The Brief

In a close vote following a pointed debate, a slim majority of the Los Angeles City Council voted to formally oppose a California bill that aims to put more housing next to train stops and rapid bus lines.

Eight council members voted to oppose Senate Bill 79, written by Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco. The bill would override local land-use restrictions and let developers construct apartment buildings up to six stories tall, as long as they are within a quarter-mile of a light rail station or a rapid bus stop.

Sacramento upzoning bills regularly have met resistance from local politicians in cities across California, including Los Angeles. In Tuesday’s council meeting, many L.A. council members again argued that state lawmakers were trying to wrest control from local leaders.

“Sacramento is hijacking local planning, stripping away neighborhood voices, ignoring safety and infrastructure, and handing the keys to corporate developers,” said Councilmember Traci Park, whose district includes the Pacific Palisades and who introduced the resolution to oppose SB 79 alongside Councilmember John Lee of the San Fernando Valley.

Joining Park and Lee in voting to oppose SB 79 were councilmembers Heather Hutt, Ysabel Jurado, Tim McOsker, Imelda Padilla, Monica Rodriguez, and Katy Yaroslavsky.

‘Our actions have not met the moment’

Other council members said L.A.’s unaffordable rents and out-of-reach home prices prove new approaches are needed.

“We talk a lot about our housing crisis in this body, but our actions have not met the moment,” said Councilmember Nithya Raman, whose district stretches from Encino to Los Feliz. “The only times that they have met this moment are when Sacramento forces us to do something.”

Raman said she believes lack of housing growth currently is the city’s biggest problem. She noted that L.A.’s approval process for new housing regularly takes years, and the city recently has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees in failed efforts to kill 100% affordable housing projects.

Raman voted against opposing SB 79, along with councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez, Curren Price, Hugo Soto-Martinez, and Marqueece Harris-Dawson.

Two councilmembers — Bob Blumenfield and Adrin Nazarian — were absent.

Soto-Martinez, whose district includes much of Hollywood, as well as Silver Lake and Echo Park, had strong words for his colleagues who stood against the state bill.

“You can't have your cake and eat it, too,” Soto-Martinez said. “If you want the solution to these issues — the homelessness, permanent supportive housing sites — then build them in your district.”

State bill exposes fissures on the council 

The vote was not split entirely along ideological lines. Jurado — whose district includes Eagle Rock, El Sereno, and Boyle Heights and who frequently allies with Soto-Martinez, Raman, and Hernandez on tenant rights and other housing issues — expressed concern that upzoning could lead to the redevelopment of older, rent-controlled buildings.

“I'm not willing to gamble losing Boyle Heights,” Jurado said. “That's a gamble I don't want to take considering the lack of clarity around the issues of tenant protections, how it may or may not impact my district.”

During the meeting, SB 79 opponents argued the city already is doing enough to spur the construction of more housing through its recent housing plan update.

That plan left areas zoned for single-family homes — representing 72% of the city’s residential land — untouched. An analysis from the advocacy group Streets for All, which supports SB 79, found that 45% of the land surrounding L.A.’s “high-quality transit stops” is zoned for single-family homes, duplexes, or parking lots.

Before Tuesday’s City Council vote, local opposition to SB 79 came from an unusual source: L.A. City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto. In a letter she sent to a state senator in May, Feldstein Soto argued that local taxpayers would have to foot the bill for increased utilities, trash collection, and other services connected to the new housing.

Supporters of SB 79 have argued the new housing would help working- and middle-class Angelenos stay in the city and would help cash-strapped transit agencies boost ridership.

L.A. currently is falling far short of achieving its state-mandated goal of planning for nearly a half-million new homes by 2029. Last year, the city permitted about 17,200 new homes. More than triple that amount would be needed annually to meet the 2029 target.

LAist transportation correspondent Kavish Harjai contributed to this report.

L.A. County CEO Fesia Davenport, who has been on medical leave for the last five months, has announced she’ll be stepping down in mid-April, citing health concerns. While on leave, she has faced scrutiny from the public and county employees — as well as a lawsuit — over a secretive $2 million payout she received last August.

Davenport gave notice on Wednesday to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors — her bosses — that she plans to step down effective April 16, according to a spokesperson for her office.

Davenport remains on medical leave and her second-in-command, Joseph Nicchitta, continues to serve as acting CEO, according to a statement from the CEO’s office.

“We appreciate Fesia's nearly three decades of service to Los Angeles County and all that she has accomplished on behalf of its residents and communities,” the statement added.

Davenport said in a LinkedIn post she was stepping down “to focus on my health and wellness.” She also emailed CEO office staff to say she’s learned she has a predisposition for the same type of health problem that killed her brother Raymond in 2018 and that two of her sisters experienced last year. One of her sisters will require 24-hour care for the rest of her life, Davenport wrote.

