The Brief

On a chilly morning earlier this month, six film students huddled in a computer lab in Glendale Community College. In the spirit of concertgoers hoping to score Taylor Swift or Beyoncé tickets, they clicked and clicked on their screens, hoping to gain access to events that could help make their careers.

Next week, these students and their two professors will board a plane to Salt Lake City. They’ll bundle up and head into the snow at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Sundance is the largest independent film festival in the country. The annual event features world premieres and screenings in every genre, from animation to nonfiction. Participants also get a chance to attend panels with filmmakers and actors.

It’s “kind of a mecca for new filmmakers,” said Sharukh Khan, one of the six students making the trek.

It’s “a hub for discussions, collaborations, and exposure to new perspectives,” his classmate, Tatiana Golykh, chimed in.

They had to make a concerted effort to snag seats together for certain screenings or workshops, because they also want a shared experience. Plus, some popular screenings — like the 20th anniversary of Napoleon Dynamite or A Real Pain starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin — can quickly run out.

And so, when one of their peers confirmed a seat at a given event, the entire room rejoiced.

The idea of becoming a filmmaker

Geri Ulrey, Glendale’s media arts department chair, wrote a grant proposal to secure the funding for the trip. Students don’t have to pay for their flight, lodging, or any Sundance programming.

Ulrey began working at Glendale Community College in 2016, after 10 years of teaching at Cal State Northridge. One of the first things she did after becoming department chair was upgrade Glendale’s studio.

Glendale Community College student Malena Wilson celebrates after securing tickets for screenings at Sundance Film Festival.

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In an industry town where USC, UCLA, and AFI tout their powerful alumni networks, “I never want my students to feel like, ‘Well, you're at a community college and you don't have money to go to a real film school, so you're only going to get the cheap equipment,’” she told LAist.

On the surface, the students have little in common. By background, they represent everywhere from L.A. to North Carolina to Canada to Russia. Some of them enrolled in college immediately after graduating high school. Others have returned to school after years, or even decades, of being away. Some are parents. And while some are close to earning their first associate’s degree, some already have a bachelor’s and are looking to launch a new career. Their love of film brought them together.

One of them, Malena Wilson, recently completed an introductory course in sound design.

“It gives you a lot of respect for sound editors,” she said. “You don’t understand the struggle until you spend an entire class just trying to line up footsteps [with images].”

John Edward will also be going to Utah next week. He recently completed a cinematography course that taught him essential skills, like how to set up lights and work a camera. When he looked at the syllabus and saw that there would be an entire class on color, he wondered: “What more could we possibly learn?”

“And then we had a three-hour lecture about color and how it's related to the screen,” he said.

A program that believes in you

Even with a strong foundation, Ulrey said, becoming a filmmaker might still feel out of reach for some students. To counteract that uncertainty, she and her colleagues start by making the department feel welcoming.

“Instead of having people trying to prove themselves to us,” she said, “the presupposition here is: ‘Of course you belong.’”

Fostering that sense of belonging in students and exposing them to the entire breadth of the film industry is part of the impetus behind Ulrey’s grant writing.

Glendale Community College student Tatiana Golykh.

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“My instinct was: ‘We've got promising students who maybe think that they would never in a million years get to go on a trip to Sundance,” she said. “By opening that door, we’re giving them the chance to sit at the same table as everybody else.”

Even students who don’t go to the festival will benefit, Ulrey said, because “they're going to hear about it” and learn about what’s possible from their peers.

Falling in love with film

This year’s cohort is the second to go to Sundance from Glendale. In 2019, Michelle Castillo and five other students made the same journey.

Castillo began her postsecondary journey at UC San Diego, where she’d planned to major in business. But after an isolating year, the campus and the major no longer felt like a good fit. She went to community college to explore her options and “figure it out.”

Castillo signed up for a theater class at Glendale, which she enjoyed. Then, a classmate mentioned the media arts department, with its emphasis on television and film. She signed up for a beginner’s course on multi-camera filming and fell in love. Soon after, she was on her way to Salt Lake City.

“It was really magical, very Winter Wonderland,” she said. “There were a lot of lights everywhere. The little town was very much like what you would see in Gilmore Girls."

But what Castillo remembers most is that, even though she was there on a scholarship, she never felt like an outsider.

