Topline:
First pushed through by the Republican senator and climate denier Jim Inhofe, the "exceptional events" rule has become a "regulatory escape hatch" for states that want to meet federal air-quality standards.
Why it matters: The increasing use of the rule for wildfires, experts say, not only obscures health risks to people across the U.S., but undermines the goals of the landmark Clean Air Act.
Read more ... for an in-depth explanation of the rule.
When smoke from the Camp Fire poured down over northern California in 2018, schools across the region closed to protect kids from breathing dangerous air. When wildfires blanketed the Willamette valley with soot and ash in 2020, hundreds of Oregonians sought urgent care for shortness of breath, headaches and asthma. When Canadian wildfire smoke made its way to Michigan last year, ozone levels in Detroit spiked to levels that caused officials to warn residents sensitive to air pollution to take extra care.
Full series:
In LA
Coming this week:
Credits
"Smoke, Screened: The Clean Air Act’s Dirty Secret" is a collaboration of The California Newsroom, MuckRock and the Guardian. Molly Peterson is a reporter for The California Newsroom. Dillon Bergin is a data reporter for MuckRock. Emily Zentner is a data reporter for The California Newsroom. Andrew Witherspoon is a data reporter for the Guardian.
LAist is a member of The California Newsroom.
In each of those cases, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the federal agency that oversees air quality, allowed local air regulators to strike the pollution caused by these events from air-quality records, using a mostly overlooked legal tool called the exceptional events rule, which allows pollution caused by “uncontrollable” events to be forgiven.
A new investigation from The California Newsroom, MuckRock and the Guardian found that local regulators are turning to the exceptional events rule for wildfires more and more often to reach air-quality goals — goals that are harder to meet as the climate crisis gets worse.
The review of thousands of documents, which include regulatory filings, emails and scientific analyses, also found several examples of industry groups working hand in hand with local regulators to get these exemptions.
The increasing use of the rule for wildfires, experts say, not only obscures health risks to people across the U.S., but undermines the goals of the landmark Clean Air Act.
Nick Leonard, who directs the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center in Detroit, Michigan, sees the problem in fairly simple terms: the growing threat of wildfire smoke is exacerbated by climate change. Climate change has been fueled by the oil and gas industry. Their lobbyists, in turn, have pushed states to use the exceptional events rule as much as possible, slowing progress to address air pollution at the local level.
“EPA’s had a stake in this problem for a long time. States have had a stake in this problem for a long time. Private companies have had a stake in this problem for a long time,” Leonard said. “And now when that problem is coming home to roost, they’re saying, well, who could have seen this coming?”
The driving force behind the exceptional events rule was Jim Inhofe, the former Republican senator from Oklahoma who, for decades, called climate change a hoax.
In the spring of 1998, air-quality managers in his home state found themselves in a tough spot. A wildfire on Mexico’s drought-stricken Yucatán peninsula had sent acrid smoke north, and around that time Oklahoma City exceeded its pollution limits. If the soot and ozone stayed on the books, they’d have to tighten controls on known local polluters. Instead, they argued to the EPA that the pollution shouldn’t count because it came from a wildfire, and so was “natural” and “uncontrollable”.
The EPA turned air-quality managers down, to Inhofe’s frustration.
He held several hearings and meetings, grilling the EPA. He thought local regulators should have more discretion to ignore pollution — including the kinds that are hard to control.
Until then, no formal rule in the Clean Air Act allowed that. The EPA did have a policy, infrequently used in the 1980s and 1990s, that allowed local governments to write off some wildfire smoke on a case-by-case-basis as “unrealistic to control” or “impractical to fully control." That wasn’t enough for the pro-business senator.
Inhofe’s years-long crusade succeeded. Once added to the Clean Air Act, the “exceptional events” rule enabled regulators to erase pollution — not from the sky, but from records used to make regulatory decisions. Since 2007, local officials have been able to request that pollution data be excluded from clean air determinations when it comes from an array of events, from volcanoes to fireworks to “unusual traffic circumstances” and the fastest-growing event of all: wildfires.
