The Brief

In Bloomington, a small community of some 24,000 people in unincorporated San Bernardino County, people ride horses next to big rig trucks rushing to warehouses. Solar panels adorn the roofs of homes next to truck yards — the panels sometimes paid for by warehouse developers.

Like so much of Southern California, Bloomington is a place of contrasts.

Over the last 15 years or so, this once-rural town that’s bordered by the cities of Fontana, Rialto and Jurupa Valley has been surrounded by warehouses being built to support our online shopping habits and the supply chain corridor from the ports of L.A. and Long Beach. That pipeline is one of the largest sources of the Southland’s health-harming and planet-heating pollution.

A partially demolished home in Bloomington, where a 213-acre warehouse project is being developed.

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And now, 117 homes and small ranches in Bloomington are being demolished to make way for yet another warehouse — the largest one yet in the community. The project will bring more than 2 million square feet of warehouse space built by Orange County company Howard Industrial Partners. The project is expected to bring more than 1,000 additional big rig truck trips per day.

After years of debate, San Bernardino County supervisors unanimously approved the project in 2022. Today, everyone in the development’s way — the non-numbered streets of Bloomington — have been bought out and homes have already been demolished.

The project was able to happen because back in 2017, the county designated the non-numbered streets of Bloomington as a potential area for re-zoning and development to boost tax revenue to fund more services for the community.

Construction progress has now stalled due to a lawsuit against the project brought by environmental justice groups. (County Supervisor Joe Baca, who represents Bloomington, declined an interview with LAist due to the ongoing litigation).

But those who want to stay in Bloomington worry the warehouse will mean the end of their small town and rural lifestyle. Others say the project is necessary to get badly needed infrastructure improvements.

The site of the future warehouse project, which will bring more than 2 million square feet of warehouse space to Bloomington.

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A changing community

I meet Margaret Razo and her husband Rafael at a park that will be right across the street from the new warehouse project and next door to another warehouse being developed in Jurupa Valley.

The 54-year-old grew up in Bloomington and has watched the community transform.

“Bloomington was so pretty, so beautiful,” Razo said. “And, just driving over here now, it's awful. All the houses are torn down. Childhood homes of our friends. I almost want to cry thinking about how much Bloomington has changed.”

Rafael and Margaret Razo live in a house near the new warehouse development in Bloomington. They regularly receive calls from developers asking if they want to sell.

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When she was a kid, the road in front of her family’s house was dirt. Her little brother and sister played Little League at the park we’re sitting at. The park has changed too … but for the better, thanks to recent donations the county received to improve the park, with a new skate park, children’s play structure and well-kept grass. She loves seeing people ride horses around town.

The warehouse project will be across the street from a park and baseball field. Another warehouse being developed in neighboring Jurupa Valley is also being developed just west of the field.

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“We just never left Bloomington because we loved it,” Razo said. “And it's the first time in my whole entire life that I've ever thought maybe it's time to leave. Because I feel like we're being pushed out by industry.”

Though they’re not within the bounds of this project — they live in the numbered streets of Bloomington — they’re close to it, and Razo said calls from warehouse developers offering to buy the home she and her husband live in are constant.

“It just takes one person to sell,” said Rafael.

But Razo said she can’t blame others for selling.

“My cousin is a teacher at Colton High School and she said she was talking to someone and the guy told her, ‘You know, if they're offering me a million dollars for my house, and I'm going to be able to send my kids to college now, how can I say no to that?’” Razo said.

“At first I was mad at the people who were accepting the money and leaving Bloomington because I'm like, ‘Oh, they don't really love Bloomington,’” Razo continued. “How can you blame them? These big old companies are coming in and just throwing money at people and it's such a poor community. And it just keeps chipping away and chipping away more at Bloomington.”

For some people, the buyouts, which have all been at or above fair market value, were welcome. I spoke to one Bloomington resident who lives with his grandmother across from the construction site — he declined to share his name, but said they want to move to Yucaipa due to rising crime in Bloomington and his grandmother’s desire to be in a more rural area. He said they were excited to be in conversation with the developer for a generous buyout, but those discussions have now halted due to the lawsuit.

Razo said if they left, she doesn’t know where they’d go. After all, Bloomington is home. She raised her own children here, her siblings still live here, and her parents are buried here.

