The Brief

Last summer, after nearly two years of organizing, hundreds of untenured faculty at Loyola Marymount University celebrated the certification of their newly formed union.

In a message to the campus community, Thomas Poon, who served as LMU’s executive vice president and provost, wrote: “We honor the will of our [non-tenure track] faculty and the perspectives they expressed throughout the election campaign.” The university, he added, “will continue to engage the union in good faith and with transparency.”

Poon is now president of LMU and, earlier this month, he changed his tune.

Poon announced Sept. 12 that the university’s board of directors decided to invoke a religious exemption to the National Labor Relations Board's jurisdiction. That board guides unionization efforts and protects the rights of private sector employees. In practice, Poon added, LMU’s exemption means the school will no longer recognize unions or participate in collective bargaining.

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Colleges like the University of Southern California and Loyola Marymount University are trying different tactics to push back against new labor unions. What does it mean for unions at universities — and beyond— in the long term?

How union organizing is being upended by private universities in Southern California

Colleges like the University of Southern California and Loyola Marymount University are trying different tactics to push back against new labor unions. What does it mean for unions at universities — and beyond— in the long term?

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For the untenured faculty eager to negotiate their first contract, the announcement came as a blow. Multiple members described feeling blindsided and betrayed.

“I thought the fact that the union election had been certified and that the university had already been bargaining with us [meant] we had protections,” said Arik Greenberg, an assistant professor in theological studies.

At USC, untenured faculty also face resistance as they work to establish a union of their own. There, administrators say the faculty can’t unionize because they’re all “managerial employees and/or supervisors.” The university has also aligned itself with companies like Amazon and SpaceX, which claim that the NLRB itself is unconstitutional.

Experts say the universities’ anti-union tactics aren’t wholly original. But, taken together, the pushback marks an era of more aggressive opposition to labor organizing at campuses in Southern California — one that could have implications for higher ed institutions nationwide.

Why are non-tenured faculty unionizing?

In the last 40 years, colleges across the U.S. have moved away from offering tenure-track positions, said William Herbert, executive director of Hunter College’s National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. Instead, new hires in academia increasingly sign on to short-term contracts. And, usually, this involves at-will employment — and lower pay.

The shift to non-tenured roles has also transformed campus labor relations, Herbert said. Among untenured faculty, there’s been a “massive increase in unionization,” particularly in the last decade.

At LMU and USC, the faculty who are fighting to get their units off the ground say their bargaining units are key to securing better working conditions in their precarious roles.

Why did LMU do an about-face?

Untenured faculty at LMU began building their unit, SEIU Local 721, in 2023. After the NLRB certified it, the bargaining team presented the university with nearly 40 proposals, spanning a range of labor issues.

“Money is a big part of it,” said Sam Goff, a lecturer in animation. “Obviously, we want to be making a living wage — but it's not the only thing. There's also job security, pathways to full-time employment, academic freedom. There's structure put around how we are evaluated, and when we have those evaluation processes take place.”

But in the months following their union’s certification, Goff and other bargaining team members said there was little progress.

“We were requesting bargaining dates as soon as we had that election certified in June of 2024,” said assistant professor Greenberg. The university’s representatives, he said, “dragged their feet.”

The bargaining team members said they and the university managed to advance on “a couple” proposals before the university invoked the religious exemption — but none of them had to do with compensation.

“We kept asking them: ‘When are we going to get a counter on the economic proposals?’ And they kept pushing that timeline down the road,” Goff said.

In the video to the campus community, Poon provided more details to explain the university’s about-face toward the union.

“When LMU began bargaining in 2024,” he said, “the higher education landscape looked very different. Since then, higher education is facing seismic pressures, from the looming demographic cliff to shifting federal policies, creating a far more challenging environment than just a year ago.” After “carefully reviewing” the untenured faculty’s proposals, he added, the university determined they “proved financially unsustainable.”

Union members insist that their economic proposals were not outlandish, but simply rooted in the cost of living in L.A. County. They also said they never expected the university to accept their initial proposals — they expected to negotiate.

“I counsel them strongly: Please get back to the bargaining table. Save yourselves millions and millions of dollars of woe that you're going to wind up spending, either on attorneys' fees or on PR, just to try to silence us,” Greenberg said.

How does a religious exemption work?

