The Brief

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The homes in the half-built subdivision look a lot like all the others nestled up against the parched, shrubby hills of Escondido, north San Diego County.

But look a little closer. The gutters and vents are enclosed in a thin, wire mesh. Each window is double-paned, the glass tempered to withstand the heat of a wildfire, the stucco around the shutters resistant to flame. The privacy fences, a suburban staple, look like wood, but are actually brown-tinted steel. Every foundation sits behind a moat of gravel.

National mega-developer KB Home is marketing Dixon Trail as the first purpose-built “wildfire resilient neighborhood” in the United States. The next time fire rips through the chaparral in surrounding hills (a question of when, not if) this cluster of homes is being built to keep the flames at the subdivision’s edge.

Though only half of the 64 homes have been constructed, the development had its grand opening earlier this month. No one from KB would say as much, but in purely marketing terms, the timing couldn’t have been better. For years, wildfire-resilient home and neighborhood design has been a niche consideration for many California homeowners. January’s Los Angeles firestorms have made it feel more like an urgent necessity.

“Buyers want to feel safe in their homes and this is a really big plus for them,” said Steve Ruffner, who oversees KB projects across the region.

The design of each house and the layout of the entire subdivision — with healthy buffers between each building and scant flammable vegetation — meet standards set by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, a research nonprofit funded by the insurance industry. The institute began issuing its “wildfire prepared” designations to homes in 2022. Think organic certification on produce, except for homes built to withstand wildfire.

This is the first time the institute plans to give its stamp of approval to an entire neighborhood.

Building a fire resilient home from scratch is one thing. Bringing older homes up to that heightened standard is a more daunting and costly challenge — and one that California lawmakers at the state and local level are only beginning to grapple with.

Millions of Californians already live in tinderbox canyons and at the edges of shrub fields and overgrown forests. An unknown number live in homes built before 2008, when the state introduced its wildfire-minded building code for new construction in high hazard areas. Some home-hardening retrofits are cheap and DIY-able. Others less so. A report from 2024 by the independent research group Headwater Economics put the cost to harden a two-story, 2,000 square-foot single family home at anywhere from $2,000 to “more than $100,000.”

Karen Collins, vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, calls these retrofits “pre-disaster mitigation” measures. As wildfires grow more severe and costly, these measures can offer “a huge return on investment from what is otherwise spent at the loss,” she said. Translated from insurance speak: Replacing a roof before a fire is cheaper than replacing an entire house afterward.

“But yes, to retrofit and put on new roofs and new siding, that gets into the multiple tens of thousands of dollars, so there's a public policy trade off,” she said. “Like, how do we do this?”

Steve Ruffner, regional general manager for KB Home’s coastal division, touches a window with two panes of tempered glass on the side of a model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.

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Some local governments — albeit not many — offer grants and incentives to fire-wary homeowners hoping to make these upgrades.

The insurance industry is beginning to offer discounts to some homeowners who make firewise changes, though the promised savings are often smaller than many homeowners expect or demand.

There aren’t any statewide plans to help harden California’s housing stock en masse, though a pilot project is underway and the Legislature is considering a few other ideas.

Beyond changes in policy, California homeowners, planners, real estate agents and developers may need to change the way they think about wildfire risk, said Yana Valachovic, a forest health and fire expert with the University of California. Rather than viewing home hardening as a luxury expense, or even a necessary cost that must be begrudgingly assumed, such protections might just need to become standard features of homeownership across the increasingly fire-prone American West.

“It needs to be spoken about in the advertisement of the house, because these are all keys to insurability and the protection of your investment,” said Valachovic. “Fuels management and home hardening are just as important as a remodeled kitchen at this point.”

A fireproof home?

Home-hardening experts try to think like embers in a windstorm.

Open eaves (the cavities beneath a roof’s overhang); vents that lead into an attic; wood decks; wood shingles; wood fences; and any plants, lawn furniture, cars, sheds and trash bins stowed right up against the house — all of these present an inviting array of nooks and crannies in which embers can settle and smolder. Hardening a home means covering them up, replacing material that burns with material that doesn’t, and clearing a five-foot non-combustible buffer around the house, an area state regulators call “zone zero”

Ember-proofing alone isn’t always enough. In urban conflagrations, like the ones in Los Angeles, flames go horizontal in the gale-force winds, turning a burning home into a blow-torch trained upon its neighbors. The sheer heat radiating off of a burning structure can warp and melt window frames 20 feet away.

