1800s when a San Bernardino militia killed Native people. The Yuhaaviatam’s leader at the time, Paakuma, who was known outside the tribe by his Spanish name of Santos Manuel, led the couple dozen remaining members out of the mountains.

The tribe moved around the region, but the federal government eventually placed them on the San Manuel Reservation in 1891. Johnny Hernandez Jr., the Yuhaaviatam’s vice chairman, told LAist it was a time of hardship.

“ We were put up against the hillside there with non-fertile land and really in an area where people probably didn’t think that we were going to survive,” he said.

The Yuhaaviatam had to rebuild largely on their own. The tribe got by financially with apricot orchards and other small ventures. When members needed money, they’d sell some of their livestock or hold bake sales. Hernandez said it wasn’t enough to fund what people needed.

The bingo hall origin

The entrance of San Manuel Bingo.

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By the ‘80s, other tribes across the United States were in a similar predicament. Looking for ways to generate other forms of revenue, some turned to bingo halls, often outside the jurisdiction of states’ gambling regulations, as their economic springboard.

Under the leadership of tribal chairman Henry Duro, the Yuhaaviatam proposed opening a high-stakes bingo hall. According to newspaper reports, they faced immediate opposition.

Local officials feared the operation would disrupt nearby neighborhoods and foster illicit activity. One critic was San Bernardino City Councilmember Steve Marks, who reportedly instructed city officials to find “every legal way possible to stop the project.”

“ I think from the community, there was a lot of concern about having gaming in their backyard,” Hernandez said, who’s Duro’s nephew. “Everybody understands that gaming can lead to issues with not only the person, but the families …  so we really take that responsibility seriously.”

City leaders tried to push the bingo hall off the reservation and even tried to delay construction in court. The Yuhaaviatam had talks with San Bernardino to find a solution, but according to reports in October 1985, that effort broke down.

San Manuel Bingo could hold 2,500 players at a time.

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A view of San Manuel Bingo in its heyday.

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Ultimately, the Yuhaaviatam moved forward with building San Manuel Indian Bingo on the reservation, which opened on July 24, 1986. It was a hit. They had sold out nights.  People even climbed over the back walls to play.

“A funny story that my chairwoman Lynn always tells is that those ones that really were against [the bingo hall] and had the biggest concerns were the first ones in line to go into the bingo and to game,” Hernandez said.

He grew up next door to the bingo hall and would sit outside to watch the stream of people go in and out. He said the building looked like a box compared to the casino they have now. But inside, hundreds of hopeful bingo winners packed rows upon rows of tables.

“ They would have costume contests and everything, and it was real lively,” Hernandez said. “I remember a lot of people were excited to be there.”

When the bingo hall opened in 1986, it soon became popular.

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Courtesy the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation

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Employees at the bingo hall.

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As controversial as the bingo hall was to some, it was also a source of employment for San Bernardino. Kenneth Shoji, the tribe’s spokesperson, told LAist how when the hall opened, much of the area around was in an economic downtown.

“ The air base had closed. Kaiser Steel was closing. Santa Fe [Depot] had down-scaled significantly,” Shoji said. “Many people who came to work here were coming from those industries.  In fact, many tribal elders … also came from those businesses.”

The rise of tribal gaming

San Manuel Indian Bingo opened the door to financial stability, but tribal gaming enterprises still faced trouble in California. State and local leaders wanted to shut them down.

One fight ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court.  Two Native reservations, Cabazon and Morongo, ran bingo and card games in Riverside County, which began a few years before the Yuhaaviatam’s enterprise. Officials argued the state had the right to ban tribal gaming to discourage gambling.

The Supreme Court ended up siding with the tribes in part because California already permitted multiple forms of gaming, like horse racing, card games and a state-sponsored lottery.

The ruling led to the creation of the  Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, a landmark piece of legislation that Congress signed into law in 1988. It paved the way for tribal nations to run more profitable forms of gaming, like craps and slot machines.

Casino games at Yaamava’ Resort & Casino.

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The act established regulations that split gaming into three classes and created a system where tribes would have to make agreements with states before offering the highest level.

Randall Akee, a professor of economic development in Indigenous communities at Harvard University, told LAist it took awhile for California to get on board.

“Tribal gaming really as an industry, larger scale in California, took off in the post-2000 era,” he said.

That came with the passage of Prop. 1A and Prop. 5, which permitted compacts for Class III gaming on tribal lands in California. The deals have been moneymakers. According to the National Indian Gaming Commission, California and northern Nevada (which are calculated together) lead the nation in gross gaming revenue, bringing in $12.6 billion in fiscal year 2025.

Akee said the Yuhaaviatam people have created a large gaming footprint in California despite their small population and geographical size. Overall, the tribe is one of San Bernardino County’s top employers with nearly 8,000 employees, according to Shoji.

A miniaturized version of Yaamava's tower.

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A display celebrating 40 years of the Yuhaaviatam's gaming enterprise.

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They’ve also expanded their gaming enterprise into new, larger buildings. When San Manuel Casino (as the bingo hall was later named) opened in 2021, it was rebranded to Yaamava’ Resort & Casino. The $760 million expansion, with a 17-story hotel tower and 432 rooms and suites, brought their footprint to over 700,000 square feet. A parking structure now stands in place of the former bingo hall.

Hernandez said tribal gaming has helped his community thrive. They use the revenue to pay for critical resources, like supplying medical care to elders, hiring teachers for schools and buying generators to curb power outages. The tribe has also donated over $450 million to local communities.

“  I think the thing that people always forget or don’t understand is that every time we buy a piece of land, we’re just going to throw a casino there,” Hernandez said. “First and foremost, we’re a tribe. We have the needs for our people, and [want to] protect our cultural resources.”

The Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation is a financial supporter of LAist. Like other funders, the tribe has no influence on our coverage.