The Brief

It wasn’t the first summer Justin Guay went outside and choked on smoke. Or the second. But by the time wildfire season seemed to last year-round, he decided to move his family away from California and back to Utah, where he’d grown up.

In 2020, Guay bought a house in Wasatch County near the jagged mountains, where he thought the worst climate impacts would be warmer winters with higher snow lines. An avid skier, Guay thought that was bad enough. But this spring, a letter arrived from his homeowners insurance company, brokered through Progressive. “They were dropping us because they would no longer be providing insurance — period,” he recalled.

As they scrambled to find new coverage, Guay and his wife were shocked when their first inquiry was rejected. “They said, ‘We no longer provide insurance to homes in your area.’” Other companies at least provided quotes, though they all offered rates at least double his previous policy. Returning to his home state, he hadn’t considered fires as a risk. They were never a major issue while he was growing up. Shortly after he moved back, however, 5,000 people were evacuated from a neighboring town during a large burn.

As climate risks upend the insurance market, homeowners like Guay are being caught off guard. Losing his coverage really highlighted “the limitations of your individual ability to cope or deal with these impacts,” said Guay. It’s a nationwide problem he’s now turning to at work as the director of global climate strategy for the Sunrise Project, a climate justice nonprofit.

Climate change is now the main driver of the increase in fire weather in the western United States. As conditions get warmer and drier, blazes are burning over larger areas and scorching places once thought of as low-risk.

This summer, around 100 people died as flames tore through Maui in one of the deadliest wildfires in American history, leaving behind $3.2 billion in property damage. Across the Western United States, existing dangers are getting worse: Four of the five largest wildfires in California’s history have occurred since 2020. Meanwhile, close to a quarter of the Americans now at risk of catastrophic wildfires live in the eastern half of the country, in places that may not be prepared to respond.

The Waldo Canyon Fire burns the mountains above Colorado Springs, Colorado in June 2012. The blaze destroyed more than 300 homes.

(

Gaylon Wampler

/

Getty Images

)

All this damage has racked up quite the bill. Nationally, wildfires caused more than $22.5 billion of losses in 2017, a record surpassed in 2018 when blazes burned through $29 billion, while 2020 and 2021 took third and fourth place in the echelon of damage. Those are just direct costs; a 2020 study found the indirect costs of 2018’s wildfires alone — things like health care costs and disruption to the broader economy — cost almost $150 billion.

Compounding all this is the boom in people moving to fire-prone places. Between 1990 and 2010, more than 25 million people relocated to areas known as the wildland-urban interface, where human development abuts wilderness. As inflation spikes the costs of rebuilding, those decisions are increasingly expensive: In the last five years, wildfires cost the United States $68.4 billion.

These losses are contributing to the destabilization of the homeowners insurance market. The insurance industry argues that attempts to control pricing — like California’s regulation that required insurers to set their rates based on damages over the past 20 years, rather than looking ahead at future hazards — have backfired. Many companies have chosen to stop selling new policies in California, while others have dropped existing policies, causing an additional 50,000 people in the state to lose their coverage just this summer.

Yet as Guay found, simply relocating wasn’t a solution. Insurance, the financial mechanism that has underpinned the global economy for the last 400 years, is no longer guaranteeing most people’s largest asset. “There’s nowhere to run,” Guay said.

In California, many residents find themselves on the leading edge of this crisis. Rural areas were the first to be affected. But now, even people in suburban areas and across a broad spectrum of society — including politicians themselves — are seeing their coverage vanish.

The problem itself is pretty simple: Nearly a quarter of Californians now live in areas at risk of catastrophic fire. Knowing what to do about it is a much thornier question.

After several close calls with nearby fires, Beth Pratt decided to refinance the mortgage on her home in Midpines, outside of Yosemite National Park, and spent $100,000 — all the equity in her home and all her savings — to reduce her risk. She installed a metal roof and built a water storage tank with a fire hose hookup. She completely sided her house in metal, replaced her decking and railings, and cleared brush. Most of these measures went far beyond the basic tree trimming that Allstate requested during her last home inspection. She will now be paying off her mortgage till she is 80. Despite her efforts, she got a letter this July canceling her policy.

Almost one year after the Camp Fire, the McDonald's restaurant in Paradise, California still remains in rubble, Oct. 1, 2019.

(

Robyn Beck

/

AFP via Getty Images

)

In 2018, Governor Gavin Newsom announced a moratorium on homeowner policy cancellations for one year in ZIP codes near wildfires, a condition which applied to Pratt’s community after a fire in July 2022. Pratt’s cancellation arrived this summer almost exactly when that grace period ended, right in the middle of wildfire season. Last year, the state’s insurance commissioner required insurers to give discounts for the kind of steps Pratt took, but rather than adjusting her rates, Allstate chose to drop her coverage. (Allstate made a quiet decision last fall to stop writing new policies in California. State Farm followed suit this spring.) “I feel like I did everything right. But it didn’t matter,” she said.

Pratt’s mortgage requires her to have homeowners insurance, putting her at risk of eventually defaulting. She tried to find another private insurer to no avail. Eventually, she turned to the California FAIR Plan, a state-backed policy that covers people who have been denied private coverage at least three times. Its budget comes from levies on insurance companies operating in the state, but these coffers are shrinking: The FAIR Plan itself announced that it was seeking permission from the state’s Department of Insurance to hike premiums by nearly 50%.

Beth Pratt stands outside her home in Midpines, California. She lost her home insurance this summer, despite spending $100,000 on measures to reduce her wildfire risk.

(

Courtesy of Beth Pratt

)

Most of Pratt’s neighbors in Midpines have also lost their insurance. Some may still qualify for private policies, but can no longer afford them. “What you’re talking about in an area like mine is not rich people or second homes, but working-class people, people who have lived here their whole lives, losing the ability to insure their properties,” she said.

Nationwide, approximately one in three houses is located in the wildland-urban interface. But even documenting the hazards has been contentious: The Oregon Department of Forestry tried to issue a map in 2022 showing 80,000 homes were at risk. But homeowners worried this would decrease their property values and raise their insurance rates protested until the state rescinded it. Or take the 2018 Camp Fire, which began when a spark from an electric transmission line owned by the utility Pacific Gas & Electric blew into a firestorm near the town of Paradise. In its aftermath, insurance companies sued PG&E, reclaiming around $11 billion — or about 85 percent of their claims. The utility later declared bankruptcy.

There’s a long history of insurers going after the entities that caused expensive claims, a process known as subrogation. Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, for example, won $18 million in 2001 from Philip Morris and other tobacco companies to cover the medical treatment of smokers. Advocates suggest insurers could take a similar approach to the fossil fuel industry, whose product has helped worsen wildfires. Rather than individuals, or even insurers, said Peter Bosshard, the coordinator of the Insure Our Future campaign, “it should be the polluters who pay.”

Multnomah County, Oregon, took its first step in this direction in June, suing several multinational oil companies for the heat dome that smothered the region in June 2021, killing at least 69 people in the county, which includes Portland. (The death toll across the Pacific Northwest was much higher: at least 250 in the U.S. and another 400 in Canada.) In addition to $50 million in damages, the county is also seeking $50 billion for research and to implement “weatherproofing” to help handle future extreme heat.

An arrow points toward Extreme Fire Danger today on Sept. 4, 2020 as a vehicle passes along the Angeles Crest Highway in the San Gabriel Mountains northeast of Los Angeles.

(

Frederic J. Brown

/

AFP via Getty Images

)

“What we’re staring at now is a situation where everything is going to get more expensive,” said David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute. Homeowners aren’t the only ones finding they’re priced out of the insurance they need. Utility companies, for example, are also struggling to find wildfire liability coverage to protect them from lawsuits like the ones PG&E faced. That makes upgrading utility infrastructure even more important — but that ultimately costs consumers money, too. PG&E is currently improving its transmission network and asked California regulators for a $3.2 billion rate increase this year, or an average bill increase of around $450 a year. Perversely, utilities themselves primarily profit by making these kinds of capital expenditures, so “every utility in the West is doing this to some degree,” Pomerantz said.

As this system breaks down, everyone’s feeling the pressure to guess the future correctly. In most states, the industry standard has been for insurers to use catastrophe models to estimate wildfire or other disaster risk in a region over time, then use those predictions to make decisions about their overall risk, like how much reinsurance to purchase as a backstop.

Technological advances have made it possible to predict hazards not only in your part of town, but also for the exact parcel of land you call home. “We’re entering a new era where you can get at the root cause of mitigating risk, as opposed to just transferring that risk,” said Attila Toth, co-founder and CEO of start-up ZestyAI, which uses artificial intelligence to assess properties. The eight-year-old startup has collected satellite data, building permits, and two decades of historical losses to train its AI, developing a model called Z-FIRE. The company claims it can now spit out a wildfire risk score for all properties in the Lower 48, based on specific information about your home, such as what type of roof it has or what vegetation is nearby.

ZestyAI’s wildfire model has gained regulatory approval in seven states, including as part of a rate filing by the California Department of Insurance. Among the many high-profile companies now using ZestyAI’s model is Amica Insurance. After the 2017 Tubbs Fire, which destroyed 3,000 homes and killed nine people in Santa Rosa, California, Amica realized that it had mistakenly underpriced high-risk properties, leaving it on the hook for major losses in several counties. The company now uses Z-FIRE, a move Amica says “leverage[s] the power of AI to generate a clear picture of not only how likely it is that a home might be exposed to a wildfire, but also the probability of its damage.” The system has also allowed Amica to “offer coverage for homes that may have previously been declined.” Farmers Insurance says thanks to Z-FIRE’s fine-tuned analyses, it expects to add 30,000 new policies in California.

A family looks for belongings through the ashes of their home in the aftermath of a wildfire in Lahaina, western Maui, Hawaii on Aug. 11. Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images

(

Patrick T. Fallon

/

AFP via Getty Images

)

Helping both insurers and homeowners get a better sense of their actual risk is long overdue, says Roy Wright, a former director of the Federal Emergency Management Association’s insurance administration. He now leads the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, a nonprofit organization that tries to “translate science into action” for insurance companies and homeowners. It conducts research to provide information on how to prevent damage during disasters. “We show people what actions make a difference,” Wright explained. The institute has spent decades testing construction design, like intentionally setting siding and roofing materials on fire in the lab to see what helps prevent embers from catching. He is lobbying regulators to add the institute’s construction standards to states’ building codes.

Wright’s organization is now collaborating with ZestyAI to improve its models’ accuracy and to better understand new hazards. But some are leery of these kinds of proprietary datasets, saying that nontransparent pricing decisions may increase discrimination. Unless regulators step in, Madison Condon, a corporate and environmental law professor at Boston University, predicts an obvious consequence will be “huge differentiations in the cost of insurance that could have demographic effects.”

California currently has some of the most transparent policies, requiring companies to publicly disclose when they won’t renew a policy and to provide homeowners their risk assessments and an opportunity to appeal them. Washington state, in contrast, does none of the above. But the Golden State is also facing some of the highest losses: Insured claims have outpaced premiums in the state since 2016 by more than $4 billion. Insurers, like banks, have to have a certain amount of money on hand, so to sell more policies, they have to increase their capital. Many private companies turn to reinsurers for this, paying them a fee for their financing. But now that risks have increased, reinsurance prices have too: In July, reinsurers increased the cost of U.S. property reinsurance by as much as 50 percent.

Unlike most other states, California’s insurance commissioner prohibits insurers from passing on these reinsurance costs to the consumer. The goal of measures like this, according to Harvey Rosenfield, an advocate who founded the nonprofit group Consumer Watchdog, was to make insurance available and affordable. During the last insurance crisis in the 1980s, the industry claimed that higher losses and a spike in lawsuits were responsible for rising premiums, which Rosenfield alleges led to discriminatory practices in minority neighborhoods, an issue researchers have identified nationwide. To address these issues, Rosenfield wrote California’s Proposition 103, which passed in 1988. It aimed to rein in costs and increase transparency in the country’s largest market, establishing a review process for rate increases and electing a state insurance commissioner.

Firefighters try to keep flames from spreading to a neighboring apartment complex as they battle the Camp Fire in 2018 in Paradise, California.

(

Justin Sullivan

/

Getty Images

)

The insurance industry argues Proposition 103 keeps the market from reflecting true risk and forces companies to offer insurance at artificially low rates. Since 2009, California has seen a 335 percent jump in buildings destroyed by wildfires, along with a 270 percent increase in associated costs. But Rosenfield notes homeowners insurance companies in California earned an average annual return on net worth of 8.8 percent over the last 20 years, compared to 6.2 percent nationally.