“If they start chipping away at my neighborhood, I don't know,” Razo said. “We're gonna be the little 'Up' house [referring to the movie “Up”]. I don't want to leave, but I feel like they're pushing me out. There's going to be nothing left of the character of Bloomington, the place that we grew up in, it's just going to be all gone.”

A rural lifestyle coming to an end

I run into Felipe Ortiz and his daughter Fatima while he’s picking her up from Bloomington High School, which is across the street from the future warehouse project. He, his wife and three kids rent a house in the path of the warehouse. One day they were startled by a bulldozer destroying palm trees Ortiz had planted and fencing on the property. Their landlord didn’t tell them that he’d sold the house to the developer.

Felipe Ortiz shows a photo of his children, who grew up riding horses.

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Felipe Ortiz and daughter Fatima outside Bloomington High School. Ortiz and his family are currently looking for somewhere else to live after their landlord sold the house they rent to a warehouse developer.

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Like many people in the area, they own horses, goats and other livestock and thought Bloomington was a place where they could maintain their rural lifestyle and connection to their Mexican roots. Now, they don’t know what they’ll do.

“It’s hard that we can't find anywhere to go because we don't have the money to buy a house,” Ortiz said in Spanish. “I have to protect my family and my animals.”

15-year-old Fatima said the whole experience has been so stressful she’s had trouble focusing in school.

“I be seeing machines going through, passing by my house, and I be getting scared,” she said. “And then sometimes I get the feeling of not wanting to come to school. Even if I do, I be thinking about the house instead of thinking about my subjects at school.”

Across the street from where I talk with the Ortiz’s, I meet 15-year-old Jose Sanchez and 17-year-old Francisco Plascencia riding their horses, something they do every day. They grew up riding, and even in their short lives they’ve seen other warehouse projects already change the community — more big rig trucks driving the roads, and less open space to ride their horses.

“I grew up here in Bloomington so seeing everything go away … it kind of hurts me,” said Sanchez.

For now, he said, they’ll have to appreciate riding their horses around town as much as they can.

“Just enjoy what we have right now,” Sanchez said. “Until the time comes, if they do end up buying our property, it is what it is.”

Jose Sanchez, left, and Francisco Plascenscia grew up riding horses in Bloomington and have seen the community become more industrial over the years.

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A necessary project? 

Others in the community say the project is desperately needed.

Like many unincorporated areas, Bloomington has a lack of basic infrastructure, such as sidewalks, sewage lines and flood control. That’s led to persistent flooding issues and dangerous traffic conditions. Many community members also worry about public safety with little law enforcement dedicated to the area.

“The residents of Bloomington need better streets, better schools, good paying jobs and law and order,” said Irma Hansel, who's lived in Bloomington for more than 40 years, at the 2022 supervisor’s meeting when the project was approved. “We believe that the Bloomington project is a way to help to achieve prosperity and a better future for the residents of Bloomington.”

“Personally, my family and I would love to go one winter without our house flooding or having a river that builds up in my backyard, [taking] my 68-year-old mom along with it when she tried to redirect the water without success,” said resident Raquel Diaz at that same meeting.

To address the flooding issues, traffic conditions, and public safety concerns, the developer has promised to spend:

• $39 million for 2.2 miles of street improvements like sidewalks and traffic signals (some of those street improvements will also support an increase in truck traffic expected from the project).
• $30 million to build a 13-acre drainage basin and 2 miles of storm drains 
• More than $1 million in tax revenue per year will go to a fund for Bloomington to spend on public safety, code enforcement and parks. $6.4 million in one-time funding will go to a Bloomington-specific infrastructure fund. 
• $45 million for a brand new elementary school because the old one is right next to the project
• 198 apartment units will be built in another part of Bloomington to make up for the homes destroyed and comply with California's housing law. 

The project is also expected to generate more than 3,200 permanent local jobs and some 5,450 union construction jobs, as well as $500 million in tax revenue for the county over 30 years.

A FedEx truck drives past a trucking terminal in Bloomington. The new "Bloomington Business Park" isn't the first warehouse development to come to Bloomington, but it's the largest.

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A spokesperson for the developer said in a statement to LAist that the property will be landscaped with mature trees and drought-tolerant plants and that electric charging infrastructure will be installed to power electric forklifts and other heavy duty electric equipment onsite.

“If you're going to get infrastructure improvements, it's going to come out of one of two sets of hands — it's either going to come out of the business and development community," said Gary Grossich, a 45-year Bloomington resident, "or it's going to come from the residents. The residents don’t have that kind of money."

