The Brief

It’s been a year since the most destructive fires in L.A. County history killed at least 31 people, reduced neighborhoods to ash and instantly changed the lives of tens of thousands of Angelenos.

Most survivors remain displaced. Temporary housing insurance funds are dwindling. Many whose homes still stand continue to fight to get the structures properly cleaned. And the majority of residents, underinsured or not insured at all, face a wide gap in the funds needed to rebuild. Survivors are digging into savings and taking out new loans.

At the same time, the grief, trauma and emotional devastation wrought by the Eaton and Palisades fires remain at times overwhelmingly present.

Every survivor’s situation is unique yet connected by loss, obstacles to recovery and a deep sense of connection to the places they called home.

To understand how residents are continuing to pick up the pieces, LAist spoke with six survivors — some families, some individuals — a year after the L.A. fires.

The barber

Barber Geoff Cathcart smiles as Jason Fulton inspects his haircut at Lawrence and Colbert in Altadena.

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It was a typical day at Altadena’s oldest salon, Lawrence and Colbert, a Black-owned business that has served the community for some 46 years.

Well, it was a typical day after the Eaton Fire.

Geoff Cathcart expertly styled the hair of longtime client Jason Fulton, the buzz of the shaver the backdrop to their conversation — also typical for the barbershop, yet all its own, about men and their mental health.

But the rest of the barber chairs were empty.

A year after the Eaton Fire, they’re empty much of the time.

Lawrence and Colbert salon in Altadena is pretty quiet these days. But barber Geoff Cathcart says he is seeing slow progress in the area's rebirth.

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The barbers and stylists here have seen their business plummet. The majority of their clients — mostly elders in Altadena’s tightknit Black community — lost their homes in the fire.

Cathcart, who grew up in Altadena, lost his rental and now commutes from Glendora.

“ I used to walk to my shop ... didn't have to worry about gas or commute or traffic or any of those things,” Cathcart said. “And now it's just different, just adjusting. But I still want to show up and be here for the community. This is where I made my roots.”

He plans to return to Altadena permanently, eventually. But finding an affordable rental in the area has proved impossible — prices have shot up since the fire. So he’s waiting for prices to go down or for his own family members to rebuild — three homes his extended family owned burned down.

Cathcart says most of his clientele have had to relocate to Glendale, Pasadena, Lancaster or even out of state. Half of the salon’s stylists have been forced to move on because of the lack of business. Cathcart, who has been barbering for more than 25 years, says he’s applied for other jobs to supplement his income.

“When you come up to Altadena, there's not a lot here at the moment, and so it's very depressing,” Cathcart said. “I've had clients who don't want to come back until things are built back. It's heartbreaking to see. I've kind of become desensitized to some extent because I witness this every day coming to work.”

A year later, though, he sees the community starting to come back.

“It's slow, definitely slow,” Cathcart said. “But I do see progress. I do have hope.”

Meanwhile, he’ll keep cutting hair and having the conversations he’s always had with his clients — often intimate and personal, though the tune of them now is dominated by the fire’s aftermath.

“Every conversation is, 'Where are you at in the rebuild? and, 'Do you need help?' 'What stage are you at?' And I find, at least for my clients and the people I've run across, there are some people making great progress, but there's some people that are just completely lost still,” Cathcart said. “ Every conversation is really a psychological and emotional evaluation of how everyone is doing.”

That’s something the fire couldn’t change, he said — the role of the Black barbershop, long a sanctuary for the community, a hub of information sharing and support. The shop may have physically survived the fire, but the loss of business since is an ongoing threat.

“If we lose this, then it's just one less place for us to go as a community, as a people and as a culture,” Cathcart said. " We've been trying to rebuild the community one step at a time by just showing up and coming to work.”

A mobile home paradise lost

Donna and Howard Burkons at their rental in Woodland Hills.

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Donna and Howard Burkons have lived out of four suitcases since January 2025. The longest they’ve stayed in one place is a few months — a friend’s condo in Redondo Beach, a six-week road trip to Colorado and Arizona, a couple of furnished rentals in Woodland Hills they found on a website for traveling nurses.