Consumer Watchdog says what’s needed to address the lack of affordable insurance is to enforce existing laws. For example, it says its advocacy challenging consumer rate increases has saved homeowners $2.2 billion since 2002. Long-term, the organization thinks the government should be helping homeowners afford to fortify their property, as well as instituting policies that require companies to sell insurance to all owners who meet certain mitigation measures.

In early September, the president of Consumer Watchdog’s advocacy group, Jamie Court, happened to be on the same morning flight to Sacramento as an insurance lobbyist, Michael Gunning. When Gunning began bragging about his efforts to push through a multi-billion-dollar bailout for the industry through California’s state legislature at the end of its session, Court started recording their conversation. “We are trying to jam a bill in the last three weeks,” Gunning can be heard saying.

The bill, which would have absolved companies of responsibility for covering fire claims under the state’s FAIR plan, failed to pass. But several weeks later, California’s insurance commissioner, Ricardo Lara, announced he would expedite changes to allow companies to use catastrophe modeling and artificial intelligence to take into account projected impacts of climate change in their pricing. He also signaled he would “explore” allowing companies to pass on reinsurance costs. In exchange, insurers will be required to write at least 85 percent of their market share in “distressed areas,” although those have not yet been identified. Governor Newsom supported the changes, immediately issuing an executive order authorizing the Commissioner’s “emergency regulatory action” to bolster the faltering industry.

Consumer Watchdog says these changes could increase premiums by as much as 50 percent overnight. “Insurers are leveraging a real climate crisis with a false crisis of affordability in order to line their pockets,” said Carmen Balber, executive director at Consumer Watchdog. “If trends continue, and insurers are allowed to continue making those choices on their own, we could be seeing a much more serious crisis for homeowners.”

When these cascading effects hit, it’s going to cost those who can least afford it the most. While insurance is ultimately about managing risk for a single business or person, the escalating nature of the climate crisis can only be addressed by action society-wide. Homeowners insurance is increasingly at the crux of this mismatch: Buying a home is one of the biggest financial decisions in someone’s life, and it’s a long-term investment. But even if you can get — and afford to pay — for insurance when you buy a house, companies reevaluate their policies and premiums every year. “It’s not like we need more information,” Condon said. “We need better ways to think about how to adapt in the face of uncertainty.”

Flames come close to houses during the Blue Ridge Fire in 2020 in Chino Hills, California.

(

David McNew

/

Getty Images

)

As the stakes rise, the house seems to always win. “I looked up the revenues of some of these big insurance companies,” Pratt says. Their profits might be declining — after making 32 cents on the dollar in 2023, Allstate’s credit dropped for a second time in 2023, to BBB+, a middling rung on S&P’s rating scale — but it’s still “a lot more than I make,” she said. She paid into a policy with Allstate for 32 years, but never made a claim. “What’s fair about that?” she asked.

Last winter, Pratt’s property was without power for a week, and she stayed warm hauling wood for her stove in a sled over record snowfall. Last summer, she was sweating in an extreme heat wave, watching a woodpecker gasp for breath at her bird bath. She watched, helpless, as a fire burned 127 homes nearby.

“We are learning to adapt to what it’s going to take to live in this time of climate extremes,” Pratt said, noting that while she ultimately found a California FAIR plan, it doubled her cost. “Rethinking the insurance industry — in this new regime of climate disruption — is going to be needed.”

More than 29,000 people sleep outside in L.A^., according to official estimates — a nearly 8% increase over last year.

Two candidates for mayor are promising to change that, but they have different ideas about how.

Incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman appeared separately at homelessness forums hosted this week by Hope The Mission, a large homeless shelter operator.

The events were held amid a national spotlight on L.A.’s homelessness crisis.

This week, a congressional subcommittee held a hearing on allegations of fraud and mismanagement of homelessness funds — a hearing in which Bass declined to appear. The next day, federal authorities announced charges against three employees at L.A. homelessness nonprofits in a widening federal investigation of homeless services fraud.

