Topline:
More than a month and half after L.A.’s devastating fires, the recovery is just beginning. And even for the residents of burn zones whose homes survived, the road ahead is complicated.
Health concerns: Some residents are staying in their homes in the burn zones, waiting for insurance to cover cleanup and worrying about their health as debris removal continues around them.
Read on ... to learn more about how two Altadena residents are coping and for recovery resources.
On a sunny day in late January, Tamara Carroll returned to her home on Navarro Avenue in west Altadena for the first time. It survived the Eaton Fire, and she was coming back with an insurance inspector to assess the damage.
“ I don't know how I feel,” Carroll said. “I'm grateful I have a house to come back to, but it's a long journey ahead.”
Her group of girlfriends were there to support her — close friends she’s known for some 35 years.
"We come together in happiness and sadness ... all the events of life,” said friend Barri Brown. “This is one of those times where we come together and put our arms around each other.”
More than a month and half after L.A.’s devastating fires, the recovery is just beginning.
Even for residents whose homes survived, the road ahead is complicated.
Some are staying in their homes, worried about the health effects as they wait for their insurance to cover smoke and ash cleanup, and watch as debris removal continues around them. Others are staying elsewhere, and still not sure they’ll ever return for good.
For those whose homes still stand in the burn zones, homeowners insurance and personal property insurance should cover most damage, including smoke damage, said David Russell, professor of insurance and finance at Cal State Northridge. But there can be limitations.
“ In some cases, smoke damage is a tricky one because reasonable people can disagree about whether or not there's a smell of smoke or if it's damaged,” Russell said. “The policy is really about physical damage. And it's less about if you don't feel safe.”
Russell said personal property insurance may cover only the depreciated value of objects like couches and mattresses. Russell added that residents should not be afraid to ask their adjusters about additional coverage and to document everything if you disagree with the assessment.
Here are some more resources to help you navigate insurance and recovery after the fires:
Carroll didn’t evacuate the night the Eaton Fire broke out, putting out spot fires in her yard and her neighbors’ yard as she watched homes burning a couple blocks down the street.
Once the flames died down, she stayed in her house for nearly another week without power, water or gas.
“It was just cold. I had no heat, and I was sleeping in my clothes,” Carroll recalled. “I was hyper vigilant: I had my backpack. I slept in my shoes. And it just became too much on my psyche.”
She left for a hotel in Burbank, which her insurance is covering. But she’s been replaying the night of Jan. 7 in her head, and rewatching the videos she took on her phone.
“I keep replaying those moments where I see the flames and the fire.... That's the trauma,” Carroll said.
The insurance adjuster tallied the physical damage. He marked charred shingles on her roof with white chalk. Her outdoor furniture is burned. The wall between her and her neighbor's house blew over in the wind.
Inside, the house smells like smoke. The adjuster swiped the walls with tissues — a thin coat of ash covered them. The adjuster recommended a smoke and ash cleaning.
Her homeowners insurance covers only the structure itself — the adjuster told Carroll she’ll need to have another adjuster with her personal property insurance to assess her furniture, rugs and the like.
By mid-February, Carroll just got the check for exterior repairs, but still awaits the insurance payment for smoke and ash remediation inside. She’s negotiating with her adjuster for additional coverage.
Even once the repairs are done, though, she doesn’t know if she’ll permanently return to the home her parents bought in 1963.
“We're grieving,” Carroll said. “Altadena will never ever be like it was. Ever.”
A couple of blocks over, on Glenrose Avenue, Ana Martinez and her family are still working to clean up their home, which also survived the fire. Their neighbor’s house didn’t.
“We’re surviving,” Martinez said. “Trying to get back to normal. Our new normal now.”
Martinez pointed out damage to the three homes on the property: Roof shingles and wood siding are charred. The carport is gone. The window blinds are melted, the glass broken from the heat of the flames. Her trash bins are a single melted piece of green, blue and black plastic.
“It's my new art piece now,” Martinez said.
Martinez said insurance will replace only damaged shingles, not the whole roof, though she thinks that is needed. They’ll also replace the windows. Martinez and her husband, sons, nephews and other family members have done their best to clean up inside and outside their homes.