“The purpose of the amendment was deregulatory, to be sure,” said John Walke, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization.
The exceptional events rule functions as a regulatory escape hatch. When soot and ozone drift in from “natural” sources like wildfires, regulators can ask the EPA for an exception. If the federal agency grants it, that air pollution is erased from the regulatory record and disregarded in regulatory decisions.
Local air officials often spend months, using publicly funded atmospheric modeling and meteorological data, to create hundreds of pages documenting why pollution exceedances shouldn’t count – sometimes with the help of industry-funded consultants.
Because justifying an exceptional event is complicated and expensive, guidance from the EPA directs regulators to apply the rule only when it has regulatory significance, including meeting federal air standards — or, in regulator speak, achieving “attainment."
Attainment communicates to the public that the air meets conditions regulators have deemed healthy. It helps people decide where to live and work. The meeting of standards loosens both federal funding for transportation and pollution controls for factories.
No other rule works like exceptional events to discount recorded pollution from consideration by regulators. We requested hard-to-find EPA data about exceptional events. We reviewed thousands of pages of written material, including correspondence, materials related to contracting, and what are called “demonstrations” of these events – basically, descriptions of toxic events regulators don’t want to be responsible for.
Our analysis shows that:
The use of the exceptional events rule means U.S. air-quality data doesn’t reflect how safe it is to breathe, said Vijay Limaye, a climate and health scientist at the NRDC.
“Our regulatory picture is really not keeping up with the true toll, the true health burden posed by air pollution and wildfire smoke,” he said. “And we really need to be taking into consideration the truth on the ground in terms of what exposures look like and what that means for public health across the country.”
We’re just pretending like it’s just not happening.
The rule in practice lets regional regulators meet air-quality goals without having to put additional demands on polluters.
“We’re just pretending like it’s just not happening,” said Sanjay Narayan, the managing attorney for the Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program. “The pollution is not in the air from sort of a regulatory perspective, which is the way in which things become invisible. All of this is invisible unless you trawl through all of these reports.”
In response to questions, a spokesperson for the EPA, Khanya Brann, said the agency “takes our decisions related to exceptional events seriously. We recognize that even when pollution (such as wildfire smoke) is not something that an air agency can control, people still are breathing the polluted air.”
The EPA said it requires mitigation plans where exceptional events recur. Those plans include efforts to educate and notify the public about the pollution risk, as well as to take “steps to identify, study, and implement mitigating measures."
Soot, ash and other particulate matter drive health risks that are significant to pregnant people, children, outdoor workers, residents of leaky buildings and anyone with heart or lung ailments. Ozone produced by wildfire pollution carries an invisible threat, irritating and inflaming lungs; even short-term exposure above certain levels raises the risk of premature death. The federal Office of Management and Budget estimatesthat in an increasingly extreme climate, wildfire smoke exposure could increase federal healthcare expenditures by $128 million to $226 million each year by the end of the century.
“We need to focus on solutions for wildfire smoke, because about 30% to 50% of our wildfires are directly attributed to climate change and increasing temperatures around the globe,” said Kari Nadeau, an immunologist who directs the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. “No one is immune to this. Everyone can be affected.”
Climate change has already created the conditions for more frequent and significant wildfires this year, from Maui to Quebec.
Scientists and activists worry that the exceptional events rule can be exploited to avoid the costly efforts needed to address this growing crisis.
When the Clean Air Act was passed by a nearly unanimous Congress and signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1970, it focused on pollution from soot-spewing smokestacks and freeways full of cars with tailpipes.
The soot from Canadian fires that choked skies from Chicago to Washington earlier this year was a sickly brown telltale for some of the same key pollutants the Clean Air Act aimed to fight.
The EPA has proposed lowering the standard for fine particulates. Soon, ozone standards could be tightened, too, a consensus recommendation of the agency’s top scientific advisers.
Lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry have told the EPA the exceptional events rule will be a key part of meeting ozone standards. States themselves say any moves to tighten particulate or ozone limits will be met with a greater reliance on the exceptional events rule.