In those conditions, cement siding and tempered-glass can give a home a fighting chance.

Steve Ruffner, regional general manager for KB Home’s coastal division, places his hand on a window shudder made out of non-combustible stucco material on a model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.

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Enclosed eaves that prevent heat buildup are installed on a home.

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A non-combustible metal fence is placed in front of a five-foot buffer zone in the backyard of a model home in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.

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When the Insurance Institute conducted a formal forensic survey in Los Angeles, they found repeated examples of homes where a single double-paned tempered glass window, a stucco wall or a walkway free of decorative plants likely kept the flames at bay.

Experts turn to the surviving homes for lessons after every major fire. In Maui, after the Lahaina waterfront burned in 2023, images of a single red-roofed home, lonely and seemingly untouched, went viral. Reporting later revealed that just prior to the disaster, the homeowners replaced the roof with a thick metal one and removed its surrounding vegetation. They were trying to keep out termites, not flames, but fire doesn’t consider motive.

There may be no such thing as a fire-proof house, but if vulnerability to disaster is a numbers game, home hardening — like seat belts, bike helmets and vaccines — can up the odds of survival.

Pilots and programs

The closest thing California has to a statewide home hardening campaign at the moment is a $117 million pilot project.

The California Wildfire Mitigation Program, run jointly by the California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) and the governor’s Office of Emergency Services, is funding half a dozen neighborhood-wide retrofits in especially fire-prone and economically distressed corners of the state.

The program seeks to tackle the problem of fire resilience at a community scale. Managing wildfire risk is a bit like managing an infectious disease: There’s only so much a single homeowner can do if their neighbors are unprotected.

The pilot was launched by the legislature in 2019, but is only just beginning to get off the ground. So far, 21 homes have been retrofitted: 19 in Kelseyville, Lake County and two in Dulzura, east of San Diego. Neighborhoods in the Sierra foothills and California’s far north are still working through the start-up and permitting process.

Each house presents its own array of costly challenges. New roofs, new siding, new windows, replacing decks, cleaning brush. “We don’t want to just kinda harden the home,” said Deanna Fernweh, program manager for the Lake County project.

This is new terrain for the state and the pilot has run into plenty of unexpected complications along the way. Fire-resistant materials are a specialty product that can be hard to source, particularly if you need something to be just the right size. Local contractors don’t always know much about fire risk, nor do the local permitting officials. Some counties require construction workers to be paid union-level wages. With most of the money coming from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the work is also subject to rigorous environmental standards. Any work done in the spring and summer has to wait on nest surveys to ensure that construction doesn’t disturb migratory or endangered birds.

An aerial view of homes in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.

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All of that adds to the price tag. The cheapest retrofit so far has come in at roughly $36,000, said J. Lopez, executive director of the statewide program. That was a tidy, well-maintained home in Kelseyville. The most expensive so far was $110,000. At current funding levels, the program is on track to harden roughly 2,000 homes.

That’s not likely to put a noticeable dent in the total number of vulnerable homes across the state. But Lopez said part of the goal of the pilot is to figure out just how expensive, delay-ridden and generally annoying it is to harden a neighborhood — and then figure out ways to make it all less so.

“When the VCR first came out, I think the first ones were about $1,500,” he said. “I leave it to American ingenuity to come up with solutions — and we are part of that, helping move that along.”

The pilot is currently set to expire in 2029, though the Legislature is considering a bill to make it permanent. Future funding remains an open question. So far FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Assistance Grant program, which provides much of the funding for the California program, has been spared the cuts that have felled other emergency response and preparedness initiatives under the Trump administration.

Legislators may also take up legislation this year to shave off some of the tax revenue the state currently collects from property insurers and redirect it toward a grant program for fire-resistant roofs and vegetation management work. Another bill would create a “Community Hardening Commission” inside the state’s Department of Insurance to be tasked with recommending new home hardening rules and improving old ones. A third bill would create a state-run home hardening certification program, with the hope being that insurers will be more likely to cover a home with the state’s imprimatur.

