The Brief

In 2022, the Los Angeles electorate voted to slap the sale of mansions and other high-value real estate deals across the city with a hefty tax.

Locals have been debating Measure ULA ever since. Supporters call it a vital lifeline for the city’s unhoused and housing insecure who stand to benefit from the hundreds of millions of dollars the initiative has already raked in. Critics call it an economic own-goal that has choked off new apartment construction in a city where new housing is in excruciatingly short supply.

That debate is about to go statewide.

The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, a low tax advocacy group, is currently gathering signatures to put a measure on California's November 2026 ballot. A central part of their pitch: No more Measure ULAs.

The proposed constitutional amendment takes aim at two types of taxation common across California:

• Transfer taxes on the sale of real estate. The measure would cap rates at a little more than one-twentieth of one percent of the value of the property. Los Angeles' highest rate is one hundred-times higher.

• Local tax measures put on the ballot by voter-backed campaigns (as opposed those put there by city councils) that are earmarked for a particular purpose. The tax-capping proposal would raise the electoral support needed to pass these types of “special” tax measures to two-thirds, up from a simple majority of more than 50%. 

Municipal governments across the state stand to lose billions of dollars (with taxpayers standing to save just as much) if the measure ultimately succeeds. Voter-proposed tax hikes have been approved by simple majorities in cities and counties across California. Transfer tax hikes have also been a popular funding source for certain local governments.

Measure ULA, which 58% of Los Angeles voters backed in 2022, happens to be both. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and its political allies appear happy to make it the face of the statewide campaign.

Putting a lid on both citizen-initiated tax measures and high transfer taxes “is something that we have always had as a priority,” said Rob Lapsely, president of the California Business Roundtable, a coalition that has yet to take a formal position on the measure but which backed an earlier version. “The question was, ‘can we actually find the right opportunity?’”

“And then suddenly, along came Measure ULA.”

The fight over the “mansion tax”

The City of Los Angeles’ measure was sold to voters as a “mansion tax,” because it sticks new, elevated transfer fee rates on only the highest value sales: 4% on properties between $5 million and $10 million and 5.5% for those above that. Those numbers have inched up with inflation. All sales below those thresholds are taxed at roughly half of 1%.

Since going into effect in 2023, the measure has raised some $830 million for affordable housing construction, subsidies for cash-strapped renters and legal assistance for tenants facing eviction. It is by far the largest single contributor to the city’s overall homelessness spending.

But ULA has its critics. Not just a tax on mansions, the high rates apply to commercial, industrial and multifamily residential projects too, including land sales for new apartment developments. Apartment construction has indeed slowed to a crawl across the city in recent years and developers and researchers have laid at least some of the blame on the city’s high transfer taxes which they argue has driven new construction down further than in surrounding cities. One report by researchers at UCLA and the Rand Institute estimated that the measure has resulted in 1,910 fewer apartments per year, including 168 fewer affordable units. Another study by researchers at Harvard, UC Irvine and UC San Diego, found that property tax collections fell steeply as a result of the dramatic slow down in sales, off-setting an estimated 63% of the collect transfer tax revenue, if not significantly more.

Backers of the mansion tax have taken issue with the UCLA study in particular. They also note that the program is currently accepting applications for its first major distribution of funds, with plans to push nearly $400 million out the door, which could ultimately ramp up affordable housing development across the city.

But there’s growing concern, both in Los Angeles and among Democrats in Sacramento, that ULA as it currently exists has become a political vulnerability — and one that could fuel the campaign behind the statewide tax busting measure.

“Measure ULA is the tail wagging the dog,” said Mott Smith, a developer and board member of the California Infill Builders Association who co-authored another study that found a chilling effect on the housing market. “Anyone with assets in Los Angeles is like, ‘please where can I send my check to Howard Jarvis?’”

In the final days of the California Legislative session, Mayor Karen Bass and former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg tried to hammer a grand bargain into state law. Senate Bill 423 would have exempted certain new residential developments from the tax, offering a reprieve to many multifamily housing developers. It would have also given the city more flexibility to renegotiate affordability requirements on housing projects funded by the measure, addressing concerns by some developers and financiers that ULA cash comes with too many strings attached to be of use.

The bill would have also exempted homes destroyed in the recent wildfires.

But there was a catch: The ULA tweak would only go into effect if the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association pulls its ballot measure or it fails to qualify for the ballot.

All of that ultimately proved too complicated, contentious and of questionable legality to ram through the Legislature in the final days of the session. Long Beach Sen. Lena Gonzalez and Inglewood Assemblymember Tina McKinnor, both Democrats, vowed to pick it up again in January.