Meaning, taxes. Unincorporated areas often lack basic infrastructure because they have less tax revenue, and the revenue that does exist is stretched across an entire county.

Truck yards like this one are common in Bloomington.

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“So unfortunately — you can maybe call it a trade-off — for these types of infrastructure improvements that the community needs, we have to rely on the development community to bring in these types of projects because that's the only thing that's going to pencil out for that type of a huge, tens of millions of dollars of investment in a community,” Grossich said.

Grossich owns a pizza restaurant in neighboring Colton and has lived in Bloomington for 45 years. His home is near the development.

Grossich said he’s been against past warehouse projects in the community, but he thinks this one is the gold standard and will bring more benefit than harm.

Bloomington resident Gary Grossich stands outside his restaurant in Colton. He believes the warehouse project will bring more benefit than harm to Bloomington.

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A dream of becoming a city that can keep warehouses out

Grossich serves on the Bloomington Municipal Advisory Committee, or MAC, a non-voting group of community members that liaison between the community and county supervisors.

Gary Grossich owns a pizza shop in Colton, where he grew up, and moved to Bloomington 45 years ago after purchasing his dream home with his wife.

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He says that’s part of the problem — because Bloomington is unincorporated it has too little political representation. He worries that if Fontana and Rialto continue to build warehouses on Bloomington’s borders — multiple projects are planned, with land already leveled to make way for them — those cities will be able to annex Bloomington and turn all of it into warehousing space.

“The idea is that we want people that live in Bloomington to make these decisions, not people from outside,” Grossich said. “For Bloomington to ever get to the point where we can make our own decisions, it is going to be necessary to find funding. It was never the intention of the MAC to make Bloomington into any type of a warehouse central or anything like that. As a matter of fact, we wanted to preclude that from happening.”

Ultimately, he sees this project as a necessary step for Bloomington to generate enough revenue to become its own city, so it can ideally elect people from the community who will keep further warehouse development out.

He envisions a city that has some warehouses, but also has a thriving downtown corridor full of local businesses, restaurants and homes.

“Each individual project, you gotta weigh the pros and cons,” Grossich said. “All projects have impacts, no matter what it is. You can build a church, it's gonna have impacts. The question really is, can you mitigate the impacts to beyond a significant level.”

The foundation of a home demolished where the future warehouse project is planned.

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A dangerous precedent?  

Joaquin Castillejos, an organizer with the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, worries that relying on warehouse development for necessary infrastructure improvements in unincorporated areas sets a dangerous precedent, and that there are not enough protections in place now to prevent future warehouse expansion into the numbered streets of Bloomington.

He said it’s up to the county to find the needed funding for building safe infrastructure without approving a project that brings more heavy truck traffic and pollution near residential areas, schools and a park.

People walk along a residential street. The green fencing on the right is where part of the warehouse development will be. The developer purchased a palm tree nursery.

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“The county has a responsibility to the residents of Bloomington to keep up with the infrastructure, to fix our streets and to make sure that it's a livable area,” he said.

The county said in a statement to LAist that it's made "significant investments" in Bloomington in recent years, including street improvements, an affordable housing project, a sewer installation on Valley Boulevard, a new park and additional dedicated sheriff's deputies to the area, among other things.

"There are challenges throughout the County, as with any government agency, to meet all the needs with funding not being unlimited," the statement to LAist read. "However the County has done well toward investing in Bloomington."

Castillejos said this new warehouse project is different from others for its scale and because the county rezoned a residential area to industrial to make way for the warehouse project. Unincorporated areas in the Inland Empire such as Bloomington have been some of the few places left in a state with rising housing costs where people, like Castillejos’ family, can still afford to buy their own homes.

Castillejos grew up in Bloomington after his family moved there from an apartment in south L.A. to achieve their dream of buying a house in the early 2000s. He lives in Pomona now, but his parents still live in Bloomington, two blocks from another large warehouse project that was built in neighboring Fontana.

Warehouses dominate the Inland Empire

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“There's nothing that they can say to justify creating an industrial zone in the middle of a residential area, but that's exactly what they did,” he said. “This project will just be the beginning of more types of developments like this, where they target residential areas in other unincorporated areas in the county.”

Though homes have already been demolished, Castillejos hopes the current lawsuit against the project at least sends a message to future warehouse developers.

“I'm hoping that this lawsuit shows all other developers that if you want to do a project like this,” he said, “there's going to be consequences.”

