The Brief

Lea este artículo en español.

More than a year after California community colleges received $650 million in state COVID-19 relief money, schools have spent less than 20% of it.

Colleges say they desperately need the money, but that they are reluctant to spend it because of ongoing uncertainty surrounding the state’s budget. Namely, they fear they’ll be asked to give it back.

“It’s either feast or famine,” said Dan Troy, an assistant superintendent at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo and a former member of the finance team at the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office.

Community colleges can spend the relief money on a wide range of programs, including mental health services, food pantries for students, technology, and professional development for faculty. But more than $500 million remains unspent, according to the most recent data from the chancellor’s office.

Two years ago, in the 2022-23 budget, California had a projected budget surplus due in part to an influx of federal COVID-19 relief money. The state allocated that surplus to a number of programs and services, including $650 million to community colleges.

Last year, the state had a projected deficit, and Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed asking colleges to return the COVID-19 money less than a year after giving it to them. It was part of a proposed tradeoff so that the governor could accommodate other requests, including an increase in the amount of general fund dollars awarded to community colleges.

The proposal never came to fruition, but the governor did claw back other funds from community colleges in order to close the state’s budget deficit.

The Dovica Learning Resource Center at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo on Jan. 10, 2024.

(

Julie Leopo-Bermudez

/

CalMatters

)

Now the governor and the Legislature are grappling with a $37.9 billion deficit as they plan the 2024-25 budget. According to the governor’s proposed budget, released last week, the community college system will not face any major cuts this year, though the budget is subject to change before it’s enacted this summer.

“Predictability, consistent funding, I think that’s what most campuses would love to see,” Troy said. His district, which has three campuses in San Luis Obispo County, has spent or signed contracts amounting to $390,000 as of the end of last year, a fraction of the nearly $5 million in COVID-19 funds it received in 2022.

There are other reasons behind his spending decision. Before Cuesta College received its nearly $5 million portion of the state’s COVID relief dollars, it had already received a much larger relief grant — roughly $28 million — directly from the federal government. Troy said his plan was to prioritize spending down federal dollars first, since it’s much more money and needed to be used before the end of last year. Colleges have until 2027 to spend the money from the state.

Uncertainty makes it hard to spend

Across the state, community colleges said financial uncertainty is shaping everyday decisions about spending money they receive from the state.

In South Lake Tahoe, where the cost of housing has become unaffordable for many low-income students, the local community college is building a 100-bed dorm with state construction funding. But inflation led to rising building prices. President Jeff DeFranco said the college initially held back on spending its COVID-19 money in case it needed to use it for the housing project. The final housing estimate came in lower than expected, he said, meaning the college was free to use its COVID-19 funds elsewhere.

More uncertainty followed for Lake Tahoe Community College. Several months after the final housing estimate came in, Newsom proposed that colleges return more than half of the COVID-19 money they had received.

While the final version of the budget didn’t include those particular cuts, the governor did ultimately ask colleges to return more than half of the money they had received for maintenance projects. Colleges that had already spent that money either needed to renege on contracts or pull from other sources of funding to cover the difference.

“I was reluctant to make major commitments to the (COVID-19) dollars for fear that the rug would be pulled out from under us. I was concerned that we’d make commitments we couldn’t keep,” Troy said. Of the $390,000 that Troy has committed so far, most is for a contract with the regional transit agency to provide free bus travel for students. That contract has more flexibility than a traditional contract with a private company.

Sean Runyon, 55, a student at Cuesta Community College, in his home in Santa Margarita, Calif. on Jan. 19, 2024.

(

Julie Leopo-Bermudez

/

CalMatters

)

While a small investment compared to the millions of unspent funds, those dollars make a difference for Sean Runyon, 55, who relies on the bus in order to attend classes at Cuesta College four days a week. He sold his car a few years ago in order to help pay for a surgery and can no longer drive because of a related disability.

He’s a single parent of a teenager and survives on government benefits, earning about $1,000 a month, half of which goes to rent. “That $68 dollars is a lot of money,” he said, referring to the cost of a monthly bus pass. Without it, he said, “I’d probably have to stop going to college.” After working as a chef for decades, his goal is to change careers into something that’s less physically demanding, such as counseling for people with substance use problems.