“I remember having so many different conversations with random strangers on the bus, because we were all there for the festival,” she said. “Everyone had done something or watched something, and they would ask each other: ‘What did you watch? What did you think of it?’”

Castillo went on to transfer to San Francisco State, where she completed her bachelor’s degree in one year. Now she works at Warner Music Group, which gives her the time and financial security to work on her screenwriting in the evenings.

As a fan of Sofia Coppola and Greta Gerwig, Castillo also aims to direct. And when she talks about that future, Castillo does so with confidence.

Going to Sundance, she said, made her see that: “I deserve a place in the world.”

Building an enduring network

Castillo is still in contact with people she met at Glendale. On top of rooting for each other, she said, she and her former classmates share work opportunities, including well-paid gigs in the film industry.

Her hope is that this year’s cohort will also get a confidence boost and forge strong professional relationships.

For Thomas Greenough, community college has been a delightful whirlwind. They tried learning about film on their own and even managed to co-create a web series. But, through that experience, Greenough realized that to make high-quality work, “you need the resources, you need the equipment.”

Glendale Community College student Thomas Greenough.

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Greenough currently works as a bartender and was reluctant to sign up for school. They dipped their toes into community college with a photography class at Glendale. Then, they took the plunge and signed up for film courses.

“It's been very fun and satisfying to just be like a sponge, because I've never had a formal education like this,” they said.

For CandyJoe Dahlstrom, going back to school was anxiety-inducing. She went straight into the workforce after high school, raised a family, and enrolled at Glendale to learn how to better manage her small business.

Initially, she only signed up for the courses required to earn a certificate in entrepreneurship/small business. “And then it turned out that I really enjoyed taking classes,” she said. “And so, I was like: ‘You know what, this is a lot of fun. And I want to take more.’”

Dahlstrom signed up for courses in the media arts department, and by pursuing those interests, she discovered that she loves editing and sound design. Last spring, she was named producer of a film that was submitted to the Glendale International Film Festival. The film was nominated for “best students’ short,” but didn’t win. Even so, it was an important step forward for Dahlstrom.

That was the first time she went to a film festival. And, she said, it was “also the first time I've ever called myself a filmmaker.”

Dahlstrom is excited to go to Utah. “As a mother, I don't often leave my family and go on, like, solo vacations,” she said. “I'm really looking forward to the opportunity to do some exploring on my own.”

A federal judge has denied an unprecedented, emergency request by the Department of Justice to segregate thousands of California ballots in the midterm elections.

The Justice Department wants California election officials to stop processing ballots pertaining to 20,000 individuals that federal officials say are "likely" noncitizens.

State and local officials in California have countered that the DOJ's list of "likely" noncitizens is unreliable, with a preliminary analysis by Los Angeles County showing that many on the list do not have active voter registrations. The officials also claim that setting aside ballots just days before Election Day, when voting and processing mailed ballots are already underway, would be unlawful and infeasible and would disenfranchise eligible voters.

In his 26-page ruling issued Wednesday evening, U.S. District Judge David Carter, a Clinton appointee, denied the Justice Department's request for a temporary restraining order to stop processing the ballots in question.

"Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch," he wrote.

Carter also expressed concern about taking action that could disenfranchise eligible voters and create chaos.

"Once a vote is segregated, lasting harm has occurred," Carter wrote at the conclusion of his order. "If the Executive can discount votes and threaten an ongoing election due to unproven allegations, then our democracy is in danger. This Court declines to be a party to such process."

The judge said that the federal government can address the issue by continuing to indict people for the crime of illegally voting as noncitizens. DOJ officials say in the last two months they have charged dozens of people for registering or voting without being a U.S. citizen.

The DOJ's lawsuit in California, which was filed Oct. 15, is among a flurry of unprecedented actions the department has waged in states close to Election Day, raising alarms about federal interference in state election procedures.

Like in California, on Monday federal prosecutors asked Washington state election officials to review a list of 400 registered voters the DOJ believes are likely noncitizens. And last week, the DOJ filed an unusual lawsuit in Alaska that seeks to stop the state from certifying the results in its Senate race if the Republican incumbent loses due to votes for a longshot candidate with a similar name who is accused of being a spoiler candidate.

In California's most recent motion to the court, state Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, asked the judge to take into account the circumstances of DOJ's demand. "This litigation is a precursor to further interference here in California," Bonta wrote. "The Court must not be drawn into this chilling degradation of democratic values and constitutional principles."