“This is a big problem,” said Leonard of the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center. “And you’re not only actively ignoring it, you’re actively trying to get out of doing something about it.”
Topline:
Incumbent Karen Bass and challenger Nithya Raman laid out competing plans for fixing L.A.'s homelessness crisis at separate mayoral candidate forums this week ahead of the Nov. 3 election.
Why it matters: More than 29,000 people sleep outside in the city, a nearly 8% jump from last year. The two candidates are both promising to solve L.A.'s homelessness crisis, but they have slightly different approaches. Voters decide between the two on Nov. 3.
Breaking from LAHSA: Both candidates now support the city eventually leaving LAHSA, the joint city-county homelessness authority. Bass wants to move now, proposing an independent system within about two years. "The county filed for divorce. Now we file, too," Bass said.
The Inside Safe fight: Bass's signature program, which moves people from encampments into motels, is the sharpest divide. Raman calls it too costly — and wants cheaper rental subsidies instead.
More than 29,000 people sleep outside in L.A., according to official estimates — a nearly 8% increase over last year.
Two candidates for mayor are promising to change that, but they have different ideas about how.
Incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman appeared separately at homelessness forums hosted this week by Hope The Mission, a large homeless shelter operator.
The events were held amid a national spotlight on L.A.’s homelessness crisis.
This week, a congressional subcommittee held a hearing on allegations of fraud and mismanagement of homelessness funds — a hearing in which Bass declined to appear. The next day, federal authorities announced charges against three employees at L.A. homelessness nonprofits in a widening federal investigation of homeless services fraud.
Bass cited L.A.’s homelessness crisis as the reason she sought the city’s top job in 2022.
“I ran because I am always compelled to go toward a crisis,” she said Thursday.
She has made clearing homeless encampments and moving people indoors a top priority as mayor, but fell far short of her pledge to end street homelessness by 2026.
Raman has said founding a local homelessness nonprofit inspired her 2020 L.A. City Council run. For years, Raman was chair of the council committee focused on city homelessness policy.
Both candidates have played major roles in shaping L.A.’s homelessness response in recent years, and they told forum moderators this week that the city’s approach has been dysfunctional.
L.A.’s next mayor will face a barrage of challenges related to homelessness.
Here’s how the candidates said they would handle some of the big ones:
The Trump administration has been cracking down on the L.A. region’s administration of homeless services to root out potential financial mismanagement, but also to challenge the local policy approach to homelessness and impose policies it prefers.
Federal officials argue that approaches known as “housing first” and “harm reduction” are failing. They favor treatment and enforcement instead.
Bass, a Democrat, skipped a House subcommittee hearing on federal homelessness spending Tuesday, dismissing it as politically motivated.
“ I'm the mayor of the second-largest city in the country, and I don't have time for foolishness,” Bass said Thursday. “And remember, I know these people. It's a dog and pony show to see who's gonna get on Fox that night. I was not going to subject myself to that, and I was not going to subject our city to that.”
Bass said her office is cooperating fully by supplying thousands of pages of documents.
Raman said L.A. should be using the courts much more aggressively to challenge federal overreach and protect funding.
“ We've done that less than I would've liked here in Los Angeles, but other cities have done that and actually kept their federal dollars in place despite the best efforts of the Trump administration.”
She said the city also has to make sure that funding is spent effectively, arguing L.A. currently has no single person tracking every dollar coming in from the federal government, state government and other sources.
“That is wrong,” Raman said at a forum on Wednesday. “If I am mayor — when I am mayor — I will ensure that every single dollar that is being given to us is being used to get as many people indoors into safety and to keep them there as effectively as possible.”
Both candidates have said they support the city eventually breaking away from LAHSA, the joint city-county homelessness authority.
"The county filed for divorce. Now we file, too," Bass said on Thursday.
Last year, L.A. County officials voted to remove more than $300 million in annual homelessness funding from LAHSA’s control and to manage those funds itself with a new county department. Bass is now proposing the city create its own, independent “continuum of care,” a process she said could take “a couple of years.”
