The Brief

This story is part of The Disaster Economy, a Grist series exploring the often chaotic, lucrative world of disaster response and recovery. It was produced by Grist and co-published with LAist. It is published with support from the CO2 Foundation.

Last January, a series of massive wildfires broke out across the Los Angeles area, fueled by high winds and dry temperatures. The fires raged for weeks, incinerating entire neighborhoods in the wealthy Pacific Palisades and in middle-class Altadena. They killed at least 30 people and destroyed at least 10,000 homes.

As the embers cooled, thousands of displaced Angelenos scrambled to find new housing in a rental market that was already among the nation’s toughest. They scoured Zillow and Airbnb for units they could afford on short notice. What they found were sky-high prices gouged by property owners and real estate agents rushing to capitalize on the surge in demand.

Dawn Smith and her family had rented in Altadena for nine years. After their home burned in the Eaton Fire, she combed through online listings for a similar alternative. But options were $10,000 a month or more, triple what she had been paying before the fire.

Eventually, she found a smaller place in Sherman Oaks, more than an hour away, for a still-astonishing $7,800. Her renter’s insurance would cover the difference for a few months, but not for the whole term of the lease. Now, as her insurance comes close to expiring, she and her husband are trying to figure out where to go next.

“The prices were insane,” she told Grist, “but because we had to find somewhere, we rented.”

Controversies over price-gouging play out all over the country in the wake of natural disasters as victims scramble for essential goods. Officials in New Jersey went after price-gouging gas stations after Hurricane Sandy; officials in North Carolina went after scam contractors after Hurricane Florence; and Florida prosecutors said they received more than 100 complaints after last year’s Hurricane Milton.

Most states have laws that prohibit such behavior, but they are difficult to enforce in the chaos of disaster, and some economists contend that they can backfire and cause shortages or hoarding.

But housing is a special case. Overpaying for water or gasoline might be difficult, but overpaying for a rental apartment is a long-term commitment that can lead to bankruptcy or eviction down the road. Concerns about price-gouging of rental apartments have appeared after numerous recent wildfires, including the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise and the 2021 Marshall Fire in Boulder. But prosecutors and public officials have largely failed to deter or punish this illegal behavior.

Two days after wildfires broke out in Los Angeles last January, tech founder Edward Kushins and real estate agent Willie Baronet-Israel hiked the price of a home they were renting out in the waterfront city of Hermosa Beach by 36 percent, likely an increase of more than $1,000. The city is about 15 miles from the Palisades burn zone.

A month later, California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the two, citing a state law that makes it a crime to raise prices for food and shelter during an emergency by more than 10%. If found guilty, Kushins and Baronet-Israel would face fines of up to $10,000 and as much as a year in prison.

But the Hermosa Beach listing was just one of thousands that were spiking in price. According to a Washington Post analysis of listings data from the firm RentCast, the average rent in the L.A. area rose by 20% in the two weeks after the fire — double the maximum allowable increase under California law. The home-rental company Airbnb also allowed users to raise prices above legal limits on more than 2,000 properties, despite its assurances that it would block such behavior, according to prosecutors.

The burnt remnants of an apartment building in Altadena, California, following the Eaton Fire in January. Many fire victims struggled to find housing as rents skyrocketed.

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Keith Birmingham

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This lack of enforcement is common after disasters. But this time, it triggered an unprecedented campaign for stricter regulation of housing prices — and one that got results.

“The minimal enforcement that has happened has totally sent a signal,” said Chelsea Kirk, a tenant advocate who organized against price-gouging after the L.A. wildfires. “Landlords expect that enforcement does not exist.”

Three dozen states and the District of Columbia have laws that prohibit merchants from price-gouging during an emergency, but unlike California, which prohibits hikes of more than 10%, many of these laws are vague, prohibiting “excessive” or “unconscionable” increases without specifying what that means or what goods are covered.

“The laws are all over the place,” said Teresa Murray, the lead consumer advocate at the Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit that focuses on consumer protection. Furthermore, enforcement of these laws is minimal — the government can’t be everywhere all at once after a hurricane or flood, and most disaster victims aren’t aware of their rights and don’t track or call out violators.

The stakes are even higher when it comes to housing, which is already in shortage across the country. Around half the nation’s tenants are rent-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on rent. Wildfires and hurricanes often destroy thousands of homes in quick succession, exacerbating supply crunch in local housing stock.

