The Brief

A proposed compensation program from Southern California Edison for survivors of the Eaton Fire is facing criticism from a community group that says it doesn't go far enough.

The utility plans to offer direct payments to fire victims if they agree not to sue. SoCal Edison announced the program this summer and released a draft for its plan last month.

A group of fire victims gathered in Altadena on Thursday to demand Edison offer more to the thousands of people affected by the fire. The group emphasized not just the financial strain of trying to stay in their community and rebuild, but the emotional toll of prolonged displacement.

SoCal Edison faces a slew of lawsuits over the Eaton Fire, which killed 19 people and destroyed thousands of homes and businesses. The utility company has not admitted fault, but acknowledged that it's possible its equipment could be associated with the start of the fire that sparked in Eaton Canyon on Jan. 7.

On Thursday, some accused Edison of lowballing the survivors who need money the most.

"It's to pick off the most vulnerable in our community who need money the fastest," said Andrew Wessels, whose home was damaged in the Eaton Fire.

Wessels is a member of the Eaton Fire Survivors Network, an organization formed in the aftermath of the disaster that issued a 51-page report that included recommendations and critiques of SoCal Edison's current program proposal.

The report, produced with the input of more than 200 fire survivors, says the compensation program replicates the problems people are facing with their insurance providers, excludes affected people outside of the fire zone and offers less money for children than adults when compensating for emotional damages.

Joy Chen, who leads the fire survivor group, told LAist Edison "severely discounts" the toll of the fire and its aftermath on people in Altadena and the surrounding area.

" They're doing this to shield their corporate liability as opposed to enabling us to recover from their fire," she said.

Diane Castro, a spokesperson with SoCal Edison, said the utility's program wasn't yet finalized and that it would take the report into account.

" We will take what was shared today, we will take what we learned from the community workshops and we'll update the program as needed," she said.

What does Edison's proposal include?

Edison's proposed voluntary program would offer different levels of cash payment to survivors of the Eaton Fire within the fire's perimeter, depending on their circumstances. A draft of the proposal lays out figures for different types of loss, like a destroyed or damaged home, or loss of use.

There are two options for filing a claim: one "fast pay" track promises applicants a compensation offer within 90 days of submitting a completed claim, and a longer process that involves a "detailed review" of the person's economic losses. That route will take nine months to produce a settlement offer, according to Edison's draft proposal.

SoCal Edison says it will announce its compensation program sometime this fall.

Pedro Pizarro, the chief executive of Edison International, SoCal Edison’s parent company, has said the program would allow fire survivors to receive financial support faster.

“This allows the community to focus more on recovery instead of lengthy, expensive litigation,” he said in a statement.

What issues are some fire survivors raising?

In their own report, the Eaton Fire Survivors Network accused the utility of mimicking the tactics of insurance companies, and downplaying certain types of loss. The program, as written, would offer people $10,000 for each structure "with non-burn damage from smoke, soot, or ash infiltration."

Some people displaced by the fire aren't included in SoCal Edison's proposed compensation program at all. Priscilla Hernandez said she and her family live in the Hastings Ranch neighborhood of Pasadena, and have been living in alternative housing since January due to smoke damage.

Under the utility company's current plan, she said she wouldn't be eligible for a payout because she's outside the fire zone.

" When I saw that we weren't even included in the proposal, my jaw dropped," she said.

Then there's the payments for emotional distress — the money meant to compensate for "non-economic" losses like stress, despair and annoyance.

SoCal Edison's proposed program lays out dollar amounts for fire victims to correspond with their experiences, like a lost loved one, or destroyed home. Some of those amounts distinguish children from adults, offering less for kids than their parents.

Eligible residents whose homes were damaged by smoke, soot and ash will get $20,000 per adult and $5,000 per child.

That's the amount Andrew Wessels is eligible for. He recalled evacuating his two children in the middle of the night as the top of their street burned.

"To think that that trauma is $5,000," he said. "For fleeing in the middle of the night in this terrible circumstance, being out of school for weeks, being displaced into 12 homes… Are you kidding me?"

As Los Angeles gears up for a surge of tourists for this year’s FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Olympics, vacation rental giant Airbnb is urging the city of Los Angeles to legalize thousands of new short-term rentals.

