The Brief

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

The friendship that developed between billionaire Stan Kroenke and Inglewood Mayor James Butts helped bring the NFL back to Los Angeles and spark the construction of venues now scheduled to host some of the world’s most-watched events — at least, that’s how the mayor has often told the story. 

But in July 2025, a company that operates Inglewood’s 300-acre Hollywood Park development — home to SoFi Stadium and owned by Kroenke — sued the city of Inglewood, trying to stop the installation of more than 100 digital billboards near the stadium and several other event venues.

“Dear Stan,” Butts responded in a letter, telling the largest landowner in America he was “greatly surprised” by having been recently served.

“I would have expected a call from you personally and not just a lawyer’s letter and a lawsuit,” Butts wrote.

Peppered among repeated requests to sit down man-to-man and work it out, Butts wrote that he would do whatever it takes to fight Kroenke’s legal challenges to the city’s billboard program.

Butts would later make a bombshell argument: that the very contract the stadium was built on was void.

Kroenke isn’t the only billionaire Butts has been legally feuding with. A business owned by Steve Ballmer, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers and the Intuit Dome, has also sued to stop the city from moving forward with its billboard network.

At the heart of each case is a looming conflict over advertising territory — who gets to control what millions of gamegoers see and who gets to cash checks from brands eager to hawk their products to people attending the upcoming World Cup, the 2027 Super Bowl and the 2028 Olympics. 

The legal flexing between Butts and the billionaires — recounted in court filings and interviews by The LA Local — threatens to go beyond billboard advertising and undo the public-private partnerships that built one of the nation’s premier stadium and venue hubs. As the conflict grows, so do the hazards to the city’s financial prospects, its residents’ quality of life and Butts’ campaign for a fifth term as mayor. 

Butts declined to comment for this story after being contacted multiple times. John Quinn, a lawyer for Hollywood Park, told The LA Local that the claims made by the mayor and his administration raise fundamental questions about whether the city is a reliable place to do business.

“That kind of uncertainty doesn’t just affect this project, it makes it harder for anyone to trust long-term agreements with the city, which could deter future investment and limit opportunities for residents,” Quinn said.

The billboard battles ignite

Inglewood’s bet on building and redeveloping stadiums and event venues in the wake of the Great Recession was a gamble from the start. Research shows that city investments in sports stadiums often don’t pay in the ways city leaders hope.

When Butts was elected mayor, he inherited a city with considerable financial challenges. Still, he led an effort in 2012 to use $18 million in city funds to help renovate what is now the Kia Forum. In 2015, the City Council voted unanimously to approve the construction of what would become SoFi Stadium. Development after development followed.

In some ways, Butts’ bet paid off. The teams and their fans flocked to the city. SoFi Stadium is home to two NFL franchises, one of which won the Super Bowl there in 2022. The Clippers launched their first season at the newly built Intuit Dome in late 2024. By 2025, SoFi Stadium announced that 10 million people had attended events there since its opening. 

And more fans are expected for the major international sporting events on the horizon. About 5 million people registered to purchase tickets to the 2028 Olympics, and the LA Sports and Entertainment Commission forecasts the World Cup could inject about $17 million into Inglewood’s economy.

The city is paid a portion of ticket admissions and parking revenue from all venues, and is in a far better financial position than it was before the stadium boom. Its unemployment rate is about 6%, according to the California Employment Development Department, down from nearly 16% when Butts was first elected. The city’s budget shows it received about $19 million in revenue related to venue admissions and $7.7 million related to parking in fiscal year 2024-25.

But the success of SoFi alone is beginning to come at a cost. According to the contract between the city and Hollywood Park, once the city receives $25 million in tax revenue from the development in any given year, it has to pay several businesses owned by Kroenke back for various improvements made to the city during construction.

A spokesperson for Hollywood Park’s legal team said that the city had surpassed $25 million in annual revenue by 2022.

The stadium operating company claims the city owes it about $376 million.

It hasn’t always been clear to residents that the money the city makes outweighs the costs they pay. Inglewood’s business corridor has continued to struggle. Despite public outcry, water and sewer rates increased last year. Nearly every weekend, parking and traffic problems reach severe levels as the city hosts various events.

In April 2025, the Inglewood City Council quietly launched its own project to independently capitalize on eventgoers by advertising to them. It awarded a 20-year contract, which can be extended for decades, giving WOW Media, a Los Angeles advertising firm, exclusive rights to expand a series of billboards near the Inglewood stadiums. 

Butts pitched the project as a transportation information network that could be used to alert the public to critical safety information, according to City Council filings.

Digital billboards in Inglewood on Saturday.

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Dania Maxwell

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The LA Local

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Digital billboards in Inglewood on Saturday.

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Dania Maxwell

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The LA Local

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Digital billboards in Inglewood on Saturday.

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Dania Maxwell

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The LA Local

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The WOW Media contract involves constructing digital billboards in medians and near sidewalks of public streets. In total, the network could include what the city described as 60 digital signs and 108 digital screens. WOW Media would pay about 40% of the ad revenue to the city as “rent,” according to the contract.

WOW did not respond to a request for comment to this story.

The city’s billboard project took the stadium businesses completely by surprise, as they manage their own digital advertising operations on their properties. 

Businesses tied to Kroenke and Hollywood Park sued the city last July, saying the billboards threaten their own advertising business and undermine the branding of the teams and events hosted there. Those linked to Ballmer, the Intuit Dome and the Kia Forum followed with nearly identical claims. The two share the same law firm for the suits. 