Bass cited L.A.’s homelessness crisis as the reason she sought the city’s top job in 2022.

“I ran because I am always compelled to go toward a crisis,” she said Thursday.

She has made clearing homeless encampments and moving people indoors a top priority as mayor, but fell far short of her pledge to end street homelessness by 2026.

Raman has said founding a local homelessness nonprofit inspired her 2020 L.A. City Council run. For years, Raman was chair of the council committee focused on city homelessness policy.

Both candidates have played major roles in shaping L.A.’s homelessness response in recent years, and they told forum moderators this week that the city’s approach has been dysfunctional.

L.A.’s next mayor will face a barrage of challenges related to homelessness.

Here’s how the candidates said they would handle some of the big ones:

How will they deal with the Trump administration?

The Trump administration has been cracking down on the L.A. region’s administration of homeless services to root out potential financial mismanagement, but also to challenge the local policy approach to homelessness and impose policies it prefers.

Federal officials argue that approaches known as “housing first” and “harm reduction” are failing. They favor treatment and enforcement instead.

Bass, a Democrat, skipped a House subcommittee hearing on federal homelessness spending Tuesday, dismissing it as politically motivated.

“ I'm the mayor of the second-largest city in the country, and I don't have time for foolishness,” Bass said Thursday. “And remember, I know these people. It's a dog and pony show to see who's gonna get on Fox that night. I was not going to subject myself to that, and I was not going to subject our city to that.”

Bass said her office is cooperating fully by supplying thousands of pages of documents.

Raman said L.A. should be using the courts much more aggressively to challenge federal overreach and protect funding.

“ We've done that less than I would've liked here in Los Angeles, but other cities have done that and actually kept their federal dollars in place despite the best efforts of the Trump administration.”

She said the city also has to make sure that funding is spent effectively, arguing L.A. currently has no single person tracking every dollar coming in from the federal government, state government and other sources.

“That is wrong,” Raman said at a forum on Wednesday. “If I am mayor — when I am mayor — I will ensure that every single dollar that is being given to us is being used to get as many people indoors into safety and to keep them there as effectively as possible.”

What to do about LAHSA?

Both candidates have said they support the city eventually breaking away from LAHSA, the joint city-county homelessness authority.

"The county filed for divorce. Now we file, too," Bass said on Thursday.

Last year, L.A. County officials voted to remove more than $300 million in annual homelessness funding from LAHSA’s control and to manage those funds itself with a new county department. Bass is now proposing the city create its own, independent “continuum of care,” a process she said could take “a couple of years.”

Bass, who appointed herself to serve on LAHSA’s governing board before stepping down this month, said she’s learned in recent years “how profoundly dysfunctional” the regional homeless services system is.

She argued that because L.A. represents 40% of the county's population and is the epicenter of the crisis, the city must have more control over the system.

“You might remember that expression I started with: locked arms,” Bass said. “And we locked arms as long as we could.”

Raman, in her mayoral platform, also called for the city to prepare to move hundreds of millions of dollars in homelessness contracts away from LAHSA, which she described as "plagued with scandal." But she said the city has to build the capacity to take on the job first.

At Thursday's forum, Raman didn't mention LAHSA by name, instead describing coordination failures between agencies — citing permanent supportive housing units that sat empty for more than a year because departments weren't talking to each other.

As chair of the council's Homelessness Committee, Raman said she created the city's Bureau of Homelessness Oversight to track spending and outcomes, but accused Bass of failing to staff it promptly.

“The mayor did not hire people to staff up that oversight body quickly enough,” Raman said.

LAHSA has served as the lead agency managing homelessness services for the region since 1993, including conducting a yearly homeless count, preparing regional applications for federal funds and managing key databases.

This week, the agency announced it would soon forfeit those roles and allow other agencies or organizations to apply for them instead — including other county or city of L.A. agencies.

What about encampments?

The candidates are also somewhat split on their approach to homelessness encampments. Bass has criticized Raman for voting several times since 2022 against expanding the city’s anti-camping ordinance, which restricts camping in certain public spaces including schools and day cares.

Raman has defended her votes. She argued the law, at best, “would have moved an encampment from one block to the next block.”