Herbert, of Hunter College, said LMU is not the first university to invoke a religious exemption. A 1979 Supreme Court decision has been the basis for litigation by religiously affiliated institutions seeking to thwart faculty unions. In that case, the Supreme Court held that the NLRB should decline jurisdiction over questions of representation concerning parochial school faculty, to avoid potential First Amendment issues.

Still, Herbert underscored, “the fact that [a university] may or may not be subject to the National Labor Relations Act does not preclude [it] from agreeing to continue to negotiate” with a union. LMU’s peer Catholic Jesuit institutions, including Georgetown University and Fordham University, have active collective bargaining units.

By starting negotiations with the untenured faculty union last year, LMU “essentially said the NLRA had jurisdiction,” said Leticia Saucedo, a law professor at UC Davis.

“I think part of what's going on here is that [LMU] is reading the tea leaves and making a calculated decision about how [it] would fare under a National Labor Relations Board that is governed under the Trump administration,” she added.

After LMU announced it would no longer recognize SEIU Local 721, members staged a rally on campus. Then, they launched a strike authorization vote to pressure the school to return to the bargaining table. The vote closes on Sept. 30.

Students and other campus employees came out in support of LMU's untenured faculty in mid-September.

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Courtesy Emily Dorrel

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SEIU Local 721

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In an email, LMU spokesperson Griff McNerney said the university is “disappointed” by the strike authorization vote because it “risks disrupting the continuity of instruction and the student experience.” McNerney also said the untenured faculty’s union “has no standing,” since “the university lawfully invoked its religious exemption on September 12.”

“Since then,” he added, “LMU has reinstated merit pay retroactively, begun reviewing contracts for greater stability, and expanded professional development opportunities.”

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) represents about 2 million workers in North America, including at least 83 faculty units. McNerney said the union is “an outside, dues-funded organization that has acted more like a third-party bully than a partner advancing faculty or student interests.”

Greenberg, who sought out the SEIU — and who has been trying to organize untenured faculty at LMU for over a decade — strongly disagreed with McNerney’s characterization. So did Goff.

“We are SEIU,” she said. “And what’s wrong with paying dues?”

In his email, McNerney noted that LMU benchmarks pay “at the 75th percentile of the market.”

“That 75th percentile means nothing to me when my colleagues can't pay to sustain their lives,” said Goff. An LMU alumna, she’s still paying off her student loans. “If I can’t earn a living wage,” she asked, “what is the value of an LMU degree?”

What’s the status of unions at USC?

At USC, untenured faculty filed a petition for an election in December 2024. If a majority of votes are cast in favor of their union, United Faculty UAW, the NLRB will certify the group. The proposed bargaining unit is composed of about 2,500 educators from various schools — everything from engineering to music. (The school of cinematic arts has its own union.)

Sanjay Madhav, a USC graduate who is now an associate professor in the school of engineering, said he and his colleagues aim to secure salaries that keep pace with inflation and the cost of living. They also want to protect their retirement contributions and keep their health insurance premiums affordable. The cost of parking and tuition coverage for the faculty’s dependents are also top of mind.

Madhav also noted that, in recent months, the university has laid off over 600 employees.

“With the current structure,” he said, “the administration makes these top-down decisions, and we, as individuals, have no way to have input on that.”

“By forming a union, we'd have a seat at the table. We would actually be able to work with the university to figure out what's an equitable way to handle the budget cuts,” Madhav added. “The current model asks that we, as faculty, trust that the same administration that got us into the budget crisis also knows the best way to get us out.”

When the untenured faculty submitted their petition to the NLRB last December, the university could have agreed to an election, said Kate Levin, an associate professor of writing. Instead, USC issued a legal challenge.

Chief among its arguments is that the petition “should be dismissed because the proposed unit is comprised entirely of faculty who are managerial employees and/or supervisors.” The university also says the proposed unit is “not appropriate” because it’s made up of faculty “who have distinct areas of scholarship, job functions, and work.”

On top of its unionization battle, untenured faculty at USC have seen hundreds of colleagues laid off in recent months.

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Courtesy Kate Levin

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Like Amazon, SpaceX and other companies, USC’s legal counsel challenges the constitutionality of the NLRB, arguing that its structure violates the nation’s separation of powers and gives it unchecked power to enforce labor law.

If USC succeeds, it “will preclude non-tenured faculty from being able to vote on whether or not they want representation,” Herbert said.

But even if USC ultimately doesn’t prevail with this line of argument, delaying the vote could have adverse effects on the union, he said. If the unionization process gets dragged out, support for the effort could waver and ultimately result in a negative vote. This tactic, Herbert said, “is very real in the private sector.”

Are non-tenured faculty ‘managers’?

With regard to USC’s claim that United Faculty UAW’s proposed unit is “comprised entirely” of managers and supervisors, Herbert and UC Davis’s Saucedo also noted that this type of opposition isn’t novel. In 1980, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled that faculty at Yeshiva University were managerial personnel and not entitled to the rights under the NLRA due to their role in making decisions through shared governance.

The issue at USC, Herbert said, is whether their untenured faculty have “played a significant role in the governance of the university, like the tenure-track faculty” at Yeshiva.

In the past, Saucedo added, the NLRB has made determinations about these types of cases by examining the faculty’s “participation in things like decision-making around academic programs, enrollment, finances and personnel policies.”

Thousands of USC employees signed a letter, urging the school to let untenured faculty vote if the NLRB allows them to proceed.

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Courtesy Kate Levin

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In an email, USC spokesperson Lauren Bartlett said "USC has a long history of good relations with the unions that represent our staff. But because of the role that our [non-tenure track] faculty play in shared governance, they are not eligible to unionize under existing law. This in no way diminishes our appreciation of the critical role that all USC faculty play in advancing our mission of academic excellence.”

What would it mean to lose the NLRB?

Attacks against the NLRB have become commonplace in the business world — but, among higher ed institutions, they’re still rare, Saucedo said.

If cases like SpaceX v. NLRB make it to the Supreme Court and succeed, she added, those decisions could affect “the whole structure of the National Labor Relations Board and the authority of the National Labor Relations Act.” Congress could have “to go back to the drawing board” and create a new agency, she said, which could make it harder for workers to unionize and take collective action in pursuit of better working conditions.

Members of USC’s United Faculty UAW expect a favorable NLRB ruling, one that will allow them to vote and, eventually, certify their union. Earlier this month, they teamed up with other campus workers to stage a rally on campus. They also delivered a letter signed by over 1,100 campus employees, calling on university leaders to respect the outcome.

“Do not issue any further appeals or legal delays — just let the democratic process proceed,” Levin said. “And when we win that election, meet us at the bargaining table and bargain in good faith.”

For Herbert, the conflicts at LMU and USC go beyond legal questions. “Are we a society that supports workplace and political democracy,” he said, “or are we a place where we think that those questions should be decided by people who have greater power than those who don't?”

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Colleges like the University of Southern California and Loyola Marymount University are trying different tactics to push back against new labor unions. What does it mean for unions at universities — and beyond— in the long term?

How union organizing is being upended by private universities in Southern California

Colleges like the University of Southern California and Loyola Marymount University are trying different tactics to push back against new labor unions. What does it mean for unions at universities — and beyond— in the long term?

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California’s first-in-the-nation fast food council — created to give workers a voice on wages, safety and working conditions — has not met in over a year and has no chairperson.

Now the workers the council was built to protect, organized by the Service Employees International Union, are taking their concerns directly to the state, demanding that Gov. Gavin Newsom appoint a chairperson so the council can do its work, as required by law.

Luna Mondragon, who works at a Carl’s Jr. in Milpitas, told CalMatters through a translator that she started out as a cook but has done many other duties in her five years there. After she joined the fast food workers union, she said she began speaking up, especially when she started to experience aches and pains from her job. Since then, she said she has been retaliated against, including with fewer shifts.

“If we don’t have our health we can’t accomplish anything,” she said, her voice choked with emotion. “It’s so important for them to appoint a chair. We need the council.”

The council was created as part of a 2023 compromise that also set a $20 minimum wage for fast food workers. It has the power to set standards on wages, health, safety and working conditions — and to raise the minimum wage annually for hundreds of thousands of fast food workers at chains with 60 or more locations nationwide.

The council — composed of four members representing the businesses, four members representing labor and a chairperson who’s an “unaffiliated” member of the public — must, under state law, hold at least two meetings a year, though the law does not specify who should enforce this provision.

The council only held those meetings in 2024; last year it held two subcommittee meetings, the latest in February 2025. Shortly after, the council’s chairperson, Nick Hardeman, resigned when Newsom appointed him to a different state position. When reached by CalMatters, Hardeman said he did not want to speak on the record about a council he has not chaired in a while.

