The Brief

California lawmakers on Thursday passed a 2024-25 budget that rejected Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposal to cut in-home supportive services for low-income older, blind, and disabled immigrants lacking legal residency. However, the Democratic governor has not said whether he’ll use his line-item veto authority to help close the state’s $45 billion deficit.

The legislature, controlled by Democrats, passed a $211 billion general fund spending plan for the fiscal year starting July 1 by drawing more from the state’s rainy-day fund and reducing corporate tax deductions to prevent cuts to health and social services.

“Our legislative budget plan achieves those goals with targeted, carefully calibrated investments in safety-net programs that protect our most vulnerable,” said Assembly member Jesse Gabriel, chair of the Assembly’s budget committee, following voting in Sacramento.

Newsom and lawmakers are expected to continue talks.

“What was approved today represents a two-house agreement between the Senate and the Assembly – not an agreement with the governor,” said state Department of Finance spokesperson H.D. Palmer. “We’ve made good progress, but there’s still more work to do.”

Newsom had proposed eliminating the new in-home benefit for qualified immigrants to save nearly $95 million in the next fiscal year, with no plans to bring it back. Lawmakers not only rejected Newsom’s cut to the in-home services program; they also refused the governor’s proposal to slash $300 million a year from public health agencies. However, they accepted delaying food assistance to low-income older immigrants without legal residency.

The In-Home Supportive Services program helps low-income older, blind, and disabled individuals receive care in their homes, which helps keep them out of more costly nursing and residential facilities. The program works by paying $16 to $21 an hour to caregivers, many of them family members.

Advocates applauded lawmakers for rejecting the cut. They had urged the governor to adopt the legislature’s budget, arguing the state could end up paying more in the long run as Medi-Cal recipients tap nursing services. The state has estimated the annual per-person cost of nursing homes is $124,189, compared with the roughly $28,000 average cost for people without legal residency in the in-home services program.

“These individuals would need to essentially go into costly hospital or nursing care,” said Ronald Coleman Baeza, managing policy director at the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network. “It’s not only cruel for undocumented immigrants, but it doesn’t make sense as a fiscal decision either.”

The governor has said he’s trying to maintain fiscal discipline while preserving Medi-Cal benefits for immigrants. California was the first state to expand Medicaid eligibility to all qualified immigrants regardless of legal status, phasing it in over several years: children in 2016, adults ages 19-26 in 2020, people 50 and older in 2022, and all remaining adults this year.

“It’s a core of I think who we are as a state, and we should be as a nation,” Newsom said in May.

As part of the Medi-Cal expansion, the state authorized nearly 3,000 older, blind, and disabled immigrants without legal residency to access paramedical services and daily care, including meal preparation, bathing, feeding, and transportation to medical appointments. Advocates estimate 17,000 immigrants qualify.

“Fixing California’s deficit means making tough choices, so the Assembly came to these negotiations focused on preserving programs that matter most to Californians,” said Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, a Central Coast Democrat, in an earlier statement.

Lawmakers did agree to Newsom’s proposal to delay around $165 a month in food assistance to low-income immigrants without legal residency ages 55 and older. Lawmakers had approved the benefit two years ago, but the governor proposed delaying it by two fiscal years to 2027.

Lineage Logistics has removed all food waste inside the Boyle Heights cold storage that burned down in June, the company and air quality officials said this afternoon.

Now, Lineage has seven days to remove debris, power wash and disinfect certain areas.

The fire started on June 17 and burned for about a week, displacing many Boyle Heights residents and causing widespread air quality issues across the region.

Then putrid odor from an estimated 88 million pounds of food rotting inside the facility began to blanket Boyle Heights and surrounding communities.

Lineage said total cleanup cost is expected to run more than $100 million.

"The City gave Lineage 45 days to remove the biohazard food waste; today is day 60 on the City’s timeline," said L.A. City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, whose district includes Boyle Heights, in a statement today.

The food waste removal, Jurado added, "does not erase two months of odors, pests, and disruption."

South Coast AQMD said it has received more than 4,900 odor complaints from surrounding communities since July 12 and has issued 38 notices of public health and safety code violations.

Last week, a L.A. City Council committee voted to withhold permits to rebuild the warehouse, pending a full investigation by the fire department. That motion heads to the full City Council for consideration.

In a last-minute move, state legislators added language to a bill on Friday evening that street safety advocates say would threaten a long-planned project to slow speeding cars on Forest Lawn Drive near Griffith Park in Los Angeles.

The proposal, which would amend a larger bill if approved, targets projects that would reduce lanes on roads that provide access to “two or more adjacent cemeteries” in cities with populations over 2 million. Los Angeles is the only city in California large enough to meet that requirement.