“To me, that is not good enough," Raman said. "My imagination for how we address homelessness in L.A. goes beyond just thinking about which block an encampment should be on. It is about how we actually get encampments indoors."

Asked about enforcement approaches, Bass pointed to physical barriers — like cement planters that replaced a major encampment on San Vicente Boulevard — as a more effective deterrent than ticketing or arrests.

“ So sometimes using physical barriers work, but what we have not done is just gone in and arrested homeless people,” Bass said. “That has never happened.”

The sharpest divide between the candidates centers on Bass’ signature program, Inside Safe, which moves people from encampments into motels and interim housing.

Raman said she agreed with the underlying concept — going out to encampments and offering shelter — but that the program is too costly and hasn't evolved since Bass launched it in 2022.

“Her program has not changed or learned or adapted from the lessons that they should have had in place, and to me, that is a major, major issue,” Raman said.

Raman put the cost at roughly $100,000 per person, per year — "not a fiscally sustainable approach to a crisis that is growing in our city," she said — and favors time-limited subsidies, short-term rental vouchers that cost a third as much.

Bass called that framing "fundamentally dishonest," arguing the county reimburses the city for some of the up-front cost.

Bass said she wants to bring costs down by building permanent structures on public land instead of renting motel rooms.

She said she favors moving groups of unhoused people together and bringing services to them, which she said is harder to do with the housing vouchers Raman wants to rely on.

"I would house 30 people at a time, not one by one,” Bass said. "I see it from a people's point of view. She sees it from a numbers point of view. Both are needed."

The general election is Nov. 3.

Just off the 405 freeway at the border of Costa Mesa and Santa Ana, a block down from IKEA and a couple of business parks over, you'll find Darkroom.

It's the kind of address where you'd expect to find a dentist's office or a logistics company — instead, it's home to some of the most inventive food in Orange County, and arguably beyond, anchored by a formidable wine program featuring small producers.

The location is a deliberate choice by Zach Scherer, Darkroom’s chef-owner, that has turned the restaurant into a growing word-of-mouth destination. For Scherer, hiding in plain sight was never a compromise. It was the plan.

Inside Darkroom

The interior of the restaurant is a completely different story. Its decor matches that of an angsty teenager who shops at Hot Topic, with an affinity for industrial and goth music, and a bit of new wave mixed in.

Darkroom's interior leans into its irreverent, gallery-meets-Hot Topic aesthetic.

(

Wales Communications

/

Courtesy Darkroom

)

Your eyes might take a minute to adjust to the low light before a friendly server wearing a tattered band T-shirt greets you and escorts you to your table.

Scherer wears his nonconformist attitude with pride — and intention. "If you're a little too serious, Orange County won't love it," he said, and it shows: the room is built to feel like the opposite of a hushed tasting menu.

Chef Zach Scherer (right) and Drew Adams work the pass together — the same partnership they describe as "like a band."

(

Wales Communications

/

Courtesy DARKROOM

)

Scherer runs the kitchen with longtime partner Drew Adams — a lifelong Orange County resident — who also oversees the pastry program. The two think of Darkroom's identity "like a band," Scherer said: a shared core sound, no matter who's guesting on a given dish. (Their tasting-menu concept, Chrysalis, runs out of the same kitchen some nights — a five-course tasting menu happening in parallel.)

The menu

Start off with the Scotch olives, fried Castelvetrano olives with anchovy and lamb merguez, served over spiced sumac yogurt. Meanwhile, a couple of slices of their zucchini bread with koji butter, topped with silky jamón serrano, provide some comforting bites.

Grilled and marinated Jimmy Nardello peppers — a short-season ingredient the kitchen deliberately doesn't overwork.

(

Wales Communications

/

Courtesy Darkroom

)

From there, seasonal produce takes center stage, with grilled, marinated Jimmy Nardello peppers served with fennel-pollen labneh and sprinkled with walnut dukkah, hitting equal notes of sweet, spicy, nutty, and fresh. Followed by honeynut squash from Weiser Farms — poached in a light broth known as nage, made with bits of country ham and horseradish, topped with rainbow chard, a dish that reads Southern-meets-European.

The Darkroom burger, cut in two — only 10 are made a night.