Runyon said he’s grateful for the services that Cuesta College provides and places the blame for the college’s budget dilemma on Newsom and the state’s leadership.

Troy said the recent budget the governor released gives him more confidence to spend down the money he has. “It’s not a great budget by any means, but it’s stable enough that I feel confident committing those dollars.”

He said the college might spend the remaining money on services to support students, such as food pantries and vouchers to offset textbook costs. He also mentioned possible improvements to classroom technology, such as new whiteboards and laptops.

‘Spending a lot of money is a lot harder’

California’s 116 community colleges are organized into 73 independently governed districts, which are overseen by the state chancellor’s office. Spending public money within any of these districts requires various approval processes, which can each take time, said Michal Kurlaender, a professor at UC Davis who studies COVID-19 recovery in higher education. College boards typically make the final call but the state usually requires that faculty, staff, and students be involved too.

“It’s a really diverse system,” she said.

While most colleges have only used a fraction of the state’s COVID-19 dollars, some have already spent it all or committed it all through contracts.

Students leave class at Rio Hondo College in Whittier on Dec. 2, 2022. Photo by Alisha Jucevic for CalMatters

(

Alisha Jucevic

/

CalMatters

)

Rio Hondo College, located in Whittier in eastern Los Angeles County, has spent roughly half of the more than $7 million in COVID-19 relief it received in 2022 and has signed contracts that spend the rest by May, according to Stephen Kibui, the vice president of finance and business for the college. Most of the money is going toward providing low-income students laptops, WiFi hotspots, and software such as Microsoft Office.

The college is not immune from budget fluctuations, though. Last year, when the state pulled back money for maintenance, Rio Hondo was one of several colleges that had already spent the money or signed contracts for projects.

“One of the contracts we’re dealing with now is the roofing of our science building. It’s a three story building and it’s leaking all the way to the second floor,” he said.

He pulled from the college’s general fund in order to keep the project going. Now, the coffers of the general fund are getting low, so he said he’d need to pull from the college’s reserves if anything similar were to happen this year. It would be “unacceptable” and “very punitive,” he said.

Just north of Joshua Tree National Park, Copper Mountain College received the smallest amount of COVID-19 funds in 2022 and spent it all within the fiscal year, said President Daren Otten.

“We’re a small operation,” he said. “We move quickly. Once we realized what the resources could be spent on, we deployed them.” The school used the money to cover debts, such as unpaid course fees, that students had accrued.

However, Otten drew a distinction between his college and many other schools. “Spending a lot of money is a lot harder. Our total allocation was $760,000.” On average, community college districts received more than $9 million in 2022 from the state for COVID-19 relief.

At the start of the pandemic, Kurlaender said college leaders often asked her what to do with all the relief money they received, especially the federal dollars which were even larger than the state’s allocation. She said she didn’t have an easy solution. “The reality is we don’t have a big wealth of evidence of how to deal with something like a pandemic when students are facing this level of disruption.”

The legal tug-of-war centers on a two-panel work called “Adam” and “Eve.” The life-size paintings depicting the biblical characters were created around 1530 by German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder.

The Nazis stole the two paintings, and many others, from Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker in Holland in 1940. After the war, the Dutch government sold these two works to a Russian aristocrat, who sold them to the Norton Simon in Pasadena in 1971.

“By pursuing the recovery of the Cranachs, we are seeking to reverse a great injustice perpetrated by the Nazi theft of a Jewish family’s property,” Rabbi Noah Farkas, president and CEO of Jewish Federation Los Angeles, said in a written statement.

The Federation is plaintiff in a lawsuit filed on Monday in L.A. Superior Court that names the museum and two related foundations as defendants. Cranach the Elder’s work has sold for millions of dollars.

Goudstikker’s only living heir, Marei von Saher, gave the Federation the authority to file the lawsuit. If the lawsuit is successful, the Federation pledges to use the majority of the net proceeds to care for impoverished Holocaust survivors living in the L.A. area.

Adam and Eve, painted around 1530 by German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder.

(

Courtesy Norton Simon Art Foundation

)

Von Saher has spent years trying, unsuccessfully, to get these paintings back. But this lawsuit is different. It’s filed under a 2024 California law that gives people the ability to petition to recover cultural property “that was taken or otherwise lost as a result of political persecution,” according to the law.

