The Brief

Come March, California voters will get the chance to weigh in on sweeping changes proposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to the state’s mental health funding system — including a $4.68 billion bond measure to add treatment beds — but critics say the proposal pits children’s mental health services against the state’s ballooning homelessness crisis.

Newsom announced his intent in March to divert nearly one-third of the state’s Mental Health Services Act money — roughly $1 billion — to housing homeless individuals with severe mental illness or drug addiction.

“We have to address and come to grips with the reality of mental health in this state and our nation,” Newsom said at the time.

The announcement was met with praise from legislative leaders and alarm by children’s mental health advocates who fear cuts to their services. Today Newsom’s office released long-awaited details.

Key changes to the Act include:

• Allocating 30% of the state’s Mental Health Services Act budget to housing those with severe mental illness or substance use disorders. Half of that money would be reserved for chronically homeless people;
• Directing 35% of the money to full-service partnerships, which provide 24/7 wraparound services like case management, clinical treatment and social supports;
• Earmarking 15% of money for early intervention programs and 5% for prevention programs. Eliminating the 5% innovation fund, which has historically been used to jumpstart programs for communities of color and LGBTQ folks;
• Making people with substance use disorders eligible for services;
• Adding 10,000 treatment beds if the bond measure passes;
• Adding $36 million to shore up workforce development.

About one-third of the county mental health infrastructure in the state is supported by the Mental Health Services Act, which was approved by voters in 2004 as a ballot initiative that levied a 1% tax on the state’s millionaires. Substantial changes to the act, like the ones proposed, are subject to further voter approval. Last year the tax generated about $3.8 billion.

Democratic legislators Sen. Susan Talamantes-Eggman, from Stockton, and Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, from Thousand Oaks, authored the bills detailing the proposed changes.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg said updates to the act are long overdue. Steinberg co-authored the original measure when he was an Assemblymember.

“I am 1,000% behind this modernization,” Steinberg said during today’s news conference.

The original intent of the act was to prioritize services for people “whose lives are most at risk,” Steinberg said, criticizing counties that currently “do their best to use nearly $4 billion annually on people who need help, but without any clear state and societal priorities driving their investments.”

When Newsom announced his proposal in March, county behavioral health leaders countered that this money is the only funding source that gives them broad flexibility to focus on local priorities and any changes will result in program cuts. The money is “braided into the fabric of all things in our safety net,” said Michelle Doty Cabrera, executive director of the County Behavioral Health Directors Association, at the time.

Children’s mental health advocates also said the new proposal details fail to address their earlier concerns about cuts to youth services, which include local at-risk youth centers, LGBTQ+ programs, school-based suicide prevention programs, and infant and early childhood mental health consultations.

“They don’t seem to have done any analysis on what they’re giving up to have this $1 billion for housing,” said Lishaun Francis, senior director of behavioral health at Children Now. “It’s an interesting time to make a change that seemingly shifts resources away from young people.”

Data on youth

Mental health among youth worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, with one survey showing 63% of middle and high school students reported having had an emotional meltdown, 43% reported panic or anxiety attacks, and 19% described suicidal thoughts between April 2020 and March 2021.

In 2021, Newsom and the Legislature allocated $4.4 billion to a Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative, but people who provide services to young folks say that was a one-time investment — it doesn’t replace ongoing money they currently get from the Mental Health Services Act.

But Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Mark Ghaly said the proposed changes cannot be considered alone. In addition to the one-time $4.4 billion investment, the state has added money outside of the Mental Health Services Act to mental health and substance use prevention programs, which include youth programs.

“Compared to 20 years ago, not only do we have a number of new programs, we have a number of new opportunities to bring funding to those programs,” Ghaly said. “It is our belief that even though we are today really helping focus on some of the Californians with the most severe conditions, we also are in a much different better place to promote and support the prevention programs.”

The measure creates an early intervention program that earmarks funds to reduce suicide, incarceration and school failure as well as establishing early-psychosis interventions. Steinberg said it invests the same amount of prevention funds as the current Mental Health Services Act in a “more focused and targeted way.”

