The Brief

The Pacific Palisades’ Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine, a sanctuary for spiritual seekers, has reopened to the public after a lengthy recovery and remediation process.

The Lake Shrine is tucked away off Sunset Boulevard near the Palisades coast and narrowly escaped being burned in the Palisades Fire in January. It reopened Wednesday, and the shrine’s leaders hope it can provide a sanctuary for the fire-ravaged neighborhood, along with any other visitors who stop by for the peace and quiet.

The boat was used in old silent movie productions. The memorial in the background houses some of Mahatma Gandhi's ashes.

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Saving the shrine

As it turns out, some foresight and a convenient water source are why the Lake Shrine managed to reopen just months after the devastating Palisades Fire. The shrine’s minister-in-charge Brother Satyananda told LAist that a new pumping system had been installed in advance of the fire.

“ We defended our own property here with our water from the lake, and it proved to be more effective than we ever imagined,” he said.

As the Palisades Fire raged on, volunteer firefighters affiliated with the shrine worked day and night to put out spot fires, even as hydrants failed to work due to water pressure issues and firefighters were dealing with unprecedented demand.

That firefighting process lasted about a week, Satyananda said. In the end, the shrine’s major historical assets were all saved.

But the Self-Realization Fellowship’s land didn’t make it out unscathed.

Some buildings used as dormitories were lost, including one where Brother Satyananda had slept, along with a Waldorf school on the fellowship’s property. Though those lots have been cleared, Satyananda said what the fellowship will do with them “still remains to be discussed and decided.”

Recovery and reopening

Visitors may notice the recovery still is a work in progress despite the reopening. Though the grounds and indoor spaces near the lake are open to the public, remediation work still has to be done on the shrine’s temple, perched higher up in the hills.

“There'll still be work going on in the background, but we'll have a nice quiet space for people to appreciate the value,” Satyananda said.

The path along the Lake Shrine takes visitors around the property. At a few points, like here, some burn scars from the Palisades Fire can be seen in the surrounding hills.

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“Some of our neighbors have said when they come here, ‘Oh wow, it doesn't seem like any disaster ever happened here,’” Satyananda said.

The swans that call the lake home, named Shobha and Shanti, were nearly as quick to bounce back. They got blanketed with ash along with the rest of the lake, and Satyananda said their feathers were nearly black.

Shobha, meaning "radiance," is the younger of the two swans at about 15 months old.

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Shanti, meaning "peace" in Sanskrit, is about two years old.

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It took careful scrubbing to clean the swans, which was possible in large part because the swans knew and trusted the Lake Shrine’s ministers and staff, not to mention their stain-resistant feathers.

The shrine’s history

The site originally was a quarry used to extract building materials for roads in the early 1900s, before Los Angeles was anywhere close to the metropolis we know today. The mining stopped after workers hit the water table, which filled up the surrounding area and created the lake that you still can see today.

The lake passed through a number of hands, including some who developed the property for use as sets in the burgeoning film industry. You still can see a boat docked, and a Dutch-style windmill on the site has been repurposed into a chapel.

The windmill was once used in silent film productions in the early days of Hollywood.

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After the Self-Realization Fellowship acquired the land in 1950, it became a base for its founder, Paramahansa Yogananda, and his spiritual teachings. They proved very influential in California’s spiritual spheres throughout the 20th century. Yogananda is notable for embracing universal elements from all religions in his work: One of his best-known books is titled “The Yoga of Jesus.”

Yogananda’s influence lasted long after his death in 1952. The Self-Realization Fellowship’s Lake Shrine is just one of dozens of locations around the world, and some of the most influential figures in the world have counted themselves as devotees. Just one example: The late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs gifted copies of Yogananda’s autobiography to the people who attended his funeral, according to CNN.

One of several spiritual quotes you'll encounter walking around the Lake Shrine.

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The Lake Shrine’s significance

In keeping with Yogananda’s beliefs, the shrine is interfaith — you’ll see quotations and markers representing major world religions as you walk around.

The path is circular, meant to inspire reflection on spiritual principles, and there are lots of stopping points for meditation. Satyananda, told LAist that some of the Shrine’s regular visitors have specific spots that they prefer to sit and meditate.

Many of the shrine's meditation benches pay tribute to its wildlife.

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Another bench that pays tribute to the shrine's wildlife.

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One of the stopping points along the way is the shrine’s Gandhi World Peace memorial, which has a 1,000-year-old sarcophagus that holds some of Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes. The Self-Realization Fellowship says they’re the only portion of his ashes outside India.

The ashes were sent to Yogananda because he was a close personal friend of Gandhi. Yogananda was also — fun fact — the driving force who brought yoga to Los Angeles (and the country).

This sarcophagus contains a portion of Gandhi's ashes.

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“ We see that in all different kinds of people, the location invokes kind of a natural reverence," Satyananda said. “In the East, meditating in front of a calm body of water is historically symbolic because there's the calmness of the surface, and as you sit quietly and gaze on it, it quiets the mind.”

Brother Satyananda meditates on one of the Lake Shrine's benches.

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He hopes that by reopening the Lake Shrine, he can bring a measure of peace back to the fire-stricken neighborhood.

“I think everybody in the Palisades agrees that this is a time of change,” Satyananda said. “ What I'm seeing as a counselor is people that have been meditating, they have resilience and they tend to bounce back. There's the shock, there's the trauma, but they bounce back rather quickly.”

How to visit

The Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine is now open from Wednesday through Sunday. Visitors have two options: A morning visit at 10 a.m. or an early afternoon visit at 1 p.m.

Advance registrations are required to visit.

Reservations open at 10 a.m. Saturdays for the week ahead. For more information, see the Lake Shrine’s website.

Doctors and health insurers filed a lawsuit Friday alleging Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature violated the law when they approved a healthcare tax that could substantially increase insurance premiums for Californians.

The lawsuit claims the recently passed tax on health plans, known as the managed care organization tax or MCO tax, circumvents a 2024 initiative that limits healthcare taxes and directs revenue toward specific purposes. The California Medical Association and California Association of Health Plans filed the complaint with the California Supreme Court.

“California voters passed Proposition 35 and made it law. The state does not get to ignore that law simply because following the law is inconvenient,” medical association CEO Dustin Corcoran said in a statement.

Newsom’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. H.D. Palmer, a spokesperson for the Department of Finance, said in a previous statement to CalMatters that the state wanted to balance the affordability concerns of privately insured patients against large-scale federal Medi-Cal cuts.

Newsom stopped short of opposing the 2024 initiative when it was on the ballot, but he warned at the time it would “hamstring” the state budget.

For more than 20 years, California has levied taxes on health insurers to help fund Medi-Cal, the state’s insurance program for low-income people. The state historically taxed private health plans at a lower rate than Medi-Cal insurers, but in June, the Legislature passed a bill substantially raising the tax on private plans.

Health insurers said they will pass the cost directly on to consumers, spiking premiums by about $100 per person each year. That means a family of four could pay a $400 annual increase. That would come on top of the rate increases people typically see year to year.

“California is breaking the law by blowing through a tax limit voters put in place to protect Californians and businesses from higher health care costs,” said Charles Bacchi, CEO of the health plans association.

Doctors, hospitals, clinics and Medi-Cal insurers have argued for many years that the revenue from the tax should go toward improving Medi-Cal. They said that the state was inappropriately using the money to replace general fund spending, and that many providers were being paid far less than their services cost. In 2024, they asked voters to approve a limited tax that would be reserved for Medi-Cal improvements.

But Congress last year changed the rules on taxes used to generate revenue for healthcare, including the ones imposed on health plans. Rather than lose the money generated by the tax, Newsom proposed and the Legislature agreed to submit two taxes to the federal government for approval: one that complied with the 2024 initiative but would be rejected by the feds, and one that complied with federal regulations and largely disregarded the initiative.

Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit www.chcf.org to learn more.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

California could create its own multi-billion-dollar science and health research agency under a bill signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom Wednesday, helping to fill a gap left by the politicization of science under the second Trump administration. Voters will decide in a year and a half whether to fund the idea, which the University of California has championed.

Approved by state lawmakers at a time when federal science funding has become increasingly unpredictable, the bill places a $7.5 billion bond measure on the March 2028 ballot to pay for the creation of the California Foundation for Science and Health Research. The new state agency would provide grants and loans for projects in public health, climate science, agriculture and other areas. Panels of scientists would review proposals, and the agency would develop rules allowing the state to share in some of the profits from inventions made with its support.

“Scientific advancements are curing and preventing diseases, improving the lives of people living with chronic conditions, protecting our communities from wildfires, lowering the cost of food, and powering our economy,” the bill’s author, state Sen. Scott Wiener, said in a statement. “We cannot allow the federal government to throw away that hope for a better future.”

