The Brief

It seems like only yesterday that hacking fast food meant ordering off the menu. The most famous in recent years was the Starbucks pink drink, where customers would order a strawberry acai refresher and substitute the water for coconut milk.

The drink went so viral on social media that Starbucks eventually added it to its permanent menu… making you pay more in the process.

(Let us also not forget The McGangBang (actual name, apparently), which combined a McChicken and a McDouble into one ridiculous sandwich in the 2010s.)

Now, with food influencers trying to outdo each other, menu hacking has gone even further.

Instead of ordering from just one menu and modifying it, now you can order two items and combine them, or even order items from two different fast food chains and mash them up into one meal.

(Driving from one place to another means the result is anything but fast, but hey, this is creativity).

While I’m a little concerned about where this amalgamation could end — Three restaurants? Four? — I figured I’d pull together some hacks that caught my eye, show you how to make them, and then rate them. Call it public service. You’re welcome.

The In-N-Out Patty Melt

The In-N-Out patty melt made with their Flying Dutchman burger and two toasted buns.

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Sean Vukan

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What to order

• One Flying Dutchman 
• Two buns on the side, toasted

The assembly

For the uninitiated, the In-N-Out Flying Dutchman is not a pirate ship but rather two beef patties with a slice of cheese between the patties and on top of them.

It also comes with grilled onions. (It’s my personal favorite of the In-N-Out off-menu items. It's just a great combination of gooey melted cheese and classic In-N-Out hamburger patties.)

Order one of those, and two toasted buns. Now invert the buns — what’s facing the inside on a traditional burger will now be facing outward. (It’s what makes it a patty melt). Finally, carefully peel off the Flying Dutchman from the paper it’s sitting on and place it in between the toasted inverted hamburger buns. Get ready to enjoy a drive-thru version of a diner classic.

Does it work?

A patty melt is at its best when the bread, hamburger patty, onions, and cheese are all griddled together in perfect harmony. Unfortunately, the bun lets this version down.

When I tried it, the bread was dry, whereas on an actual patty melt, all the juices from the onions and meat have had a chance to seep through to the rye or sourdough. This version was fine, though, and if it came cooked as one, it might have yielded a different result.

Score: 6.5/10 There are better versions of this diner classic throughout Los Angeles, but it’s a fun, newer In-N-Out hack that doesn’t involve using grilled onions as a substitute bun for your burger. Oh, and it does double the trash you’d normally produce, but that kind of goes with all these mash ups.

The Baja Blast Float

A McDonald's soft serve cone dipped into the signature Taco Bell soft drink, Baja Blast. Things are about to get messy.

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Sean Vukan

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For LAist

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What to order

• A large Baja Blast from Taco Bell
• A soft serve cone from McDonald's

The assembly

Because you’re dealing with ice cream, it’s best to get the Taco Bell exclusive soda first, so there’s a small amount of time between dunkage of ice cream and soda.

This also allows time to drink some of the soda to somewhere about the halfway to three-quarters point. Why? Because sticking an ice cream cone into a full cup of soda will cause it to overflow. Once the soda is at an acceptable level, scoop the soft serve from the McDonald's cone into the soda and swirl it around at the same time, allowing the ice cream to mix in partly with the soda.

Does it work?

Yes. But a Baja Blast from Taco Bell has been my personal go to drink from The Bell since it was launched in 2004, so I may be a bit biased. The ice cream combination mixed with the citrusy, tropical lime flavor of the soda was really good and comes off as sort of like a millennial version of an orange soda float.

Score: 8/10 Was I questioning my journalistic choices in the parking lot of a Walmart on a Sunday morning as I was slowly dunking and drinking while balancing the Baja Blast to keep it from spilling everywhere? Absolutely. But the end result made me glad that I followed through with it. This would be a great treat just in time for summer.

The In-N-Out/Dave's Hot Chicken Sandwich

A collection of Dave's Hot Chicken, fries and a burger bun with no meat from In-N-Out. This is about to become a sandwich.