(

Wales Communications

/

Courtesy Darkroom

)

Cap things off with The Darkroom burger, cut in half, made with dry-aged beef, molten Comté cheese, and gooey caramelized onions, served between soft, glossy brioche-style buns, swimming in a light au poivre bath. It's a dish that, like the others, exhibits strong technique but still wears its fun on its sleeve — all the makings of a truly memorable meal.

The philosophy

Scherer's goal is to make the Orange County food scene nationally competitive with San Francisco, New York, and Chicago — and the seasonal fluency on display that night, from summer's last Jimmy Nardellos to fall's first honeynut squash, is the technical proof behind that claim.

The fried Scotch olives — Castelvetranos stuffed with anchovy and lamb merguez, set over sumac yogurt.

(

Wales Communications

/

Courtesy Darkroom

)

The menu's dynamic approach — its ability to oscillate between cuisines — reflects that same nonconformist identity, reinforcing the idea that the food doesn't take itself too seriously, just like the space around it.

Scherer's ambitions don't stop at Darkroom's walls; he's also developing Three Eyed Tiger, a cocktail-forward concept nearby.

"The food we're making now is the food that I'm the most proud of, because it really shows our identity," said Scherer.

A San Bernardino County Superior Court judge on Tuesday rejected Chino Valley Unified School District’s request to dissolve an injunction blocking its policy requiring employees to notify parents when students identify as transgender or use different names or pronouns at school.

Judge Michael Sachs upheld his 2024 injunction blocking Chino Valley Unified from enforcing a policy the school board adopted in 2023. The policy required district employees to notify parents within three days if their student asked to go by a name or pronoun different from official school records or join a sex-segregated program, such as athletics, that did not correspond to those records.

The school district had asked Sachs to overturn a permanent injunction after the U.S. Supreme Court issued an emergency docket ruling in a separate case, Mirabelli v. Bonta. The district argued that the ruling affirmed parents’ constitutional right to be informed about information critical to their children’s health and well-being.

Sachs rejected the request, saying his injunction does not conflict with the Supreme Court’s ruling. During Tuesday’s hearing, he distinguished between the two cases, saying the school policy at issue in the Mirabelli case required school employees to withhold information from parents when asked.

“The school’s policy essentially mandated that staff lie to the parent about their child, and the court did not accept that,” Sachs said of Mirabelli v. Bonta.

The Chino case involves a different question: whether school employees can be required to disclose a child’s gender identity to their parents.

“There is no mandatory duty for the school district to voluntarily release information about the student,” Sachs said in court.

Chino Valley Unified was disappointed by the ruling, said Emily Rae, the district’s attorney and president of the California Justice Center, a conservative legal nonprofit focused on protecting individual liberty.

“The main problem is that it puts the burden on parents to know whether they’re having a secret kept from them,” Rae said.

Rae said Sachs’ ruling misinterpreted the Mirabelli opinion, which she said made clear that schools should not withhold information from parents. She said it was too soon to say whether the district would appeal the ruling or make changes to any of its policies.

Sonja Shaw, president of the Chino Valley Unified school board and a candidate for state superintendent of public instruction, also criticized the ruling. In an interview with EdSource, she called the proceedings a “kangaroo court” that has caused “so much confusion.”

Shaw said she planned to ask the superintendent whether the district could ask all parents to check a box: “Do you want secrets to be held from you?”

“They shouldn’t have to do that,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s insane we have to go through all these hoops to uphold a parent’s right to know.”

Christine Parker, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, said the ruling was consistent with the Supreme Court’s order in Mirabelli v. Bonta and other applicable law.

“The court got it right: Blanket policies like Chino Valley USD’s, in which school employees must — in all circumstances — disclose a student’s gender identity to their parents, remain unlawful in California,” Parker said in a statement to EdSource.

Another pending case referenced in Tuesday’s proceedings was the City of Huntington Beach v. Newsom, which hinged on a dispute over AB 1955, known as the SAFETY Act. The law, signed by Newsom in 2024, bars school districts from requiring staff to disclose a student’s sexual orientation or gender identity to parents. It went into effect before the injunction in the Chino Valley Unified case.

In the wake of the Mirabelli v. Bonta case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a preliminary injunction for parents in the City of Huntington Beach v. Newsom who sued to block enforcement of the SAFETY Act.

This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for their daily newsletter.