Research from across the country shows that landlords often hike prices after major fires and floods. Asking prices for rental apartments increased by 25% after the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, for instance, and by 44% in Lahaina following the 2023 Maui wildfires in Hawaiʻi. The increases even hit existing renters: More than a quarter of renters in Boulder said they saw hikes of more than 10% after the 2021 Marshall Fire, and a study of multiple flood events found that inexpensive apartments see hikes of 5% on average after a flood. These hikes hit low-income households hardest, forcing them to relocate or cut down on other expenses.

This same dynamic was on display in Los Angeles earlier this year following the Palisades and Eaton fires. One of the people who tested this market was Blanca, a woman who lived in an apartment building in Altadena, and who declined to give her last name because of her immigration status. The Eaton Fire destroyed her business and caused significant damage to the apartment complex where she and her husband lived. Even though their unit was intact, the building lacked water, gas, and electricity.

An aerial view of burned properties in Altadena, taken in July. Many of the homes destroyed in the January fires have not been rebuilt.

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Allen J. Schaben

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Blanca and her husband looked for other apartments, but all the available units they found were far too expensive, some thousands of dollars above what they had paid in Altadena for the same amount of space. They couldn’t afford anything like what landlords were asking, so after a few weeks, they moved back to their unit in the damaged complex and lived there paying rent in unsafe conditions for months.

“The place has not even been inspected, and many people have returned since February,” said Blanca in Spanish. “But there was nowhere else to go.”

In the first days after the fire, California attorney general Bonta trumpeted the state’s price-gouging ban several times — not only could landlords not raise prices by more than 10%, they also couldn’t list new units for more than 160% of typical market value. But property owners seemed either not to know about the law, or not to care.

Bonta, the attorney general, has sent more than 750 warning letters since the fire to property owners who may have price gouged, but has initiated only four lawsuits, and so far not obtained a conviction. The city attorney of Los Angeles has filed a few of its own lawsuits, including against Airbnb, but the district attorney for much larger Los Angeles County has not filed a single price-gouging case. Legal nonprofits say they can’t pick up the slack because they need a named victim in order to sue a landlord, and most disaster victims don’t have the knowledge or resources to pursue litigation.

“We have been a little bit disappointed, I will say,” said Rodney Leggett, the director of litigation at the Housing Rights Center in Los Angeles, which has sued a few property owners over the post-fire price gouging, including the company that owns the historic Villa Carlotta apartments in Hollywood. “We have gotten complaints of people seeing price gouging, [but] we have gotten relatively few … people saying, ‘I am actively being price gouged.’ I think a big part of that is it's really hard for people to track, and to know, the sort of price changes that have occurred.”

But the epidemic of price-gouging in L.A. after the fires has also triggered new progress on the difficult issue of enforcement. As Zillow flooded with overpriced homes, a group of tenant advocates began an unprecedented crowdsourcing campaign to track and shame price-gougers. Kirk, a policy advocate at the progressive nonprofit Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, was seeing numerous instances of price hikes, but she knew that Bonta’s office and local prosecutors lacked the capacity to track and sue every landlord who was posting high-priced units.

Kirk partnered with Lauren Harper, a data analyst and fellow tenant advocate, and together they took enforcement into their own hands. Forming a new organization called The Rent Brigade, they created a spreadsheet that scraped Zillow for apartment listings that violated the price-gouging laws, and also encouraged fire victims and volunteers to submit proof of gouging. In the first few weeks after the fire, volunteers submitted more than 1,500 examples.

Mike Nemeth, the head of communications for the California Apartment Association, the state’s biggest landlord lobby, told Grist that most landlords tried their best to comply with the law.

“The California Apartment Association takes seriously the legal and ethical obligations of rental housing providers during declared emergencies,” he said. “Most housing providers want to do the right thing, and our role is to help them navigate complex rules when it matters most.”

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Zoe Myers

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Thanks in part to the Rent Brigade’s pressure, local officials in Los Angeles are now trying to step up enforcement. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted in July to create a new system for penalizing price spike activity. Instead of waiting for a prosecutor or a legal nonprofit to file a court complaint against a landlord, the local government could slap the landlord with an administrative fine, the same way it would punish a restaurant with cockroaches in its kitchen or a driver who parked near a fire hydrant. The fines could reach up to $1000 per violation per day, with an additional $500 per day for failing to cooperate with county investigations.