Stolen painting

Responding to the lawsuit, the Norton Simon Museum did not challenge that the painting was looted by the Nazis.

“After decades of litigation, court after court including the United States Supreme Court has confirmed that the Norton Simon Art Foundation has proper title to 'Adam' and 'Eve,'" the museum said in a written statement.

The museum is referring to a 2018 ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which said that since a foreign government sold the artwork, the court could not declare that sale illegal. The U.S. Supreme Court let that decision stand without reviewing it.

The Norton Simon has been pressured to negotiate with the heirs to return the work, even from the founder’s grandson.

“In my opinion, it's immoral and unethical because they don't have good title,” said Joel Greenberg, founder of the nonprofit Art Ashes, which helps families of Holocaust survivors recover art looted from their ancestors.

It’s not the only high-profile case of Nazi-looted art in the region. The late Los Angeles resident Maria Altman recovered a work by Gustav Klimt that was looted from her family by the Nazis in Austria.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A motorist was arrested on murder charges after authorities say she slammed her SUV into a city bus in Los Angeles, killing at least two people and injuring six others in a prelude to a second deadly tragedy: the fiery crash of a TV news helicopter that was covering the collision.

Bailee Lynn Rios, 36, of Simi Valley, was arrested Tuesday night and is being held at a Los Angeles jail with bail set at $4 million, police said Wednesday. The case is being forwarded to the district attorney’s office, which will decide whether to file the charges in court or pursue different ones. Information on a lawyer who could speak on her behalf was not immediately available.

The helicopter, which was used by NBC and Telemundo, crashed about two hours after police say Rios drove her 2004 Ford Expedition the wrong way down a busy avenue, ran a red light and struck a vehicle before hitting the bus. One passenger was fully ejected from the bus and another was partially ejected, police said.

Rios’ mother, Cindy Rios, said she was shocked and saddened by the string of events. She said she had not spoken to Bailee Lynn since her arrest and had not been contacted by law enforcement.

“It’s just horrible,” Cindy Rios told The Associated Press in a phone interview Wednesday. “The fact that my daughter was involved and was the cause of it is just extremely disturbing.”

“If anything, I’m sorry for the other families,” she added. “My daughter’s alive. People lost their lives.”

Chopper crash killed a reporter, a pilot and a man on the ground

NBC4 Los Angeles reported that two people aboard the helicopter — reporter Eliana Moreno and pilot George Marciniw — were killed when the chopper went down Tuesday in the Chatsworth neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley north of downtown.

A person on the ground, identified as 29-year-old Edy Gutierrez Mejia, died in a parking lot, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office said. He was from Guatemala, the country’s consulate confirmed.

The crash happened as news crews were reporting on the collision involving the SUV that slammed into the bus.

There were no immediate details on what caused the helicopter crash, but an alarm could be heard sounding inside the helicopter’s cockpit as it lost altitude in the final seconds of video the crew broadcast before the crash.

Just after the beeping noise starts, a woman’s voice says “uh oh.” The helicopter moves quickly away from the bus crash site and starts losing altitude. The woman says “You can’t pull up?” before the video stops as the chopper nears the ground.

“That video is probably the most important evidence that we have discovered so far,” National Transportation Safety Board investigator Fabian Salazar said Wednesday at a news briefing.

Salazar said the sounds were consistent with the helicopter’s engine changing speed, as well as what he said were likely advisory tones for the pilot. The NTSB said it is also investigating the bus collision.

The helicopter, a Eurocopter AS350, went down near a large storage facility. At least four cars and two storage containers burned after the helicopter caught fire. NBC4 reporter Robert Kovacik was at the bus scene and saw black smoke and rushed to the helicopter crash site.

Anchor and reporters pay tearful tributes to deceased colleagues

Moreno was a familiar voice for NBC4 and Telemundo 52 during the station’s aerial coverage. She and Marciniw were both were employees of Angel City Air, which operated the chopper for the station.

Moreno, born in Orange County, joined Angel City Air in 2010, the same year she earned a broadcast journalism and political science degree from Chapman University. She reported for several news outlets and began flying with Marciniw in 2023, the NBC4 website said.

