The Brief

Not long after the Palisades Fire broke out Jan. 7, firefighting aircraft began drawing bright red lines with fire retardant across the Santa Monica Mountains, in an effort to slow and contain the flames.

By the time the fire was out about three weeks later, the MD-87s, S-2Ts and mammoth DC-10s had performed more than 280 drops across 20 square miles, according to data from Cal Fire obtained via public records requests.

LAist partnered with researchers at USC to test samples of the fire retardant gathered from fire zones in the weeks after the Palisades, Eaton and Franklin fires where it remained on the ground.

Those tests found toxic heavy metals including lead, arsenic, cadmium and chromium, which can accumulate in the environment and pose risks to humans and wildlife, according to federal and state environmental agencies.

Fire authorities say retardant is a critical component of the firefighting arsenal.

(

Mario Tama

/

Getty Images

)

Tests USC conducted on LAist's behalf found the presence of heavy metals in unused retardant and in samples collected after the recent fires.

(

Allen J. Schaben

/

Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

)

A product called MVP-FX, a variant of Perimeter Solutions' Phos-Chek, was the primary aerial retardant dropped on the Eaton and Palisades fires, according to the company.

The presence of heavy metals in MVP-Fx has not been previously reported.

LAist shared the USC lab results with Perimeter Solutions. Jeff Emery, Perimeter’s president of global fire safety, said the company’s products, including Phos-Chek MVP-Fx, have passed extensive testing. He added that the amount of heavy metals found by LAist was far below limits set by the Environmental Protection Agency and “any concerning levels for human health and safety.”

The presence of heavy metals isn’t noted in safety documents publicly shared by Perimeter Solutions.

Aircraft often drop more retardant than water each year on fires in California. From 2006 to 2024, more than 194 million gallons of various types of fire retardant were dropped by aircraft, according to data from Cal Fire.

“We don’t check into every single thing that’s in there,” said Chris Jurasek, deputy chief of tactical operations at Cal Fire.

He said his agency relies on the U.S. Forest Service to test and verify the safety of the retardants it uses. The use of fire retardants is a “critical” component of the firefighting arsenal, according to both Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service.

Why we had to run our own tests

Late last year, LAist requested samples of MVP-Fx from Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service and Perimeter Solutions, which manufactures the product, for the purpose of running an independent analysis for heavy metals. All declined.

“It’s not in our interest to share product with public or private agencies,” Jurasek said at the time. “You are not the first person to ask for us to give them fire retardant. It happens. It’s not something we do.”

Fire retardant coats laurel sumac in the Santa Monica Mountains after the Palisades Fire.

(

Jacob Margolis

/

LAist

)

A bag of laurel sumac covered in Phos-Chek, gathered in the Santa Monica Mountains. It was later taken to USC for testing.

(

Jacob Margolis

/

LAist

)

So over the next few months we gathered our own samples from the field.

After the Franklin, Eaton and Palisades fires were under control, I hiked to remote sites and collected vegetation, trash and dirt that had been caked with fire retardant. The samples were placed into baggies and taken to the Environmental Chemistry Laboratory at USC, where the fire retardant was tested for heavy metals.

Marella Schammel, a Ph.D. student, scraped dried red flakes into tubes filled with a diluted mixture of nitric acid and ran them through an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer.

Flakes of Phos-Chek were scraped into tubes along with diluted nitric acid for testing.

(

Jacob Margolis

/

LAist

)

Arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, manganese, nickel, lead, antimony, thallium, vanadium and zinc were all found in the samples.

Emery told LAist that any trace heavy metals found in testing were “naturally occurring.”

Phos-Chek MVP-Fx is primarily made of ammonium phosphates, which are derived from phosphate. That rock, when mined, can contain trace amounts of heavy metals.

“There are no heavy metals added to any of our formulations,” Emery said.

Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service and Perimeter Solutions all dismissed the results of the testing — saying that the samples couldn’t be relied on because they were gathered in the field. That the potential for contamination by ash from burning structures and brush after the retardant was dropped from planes was too great.

Eventually, LAist obtained unused, unmixed MVP-Fx and verified the source and authenticity of the material.

What we found

Marella Schammel, a Ph.D. student at USC, prepares samples of Phos-Chek for testing.

(

Jacob Margolis

/

LAist

)

Samples of Phos-Chek loaded into an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry machine for testing.

(

Jacob Margolis

/

LAist

)

Like the materials collected in fire zones, this unused sample was sent to the USC lab.

Schammel processed the MVP-Fx and found the same heavy metals present as the field samples we gathered.

There were some differences. However, it’s unclear if those differences are due to contamination on the ground or if there’s a variance in the amount of heavy metals present in different batches of the product.

“I’m not too surprised,” said Daniel McCurry, professor of civil and environmental engineering, who oversaw the testing process. Last year he and Schammel analyzed another Phos-Chek variant — LC95 — and found heavy metals as well.

LC95 is one of several USDA approved retardants in use today and one of the variants manufactured by Perimeter Solutions. Cal Fire doesn't use the LC95 variant.

Those results — from tests sparked in part by questions I’d asked McCurry in 2019 about whether we should be concerned about what was in fire retardants — made me want to know more about what is in the fire retardants in use now.

In an effort to compare USC’s test results to the official safety testing required by the federal government, LAist reached out to both Perimeter Solutions and the U.S. Forest Service, an agency within the USDA, for detailed test results for MVP-Fx. Neither would provide them.

In a statement, the U.S. Forest Service said that retardants that qualify for use have to show “nondetectable or trace levels” of certain heavy metals. However, the test results are proprietary information protected by nondisclosure agreements.

'Let people know what they're dealing with'

LAist’s review of publicly available documentation related to MVP-Fx, including its safety data sheet — which is required to warn those who may come in contact with the product of potential risks — found no reference to the presence of heavy metals.

A firefighting aircraft drops fire retardant as the Palisades Fire burns amid a powerful windstorm in January.

(

Mario Tama

/

Getty Images

)

After reviewing LAist’s results and the company’s safety data sheet, Claudia Polsky, director of the Environmental Law Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law, said the company is likely in violation of multiple California laws and regulations including Cal OSHA standards, unfair competition law and Proposition 65.

“The Cal OSHA hazard communication standards require that a safety data sheet identify every hazardous ingredient in the product,” Polsky said. “Companies often resist disclosure requirements.

“To me this situation is disturbing if unsurprising.”

When asked about the safety data sheet, Emery said that the company works to “ensure compliance with all applicable regulatory requirements concerning our product.”

A firefighter stands amid vegetation covered in retardant in the hills of Mandeville Canyon in January.

(

Valerie Macon

/

AFP via Getty Images

)

Some who regularly work with Phos-Chek said that LAist’s findings were a surprise to them.

“ The heavy metal thing, I can tell you, was news to me,” said Joel Lane, air tactical group supervisor with the Orange County Fire Authority. He’s worked in the industry for decades and has come in contact with different variants of Phos-Chek, both during preparation and when it’s been dropped on him by aircraft.

Lane said that he’s never been told or read in official documentation that heavy metals could potentially be present in retardant, which he finds upsetting.

He said the lack of transparency is concerning, but that it wouldn’t be the first time.

Lane feels firefighters were left in the dark about the risk of PFAS — long-lasting chemicals used in firefighting foam and in the heavy gear firefighters wear — that have been tied to elevated rates of cancer, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Lane himself recently survived prostate cancer.

“ Be transparent, be open. Let people know what they're dealing with,” Lane said. It’s only then that they can make informed decisions about risks for themselves, he added.

LAist asked the U.S. Forest Service about potential risks to firefighters, to which they responded that “risk assessments of firefighter exposure to retardants do not indicate an increased risk for health effects,” pointing to a health assessment conducted by the agency, which includes MVP-Fx.

Although the assessment says risks are expected to be generally negligible, it doesn't explicitly mention heavy metal exposure. The U.S. Forest Service didn’t respond to whether heavy metal contamination was taken into consideration for the assessment.

What’s the risk to you?

Heavy metals can pose a serious health risk and have been tied to increased rates of cancer, as well as reproductive and developmental issues in humans.

That said, multiple health experts told LAist that the risk to members of the public exposed to the retardant when doing activities like hiking, is likely low, given the concentration of contaminants present in our samples.

“It should not be a reason for panic, but maybe it's a reason for caution,” said Dr. Ana Navas-Acien, professor and chair of Environmental Health Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, who reviewed the results.

Retardant coats a playground at a Mandeville Canyon home after the Palisades Fire.

(

Valerie Macon

/

AFP via Getty Images

)

Fire retardant covers a pool and lounge chairs dropped from a firefighting aircraft.

(

Justin Sullivan

/

Getty Images

)

Sanjay Mohanty, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA, agreed, saying that the risk for people with limited exposure, such as homeowners or hikers, is “very low.”

If you or your pets are exposed, it’s a good idea to wash it off.

Environmental effects

Retardant is a particular concern if it gets into aquatic ecosystems.

(

Valerie Macon

/

AFP via Getty Images

)

Fire retardants can be particularly dangerous to aquatic ecosystems, according to a U.S. Forest Service environmental impact study published in 2011.

Once retardant enters waterways it can lead to elevated ammonia levels, which in turn can be toxic to salmon and trout. And there’s a possibility that an influx of nutrients from retardant can boost algal growth and create dead zones, killing off organisms there.

Because of these risks, the U.S. Forest Service prohibits the dropping of retardant within 300 feet of waterways, though it does happen. There have been more than 240 intrusions since 2012, according to another U.S. Forest Service environmental impact study from 2023.

However, even if the retardant doesn’t get dropped directly on waterways, it can get washed into them by rain. Heavy metals can settle in streams and ponds and potentially have devastating impacts on organisms there.

William Clements, a professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation at Colorado State University, homed in on the cadmium LAist found in the MVP-Fx.

“ If even a small fraction of that ends up in that stream, that is cause for concern,” he said.

If you or your pets are exposed to fire retardant, it's a good idea to wash it off.

(

David McNew

/

Getty Images North America

)

The heavy metal can get taken up by sponge-like algae, which is then eaten by aquatic insects such as mayflies and stoneflies, which can die when exposed to the cadmium. Exposure to the heavy metal can also inhibit their reproduction, growth and ability to emerge from streams, compromising a source of food for fish and birds, according to Clements.

“ The levels of metals will increase and will be bioconcentrated over time. Not now, but in a year, two years, maybe five years from now,” said Dmitri Deheyn, a marine toxicologist at the  Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

“ People need to make the association that the impact is a lingering impact that will be diffused and diluted over time and space.”

In an effort to figure out how much heavy metal was spread throughout the San Gabriel and Santa Monica mountains during the Eaton and Palisades fires, LAist requested information on the total number of gallons of retardant dropped, from both the U.S. Forest Service and Cal Fire, via records requests. None were fulfilled.

If you’re in the firefighting world and have any samples of Phos-Chek or another type of fire retardant you’d like to share, please reach out.

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.

(

Mario Tama

/

Getty Images

)

"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.

(

Genaro Molina

/

The LA Times via Getty Images

)

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.

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.

(

Digital book screenshot

)

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

A page from the YA novel, Stream.

(

Digital book screenshot

)

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 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

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.