Jamie Court, president of the advocacy firm Consumer Watchdog, says this kind of ordinance could be a model for how to enforce price-gouging laws.

“This is desperately needed as a deterrent and to let people know that price gouging is not up to prosecutorial discretion,” he told Grist. “People need to know every violation could result in a fine, not just the few prosecutors choose to prosecute.”

Los Angeles County’s price-gouging will lapse at the end of August when the fire emergency ended, so the new rules will only apply the next time California declares an emergency for a fire, flood, or other calamity. But during the last months of the ban, Kirk and other advocates noticed something unexpected — and concerning. The rush of new housing demand from the fire had ended, but many landlords were still listing new units well above fair market rate.

The L.A. housing supply, Kirk and Harper concluded, was so limited that price gouging had become a normal part of the market. Even in the absence of a major shock like the fire, landlords were still asking for exorbitant rents, and tenants were still paying them. The emergency declaration was only going to last for an arbitrary period of a few months, but the overall housing picture was as bad as ever.

“When the fire started, we were seeing a lot of these units coming online for absurd prices from people who don't usually rent, maybe knowing that people coming from the Palisades would be able to afford those kinds of things,” said Harper. “But the further that we get from the fires…I think it's reflective of just high rents.”

Top California officials traveled to Washington D.C., summoned by the Trump administration for a Friday meeting as a standoff over the Colorado River’s water supplies continues amid alarmingly dry conditions.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum called in the governors from the seven Colorado River basin states in an unprecedented move to referee fraught negotiations about how to portion out the river’s overtapped supply.

The stakes are high, as California, Arizona, and Nevada in the lower basin clash with Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico upstream over how to govern the river after this year, when the current agreements end.

Gov. Gavin Newsom was the only governor absent from the meeting, “due to a longstanding prior family commitment, which was communicated to Interior staff, with alternative dates made available for the meeting,” said Tara Gallegos, a spokesperson for the governor. Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot spoke for California at the negotiating table.

Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources, offered CalMatters an insider’s look as a member of the state’s contingent. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

What happened at negotiations Friday? Who hosted the meeting, and who was there? 

It was a two-hour meeting hosted by the secretary of the interior and his top deputies. And the top deputies have been with the seven basin states in various negotiation settings, really, since this federal administration took office. The secretary just impressed upon us how important it is to get something done, and they were very interested in understanding our feedback on the various (federal) alternatives … and just get that direct communication going one on one with the governor. So we're very grateful that they did that.

Negotiators have been at it for a while. And it's not uncommon that when you get closer to a deadline that a little bit of pressure to speak with more clarity about your interests is pretty important.

Calling in the governors is a major shift in negotiations that, so far, have been the territory of people deep in the weeds of water management. What do you think is behind the change?

It is my understanding this may be the first time governors have been all in a room with the secretary on issues related to the Colorado.

Everybody has a common interest in having a system that's more predictable into the future, and that is forcing everyone to really take a hard look at the hydrology. From the California perspective, more talking at multiple levels is better. It’s going to be necessary, given the need to come to an agreement.

Did you hear anything new today?

Not particularly. We are really, really glad and encouraged by the secretary's direct engagement. Water is the life blood for California. And so an opportunity for California to describe that to the other governors was really important, so we understand where each other's coming from.

Did the governor give you and Secretary Crowfoot any special instructions as you headed to Washington?

“Roll up your sleeves. Be solutions oriented.”

What did you say at the meeting? Or what did Secretary Crowfoot say about California's position?

It was less about position and more about reiterating our commitment to a negotiated outcome and really an open hand with everybody amongst our lower basin and upper basin colleagues.

What does that mean?

You know, a lot of listening.

So not much said about what California would like to see out of a deal? 

Not anything that we haven't said before through our negotiators. We have a proposal on the table. We are wanting to engage directly with the upper basin states to narrow the issues and come to resolution.

What were the sticking points?

I wouldn't say we plowed any new ground as to the sticking points. I think there was real value in having them articulated from California's perspective.

Since the beginning of the Colorado River talks, Gov. Newsom has been pretty quiet. He hasn't said much — I don't think he’s said anything. Is that a strategy?

We have a lot of faith in our negotiators in the Colorado River board and all of our individual water rights holders in California. As time has progressed, the intensity of the hydrology is clearly creating more friction. And so that's made this process a little different from previous processes. The governor very much welcomed the secretary’s entreaty to engage the governors directly. Depending on the progress that we make, I would imagine that our governor would have more to say in the future.

Was there any tension, given Gov. Newsom and President Trump's history of antagonism?

No, when push comes to shove on these important issues, we roll up our sleeves and seek to find agreement amongst the other states.

Will this meeting change anything?

I hope so. We had optimism coming out of the meeting. Solid progress. Very worth our while, and we were grateful to the Secretary for bringing us all to Washington.

There's a Valentine's Day deadline for the states to reach a deal. Do you think the states will meet it?

I imagine people are pretty busy. That's our intent, is to meet it.

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

After fires destroyed thousands of Los Angeles County homes last year, local elected leaders passed new laws aimed at stopping massive rent hikes on the housing still available to fire victims. But a new report finds those new avenues for enforcement are not being taken.

The report from a grassroots organization called The Rent Brigade finds that no lawsuits have been filed under an anti-rent gouging ordinance passed by the L.A. City Council, and no fines have been levied after the L.A. County Board of Supervisors gave local officials the authority to monetarily punish landlords.

Anjali Claes, an organizer with The Rent Brigade, said the lack of enforcement is not because rent gouging isn’t happening. Her group has found more than 18,000 listings that appear to have violated the state law banning rent increases of more than 10% following a disaster.

“The various legislative tools that have been provided to hold landlords accountable for price gouging are not really being used to the extent that they should be,” she said.

It’s not clear exactly why tenants and their lawyers haven’t used these tools, but Claes offered a couple of theories. She said tenants may not be aware of the option, and attorneys may be hesitant to file cases that don’t yet have a proven path to success.

LAist reached out to local officials and lawmakers to ask about the lack of enforcement, but we didn’t hear back.

Few criminal charges

Prosecutors have filed a handful of criminal cases related to rent gouging. According to the report, 13 people have faced charges in 10 separate lawsuits from the California Attorney General and the L.A. City Attorney.

L.A. County District Attorney Nathan Hochman has not filed any charges, despite saying shortly after the fires that he planned to go after rent-gouging landlords.

In part because of the small number of criminal charges, local lawmakers voted last year to create new pathways for enforcement.

The L.A. City Council approved an ordinance in February 2025 that established a “private right of action,” granting tenants the right to sue landlords in civil court they accuse of violating price gouging limits.

The L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted in July 2025 to give the Department of Consumer and Business Affairs the ability to fine landlords directly, without having to wait for criminal prosecutions.

Why the lack of enforcement?

But after reviewing court filings and submitting public records requests with the county, Rent Brigade researchers found that no lawsuits had been filed under the city’s ordinance and the county department had levied no fines.

LAist asked the Department of Consumer and Business Affairs to confirm the report’s findings, but we never heard back. A spokesperson for L.A. City Councilmember Traci Park, who co-presented the motion leading to the private right of action, also did not respond to LAist’s questions on the lack of lawsuits following the City Council’s actions.

Claes, the Rent Brigade organizer, said it’s possible that county officials are still investigating landlords with the intention of levying fines in the future — but they’re not disclosing much information.

“The only information we have is that there are no closed investigations,” she said. “It's really hard to say why those fines haven't been issued yet.”

Preparations are underway to begin critical testing of NASA spacecraft for the Artemis II mission that will send four astronauts around the moon.

Fuel testing is set to begin Monday, NASA says. The fueling phase of prelaunch testing known as a "wet dress rehearsal" was delayed because of freezing temperatures at the launch pad located at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Here is what to know about preparations and the mission.

What exactly is a wet dress rehearsal?

A wet dress rehearsal is a designated time before launch when engineers and crew conduct testing of the spacecraft. During this final test, the Orion spacecraft that will house the astronauts and the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket will be checked over the course of a detailed countdown schedule.

A countdown clock began at 8:13 p.m. ET on Saturday, counting down to the simulated liftoff on Monday evening.

On Monday, more than 700,000 gallons of fuel containing liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen is scheduled to be loaded into the rocket. Launch teams will also practice removing the fuel from the rocket and will conduct a launch countdown.

A simulated launch window will start at 9 p.m. ET and is expected to last until 1 a.m.

The Orion spacecraft has been powered up for several days because of the cold weather and engineers are preparing to charge its flight batteries, NASA said on Sunday.

The chance for the Artemis II mission launch, which was scheduled to occur as early as this coming Friday, will now take place no earlier than next Sunday, according to NASA. There are also launch opportunities in March and April.

The mission is set to last for 10 days and will send astronauts around the Earth and then around the moon before heading back to Earth. It's the first crewed mission to fly to the moon in more than 50 years. The Artemis II mission is a step toward the goal of returning humans to the moon's surface and then eventually to Mars.

Artemis II astronauts are not part of prelaunch testing

NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Reid Wiseman along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen will not be on the spacecraft during testing.

The Artemis II mission astronauts have been in quarantine in Houston since Jan. 23. This is to limit their exposure to others and ensure they do not become ill prior to launch. During quarantine, the astronauts wear masks, avoid public spaces and keep contact with family, friends and colleagues as long as they follow quarantine guidelines, according to NASA.

If prelaunch testing goes well, the astronauts will fly to Kennedy Space Center in Florida six days before launch where they will live in astronaut crew quarters inside the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building.
Copyright 2026 NPR

On a fall morning 34 years ago, a fire, rekindled and supercharged by Diablo winds, began its assault on the East Bay hills. Many times since, Californians have lived through similar disasters.

The fire then was fueled by brush — desiccated by both long-term drought and days of 90-degree heat during the peak of California’s fire season. Powerful winds cast embers wide, setting shake roofs alight throughout hilly, narrow neighborhood streets.

First responders were overwhelmed.

Water pressure fell as service lines ruptured and homes burned.

Communication between departments — including those that rushed into the area to offer mutual aid — was disorganized, with at least one unit waiting 24 hours for orders, while others freelanced, doing what they thought was best. A lack of common radio frequencies delayed evacuations.

Those who went to the emergency operations center were “greeted by pandemonium,” according to an after-action report released by the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, known as Cal OES.

Just days after the Oakland Hills fire began on Oct. 20, 1991, the flames were under control. But 25 people were dead, 150 were injured and more than 3,000 homes were destroyed, making it one of the costliest disasters in U.S. history at the time.

California Gov. Pete Wilson, right, surveys the destruction after the Oakland Hills Fire.

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Robert A. Eplett

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Cal OES

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The 1991 fire tore through neighborhoods of narrow, winding, hilly streets in the East Bay.

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Robert A. Eplett.

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Things had gone so poorly that California’s legislators recognized change was needed.

By 1993, they enacted a law to overhaul how the state manages disasters, including how emergency responders coordinated their work and how they disseminated lessons learned. One provision of the law mandates that Cal OES “complete an after-action report within 180 days after each declared disaster.” (The original legislation said 120 days; lawmakers changed it to 180 in 2022.)

The goal was to make sure that emergency departments across the state could learn from thorough recountings of past crises, avoid repeating mistakes and save lives in the process.

However, compliance has been a mess.

Since 2017, Cal OES has completed only six after-action reports, a fraction of the more than 100 that need to be completed following disaster proclamations by California governors. Eighteen are listed by the agency as in process.

It’s been more than 2,900 days since the 2017 Thomas Fire — one of California’s most destructive fires — was contained. Cal OES has yet to release its report.

The 2017 fire season after-action report is still being written by Cal OES in early 2026. In this photo, a hot shot crew cuts a line among homes in Montecito during the 2017 Thomas Fire.

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Many other reports have been similarly delayed.

Assemblymember Rhodesia Ransom, a Stockton Democrat who heads the Assembly Committee on Emergency Management, pointed out that the report on the 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California “was not published until 10 months after the L.A. wildfires started.”

“Emergency response is a rapidly changing landscape,” Ransom said, “and when reports take years to become public, we leave potential solutions on the table and risk those lessons becoming outdated.”

Cal OES told LAist that it remains committed to streamlining its processes while upholding rigorous standards.

