The Brief

There are more than 35,000 idle oil wells in California, according to state data. Idle wells are wells that haven’t produced any oil for two years or more and have yet to be properly plugged or put back into production.

Many of these wells leak methane, a powerful planet-heating gas. They often also leak chemicals that have been linked to cancer and other health impacts.

L.A. County has more idle (and active) wells than any other urban area in the state, putting the health of thousands of Angelenos — largely low-income communities of color — at risk from chemicals that may leak from idle wells. That’s why many advocate groups say these regulations don’t go far enough, and that state policies should put more pressure on oil companies to clean these wells up, including a timeline on closing idle wells, especially those near where people live, play and work.

And they say oil companies, not taxpayers, should be required to pay for that cleanup. That’s the subject of a new report from the Sierra Club.

A multibillion dollar need

David Haake speaks at a press conference announcing the release of the Sierra Club's report on idle oil wells on Tuesday, Dec. 5 at Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area. The Inglewood oil field is in the background.

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Erin Stone

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LAist

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The report used data from CalGEM — the state agency that regulates oil drilling operations — to identify operators of tens of thousands of idle wells across the state and found it could cost $10 billion to clean up all the idle wells across California. The report also found that large oil companies operating in the state have more than enough profit to pay for plugging their own idle wells. The report found that Chevron, Aera Energy and California Resources Corporation own two thirds of idle wells in the state.

“The oil industry created this problem, and it's their responsibility to clean it up,” said David Haake, a professor at UCLA’s school of medicine who has long lived in Culver City, near the Inglewood oil field, which has active and idle wells. Haake has lost two spouses to cancer, which he attributes to living in close proximity to oil drilling. That’s the reason he became a volunteer with the Sierra Club.

Jasmin Vazin of the Sierra Club.

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Erin Stone

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LAist

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The report relied on publicly disclosed profit data from those companies. The report calls for additional policies, such as putting a time limit of six months to a year for how long idle oil wells can remain unplugged.

“California taxpayers should not be on the hook to pay the billions of dollars it will cost to clean up these wells,” said Jasmine Vazin, who focuses on the oil industry for the Sierra Club. “We need policy changes that hold this industry accountable for the cost of cleaning up their wells.”

State laws on idle oil wells

Under state law, oil operators have three options when it comes to dealing with an idle oil well:

• They can pay a yearly fee for each of their idle wells.
• They can submit a plan to clean up and plug those wells. 
• They can do nothing … and the well will be declared abandoned and become the responsibility of the state … and taxpayers … to clean up. Then those wells become designated as “orphan” wells.

Federal and state laws also require fossil fuel companies to set aside funds to ensure that wells are ultimately plugged and remediated. 

There’s been some progress in advancing more oversight of idle wells in recent years — state rules that went into effect in 2019 require oil operators to regularly monitor their idle wells for leaks. Rules that went into effect as a result of 2016 legislation have also led to improvements in plugging more idle wells, according to a study released by CalGEM.

CalGEM also recently released a priority list of orphan wells to clean up, including several sites in L.A. The agency estimates cleaning up those wells will cost $80 million from both state and federal funds, such as the Inflation Reduction Act.

But that cost is why Vazin said the state should do more to prevent idle wells from becoming “orphan” wells in the first place.

“If all of the idle wells we currently have become orphan, what CalGem is doing now — plugging orphan wells with federal and state taxpayer money — is what we're going to be facing for all of the wells in California,” she said.

What the oil industry says

The Western States Petroleum Association, the oil industry’s trade organization that has long lobbied for less strict industry regulations in the state, refuted the Sierra Club’s findings.

“This report is meant to provide policy makers an erroneous and exaggerated picture of idle well policy in the state,” it wrote in a statement.

Chevron, Aera Energy and the California Resources Corporation, which oversee the most idle wells in the state, all told LAist that they have plugged thousands of oil wells since 2019, far above the pace reflected in CalGEM data revealed in the Sierra Club's report.

Chevron stated they have plugged more than 2,200 wells so far this year and 6,800 wells in California over the last five years. The Sierra Club report, based on CalGEM data, shows the total number of wells Chevron plugged in 2022 was 154, while the total between 2018-2022 was 1,214.