But they’re still waiting on professional smoke and ash remediation. And as debris cleanup continues around her, she worries the house will only take in more toxic ash and dirt.
In the days after the fire, researchers measured high levels of lead, heavy metals, asbestos, microplastics and other toxic pollutants in the air. Those particles can settle into soil and dust, potentially becoming re-suspended as cleanup and rebuilding efforts continue. That toxic pollution can lead to health issues, from respiratory problems to increased risks of heart disease and cancer.
All of that is making Martinez worried about her family’s health.
The Martinezes have lived in their home this whole time. She said she and her husband developed bad coughs and recently went to the doctor for lung X-rays.
“We have kids here,” Martinez said. “We want to make sure they're safe; we don't want to just do a job halfway.”
Their young granddaughter and grandson, who has heart and lung issues, recently returned to the house because insurance stopped advancing money for their stays in hotels and short-term rentals after the first couple of weeks, instead asking them to submit claims for reimbursement.
California law requires insurance to pay four months of advance payments for living expenses for people who lost their homes in a fire, but there aren’t the same benefits for those whose homes survived. Coverage for temporary housing in this case varies by policy.
In the Martinezes case, they now have to foot the bill upfront and submit claims for reimbursement.
“They said ... 'It's best if you don't stay; we recognize it's bad for your health, so go away ... and then send us the receipts,'” Martinez said. “But what if they come out and say, ‘Oh, that's not covered.’ Then what? We don't have the money to go anywhere. ... We're out of the little bit of money we have in our savings.”
Topline
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on Monday unveiled a $14.9 billion budget that is significantly rosier than last year’s spending plan, when she suggested massive layoffs and service cuts to accommodate a billion-dollar deficit.
The details: This year, because of a projected increase in revenues, the mayor is proposing no layoffs and a modest expansion of street services. The budget also calls for hiring police officers to keep up with retirements and resignations, maintaining Fire Department spending and holding steady funding for homelessness programs.
Reserve fund: In Bass’ proposal, the reserve fund is 5.7% of the general fund, or $490 million. The budget does not dip into the reserves, in contrast to last year’s plan.
Criticism: Bass is seeking re-election this year, and several of her challengers criticized the budget. “The budget the Mayor released today tells us the plan is to largely keep doing what we're doing — but what we're doing is not working,” Councilmember Nithya Raman said in a statement.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on Monday unveiled a $14.9 billion budget that is significantly rosier than last year’s spending plan, when she suggested massive layoffs and service cuts to accommodate a billion-dollar deficit.
This year, because of a projected increase in revenues, the mayor is proposing no layoffs and a modest expansion of street services. Bass' budget also calls for hiring police officers to keep up with retirements and resignations, maintaining Fire Department spending and holding steady funding for homelessness programs.
“This budget is about protecting the progress we have made and making clear that Los Angeles is moving forward and will not go backward,” Bass said at a news conference.
In the proposal, the reserve fund is 5.7% of the general fund, or $490 million. The budget does not dip into the reserves, in contrast to last year’s plan.
Bass is seeking re-election this year. The primary is June 2.
Some of her challengers in the upcoming election, including Councilmember Nithya Raman, criticized Bass’ proposal as doing little more than maintaining the status quo.
“The budget the Mayor released today tells us the plan is to largely keep doing what we're doing — but what we're doing is not working,” Raman said in a statement.
Next, the proposal will go to the City Council for consideration. Budget hearings will be conducted in the coming weeks.
Among the reasons city officials say revenue will go up is the expected influx of thousands of visitors to World Cup soccer matches this summer. More travelers mean more people staying in hotels and paying hotel taxes, as well as more sales tax revenue.
The budget projects a $412 million increase in general tax revenue, including $71 in business taxes, $34 million in sales taxes and $67 million in utility taxes.
The budget would add 170 new positions in the department that handles street repairs and increase funding for street and sidewalk fixes, curb-ramp installation, street sweeping, bulky item pickup and dedicated illegal dumping enforcement throughout the city.
The budget also proposes hiring 510 police officers, representing a target of 8,555 for the Police Department and enough to keep up with attrition, according to budget officials. Bass has set a goal of 9,500 officers.