“For every incident that receives a Governor’s State of Emergency proclamation, Cal OES conducts a thorough after-action review,” a Cal OES spokesperson wrote in a statement. “Given the scale, complexity, and number of after-action reviews, completion timelines can vary to ensure completeness and meaningful analysis.”

It isn't just fires: All kinds of disasters require state reports. The Cal OES after-action from a 2021 oil spill in Orange County is still in process.

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'Cal OES has never completed after-action reports on time'

In 2019, the California State Auditor’s Office released a deep dive into Cal OES’s history of delayed after-action reports, finding that out of 65 emergency proclamations issued from 2014 to 2018, just eight reports had been completed.

According to the audit, “the project manager responsible for improving after-action reporting at Cal OES shared with Cal OES’s advisory board and its director that Cal OES has never completed after-action reports on time.”

The audit — titled “California Is Not Adequately Prepared to Protect Its Most Vulnerable Residents From Natural Disasters” — references mistakes made during the Sonoma Complex and Thomas fires in 2017.

It points out that crucial evacuation messages during the Sonoma and Thomas fires were sent only in English, even though many people in those areas lacked proficiency in the language. But, the audit argues, if Cal OES had published its reports in a more timely manner, that could have influenced Butte County to make changes to its emergency preparations. A year after those 2017 fires, the Camp Fire killed 85 people in Butte County. During that fire, the county sent alerts only in English.

“The potential value that one jurisdiction could gain from learning about another’s errors during emergency planning or response makes Cal OES’s failure to complete timely after-action reports a serious concern,” the audit states.

The COVID-19 after-action report is still in draft form. Here a person takes a test in Oakland in 2022.

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Why the delays?

The audit scrutinizes three factors that contribute to Cal OES’s delays:

• Non-cooperation from local agencies
• Lack of staff to research and write the reports
• A lack of clarity about when the clock starts on 180 days

Cal OES makes the case to the auditor that local jurisdictions are often delayed in sharing information, if they share it at all. That’s a problem, as state after-action reports rely on local agencies providing details about their emergency response.

The auditor questions Cal OES’s decision to delay the reports for that reason, given the benefits of sharing information quickly. It's unclear if this issue has been resolved since the audit was written.

Another reason cited for the delays was a lack of resources.

In response to the audit, then-Cal OES Director Mark Ghilarducci acknowledged that the agency had not completed after-action reports in a timely manner and that there was an ever-growing backlog. He cited personnel constraints, and said that the same staffers responsible for the reports were also working on the disasters themselves.

“As disasters increase in scale, complexity and frequency, there are more AARs [after-action reports] to complete, yet fewer staff to complete them,” Ghilarducci wrote.

The after-action report for Tropical Storm Hillary is also still in the works. Here, Joseph Wolensky stands on a Palm Desert street and asks, "You call this a storm?" during the August 2023 deluge.

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However, he said, even if an after-action report hasn’t been filed, Cal OES engages in dialogue with local jurisdictions during and after a disaster.

The auditor’s office replied: “These discussions are a poor substitute for the broader and more complete perspective that after-action reports are intended to provide.”

Cal OES has increased staffing levels since the audit was published in 2019, according to Heather Gonzalez and Drew Soderborg, analysts with California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office. They told LAist that it’s unclear whether that increase has improved the agency’s ability to write after-action reports.

Finally, in the audit, Cal OES mentions a lack of clarity around when the 180-day period specified in California law begins. The agency operates as though the clock starts when a disaster has wrapped. But that moment can be unclear — or even nonexistent.

Which may be why the state has waited a decade for an after-action report about tree mortality. That emergency declaration was signed in 2015 by then-Gov. Jerry Brown, who left office in January 2019. According to official records, that emergency is ongoing, as are many others, years after being initiated.

The audit also notes that Cal OES officials have discussed the need for a firm definition of when to start the 180-day clock.

“Given that the law requiring Cal OES to complete these reports became effective in January 1993,” the auditor wrote, “... we question the urgency of its efforts to produce those reports in a timely manner.”

Ransom, the Assembly member from Stockton, pointed out that the disaster declarations for the Eaton and Palisades fires also remain open. She said she is developing legislation to improve the after-action report process.

“We need to be proactive about ensuring California is better equipped for the next disaster, " Ransom said. “We are determined to get reports out faster and ensure accountability moving forward.”