But that may be too late to neuter the anti-tax campaign. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association is already gathering signatures and raising funds.

“This was an attempt to cut us off early in the process, but since we’re moving forward I think the attempt to leverage this is not going to prevail,” Jon Coupal, the association’s president. “Their opportunity to ambush us is now over.”

That’s given local government groups billions of reasons to worry. Along with making it more challenging to raise revenue in the future, cities with existing high transfer taxes would see them slashed. Parcel taxes currently on the books that were approved by majorities of less than two-thirds would be similarly nixed.

Cities would lose between $2 billion and $3 billion each year if the measure becomes law, according to an analysis commissioned by the League of California Cities, a lobbying group. That includes hundreds of millions of dollars in foregone funding dedicated for new housing and homelessness services in Los Angeles and Santa Monica. But it also includes hundreds of millions more for cities that don’t use these transfer dollars for new, specific purposes and projects, but simply to top up their budgets.

The City of Berkeley, for example, stands to lose between $33 million and $63 million, according to the League’s analysis. That’s the equivalent of between 15% to 30% of the town’s general fund.

California’s favorite fight

Californians have been having some version of this fight for nearly half a century.

In 1978, voters passed Proposition 13, which capped property taxes and put strict limits on local and state governments’ ability to raise revenue. Defending, rolling back and revising those limits in court battles and subsequent state ballot measure campaigns is now a storied California political tradition.

The latest chapter begins in 2017 when the California Supreme Court ruled in a case against the southern California city of Upland that citizen-initiated special tax measures only need to get more than 50% of the vote to pass. Up until that point it was presumed that the required threshold was the much more electorally formidable two-thirds.

Since then cities and counties have passed two dozen of these measures by margins of less than two-thirds. That includes taxes on parcels, sales and gross receipts that have been used to fund local schools, parks, street repairs and housing and that have been put on the ballot by homeless advocates, environmentalists and organized labor groups. It also includes Measure ULA.

And since then, business groups have been clambering to close the “Upland loophole.”

“This is now the vehicle for unions and others to be able to try and pass new taxes on targeted business sectors using a majority vote,” said Lapsely. “That only hurts job growth.”

Over that same period some cities have also turned to transfer taxes as a new source of revenue. It’s a fiscal avenue only available to a select number of cities. Under state law, most municipalities max out their transfer taxes at 55 cents for every $1,000 in sale value. But for “charter cities” — local governments with their own municipal constitution — there is no upper limit. Twenty-six have taken advantage of that fiscal opportunity.

They include Santa Monica, which passed its own version of a high-value transfer tax (Measure GS) in 2022, and Los Angeles. Voters in cities across the San Francisco Bay Area have voted to make more modest or incremental hikes over the last 10 years.

Electoral hurdles to come

The transfer tax trend has particularly irked landlords and real estate developers.

Last year, they joined forces with anti-tax advocates and other business groups to rein in both types of bothersome taxation with a ballot measure. The California Supreme Court took the unusual step of striking it from the 2024 ballot, ruling that it proposed too “substantial” a change to state government to be enacted by a mere ballot measure.

This year’s version is much more carefully targeted making it less likely to hit this same constitutional snag.

But even if the signature gathering effort is successful, the Howard Jarvis campaign has its work cut out for it — even for a conservative-coded measure in reliably blue California. In late 2023, the Legislature floated its own head-spinning ballot measure that would require future initiatives that want to hike the threshold needed to pass other measures (see: the business-backed measure) to meet that same higher threshold (in this case, two-thirds) before becoming law.

That effort to hoist the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Association on its own petard is already slated for the November 2026 election. If it passes, it would apply to any other measures also on the ballot.

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

Lawmakers and the governor on Monday failed to extend a state grant program that helped schools upgrade their air conditioner systems, a decision that will allow utilities that funded the program to claw back funds for their ratepayers.

The California Schools Healthy Air, Plumbing and Efficiency program — CalSHAPE for short — set aside nearly $1 billion in utility funds to help schools assess and upgrade aging HVAC and plumbing systems. But the California Energy Commission abruptly closed applications in 2024, leaving $191 million unused — money that must now be returned to utilities by law.

After last-minute negotiations, lawmakers passed a budget trailer bill giving schools that had already received funding an additional three years to finish projects before the state claws back the money. But they dropped a separate measure that would have reopened applications for schools to make upgrades because it did not have support from Gov. Gavin Newsom, according to sources familiar with the negotiations.

“I don't understand why [Newsom] doesn't have the backs of everyday people in California, and why he doesn't think that children deserve a safe place to learn with air conditioning,” said Leah Stokes, a political science associate professor at UC Santa Barbara who has advocated for the program. “This is all on him.”

Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a spokesperson for the governor, declined to comment on the matter.

‘A disillusioning conclusion’ 

School administrators have praised CalSHAPE, saying the program offered schools the chance to improve class environments for students.

The program helped more than 4,500 schools assess the status of their HVAC systems. Of those, 172 schools made significant upgrades with program funds.

But the program’s future has been in question since 2024, when the California Energy Commission abruptly stopped accepting applications. Much of the controversy centered on whether ratepayers should be responsible for funding a school grant program.

Consumer advocates said the program doesn’t directly benefit ratepayers, while school advocates questioned why the state would pull back money already designated for schools.

In its June 2024 notice pausing the program, the commission cited budget constraints. Later that year, the governor signed an executive order directing the commission to examine ratepayer-supported programs “whose funding might more appropriately come from a source other than ratepayers.”

In a letter opposing the budget measure to extend CalSHAPE, San Diego Gas & Electric Senior Vice President Mitch Mitchell said its customers contributed about $189.6 million to the program.

The company stands to get back $100 million — the most of any participating utility — which would amount to about $24 per customer, divided into $2 monthly payments over a year, according to a legislative analysis. Utility officials said they are committed to returning all unspent funds to customers through bill relief.

“Policymakers cannot credibly elevate affordability while simultaneously redirecting unused customer dollars away from bill relief,” Mitchell said in the letter. “If affordability is truly a legislative priority, then these funds should be returned to customers as intended under existing law.”

School advocates questioned whether returning the money would make any meaningful impact for ratepayers. SoCal Edison ratepayers would receive $1.25 per month for a year and Pacific Gas & Electric customers would receive 20 cents per month for a year, according to the legislative analysis.

Meanwhile, the CalSHAPE-funded assessments revealed HVAC systems in California schools are aging and in disrepair.

“Extending CalSHAPE deadlines so existing funds could go to repair or replace broken school HVAC systems should have been an easy win,” said JuNelle Harris, founder of Clean Air Allies, a nonprofit that advocates for healthy air in schools. “Instead, this campaign has been a multiyear saga that’s come to a disillusioning conclusion.”

Schools cope with heat 

The most recent heat wave left classrooms sweltering as many students returned for their first weeks back to school. School districts throughout the state reported having to adjust school times or cancel classes altogether.

In Los Angeles, where students endured temperatures above 90 degrees for 12 consecutive days, the Los Angeles Unified School District limited outdoor time for some students. The district received $27 million to assess their air conditioning systems from CalSHAPE but no funds for upgrades.

In San Diego, average temperatures stayed in the mid to high 80s, far above the average for the coastal city. The Coronado Unified School District shut down classes for all students.

Cody Petterson, a trustee on the board of the San Diego Unified School District, said he’s disappointed the governor would rather see CalSHAPE funds returned to ratepayers, when there is so much need for air conditioning in schools. He also criticized the CalSHAPE process, saying it limited schools from completing projects on time and disincentivized applications.

“No child should be in a classroom that is overheating because they cannot learn, they cannot achieve, they cannot grow,” he said. Petterson added that he’d prefer the state fund HVAC upgrades as categorical investments, rather than through a grant program.

San Diego Unified received $12 million to assess school air conditioning systems, but no funds to upgrade them.

Advocates said they were confused about the governor’s lack of support, but will continue to advocate for school HVAC investments from the state.

“It’s deeply disappointing that lawmakers, starting and ending with the Governor, have chosen to treat our children’s and teachers’ interests as secondary to those of big utility companies,” Harris said. “As our outdoor environment is transformed by more extreme weather events and wildfires, safe classrooms where children can learn and grow have never been more important.”

Stokes said Newsom “sat on it as an executive for years,” while disadvantaged communities went without air conditioning. “Why would he do that? Seems very Trumpian to me.”

California schools won’t be able to access more funds for upgrades, but hundreds of schools could have more time to complete projects in the works. According to the energy commission, 216 out of 719 school districts that were awarded a grant have pending projects.

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

The largest cyclospora food poisoning outbreak in U.S. history is over, U.S. health officials said Friday.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials said they are confident that all recalled iceberg lettuce related to this specific outbreak is off the market.

Nearly 13,000 reported cyclospora cases were tied to the multistate outbreak, federal officials say. They represent the bulk of an unprecedented surge in the parasitic diarrheal illness this year.

Even with the outbreak deemed over, several questions remain, including about its origin. The parasite is spread through human feces, and it still isn’t clear how sewage could have contaminated enough food to sicken so many people.