Only recently did Donna Burkons buy linens for the carousel of beds they’ve been sleeping in, plus a skillet and some utensils of their own.

The only thing from their home that survived the Palisades Fire was a 100-year-old iron skillet that Donna Burkons’ great-grandmother used to cook on a chuckwagon back in Indiana. They’re reluctant to buy much of anything — their constant moves since the fire have become something like momentum to keep up until they rebuild.

The Burkonses lived on a rented lot in the Tahitian Terraces mobile home park overlooking the Pacific — one of the few middle-class havens in the Palisades. Their deck was bigger than their home. Donna would watch the sunset every evening with a glass of wine. Howard would watch her watching it. They’d keep an eye out for the “green flash” to light up the horizon just before the sun dipped below it.

“We’d see cars parked along the ocean just to see the sunset, and we had it every day,” Donna Burkons said.

“And we didn’t ever take it for granted,” Howard Burkons said, finishing the thought — a common occurrence for the couple who have been together since they were 18, just two hippie kids from Scottsdale, Ariz., who fell in love, moved to L.A. to work in film and TV and built this dream life by the ocean.

One of the Burkonses' grandchildren drew their former home in the Palisades.

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That is until all but one of the 158 mobile homes in Tahitian Terraces burned in the Palisades Fire. One of their neighbors died. The mobile home park next door, home to another 150 or so residents, also burned.

Now in their 70s, the Burkonses are caught in a waiting game. They owned their mobile home but not the land it sat on. So they have to wait for their landlord to complete the necessary infrastructure and permitting before they can start to rebuild. On top of that, like most survivors, they’re deeply underinsured.

It’s not the fire, or the controversy about how it started, or Small Business Administration loan applications or the 55 pages of inventory they had to put together for insurance that are their biggest enemies. Right now, Howard Burkons says, their enemy is time. They estimate it could be years before they rebuild. Yet their temporary housing insurance will run out this summer.

“At our age, it felt like the pandemic stole a couple of years of our life, and now the fire is stealing another four or more years of our life,” Howard Burkons said.

Before the fire, a typical day was spent with their four grandchildren, babysitting or helping with carpooling. Donna Burkons loved to play pickleball with friends. Howard Burkons would swim in the mobile home park pool every morning. They’d go out dancing the two-step together — a hobby they fell in love with in their 50s and one they’ve kept up since the fire to hold on to something normal and joyful. Their grandkids help with that too.

The Burkonses thought about moving back to Arizona, where they own some rental units. But they couldn’t be so far from the kids and grandkids. And they can’t afford to buy a “stick-built” house elsewhere. So for now, they’re taking it day by day, waiting to get back to their mobile home paradise, their little lots overlooking the grand Pacific.

The family who never left

Ana Martinez at home.

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There’s an old water well outside of Ana Martinez’s house in west Altadena. At first glance, the spiraling metal design, charred and rusted, seems intentional, evoking a country charm.

But the metal was blackened by the Eaton Fire.

“ It's just a reminder of what we went through,” Martinez said. “We did lose a lot of pieces that melted, but it's there. Just like us, you know? We survived.”

The Martinez family home still stands — Ana, her husband, Carlos, and their sons fought the flames throughout that terrifying night a year ago. As the wooden fence and tree in front of their house caught fire, they hacked them apart with a chainsaw. Their neighbor’s house burned to the ground.

In the time since and in the absence of sufficient insurance, Ana said the family has spent down their savings and maxed out credit cards to repair the house — putting up a concrete fence, replacing the melted windows and singed roof, cleaning smoke and ash and installing new insulation, rebuilding the carport that was reduced to ash.

“We got less than $70,000 from the insurance, and we've spent almost $200,000 with everything that needed to be done,” Ana said. “So we're starting at zero again, but at least we have a home.”

The family’s determination to protect their property — a place Ana and Carlos Martinez raised their three children, where one of their sons lives with his own children now, in the front house — brought them all together, closer than ever.