The company promises that the expansion will add more than $100 million in tax revenue to city coffers amid a severe budget crisis. But opponents say more short-term rentals will further strain an already limited housing supply.

In a report issued this month, Better Neighbors LA, a coalition of housing activists and labor groups that monitor short-term rentals, countered the Airbnb proposal with its own revenue generating idea: Enforce the city’s existing home sharing law, cite violators and bring in tens of millions of dollars in fines that the group says the city has simply failed to collect.

Beefed-up enforcement is a “simple fix for the city” that would “raise enormous amounts of money,” said Randy Renick, Better Neighbors LA executive director. “It’s also going to return thousands of affordable housing units to the market for long-term renters,” he said. (Disclosure: Renick’s law firm, Hadsell Stormer Renick & Dai, is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

Better Neighbors’ coalition includes the hotel workers union UNITE HERE Local 11, along with local organizations like Venice Community Housing and Strategic Actions for a Just Economy. (Disclosure: UNITE HERE is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

Last year, as Airbnb rolled out its “Save Our Services” campaign for short-term rental expansion, it poured $19 million into lobbying and political contributions at the state level, according to the California Secretary of State’s online database.

Also in 2025, the company spent $360,000 on lobbying at Los Angeles City Hall and made hefty donations to charity at the request of L.A. city councilmembers, Los Angeles Ethics Commission records show. The company donated $570,000 to the nonprofit Salvadoran American Leadership and Educational Fund at the request of L.A. City Councilmember Traci Park and $25,000 to the North Valley Family YMCA at the request of Councilmember John Lee.

California law places no limits on such donations, known as behested payments, but requires them to be disclosed to help the public identify attempts to influence public officials.

Airbnb wants the city to revive an idea that city councilmembers, including former councilmember Herb Wesson, the father of current Airbnb spokesperson Justin Wesson, first proposed eight years ago. The proposal would have allowed property owners to list second homes on platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo or booking.com. The current proposal would add up to about 31,000 units to the city’s short-term rental market. Under L.A.’s Home-Sharing Ordinance, which took effect in 2019, short-term rental hosts are allowed to list only their primary residences on vacation booking platforms. Neither Vrbo nor booking.com responded to Capital & Main’s request for comment about the proposal.

The Airbnb-backed coalition, Save Our Services, says on its website that the additional vacation rentals could generate more than $100 million for the city in “bed taxes,” a 14% levy on overnight stays paid by hotel and short-term rental guests, as well as $100 million in sales tax revenue from tourist spending.

Labor unions like the Teamsters Joint Council 42, the Los Angeles/Orange Counties Building and Construction Trades Council and the International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees, along with the Central City Association of Los Angeles and community groups like the Brotherhood Crusade and the Koreatown Youth and Community Center, back the effort.

Airbnb spokesperson Justin Wesson said in a statement, “By allowing a limited, regulated number of vacation rentals in the City of Los Angeles we can help stabilize funding for essential services, support neighborhood-based tourism, and prepare the city for upcoming global events in a way that benefits residents, visitors, and local businesses alike.”

Airbnb supports stronger enforcement of the city’s Home-Sharing Ordinance, Wesson wrote in a January 2026 letter to the L.A. City Council. The letter also urges the city to require all vacation rental platforms to share data with the city and remove illegal listings. Airbnb is the only company that currently does so voluntarily.

The Better Neighbors LA report dismisses Airbnb’s claim that expanding short-term rentals would generate more than $100 million in new hotel taxes as “fanciful” because the proposal wouldn’t necessarily bring additional tourists to the city. In 2020, as the City Council first considered an expansion of the short-term rental market, Los Angeles Director of City Planning Vince Bertoni was also skeptical that expanding vacation rentals would draw visitors to Los Angeles.

Still, the World Cup and the Olympics will bring an influx of visitors to L.A., and groups like Better Neighbors LA fear that the city will lose much needed housing to tourist rentals, especially if city officials permit additional vacation rentals.

This concern is heightened by the fact that the city has long struggled to enforce its existing Home-Sharing Ordinance.

Fully half of the Los Angeles vacation rentals listed on booking sites are illegal, according to data included in the Better Neighbors LA report. But only a tiny fraction of violators are cited; the city has collected a total of about $667,000 in fines under the 2019 home sharing law, Better Neighbors LA reports. The group estimates the city could immediately rake in $95 million in two months if it stepped up enforcement.