Bass, who appointed herself to serve on LAHSA’s governing board before stepping down this month, said she’s learned in recent years “how profoundly dysfunctional” the regional homeless services system is.
She argued that because L.A. represents 40% of the county's population and is the epicenter of the crisis, the city must have more control over the system.
“You might remember that expression I started with: locked arms,” Bass said. “And we locked arms as long as we could.”
Raman, in her mayoral platform, also called for the city to prepare to move hundreds of millions of dollars in homelessness contracts away from LAHSA, which she described as "plagued with scandal." But she said the city has to build the capacity to take on the job first.
At Thursday's forum, Raman didn't mention LAHSA by name, instead describing coordination failures between agencies — citing permanent supportive housing units that sat empty for more than a year because departments weren't talking to each other.
As chair of the council's Homelessness Committee, Raman said she created the city's Bureau of Homelessness Oversight to track spending and outcomes, but accused Bass of failing to staff it promptly.
“The mayor did not hire people to staff up that oversight body quickly enough,” Raman said.
LAHSA has served as the lead agency managing homelessness services for the region since 1993, including conducting a yearly homeless count, preparing regional applications for federal funds and managing key databases.
This week, the agency announced it would soon forfeit those roles and allow other agencies or organizations to apply for them instead — including other county or city of L.A. agencies.
The candidates are also somewhat split on their approach to homelessness encampments. Bass has criticized Raman for voting several times since 2022 against expanding the city’s anti-camping ordinance, which restricts camping in certain public spaces including schools and day cares.
Raman has defended her votes. She argued the law, at best, “would have moved an encampment from one block to the next block.”
“To me, that is not good enough," Raman said. "My imagination for how we address homelessness in L.A. goes beyond just thinking about which block an encampment should be on. It is about how we actually get encampments indoors."
Asked about enforcement approaches, Bass pointed to physical barriers — like cement planters that replaced a major encampment on San Vicente Boulevard — as a more effective deterrent than ticketing or arrests.
“ So sometimes using physical barriers work, but what we have not done is just gone in and arrested homeless people,” Bass said. “That has never happened.”
The sharpest divide between the candidates centers on Bass’ signature program, Inside Safe, which moves people from encampments into motels and interim housing.
Raman said she agreed with the underlying concept — going out to encampments and offering shelter — but that the program is too costly and hasn't evolved since Bass launched it in 2022.
“Her program has not changed or learned or adapted from the lessons that they should have had in place, and to me, that is a major, major issue,” Raman said.
Raman put the cost at roughly $100,000 per person, per year — "not a fiscally sustainable approach to a crisis that is growing in our city," she said — and favors time-limited subsidies, short-term rental vouchers that cost a third as much.
Bass called that framing "fundamentally dishonest," arguing the county reimburses the city for some of the up-front cost.
Bass said she wants to bring costs down by building permanent structures on public land instead of renting motel rooms.
She said she favors moving groups of unhoused people together and bringing services to them, which she said is harder to do with the housing vouchers Raman wants to rely on.
"I would house 30 people at a time, not one by one,” Bass said. "I see it from a people's point of view. She sees it from a numbers point of view. Both are needed."
The general election is Nov. 3.
Topline:
Chef-owner Zach Scherer's Darkroom sits in an unmarked business park on the Costa Mesa/Santa Ana border — a deliberate choice that's turned the restaurant into a word-of-mouth destination rather than a drive-by discovery.
Tell me more: The menu changes constantly, tracking real-time seasonal shifts — this visit caught the tail end of summer's Jimmy Nardello peppers giving way to fall's first honeynut squash. Scherer runs the kitchen with longtime partner Drew Adams, and the two also operate Chrysalis, a tasting-menu concept sharing the same space some nights.
Why is it important? Most diners expect flashy fine dining to come with flashy real estate. Scherer, aiming to make Orange County "nationally competitive" with cities like San Francisco and Chicago, is proving serious technique doesn't need a serious address — or a serious attitude.