“This contamination can happen if produce is grown in soil or comes into contact with water that has been contaminated,” said Ellen Shumaker, director of outreach for a North Carolina State University food safety program, Safe Plates.

Since May 1, the government has received reports of nearly 20,000 lab-confirmed cases, or more than 16 times the number reported during the same period last year. More than 6,100 suspected cases also have been reported.

The worst previous year in the U.S. for infections was 2019, when about 4,700 illnesses were reported nationally.

This year’s surge in cases was dominated by an outbreak in 21 states linked to iceberg lettuce. But there are thousands of other cases that have not been linked to that outbreak.

Michigan was the hardest hit state, with the most reported cases and the two U.S. deaths tied to the outbreak.

Cyclospora is a microscopic, spherical parasite that commonly causes watery diarrhea “with frequent and sometimes explosive bowel movements,” according to the CDC. Outbreaks tend to occur most often in the late spring and summer.

The illness, called cyclosporiasis, is less common than foodborne illnesses caused by other germs, including salmonella and E. coli. Many cases are never linked to a specific food or other source.

In this outbreak, investigators initially zeroed in on lettuce served at Taco Bell. Federal officials subsequently focused on Taylor Farms as the source of the lettuce, and the company recalled iceberg lettuce grown in central Mexico.

The Taylor Farms recall involved thousands of packaged salad products combining iceberg lettuce with other vegetables. The products were shipped to major U.S. restaurant chains, including Yum Brands, which owns Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC.

The FDA has ended its on-site inspections and sample collection at iceberg lettuce growers and the processing facility in Mexico, the agency said Friday. Samples from the on-site inspections are pending analysis, the FDA said.

The outbreak cast a spotlight on a worsening problem: U.S. regulators are conducting fewer international inspections to catch contaminated produce before it lands on American plates.

The Associated Press’ health and science coverage receives financial support from the AP Fund for Journalism and private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

For 16 years, Carlos Ortez, 64, has opened the doors of his restaurant, Un Solo Sol, near Mariachi Plaza, eager to share the philosophy behind his plant-based dishes and the importance of nourishing the body through holistic food. 

It’s what he’ll miss the most when the restaurant closes on Sept. 28, Ortez said. 

“This decision was not made lightly,” Ortez wrote in an Instagram post announcing the restaurant’s closure. “Rising operational costs, inflation, and the broader challenges facing the restaurant industry have made sustaining a small footprint increasingly difficult.”

The announcement comes after years of declining sales and mounting economic crises that have driven customers away, including the COVID-19 pandemic, immigration raids, and recently, the Lineage warehouse fire. 

The restaurant stopped making a profit in 2022, and ever since, Ortez has been using personal funds to sustain it, he said. 

“We’re closing the front door right now so that I can think,” Ortez said. “How am I going to fit a small restaurant with these ideals … in Los Angeles, in Boyle Heights, in the world?”  

Carlos Ortez, 64, owner of Un Solo Sol, stands in front of the restaurant on Sept. 10 in Boyle Heights.

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Laura Anaya-Morga

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Boyle Heights Beat

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Un Solo Sol’s origin 

Ortez, a career engineer-turned-business owner, launched Un Solo Sol in 2005 with his ex-wife as a food-service provider for charter schools. In 2010, Ortez opened the brick-and-mortar across the street from Mariachi Plaza, serving primarily vegan and vegetarian dishes before becoming fully vegan in 2022. 

The menu features Latin-American staples like pupusas from Ortez’s native El Salvador, pozole and enchiladas, as well as cuisine from cultures around the world.  

The yellow and green storefront near the corner of Boyle Avenue and 1st Street has become part of the fabric of the 1st Street business corridor. In neighborhoods like Boyle Heights, losing a small business disrupts “the cohesiveness of the community,” Ortez said. 

On social media, customers grieved the loss of one of the only vegan restaurants on the Eastside.  

“Thank you for the many years of delicious meals made with love,” one user commented. 

“Carlos you poured your heart out for the Vegan community and Boyle Heights,” another wrote. 

What’s next

While the restaurant will close its doors, Ortez said his work isn’t over. He plans to stay in the community and take time to consider how his naturopathic, whole-foods-oriented restaurant concept can continue in a different form.

“The plan is to reemerge,” Ortez said. “It’s not that I don’t have the capacity to let go, it’s that I’m still alive.” 

Want to visit?

The restaurant will close on Sept. 28. Until then, hours are Monday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 12 to 3 p.m. and 5 to 9 p.m. and Sunday from 12 to 3 p.m. and 5 to 8 p.m The restaurant closes Tuesdays and Wednesdays. 

Un Solo Sol is located at 1818 E. 1st St.