The Department of Justice is expected to appeal Carter's denial, and the matter could ultimately wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The DOJ has argued the issue is urgent since ballots are already being processed. Once signatures are verified on returned mail ballot envelopes, the ballots are separated from their envelopes to retain voter confidentiality and it then becomes impossible to retrieve an ineligible ballot.

Federal prosecutors have argued that votes by noncitizens dilute the votes of U.S. citizens. Voting by noncitizens has been shown by audits and investigations to be extremely rare.

The accuracy of the DOJ's list of "likely" noncitizens is still an ongoing matter of dispute.

A Los Angeles County analysis of a small sample of people on the DOJ's list found that a significant portion had said in records they were born in the U.S. But U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services senior official Nicolas Bartell contested that in recent court filings, writing that his office's review of those individuals found none were U.S.-born.

Bartell did acknowledge the review found four of those people "might have a claim to U.S. citizenship."

He also provided the court additional details about the federal government's methodology in creating the list in recent court filings.

But University of Delaware political scientist Kassra Oskooi, who has been tapped as an expert witness by voting rights groups who are intervening in the case, responded in his own declaration to the court that he believes USCIS's matching protocol "is likely to be unreliable."

California’s Public Utilities Commission will decide on Thursday whether to claw back or keep $37.5 million in grant funding meant to bring fast, reliable internet to Catalina Island.

The island is home to more than 4,000 residents, and it draws thousands of tourists each year. Its slow, unreliable internet connection affects everything from remote learning to emergency response.

Lance Ware is CEO of AVX Networks, the company awarded the grant from the CPUC in December 2025. He told LAist host Nereida Moreno that the island depends on a very limited wireless internet link.

“When the town is busy, for instance, a cruise ship comes … the internet just gets crippled along with all the telephone services,” Ware explained.

Months after AVX Networks was awarded the grant, CPUC staff accused the company in July 2026 of breaking federal spending rules, citing insufficient justification and documentation for invoices.

The proposed plan would build the fiber-optic network under the San Pedro Channel from two points on Catalina Island to landings near Huntington Beach. Those cables will then connect to the Middle Mile Broadband Network in Stanton.

Where do things stand today? 

CPUC staff allege that AVX Networks violated several program requirements, according to records.

“Since the award, AVX Networks has not shown itself to have the requisite administrative, technical, and operational capacity to deliver on its project, and AVX Networks has failed to comply with the terms and conditions of its award,” the CPUC agenda item records state.

Ware said he “vehemently disagrees” with those statements.

“There are allegations on things in there that do not make sense to us in that we've had no due process or cure and correct period to address,” Ware said.

What’s next? 

If the commission terminates the contract and pulls the funding, Ware said the project will be delayed, but not stopped.

“This is not curtains down for us,” Ware added. “It's gonna take longer, and we'll have to find some other way to finance it, but we certainly haven't given up.”

Nereida Moreno contributed to the reporting of this story.

Southern Californians are feeling squeezed by the rising costs of, well, everything. And now their local governments are asking for more money, too.

By LAist’s count, more than 30 cities or districts in Los Angeles and Orange counties are asking residents to approve tax measures on Election Day, Nov. 3, citing stagnant revenues that haven’t kept pace with the rising costs of insurance, maintenance and infrastructure projects, and employee pensions. Big cities, suburbs and small towns are all facing multimillion-dollar budget deficits and asking residents to open their wallets — or potentially see deep cuts to basic city services.

The list of local measures on ballots from Culver City to San Clemente includes sales taxes, hotel taxes, business taxes, parcel taxes and utility taxes. Some ballot measures would extend or increase existing taxes while others are brand-new.

Much of the answer to why so many tax measures are on the ballot lies in Proposition 13, which capped property taxes in 1978.

Before Prop. 13, cities and counties relied on property taxes for nearly all of their revenue. In the decades since, they’ve increasingly turned to other types of taxes. Hotel and utility taxes, for example, were essentially nonexistent before the mid-1970s, and sales taxes represented a small sliver of revenue. Even as these taxes have grown, they’ve struggled to replace property tax revenue.

State law caps the maximum combined local and county sales tax rate, and many Southern California cities are already at or near that cap, Coleman said. And sales tax isn’t as reliable as it used to be, amid the broader retail downturn and shift to a service-based economy (most services aren’t taxable in California).