“Almost everyone knows what the things are that we have to do with home hardening,” Assemblymember Steve Bennett, an Oxnard Democrat and the author of that certification bill, said at a budget committee hearing in February. “We’ve talked about it and talked about it, but we’re not really making much progress.”

Locals step up

Absent a comprehensive statewide hardening program, some cities are trying to fill the gaps.

In 2020, Marin County voted overwhelmingly to tax itself to fund a countywide wildfire prevention program. The program shells out roughly $20 million each year on individualized home safety assessments, home hardening and vegetation clearing grants and evacuation route clearing operations.

In the city of Novato, the local fire district has used those funds to inspect every house in town. Homeowners can apply for matching grants — up $1,500 for home hardening and $1,000 for brush clearing.

Sometimes that’s enough to cover the cost of the work. Vent screens aren’t expensive, and vegetation management can be cheap if a homeowner is willing to do the work themselves.

Homes under construction in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.

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But often the grants aren’t nearly enough to cover all the called-for work. In Novato at least, a financial nudge is often all that people need, said Fire Marshal Lynne Osgood. According to data collected by the fire district over the last fiscal year, the city doled out half a million dollars in these matching grants to fund home-hardening projects; homeowners spend four times that amount.

“(Novato homeowners) are getting pressure from the insurance companies, they’re seeing, year after year, major conflagrations where thousands upon thousands of people are losing their homes,” Osgood said. “They are highly motivated.”

Where Marin County is offering carrots, other cities are using sticks. Across the Bay, the city of Berkeley just passed its own “zone zero” regulations which will require hill-dwelling residents to keep the five feet around their homes free of plants, wood fencing and other flammable odds and ends. The new policy will go into effect at the beginning of next year when it will be enforced with the possibility of daily fines.

That’s a few years ahead of the rest of the state. Cal Fire is scrambling to cobble together specific “zone zero” regulations for all high hazard areas, something a state law directed them to do by 2023. In February, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order directing the department to “accelerate” its regulatory process and produce a final rule by the end of the year. The most recent draft of the regulations would give homeowners three years to comply.

'Do this or you’re done'

Byers Enterprises has run a steady roofing business out of Grass Valley, just west of the Tahoe National Forest, since the late 1980s. In 2022, it started a specific division for home hardening.

“We’re seeing a real groundswell of interest,” said Jeff Fierstein, the company’s general manager. Some of that interest is due to the Los Angeles fires, which put fire risk top of mind for many.

But he said roughly half of his customers are turning to him out of duress. “The insurance companies are saying ‘Do this or you’re done,’” he said.

Not every fire-prone jurisdiction has Marin’s resources or Berkeley’s political appetite for new mandates. For the majority of Californians living in the so-called wildland urban interface, the most powerful nudge toward home hardening comes in the form of an insurance company’s premium hike or non-renewal notice.

A regulation from 2023 is forcing California insurers to offer discounts to homeowners who make certain home hardening investments or join Firewise communities, voluntary neighborhood disaster preparedness groups. But the approval process has been slow, the discounts vary from carrier to carrier, the requirements coming from insurers don’t always match the state’s own standards and the savings on offer are, according to some, miserly.

California property insurers are not in an especially discounting mood. After a decade of staggering wildfire-related losses, surging inflation and what the industry has long characterized as a sclerotic regulatory environment that doesn’t allow them to cover their costs, many carriers are looking for any excuse to drop California customers.

That dour climate might begin to change soon, said Janet Ruiz, a spokesperson for the industry association, the Insurance Information Institute. The state’s Department of Insurance is rolling out a series of policy changes aimed at enticing insurers back into the market. That overhaul “should bring more insurance companies into writing more policies,” putting them on a stronger financial footing and making them more willing to cut certain homeowners a break.

An aerial view of homes under construction in the Dixon Trail neighborhood of Escondido on April 24, 2025.

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Even with the right regulations in place, insurers aren’t known for embracing change, said Dave Jones, California’s former Department of Insurance head who now runs the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley’s law school.

Earlier this month, Jones and the nonprofit Nature Conservancy released a new, first-of-its-kind insurance policy for Tahoe-Donner, one of the country’s largest homeowners associations. In exchange for years of tree thinning and brush clearing work, the Truckee-based HOA will receive nearly 40% off on its insurance policy.

“It's a very conservative industry,” he said. “You need to show them that an insurer is able to (make money doing this) before others will follow suit.”

