The Brief

Los Angeles’s trees are in increasingly dire health, according to one measure, weakened by climate, poor planning and a city stretched too thin to adequately care for them.

The number of “tree emergencies” reported to the city’s MyLA311 service has been climbing steadily, reaching 1,844 in December, the highest level recorded since the city began releasing data last April. A tree emergency, by the city’s own classification, typically means a tree has fallen or is at imminent risk of doing so. A Crosstown analysis shows that the increase is not isolated to just some parts of the city, but is more or less consistent across all neighborhoods.

The sudden rise — propelled by recent rains — is an illustration of what arborists have been warning about for some time: Los Angeles is failing to properly care for its urban tree canopy, pushing once healthy trees to the point of failure. They expect conditions to get worse, exacerbated by a lack of regular maintenance and increasing stresses brought on by hotter temperatures and intense storms.

The various city agencies in charge of maintaining trees are so underfunded that they “are not able to walk and chew gum at the same time,” says Aaron Thomas, the urban forestry director at North East Trees, an environmental advocacy organization. The lack of adequate care only accelerates that decline. “It’s a vicious cycle, young trees that need structural pruning that will prevent issues in the future don’t get care. Trees that are just not healthy because they are not being cared for become hazardous.”

Workers respond to a tree emergency on Venice Blvd.

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Gabriel Kahn

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Crosstown

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Once every 17 years

There are approximately 660,000 trees that make up the city of Los Angeles’s urban tree canopy, one of the largest in the nation. Keeping them healthy requires attention at every stage. A young tree that does not receive early pruning grows unevenly and eventually becomes a hazard. Without that investment, the city ends up spending more money later on bigger, more dangerous trees.

A representative for the city’s Bureau of Street Services, which houses the Urban Forestry Division, said that despite the city’s recent budget woes, staffing has remained more or less consistent, with about 220 workers. That allows the division to operate on a 17-year maintenance cycle.

That 17-year interval is far longer than what arborists recommend, according to Esther Margulies, a landscape architect and urban planning professor at the University of Southern California. “The more you defer maintenance, the more expensive and difficult it becomes,” she said, “because you’re dealing with bigger trees and more structural problems.”

Recent patterns of intense rainfall followed by high winds have made conditions worse, and have likely pushed up the number of tree emergency calls. Saturated soil loses its grip, and trees that might have held come down.

Margulies described the situation as an infrastructure problem. Trees provide shade, stormwater absorption, and cooling in a city that faces more extreme heat every year. “None of that happens for free,” she said, “just like other infrastructure in our city.”

New trees needed for a new climate

Bryan Vejar is the associate director of community forestry at TreePeople, an organization that helps maintain the local tree canopy, among other things. The city’s Urban Forestry Division is “so undercapacity, their priorities are responding to tree mortality and hazards, not planting.”

Part of what is occurring now is the consequence of bad decisions made years earlier. Trees planted across the city were chosen for their looks rather than their ability to survive in Los Angeles’s evolving climate. Only 10-15% of them are native to Southern California, says Vejar. Species selected for fall color or flowering, popular in wetter climates, were never suited for prolonged drought or rising heat. Many are now approaching the end of their lifespans. Vejar noted that Los Angeles street trees survive on average between eight and 25 years, even though many of the species planted are capable of living hundreds of years under the right conditions.

Simply planting more trees won’t fix the problem. “Once you plant it, as a minimum, you have to care, water for three years,” says Vejar. “We can’t plant ourselves out of tree mortality.”

Trees need to be capable of surviving in compacted soil that is often poor quality. “These different pressures winnow down the inherent tree palette. Climate change makes it harder,” says Vejar. He added that in some cases, even native tree species are no longer adequate. “Sometimes, we have to plant for a climate that is hotter, drier. We can’t plant native trees, but ones that can survive in that new climate.”

How we did it: We analyzed 10 months of MyLA311 data for tree-related services requests and also broke down the data by neighborhood.

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.