All of that means cities are increasingly turning to “ticky-tacky, peculiar taxes” to come up with revenue, according to Kirk Stark, a professor of tax law and policy at UCLA.

The “conventional tax instruments” — property, income and sales taxes — are all limited by state law, Stark said. “Local governments that are hoping to satisfy demand for any kind of public expenditure have to turn to other, less conventional sources of revenue.”

This year, cities are asking Southern Californians to say yes to a wide range of taxes. Below, we look at three examples in South Gate, Orange and Diamond Bar.

South Gate: A utility users tax

South Gate is asking voters to approve something less common: a utility users tax, or UUT for short. If Measure SG is approved, the 8% tax would be added to bills for utilities such as electricity, water, natural gas, cable and phone service. The tax would bring in an estimated $10.4 million per year.

The city is facing a potential fiscal emergency and a $9.4 million budget deficit. Earlier this year, South Gate began cutting back services, including eliminating its crossing guard program and assigning fewer police officers per shift.

At a City Council meeting on the tax measure earlier this year, several residents spoke against the measure, with some calling the deficit a result of potential financial mismanagement that shouldn’t be pushed onto residents. Others said the monthly costs would simply add a new burden to already tight budgets.

“Being a homeowner here for the past 13 years, I have seen my utilities go up as well as the cost of living, my insurance for my house, and my car insurance go up. I believe there’s got to be a way to fix this problem without the UUT measure,” one resident told the City Council.

“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 another.

The only other utility users tax on the ballot in Los Angeles or Orange counties this year is in San Marino, where residents will decide whether to extend the city’s existing 5% utility users tax, which is set to expire on March 31, 2027, and increase it to 6%. Last year, the tax provided almost $2.2 million in revenue. As of 2021, a total of 162 out of 540 California cities and counties had a utility users tax, according to Coleman’s California Local Government Finance Almanac.

Orange: Hotel and sales taxes could go up 

Most people don’t book a hotel in their own city. That’s made hotel taxes an easier pill to swallow for voters, since the tax is mostly levied on visitors.

The city of Orange is asking voters to approve Measure J, which would raise the hotel tax from 10% to 14%. Orange is one of 10 cities across Los Angeles and Orange counties where voters will decide in November whether to increase or establish a local hotel tax, also known as a “transient occupancy tax.”

Orange residents will also vote on a 1-cent sales tax measure, as the city projects a $27.6 million deficit that it calls “one of the largest financial challenges in the city’s history.” The sales tax is expected to bring in $37 million annually, and the hotel tax would add $3 million.

Diamond Bar: A new 1-cent sales tax 

Diamond Bar voters will decide on Measure Q, a 1% local sales tax that would add a penny per dollar to purchases of taxable items. The city estimates the tax will bring in an additional $6 million annually, which could help plug a projected budget deficit of $5 million a year by 2030.

“The city’s challenge is simple: costs for city services are going up faster than revenues,” states Diamond Bar’s fact sheet on the measure, which cites rising public safety costs and $100 million in infrastructure and maintenance needs.

Several other cities have local sales tax measures on the ballot, including Santa Ana’s 1.5% sales tax extension and Los Angeles’ sales tax increase for the Los Angeles Fire Department, Measure FD.

“There’s a variety because circumstances among these local governments vary. The types of economies among governments vary, the local conditions, even the preferences for what type of revenue measure or tax measure might work varies,” Coleman said. “A local government that’s looking at one of these is going to look at a number of different options and consider what might be most palatable to the voters in their community.”

What’s on your ballot?

Our LAist Voter Game Plan is here to help guide you through the Nov. 3 election with guides to races across Los Angeles and Orange counties — and that long list of state propositions — to help you cast a ballot that’s in line with your own personal beliefs and values.

But the one thing we don’t do? We don’t tell you how to vote. That part is left up to you.

You can find it all at LAist.com/Vote.

Further reading

• Voter guide for parcel taxes in Culver City, Santa Monica, Las Virgenes Unified, San Marino Unified (LAist)
• City of Pasadena Measure PFD: What to know about the tax to support the Pasadena Fire Department (LAist)
• Los Angeles Measure FD: What to know about the proposed sales tax bump for the LA City Fire Department (LAist)
• Proposition 43: Making it harder to pass citizen-led local tax initiatives (LAist)

At the height of the Los Angeles fires in 2025, millions of residents were exposed in a 24-hour period to toxic lead levels from smoke that were 80 times higher than the typical background level, according to a new study.