In 2022, the Legislature raised fast food workers’ minimum wage to $22 an hour. The industry fought back, gathering signatures to repeal the law. Workers across the state went on strike. In late 2023, the SEIU and the industry reached a last-minute compromise: Workers dropped a ballot fight in exchange for a $20 minimum wage and the establishment of the council. The SEIU-affiliated California Fast Food Workers Union launched the following year — lacking the collective bargaining rights of a traditional union but acting as an advocacy and membership group for workers.

Tara Gallegos, a spokesperson for the governor, would not answer questions about the council, instead referring CalMatters to the state’s Labor & Workforce Development Agency. Crystal Young, a spokesperson for the agency, confirmed that there is no chairperson and the council’s meetings are on hold. The council’s four-person staff continues to respond to inquiries and prepare for future meetings, she said.

On April 16, marking about two years since the council’s first meeting, workers delivered a 96-page book to the governor’s office, describing more than 100 complaints filed with CalOSHA, the state labor department and different city agencies since the council’s formation, alleging wage theft and poor working conditions. The union estimates there are about 630,000 fast food workers in the state, about 75% of whom are people of color and 20% of whom are immigrants.

“Employers feel newly empowered to threaten us with calling ICE when we ask questions about paid sick leave or [workers’ compensation] or report health and safety hazards,” Angelica Hernandez, a McDonald’s worker who is a member of the fast food council, said in the book.

Rich Reinis, a member of the council who represents employers and is a former franchise owner, said he has no knowledge of when meetings will resume and is waiting. In his view, the council should have been discussing “fire and ICE.” The phrase refers to the effects of last year’s L.A. County fires on the fast food industry and its workers, some of whom lost their homes, and what businesses and workers need to know about immigration enforcement.

Reinis also wants the council to order a study of the wage increase’s effects on prices and employment. Competing studies by UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz have reached opposite conclusions, and the question of affordability remains unresolved, he said.

A Los Angeles Times columnist who analyzed the competing studies concluded the debate over the wage's effects is likely to continue. Hernandez, the councilmember, rejected the industry's claims the wage increase has hurt business. “The sky didn’t fall on the California fast food industry,” she said.

The council is also required to submit a performance review to the Legislature every three years — a deadline approaching without a single full meeting in the past year. Before he resigned, Hardeman, the former chairperson, said it was hard for the council to reach decisions.

“The staff will have to write a report without having any meetings,” Reinis said. “How the hell are we supposed to do that?”

Chris Holden, the former California assemblymember who authored the law that raised the workers’ wages and created the council, told CalMatters the council was “groundbreaking” and “needs to address the challenges that were the genesis of the council in the first place.” He said he hopes the governor is doing his due diligence to identify a new chairperson.

“I want to tell [the governor] to finish the job he started,” Julieta Garcia, a cook at a Pizza Hut in Los Angeles, told CalMatters through a translator. “Leave a good legacy for this generation and the future generation, so you can be recognized as a leader who gave fast food workers a chance.”

Young, the Labor & Workforce Development Agency spokesperson who was speaking on the governor’s behalf, confirmed that Newsom’s office received the workers’ book.

The governor's office has not said when — or whether — Newsom plans to appoint a chairperson to the council.

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

Nearly 20 years after founding a successful environmental and safety consulting services company, Robin Thorne said she still gets checked for being a Black woman in the construction industry.

“I've had situations where people, they don't even make eye contact, and then the male has to step back to say, 'She's running the show,'" she said.

Robin Thorne (in pink jacket) founded DemoChicks to help women of color land jobs in construction industries.

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Courtesy DemoChicks

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Thorne runs CTI Environmental, a multi-million dollar company that was contracted by the Army Corps of Engineers to do debris removal after the L.A. fires.

She’s been an engineer for decades and knows fewer than one of four workers in architecture, construction and engineering industries who are women — and much fewer are women of color.

That proportion is low considering 47% of the U.S. labor force are women.

That's why she’s organized a “Women in STEM Signing Day” at Long Beach City College on Saturday, May 30. The event’s meant to create the type of excitement normally associated with young people signing up for college sports teams.

She wants younger women to tap into their drive to succeed

There were far fewer women in these jobs when Thorne was growing up in Philadelphia, but she didn’t let roadblocks, including those in her personal life — like being a single mom on public assistance — stop her.

DemoChicks helps give young women of color exposure to construction-related jobs.