Newsom joined Wiener to sign the bill Wednesday atop the Golden Gate Bridge, a landmark built with voter-approved bond money in the 1930s that his press office described as a symbol of California ingenuity. He said the proposed science agency “does the opposite of what Donald Trump is doing (and) will allow us to double down on what makes this state great.”

It was a dramatic comeback for a measure that almost died in the Legislature earlier this year, when a more ambitious $23 billion version of the plan failed to make it onto the November ballot despite bipartisan support.

Researchers from UC Berkeley and elsewhere had joined with UC leadership to lobby for the bond, hosting rallies and inviting lawmakers to a science fair highlighting projects that had seen their funding stalled or canceled by the federal government.

There were plenty to choose from: The Trump administration canceled nearly $2 billion in research grants to the University of California beginning in early 2025, later acknowledging in court that officials searched for keywords such as “health equity” and “sexual orientation” in order to decide what to cut. While a court order restored much of the money, the National Science Foundation has since slowed grantmaking nationwide, and President Trump has proposed giving political appointees more power to veto National Institutes of Health grants that don’t align with his agenda.

This spring, the National Science Foundation canceled an additional $21 million in grants to UC Berkeley, accusing the projects’ lead researchers of accepting foreign funding without disclosing it, a charge some of those scientists denied. UC President James Milliken has called the disruption of federal research funding “one of the gravest threats to the University of California in our 157-year history.”

Lawmakers nevertheless declined to move the science bond forward this spring amid worries about competing demands on state funds – including a housing bond on the November ballot and the possible need to backfill other federal cuts. But negotiations among bill supporters, legislative leaders and the governor over the summer led to the scaled-down version that Newsom signed Wednesday.

Along with the University of California, California State University, private universities, and independent labs would all be potentially eligible for grants from the new state fund. A $7.5 billion state fund would not by itself make up for the instability in federal grants – the UC alone received nearly $5 billion in federal research funding in fiscal year 2024-25. But supporters say it could be especially helpful to researchers in fields such as climate science that are critical to the state’s future but have run afoul of Trump administration priorities.

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Berkeleyside partners with the nonprofit newsroom Open Campus on higher education coverage.

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This story was originally published by Berkeleyside and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

A winter of potentially devastating weather driven by what scientists predict to be a massive El Niño event could strain many of California’s TK-12 public schools, experts say, likely damaging aging structures and forcing school closures.

The southern and central parts of the state are expected to be hit hard along with coastal areas, as they were in 2023 when mid-March storms forced the closure of at least 178 schools. Only this time, weather scientists predict El Niño could stress levees to the max, and even bring potential for tornadoes, along with torrential rains, mudslides, storm-driven tides and heavy winds.

While district superintendents in especially vulnerable areas are already planning ahead, some schools may be ill-equipped to handle punishing weather. At least 59 California school districts are seeking voter approval for bonds in the November election, and have identified the need to repair or replace “leaky,” “dilapidated” and “decaying” roofs, an EdSource examination of local ballot language shows.

Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency on Sept. 21, ordering pumps and sandbags to be stockpiled near vulnerable areas, among other precautions. Federal flood data show roughly 20% of the state’s schools are located within flood plains. In 2023, heavy storms flooded schools in Alameda and Merced counties as well as one near Watsonville, where a levee ruptured.

“Climate-driven El Niño conditions could mean months of dangerous weather, heavy rain, strong winds, deep mountain snow and flooding,” Caroline Thomas Jacobs, director of the California Office of Emergency Services, said at a news conference, adding that the public shouldn’t underestimate “the power of water.”

Preparing for a severe El Niño

As predictions of severe weather spread, there isn’t a school superintendent in an area that the El Niño is predicted to impact “that hasn’t been thinking about this for weeks already,” said Scott Borba, executive director of the California Small School Districts Association. Many small districts have aging buildings — some as many as 75 years old, Borba said.

“You’ve got leaks and dry rot and all the things that a super wet winter is going to just exacerbate,” he said.

While district leaders work with other local agencies during weather emergencies, they are largely on their own when making major decisions, such as whether to cancel school, Borba said.

“Sometimes you have some county office of emergency services’ support. But when it comes to making that decision, that decision lies with the superintendent alone,” he said.

One small school district leader who may soon be making such decisions is Raven Coit, the superintendent and principal of the 61-student TK-8 Peninsula Union School District on the south end of the Northern Humboldt Peninsula in Humboldt County. It’s perhaps the most isolated coastal school in California, roughly 600 yards from the ocean. Dunes often serve as a play area for students.