“It’s about preventing the shrinkage of LAPD,” Bass said.
That proposal is likely to see opposition from some council members who want to see the department shrink and funding for unarmed response teams increase.
The budget sustains citywide coverage for civilian unarmed crisis response, maintaining deployment of 500 crossing guards and expanding a program that aims to help children get to and from school safely and protect them from gang violence.
Under the budget, funding for Inside Safe, the mayor’s signature program to address homelessness, would remain about the same — $104 million.
The mayor touts an 18% drop in street homelessness as evidence of its success.
The budget maintains funding for the city Fire Department. In November, voters are expected to decide whether to increase the sales tax by half a percent to pay for more firefighters and equipment.
Bass’ challengers immediately criticized her budget as lacking vision.
“This budget maintains a status quo of reduced services and higher fees, the direct result of fiscally irresponsible decisions made by this Mayor in prior years,” Raman said in her statement.
In January, the council member voted against Bass’ plan to hire 170 more police officers.
Adam Miller, a tech entrepreneur and another Bass challenger, said keeping the budget flat “implies that the status quo is working.”
“That is tone-deaf to the city of Los Angeles as Angelenos overwhelmingly feel we need change," he said.
The budget needs to be approved by the City Council and signed by the mayor by July 1, the start of the fiscal year.
Topline:
The L.A. Homeless Services Authority announced Monday that the agency will narrow its focus and lay off 284 employees at the end of June.
Why now: The changes at the public agency, known as LAHSA, come after the L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted last April to withdraw more than $300 million in annual funding for the agency.
The context: LAHSA interim CEO Gita O’Neill called the staffing changes a “necessary evolution," according to a news release announcing the move. “By narrowing our focus to macro-level governance, data management, and securing federal funding, we are stepping into our true role as a strategic architect of the region’s homelessness response system.” In December, a group of LAHSA employees wrote an open letter to the Board of Supervisors demanding they “ensure no County-funded worker is displaced.”
Hundreds of layoffs: The agency will send layoff notices to the 284 employees on April 30, according to the news release. Another 130 positions that are currently vacant will also be eliminated in the transition. Some of the layoffs may be avoided, a LAHSA spokesperson said in the news release, “depending on the final details of the City of Los Angeles budget.”
"I want to profoundly thank our staff for their unwavering dedication and hard work serving people experiencing homelessness across Los Angeles County," O’Neill said. "Our staff has been the driving force behind the historic reductions in street homelessness we've seen over the past two years.”
Topline:
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is leaving her post amid an internal investigation brought on by complaints about misconduct.
More details: White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung announced the departure on X, writing "she has done a phenomenal job in her role by protecting American workers, enacting fair labor practices, and helping Americans gain additional skills to improve their lives." Cheung said Chavez-DeRemer was taking a position in the private sector.
Why it matters: Chavez-DeRemer is the third cabinet member to leave during President Trump's second term.
Read on... for more on the resignation.
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is leaving her post amid an internal investigation brought on by complaints about misconduct.
White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung announced the departure on X, writing "she has done a phenomenal job in her role by protecting American workers, enacting fair labor practices, and helping Americans gain additional skills to improve their lives." Cheung said Chavez-DeRemer was taking a position in the private sector.
A senior official at the Labor Department not authorized to speak publicly about the departure said the secretary had resigned.
Chavez-DeRemer is the third cabinet member to leave during President Donald Trump's second term.
In early March, Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem shortly after lawmakers on Capitol Hill berated her over her agency's handling of immigration enforcement — as well as its $220 million ad campaign featuring the secretary on horseback.
A month later, Attorney General Pam Bondi left amid simmering frustration over her leadership of the Justice Department and her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
While Chavez-DeRemer has played a far less visible role than Bondi or Noem in Trump's second term, her tenure has also been marked by controversy.
In January, the New York Post first reported that the Labor Department's inspector general was looking into complaints that Chavez-DeRemer was having an affair with a subordinate, drinking alcohol on the job and using taxpayer-funded travel to visit with friends and family members.