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Courtesy DemoChicks

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“When I thought about being an engineer, I didn't think about it being male-dominated. I just knew I wanted to be an engineer,” she said.

She added that some women do give up on similar dreams or fail to find the spark that allows them to see themselves doing these jobs. That’s why Thorne started DemoChicks seven years ago. She wants young women to see her and think “engineer,” as well as connect with women who are already working in these industries.

Mentorship, examples, and money

The organization is called DemoChicks because demolition is one of the jobs that keeps Thorne’s company busy. More women are entering architecture, construction and engineering jobs than before, but the percentage of women in each industry is still low:

15% in engineering
26% in architecture
11% in construction

These are mostly stable jobs with good entry-level wages, jobs such as safety coordinators, project managers, project engineers and construction managers.

Beyond giving teen girls IRL examples of women in construction industry jobs, DemoChicks supports their academic efforts, which often means helping them out meet college expenses. DemoChicks gave out $1,000 scholarships to eight women last year (35 applied).

A third generation Latina truck driver from South LA

One of those scholarship recipients in 2024 was Ana Terrazas. She recalled growing up in South L.A., not as a latch key kid, but as a truck cab kid.

Ana Terrazas as a teen at her mother's construction job. Terrazas now works for a large construction company as a project engineer.

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Courtesy Ana Terrazas

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 ”My mother… was a truck driver,” Terrazas said, driving belly dump trailers on construction sites. Terrazas would help her mother change tires and lend a hand with any mechanical repairs. Her grandfather was a truck driver too.

“Since then I've always been obsessed with job sites, and also the superintendent, the one that would tell everybody where to go, how to do their job, and organize everything,” Terrazas said.

Two years ago she was working hard to finish her two majors — civil engineering and construction management — to earn her bachelor’s degree from Cal Poly Pomona. She applied for and was awarded a $1,500 scholarship from DemoChicks. That help, she said, had a big effect.

DemoChicks founder Robin Thorne, right, presents Ana Terrazas with a scholarship.

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Courtesy Ana Terrazas

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“I didn't have to take as many hours of work to be able to focus more on my studies and also in my internship during that time,” Terrazas said.

The internship, at Swinerton, a nationwide construction company that's more than 100 years old, turned into full time work as a project engineer.

Terrazas paid it forward earlier this year, inviting Thorne and a dozen DemoChicks to a Swinerton work site during Women in Construction Week. She urged the women to tap into their drive to succeed and lean on people like her for help.

“As long as they're driven and this is what they want, there shouldn't be a reason for them to not be able to get a job here,” Terrazas said.

With LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries just steps away, it may be easy to forget that we have the richest Ice Age fossil site on Earth right here with the La Brea Tar Pits.

But the museum and research facilities at the tar pits are also scheduled for a multimillion dollar renovation.

Built in 1977, the George C. Page Museum at the tar pits has a special place in the hearts of Angelenos who’ve ever taken a field trip to see its massive mastodon skeletons or dire wolf skulls. Or have maybe shed a tear at the sculptures of the mammoth family in distress in the Lake Pit out front.

All that stuff is staying, museum educator Kay Lai told LAist, but new interactive exhibits will allow visitors to better understand the science that’s happening in their own backyard.

A rendering of the new outdoor amphitheater at the La Brea Tar Pits.

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Courtesy the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County

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The transformation

“This museum, as beloved as it is, definitely needs that refresh,” Lai said. “And I’m really excited for the next generation of kids that gets to grow up and make new memories here with this new space.”

Lai said the museum refresh will include a new focus on Zed — the 80% complete Columbian mammoth found here — and other notable animals they’ve unearthed over the decades. The mammoth’s bones will be reassembled and Zed will “stand tall for the first time since the Ice Age,” according to the museum’s website.

“We’re able to focus on the very first saber-toothed cat fossils that we’ve ever discovered ... As well as some of our Ice Age survivors ... like Pebbles the Puma ... Pebbles would have been the ancestor of some of the mountain lions that still live in Los Angeles today, including P-22 that passed away a couple years ago,” Lai said.

Then there’s the fish bowl: you know, the fossil lab with windows where you can watch researchers at work?

An even better fish bowl

“So we’ll still have the fish bowl, but it’s going to be much more interactive and there’ll be much more discussion of what’s going on inside the fossil lab,” said Regan Dunn, assistant deputy director and curator at the new Samuel Oschin Global Center for Ice Age Research.