The upside: The new policy shows that at least one insurer — in this case, Globe Underwriting, based in London — believes it can account for the reduced risk that comes with certain wildfire mitigation efforts and then pass some of those savings onto customers.

The downside: The policy only covers commonly held land, not individual homes and, at least for now, the Nature Conservancy is footing the $55,000 annual premium.

“The big success here is that the insurance policy was written at all because this is an area where insurers are pulling out and it was written because of the forest treatment work that the homeowners association is undertaking,” said Jones.

Whether it’s forest management programs, zone zero mandates or home hardening grants, the public is only going to support these taxpayer-funded initiatives if they start to open up the insurance market and bring down premiums, he said.

“Part of what we're trying to do here is demonstrate that this can be done, convince insurers to do it, but also continue to build public support for these necessary investments,” said Jones. “Because this stuff is not inexpensive to do.”

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

Warner Bros. Discovery's blockbuster announcement Thursday that it would accept Paramount Skydance's takeover bid shouldn't be thought of simply as seeking to unify two major Hollywood players, two big streaming platforms and two leading TV news divisions under one roof.

It is certainly that. The nearly $111 billion Paramount-Warner marriage would unite their studios — and their back catalogue of shows and movies. It would add such franchises as D.C. Comics, Harry Potter and Game of Thrones to Paramount's Top Gun, Mission Impossible and Star Trek powerhouse. Paramount+ and HBO Max. CBS and CNN.

But there's more to it.

Paramount Skydance Chairman and CEO David Ellison is relying largely on the financial backing of his father, Larry Ellison — the co-founder of software giant Oracle, the lead investor in TikTok US, and one of the richest people on the planet.

The Ellisons have staged what appears to be a lightning-swift ascent through social and legacy media relying heavily on their connection to the Oval Office.

Should the Ellisons receive a green light from regulators to proceed with the deal, the minnow will have swallowed the whale. Warner currently has more than five times the market value of Paramount.

That's on top of acquiring Paramount itself and a major stake in TikTok US — all in less than a year. And that's in addition to Oracle, which runs much of the digital backbone of the nation's commerce and government.

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, right, sits next to media mogul Rupert Murdoch as they listen to President Donald Trump speak in the Oval Office.

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"It's tech giants becoming media giants," argues Jon Klein, a former top executive at CNN and CBS News.

But history shows such mega-mergers often end in tears. The movie business is expensive. Cable television is highly profitable but in steep decline as viewers cut the cord. The combined company will be saddled with debt. So why would the Ellisons spend their billions this way?

David Ellison has sought to be a force in Hollywood for years. He helped to produce movies with Tom Cruise at his family's company Skydance Media. But for his father, Larry Ellison, it's about more than just making his son's very expensive dreams come true.

"Beyond any dollars that they can derive — it's the data about consumer habits, down to the specific identity," Klein says.

He says the push into artificial intelligence by Oracle creates a thirst for more insight into how people view news and entertainment and what products they buy online. The streaming channels and social media giant both offer greater and more granular information.

"That's the prism that you've got to look at this Paramount/WBD deal through," says Klein, co-founder of HANG Media, a Gen Z social video engagement platform. "Oracle... wants to be one of the major players in AI. That's what Oracle wants to get out of media."

The deal still hinges on acceptance from antitrust regulators in Washington and Europe, who can seek to block the transaction. California's attorney general made clear Thursday night he would also give the acquisition tough scrutiny.

"If a merger substantially reduces competition in any market, it's illegal. Courts sort of take that literally," says University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner, who held a senior antitrust position in the U.S. Justice Department under former President Joe Biden.

"But in practice, the Justice Department has discretion on whether to challenge these mergers," Posner tells NPR. "And the courts have discretion on whether to block them."

Friendly ties to Trump

President Donald Trump's Justice Department is a wild card. Last year, the department's then antitrust chief, Gail Slater, took an aggressive stance against Google in court. Last month, the Justice Department sued to block Hewlett Packard Enterprise's $14 billion acquisition of a wireless tech competitor. Slater resigned under duress this month, however.

The Federal Communications Commission is unlikely to intervene, as no broadcast licenses would change hands in the Paramount takeover of Warner. But its chair, Brendan Carr, may well advise the Justice Department and he has lauded David Ellison's moves at CBS.