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Sean Vukan

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For LAist

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What to order:

• Cheeseburger w/no meat from In-N-Out
• The Two Tender Combo from Dave’s Hot Chicken, OR ask for one tender a la carte if you don’t want the fries and extra tender. The spice level varies depending on preference.
• Honey packets, spread, Dave’s sauce (optional).

The assembly

Ordering the cheeseburger with no meat saves you the question from the attendant at In-N-Out asking if you want the grilled cheese plain or with the veggies, which you absolutely still want, and in some cases, they may not ask you, so better to be on the safe side and order the cheeseburger with no meat. For the Dave’s portion, the first time I asked for one tender they obliged, but looked at me kind of weird (journalism, folks) so the second time I just ordered the #1 combo, which is the two tenders.

Place a tender between the meatless burger and congrats; there’s now an In-N-Out chicken sandwich.

Does it work?

Look, Dave’s Hot Chicken already has a chicken sandwich so there’s absolutely no need for this to happen unless you’re aching for tomato, grilled onions, and Thousand Island dressing to be a part of it. But welcome to the world of fast food influencers, folks. A world where putting a clickbaity title like “In-N-Out Chicken Sandwich?” on a title card in an attempt to rack up views because you think something new has been launched, but in reality, it’s all a ruse.

Score: 7/10 The original concoction of this called for a Chick-fil-A cutlet to be used, but since I don’t eat at Chick-fil-A and prefer a hotter chicken anyway, I opted for a tender from Dave’s. This was fine. Not mind-blowing in any way. Would it have been different if Chick-fil-A chicken were used instead? Probably not. But to each their own. Order the In-N-Out first because the line will probably be long, and it is probably best to be in an area where a place that serves crispy chicken cutlet sandwiches or tenders is somewhat nearby an In-N-Out.

Del Taco Birria Nacho Fries

The contents of a birria quesadilla placed upon an order of Del Taco nacho fries.

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Sean Vukan

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For LAist

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What to order

• Birria quesadilla or birria combo burrito
• Plain crinkle-cut fries or the special nacho cheese fries
• Hot sauce
• Ask for sides of sour cream and jalapeños

The assembly

Scoop the contents out of the quesadilla or burrito onto the fries. The nacho fries are currently a special that Del Taco is running, which is their crinkle-cut fries topped with nacho cheese.

Depending on your preference, the birria quesadilla is just the Del Taco birria and that classic orange shredded cheese they put on, like, 90% of the items at Del Taco. The birria combo burrito comes with birria and refried beans, but I found the chunks of birria in the quesadilla to be more hearty and meaty than the ones in the burrito.

Once the fillings have been placed atop the fries, top with the sour cream, jalapeños, and drizzle the hot sauce of your choosing atop it.

Does it work?

Yes. I got the idea for this from my friend and fellow food writer, Sarah Mosqueda of the L.A. Times. I texted her prior to the assignment to ask if she knew of any under-the-radar menu hacks or mashups that people wouldn’t know about.

She said that while working at an old restaurant of hers, she would bring in Del Taco fries and pour braised lamb over them for a staff meal. While braised lamb from fast food isn’t necessarily a possibility, it got me thinking that Del Taco could be a possibility for a menu hack whereas initially it wasn’t, and specifically their fries or nachos.

Del Taco currently has their recently added birria in tacos, a burrito, in a cup with consomme, and atop nachos. However, they missed an opportunity to place it on their crinkle-cut fries, even though they already offer the fries with ground beef, chicken, and steak.

Score: 7.9/10 The tender beef birria was a great addition to the fries, allowing just enough of the juices to soak up into the crinkle-cut potatoes. Granted, these are light on diced tomatoes or guac, and I did get the smaller, cheaper version of the fries because I was told the larger option with more toppings couldn’t be modified with the birria. Still, it was really good. The pickled jalapeños and sour cream add acidity to help cut through the hearty beef and potatoes.