“The County CEO role requires an extraordinary amount of time and energy to meet the demands of the job, and although I originally assumed that I would be able to return in early 2026, I now know that I would be unable to continue to do the job as it deserves to be done while also prioritizing my health,” she added.

The $2 million taxpayer payout from the county was in response to her claiming she was harmed by a voter-approved measure that will change her job almost two years after her employment contract expires. The settlement was marked “confidential” and not made public until it was brought to light by LAist.

A lawsuit filed last month claims the payout is illegal because Davenport did not have a valid legal dispute with the county. Under the state Constitution, local government settlement payouts are illegal gifts of public funds if they’re in response to allegations that completely lack legal merit or exceed the agency’s “maximum exposure,” according to court rulings.

On Tuesday, county supervisors ordered new transparency measures in response to LAist revealing the secretive payout to Davenport. The county will now create a public dashboard of settlements between the county and its executives, and make sure all such settlements are reported to the public on meeting agendas after they’re finalized.

In her message to staff, Davenport said she was proud of their work together. She pointed to balancing the county’s budget, developing a plan to compensate victims in the largest sexual assault settlement in U.S. history and protecting the county's credit rating when other agencies were being downgraded.

As word of the damning sexual abuse accusations against César Chávez spread this week, California’s farmworking communities struggled to process and reconcile the disturbing details with the image of a labor icon and civil rights fighter many considered a hero.

Reached by phone, people described feeling stunned and disjointed after learning the news from a neighbor’s call, conversations with relatives, work meetings or social media.

“It’s almost too difficult to believe what is happening,” Maria García Hernández, a farmworker for more than 30 years, said in Spanish on Wednesday afternoon. The 52-year-old, who lives in Tulare County, said she and her parents benefited from Chávez's advocacy to include undocumented farmworkers in the last major comprehensive immigration reform in the 1980s.

“I still can’t quite believe it — that such a courageous person who fought for all of us to ensure we had shade, water, clean restrooms, better working conditions, that such a person, so dedicated to the people … could do that,” said García, who seeds and harvests plants in a job represented by the United Farm Workers, the union that Chávez and Dolores Huerta co-founded.

Huerta, now 95, revealed for the first time publicly that Chávez manipulated her into sex and raped her in the 1960s, telling The New York Times that the two encounters each left her pregnant. The Times’ multi-year investigation, published Wednesday, also detailed accusations by two women, daughters of union organizers, who said Chávez sexually abused them when they were children in the 1970s.

A farmworker picks grapes at a field in Fresno on Sept. 3, 2025.

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When Rolando Hernandez first heard about the allegations from coworkers during a job training meeting, the former agricultural worker was confused. He thought the discussion must be about someone else.

“Excuse me, but which César Chávez are you talking about?” Hernandez, 33, asked at the gathering. “Because I only know of one César Chávez who fought for farmworkers’ rights so that there’d be better wages and not so much injustice in the fields.”

“That’s the one,” came the response, leaving Hernandez speechless.

“It landed really heavy,” said Hernandez, an outreach educator for a Fresno-based farmworker nonprofit who began harvesting chile fields as a 14-year-old in Arizona before working with grapes and oranges in California.

The fallout from the revelations was almost immediate. California lawmakers announced they plan to rename the state holiday named after Chavez as Farmworkers Day. Cities, states and organizations, including the UFW, moved to postpone or cancel celebrations planned for March 31 in honor of the Mexican American labor leader’s birthday. Officials are considering renaming streets, parks, libraries, schools and other buildings named after Chávez.

For decades, Chávez and Huerta’s collaboration to advance farmworker rights has been celebrated in children’s textbooks, biographies, movies and parades. Now, mothers like García are troubled that more was not done sooner to prevent and respond to the alleged attacks.

“I feel for them; it really pains me in the bottom of my soul what happened to them,” García said. “But if what happened is true, why wasn’t it spoken of a long time ago? Why now?”

Chávez died in 1993. Huerta said she stayed silent for 60 years because she feared hurting the reputation of a man who became the face of the Mexican American civil rights movement, known for national boycotts, marches and strikes that achieved significant gains for thousands of farmworkers.

“I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work,” Huerta said in a statement after the Times investigation was published. “I have never identified myself as a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor — of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”

Luz Gallegos, whose childhood experiences accompanying her parents to UFW pickets and marches inspired her to become a farmworker advocate, said she felt shattered by the revelations. Now the director of TODEC Legal Center, an immigrant and farmworker nonprofit in the Inland Empire and Coachella Valley, Gallegos praised the courage of Huerta and the other victims who carried their pain before choosing to speak up.

“We stand with our compañera Dolores Huerta and the survivors. What has been revealed is very painful and deeply disturbing,” said Gallegos, her voice cracking. “We know firsthand that silence has never protected our farmworker communities, and no movement or justice can ask people to stay silent about abuse — not then and not now.”