Even before sweetening its offer this week, Paramount proclaimed its "confidence in the speed and certainty of regulatory approval for its transaction."

Publicly, it argues that such consolidation is needed to take on streaming giants, very much including Netflix but also Amazon Prime, Apple, Disney and YouTube.

Behind the scenes — and sometimes in not-so-hidden ways — the Ellisons have become cozy with President Trump. Larry Ellison is a backer and adviser.

On Tuesday night, David Ellison attended Trump's State of the Union address as a guest of the president's ally, Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican. Graham tweeted out a photo of the two men making Trump's signature "thumbs-up" gesture ahead of the speech.

The president cares deeply about TV news. He has publicly said he wants new owners for CNN — which he has blasted repeatedly as "fake news" — and has proven willing to interfere in corporate matters in his return to the White House.

Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos departs the White House on Wednesday. Sarandos was there to discuss Netflix's bid for Warner Bros. just hours before Warner announced its preference for Paramount.

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Netflix chief Ted Sarandos met Thursday with administration officials at the White House — though notably not with Trump, according to an aide — in a last-gasp effort to salvage his company's competing bid. By the end of the night, Netflix had given up the fight.

The shadow cast over the process by the president has inspired sharp criticism of the path that Paramount and the Ellisons took to land the Warner deal.

"A handful of Trump-aligned billionaires are trying to seize control of what you watch and charge you whatever price they want," Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said in a statement. "With the cloud of corruption looming over Trump's Department of Justice, it'll be up to the American people to speak up and state attorneys general to enforce the law."

"It is not just the seemingly open corruption of this entire process that leaves me shaken," writes Jeffrey Blehar in the conservative National Review. "I am shaken by how little people will care."

Said Seth Stern, head of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, "Ellison will readily throw the First Amendment, CNN's reporters and HBO's filmmakers under the bus if they stand in the way of expanding his corporate empire and fattening his pockets."

CNN's future hangs in the balance

The Ellisons' acquisition of Paramount followed a similar path.

Last summer, the previous owners of Paramount announced the end of late night host Stephen Colbert's CBS show as they sought federal approval to sell the company to David Ellison.

While they cited economics, Colbert's was the top-rated late night show on network television — and he has been a lacerating satirist of the president. Colbert called the cancellation a "big fat bribe."

Ellison subsequently made additional pledges to the FCC's Carr to win support. Among them: he promised the cessation of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives throughout Paramount and the addition of an ombudsman to field complaints of ideological bias. He named the former head of a conservative think tank to that role.

Carr blessed the sale. He has since praised the shifts made at CBS News.

The question of what happens to CNN hovers prominently over the Warner sale. The network has undergone rounds of cuts under a series of owners seeking to reduce debt; Paramount would be its fourth corporate parent in under a decade.

Other elements are in play as well.

CBS's new editor in chief is Bari Weiss, founder of the center-right opinion and news site The Free Press. Ellison bought the site and added it to Paramount's portfolio.

Bari Weiss, CBS News' editor in chief, interviews conservative activist Erika Kirk in a CBS town hall event in December.

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Weiss has contended CBS and much of the rest of the media has been too reflexively hostile to conservatives and the president, and she's sought to revamp the newsroom.

CNN's Anderson Cooper, who has also served as a correspondent for CBS's 60 Minutes for two decades, recently announced that he would leave the show, citing the desire to spend time with his small children. Associates, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose internal network matters, say he was concerned about the approach that Weiss has taken at CBS.

She is considered likely to have a role over CNN as well, should the deal go through.

CNN CEO Mark Thompson urged colleagues to focus on their news coverage. "Despite all the speculation you've read during this process, I'd suggest that you don't jump to conclusions about the future until we know more," he wrote in a memo Thursday.

Perceived value beyond the bottom line

The deal David Ellison struck for Warner is valued at nearly $111 billion. The new company would carry substantial debts and have Saudi and Emirate backing. The profits are currently relatively modest.

Yet Klein contends larger motives are in play. Just look at Google, he says, which owns what many consider the dominant media company, YouTube.

"They want to know what you watch, and where you come from, and what you buy when you watch, and where you go after you buy, and what you post in the comments and what you like and love and all that," Klein says.