But over the months following, as funds dwindled, as Carlos Martinez, an electrician, and their sons worked around the clock to make ends meet, as Ana Martinez, who is in charge of the bills, watched the costs pile up, tension grew.

“We've never had money, but we've never had problems paying our bills,” Ana Martinez said. “At the beginning, it brought us together. Now, it's been a lot of problems because it doesn't matter how much work gets done, there's not enough money. There’s been a lot of arguing.”

They’re giving themselves at least five years “before we could say, hopefully, that we’ll be back to normal.” The money will come back, Ana Martinez is sure.

She’s not as sure about their health — the Martinezes never left their home, breathing in the smoke of the fire, then the dust of the debris cleanup and construction surrounding them since.

She and her husband developed asthma — they now use nebulizers and carry inhalers. Both of them have started losing their hair from all the stress. Ana Martinez had a cancerous growth removed.

“There's days that I wake up and I feel like I've been punched in the stomach,” Ana Martinez said. “My throat always hurts ... this burning sensation in my throat.”

Then there are the less tangible reminders: like when a neighbor recently had a barbecue and Ana ran outside, smelling smoke, frantically scanning for flames. Or the spike of terror she feels when the Santa Ana winds start up, or when the sun sets, its orange glow reminding her of the fire’s apocalyptic days. The apparently random moments of grief that well up, painful in her chest.

“ I've never been a person that would cry for no reason,” Ana Martinez said. “It's changed me.”

Parts of the well melted, but like the Martinezes, it survived.

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The lemon tree is putting out fruit.

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A year on, those emotions are lessening, or at least, she’s finding ways to let them move through her more easily. Ana says she feels more present, she notices the little things more. The lemon trees in her yard that somehow returned, that have borne fruit despite the flames. The beauty of the massive surviving oak that continues to shade their home. She says she’s less inclined to grow angry when someone cuts her off in traffic or is rude at the grocery store.

“We don't know what people are carrying around, you know? If we lash out for no reason, it's because we have so much internally that sometimes we just don't know how to control our emotions,” Ana Martinez said.

Despite the stress of it all, and the survivor’s guilt she continues to feel, watching neighbors sell their lots or struggle through the process of rebuilding, she finds solace in gratefulness.

“ That's what I've learned so far because there's been days that I'm just grateful that I'm able to get out of bed,” she said. “It's made me very mindful to appreciate what we have. ... We have life, and that's all that matters.”

The Holocaust survivor

Rachel Schwartz's home after the Palisades Fire.

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Rachel Schwartz lived in a house way up on a hill, where she could see the ocean. She loved clear days when Catalina Island emerged from the haze on the horizon, its rugged silhouette vivid on a glittering sea.

Schwartz called the Pacific Palisades home for nearly three decades, and all she wants to do is get back. In the meantime, the 94-year-old is living in an apartment off a busy road in Westwood.

“It left me, I'm afraid, with a severe depression,” Schwartz said. “The doctor said this is part of losing everything.”

She said she’s no longer the person she used to be — upbeat, always ready to try new things.

“Right now, nothing interests me except my wish to rebuild my home,” Schwartz said.

This is not the first time Schwartz has lost everything.

Born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1931, she and her older sister were the sole members of her immediate family to survive the Holocaust. After the war, the two girls landed in Detroit, where they had some relatives. Schwartz was just 15.

Eventually, Schwartz, her husband and their two young children moved to L.A. She and her husband divorced, and Schwartz built a career as an accountant, then real estate agent — she still works to this day. She eventually remarried. In 1997, she and her future second husband were able to purchase a townhouse in the Palisades, a dream. It was the house she planned to stay in the rest of her life.

Then came the fire.

“ I told my mother, ‘Mom, you've been through three concentration camps and a three-week march,’” said Bruce, Schwartz’s son. “You can survive this fire if you survived that.”

“This fire is like a  second Holocaust. Everything gone, everything burned,” Rachel Schwartz said. “If not for Bruce, I wouldn’t have made it.”