A digital rendering of the new fish bowl at the Samuel Oschin Global Center for Ice Age Research.

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Courtesy the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County

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Dunn explained that the area where they store their collections of fossils and other specimens is getting major updates too.

“Super valuable, millions of specimens, will be in upgraded systems where there’s climate control. There’ll be enclosed cabinets and be under much better maintenance. And also allow for much more research to happen,” she said.

The La Brea Tar Pits are still very much an active paleontological research site. Dunn said any time a hole goes in the ground in the Hancock Park area, a new discovery is made.

With new outdoor classrooms and a 1-kilometer pedestrian pathway that will take visitors past excavation sites, the idea is to make the research going on here more visible to the public.

Your last chance to visit the tar pits before its two-year transformation is July 6.

A digital rendering showing the aerial view of the updated La Brea Tar Pits grounds.

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Courtesy the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County

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This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

In the face of the nation's highest gas prices, California lawmakers approved a bill to ease restrictions on E85 conversion kits — devices that let conventional gasoline cars run on a cheaper, mostly ethanol fuel blend.

Assembly Bill 2046, dubbed the “Access to Affordable Gas Act” by its author, Assemblymember Rhodesia Ransom, a Stockton Democrat, advanced through the Assembly on a 59-0 vote with no debate or opposition.

The measure is the latest example of Sacramento lawmakers scrambling to respond to gas costs that have soared amid the Iran-Israel war, which has rattled global oil markets and pushed California pump prices above $6 a gallon. It now heads to the California state Senate and would need Gov. Gavin Newsom’s approval before it becomes law.

“Californians consistently pay more at the pump than drivers from other states, and gas prices are once again climbing across the state,” Ransom said on the Assembly floor Thursday. “For commuters and working families, [the proposal] offers a practical way to save money.”

If approved in its current form, the measure would exempt manufacturers of E85 converter kits from an approval process by the state’s primary climate regulator, the California Air Resources Board, which requires companies to demonstrate the devices do not increase a vehicle's emissions. The bill would leave in place a separate federal certification process run by the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Members in Sacramento are looking for ways to try to reduce costs — or appear to reduce costs of driving — and so this is a way to do that,” said Aaron Smith, a UC Berkeley economist and fuels expert.

The converter kits, which cost between $800 to $1,250, according to a legislative analysis of the bill, would let drivers convert their cars to run on both gasoline and E85 fuel.

E85 is a blend of up to 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline; the share of ethanol typically is between 55% and 85%, said Smith, the Berkeley expert.

Jeff Wilkerson, government affairs manager for Pearson Fuels, the largest E85 fuel provider in the state and a bill supporter, said E85 — much of which is made from Midwest corn — is largely insulated from overseas oil shocks that drive California gas prices. The ethanol blend has sold for $2 or more less per gallon than gasoline during recent price spikes.

While E85 is typically priced lower than gasoline and can reduce petroleum dependence and carbon emissions, it delivers 20% to 30% fewer miles per gallon, according to the air board, meaning drivers only save money when E85 is priced at least 20% to 30% below gasoline.

About 1.3 million vehicles in California can currently use the fuel, which is sold at about 640 stations statewide — just 3% of the state’s more than 15,000 fuel pumps, according to the bill analysis.

Ransom said more E85 pumps would be built if the state loosened restrictions and encouraged demand for the fuel blend. She stressed that her bill would present E85 as an alternative.

“For some people, it may not be a wise choice, but at least now it’s going to be a choice,” she said.

Environmentally, the fuel is rated cleaner than regular gasoline by California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard. But that rating has critics. Smith, the Berkeley economist, said the benefits of ethanol are likely overstated. Official numbers likely understate emissions from land use as rising corn demand for ethanol pushes farmers to clear forested land.

The state’s own certification record offers a cautionary tale. Lindsay Buckley, a spokesperson for the board, said the agency has received only five applications from companies for E85 conversion kits since 2008 and that none has cleared the certification process, which is designed to ensure modified vehicles still meet their original emissions standards. Supporters of the proposal argue the board moves slowly and its regulations are burdensome.

But loosening that standard carries its own risk, cautioned Aaron Kurz, senior consultant on the Assembly Transportation Committee, especially now.

As the federal government has stripped scientific expertise from regulatory decisions, he wrote in his analysis, “this committee should consider if the state should cede authority over an inherently scientific process and set a precedent for transferring approval authority to the federal government.”