"And if you can combine that with your streaming content and your studio decisions and your marketing for all the content product you're creating," he adds, "you're in a very very powerful position."

Copyright 2026 NPR

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

The Serving Spoon has been an Inglewood cornerstone for four decades, dishing up grilled corn bread and fried turkey chops. 

Now, though, the whole country is in on the secret. 

The breakfast and lunch spot on Centinela Avenue was announced Wednesday by the James Beard Foundation as one of six winners of the America’s Classics Award, an honor the foundation says goes to “timeless” local institutions. The foundation is also responsible for the James Beard Award, one of the nation’s top culinary honors. 

The Serving Spoon joins a pantheon of other L.A.-area eateries to win the classics award including Guelaguetza, Langer’s Deli and Philippe the Original. 

Jessica Bane, part of the third generation to run the family-owned restaurant, said the honor is still sinking in, but that it validates decades of work. “It’s being done out of love,” Bane said.

The Serving Spoon has been an Inglewood cornerstone for four decades, dishing up grilled corn bread and fried turkey chops.

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The award announcement hailed The Serving Spoon as an “anchor” of L.A.’s Black community, run by staff who genuinely care for their customers.“The restaurant is cherished for its joyful hospitality and as a place where all can gather and feel at home,” the announcement read. 

The Serving Spoon didn’t exactly need Beard recognition — the diner is often packed and already has  pedigree as Snoop Dogg and Raphael Saadiq’s breakfast spot of choice in the 2000 Lucy Pearl song “You” — but Bane said the award takes the diner’s reputation national.“The recognition is beyond appreciated,” Bane said. 

The Serving Spoon was founded in 1983 by Bane’s grandfather, Harold E. Sparks. He passed the restaurant down to Bane and her brother, Justin Johnson, through their parents. 

The menu looks much the same as it did four decades ago, Bane said, though some of the dishes have been renamed for regulars. 

During the Thursday lunch rush a day after the announcement, The Serving Spoon’s vinyl booths were packed, as usual. Bane oversaw the dining room while Johnson marshaled plates of fried catfish through the kitchen. 

Tina and Kevin Jenkins waited for a table outside. The L.A. natives each have been coming to The Serving Spoon since childhood. They live in Lancaster now, but make sure to come back to the diner whenever they’re in town. 

“It’s the atmosphere, our people, our music,” Tina Jenkins said.

Despite taxes on imports at levels not seen in a century, Long Beach’s seaport had a good year in 2025. And a decent January.

Port officials said Wednesday they started the new year by leading the nation in trade, responsible for moving more than 847,000 shipping containers in January — 51% of the total cargo at the San Pedro Bay Complex, which it shares with neighboring Port of Los Angeles.

In a call with reporters, Port CEO Noel Hacegaba said that despite a “fair share of doom and gloom” at the time, the seaport finished 2025 as its busiest year on record.

This comes days after President Donald Trump signed new, across-the-board tariffs on U.S. trading partners, and later added he would raise the tariffs to 15%. It’s a direct response to a recent Supreme Court decision that found his tariffs announced last April were unconstitutional.

The new tariffs would operate under a law that restricts them to 150 days, unless approved by Congress.

Asked to measure how much this will affect the seaport, traders, logistics companies and consumers, Hacegaba reiterated a word he has evoked heavily in the past 10 months: uncertainty.

“Our strong cargo volumes do not suggest we are not being affected by tariffs,” Hacegaba said, adding the Port saw a 13% decline in imports driven by major reductions in iron, steel, synthetic fibers, salt, sulfur and cement.

Economists are somewhat more confident, saying it would take nothing short of a national economic crisis to reverse the seaport’s fortunes. “Even if the market is affected, our standing at the Port of Long Beach, even compared to other ports, is strong,” said Laura Gonzalez, an economics professor at Cal State Long Beach.

But experts caution that the ruling will heap the most damage on businesses, especially smaller enterprises, as well as the average consumer who already bore the tariff’s costs last year.

Noel Hacegaba, CEO of the Port of Long Beach, held his first State of the Port in Long Beach on Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026.

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Tariffs added $1,700 in costs to the average U.S. household, as importers raised prices to offset higher import taxes — especially on clothes, shoes and electronics from China and other Southeast Asian nations.

Consumers, Gonzalez said, should budget over the next six months “for essentials.”