By the time Democrat Xavier Becerra left Washington, D.C., more Americans than ever had health insurance, owing partly to his work over the years to pass, defend and expand the Affordable Care Act.

It's an achievement the former congressman and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services often touts as he campaigns for California governor against Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News commentator.

But should Becerra cruise to victory in November, as polling suggests, he will face what may be the steepest decline in health insurance coverage in a generation, one that will land especially hard in his home state.

Federal cuts mean more people uninsured

By 2030, the number of uninsured Californians under 65 is expected to nearly double from 2.4 million to 4.6 million as recently enacted state and federal cuts to Medicaid and ACA marketplaces begin to roll back historic gains in health coverage, according to a May analysis by the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center. The anticipated rise in the uninsured population could have broad implications for hospital systems, insurers and the economy.

In February, Miranda Dietz, the labor center's healthcare program director, told legislators the changes could end up costing California about 200,000 jobs, mostly in the healthcare industry.

Hospital executives have begun reporting more unpaid medical bills, and experts warn health plans will raise premiums further as they're left with enrollees who are, on average, sicker and more expensive to cover.

"It's triage," said Jessica Altman, executive director of Covered California, the nation's largest state-run health insurance marketplace. "That's what the next governor is walking into."

California achieved one of the most dramatic drops in its uninsured population in the nation, largely credited to the state's robust adoption of the ACA. If tapped to lead the wealthy, progressive state, Becerra would wrestle with how uninsured Californians get care and who pays as the Trump administration shrinks a federal safety net he once oversaw.

Becerra has some experience pushing back against Washington, D.C. As California attorney general, he successfully defended many provisions of the Affordable Care Act, including access to birth control.

Becerra said he would issue an executive order to keep those affected by federal cuts insured. But he has not detailed how the state would backfill as much as $30 billion in federal funding California stands to lose annually.

At a policy forum hosted by Politico this month, Becerra promised Californians would not lose health coverage despite federal cutbacks, saying he would push the industry to eliminate waste from "attorneys, accountants, pencil pushers" that cost consumers billions.

"I'm going to ask them to help me extract some of that waste and put it into healthcare, which helps us cover the cost of keeping Californians insured," he said.

His opponent, Hilton, is trying to appeal to voters opposed to President Donald Trump, despite receiving the president's endorsement, and has stumped on cutting off coverage for Californians without legal status, which is paid for with state funds. Hilton has vowed to use those savings to issue state income tax breaks, calling it an immediate antidote to high costs.

Steve Hilton, the Republican candidate for governor of California, campaigns at a Sheraton hotel on July 27 in Pomona.

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"We all understand that the healthcare system is a mess and needs major reform," Hilton said in an interview. "The quickest thing we can do on healthcare costs is actually to tax people less."

Left behind?

In 2010, Becerra was part of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's leadership team and helped whip up votes to pass the law. He also had a hand in crafting it, though his attempt to include a government-backed coverage option failed.

A decade later, when lawmakers considered him for the nation's top healthcare job, Becerra said his primary mission would be to carry out President Biden's vision to expand access and cut costs under the Affordable Care Act.

Before the ACA, some 50 million Americans — roughly 1 in 6 — were uninsured. Within a few years of the law's passage in 2010, its expansion of Medicaid eligibility and financial aid to lower-income marketplace enrollees helped slash the U.S. uninsured rate by nearly half.

Millions more gained coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic after Becerra implemented a freeze on Medicaid disenrollment and administered generous but temporary tax credits that put the cost of Obamacare plans within reach for more people.

As Biden's health secretary, Becerra launched aggressive public awareness campaigns, loosened enrollment rules and distributed hundreds of millions in grants to pay consumer assistants, also known as healthcare navigators, to help enrollees wade through paperwork.

"One of the common things we would hear from him as a leader was, 'Who's being left behind?'" said Benjamin Sommers, a Harvard health policy professor who was a deputy assistant secretary under Becerra.

Under Biden and Becerra, the percentage of people with health insurance reached a historic high of 92%, or 310 million Americans having health coverage in 2024.

Republican response

But conservatives said those policies inflated enrollment by attracting fraudulent and wasteful coverage. In response, the second Trump administration has tightened enrollment windows and toughened income reporting.

"It's simple and easy to say, well, the numbers are up so the program must be working," said Edmund Haislmaier, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "My argument would be that's the wrong metric."