Coit took steps this year to try to limit storm damage. She had trees cut back and used money saved by deferring other projects to complete much-needed roof repairs. “There was a big storm that caused leaking. I’m proud to say that it won’t rain inside this year,” she said.

But the likelihood of impacts from El Niño remains. The school’s “in a vulnerable spot,” she said. Flooding could cut off access to the only road leading to the school. There’s a backup generator that she’s “trying to figure out if I can make it work.”

While nearly all the school’s students live nearby, many teachers do not, and may not be able to get to work. Local high school students are bussed to Arcata on the mainland — if buses can get through.

She said the school could also turn to remote learning in a crisis.

How El Niño may impact schools in coastal areas

One of the things that makes El Niños so dangerous in coastal areas like Coit’s is that they are known in California for also causing rising tides known as Kelvin waves.

They are slow moving, and can raise sea levels for weeks. Some could reach shore as early as October. At the same time, an astronomical phenomenon known as super king tides is expected from November to January, Danial Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, said in an online presentation.

“That would probably bring record-breaking coastal flooding this year.”

A worst-case scenario “would be an El Niño Kelvin, plus a peak king tide, plus a significant storm,” he said.

A Southern California school leader of one of those districts said it’s bracing for storms.

Don Austin, superintendent of Laguna Beach Unified School District in Orange County, said that living on the coast, “I have seen our beaches get washed away with recent storms and homes destroyed.”

His schools have “roof leaks and other issues that will be heavily impacted by an El Niño,” he said.

The most impactful weather-driven damage to a California school in recent years was in March 2023 when a broken river levee caused the Pajaro Middle school near Watsonville to flood, along with the heavily Mexican immigrant and farmworker community it serves.

The school reopened in 2024. A complete replacement of the entire levee by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could take a decade, officials said.

Mark Strudley, executive director of the Pajaro Regional Flood Management Agency, said the agency is spending roughly $1 million to strengthen the levee, and that the breach that led to the school flooding has been permanently repaired. El Niño, he said, is the obvious concern, and the work is aimed at protecting the town of Pajaro and the middle school.

Leaders of the Pajaro Valley Unified School District remain concerned about El Niño, but haven’t identified a temporary site to move students to if the school floods again, according to Peggy Pughe, the district’s executive director of teaching and learning.

Asked what the district officials are doing based on their experience with the 2023 floods and the threat of El Niño, Pughe said they are “canvassing local neighborhoods, encouraging families and residents to sign up for emergency alert services.”

Data journalist Daniel J. Willis and staff writer Emma Gallegos contributed to this story.

In August, the Trump administration announced a significant overhaul of the Head Start program, leaving early childhood providers in Los Angeles concerned about their ability to serve low-income children.

The proposed rules strip Head Start of many of its regulations and impose new requirements, like teaching in English only.

The public comment period ends Oct. 6 — after which the administration could finalize the new rule. It’s unclear when that will happen, and experts say it could be caught up in litigation.

Why does the administration want to change the rules?

Federal officials said the deregulation would provide for more local flexibility.

An administration statement said the moves reduce both regulatory burden and administrative costs, allowing for more available slots — as many as 236,000 Head Start slots nationwide — and save $2.2 billion.

“We are removing unnecessary bureaucracy, strengthening nutrition and physical health, trusting parents and local communities, and opening Head Start to hundreds of thousands more children,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services. “That’s how we renew the promise of Head Start for the next generation.”

Earlier in the administration, the White House proposed to cut Head Start entirely from the budget but reversed course.

The case against the proposed rules

Head Start providers worry the new rules, if implemented, could be the start of whittling down a program that provides early education and other wraparound services for about 70,000 children across the state.

“It's a holistic program really designed to lift kids out of poverty and to set them up for future success, so what's at risk when the standards are changed are a lot of those elements and guidelines that support the program quality,” said Melanee Cottrill, executive director of Head Start California.

For example, Head Start provides support services beyond education, like developmental screenings and dental care, which would no longer be required under the Trump administration’s plan. The new rules would also require documentation beyond self-attestation for families experiencing homelessness.

“Putting a lot of documentation requirements in place would be very onerous for people who are in really difficult circumstances,” said Donna Sneeringer, president of the Child Care Resource Center, which serves about 2,000 kids in its Head Start programs in northern L.A. County. The program opened up a Head Start center at a family homeless shelter last year.

The administration’s proposal also sets a 5% cap on administrative costs, down from the current 15%, which Sneeringer said will be hard for nonprofits to implement.

“I think many Head Start operators are really going to struggle to even keep their programs open,” she said.