Marciniw grew up in Southern California and graduated from Burbank High School in 1974.

“I think a lot of us are still trying to process what happened, this terrible loss,” NBC4 reporter Lauren Coronado told viewers early Wednesday as she stood near the crash site. A hazmat crew was cleaning up jet fuel, she said.

In a tribute to Moreno and Marciniw, the newscast referred to them as “the team in the sky,” saying Moreno would often post videos from her job and was in awe of the view. Anchor Lynette Romero held a colleague’s hand and wiped away tears after hearing Moreno’s voice when one of her posts was played.

In an interview with the station, Esteban Jimenez, a pilot, said he had known Marciniw since the 1990s. He said Marciniw had been his instructor.

“I just talked to him on Sunday. We were talking about the aviation business and retiring,” he said.

Expert talks about what may have caused the crash

Aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti said the alarm sounding in the helicopter’s final video sounds like the low rotor RPM warning horn that signals the main rotor is no longer spinning enough to keep the helicopter in the air.

“It just has all the earmarks of a potential loss of engine power and a dangerous decrease in the main rotor speed,” said Guzzetti who used to investigate crashes for both the NTSB and FAA.

Guzzetti said the pilot appeared to be trying to perform an emergency maneuver to use the wind to force the rotor to spin again much like a breeze turns a windmill. Doing that can create a bit of lift that could help cushion the impact, but Guzzetti said there would have been little opportunity to do that because the helicopter had been hovering at a low altitude beforehand.

There are risks to news helicopters particularly in a major city like Los Angeles where multiple helicopters respond to an incident, but the pilots all coordinate closely over the radio to ensure they maintain a safe distance from each other. The industry also shares best practices to help keep these news flights safe.

“It’s a very unique form of flying. And the community is very good about lessons learned,” Guzzetti said. “And so because of that, you don’t hear about too many of those accidents. So they’re rare, but they do occur, just because the mission is a risky one.”

Other crashes involving news helicopters

The station said this is the second aviation tragedy in its history.

In 1977, a KNBC news helicopter crashed when it ran out of fuel while returning to the station after covering a wildfire in Santa Barbara, killing the pilot and camera operator. The pilot, former U.S. Air Force officer Francis Gary Powers, had been in the news years earlier when he was shot down and captured while flying a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union for the CIA, an ordeal portrayed in the movie “Bridge of Spies.”

There have been at least eight fatal crashes involving news helicopters in the U.S. since 2000, killing 16 people, according to a review of federal accident records and news accounts.

They include a 2023 crash in a New Jersey forest that killed the pilot and a photographer aboard a helicopter used by Philadelphia station WPVI and a 2022 crash beside a Charlotte, North Carolina, interstate that killed a pilot and meteorologist during a training flight for WBTV.

A 2007 midair collision in Phoenix of two TV news helicopters that were covering a police chase led the NTSB to recommend that news helicopters have at least two people in the cockpit so the pilot can focus on flying while the reporter focuses on the story.

___

Golden reported from Seattle, and Collins from Hartford, Connecticut. Associated Press writers Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska; Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco; Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire; and Allen Breed in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed.

Federal and county law enforcement announced charges Wednesday against three people in a widening investigation of homelessness services fraud in the L.A. area. Prosecutors previously charged three other people and said they plan to bring “many more” cases.

In Wednesday’s announcement at a news conference, authorities alleged a bribery scheme built on "ghost" clients illustrates a yearslong problem.

"Nobody was minding the shop," the region’s top federal prosecutor, Bill Essayli, told reporters in response to a question from LAist. "There's no vetting. There's no auditing. There's no accounting. It was just a rush to push as much money out the door."

What are the charges?

Authorities arrested Michael Young — founder of the Culver City nonprofit Home At Last — and accused him of using shell companies and fake bids to misappropriate $12 million in taxpayer funds. The allegations include siphoning $1 million into a high-end nightclub, a nearly $50,000 trip to Tahiti and a $140,000 restoration of a vintage Chevy Impala.

Michael Young, 46, of Baldwin Hills

(

Courtesy Department of Justice

)

A headshot of Alex Soofer shared by a federal prosecutor on X.