Last summer, the GOP-led Congress passed Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Republicans argued preserves Medicaid for those who need it most while rooting out fraud and waste. Altogether, the law is expected to cut Medicaid spending by $900 billion-plus over a decade.

Congress also allowed enhanced premium tax credits for Obamacare plans to expire last year, spiking premium payments for middle-income Americans and driving down enrollment by nearly 3 million this year.

"We are now witnessing almost a wholesale reversal of pretty much all those policies" that helped cover millions more Americans, said Sabrina Corlette, co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University.

For Eric Maciel, the $800 cost of a Covered California plan is too much. To avoid injury, the 28-year-old stays home more and rarely plays pickup soccer at the park — the other players, he added, can get pretty rough.

"That's another car note," Maciel said. "I'd be left with nothing."

Health economists say Maciel is the type of customer insurers need to stabilize their risk pools: young, healthy and less costly.

Hilton criticized state leaders for passing a revised provider tax he asserts will send premiums soaring and said he wants to inject more competition into California's health insurance market — but he offered no specific ideas.

Playing defense

Higher-than-expected state costs coupled with federal cuts have prompted California to retreat on healthcare coverage. Federal funds account for one-third of the state's budget and more than 60% of spending by Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program.

Xavier Becerra served in the House of Representatives when the Affordable Care Act passed and as health secretary under President Biden. He's the frontrunner in California's governor's race.

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Gov. Gavin Newsom has frozen enrollment for immigrants without legal status, enacted monthly premiums for some, and plans to only temporarily backfill federal assistance for legal immigrants and refugees.

Newsom and Democratic lawmakers agreed to delay some cuts until July 2027, leaving the next governor to weigh further rollbacks against increased taxes. Becerra, a California native born to Mexican immigrants, opposes what's known as the billionaire tax, on November's ballot. This month, he said he supported legislative efforts to penalize large corporations whose workers rely on Medi-Cal, arguing that taxpayers are subsidizing employers' low wages and paltry benefits.

County governments, which are legally required to provide healthcare to uninsured residents too poor to afford care, are lobbying lawmakers for funding to treat what they describe as a fresh deluge of patients who need free care.

"It's a pretty big cliff if all this stuff goes into effect," said Dietz, the labor center's healthcare program director. And there's a choice whether to make it less bad and maintain coverage for folks."

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

A battle over a first-of-its-kind tax on billionaires is heating up in California, with tech moguls pumping millions of dollars into a campaign to defeat it and union leaders who support the measure insisting the state's very wealthiest residents should pay their fair share.

Voters in November will be asked whether to pass the ballot measure, known as Proposition 40, which imposes a one-time 5% tax on the assets of the nearly 250 billionaires in the state. Backers say the new revenue would mostly fund healthcare services.

The tax was envisioned by union leader Dave Regan, who said millions of the state's neediest patients could lose health insurance in the coming years, driven largely by President Trump's 2025 tax and spending bill. Dubbed by the White House the "One Big Beautiful Bill," the law slashes federal funding to California and other states.

"Proposition 40 was developed specifically to backfill those cuts from the One Big Bill that are scheduled to take effect in the next five years. It is a five-year solution to that plan," said Regan, who is the president of the SEIU United Healthcare Workers West.

If passed, the measure would direct 90% of the tax revenue to fund healthcare services and the other 10% to food assistance and public education across California.

"We're not even talking about the top 1%, we're talking about the top 0.0001%, the billionaires: 250 individuals in California, $2.4 trillion worth of wealth, and that's an amount of money equivalent to the annual income of all Californians who are not billionaires, including extraordinarily wealthy people," Regan said.

But the populist fervor fueling supporters of the measure is being met with a growing coalition of resisters, from tech billionaires to other unions and some state Democrats. That includes Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has said the tax would hurt the state's economy, which is powered by profitable tech companies in Silicon Valley that have spawned many of the billionaires who would be taxed under the measure.

Opponents of the tax argue it offers a short-term fix to a long-term problem and could ultimately backfire.

"I'm not against taxes. But this is not the right tool. What we need to develop is something that is stable and consistent," said René Bravo, president of the California Medical Association, in an interview with NPR. "Human beings need and deserve health care that is financed in such a way that you're not increasing the insecurity."

Bravo argues Proposition 40, if passed, would make patients more unstable by providing them with bridge coverage now, but no longer-term solution — making it difficult to plan out medical coverage over many years. Bravo also said he does not trust state lawmakers to spend most of the new revenue on healthcare, speculating that they could direct the money to other pet projects.