NPR has not independently verified the contents of the investigation.
While in office, Chavez-DeRemer spent much of her time away from Washington. A year ago, she launched her "America at Work" listening tour, an initiative that took her to all 50 states.
Chavez-DeRemer's chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, who had been on leave since January, resigned in early March. A third senior member of her staff, Melissa Robey, said in a statement issued March 26 that she had been fired a couple days earlier, after giving a four-hour interview to the Office of the Inspector General.
Meanwhile, the New York Times was first to report that Chavez-DeRemer's husband, Shawn DeRemer, an anesthesiologist in Portland, Ore., had been barred from Labor Department headquarters in Washington, D.C., after at least two staffers reported he had touched them inappropriately. Washington, D.C. police and federal prosecutors closed the investigations without bringing charges.
Trump's selection of Chavez-DeRemer to lead the Labor Department was seen by many as a concession to Teamsters President Sean O'Brien. O'Brien had been friendly with Trump through the presidential campaign, taking a prime-time speaking slot at the 2024 Republican National Convention and later declining to endorse Trump's opponent, then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
O'Brien had pushed for Chavez-DeRemer's selection, noting that she was one of only a few Republicans in Congress to have supported the PRO Act. That bill aimed to make it easier for workers to organize unions, including by overturning state Right to Work laws, which weaken unions.
At the time, Trump wrote, "Lori's strong support from both the Business and Labor communities will ensure that the Labor Department can unite Americans of all backgrounds."
Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, who has already been running much of the day-to-day operations of the Labor Department, has been named acting secretary, according to Cheung's post on X.
Sonderling previously served at the Labor Department during the first Trump administration and at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under the Biden administration, having been nominated by Trump during his first term to fill a Republican seat.
Copyright 2026 NPR
Topline:
Before he became an Orange County Superior Court Judge, Ebrahim Baytieh was fired as a prosecutor by District Attorney Todd Spitzer for allegedly cheating to win convictions. And Baytieh was accused by a San Diego judge last year of lying under oath. But an O.C. nonprofit that teaches youth about constitutional rights awarded Baytieh “Judge of the Year” at its annual reception last week.
The backstory: Before becoming a judge, Baytieh held a top position in the office of former O.C. District Attorney Tony Rackauckas, when it came to light that he and other prosecutors had illegally used jailhouse informants or “snitches” to win convictions. Baytieh repeatedly denied the misconduct in public, and was accused last year by a San Diego judge of trying to conceal his own role in the misdeeds.
What does the nonprofit say? The group that gave Baytieh the award, the Constitutional Rights Foundation, Orange County, said in a statement that they honored Baytieh because he was the top volunteer for the group’s high school mock trial competition. They said the group had “received positive feedback from coaches and students over whose trials [Baytieh] presided.”
Before he became an Orange County Superior Court Judge, Ebrahim Baytieh was fired as a prosecutor by District Attorney Todd Spitzer for allegedly cheating to win convictions. And Baytieh was accused by a San Diego judge last year of lying under oath. But an O.C. nonprofit that teaches youth about constitutional rights awarded Baytieh “Judge of the Year” at its annual reception last week.
The group, the Constitutional Rights Foundation, Orange County, said in a statement that they honored Baytieh because he was the top volunteer for the group’s high school mock trial competition. The statement said the group had “received positive feedback from coaches and students over whose trials [Baytieh] presided.”
Some questioned whether the award was appropriate.
“It’s disgusting,” said Scott Sanders, the former public defender who uncovered the so-called “snitch scandal,” in which Baytieh was a major player. “If you’re going to have a group that’s dedicated to constitutional rights, it is not a good look to make your ‘Judge of the Year’ a guy who has been found to violate constitutional rights.”
What’s come to be known as the O.C. snitch scandal refers to the systematic use of jailhouse informants to coax confessions from defendants without their lawyers present, and then hide that evidence from defendants — both of which are illegal. The misconduct took place under former District Attorney Tony Rackauckas. Spitzer, the current DA, has vowed to never let such misconduct happen again. But he has been left to deal with the fallout, including past wrongful convictions that continue to come to light.