Since 2022, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and the city council office of Nithya Raman, who is running for mayor, have studied and planned to reduce the number of lanes along a one-mile stretch of Forest Lawn Drive. The proposal would cut the number of lanes to three — two through-lanes and one center turn lane.

The stretch of road is the point of entry for Forest Lawn’s Hollywood Hills location and Mount Sinai Memorial Park. The cemeteries are home to the graves of famous actors such as Debbie Reynolds and Brittany Murphy, at Forest Lawn, and comedians Don Rickles and Bob Saget at Mount Sinai.

Forest Lawn Memorial-Parks and Mortuaries, which operates a chain of cemeteries including the Hollywood Hills location, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying against the project at the state and local levels, according to an LAist review of lobbying activity. Mount Sinai has also advocated against the project.

“After years of work to finally make this street safer, Sacramento is threatening that progress because powerful interests objected,” Michael Schneider, CEO of Streets for All, said in a post on the street advocacy group’s website condemning the bill’s language. 

The project

According to the L.A. Department of Transportation, Forest Lawn Drive has seen more than 95 collisions, resulting in four deaths, since 2013. Earlier this month, a driver died on the road after their "vehicle collided into a tree and became engulfed in flames,” according to the LAPD.

In response to concerns about speed and safety, the Department of Transportation proposed reducing the number of lanes. The project would also install plastic posts to separate vehicular traffic from cyclists.

Both cemeteries along the affected portion of Forest Lawn Drive have opposed the project from the start, saying the reduction in lanes would “create severe gridlock.”

The city’s analysis of how traffic could be impacted show that the lane reduction would result in a driving delay of about 15 seconds during weekday evening rush hour and by a little more than a minute and a half during weekend peak hours, when traffic is heavier.

The project was set to break ground earlier this summer before state legislators and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass requested city departments to pause work, citing "significant community opposition."

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass during a talk with LAist's public affairs show AirTalk.

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Courtesy of Loyola Marymount University

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Bass is facing Raman in a runoff race for the L.A. mayor’s seat this November. The project has become a heated campaign issue with Bass wanting to block the work and Raman supporting the project.

“This last minute amendment to the legislation is clearly meant to stop one road safety project in my district, which is designed to save lives while keeping travel times nearly unchanged for commuters,” Raman said in a statement shared by her campaign.

L.A. Councilmember and mayoral candidate Nithya Raman at a press conference to speak in support of safety updates following a fatal crash that occurred on Forest Lawn Drive, on Tuesday, August 18, 2026.

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The mayor's office did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment

The bill

If the added language is approved, State Senate and Assembly bills 194 would require Los Angeles to get approval from the City Council and the mayor and hold a public hearing before reducing “the number of vehicle travel lanes on a street that provides the only access to two or more adjacent cemeteries.”

The proposed bill change comes at the tail end of the legislative session, meaning lawmakers would have until midnight on Aug. 31 to either advance or reject the legislation.

A joint statement from Forest Lawn and Mount Sinai cemeteries said the legislation, if passed, would represent a “momentous victory.”

“The proposed legislation places important safeguards around any future effort to reduce vehicle lanes on the only street providing access to these adjacent cemeteries,” the statement reads.

Lobbying money

Records held by the California Secretary of State show that Forest Lawn Memorial Parks and Mortuaries paid a lobbying firm $125,000 between April and June to advocate the governor’s office and state legislature regarding “transportation issues.” No additional details are available.

Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur, who represents the project area, confirmed to LAist that he heard from Governmental Advocates, Inc., the lobbying firm retained by the cemetery. Zbur said the firm and other stakeholders reached out to his office about “the harmful impact of the proposed projects on access to the cemeteries and the surrounding area.”

According to city records, lobbyist Rick Taylor and Associates received $360,000 from a law firm working on behalf of the cemetery between 2025 and 2026. Reports filed with the L.A. City Ethics Commission about the lobbying activity list opposition to the Forest Lawn Drive transportation project as the subject.

Status of the project

According to an Aug. 24 statement from the mayor’s office received before the proposed state language was introduced, alternative plans that preserve the four lanes of traffic and include protected bike lanes “are being reviewed.”

The mayor’s office said the project will break ground following additional community outreach.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

After Inglewood systematically violated state law, a judge reminded the city it was required to release records on police misconduct and use of force — but rolled back an earlier ruling that would have required the records to be posted online.

Barring an appeal, the decision brings five years of legal wrangling between the city and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California closer to a conclusion.

Inglewood won’t face serious consequences for the pattern of breaking California public records law, but the city must pay attorney fees for the ACLU and Trisha Shanklin, who joined the ACLU’s 2021 lawsuit. Inglewood police fatally shot Shanklin’s sister, Kisha Michael, and Marquintan Sandlin in 2016.

LA Superior Court Judge Amy Carter said the city will not have to proactively post the records online, which another judge had previously ordered the city to do for the next three years. Carter said during a Wednesday hearing that such a requirement would have to come from state legislators, not a judge.

Over the last decade, California lawmakers have expanded the public’s right to access police misconduct and use-of-force records, but Inglewood has thrown up a series of obstacles to that access.

The Inglewood City Council voted to destroy decades of internal affairs records in 2018 just weeks before one law went into effect, though Mayor James Butts denied the move was intended to thwart the law, according to LAist. The LA Times reported that the city nearly did it again in 2021 before being blocked by a judge.

This week’s court ruling found the city has routinely violated the law since then, missing deadlines, sharing incomplete records, and at times, failing to provide any documents at all.

Tiffany Bailey, an ACLU attorney, celebrated the decision and said it streamlines the civil rights group’s ability to get police records from the city in the future.

David Loy, an attorney with the First Amendment Coalition, said the case was a great win for the ACLU.

“These kinds of (public records) delays are not uncommon throughout the state,” Loy said. “I hope and believe this is a signal to other cities to get their house in order.”

Attorneys for the city declined to comment on the ruling, and Mayor James Butts did not immediately reply to written questions from The LA Local.

CalMatters maintains a searchable database of police misconduct and use-of-force records called the Police Records Access Project that includes records from the Inglewood Police Department.

The universe is a strange place — filled with exploding stars, ancient galaxies, and unseen worlds. Now, astronomers are about to get a brand new tool to explore it.

The $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled for launch Aug. 30. Named for NASA's first chief astronomer, the observatory is expected to reveal new information about the expansion of the universe and discover multitudes of planets orbiting distant stars.

Roman, as it is known to its friends, has an unusual history. About 15 years ago NASA was making plans to build a space telescope that could, among other things, search for exploding stars known as Type 1A supernovas. These supernovas were used as a kind of cosmological measuring stick to uncover a mysterious force called dark energy that was causing the universe to expand — a discovery that earned the Nobel Prize in 2011.

Cosmologist Daniel Scolnic at Duke University says finding more of them would be key to better understanding that expansion.

As NASA was developing plans for this new telescope, a call came in from the government office in charge of surveillance satellites.

"The National Reconnaissance Office reached out to NASA," Scolnic says, "saying, 'We have this amazing satellite sitting in a hangar that we're not using. And what what do you guys think about instead of pointing downwards, we point upwards, and you guys use it?'"

NASA said yes. It took some substantial modifications, but now that old satellite is set to become NASA's next major space observatory.

Scolnic says that the new observatory could fundamentally change the scientific model that astronomers use to understand our universe.

"In the last few years, there have been measurements saying that model might be wrong — and that's something that Roman will absolutely nail, whether the model's right or wrong," he says.

Another goal of the telescope is to spend a month surveying all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Julie McEnery is Roman's project scientist. She says even though Roman has broadly the same sensitivity and sharpness of vision as the currently orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, its design lets it do things much faster.

"That one month of observations to survey our Milky Way galaxy would take about a century with Hubble," says McEnery.

Instead of focusing on a single object, Roman is designed to make catalogs of large swaths of the sky, and McEnery says these catalogs will be available to everyone, not just academics.

"You can be a teacher in a high school in Kentucky and your students have the opportunity to see Roman data at the same time as a professor in Princeton," she says.

One professor eager to get his hands on Roman data is Scott Gaudi at The Ohio State University. Along with colleagues, Gaudi developed a technique for detecting planets around distant stars. It's called gravitational microlensing, and it measures the way those planets bend the starlight that passes them by.

Albert Einstein described the idea in 1936 but thought it would be impractical. New technology has proven him wrong — and Gaudi expects Roman will find tons of planets that way.

"We're looking for planets that are just completely undetectable by any other method," Gaudi says. That includes planets at the center of our galaxy, "that are very analogous to our own solar system planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune."

In addition to new planets, Roman should also reveal new galaxies, helping astronomers to get a better idea of the large-scale structure of the universe.

But predicting what will be Roman's greatest accomplishments over the course of its five-year mission is a tricky business.

"The history of astronomy really has shown that when you get a new capability, and especially a survey capability, you learn something new, something unexpected," says Wendy Freedman, an astronomer at the University of Chicago. "Often that turns out to be the most exciting part of a new facility. So I am completely open to what this telescope will find."

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