"Not accurate, not true," responded union leader Regan. He said voters face a choice between more immediate healthcare funding for Californians or none at all, and that a third way being proposed by some critics is not on the ballot.

Will billionaires leave California if wealth tax passes?

Another major rift between both sides of the fight is whether the first-of-its-kind state wealth tax would drive billionaires out of California.

It's a crucial issue, since California's Chamber of Commerce estimates 1% of the state's residents pay nearly 50% of all personal income taxes.

Few disagree that a mass flight of the ultra-rich would throw California's budget into a tailspin, but the measure has sparked a fierce debate about whether billionaires will actually pack up and leave the state.

French economist Thomas Piketty, who has written extensively about disparities in international wealth, has argued that what's known as "capital flight" is often overstated in debates about wealth taxes. "If one builds a fortune while relying on the country's infrastructure, education, and health systems, there is no reason that one should so readily escape the collective obligations that fund these systems," Piketty wrote last year about a proposed wealth tax in France aimed at the ultra-rich.

Adam Michel, who studies tax policy at the libertarian Cato Institute, believes taxing high income earners will be destructive for the state.

"A wealth tax of this magnitude will be bad for California and for California taxpayers. We should expect not just targeted billionaires to leave, but anyone that expects to be a billionaire or expects to be the target of aggressive taxes like this in the future to leave," he said.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, one of the richest people in the world, agrees.

He has poured $102 million into a group known as Building a Better California, which he co-founded with former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt. The group has also received millions of dollars in funding from venture capitalist John Doerr, crypto executive Chris Larsen and others. Building a Better California's mission is to defeat the effort, in part by supporting a separate ballot measure that would invalidate the wealth tax. Other tech billionaires, including Palantir founder Peter Thiel, who no longer lives in California, have funneled millions of dollars into other groups hoping to topple the measure.

A spokesperson for Building a Better California did not return a request for comment, but Brin told The New York Times: "I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don't want California to end up in the same place."

Brin recently moved to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. Critics of the tax say there will only be more billionaires leaving California if voters pass the measure.

Union leader Regan calls Brin's move political theater. He pointed out that the wealth tax applies to California residents who lived in the state in January of this year, so moving out of state would not allow anyone to dodge the tax, nor would relocating after November, if the ballot measure prevails. Bloomberg estimated the tax could personally cost Brin around $13 billion.

Regan said Brin owes his success in part to government-backed research that helped create Google and insisted that a one-time 5% tax would not be overly burdensome for the tech mogul.

"You are now one of the five wealthiest people in the world in the state that made you rich, enormously rich," said Regan as if speaking directly to Brin, noting that California "needs to stabilize its healthcare system."

Some polls show that Californians are nearly evenly split on the tax.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Writer Aida Salazar did not spend endless hours on devices as a teen. She grew up in the 1980s, way before TikTok and Instagram. But she has raised teens, a boy and a girl. She felt she lost them to their screens during the pandemic.

“To the point where they were harming themselves on different levels,” she said.

The antidote to the overconsumption of screens, she and her husband realized, was found when they spent time outdoors near their home in Oakland.

“We went to the redwoods, or we went to the ocean, or we went somewhere else where they were my kids again,” she said.

Salazar, who has received numerous awards for some of her 10 YA books, has drawn on that experience for her latest work, Stream.

It’s written in first person rhyme in the voices of the two main characters, a teen boy named Elio and Celi, a girl. (Both appear in Salazar's previous YA novels).

In this book they’re both eighth graders who live separately in Oakland. After their parents realize the extent of their tech dependency, they take the drastic action to send them to rural Mexico for an IRL shock.

“To detox digitally in a rancho, or a place that has no running water, no electricity, and of course, no internet,” said Salazar.

Out of their digital element

Salazar was born in the Mexican state of Zacatecas and grew up in Maywood, in Southeast L.A. County, before earning a master’s degree in writing from CalArts.

The rural Mexican setting of Stream is partly based on her mother’s hometown in Zacatecas, where she wrote some of the book. The title is inspired by a vibrant stream there that once sustained the community but is now in the shadow of crumbling adobe homes.

The cover for the YA book Stream, writren by Aida Salazar.

The book begins with Elio’s narration that brims with excitement about his last day of school.

The first page of the YA novel, Stream.

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Celi’s narration of that last day is more dream-like.

A page from the YA novel, Stream.