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology compared the chemical composition of smoke from the Eaton Fire with that of a wildfire and found that the urban plume had more lead, arsenic and halogens (which include chlorine and bromine) linked to burning vehicles, building materials and electronics.

“The main, key finding is really that wildfire smoke is very different fundamentally from the urban smoke,” said Nga Lee “Sally” Ng, an author of the study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. With the new technology they used to measure what was in the smoke, they were able to “actually see the very detailed component of these particles that we are breathing.”

Co-author Haroula Baliaka said understanding the different chemical compositions of smoke from an urban versus a wildland fire helps bridge a missing gap in research. Wildfires are growing larger, more intense, faster-moving and more frequent largely because of drier and warmer weather associated with human-caused climate change. As urban growth and climate change push more fires into cities, researchers said monitoring and emergency response will have to adapt.

Ed Avol, professor emeritus in the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California who has researched the health effects of air pollution for decades, said significant exposure to heavy metals is consistent with what he’d expect, “but certainly surprising because we haven’t been able to document this sort of thing.”

“One of the real advantages of this study is that it had the opportunity to make measurements sort of hour-by-hour across the sampling network. And typically we make measurements of airborne particulates and so forth a couple of times a week, at best,” said Avol, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Thousands of structures burned, releasing toxic chemicals

The two wind-whipped infernos in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades that ignited on Jan. 7, 2025, killed at least 31 people and destroyed more than 16,000 structures, mostly homes, and everything in them — cars, paint, furniture, chemicals under sinks and more. Millions of people were exposed to smoke, which across the entire United States has been linked to tens of thousands of deaths annually. A recent study found that metal mixtures in the leftover smoke, ash and debris from the deadly 2023 Maui wildfires were harmful to the lung health of people living nearby long after the burning ended.

During the fires, researchers measured trace elements of fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, every hour reported by instruments in the Atmospheric Science and Chemistry mEasurement NeTwork ( ASCENT ), a relatively new network of air quality monitors across the U.S. that measures the size and chemical composition of these particulates in real time. Ng said ASCENT is the U.S.'s first measurement network able to measure the chemical composition of airborne particles in real time.

Researchers were able to see what chemicals were in the smoke, track how its composition changed over the fire’s course, and distinguish emissions coming from burning structures. From there, they estimated how many people across Los Angeles were exposed to the heavy metals, particularly lead, during the fire’s first days.

They compared the typical value of lead before the fires and the chemical makeup of smoke from a 2024 fire in Riverside County that burned mostly vegetation with data from the Eaton Fire plume. Contrasted with the wildfire smoke, the plume from the LA fire contained 50 times more lead, three times more arsenic, and seven times more halogens. At the peak of burning, about 7 million people were exposed for 24 hours to lead levels more than 80 times what’s typical.

Lead is a neurotoxin that can stunt children’s development, lower IQ scores and increase blood pressure in adults. Scientists still don’t know how short-term, high exposure to lead impacts human health. Arsenic exposure is associated with various cancers.

Yaguang Wei, assistant professor in the department of environmental medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who researches the health impacts of air pollution, wildfire smoke and severe weather, said their findings reinforced some conclusions of a recent study he co-authored that found, in part, that PM2.5 from wildfire smoke was more toxic than particulates from other sources.

“I think their findings are not surprising,” said Wei, who was not involved in the study. When fires burn properties, they’re also burning “a lot of lead on your wall paint and the plastics and electronics and those are very toxic” when they burn, he said.

Monitoring, policies and emergency response need to adapt, experts say

Wei said the study has “important policy implications.” He thinks governments should take stronger actions to protect public health during these fires by investing in more wildfire monitoring and public alerts, and having more prescribed fires.

For Avol, the study is a reminder of our “strange and increasingly dangerous new world” where urban and wildland intersect — and increasingly catch fire.

“It reminds us to be cautious and be concerned and, you know, think about what we can do to minimize this. We’re not going to stop using all these materials containing metals and halogens and so forth in our homes,” he said. “How do we protect people from being exposed to that?”

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment