Topline:
The next governor — Republican Steve Hilton or Democrat Xavier Becerra — will inherit the state's challenges, including how to manage the precious resource of water.
Why it matters: Groundwater overuse and sinking land in the state’s agricultural heartland continue to jeopardize both water supply and delivery systems. The fishing industry is cratering and farmers feel so squeezed that some are planting solar panels instead of crops.
Read on ... to learn about each candidate's approach.
California’s next governor must reckon with a state of extremes — where weather swings from drought to deluge, and water divides the land of backyard swimming pools from places where grandmothers fear to bathe babies in water from the tap.
Climate change is raising the stakes, amplifying the cycles of wet to dry and fueling conflicts between water haves and have-nots that have defined California for generations.
The next governor — Republican Steve Hilton or Democrat Xavier Becerra — will inherit these challenges, and more.
Groundwater overuse and sinking land in the state’s agricultural heartland continue to jeopardize both water supply and delivery systems. The fishing industry is cratering, and farmers feel so squeezed that some are planting solar panels instead of crops.
And hundreds of thousands of Californians still lack access to safe, affordable water.
From this shared reality, the two candidates’ strategies diverge: Hilton is outspoken about his plans to clearcut environmental regulations in order to build more ways to store and move water to farms and cities.
Becerra leans on his history as attorney general, the legal arm in California’s first-term fights against President Donald Trump. But Becerra offers no specific proposals on water.
“(Becerra) knows that there is not a whole lot of upside for him in coming out with detailed plans ahead of the election,” said Max Gomberg, an independent water consultant and former climate and conservation manager for the State Water Resources Control Board, who resigned in protest of the Newsom administration’s water policies.
“Because no matter what he says, someone will pop up to criticize it.”
Republican Hilton’s water strategy is: more.
More water for farms. More storage. More desalination. More water recycling. More of the state’s money, spent to cut expensive water bills and build more infrastructure. Less of the rulebooks for protecting endangered species from California’s water delivery systems — which he says get in the way of more.
“We can and should have abundant water in California, and there’s no reason that we don’t other than bad policy and mismanagement,” Hilton told CalMatters. “You get to abundant supply with a much more aggressive plan for building and running capture, storage, distribution of water in all its forms.”
Hilton, political strategist and former host of The Next Revolution on Fox News, traded the United Kingdom for California permanently in 2012 and settled in the wealthy Bay Area enclave of Atherton. In 2024, he wrote a water policy strategy with Edward Ring of the libertarian think tank California Policy Center.
The plan, titled “Achieving Water Abundance,” estimates that making abundant water a reality could take as much as $150 billion, assuming regulatory reforms.
Hilton and Ring proposed a combination of funding sources, including a 2% allocation from the state’s general fund gleaned by “cutting wasteful and ineffective programs.”
Water experts are skeptical.
“Rule 1. There is plenty of water, there is no more cheap water,” said Greg Gartrell, retired water manager at a Northern California water district and now an adjunct fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. “The only cheap water is water that someone else pays for and gives to you below cost.”
Hilton is bullish on building. That includes Sites Reservoir — the Northern California reservoir expected to cost between $6.2 and $6.8 billion that’s intended to store Sacramento River water to send south. The project is closer to clearing a major permitting hurdle after pressure from Newsom and other backers to relax limits aimed at protecting fish and others relying on the river’s water, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Hilton also backs the Trump administration’s controversial proposal to build Shasta Dam higher.
The powerful Westlands Water District, the nation’s largest farm water supplier and a major player in California’s $60 billion agricultural industry, has long supported both.
“It is good to hear that Mr. Hilton is considering water infrastructure, and really already considering water projects,” said Allison Febbo, Westlands general manager. Neither candidate, Febbo said, has met with Westlands staff, and the district is not permitted to make endorsements or contributions to campaigns.
Opponents of the reservoir project and dam raise, including fishing and environmental groups as well as the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, fear that further loss of river flows will harm iconic salmon and other species already imperiled under federal and state water management.
Though Hilton said he sees the salmon industry as “hugely important, just as important as the ag industry,” his goal, he said, is to “rebalance the system in favor of agriculture and domestic use away from the very, very narrow focus on what they call environmental use, but actually it’s much narrower than that — it’s a couple of fish species.”
Plummeting population numbers forced the cancellation of salmon fishing for three years in a row during Newsom’s tenure as governor.
The one thing Hilton’s determined not to build is the Delta tunnel, Newsom’s version of a decades-old plan to route water around — rather than through — the fragile Delta in order to send more water south. That, for Hilton, is a building project too far.
“I’m totally against it,” Hilton said. “It’s ridiculous, and unnecessary.”
Frontrunner candidate Becerra — former state assemblymember, congressman, California attorney general, and U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services — is much more cautious about making promises.
Unlike Hilton, Becerra has not detailed water plans and has no specific water policies on his campaign website. He refused multiple requests from CalMatters for an interview on water issues. CalMatters eventually emailed his campaign the same list of questions that Hilton responded to over the phone.
After several follow-ups, spokesperson Jonathan Underland responded:
“As governor, Becerra will bring everyone to the table to modernize our water infrastructure, guarantee safe, affordable drinking water for every Californian, give farms and businesses the reliable supply they need to grow, and prepare for the wet and dry years ahead.”
Becerra’s is an audible silence in a state where 83% of Democrats, 77% of Independents, and 67% of Republicans say they are more likely to support a candidate who “prioritizes improving California’s water reliability and affordability,” according to polling earlier this summer by the Association of California Water Agencies and FM3 Research.
Instead, Becerra has said he’ll listen.
“I will tell you, as governor, when you’re at the table sitting with me, I will listen to what you think we need to do,” he told the audience at an April forum in Fresno hosted by powerful agricultural groups. “Because water is more precious than gold. Let’s make it work.”
Some water experts say Becerra’s deliberative approach is refreshing on an issue as complex as California’s water.
“The idea of a governor who wants to think about things and talk to everyone — that’s music to my ears,” said Felicia Marcus, who led the State Water Resources Control Board under Gov. Jerry Brown. “It’s something you want a governor to do even after they’re elected, you know, versus being fully baked.”
Others are more cynical.
“Becerra’s right. It would be great if everybody was at the table,” said Peter Gleick, climate scientist and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, a global water think tank. “But what’s being served?”
Where Becerra is light on specifics, he’s deep on history. As attorney general, he sued the Trump administration more than 120 times. His lawsuits beat back a Westlands-assisted effort to raise Shasta Dam, and contested a Trump proposal affecting water delivery systems that state officials feared would harm salmon and other species.
At their only one-on-one debate, Hilton described this track record as Becerra “suing to stop our farmers getting the water that they need.”
Becerra fired back: “Donald Trump was trying to impose his standards on California when it comes to water infrastructure. We have a right to make sure water in California is regulated by California.”
For all of Becerra’s and Hilton’s barbs, though, they echo each other in some ways.
Both agreed at the Fresno forum during the primary election that protecting groundwater is important and both agreed the state’s landmark policy to rein in agricultural overpumping may be overburdened by bureaucracy.
But where Hilton said the answer is more surface water and that “it’s all insane. It all needs to be cut back and shut down wherever possible,” Becerra said rules are necessary.
“I’m not sure how some folks who want to get rid of our rules that help us manage groundwater believe that we can do the right thing without some guidance. I agree that maybe there’s too much regulation … and we have to trim it back. But let’s be honest: we need groundwater.”
Like Hilton, Becerra, too, has centered his limited public remarks on the promise of abundance — predictable supplies for farms, conservation, groundwater recharge and wastewater recycling.
“We have to do a far better job of storage, of conveyance, and we have to do a far better job of conservation and distribution,” Becerra said at the Fresno forum. “We have enough water in California. It’s making the best use of it, and the state has an obligation to be the big investor to make it work for everyone.”
Unlike Hilton, though, Becerra’s version of "more" may include the deeply controversial Delta tunnel, called the Delta Conveyance Project.
Questioned about it at a January forum hosted by California Environmental Voters and others, Becerra nodded to ecological concerns tunnel opponents raise, but added, “We should never say no to anything until we’ve examined it completely … everything should be on the table, and everyone should be at the table.”
"More" is a strategy that California governors have tried before, over and over, with mixed results. But none have moved water at the scale — or with the hubris — of Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown.
In the 1960s, in a feat of nature-defying engineering, Brown spearheaded construction of the State Water Project to carry Northern California river water to Central and Southern California.
“I wanted this to be a monument to me,” Brown said of the project, which now funnels water through 705 miles of aqueducts and canals to two-thirds of California’s population and Central Valley farmland.
The emphasis, noted Norris Hundley — one of California’s great chroniclers of water — was Brown’s.
But the lengths California’s leaders have taken to move water from rivers and aquifers to cities and farms have consequences. A dying Delta. Undrinkable water. Disappearing species. Sinking earth.
In his 1952 novel East of Eden, John Steinbeck described how the turning of California’s great water wheel drove out memories of what came before: “And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
But in this new California, where the wheel turns wild and fast, Californians remember both. The state is recovering from its driest three-year stretch on record, followed by catastrophic floods. The Colorado River’s massive reservoirs plunged to record lows this past summer. Now, California is on the brink of an El Niño winter, and the rainfall and flooding it could bring.
The question is whether the next governor is ready to manage what’s coming. Gleick isn’t sure.
“Here’s the problem: The problem is what we’ve always done for California water no longer works,” Gleick said. “And no governor has been able to move beyond incremental approaches, incremental changes to past policies.”
Topline:
L.A. County quietly stopped handing out syringes and pipes at its Skid Row Care Campus in August and has ended its contract with Homeless Health Care Los Angeles, the nonprofit that ran harm reduction there, effective Tuesday.
Why it matters: The goal of these programs is to keep people who use drugs alive and free of infections like HIV and hepatitis, while working to connect them with services including treatment. The pause comes amid a growing cluster of HIV cases in Skid Row.
Why now: The county says the temporary pause stems “in part” from concerns raised by community stakeholders and local businesses.
What’s next: Homeless Health Care Los Angeles is laying off 134 workers. New providers have rehired many of them, the county says.
Los Angeles County quietly stopped handing out syringes and pipes at the county’s flagship services hub in Skid Row in August, and has now terminated the contract of the nonprofit that ran harm reduction programs there, the Department of Health Services told LAist.
The pause — which county officials said is temporary — began in August, “in part due to concerns that community stakeholders and local businesses raised to County leadership,” according to a statement provided to LAist by Thomas Lynch, a spokesperson for the county’s Department of Health Services.
The changes come amid a growing cluster of HIV cases in Skid Row and mounting pressure from the Trump administration and neighboring businesses on L.A. programs that distribute drug paraphernalia. Critics argue the programs enable drug addiction and contribute to crime in the area.
The goal of these programs is to keep people who use drugs alive and free of infections like HIV and hepatitis, while working to connect them with services including treatment.
In late August, the county Department of Public Health identified a cluster of HIV cases among people who live in and around Skid Row. As of Sunday, 15 people had been linked to it, 11 of them women, according to Becky Schlikerman, a spokesperson for that department.
In a statement, Schlikerman said both substance use and sexual transmission are being investigated as possible factors, and that the department is working with street medicine teams and harm reduction groups to expand HIV testing and prevention in the area.
“There is an active HIV outbreak in Skid Row, so reducing safe injection supplies to people who use drugs in this moment seems particularly dangerous,” said Ricky Bluthenthal, distinguished professor of population and public health sciences at USC’s Keck School of Medicine.
The Skid Row Care Campus still distributes naloxone — the opioid overdose reversal drug — wound care supplies and safe sex supplies, Lynch said, but “distribution of syringes and pipes is currently on pause.”
He also said they have not set a date for syringe services to resume, that the pause applies only at the campus, and that staff are referring people to syringe programs elsewhere.
The state lists 24 authorized syringe services programs in L.A. County, according to the California Department of Public Health. Two are based in or next to Skid Row.
Harm reduction services are provided across much of L.A. County, according to the L.A. County Department of Public Health.
The county has also terminated its contract with Homeless Health Care Los Angeles effective Tuesday, county officials said. The county announced the change in an Aug. 28 statement, the same month the syringe and pipe pause began.
Homeless Health Care Los Angeles, one of L.A.’s best-known harm reduction providers, notified the state in September that it would permanently lay off 134 workers — including 117 employees at the Skid Row Care Campus — effective Tuesday, Nov. 3, according to state Employment Development Department records.
“Right now, HHCLA is being forced to say goodbye to some deeply valued staff and reduce services that some of LA’s most marginalized rely on every day,” the nonprofit wrote in an Instagram post in late September.
In the same post, Homeless Health Care Los Angeles said its jobs program for people in Skid Row “no longer exists.” The nonprofit said the program offered “real income, real pathways forward for people too often shut out of opportunity.”
The county is bringing in nonprofits St. Joseph Center and LA Community Health Project instead, officials said. Meanwhile, Social Model Recovery Systems will expand its existing services and Wesley Health Centers will continue providing healthcare on site.
In statements provided to LAist, L.A. County's health services and homelessness departments described the shake-up as “contractor changes” made as part of an effort to “strengthen operations.” Officials are updating campus protocols, “strengthening on-site safety” and expanding substance use treatment and healthcare, according to those statements.
County officials said they are committed to a transition that avoids disruption for people using the campus.
“Providers are hiring from within the Skid Row community and have worked hard to retain staff who were working for Homeless Health Care Los Angeles,” Lynch told LAist.
Those providers have hired more than 80 people so far, and nearly 90% previously worked for Homeless Health Care Los Angeles, according to the department.
Representatives for Homeless Health Care Los Angeles did not respond to repeated requests for interview or comment.
The nonprofit has worked in Skid Row since the 1980s and ran the campus’s harm reduction and overdose response programs. It celebrated its 40th anniversary this year.
A group of Skid Row community members and laid-off campus workers calling itself the Skid Row Coalition for Community Safety has launched a campaign saying L.A. County is “playing politics with people’s lives.”
“Supervisor Hilda Solis and LA County chose to cowardly abandon the recommendations of public health experts and the Skid Row community,” the group said in a statement on its website.
County Supervisor Hilda Solis, who represents the area and authored the 2022 motion that created the Skid Row Action Plan, told LAist in a statement that the decision to end Homeless Health Care Los Angeles’ contract was made jointly by the county’s health services and homelessness departments.
“Some services have been paused to allow the incoming provider to onboard staff and establish operations,” Solis said. “This is a necessary part of coordinating the transition.”
“I am proud of the Skid Row Action Plan and its commitment to expanding low-barrier services, health care, and pathways to housing,” Solis’ statement continued. “That commitment remains unchanged.”
Solis completes her final term next month and is on Tuesday’s ballot running for California’s 38th Congressional District, which covers parts of eastern Los Angeles and Orange counties but not Skid Row.
The Skid Row Care Campus opened in spring 2025. County officials call it the first community-designed homeless services hub in the nation.
The campus logs more than 2,700 visits a day, a count that includes repeat visitors, according to the county. It costs about $26 million a year to operate. Funding is secured through June 2027. The budget for the following fiscal year has not been finalized.
The campus in the heart of Skid Row drew scrutiny this year. In May, Fox 11 aired a segment featuring Estela Lopez, executive director of the Downtown Industrial Business Improvement District, who called the campus a “meth mansion.” L.A. Mayor Karen Bass told the TV station she was concerned about problems at the campus.
LAPD responded 693 times to the two blocks around it between January and late May, and recorded four homicides there in the first four months of 2026, according to LAPD figures first reported by Fox 11.
On Oct. 8, federal agents and LAPD officers carried out a drug sweep dubbed “Operation Save Skid Row,” centered about a block from the campus. Federal prosecutors charged 28 people and arrested 23, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
In July 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing agencies to stop funding “so-called ‘harm reduction’” efforts. In April, federal health officials barred grantees from using federal money for pipes and drug test strips, on top of a longstanding ban on federal funds for syringes.
L.A. County officials have not said whether federal policy played a role in the pause. The campus is funded through opioid settlement money, Medi-Cal managed care plans, the state and the county — not federal grants, according to officials.
County officials and employees have credited harm reduction programs with helping drive down overdose deaths, which fell 6% in 2025 — the third straight annual decline — according to the county Department of Public Health.
Harm reduction programs including needle and syringe exchanges started in L.A. more than three decades ago in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. L.A. County declared a local public health emergency in 2000 to authorize syringe exchange under a new state law, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation report.
People who use fentanyl in L.A. have increasingly shifted from injecting it to smoking it, according to a 2025 study co-authored by Bluthenthal, with USC’s Keck School of Medicine.
Bluthenthal called the recent syringe and pipe distribution pause at the Skid Row Care Campus “obviously a setback.”
“Harm reduction programs, through providing social and material support, have been one of the most consistent pathways to treatment for people who are currently using illicitly purchased drugs,” he said.
In a statement on the pause, officials at L.A. County’s Department of Health Services said people who receive syringe services are three times more likely to reduce or stop using drugs and five times more likely to enter substance use treatment.
John Raphling, an organizer with the Los Angeles Community Action Network based in Skid Row, said his group is “extremely concerned that the county is cutting these services” and that Skid Row residents “were not at all consulted.”
“Harm reduction services, like those provided by Homeless Health Care, help save lives, prevent the spread of disease, and allow people to survive and work through their recovery,” Raphling said.
Some Skid Row residents see it differently — including Don Garza, who has lived in the neighborhood for 27 years and resides in a single-room-occupancy building there.
“It’s not helping anyone,” Garza told LAist. “It exponentially accelerates the overdose deaths.”
“The part of harm reduction that we still need is the overdose prevention, but without the pipes and the needles,” Garza said. “We still need the Narcan because Skid Row is not going anywhere, and people are still gonna OD, and they're gonna die.”
Topline:
The U.S. Supreme Court has denied a last-minute request from the Department of Justice to wade into its unprecedented feud with California over the state's voter rolls.
What happened: The court denied taking up the Justice Department's appeal today, just hours after it was filed. Election Day is tomorrow.
Why now: The appeal was the department's latest foray into state election administration, which a federal judge referred to last week as "a broad, ongoing pattern of attempted election interference by federal officials."
About the claims: The DOJ says it has identified 20,000 "likely" noncitizens on California's voter roll whose ballots should not be counted until their citizenship can be verified. Over the weekend, data scientists at University of California Los Angeles' Voting Rights Project were granted access to the DOJ's list through a court order in another lawsuit and found that 42% of the names on the list do not appear on California's current voter roll. That analysis also found naturalized citizens on the DOJ's list.
The U.S. Supreme Court has denied a last-minute request from the Department of Justice to wade into its unprecedented feud with California over the state's voter rolls.
The court denied taking up the Justice Department's appeal on Monday evening, just hours after it was filed. Election Day is Tuesday.
The appeal was the department's latest foray into state election administration, which a federal judge referred to last week as "a broad, ongoing pattern of attempted election interference by federal officials."
After that judge, David Carter, a Clinton appointee, and a divided 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel rejected the DOJ's request to order California to set aside and stop processing the ballots of thousands of people, the DOJ sought injunctive relief from the high court.
The DOJ says it has identified 20,000 "likely" noncitizens on California's voter roll whose ballots should not be counted until their citizenship can be verified.
Courts so far have sided with California and Los Angeles County's arguments that the federal government's list is unreliable, and that creating a novel system to segregate ballots while voting is already underway is infeasible.
"[T]here is a material risk that granting the United States its requested relief would result in disenfranchisement and could jeopardize the County's entire election," 9th Circuit Judges Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, and Gabriel Sanchez, a Biden appointee, wrote in their Friday decision rejecting the Justice Department's emergency request.
The two judges cited longstanding legal precedent, known as the Purcell principle, that election rules should not be altered on the eve of an election, as well as the fact that the Constitution gives states authority to run elections. The opinion also cited the National Voter Registration Act, which bars states from systematically removing ineligible voters within 90 days of a federal election.
The panel's third judge, Patrick Bumatay, also a Trump appointee, dissented.
The actual number of ballots in dispute is likely much smaller than 20,000, since county election officials have found that many of the people on DOJ's list did not have active voter registrations and were not mailed ballots.
Over the weekend, data scientists at University of California Los Angeles' Voting Rights Project were granted access to the DOJ's list through a court order in another lawsuit and found that 42% of the names on the list do not appear on California's current voter roll. That analysis also found naturalized citizens on the DOJ's list.
The Supreme Court's refusal to intervene comes as the Justice Department has been escalating its feud with California election officials.
In recent weeks, the Department of Justice has sent subpoenas to election officials in California, and reminded officials that they could be criminally prosecuted for allowing ineligible voters to cast ballots.
A federal judge in San Francisco issued a temporary restraining order late Friday barring the Trump administration from threatening, intimidating or coercing election officials to demand they stop processing the ballots of registered voters that the federal government alleges are ineligible to vote. The federal government has appealed the order.
Copyright 2026 NPR
Topline:
If Rep. Mike Levin’s proposal moves forward, the spent nuclear fuel stashed on the beach at San Onofre will be stored and processed at one of several potential campuses in other states. Levin, a Democratic congress member representing parts of San Diego and Orange County, discussed his plan from a point above the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station last week.
Why it matters: Levin is pushing to create facilities called Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses in communities that want to recycle some of the spent fuel and store remaining waste, in exchange for economic development opportunities. The Department of Energy said the campuses could “attract significant investment, expand domestic manufacturing, and create thousands of new high-paying jobs in their respective regions.” Utah, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Idaho have stepped up as potential hosts for the facilities. Finland and Canada have embarked on similar efforts to locate nuclear waste facilities, with the consent and collaboration of local communities, according to a report by Levin’s office. Finland expects to permanently dispose of nuclear waste as soon as next year.
The backstory: San Onofre ceased operating in 2013, after a newly installed steam generator failed, leaving the plant inoperable. Officials began decommissioning the plant in 2020. Since then, 700 million tons of building material have been hauled away from the site, and the spent fuel rods were moved from cooling pools to dry storage on the beach, Levin said. But there isn’t a permanent repository for the spent nuclear fuel, following backlash to an earlier proposal to store the waste.
If Rep. Mike Levin’s proposal moves forward, the spent nuclear fuel stashed on the beach at San Onofre will be stored and processed at one of several potential campuses in other states.
Levin, a Democratic congress member representing parts of San Diego and Orange County, discussed his plan from a point above the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station last week.
“Since I've been in Congress, getting this spent nuclear fuel off our coast has been one of my top priorities,” Levin said, overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the steel and concrete canisters housing nuclear fuel rods. “I have been in this fight for eight years, fighting the status quo of inaction on spent nuclear fuel.”
He’s pushing to create facilities called Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses in communities that want to recycle some of the spent fuel and store remaining waste, in exchange for economic development opportunities.
The Department of Energy said the campuses could “attract significant investment, expand domestic manufacturing, and create thousands of new high-paying jobs in their respective regions.” Utah, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Idaho have stepped up as potential hosts for the facilities.
Finland and Canada have embarked on similar efforts to locate nuclear waste facilities, with the consent and collaboration of local communities, according to a report by Levin’s office. Finland expects to permanently dispose of nuclear waste as soon as next year.
Levin said similar U.S. sites could begin operation by the late 2030s, and he’s pushing to make the San Onofre plant a priority for nuclear waste removal and storage.
San Onofre ceased operating in 2013, after a newly installed steam generator failed, leaving the plant inoperable. Officials began decommissioning the plant in 2020.
Since then, 700 million tons of building material have been hauled away from the site, and the spent fuel rods were moved from cooling pools to dry storage on the beach, Levin said.
But there isn’t a permanent repository for the spent nuclear fuel, following backlash to an earlier proposal to store the waste.
“The federal government still hasn't done what it pledged to do all the way back in 1998, and so communities like ours have been left holding the fuel,” Levin said.