But now, Rachel and Bruce Schwartz, who lived with her, are racing against a seemingly stuck clock. They haven’t been able to start the rebuilding process because of complications with the rules of their homeowners association — 17 units burned; eight didn’t. The HOA requires 75% of the members to approve a rebuild in the case of calamity, and the majority of residents voted against it.

“There are many unanswered questions as to what is going to happen to us,” Bruce Schwartz said. “ We're stuck in limbo, and I think it's going to be three to five years before we have a clear picture.”

Not only are there complications with the HOA, but they’re also severely underinsured — just a few months before the fire, State Farm dropped them, and residents had to instead get on the California FAIR plan.

Meanwhile, their temporary housing insurance is running out. And anger about the cause of the fire — a reignition of a fire that started a week before and wasn’t completely put out — and the ongoing lack of accountability remains a constant.

“I feel that it was a great negligence why the fire was not put out,” Rachel Schwartz said.

But a year on, they are both growing tired of the anger and the grief like a constant cloud hanging over them.

“We just have to move on from it because there's been so much sorrow and so much feeling bad, that it's time to start feeling good,” Bruce Schwartz said. “It's time to move forward and rebuild our community.”

Rachel Schwartz nodded as her son spoke. She still can get her nails and hair done, she joked, so things can’t be all that bad.

“ I came from Europe as a small girl, and even in this tragedy, we still have enough to eat. We have comfortable beds to sleep,” she said. “I look out and the sun is shining. And I still feel very grateful to be in America.”

A prefab symbol of hope

Charlotte and Steve Gibson hosted a construction-viewing party for their neighbors.

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On a quiet street of mostly empty lots in Altadena, a celebration recently took place. Steve and Charlotte Gibson’s new home is nearly finished — they expect to move in at the end of this month.

“It seemed like nothing was happening for a long time. ... We didn’t see any movement for months and months,” Steve Gibson said. “And now it feels really rapid.”

The couple had lived in their 1923 wood-framed house for 22 years before it was reduced to ash by the Eaton Fire. Their new house is dramatically different — a 900-square-foot, hyper modern, steel-framed prefabricated home. It’s all electric, with solar panels and a battery. The Gibsons plan to landscape with mostly California native plants, as well.

They had concerns about being one of the first to rebuild. Would their old neighbors return? Would they be alone and surrounded by construction for years to come?

But on a recent day, as they looked at the modern, rectangular boxes that will become their new home, “the hope, the promise, the future outweigh those concerns by a mile,” Charlotte Gibson said.

It’s why they hosted a “construction viewing party” in December — to show their neighbors rebuilding is possible.

Another couple from up the street stopped by to say they were going with the same Gardena-based prefab housing company, called Cover.

“ We're nowhere near this yet, but we’re very excited,” the wife said as a toddler gripped her hand. “We came to stalk your house to see what it's going to look like, so thanks for doing this.”

The Gibsons are in for a big change. The home they lost was built in the 1920s. Their new home is prefabricated and modern.

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Plans show what the Gibsons' new home will look like when complete.

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The Gibsons still face a several-hundred-thousand-dollar gap in how much their insurance paid out and how much they’ve had to spend on their rebuild. They hope the Small Business Association disaster loan they applied for will cover that.

Despite the uncertainty and the grief of all that’s been lost, their determination and stamina to rebuild and return has remained in large part due to community ties made long before the fire.

“Thankfully our neighbors on this block ... the ones that are closest to us and that we're closest to, they're all rebuilding,” Charlotte Gibson said. “ And that was a huge lift.”

The family next door, the Pattersons, are among those neighbors. They hope to move in by summer.

“ I feel so hopeful for the future and for Altadena,” said 22-year-old Mona Patterson. “It's just nice knowing that our community's coming back and that the Altadena that I knew and grew up with is still here.”

The block may end up looking very different. But as long as the people who made it what it was come back, the Gibsons are sure it will once again feel like home.

“We’ve heard from people who were here today, the progress they've made, so that's encouraging,” Steve Gibson said. “That makes me think, 'Hey, we're not going to be here all alone for long.'”

Rebuilding side-by-side

The Horusickys, left, with their daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren (and Roxy the dog) at one of their homes under construction.

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The sound of construction is a constant on a formerly quiet street in the Marquez Knolls neighborhood of Pacific Palisades.

A foundation is being laid on one lot. Next door, the new wood framing of a single-story house is getting finishing touches. When they’re done, three generations will live side by side. Again.

The sound of hammers and drills is a welcome symphony as Andrea Horusicky Heindel, her husband, Jason Heindel, and their teenagers, Misha and Jakob, enter the partially built home.

Andrea Horusicky Heindel grew up in the house that stood here before, a place that encompassed the family’s history — her father, Michael Horusicky Sr., and mother, Jana, landed in the Palisades after escaping from Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Soviet invasion. Andrea was born soon after.

In 2012, Andrea and her husband were able to purchase the house right next door. They built a little gate in the fence between them so the kids could easily visit their grandparents.

“We’ll try to bring that back again,” Andrea said.

Michael Horusicky Sr., now in his 80s, built a successful construction company for over 40 years in the Palisades — a reason he has the know-how to move so swiftly on his rebuild today, as well as the friends to get it done, electricians and contractors, many of whom lost their own homes in the fire.

Jana and Michael Horusicky Sr. can see the progress on their daughter's home next door from their own home under construction.

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Michael Horusicky Sr.'s construction experience has helped jump-start the families' rebuilds.

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He hopes he and Jana can move in by May, but he knows it won’t be the same. His daughter and her family hope to be in their house by late fall.

“ I don't have a problem building a house, but I have problem with losing the house — it’s going to be empty,” Michael Horusicky Sr. said. “And my age is another problem. So I have to do it quick.”

Meanwhile, the family of six and one dog are living in a rental nearby. The kids are rotating paying for Ubers to see displaced friends whose houses they used to bike to. The parents are navigating insurance and contractors as they both work full-time jobs. Their temporary housing insurance is running out, and the family is having to take out loans to afford the rebuild.

“We’re determined to make it work, but it’s stressful, and there’s a lot of uncertainty,” Jason Heindel said.

A year after the fire, the timeline to recover seems to be getting longer — permitting is moving slowly, the rains have caused delays, and they say there’s little guidance from the city about connecting to new infrastructure.

“ We have to just keep going, it seems like, at a marathon's pace since Day 1,” Andrea Horusicky Heindel said. “The list of things to do is endless.”

Being back in the Palisades, despite being surrounded by destruction, feels more comfortable. The family doesn’t have to explain themselves. Everyone they run into here lost something.

The family is sure the jacaranda tree out front, though a bit charred, will bloom again. Despite their love-hate relationship with the tree’s sticky purple flowers, they can’t wait for spring this year.

“We're saving our tree because that was the only thing we had left,” Andrea Horusicky Heindel said. “We decided if it survived, it deserves to stay.”

LAist partnerships producer David Rodriguez contributed to this report.

The traditional way of voting in Huntington Beach could be upended after a judge’s ruling this week in a case accusing the city of diluting the electoral power of its Latino residents.

What happened?

The judge ordered Surf City to adopt ranked-choice voting for the November general election. Ranked-choice voting is where voters rank all candidates in order of preference, so if your first choice is eliminated, your vote transfers to your second-choice candidate.

It’s also the type of voting that helped Zohran Mamdani seize victory in the New York City mayoral race.

Why it matters

The ruling comes in a legal challenge to the city’s at-large elections, arguing Latino voters are unfairly disadvantaged and unable to elect a candidate of their choice. Orange County Superior Court Judge Craig Griffin agreed with the plaintiffs’ argument that “racially polarized voting has regularly occurred in Huntington Beach elections.”

The backstory

The case was brought to court more than two years ago by the nonprofit group Southwest Voter Registration Education Project and Victor Valladares, a Huntington Beach resident and local Democratic activist.

They argued that the city’s predominantly Latino neighborhood of Oak View had suffered decades of neglect, in part because residents there lacked the voting power to get representation in city government.

The bigger picture

Dozens of cities across Orange County and elsewhere in California have faced similar challenges to at-large elections over the past decade. Most have settled out of court by adopting district elections, whereby voters elect a candidate to represent their area, rather than citywide.

The change has coincided with an increase in Latino city council members in some Orange County cities.

Why ranked-choice voting?

Judge Griffin wrote that ordering the city to adopt ranked-choice voting was a “less drastic remedy” to bolster Latinos’ voting power than district elections. Currently in Huntington Beach, all residents vote citywide for city council seats, and the top vote-getters win.

With district elections, only people within a particular district can vote for a particular seat, which advocates say helps ensure districts see themselves represented in their local government bodies.

Among the advantages of a ranked-choice system, advocates say, is that it gives voters more freedom to vote for their favorite candidate, even if they think that person won’t ultimately win.

What does the ruling say, exactly?

The ruling orders Huntington Beach to implement ranked-choice voting for the November 2026 general election, if the Orange County Registrar of Voters can support the quick switch. The ruling also calls for the city to elect all seven councilmembers at once, rather than staggering the elections, as it currently does per the city’s charter.

Judge Griffin had delayed his ruling earlier this year to consider the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which ruled that race cannot play a role in the drawing of voting districts. Griffin ultimately determined that “nothing in Callais alters this Court’s decision” in the Huntington Beach case.

What’s next?

Both sides have two weeks to raise objections to the tentative ruling. Kevin Shenkman, the attorney representing the plaintiffs, said he would not be surprised if the city appeals. City Attorney Mike Vigliotta told LAist in an email that his office is “reviewing the decision with outside counsel that litigated the case and determining next steps.”

We reached out to the Orange County Registrar of Voters for comment, and did not hear back before publication. If and when that changes, we will update this story.

How to attend Huntington Beach City Council meetings

• Huntington Beach holds City Council meetings on the first and third Tuesday of each month at 6 p.m. at City Hall, 2000 Main St.
• You can also watch City Council meetings remotely on HBTV via Channel 3 or online, or via the city’s website. (You can also find videos of previous council meetings there.)
• The public comment period happens toward the beginning of meetings.
• The city generally posts agendas for City Council meetings on the previous Friday. You can find the agenda on the city’s calendar or sign up there to have agendas sent to your inbox.

LAist staff writer Sammy Marvin also contributed to this report.

A judge has ruled that a Metro bus project in a congested area of Los Angeles can go forward, for now, without incorporating bike lanes that street safety advocates argue are required by city law.

The $400 million project will add dedicated bus lanes along a more than 12-mile-long stretch of Vermont Avenue between 120th Street and Sunset Boulevard. The stretch of road has among the highest rates of pedestrian deaths and injuries in the city.

The ruling from June 15 is a preliminary decision on an injunction request that’s part of a lawsuit brought by Joe Linton, who argues that L.A.’s role in the design and permitting process of the project triggers Measure HLA street safety improvements. The L.A. City Attorney and Metro have rejected that interpretation of the law.

Linton filed the lawsuit in April 2025. He is the editor of the transportation publication Streetsblog LA. Linton is filing the suit as a resident of L.A., not in his capacity as an editor for Streetsblog.

What is Measure HLA?

In 2015, the L.A. City Council adopted Mobility Plan 2035, which identified networks of streets to improve with protected bike lanes, pedestrian signal improvements, bus lanes and other enhancements.

Seven years later, frustrated with a lack of progress on the plan, the local nonprofit Streets for All began campaigning for Measure HLA. The ballot measure, which was passed by voters in 2024, legally requires the city to implement Mobility Plan upgrades when it repaves at least one-eighth of a mile of a street located in one of the networks.

What are the key issues at stake in the lawsuit? 