City Councilmembers Katy Yaroslavsky and Hugo Soto-Martinez, whose Hollywood-Silver Lake district has among the highest concentration of the city’s short-term rentals, support Better Neighbors’ plan to increase enforcement of the city’s current law.

“This report makes clear that the path forward is enforcing the home-sharing laws already on the books,” Soto-Martinez said in a statement. “If we fully implement the rules we passed, we can protect tenants and generate additional revenue for the city without sacrificing housing.”

L.A.’s Home-Sharing Ordinance generally allows individuals to list only their primary residences on sites like Airbnb and Vrbo for up to four months, although the city also makes exceptions, allowing year-round “extended home sharing” in many cases. Home sharing is not permitted in dwellings covered by the city’s rent control law or in affordable housing units, including those built with public funds.

But property owners have easily evaded the existing home sharing law, even amid a severe housing and homelessness crisis. In 2024, a Capital & Main and ProPublica investigation found that tourists could rent apartments in dozens of rent controlled buildings in apparent violation of the law. Owners of some of these buildings openly listed fabricated or nonexistent city registration numbers and were never cited.

For years, residents complained about loud parties in short-term rentals, parking problems and the loss of permanent housing in their neighborhoods. Last March, the City Council finally voted to pursue reforms, including requiring short-term rental platforms to use a computer system that would automatically block illegal transactions and giving individuals the right to sue suspected short-term rental law violators. But the reform effort hasn’t moved forward.

Last year as the City Council considered stricter oversight of short-term rentals, Los Angeles Housing Department officials said they lacked the staffing and resources to effectively enforce the ordinance. This month, Sharon Sandow, a spokesperson for the housing department, which is one of several city agencies overseeing the Home-Sharing Ordinance, said in an email that all of the departments would have to assess their “resources and capacity” for a coordinated enforcement effort.

Meanwhile, the Airbnb proposal has caught the attention of at least one city councilmember, Heather Hutt, who represents Koreatown and Mid-City. In January, Hutt requested that the chief legislative analyst and other city department staff brief the City Council’s budget and finance and planning and land use committees on the status of the ordinance.

Support for the Airbnb plan would represent a distinct shift for most members of the City Council: Last year, councilmembers put themselves squarely on the side of limiting short-term rentals in the city, voting 12-0 to strengthen oversight of the program. Three members — John Lee, Monica Rodriguez and Bob Blumenfield — were absent.

Copyright 2026 Capital & Main

Iran's sports minister said Wednesday that the team will not compete in the World Cup, citing the U.S. war on Iran, the Associated Press and other news outlets reported.

Iran is scheduled to play two matches in Los Angeles in June against New Zealand and Belgium.

Iran's participation in the global tournament has been in question since the U.S. and Israel launched a bombing campaign against the country in late February.

On Wednesday, the country's sports minister, Ahmad Donyamali, told state television that the country's team would not participate in the tournament in the U.S. “considering this corrupt regime has assassinated our leader,” according to the New York Times. A joint U.S.-Israeli attack killed Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war.

The remarks came after FIFA president Gianni Infantino said Tuesday that he had met with President Donald Trump and that Iran continued to be welcome to attend the World Cup.

"We also spoke about the current situation in Iran, and the fact that the Iranian team has qualified to participate in the FIFA World Cup 2026," Infantino said in an Instagram post. "During the discussions, President Trump reiterated that the Iranian team is, of course, welcome to compete in the tournament in the United States."

Infantino has faced heavy criticism for awarding Trump the first-ever "FIFA Peace Prize" last year.

A FIFA spokesperson told LAist that Iran has not formally pulled out of the tournament. The local host committee for Los Angeles declined to comment, directing LAist to FIFA.

According to FIFA's regulations, any participating team that withdraws from the World Cup will be required to repay FIFA "preparation money as well as any other tournament‑related contribution payments."

The regulations also say FIFA has sole discretion to determine next steps if a team pulls out, including replacing the team.