(

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli via X

)

Scott Turner, the U.S. secretary for Housing and Urban Development, said Young's group received more than $118 million in public dollars for homeless housing since 2019 — over $75 million of it through the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA.

The new cases allege about $12 million in misappropriated funds — almost all of it by Young.

The bribery charges are against Lakiya Malone, an employee of the nonprofit Special Service for Groups, or SSG, who was responsible for referring homeless people to LAHSA-funded housing. Prosecutors say Malone took roughly $180,000 in bribes from Alexander Soofer, head of the now-defunct nonprofit Abundant Blessings, and in exchange steered him "ghost" participants — so he could bill for services never rendered.

Lakiya Malone, 48, of South Los Angeles

Donye Mitchell, 55, of Orange

(

Courtesy Department of Justice

)

“She was supposed to guard the money, and instead she took bribes,” Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, said.

In a statement, SSG said it has been working with federal prosecutors “to ensure that any responsible individuals are held accountable” and has strengthened its “protocols and compliance.”

Charges against Soofer were announced in January. Authorities announced Wednesday that he has agreed to plead guilty to wire fraud and money laundering. Soofer admitted in his plea agreement to the alleged bribery scheme.

According to prosecutors, Soofer also admitted to "pocketing at least $2 million in taxpayer money for his own personal enrichment and for businesses unrelated to homeless housing," and that he has agreed to forfeit the money to the U.S. government. Prosecutors previously alleged he diverted a much larger amount: at least $10 million.

An LAist investigation found LAHSA kept awarding millions in contract renewals to Soofer’s group even after LAHSA’s own compliance team labeled it "high-risk" for, among other things, billing for services while reporting no enrolled participants.

The third defendant announced Wednesday is Donye Mitchell of the nonprofit Big Blue Umbrella. Mitchell is accused of lying about his experience to land a $1.2 million county-funded grant, receiving $315,000 and using those funds for personal expenses, including bail for a domestic violence arrest and video games. Officials said he's believed to be in Las Vegas and hadn’t been arrested as of Wednesday morning.

Mitchell is “a convicted fraudster, by the way,” Essayli said. He was convicted in 2011 of defrauding California unemployment benefits, according to the criminal complaint in the new case, and was ordered in 2012 to compensate the state $6 million.

The county funds he’s accused of stealing were awarded by a county vendor in 2024 — well after his fraud conviction.

LAist has left phone messages for Young's and Malone’s lawyers inviting their response to the charges and will update this article if they respond. It is unknown if Mitchell, who has not yet been arrested, has a lawyer.

Prosecutors' critique 

Essayli and L.A. County District Attorney Nathan Hochman criticized what they called a glaring lack of oversight of massive spending on homeless services. Hochman cited a court-ordered 2025 report that found L.A. city officials failed to properly track $2.3 billion in homeless funds, largely by outsourcing to LAHSA — which the review found failed to collect accurate data on its vendors and hold them accountable.

"We have not seen the results you would expect for billions of dollars being spent," Hochman said.

“This is the beginning of these prosecutions,” he added.  ”Many more” are expected in the coming months, he said.

Continuing trouble for LAHSA 

The new charges were announced the day after LAHSA's governing commission decided to give up its responsibility for federal dollars, including applying for roughly $240 million a year in federal homelessness funding and running the annual homeless count.

Also on Tuesday, Mayor Karen Bass skipped a congressional hearing on LAHSA's fraud problems, calling it a "politically motivated" attack.

LAHSA, now led by Interim CEO Gita O'Neill, said in a statement Wednesday that it has "zero tolerance for fraud, waste, or the exploitation of public resources" and commended prosecutors’ action.

The agency said it terminated its contracts with Young’s nonprofit in June after evidence of wrongdoing emerged, and is pursuing recovery of cash seized from Young. The statement added that LAHSA fully cooperated with the federal task force and that no LAHSA staff are implicated — only "external provider executives and outside contractors.”

Essayli was asked Wednesday whether LAHSA's past or current leadership has been culpable.

"That's actually a very difficult question to answer," he said.

"It is not against federal law to be incompetent, unfortunately. I wish it were,” Essayli said. “So just because the people at the helm did not do a good job, that does not give us the authority to arrest them."

“ I assure you, if anyone in power engaged in violation of federal law, we will not hesitate to charge them.”