The federal government previously designated the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in Nevada as the permanent storage site for nuclear waste. But former president Barack Obama cancelled that plan in 2010, following fierce opposition from environmentalists, local groups and tribes.
Without a permanent storage repository, spent nuclear fuel has remained on site at San Onofre, where its location on the coast, near earthquake faults and next to Camp Pendleton make the waste vulnerable to natural disaster or national security threats.
To address those risks, Levin introduced the Spent Fuel Prioritization Act with co-authors including Rep. Darrell Issa, a San Diego Republican, and Rep.Young Kim, an Orange County Republican. It would move nuclear sites with high seismic hazards, large populations and national security risk, such as San Onofre, up the list for fuel removal and storage. The bill is waiting for consideration in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, according to Levin’s 2026 report on San Onofre.
Another challenge concerns transport of spent nuclear fuel. Levin said next year a specially designed train called the Atlas Railcar System will complete testing and move the first spent fuel rods from Virginia to Idaho. The Atlas is a 12-axle railcar equipped with sensors and monitoring systems, which can transport nearly half a million pounds of spent nuclear fuel, according to the Department of Energy. It took ten years and cost $33 million dollars to build.
Levin has also introduced bills to create a nuclear waste administration, to require nuclear waste canisters to last 100 years instead of the current 40 years, and to increase public engagement and improve safety inspection at decommissioning power plants.
“I will not declare victory on this until the last canister has left San Onofre,” he said.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
Topline:
Voter turnout is tracking higher across the state than at this point in the June primary, which is typical for elections.
About the results: No results will be released until after the polls close at 8 p.m. on Tuesday. The first tallies will be vote-by-mail ballots, followed by early in-person voting.'
Read on ... for more about the vote counting process.
Election officials in both Los Angeles and Orange counties report the early vote is trending higher than the last midterm election in 2022 — on trend with expectations across the U.S.
Nationally, Democrats have outpaced Republicans returning early ballots by more than 10 points, according to tracking by the University of Florida Election Lab.
Here's what you should know about the local vote totals currently released:
Keep in mind that Nov. 10 will be the final day for votes postmarked by Nov. 3 to arrive at county elections offices, so the total number of votes cast won't be known until then.
In L.A. County, updates on the counting are expected to continue through Nov. 26.
The county must certify results by Dec. 3.
In Orange County, updates on the counting are expected to continue through Nov. 26.
The county must certify results by Dec. 3.
That hasn't been true in quite some time. It takes a while to get results because after the initial tallies on election night, there are still many, many votes to count, and more mail-in ballots are usually arriving.
Here’s what we know so far.
Los Angeles County has more than 5.9 million registered voters. As of Monday, Nov. 2:
What's next:
Orange County has more than 1.9 million registered voters. As of Monday evening, Nov. 2:
What's next:
Political Data Inc. is tracking ballot returns across California and in some high-profile races.
As of Monday, Nov. 2, statewide turnout is 25%. Note: That is already higher than this time in the primary. Democrats outnumber Republicans statewide by almost double, and have returned more ballots so far (3 million compared to 1.6 million — representing 29% and 28% of each party's registered voters.
Because of the increasing use of vote-by-mail ballots, the tally has gotten longer, according to the California Voter Foundation. In an analysis, the organization found:
Election officials must physically open mail-in ballots and verify signatures.
Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, recently wrote about the ripple effect of turning in mail-in ballots by hand or in drop boxes on Election Day. She wrote, for our partner newsroom CalMatters:
"We turn in ballots in envelopes on Election Day that take time and care to process and cannot be processed until after Election Day. Processing these ballots — which account for as much as a quarter of all ballots cast — creates a bottleneck I like to call 'the pig in the python effect.' It prevents counties from doing other tasks they need to do to certify the results."
That said, counting has been speeding up considerably. According to Alexander's organization, the overall share of ballots counted within seven days of the election jumped from 72% in 2022 to 93% in the June primary. L.A. County is moving to around-the-clock counting this cycle, in a move election officials say will help increase voter confidence in the results.