Behold the Hammer Boi pizza featuring flatty beef patties, pickles, ‘Hammer sauce’ from Hammer Burger, atop a Focaccia Boi pepperoni pizza.

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Sean Vukan

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For LAist

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Mashups for the soul

When all is said and done, the best mash-ups you can support are those your local small businesses create. Post-pandemic, more and more pop-ups and small restaurants are joining forces for special releases and the results are usually home runs. Here are some of my recent favorites:

• The recent Paradise Dynasty/Pho-Holic mash-up, where OC beef pho restaurant Phoholic had a pho xiao long bao at South Coast Plaza’s Paradise Dynasty — an absolutely genius combination that tasted as good as it reads.
  
• The ongoing A’s BBQ/Quarantine Pizza collab at Smorgasburg Los Angeles on Sundays, where East LA pitmaster and sausage king Alan Cruz of A’s BBQ provides his famous al pastor sausages to Quarantine Pizza for an al pastor sausage pizza.
  
• Daniel Castillo of Heritage Barbecue in San Juan Capistrano has been using Burritos La Palma tortillas for his brisket tacos for the past few years.
  

• The recent collaboration between Orange County purveyors, Hammer Burger and Focaccia Boi. Usually in Anaheim, Derek Bracho and his Focaccia Boi pizza has been taking over the kitchen every Wednesday at Loosie’s Pizza in Downtown Santa Ana. Loosie’s also happens to be a stone’s throw from Orange County’s first smash burger truck, now turned restaurant, Hammer Burger.

  The result of this team up? A limited number of slices of The Hammer Boi pizza: flatty beef patties, pickles, ‘Hammer sauce’ from Hammer Burger, atop a Focaccia Boi pepperoni pizza.

The overall verdict

Save the corporate mashups for the influencers just looking for clicks. They’re not struggling. Follow your favorite pop-up, food truck, or small restaurant on social media and be on the lookout for their next collab or mash-up with another local favorite.

Because a pizza burger just might end up being delicious.

By the time Democrat Xavier Becerra left Washington, D.C., more Americans than ever had health insurance, owing partly to his work over the years to pass, defend and expand the Affordable Care Act.

It's an achievement the former congressman and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services often touts as he campaigns for California governor against Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News commentator.

But should Becerra cruise to victory in November, as polling suggests, he will face what may be the steepest decline in health insurance coverage in a generation, one that will land especially hard in his home state.

Federal cuts mean more people uninsured

By 2030, the number of uninsured Californians under 65 is expected to nearly double from 2.4 million to 4.6 million as recently enacted state and federal cuts to Medicaid and ACA marketplaces begin to roll back historic gains in health coverage, according to a May analysis by the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center. The anticipated rise in the uninsured population could have broad implications for hospital systems, insurers and the economy.

In February, Miranda Dietz, the labor center's healthcare program director, told legislators the changes could end up costing California about 200,000 jobs, mostly in the healthcare industry.

Hospital executives have begun reporting more unpaid medical bills, and experts warn health plans will raise premiums further as they're left with enrollees who are, on average, sicker and more expensive to cover.

"It's triage," said Jessica Altman, executive director of Covered California, the nation's largest state-run health insurance marketplace. "That's what the next governor is walking into."

California achieved one of the most dramatic drops in its uninsured population in the nation, largely credited to the state's robust adoption of the ACA. If tapped to lead the wealthy, progressive state, Becerra would wrestle with how uninsured Californians get care and who pays as the Trump administration shrinks a federal safety net he once oversaw.

Becerra has some experience pushing back against Washington, D.C. As California attorney general, he successfully defended many provisions of the Affordable Care Act, including access to birth control.

Becerra said he would issue an executive order to keep those affected by federal cuts insured. But he has not detailed how the state would backfill as much as $30 billion in federal funding California stands to lose annually.

At a policy forum hosted by Politico this month, Becerra promised Californians would not lose health coverage despite federal cutbacks, saying he would push the industry to eliminate waste from "attorneys, accountants, pencil pushers" that cost consumers billions.

"I'm going to ask them to help me extract some of that waste and put it into healthcare, which helps us cover the cost of keeping Californians insured," he said.

His opponent, Hilton, is trying to appeal to voters opposed to President Donald Trump, despite receiving the president's endorsement, and has stumped on cutting off coverage for Californians without legal status, which is paid for with state funds. Hilton has vowed to use those savings to issue state income tax breaks, calling it an immediate antidote to high costs.

Steve Hilton, the Republican candidate for governor of California, campaigns at a Sheraton hotel on July 27 in Pomona.

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"We all understand that the healthcare system is a mess and needs major reform," Hilton said in an interview. "The quickest thing we can do on healthcare costs is actually to tax people less."

Left behind?

In 2010, Becerra was part of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's leadership team and helped whip up votes to pass the law. He also had a hand in crafting it, though his attempt to include a government-backed coverage option failed.

A decade later, when lawmakers considered him for the nation's top healthcare job, Becerra said his primary mission would be to carry out President Biden's vision to expand access and cut costs under the Affordable Care Act.

Before the ACA, some 50 million Americans — roughly 1 in 6 — were uninsured. Within a few years of the law's passage in 2010, its expansion of Medicaid eligibility and financial aid to lower-income marketplace enrollees helped slash the U.S. uninsured rate by nearly half.

Millions more gained coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic after Becerra implemented a freeze on Medicaid disenrollment and administered generous but temporary tax credits that put the cost of Obamacare plans within reach for more people.

As Biden's health secretary, Becerra launched aggressive public awareness campaigns, loosened enrollment rules and distributed hundreds of millions in grants to pay consumer assistants, also known as healthcare navigators, to help enrollees wade through paperwork.

"One of the common things we would hear from him as a leader was, 'Who's being left behind?'" said Benjamin Sommers, a Harvard health policy professor who was a deputy assistant secretary under Becerra.

Under Biden and Becerra, the percentage of people with health insurance reached a historic high of 92%, or 310 million Americans having health coverage in 2024.

Republican response

But conservatives said those policies inflated enrollment by attracting fraudulent and wasteful coverage. In response, the second Trump administration has tightened enrollment windows and toughened income reporting.

"It's simple and easy to say, well, the numbers are up so the program must be working," said Edmund Haislmaier, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "My argument would be that's the wrong metric."

Last summer, the GOP-led Congress passed Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Republicans argued preserves Medicaid for those who need it most while rooting out fraud and waste. Altogether, the law is expected to cut Medicaid spending by $900 billion-plus over a decade.

Congress also allowed enhanced premium tax credits for Obamacare plans to expire last year, spiking premium payments for middle-income Americans and driving down enrollment by nearly 3 million this year.

"We are now witnessing almost a wholesale reversal of pretty much all those policies" that helped cover millions more Americans, said Sabrina Corlette, co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University.

For Eric Maciel, the $800 cost of a Covered California plan is too much. To avoid injury, the 28-year-old stays home more and rarely plays pickup soccer at the park — the other players, he added, can get pretty rough.

"That's another car note," Maciel said. "I'd be left with nothing."

Health economists say Maciel is the type of customer insurers need to stabilize their risk pools: young, healthy and less costly.

Hilton criticized state leaders for passing a revised provider tax he asserts will send premiums soaring and said he wants to inject more competition into California's health insurance market — but he offered no specific ideas.

Playing defense

Higher-than-expected state costs coupled with federal cuts have prompted California to retreat on healthcare coverage. Federal funds account for one-third of the state's budget and more than 60% of spending by Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program.

Xavier Becerra served in the House of Representatives when the Affordable Care Act passed and as health secretary under President Biden. He's the frontrunner in California's governor's race.

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Genaro Molina

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The LA Times via Getty Images

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Gov. Gavin Newsom has frozen enrollment for immigrants without legal status, enacted monthly premiums for some, and plans to only temporarily backfill federal assistance for legal immigrants and refugees.

Newsom and Democratic lawmakers agreed to delay some cuts until July 2027, leaving the next governor to weigh further rollbacks against increased taxes. Becerra, a California native born to Mexican immigrants, opposes what's known as the billionaire tax, on November's ballot. This month, he said he supported legislative efforts to penalize large corporations whose workers rely on Medi-Cal, arguing that taxpayers are subsidizing employers' low wages and paltry benefits.

County governments, which are legally required to provide healthcare to uninsured residents too poor to afford care, are lobbying lawmakers for funding to treat what they describe as a fresh deluge of patients who need free care.

"It's a pretty big cliff if all this stuff goes into effect," said Dietz, the labor center's healthcare program director. And there's a choice whether to make it less bad and maintain coverage for folks."

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

Writer Aida Salazar did not spend endless hours on devices as a teen. She grew up in the 1980s, way before TikTok and Instagram. But she has raised teens, a boy and a girl. She felt she lost them to their screens during the pandemic.

“To the point where they were harming themselves on different levels,” she said.

The antidote to the overconsumption of screens, she and her husband realized, was found when they spent time outdoors near their home in Oakland.

“We went to the redwoods, or we went to the ocean, or we went somewhere else where they were my kids again,” she said.

Salazar, who has received numerous awards for some of her 10 YA books, has drawn on that experience for her latest work, Stream.

It’s written in first person rhyme in the voices of the two main characters, a teen boy named Elio and Celi, a girl. (Both appear in Salazar's previous YA novels).

In this book they’re both eighth graders who live separately in Oakland. After their parents realize the extent of their tech dependency, they take the drastic action to send them to rural Mexico for an IRL shock.

“To detox digitally in a rancho, or a place that has no running water, no electricity, and of course, no internet,” said Salazar.

Out of their digital element

Salazar was born in the Mexican state of Zacatecas and grew up in Maywood, in Southeast L.A. County, before earning a master’s degree in writing from CalArts.

The rural Mexican setting of Stream is partly based on her mother’s hometown in Zacatecas, where she wrote some of the book. The title is inspired by a vibrant stream there that once sustained the community but is now in the shadow of crumbling adobe homes.

The cover for the YA book Stream, writren by Aida Salazar.

The book begins with Elio’s narration that brims with excitement about his last day of school.

The first page of the YA novel, Stream.

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Digital book screenshot

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Celi’s narration of that last day is more dream-like.

A page from the YA novel, Stream.

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In Mexico, out of their digital element, some connection blooms which, Salazar said, may be love.

Adults can read the book, she said, but it’s meant for teens to read in order to see how Elio and Celi struggle to balance digital and in-person relationships as well as connection and disconnection to nature and their families.

“I don't want our young people especially, to lose their understanding of their source, of who we are as natural beings connected to land, to ancestors, to legacy,” she said.

She believes nurturing the stream of connections to those things will go a long way towards helping teens rise above the various social and environmental challenges they will face in their adult lives.

A battle over a first-of-its-kind tax on billionaires is heating up in California, with tech moguls pumping millions of dollars into a campaign to defeat it and union leaders who support the measure insisting the state's very wealthiest residents should pay their fair share.

Voters in November will be asked whether to pass the ballot measure, known as Proposition 40, which imposes a one-time 5% tax on the assets of the nearly 250 billionaires in the state. Backers say the new revenue would mostly fund healthcare services.

The tax was envisioned by union leader Dave Regan, who said millions of the state's neediest patients could lose health insurance in the coming years, driven largely by President Trump's 2025 tax and spending bill. Dubbed by the White House the "One Big Beautiful Bill," the law slashes federal funding to California and other states.

"Proposition 40 was developed specifically to backfill those cuts from the One Big Bill that are scheduled to take effect in the next five years. It is a five-year solution to that plan," said Regan, who is the president of the SEIU United Healthcare Workers West.

If passed, the measure would direct 90% of the tax revenue to fund healthcare services and the other 10% to food assistance and public education across California.

"We're not even talking about the top 1%, we're talking about the top 0.0001%, the billionaires: 250 individuals in California, $2.4 trillion worth of wealth, and that's an amount of money equivalent to the annual income of all Californians who are not billionaires, including extraordinarily wealthy people," Regan said.

But the populist fervor fueling supporters of the measure is being met with a growing coalition of resisters, from tech billionaires to other unions and some state Democrats. That includes Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has said the tax would hurt the state's economy, which is powered by profitable tech companies in Silicon Valley that have spawned many of the billionaires who would be taxed under the measure.

Opponents of the tax argue it offers a short-term fix to a long-term problem and could ultimately backfire.

"I'm not against taxes. But this is not the right tool. What we need to develop is something that is stable and consistent," said René Bravo, president of the California Medical Association, in an interview with NPR. "Human beings need and deserve health care that is financed in such a way that you're not increasing the insecurity."

Bravo argues Proposition 40, if passed, would make patients more unstable by providing them with bridge coverage now, but no longer-term solution — making it difficult to plan out medical coverage over many years. Bravo also said he does not trust state lawmakers to spend most of the new revenue on healthcare, speculating that they could direct the money to other pet projects.

"Not accurate, not true," responded union leader Regan. He said voters face a choice between more immediate healthcare funding for Californians or none at all, and that a third way being proposed by some critics is not on the ballot.

Will billionaires leave California if wealth tax passes?

Another major rift between both sides of the fight is whether the first-of-its-kind state wealth tax would drive billionaires out of California.

It's a crucial issue, since California's Chamber of Commerce estimates 1% of the state's residents pay nearly 50% of all personal income taxes.

Few disagree that a mass flight of the ultra-rich would throw California's budget into a tailspin, but the measure has sparked a fierce debate about whether billionaires will actually pack up and leave the state.

French economist Thomas Piketty, who has written extensively about disparities in international wealth, has argued that what's known as "capital flight" is often overstated in debates about wealth taxes. "If one builds a fortune while relying on the country's infrastructure, education, and health systems, there is no reason that one should so readily escape the collective obligations that fund these systems," Piketty wrote last year about a proposed wealth tax in France aimed at the ultra-rich.

Adam Michel, who studies tax policy at the libertarian Cato Institute, believes taxing high income earners will be destructive for the state.

"A wealth tax of this magnitude will be bad for California and for California taxpayers. We should expect not just targeted billionaires to leave, but anyone that expects to be a billionaire or expects to be the target of aggressive taxes like this in the future to leave," he said.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, one of the richest people in the world, agrees.

He has poured $102 million into a group known as Building a Better California, which he co-founded with former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt. The group has also received millions of dollars in funding from venture capitalist John Doerr, crypto executive Chris Larsen and others. Building a Better California's mission is to defeat the effort, in part by supporting a separate ballot measure that would invalidate the wealth tax. Other tech billionaires, including Palantir founder Peter Thiel, who no longer lives in California, have funneled millions of dollars into other groups hoping to topple the measure.

A spokesperson for Building a Better California did not return a request for comment, but Brin told The New York Times: "I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don't want California to end up in the same place."

Brin recently moved to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. Critics of the tax say there will only be more billionaires leaving California if voters pass the measure.

Union leader Regan calls Brin's move political theater. He pointed out that the wealth tax applies to California residents who lived in the state in January of this year, so moving out of state would not allow anyone to dodge the tax, nor would relocating after November, if the ballot measure prevails. Bloomberg estimated the tax could personally cost Brin around $13 billion.

Regan said Brin owes his success in part to government-backed research that helped create Google and insisted that a one-time 5% tax would not be overly burdensome for the tech mogul.

"You are now one of the five wealthiest people in the world in the state that made you rich, enormously rich," said Regan as if speaking directly to Brin, noting that California "needs to stabilize its healthcare system."

Some polls show that Californians are nearly evenly split on the tax.
Copyright 2026 NPR

A California Senate committee just gutted one of the state’s most substantial DUI reform bills in years, despite widespread support from other lawmakers and families of drunk driving victims.

The bill would have required in-car breathalyzers for anyone convicted of a DUI, bringing California in line with most states. State law currently only requires the devices, called ignition interlock devices, after repeat offenses or injury crashes.

Sabrina Cervantes, a Democrat from the Inland Empire and chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, provided a hint of changes last week when she said there were amendments to the bill that had been approved unanimously by the committee. This week, an updated version of the legislation emerged, and it effectively killed a key provision to start requiring the devices for thousands of first-time offenders. Such changes are commonly referred to as “hostile amendments” because they are made without the involvement or support of the bill’s author.

Cervantes was arrested for a DUI in a high-profile incident in Sacramento in May 2025. The District Attorney’s Office did not prosecute her after a blood test showed no drugs or alcohol in her system. Cervantes then sued the city of Sacramento and several of its police officers, alleging that that police fabricated evidence and falsely arrested her. Cervantes’s sister, state Assembly candidate Clarissa Cervantes, has herself been convicted of two DUIs in Southern California, according to media reports.

Sabrina Cervantes did not respond to our request for comment for this story. We will update it if she does.

As news of the bill’s gutting spread this week, Kellie Montalvo was left wondering if there’d been some sort of horrible mistake. Montalvo, whose 21-year-old son Benjamin was killed by an impaired driver in Cervantes’s district in 2020, said she was just in Sacramento two weeks ago lobbying lawmakers – including Cervantes – on a slate of dangerous driving bills. Many of those bills have already failed.

“It’s heartbreaking, and I try to tell myself not to lose hope,” Montalvo said. “I mean, California has got to do something. Our numbers are horrific.”

Alcohol-related roadway deaths in California spiked more than 50% in a decade — an increase more than twice as steep as the rest of the country, federal data shows. More than 1,300 people die each year statewide in drunken collisions.

Over the last two years, a CalMatters investigation has shown how state officials have allowed dangerous drivers to stay on the road and kill, and how elected leaders have looked away even as the death toll skyrocketed.

For years, lawmakers have tried and failed to require in-car breathalyzers for all DUI offenders. Progressive justice reform groups and the DMV have opposed similar bills in the past, citing fears about unfairly penalizing poor DUI offenders, high costs and the DMV’s aging technology.

Montalvo and other advocates thought this year might be different. The DMV has actively participated in state hearings and, she and others said, provided technical advice to make sure the bill was realistic. Gov. Gavin Newsom also instructed lawmakers last year to continue to work on the state’s breathalyzer laws and develop “a lasting program that strengthens public safety.”

It’s unclear why this year’s bill was gutted at the 11th hour. Public records show that Senate Appropriations committee staff recently expressed concern about costs.

The amendment process is opaque even to Sacramento insiders.

“Honestly it’s sometimes a bit of a black box even for us as legislators,” said the bill’s author, Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, an Orange County Democrat. “I am still trying myself to get to the bottom of it.”

Petrie-Norris, who has spent the past three years trying to pass a version of this bill, said she does not believe Cervantes’ personal experience played a role in the decision to amend the bill. She added that she is still working to re-amend the measure after “unintended consequences” that she says would make the policy unworkable for the DMV and hurt California’s eligibility for federal funding.

Asked for an interview to explain the changes to the bill, Senate President Pro Tem Monique Límon’s office referred questions to Cervantes. Diana Crofts-Pelayo, Newsom’s chief deputy director of communications, also declined to answer questions about the breathalyzer bill, saying the office does not typically comment on pending legislation.

While the bill heads into the final days of negotiations, Montalvo and other victims’ families are grappling with deja vu. It was just about a year ago that they were standing in the Capitol with photos of their loved ones and told the bill was doomed.

She stays busy checking in with the parole officer for the Riverside County driver who killed her son. Last she heard, the driver was trying to get her license back after being released early from prison.