Step into the darkness: Scherer's next concept, Three Eyed Tiger, is currently in development nearby.
Just off the 405 freeway at the border of Costa Mesa and Santa Ana, a block down from IKEA and a couple of business parks over, you'll find Darkroom.
It's the kind of address where you'd expect to find a dentist's office or a logistics company — instead, it's home to some of the most inventive food in Orange County, and arguably beyond, anchored by a formidable wine program featuring small producers.
The location is a deliberate choice by Zach Scherer, Darkroom’s chef-owner, that has turned the restaurant into a growing word-of-mouth destination. For Scherer, hiding in plain sight was never a compromise. It was the plan.
The interior of the restaurant is a completely different story. Its decor matches that of an angsty teenager who shops at Hot Topic, with an affinity for industrial and goth music, and a bit of new wave mixed in.
Your eyes might take a minute to adjust to the low light before a friendly server wearing a tattered band T-shirt greets you and escorts you to your table.
Scherer wears his nonconformist attitude with pride — and intention. "If you're a little too serious, Orange County won't love it," he said, and it shows: the room is built to feel like the opposite of a hushed tasting menu.
Scherer runs the kitchen with longtime partner Drew Adams — a lifelong Orange County resident — who also oversees the pastry program. The two think of Darkroom's identity "like a band," Scherer said: a shared core sound, no matter who's guesting on a given dish. (Their tasting-menu concept, Chrysalis, runs out of the same kitchen some nights — a five-course tasting menu happening in parallel.)
Start off with the Scotch olives, fried Castelvetrano olives with anchovy and lamb merguez, served over spiced sumac yogurt. Meanwhile, a couple of slices of their zucchini bread with koji butter, topped with silky jamón serrano, provide some comforting bites.
From there, seasonal produce takes center stage, with grilled, marinated Jimmy Nardello peppers served with fennel-pollen labneh and sprinkled with walnut dukkah, hitting equal notes of sweet, spicy, nutty, and fresh. Followed by honeynut squash from Weiser Farms — poached in a light broth known as nage, made with bits of country ham and horseradish, topped with rainbow chard, a dish that reads Southern-meets-European.
Cap things off with The Darkroom burger, cut in half, made with dry-aged beef, molten Comté cheese, and gooey caramelized onions, served between soft, glossy brioche-style buns, swimming in a light au poivre bath. It's a dish that, like the others, exhibits strong technique but still wears its fun on its sleeve — all the makings of a truly memorable meal.
Scherer's goal is to make the Orange County food scene nationally competitive with San Francisco, New York, and Chicago — and the seasonal fluency on display that night, from summer's last Jimmy Nardellos to fall's first honeynut squash, is the technical proof behind that claim.
The menu's dynamic approach — its ability to oscillate between cuisines — reflects that same nonconformist identity, reinforcing the idea that the food doesn't take itself too seriously, just like the space around it.
Scherer's ambitions don't stop at Darkroom's walls; he's also developing Three Eyed Tiger, a cocktail-forward concept nearby.
"The food we're making now is the food that I'm the most proud of, because it really shows our identity," said Scherer.
Topline:
The driver connected to the tragic bus crash in Chatsworth on Tuesday night is facing two second-degree murder charges, as well as charges for driving under the influence and reckless driving. Bailee Lynn Rios is expected to be arraigned Friday, according to L.A. District Attorney Nathan Hochman.
What possible punishment is she facing? Hochman announced Thursday that his office was seeking the maximum sentence of life in prison for the 36-year-old driver.
What else is there? Drugs were found in her system at the time of the crash, Hochman said. His office did not share what kind of drugs.
Adding to the tragedy, an NBC4 helicopter covering the incident also crashed nearby, killing pilot George Marciniw and reporter Eliana Moreno, as well as a pedestrian, Edy Gutierrez Mejia.
Rios, who is in custody, could not be immediately reached for comment.
Background: Rios sped through a red light and plowed her SUV into a Metro bus, killing two passengers, Daniel Castillo and Gage Weida. Five other passengers were injured, according to prosecutors.