There’s been a longstanding disagreement over whether Measure HLA applies to Metro’s work in city projects. Metro and the city of L.A. say the ordinance only applies to projects the city leads. Streets for All and Linton say the question of who leads a project is a technicality and that the city is obligated to follow Measure HLA because it’s responsible for approving certain elements of the project’s designs and permits.

The Mobility Plan calls for bike lanes along the same stretch of Vermont Avenue that Metro is working on.

Linton’s lawsuit says the city didn’t implement the bike lanes in accordance with Measure HLA when it resurfaced Vermont Avenue service roads in the past and that it should implement the improvements as part of the Vermont Transit Corridor project.

What are the details of the injunction? 

As the lawsuit plays out in court, Linton requested an injunction that sought to prevent the city from approving final design plans for the project without the bike lanes that Measure HLA calls for.

L.A. County Superior Court Judge Kristin Escalante denied the request on June 15. Escalante wrote in her decision that the city neither initiated the project nor selected Vermont Avenue for resurfacing and won’t be constructing the project itself.

“Metro’s coordination with the city does not transform the project into one made by or undertaken by the city,” Escalante wrote in her decision.

In April and June, Escalante denied Linton’s requests for pre-trial judgement on two other issues in his lawsuit, including deciding if resurfacing work on Vermont Avenue service roads triggered HLA-mandated upgrades and determining whether the city’s HLA ordinance represents an “impermissible amendment” of the ordinance.

What happens next?

The ruling is a preliminary decision. Linton said his legal team is preparing for the case to go to trial.

 “We didn’t lose at the end of the day,” Linton told LAist. “It’s a setback, but it’s a skirmish and not the outcome of the battle.”

Metro said the agency does not comment on pending litigation.

LAist reached out to the L.A. City Attorney and did not hear back.

Are other legal battles taking place? 

Yes, there are two additional ongoing lawsuits that are related.

Linton filed a second lawsuit saying L.A. is using loopholes, like “large asphalt repairs,” to skirt Measure HLA requirements.

Separate from Measure HLA, Metro is working on another bus rapid transit project to connect North Hollywood and Pasadena with construction set to begin this summer. Metro filed a lawsuit in May saying Burbank is, without authority, refusing to grant the transit agency construction permits. On June 18, Metro filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to get the necessary permits so it can begin construction in July and ensure the bus project is ready for the 2028 Olympics.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

A series of Fourth of July events scheduled across Council District 14 have been postponed due to the ongoing impact of a massive warehouse fire in Boyle Heights that blanketed surrounding neighborhoods in smoke for days. 

The fire at the 500,000-square-foot Lineage cold storage facility was knocked down Wednesday evening, but many residents say they are still feeling the effects of the smoke and have questions about the short- and long-term impacts of exposure, as well as what exactly they have been breathing. 

Jurado announced Thursday that out of an abundance of caution, the four Fourth of July events that were scheduled to take place from Friday to Sunday at various parks across her district have been postponed to allow the community and her office to focus on “recovery, connecting residents with resources and getting people the answers they deserve.” The free events were set to include live entertainment, community resources booths and a drone show. 

The postponed events include:

• Friday at Eagle Rock Recreation Center
• Saturday at El Sereno Recreation Center
• Sunday at Hollenbeck Recreation Center
• Sunday at Lincoln Park Recreation Center

“While air quality regulators have not ordered the cancelation of outdoor events, the fire response remains active, residents are still seeking clear information and support, and many families in the impacted area continue to have concerns about smoke, ash, odors, and possible exposure,” Jurado said. 

In the wake of the fire, Jurado has been asking agencies and the companies responsible for transparency. On Monday, the councilmember introduced a motion calling for the public release of air quality and environmental testing information in a way residents can actually understand.

While no independent testing has been commissioned by her office, Jurado told Boyle Heights Beat that the motion, “is intended to bring that information into the open so residents can get clear answers instead of rumors, speculation, or incomplete information.”

According to CD14, the rescheduled event dates will be shared as soon as they are available.