Aera Energy oversees the second highest number of idle wells, and they wrote in a statement to LAist that since 2019, they’ve plugged more than 5,000 idle wells and are on track to plug 950 in 2023.

The California Resources Corporation oversees the third-highest number of idle wells in the state and the largest number in L.A. county, according to the Sierra Club’s report. In an emailed statement to LAist, spokesperson Rich Venn said the company has permanently plugged about 1,400 idle wells in the last two years and that the company currently oversees about 5,000 idle wells, as opposed to the 6,658 stated in the Sierra Club’s report, which used CalGEM data through April 2023.

“CRC invests significantly to permanently plug idle wells in accordance with state mandates,” Venn wrote.

Across the board, most of these wells are being plugged in rural areas (where the vast majority of these wells are located), according to a 2020 investigation by the L.A. Times and the Center for Public Integrity.

Venn added that the company is also investing in new technologies to repurpose their idle oil wells to extract geothermal energy, a climate-friendly renewable energy that California is working to expand as it transitions from fossil fuels.

Longer wait times for graffiti removal and streetlight repair. Fewer police officers per shift. Completely eliminating school crossing guards.

Those are just some of the service cuts the city of South Gate made earlier this year as it stared down a $9.4 million annual budget deficit and a looming fiscal emergency.

But none of that was enough to convince South Gate voters to approve an 8% utility user tax that would have been tacked onto a wide range of utility bills, including electricity, water, cable and phone service. Now, the city is gearing up for more cuts, including closing sports fields and the city pool for the winter months.

South Gate’s utility tax was just one of the many ways Southern California cities asked their residents to give them more money via local tax initiatives this November, with proposed taxes on everything from hotel stays to cannabis businesses.

And those early results suggest South Gate is an outlier: Of the 32 total local tax measures on the ballot in Los Angeles and Orange counties, all but six appear poised to pass, according to early results. (There are still several more days of vote counting to come.)

Eleven transient occupancy tax measures, which tax overnight stays in hotels or short-term rentals, passed in cities from Burbank to Los Alamitos. Most cities sought to increase their existing hotel taxes by anywhere from 1 to 5 percentage points, while Lynwood residents voted to establish a hotel tax for the first time.

Business-related taxes, such as taxes on business licenses or on certain businesses, also mostly passed, as did most parcel taxes in cities including Pasadena and Culver City.

But sales taxes saw more mixed results. Cudahy, San Gabriel, Orange, Santa Ana and Los Angeles all approved sales tax measures, while voters in Diamond Bar, Hermosa Beach and San Clemente all voted down their local sales tax proposals.

Most of those sales taxes focused on maintaining basic city services in communities facing big budget deficits, driven by the rising costs of insurance, maintenance and infrastructure projects, and employee pensions, among other factors. But in San Clemente, the proposed 1% sales tax would have specifically funded sand replenishment and other beach projects, along with wildfire prevention work. That measure appeared to be headed for failure, with just 36% of voters in support as of Wednesday afternoon.

Voters in San Marino approved an extension of their utility tax, and increased it from 5% to 6%. Last year, the tax provided almost $2.2 million in revenue.

City officials in South Gate had hoped for a similar boon, and projected the utility tax would bring in an estimated $10.4 million per year in general fund revenue, while raising total utility costs by about $39 per month for a typical household.

Leading up to the election, the city of South Gate pointed to other neighboring cities that have their own utility taxes, including Downey, Lakewood and Norwalk, where the tax mostly hovers around 5%. “South Gate is the exception, not the rule,” noted one city presentation that pointed to these other taxes in a bid to coax voters to go along.

Voters weren’t convinced. “I’m extremely frustrated that you now want to do electricity, water, sewer, cable, cell phone, gas. ... That hurts us. You’re passing that on to us and that is absolutely not acceptable,” said one resident at a City Council meeting on the measure earlier this year.

LAist has reached out to the city of South Gate about what’s next for the city.

The city of West Hollywood has approved an ordinance to create a domestic partnership registry for people in polyamorous relationships.

The domestic partnership registry extends certain legal protections for people in the city, including visitation rights to hospitals and jails in West Hollywood and some tenant protections. The registry doesn’t replace the state’s marriage or the state’s domestic partnership laws.