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In Mexico, out of their digital element, some connection blooms which, Salazar said, may be love.

Adults can read the book, she said, but it’s meant for teens to read in order to see how Elio and Celi struggle to balance digital and in-person relationships as well as connection and disconnection to nature and their families.

“I don't want our young people especially, to lose their understanding of their source, of who we are as natural beings connected to land, to ancestors, to legacy,” she said.

She believes nurturing the stream of connections to those things will go a long way towards helping teens rise above the various social and environmental challenges they will face in their adult lives.

A California Senate committee just gutted one of the state’s most substantial DUI reform bills in years, despite widespread support from other lawmakers and families of drunk driving victims.

The bill would have required in-car breathalyzers for anyone convicted of a DUI, bringing California in line with most states. State law currently only requires the devices, called ignition interlock devices, after repeat offenses or injury crashes.

Sabrina Cervantes, a Democrat from the Inland Empire and chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, provided a hint of changes last week when she said there were amendments to the bill that had been approved unanimously by the committee. This week, an updated version of the legislation emerged, and it effectively killed a key provision to start requiring the devices for thousands of first-time offenders. Such changes are commonly referred to as “hostile amendments” because they are made without the involvement or support of the bill’s author.

Cervantes was arrested for a DUI in a high-profile incident in Sacramento in May 2025. The District Attorney’s Office did not prosecute her after a blood test showed no drugs or alcohol in her system. Cervantes then sued the city of Sacramento and several of its police officers, alleging that that police fabricated evidence and falsely arrested her. Cervantes’s sister, state Assembly candidate Clarissa Cervantes, has herself been convicted of two DUIs in Southern California, according to media reports.

Sabrina Cervantes did not respond to our request for comment for this story. We will update it if she does.

As news of the bill’s gutting spread this week, Kellie Montalvo was left wondering if there’d been some sort of horrible mistake. Montalvo, whose 21-year-old son Benjamin was killed by an impaired driver in Cervantes’s district in 2020, said she was just in Sacramento two weeks ago lobbying lawmakers – including Cervantes – on a slate of dangerous driving bills. Many of those bills have already failed.

“It’s heartbreaking, and I try to tell myself not to lose hope,” Montalvo said. “I mean, California has got to do something. Our numbers are horrific.”

Alcohol-related roadway deaths in California spiked more than 50% in a decade — an increase more than twice as steep as the rest of the country, federal data shows. More than 1,300 people die each year statewide in drunken collisions.

Over the last two years, a CalMatters investigation has shown how state officials have allowed dangerous drivers to stay on the road and kill, and how elected leaders have looked away even as the death toll skyrocketed.

For years, lawmakers have tried and failed to require in-car breathalyzers for all DUI offenders. Progressive justice reform groups and the DMV have opposed similar bills in the past, citing fears about unfairly penalizing poor DUI offenders, high costs and the DMV’s aging technology.

Montalvo and other advocates thought this year might be different. The DMV has actively participated in state hearings and, she and others said, provided technical advice to make sure the bill was realistic. Gov. Gavin Newsom also instructed lawmakers last year to continue to work on the state’s breathalyzer laws and develop “a lasting program that strengthens public safety.”

It’s unclear why this year’s bill was gutted at the 11th hour. Public records show that Senate Appropriations committee staff recently expressed concern about costs.

The amendment process is opaque even to Sacramento insiders.

“Honestly it’s sometimes a bit of a black box even for us as legislators,” said the bill’s author, Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, an Orange County Democrat. “I am still trying myself to get to the bottom of it.”

Petrie-Norris, who has spent the past three years trying to pass a version of this bill, said she does not believe Cervantes’ personal experience played a role in the decision to amend the bill. She added that she is still working to re-amend the measure after “unintended consequences” that she says would make the policy unworkable for the DMV and hurt California’s eligibility for federal funding.

Asked for an interview to explain the changes to the bill, Senate President Pro Tem Monique Límon’s office referred questions to Cervantes. Diana Crofts-Pelayo, Newsom’s chief deputy director of communications, also declined to answer questions about the breathalyzer bill, saying the office does not typically comment on pending legislation.

While the bill heads into the final days of negotiations, Montalvo and other victims’ families are grappling with deja vu. It was just about a year ago that they were standing in the Capitol with photos of their loved ones and told the bill was doomed.

She stays busy checking in with the parole officer for the Riverside County driver who killed her son. Last she heard, the driver was trying to get her license back after being released early from prison.