But children’s mental health advocates say that’s not what they were asking for. The current funding system carves out money specifically for prevention and early intervention programs among youth. This version creates a “catch-all” fund that isn’t set aside for young people, said Adrienne Shilton, senior policy advocate for the California Alliance of Children and Family Services.

“In the current structure, there’s a requirement that 51% of prevention and early intervention funds are spent on children and youth. We’ve lost all of that,” Shilton said.

The situation at hand

Addressing homelessness has been a key priority for Newsom, who made it part of his 2018 gubernatorial campaign. Since that time homelessness has increased in California by nearly 32%, with about 170,000 people living on the streets.

A new report from the UCSF Benioff Center paints a bleak picture of California’s homeless population, with two-thirds of those surveyed reporting mental illness and one-third reporting substance use. The report, which offers new insights into the state’s most visible crisis, states that loss of income was the No. 1 cause of homelessness, not mental illness or addiction.

Francis said it will be difficult come March to convince voters that funding for youth should not be sacrificed to address homelessness. She believes the state has enough resources to address both problems.

“We want to support our unhoused population but we don’t want to do that at the expense of our youth. The legislature needs to figure out how to do both, but this isn’t it,” Francis said.

Longer wait times for graffiti removal and streetlight repair. Fewer police officers per shift. Completely eliminating school crossing guards.

Those are just some of the service cuts the city of South Gate made earlier this year as it stared down a $9.4 million annual budget deficit and a looming fiscal emergency.

But none of that was enough to convince South Gate voters to approve an 8% utility user tax that would have been tacked onto a wide range of utility bills, including electricity, water, cable and phone service. Now, the city is gearing up for more cuts, including closing sports fields and the city pool for the winter months.

South Gate’s utility tax was just one of the many ways Southern California cities asked their residents to give them more money via local tax initiatives this November, with proposed taxes on everything from hotel stays to cannabis businesses.

And those early results suggest South Gate is an outlier: Of the 32 total local tax measures on the ballot in Los Angeles and Orange counties, all but six appear poised to pass, according to early results. (There are still several more days of vote counting to come.)

Eleven transient occupancy tax measures, which tax overnight stays in hotels or short-term rentals, passed in cities from Burbank to Los Alamitos. Most cities sought to increase their existing hotel taxes by anywhere from 1 to 5 percentage points, while Lynwood residents voted to establish a hotel tax for the first time.

Business-related taxes, such as taxes on business licenses or on certain businesses, also mostly passed, as did most parcel taxes in cities including Pasadena and Culver City.

But sales taxes saw more mixed results. Cudahy, San Gabriel, Orange, Santa Ana and Los Angeles all approved sales tax measures, while voters in Diamond Bar, Hermosa Beach and San Clemente all voted down their local sales tax proposals.

Most of those sales taxes focused on maintaining basic city services in communities facing big budget deficits, driven by the rising costs of insurance, maintenance and infrastructure projects, and employee pensions, among other factors. But in San Clemente, the proposed 1% sales tax would have specifically funded sand replenishment and other beach projects, along with wildfire prevention work. That measure appeared to be headed for failure, with just 36% of voters in support as of Wednesday afternoon.

Voters in San Marino approved an extension of their utility tax, and increased it from 5% to 6%. Last year, the tax provided almost $2.2 million in revenue.

City officials in South Gate had hoped for a similar boon, and projected the utility tax would bring in an estimated $10.4 million per year in general fund revenue, while raising total utility costs by about $39 per month for a typical household.

Leading up to the election, the city of South Gate pointed to other neighboring cities that have their own utility taxes, including Downey, Lakewood and Norwalk, where the tax mostly hovers around 5%. “South Gate is the exception, not the rule,” noted one city presentation that pointed to these other taxes in a bid to coax voters to go along.

Voters weren’t convinced. “I’m extremely frustrated that you now want to do electricity, water, sewer, cable, cell phone, gas. ... That hurts us. You’re passing that on to us and that is absolutely not acceptable,” said one resident at a City Council meeting on the measure earlier this year.

LAist has reached out to the city of South Gate about what’s next for the city.

The city of West Hollywood has approved an ordinance to create a domestic partnership registry for people in polyamorous relationships.

The domestic partnership registry extends certain legal protections for people in the city, including visitation rights to hospitals and jails in West Hollywood and some tenant protections. The registry doesn’t replace the state’s marriage or the state’s domestic partnership laws.

“It's a landmark ordinance and really puts and continues to elevate West Hollywood as a city that is here to support queer people and queer families as they evolve in their needs,” said Chelsea Byers, a West Hollywood City Council member. “I think that's a real joy that we can bring to people — that they can live in a greater sense of being seen and understood.”

How it works

To file, people in a multi-partner relationship will submit a form in person that will be provided by the City Clerk’s office — all members of the relationship will have to provide identification to the clerk.

The ordinance also offers an option by mail, if the signatures are notarized.

The ordinance builds on historical precedent

In 1985, the city became the first city in the nation to create a similar domestic partnership registry for same-sex couples. Similar to that registry, people outside the city can also register.

“This new law not only gives polyamorous unions legal recognition, it also gives people permission to imagine a future together and to plan their lives openly,” said Christina Fialho, president and founder of Rewrite the BiLine, an advocacy group for bisexual people and nonnuclear families, who advocated for the ordinance.

Several cities in Massachusetts have also passed multipartner domestic partnership laws.

Among the sweeping victories by Democrats on Tuesday were wins in several congressional districts that Republicans had redrawn explicitly to boost their party ahead of the midterms.

Republicans were bracing for some losses this election cycle, so last year President Donald Trump urged his party to take the extraordinary step of engaging in mid-decade redistricting efforts.

As of Tuesday night, many of those efforts had failed.

That included in Florida, where multiple Democrats — Kathy Castor, Pia Dandiya and Jared Moskowitz — won in redrawn districts, according to race calls by the Associated Press.

In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Don Davis held on to his 1st District seat, even though Republicans in the state redrew it to be more competitive for the GOP. Trump would have won the redrawn 1st by nearly 12 percentage points, according to the Downballot.

Trump would have won by even more in Alabama's redrawn 2nd Congressional District, which Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures held on to, according to the AP race call.

Republicans in Alabama redid the state's congressional map after the U.S. Supreme Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act earlier this year.

And in Texas, which was the first state to redistrict at Trump's urging, a few of the redrawn districts had gone to Democrats.

Republicans redrew their maps with the expectation that the coalition of voters Trump won over in 2024 would support them this cycle. In Texas, Republicans were banking on gains made with Latino voters in new maps.

But many of those voters shifted their support to Democrats this year.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Nationwide election results came at a relentless pace Tuesday night, each more of a Democratic upset than the last. But you may not have known if you were attending the California Republican Party's election night event in Garden Grove.

In the dimly lit Hyatt ballroom where gubernatorial longshot Steve Hilton and his supporters gathered, the news channels were off, the music was turned up and “Don’t Stop Believin’” blasted throughout.

Minutes after the polls closed at 8 p.m., the Associated Press called the governor’s race for Democratic favorite Xavier Becerra.

Around the room, the occasional person glanced at their phone to sneak a peek at the growing GOP carnage. More of the crowd instead looked at each other or toward the empty stage, where a lectern stood in front of a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset.

Not long after, Hilton took the stage to concede the race — which had always been heavily favored against him in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1.

“Maybe this isn’t the best year to be running for office as a Republican,” Hilton told his supporters, alluding to the election results that would soon lead the Democratic Party to win so big in the House and the Senate that many dubbed it a blue tsunami. “We see what’s going on around the country.”

Hilton knew the odds were long. He’d tried a number of tactics to win over California, including a suggestive advertisement suggesting voters should “Just Try” voting for him. He’d done his best to separate himself from President Donald Trump, who backed his campaign. He also attacked Becerra for staying largely out of the limelight since making it out on top of a chaotic primary.

None of Hilton’s appeals made a significant mark on the result, which trailed at around 36% of the vote as of Wednesday afternoon.

Standing outside the ballroom, Matt Shupe, a spokesperson for the California GOP, conceded it was challenging terrain for Republicans this year across the country — and always in California.

“It’s pretty typical that the party that's not in power gains some seats, so I think that was pretty expected for the most part,” he said. “We'll plan on bringing the fight more intensely than ever in 2028.”

By 9:30 p.m., people were headed to their cars to go home.