“It's a landmark ordinance and really puts and continues to elevate West Hollywood as a city that is here to support queer people and queer families as they evolve in their needs,” said Chelsea Byers, a West Hollywood City Council member. “I think that's a real joy that we can bring to people — that they can live in a greater sense of being seen and understood.”

How it works

To file, people in a multi-partner relationship will submit a form in person that will be provided by the City Clerk’s office — all members of the relationship will have to provide identification to the clerk.

The ordinance also offers an option by mail, if the signatures are notarized.

The ordinance builds on historical precedent

In 1985, the city became the first city in the nation to create a similar domestic partnership registry for same-sex couples. Similar to that registry, people outside the city can also register.

“This new law not only gives polyamorous unions legal recognition, it also gives people permission to imagine a future together and to plan their lives openly,” said Christina Fialho, president and founder of Rewrite the BiLine, an advocacy group for bisexual people and nonnuclear families, who advocated for the ordinance.

Several cities in Massachusetts have also passed multipartner domestic partnership laws.

Among the sweeping victories by Democrats on Tuesday were wins in several congressional districts that Republicans had redrawn explicitly to boost their party ahead of the midterms.

Republicans were bracing for some losses this election cycle, so last year President Donald Trump urged his party to take the extraordinary step of engaging in mid-decade redistricting efforts.

As of Tuesday night, many of those efforts had failed.

That included in Florida, where multiple Democrats — Kathy Castor, Pia Dandiya and Jared Moskowitz — won in redrawn districts, according to race calls by the Associated Press.

In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Don Davis held on to his 1st District seat, even though Republicans in the state redrew it to be more competitive for the GOP. Trump would have won the redrawn 1st by nearly 12 percentage points, according to the Downballot.

Trump would have won by even more in Alabama's redrawn 2nd Congressional District, which Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures held on to, according to the AP race call.

Republicans in Alabama redid the state's congressional map after the U.S. Supreme Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act earlier this year.

And in Texas, which was the first state to redistrict at Trump's urging, a few of the redrawn districts had gone to Democrats.

Republicans redrew their maps with the expectation that the coalition of voters Trump won over in 2024 would support them this cycle. In Texas, Republicans were banking on gains made with Latino voters in new maps.

But many of those voters shifted their support to Democrats this year.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Nationwide election results came at a relentless pace Tuesday night, each more of a Democratic upset than the last. But you may not have known if you were attending the California Republican Party's election night event in Garden Grove.

In the dimly lit Hyatt ballroom where gubernatorial longshot Steve Hilton and his supporters gathered, the news channels were off, the music was turned up and “Don’t Stop Believin’” blasted throughout.

Minutes after the polls closed at 8 p.m., the Associated Press called the governor’s race for Democratic favorite Xavier Becerra.

Around the room, the occasional person glanced at their phone to sneak a peek at the growing GOP carnage. More of the crowd instead looked at each other or toward the empty stage, where a lectern stood in front of a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset.

Not long after, Hilton took the stage to concede the race — which had always been heavily favored against him in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1.

“Maybe this isn’t the best year to be running for office as a Republican,” Hilton told his supporters, alluding to the election results that would soon lead the Democratic Party to win so big in the House and the Senate that many dubbed it a blue tsunami. “We see what’s going on around the country.”

Hilton knew the odds were long. He’d tried a number of tactics to win over California, including a suggestive advertisement suggesting voters should “Just Try” voting for him. He’d done his best to separate himself from President Donald Trump, who backed his campaign. He also attacked Becerra for staying largely out of the limelight since making it out on top of a chaotic primary.

None of Hilton’s appeals made a significant mark on the result, which trailed at around 36% of the vote as of Wednesday afternoon.

Standing outside the ballroom, Matt Shupe, a spokesperson for the California GOP, conceded it was challenging terrain for Republicans this year across the country — and always in California.

“It’s pretty typical that the party that's not in power gains some seats, so I think that was pretty expected for the most part,” he said. “We'll plan on bringing the fight more intensely than ever in 2028.”

By 9:30 p.m., people were headed to their cars to go home.