She, like others who spoke with KQED hours after hearing the news, said they want this moment of reckoning to help prevent similar abuses in the future. They hope the allegations against Chávez don’t undercut gains by the farmworker movement as a whole, built by many laborers and their families over decades.

“Right now, we are holding grief. I am holding so much pain in my chest, in my mind, in my heart,” Gallegos said. “At the same time, it’s a reflection that we cannot stay silent, we cannot let our movement end … reassuring our community that their voice matters and that no one should endure any type of abuse.”

A farmworker picks grapes at a field in Fresno on Sept. 3, 2025.

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Gina Castro

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KQED

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García, who started accompanying her parents to work in agriculture at the age of 10, said sexual harassment by farm labor contractors and supervisors was rampant. She was fired from jobs, she said, as retaliation for not agreeing to men’s advances. But joining the UFW helped improve her job conditions and feel supported to complain if there were problems, she said.

García said that if union insiders or others knew of the allegations against Chávez but failed to investigate or willingly ignored the underage victims, there should be consequences.

“If those people are still around — if they are still alive — then they must be held accountable,” she said.

Outside a courtroom in Fresno, where the UFW is fighting a Trump administration plan to make it cheaper to hire temporary farm labor, union president Teresa Romero asked the public to respect the privacy of victims who came forward, according to CalMatters.

“We do not condone the actions of César Chávez,” Romero said. “It’s wrong.”

Three candidates for Long Beach City Council have joined forces in their bid to unseat the incumbents they’re challenging in the primary election this June.

Deb Kahookele, running for District 1; Tara Riggi, running for District 5; and Sequoia Neff, running for District 9, announced their combined ticket in a video published on social media earlier this month.

At a joint campaign event in front of around 100 people in Bixby Knolls on Wednesday, they reiterated their goal of “breaking up the 9-0 votes” they say are all too common on the mostly closely aligned Long Beach City Council, where it’s rare to see a narrowly-split vote.

All three are political newcomers, coming from careers in real estate.

They’ve claimed the grassroots lane this election, winning backing from resident groups like the Long Beach Reform Coalition that views itself as a check on City Hall power, occasionally suing — and winning — on tax issues.

Kahookele, Riggi and Neff say they feel disenfranchised from the current city government, something they emphasize in their slogan: people over politics.

They’re taking on three well-established incumbents: Mary Zendejas in the downtown area’s District 1, Joni Ricks-Oddie in North Long Beach’s District 9 and Megan Kerr in District 5 that extends east and west from Long Beach Airport. The three have already raised tens of thousands of dollars each for their reelection races and won endorsements from the mayor, other local politicians, labor and business groups.

Tara Riggi, center, and Sequoia Neff, left, talk with voters before a campaign event in Long Beach on March 19, 2026. Riggi is running for the District 5 seat.

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Riggi said she decided to run for office after moving to the Cal Heights neighborhood and becoming president of the neighborhood association.

“My allegiance is to my community,” Riggi said at the event. “We are a truly grassroots campaign.”

Kahookele, who moved around a lot at an early age because her father was in the Army, said she found Long Beach home after moving to the city in 2010 and has since risen to prominent roles in several local organizations, including the Promenade Area Residents Association, Long Beach Pride and Long Beach Rotary.

“My votes aren’t going to be bought,” she said.

Deb Kahookele speaks with voters at a campaign event in Long Beach on Wednesday, March 19, 2026. She is running for the District 1 City Council seat.

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Long Beach Post

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Neff, a Poly High School grad and mother of six who founded a local youth basketball league and track club, owns a brokerage firm that operates in multiple states. Early this year, she held a walk to raise awareness about human trafficking in her district.

“North Long Beach has been unheard and overlooked for too long,” Neff said. “And it’s time we’re a part of the conversation, and I just want to step up and do that.”

At Wednesday’s campaign event, they repeatedly hit on the theme that current representatives aren’t doing enough to represent their constituents, and they vowed to dig into the city’s spending to remedy a looming $80 million deficit. They pledged to vote against the possibility of any new tax measures.

Sequoia Neff speaks with voters before a campaign event in Long Beach on Wednesday, March 19, 2026. Neff is a candidate for the District 9 seat.

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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North Long Beach resident James Murray said he showed up Wednesday to hear more from Neff after she attended a recent Starr King Neighborhood Association meeting, and he came away convinced.

“I think it’s time for a change,” he said.

Dan Pressburg, a longtime neighborhood organizer in the DeForest Park neighborhood, said the three candidates joining together was the right move: He wants people outside the current political structure to have a chance to rise to power.

You can see a full list of candidates who will appear on the June ballot here. The Long Beach Post will have continuing coverage, including a full voter guide to be published in the coming months.