The Brief

Jentry Schippel and her 2-year-old daughter Brinlee stood at the southern end of Doheny State Beach on a recent morning, tossing rocks into the waves. For Brinlee, wiggling her toes in the sand here was a bit of a novelty — this narrow stretch of beach in Dana Point hasn't had much of the fluffy stuff in recent years.

The beach — like many in Southern California — is trapped between the sometimes pounding waves of the Pacific and the asphalt of the Pacific Coast Highway, with little incoming sand to replace what the sea takes back. That makes this part of the coast especially vulnerable to erosion which, while natural, threatens coastal homes, infrastructure and the region's beach-dependent tourism industry. Climate change is making some of these erosive forces worse.

But thanks to last winter's epic precipitation, and an unusually smooth collaboration among local and coastal authorities, this beach and neighboring Capistrano Beach Park have gotten a fresh load of sand.

Earlier this summer, Orange County Public Works began trucking the sand from the Santa Ana River flood channel near the 405 Freeway down to this stretch of coastline in Dana Point. The excess sand was washed down the river during the winter storms and had to be removed anyway, for example, to a landfill.

The eroded conditions at the south end of Doheny State Beach on June 15, 2023, at the start of the sand replenishment project.

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When the project finishes up this month, some 45,000 cubic yards of sand will have been spread over an approximately ⅓-mile-long stretch of coastline. Just a few months ago, the same stretch was covered in smooth rocks, known as cobbles, which naturally underlie many Southern California beaches.

The amount of sand trucked in on this project is enough to fill about five Olympic-sized swimming pools, said Scott Kibbey, who oversees Doheny State Beach and other South O.C. state beaches.

What's so great about sand?

Sandy beaches are a major draw for the tourism that helps power Southern California's economy. The south end of Doheny and neighboring Capistrano Beach Park are popular for their close proximity to parking, especially for families and people with mobility challenges.

Jentry Schippel and her 2-year-old daughter Brinlee enjoy a day at the southern end of Doheny State Beach, where the eroding sand is being shored up.

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Kibbey said the new sand at Doheny will also "create habitat for a couple species that wouldn't have been able to thrive in this area before," the snowy plover and the California grunion.

Sand also protects the coast from erosion, which has become an increasing problem in South O.C. as sea level rises and storm surges become more powerful.

Over the past year, landslides in neighboring San Clemente destroyed part of the Casa Romantica cultural center, left homes teetering on coastal bluffs and forced the coastal rail line to shut down for months and undergo costly repairs.

Why this is a 'short-term fix'

Coastal authorities know a few swimming pools-worth of sand is no match for climate change. "We realize that this is kind of a short-term fix for a problem that we're going to be facing for a long period of time," Kibbey said.

Still, sand replenishment, or beach nourishment, as it's also known, is seen as a promising tool for keeping the ocean at bay and protecting coastal infrastructure.

Humans have long built and rebuilt beaches by trucking sand from riverbeds or dredging it from offshore spots and hauling it to shore. Naturally, beaches are replenished by shifting tides, crumbling coastal bluffs and sediment that gets washed down rivers to the ocean.

The erosion along this stretch of beach in Dana Point was so dramatic officials needed to take steps to shore it back up.

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But Southern California has lost many of those natural replenishment sources by constructing jetties, paving river channels, and building homes and infrastructure like the Pacific Coast Highway and coastal railroad, right where erosion naturally happens.

South OC's sand deficit

University of California, Irvine, engineering professor Brett Sanders says south Orange County, especially, now has a large sand deficit. "Our natural sand supplies have been significantly reduced," Sanders wrote in an email.

Sanders said the sand replenishment project in Dana Point is significant, in part, because it's the first such project along this stretch of the coast in decades.

In contrast, parts of the coastline in Seal Beach, Huntington Beach and Newport Beach have gotten fresh loads of sand periodically, as remediation for federal infrastructure in and around the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station.

The Doheny project is also significant, Sanders said, "because local governments have taken responsibility and taken action."

The cost of sand

Sand replenishment is generally not cheap and many projects rely on federal leadership and funding. The federal government recently committed $15 million to an upcoming phase of the ongoing remediation project for beaches in the northern part of the county.

In south O.C., San Clemente will soon get part of its downtown beach replenished with federal help. The initial phase is expected to cost some $14 million and start this fall. But the city estimates the long-term cost of the project — 50 years of continual sand replenishment — at $256 million.

The cost of the Doheny project has been hard to pin down, in part because the entities involved — the county, California State Parks and the city of Dana Point — pitched in resources and staff time to make it happen. But estimates put the pricetag at approximately $113,000, excluding staff time.

Why it was 'unusually fast'

Susan Brodeur, a senior coastal engineer with O.C. Parks, said the county public works department had essentially donated the sand and the resources to haul it — at an estimated cost of $3.5 million. She called the project "a monumental achievement with all the collaboration involved."

The project also seemed to happen unusually fast — three to four months, Brodeur said. Some of the bigger beach nourishment projects, like in neighboring San Clemente, take years of planning and fundraising to get off the ground.

"Really it was more an opportunistic thing that happened," Brodeur said. She said the county had some pre-approvals in place, for things like the incoming sand composition, through a state program designed to allow local jurisdictions to do small replenishment projects quickly when the opportunity arises.

Brodeur said it's unclear whether the stars would align to do a similar project the next time there's sand available. "The transportation is the biggest issue," she said. "It's very expensive to transport that material here."

How long will it last?

Sanders, from UC Irvine, had been worried that waves and rain from Tropical Storm Hilary would wash away the new sand at Doheny — and from the Santa Ana River site providing the sand. It didn't.

Still, he said the beach would need continual sand replenishment to keep up with the ocean's eroding force. "We’ll also need a long-term plan for higher rates of sea level rise," Sanders said. That could mean moving some of the coastal infrastructure, like the PCH and the train tracks. "Some of the low-lying infrastructure will eventually need to be moved to ensure that we still have a beach," he said.

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.
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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.