Priyaranjan Jha, an economics professor at UC Irvine, said historically trade policies since 2018 have shown that for every dollar of duty imposed, consumer prices rose by about 90 cents.

Even if tariffs are reduced or reversed, and pressure is relieved on importers, consumers shouldn’t expect lower sticker prices right away, he said. “Firms do not always reduce prices as quickly as they raise them, especially if contracts or inventories are involved.”

Richer San, a former banker and business owner in Long Beach, said he’s in regular talks with shops across the city’s historic Cambodia Town that have been crushed by the increased prices of imported ingredients.

“Most of these are family-owned businesses operating on very small profit margins,” he said, adding there is little to no margin to “absorb higher costs.”

Many companies managed to avoid price increases last year in part by stockpiling inventory in the first half of the year to be sold through Christmas and the start of the year. As stock dwindles, many businesses might be less willing to eat the cost of a new set of tariffs.

Marc Sullivan, president of Long Beach-based Global Trade and Customs, said his logistics company saw a brief boom last year in ordered goods, mostly medical equipment and pharmaceuticals.

But by June, orders dropped 35%, a trend that continues today. It’s forced him to freeze any new hiring in the past year and at least through the next six months as he waits for federal officials to settle on tariffs that will determine the cost of shipped goods.

“For the companies that I work with that are importing into the state here, it’s just ‘hold on and let’s see what happens,’” he said.

“I’d like to hire a salesperson to go out and chase new business, … but it’s just a bleak outlook,” he added.

In the interim, he’s received a steady flow of calls (that started “within minutes” of the ruling) from importers looking to claim refunds or recoup their tariff expenses. The U.S. Treasury had collected more than $140 billion from tariffs enacted under emergency powers, and the Supreme Court left the decision of how to appropriate the refund proceedings to lower courts.

His response: They might be stuck waiting for a while. “Customs doesn’t pay anything back quickly,” he said. “It could be a year before you ever see anything back to you.”

Sullivan said he knows of companies that spent upwards of $20,000 per shipment for months.

“They’re going to want that money to be able to reinvest it,” Sullivan said.

But some experts say that consumers, as well as small businesses, deserve a share of refunds.

“The importer may receive a refund even though consumers bore much of the cost,” Jha said. “Courts generally refund the statutory payer, not downstream buyers, but that opens the possibility of follow-on litigation. Small businesses that directly imported goods and paid tariffs should qualify for refunds.”

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A long turtle lineage: Dubbed “Porkchop” by aquarium staff due to her hefty appetite, the young female green sea turtle represents one of seven sea turtle species worldwide (six of which occur in U.S. waters). These animals have called our oceans home since at least the time of the dinosaurs — about 110 million years ago, according to NOAA. All species of sea turtles found in the U.S. are listed as either endangered or threatened and are protected by the Endangered Species Act.

Porkchop’s healing journey: Aquarium vets had to amputate Porkchop’s right front flipper after tangled fishing lines severely cut off her blood flow. She also had a fishing hook removed from her throat. First rescued after being spotted in the San Gabriel River by volunteers with the aquarium’s sea turtle monitoring program last March, her healing journey took nearly a year. She now swims and eats as well as her four-flippered kin and after a final physical exam, blood sample and X-ray, vets determined she was ready to return to her wild roots. She also now has a microchip, so if she ends up stranded again, scientists will know it’s her.

An ambassador for conservation: Porkchop became the aquarium’s first public-facing ambassador for its expanded green sea turtle rescue efforts. A new holding tank, viewable by the public, doubles the aquarium’s capacity to rescue green sea turtles and provides firsthand education about their conservation efforts. The aquarium is currently caring for another larger and older female green sea turtle — she weighs more than 200 pounds — rescued from the San Gabriel River in January. She’ll be in the public viewing tank in the coming months when she’s recovered a bit more.

How to help local green sea turtles: Green sea turtle populations are actually doing quite well in the San Gabriel River, but trash, debris and pollution remains a big threat. If you fish the San Gabriel River, never litter fishing lines or hooks. If you see a stranded sea turtle in the San Gabriel River or elsewhere, call the West Coast Marine Mammal and Sea Turtle Stranding Network’s hotline at (562) 506-4315. You can also donate to the aquarium’s rescue program.