Just over a year ago, the U.S. Department of Education abandoned key oversight of the companies that run the federal student loan program, according to a new report from the nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

GAO investigators found that, in February 2025, the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) stopped reviewing the accuracy of loan servicers' records. FSA also stopped reviewing recordings of calls with borrowers to make sure they're being given accurate information.

Without this oversight, the report warns, borrowers could feel the consequences.

"If servicers' records are inaccurate, borrowers could, for instance, be placed in the wrong loan repayment status, billed for incorrect amounts, or not have a refund processed in time," the report says. "Similarly, FSA has not monitored calls since February 2025, so there is a risk that borrowers have received or will receive incorrect information and poor customer service."

The investigation was requested by the ranking members of the House and Senate education committees, Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

"Instead of providing relief to 43 million Americans who are drowning in student debt," Sanders said in a statement to NPR, "the Trump administration has made it harder for them to understand how much they owe and how long it will take to pay back."

What the administration has to say about GAO's findings

The Office of Federal Student Aid is supposed to conduct quarterly reviews, according to its contracts with loan servicers.

These reviews include comparing loan servicers' borrower records with FSA's own records, to screen for gaps or discrepancies, as well as "targeted reviews" of borrowers in specific situations, including those who request temporary relief from their payments.

The assessments that were stopped are more labor-intensive than other types of oversight that have been automated, GAO says. According to the report, agency officials told the government watchdog they stopped these reviews in early 2025 "due to lack of FSA staff capacity." That's around the same time the Trump administration began dramatically reducing staffing levels at the Education Department.

According to the report, FSA began 2025 with 1,433 staffers; by December, it had 777 — a 46% reduction.

In a written response accompanying the report, Richard Lucas, FSA's acting chief operating officer, disagreed with GAO's recommendation that FSA resume the reviews. While he confirmed that FSA had, indeed, stopped the oversight in question, Lucas wrote, "FSA determined that a better approach is to provide substantial oversight through additional activities that measure the accuracy of servicer data and the quality of their performance." Those activities include regular reviews of borrower satisfaction surveys.

Melissa Emrey-Arras, who led the GAO study, says FSA's "better approach" isn't better.

"While reviewing those satisfaction surveys may be helpful, they don't directly assess the quality of the information given to borrowers. A borrower may indicate they were satisfied with a call, not realizing they were given completely wrong information by their servicer," she says.

The last FSA review found problems with loan servicer accuracy

Scott Buchanan, the executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance, which represents the servicers working on the federal student loan program, says servicers also police themselves.

"[Servicers] internally are monitoring far more than any of our regulators ever could or would. Because it is in our best interest to make sure those errors are fixed. And because we have contracts, and if we have major issues that have become clearly apparent, then people will say, 'We'll find someone else to do it.'"

At the end of 2024, before the Trump administration cut oversight, GAO's review of servicer recordkeeping found that "four of the five servicers did not meet the accuracy performance standard and faced associated financial penalties."

In fact, recordkeeping at two servicers was troubled enough to merit the maximum financial penalty allowed.

And GAO notes that the Education Department's independent financial auditor reported as recently as January 2026 that the department "continued to have a material weakness related to the reliability of its student loan data."

What's more, Emrey-Arras says, scaling back oversight at FSA has also meant scaling back efforts to hold servicers financially accountable for their performance. This accountability, she says, "is critical. Without it, the government risks overpaying for poor performance."

For borrowers, servicer mistakes can lead to very real problems, said Rep. Scott in a statement to NPR. "Borrowers can either overpay or be placed in the wrong student loan repayment program. [The Education Department's] refusal to conduct oversight of student loan servicers is a dereliction of duty."

Scaled-back oversight of big student loan changes

These cutbacks in staff and oversight come as millions of federal student loan borrowers will need help transitioning into new repayment plans. The Biden-era SAVE plan is in turmoil, with borrowers now being charged interest and the plan due to be closed by 2028 at the latest. Another 12 million borrowers are either in default on their loans or on their way there.

What's more, in July, a raft of new, potentially challenging changes to the student loan program will begin — courtesy of Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act — including the introduction of two brand-new repayment plans and the phasing out of others.

GAO warns that these changes will affect millions of borrowers who "will need accurate and complete information when they call for help," yet, for the time being, the Education Department can't be certain that's what borrowers are actually getting.

Copyright 2026 NPR