Baytieh, who held a top position in Rackauckas’s office, repeatedly denied the allegations of misconduct.
Nevertheless, a federal civil rights investigation ultimately concluded that O.C. law enforcement “systematically violated criminal defendants’ right to counsel."
Baytieh’s prominent role in those violations has come into focus in recent years, most recently when the District Attorney’s Office was forced to drop murder charges in a decades-old case that Baytieh had initially prosecuted. The judge in that case concluded that Baytieh and his prosecution team had withheld evidence, and then lied on the stand about it in 2024. The judge called the prosecution’s behavior "reprehensible."
Previously, Baytieh had been fired by Spitzer after an internal investigation found Baytieh had illegally withheld evidence in the same murder case. Baytieh would go on to win election to the O.C. Superior Court a few months later, with endorsements from dozens of current and former judges and law enforcement leaders.
LAist reached out to Baytieh for this story but has not received a response. Paul Meyer, a defense attorney who has represented Baytieh in recent years, declined to comment.
As high school students and their parents arrived at Calvary Church in Santa Ana last Thursday for the mock trial awards ceremony, Paul Wilson walked through the parking lot, handing out copies of a six-page letter, penned by Sanders, the former public defender, highlighting Baytieh’s unethical behavior and urging the Constitutional Rights Foundation not to honor the judge.
The event went on as planned.
The Constitutional Rights Foundation, Orange County is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that teaches teens about civics and the legal process. It runs moot court and mock trial competitions for middle- and high-schoolers.
The board of directors, judicial advisory board, and sponsors include dozens of prominent lawyers, law firms, and judges in Orange County.
Wilson and Sanders have become unlikely allies in a quest to root out past misconduct by O.C. law enforcement and seek justice for defendants who didn't get a fair trial.
More than a decade ago, Sanders and Wilson were on opposite sides of the courtroom. Sanders was defending Scott Dekraai, the man accused of killing Wilson’s wife, Christy, and seven others in the county’s worst mass shooting in modern history, at a salon in Seal Beach.
Dekraai was arrested in what appeared to be a slam dunk legal case. But then, while preparing for trial, Sanders discovered a secret law enforcement program that offered money and perks to jailed informants to surreptitiously question defendants, including Dekraai. Questioning a defendant without giving them the opportunity to have a lawyer present runs afoul of the Constitution. Prosecutors were also hiding evidence about informants from defendants, another constitutional violation.
As a result of Sanders’s discovery, the Dekraai case dragged on for years. In a humiliating defeat, the DA’s office was removed from prosecuting the case because of the misconduct. And in a blow to the victims’ families, a judge ruled that the death penalty would be off the table.
An investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice followed, during which Baytieh, then a top prosecutor, denied having any knowledge of the misconduct.
After the ordeal, Wilson began crusading to reform O.C. law enforcement. “We haven’t gotten the justice we deserve,” Wilson said of himself and other victims’ family members.
That’s what led him to make copies of Sanders’s denouncement of Baytieh’s “Judge of the Year” award, and to bring them to the Constitutional Rights Foundation’s celebratory event last week, he told LAist.
“ I felt a great need to go down and let some of these students that Baytieh has been mentoring … know who this guy was and what he's all about and what he continues to be,” Wilson said.
“For years and years, those guys operated behind this shield that nobody was going to catch them,” Wilson said of Baytieh and other former O.C. prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies who were found by judges and the U.S. Department of Justice to have participated in the misconduct.
Wilson told LAist he passed out about 45 copies of Sanders’s letter before someone from the Constitutional Rights Foundation asked him to leave.
Read the letter:
Sanders retired last year from the O.C. Public Defender’s office after 32 years. Before he left, around 60 convictions tainted by the misuse of informants had been lessened or overturned. In one, a 69-year-old man was freed from prison after the DA's Office admitted that prosecutors withheld evidence decades ago that mitigated his guilt. The man had already spent 41 years in prison.
Sanders said there’s much more work to do — in court filings, he has detailed dozens of convictions that he argues should be revisited because of law enforcement misconduct.
Baytieh prosecuted many of those cases.
“Every one of his cases should be torn apart,” Sanders said.