Topline:
A San Bernardino County Superior Court judge on Tuesday rejected Chino Valley Unified School District’s request to dissolve an injunction blocking its policy requiring employees to notify parents when students identify as transgender or use different names or pronouns at school.
More details: Judge Michael Sachs upheld his 2024 injunction blocking Chino Valley Unified from enforcing a policy the school board adopted in 2023. The policy required district employees to notify parents within three days if their student asked to go by a name or pronoun different from official school records or join a sex-segregated program, such as athletics, that did not correspond to those records.
Why now: The school district had asked Sachs to overturn a permanent injunction after the U.S. Supreme Court issued an emergency docket ruling in a separate case, Mirabelli v. Bonta. The district argued that the ruling affirmed parents’ constitutional right to be informed about information critical to their children’s health and well-being.
A San Bernardino County Superior Court judge on Tuesday rejected Chino Valley Unified School District’s request to dissolve an injunction blocking its policy requiring employees to notify parents when students identify as transgender or use different names or pronouns at school.
Judge Michael Sachs upheld his 2024 injunction blocking Chino Valley Unified from enforcing a policy the school board adopted in 2023. The policy required district employees to notify parents within three days if their student asked to go by a name or pronoun different from official school records or join a sex-segregated program, such as athletics, that did not correspond to those records.
The school district had asked Sachs to overturn a permanent injunction after the U.S. Supreme Court issued an emergency docket ruling in a separate case, Mirabelli v. Bonta. The district argued that the ruling affirmed parents’ constitutional right to be informed about information critical to their children’s health and well-being.
Sachs rejected the request, saying his injunction does not conflict with the Supreme Court’s ruling. During Tuesday’s hearing, he distinguished between the two cases, saying the school policy at issue in the Mirabelli case required school employees to withhold information from parents when asked.
“The school’s policy essentially mandated that staff lie to the parent about their child, and the court did not accept that,” Sachs said of Mirabelli v. Bonta.
The Chino case involves a different question: whether school employees can be required to disclose a child’s gender identity to their parents.
“There is no mandatory duty for the school district to voluntarily release information about the student,” Sachs said in court.
Chino Valley Unified was disappointed by the ruling, said Emily Rae, the district’s attorney and president of the California Justice Center, a conservative legal nonprofit focused on protecting individual liberty.
“The main problem is that it puts the burden on parents to know whether they’re having a secret kept from them,” Rae said.
Rae said Sachs’ ruling misinterpreted the Mirabelli opinion, which she said made clear that schools should not withhold information from parents. She said it was too soon to say whether the district would appeal the ruling or make changes to any of its policies.
Sonja Shaw, president of the Chino Valley Unified school board and a candidate for state superintendent of public instruction, also criticized the ruling. In an interview with EdSource, she called the proceedings a “kangaroo court” that has caused “so much confusion.”
Shaw said she planned to ask the superintendent whether the district could ask all parents to check a box: “Do you want secrets to be held from you?”
“They shouldn’t have to do that,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s insane we have to go through all these hoops to uphold a parent’s right to know.”
Christine Parker, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, said the ruling was consistent with the Supreme Court’s order in Mirabelli v. Bonta and other applicable law.
“The court got it right: Blanket policies like Chino Valley USD’s, in which school employees must — in all circumstances — disclose a student’s gender identity to their parents, remain unlawful in California,” Parker said in a statement to EdSource.
Another pending case referenced in Tuesday’s proceedings was the City of Huntington Beach v. Newsom, which hinged on a dispute over AB 1955, known as the SAFETY Act. The law, signed by Newsom in 2024, bars school districts from requiring staff to disclose a student’s sexual orientation or gender identity to parents. It went into effect before the injunction in the Chino Valley Unified case.
In the wake of the Mirabelli v. Bonta case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a preliminary injunction for parents in the City of Huntington Beach v. Newsom who sued to block enforcement of the SAFETY Act.
This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for their daily newsletter.