Businesses and lawyers connected to Ballmer’s suits did not respond to The LA Local’s inquiries.

But the companies claim that the city launched its billboard campaign out of sight of the public and the owners of the stadiums. The city did not open the project up to bids from other advertising companies and did not hold a public hearing before the vote. The City Council approved the motion in April, and the companies said in court filings they did not learn about the project until late May.

In suits that attracted national and local media coverage, the companies argue that the city’s plan violates its own policies barring billboards in the public right-of-way and that the city approved the permits for construction of the billboards the month before the contract was voted on. 

They also said that the city’s billboard project “pulled the rug out” from under contracts establishing the standards the parties agreed to maintain to operate the stadiums and the millions they make each year.

Butts claims SoFi deal is void 

Screenshot from ‘Mission Inglewood- State of The City’ short film.

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via Youtube: City of Inglewood account

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Butts has long said he should be credited with saving the city from bankruptcy by spearheading venue development when he took office in 2011. In fact, the city of Inglewood released a video on YouTube in 2024 in the style of an action film showing him manning a war room, where he is briefed on the dire straits the city faced at the beginning of his tenure. 

Much like in the video, with characteristic confidence, Butts has repeatedly said he prevailed in the city’s seemingly impossible mission to once again earn it the nickname “City of Champions.”

Butts said the pending litigation prevented him from commenting, and he did not respond to questions about what consequence his legal claims could have on the city.

He previously told The LA Local that he inherited a City Council in dysfunction and reshaped it into one that attracted investment from business developers. Those same business benefits have come at a cost to public participation in local government. 

An LA Local investigation found that the Inglewood City Council rarely holds public hearings, rarely hears from the public after moving meeting times from the evening to regular business hours, and almost always votes yes unanimously on the motions it puts on its agenda. Council meetings have averaged about 30 minutes over the past two years.

In fact, the public never directly voted to approve the Hollywood Park development that became SoFi Stadium. Instead, a ballot initiative was used to add the stadium to already existing plans for the site after more than 20,000 signatures were collected. 

Among the crowning achievements of Butts’ business-friendly governing style, the City Council approved the SoFi initiative in a unanimous vote in 2015. But with the billboard legal battles intensifying, Butts dropped a bomb on the city’s deal with the profitable stadium and its related businesses.

The contract the city had agreed to with Hollywood Park to build SoFi a decade earlier was no longer valid, Butts wrote to Kroenke in July. The city would need to be reimbursed for a $20 million payment it had recently made, and Kroenke could expect no future payments on the millions they owed for infrastructure improvements under the 2015 contract, according to the letter he sent. 

Butts wrote that the city’s lawyers found the contract was void while reviewing claims Kroenke and Ballmer had made in their billboard lawsuits. A court had ruled in an unrelated case — after the Hollywood Park contract was signed — that such developments could not be approved by a signature-collecting initiative, as Inglewood had done. Butts claimed the ruling also applies to Inglewood. The LA Local found no evidence that the case has voided any other development agreement. 

“I’m surprised that your legal counsel did not advise you of the implications of that case prior to filing,” Butts wrote. 

The void contract was “very serious” he added. “Aside from the construction that has already been completed on the property, there are ongoing obligations that extend for many years and involve hundreds of millions of dollars.”

And it appears Kroenke did not directly write Butts back.

Butts wrote in August 2025 to another stadium representative, Otto Maly, that he remained interested in meeting directly with Kroenke to discuss the billboards and the purportedly void development agreement.

In it, Butts, a former police officer who later served as police chief, said city officials could be jailed for making the $20 million payment: “California Penal Code section 424 makes it a crime, punishable by incarceration, to transfer funds without legal authority.”

While he declined to comment about the claim, Butts appears to be attempting to trigger negotiations for a new development agreement. 

Months after the letter, a company owned by Kroenke sued Inglewood again to dispute its attempt to claw back the $20 million payment and reaffirm the validity of their 25-year agreement. The case remains unresolved.

After being paid millions annually for the past decade, the stadium’s lawyers wrote, “the city is repudiating all of that, in a brazen, cynical effort to avoid making the payments it promised to make, for rich benefits it has already received.”

“The potential impact here is broader than this dispute, and the risk ultimately falls on residents as it could affect job creation, business growth, and the city’s ability to sustain long-term economic momentum,” Quinn, the lawyer representing Hollywood Park for Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP, told The LA Local.

Butts appears confident he can work through the conflict and the risks it poses to the city’s finances and his political future. Having recently announced a run for his fifth term as mayor, he is not acting as if he could be arrested for the city’s $20 million payment on what he claims is an illegitimate contract. 

“I’m certain we will work things out as we have in the past,” Butts wrote to Kroenke last August.

Solar developers say they’re facing crippling losses and potential bankruptcy amid a stall in a state-funded solar power program.

California’s “self-generation incentive program,” or SGIP, was reworked in 2024 to help low-income households install solar and battery-storage systems for free.

But SGIP has been plagued by delays, bureaucracy, poor communication and stalled payments, according to five developers LAist spoke with. Small developers say they’ve been hit especially hard by a lottery system that they argue favors larger developers.

And customers who stood to benefit the most from free installation of solar and battery storage — low-income households in the hottest and most fire-prone areas of the state — are in limbo, waiting months for the bill savings and energy reliability they were promised ahead of what is expected to be a record-hot summer.

The issue highlights the challenges to expanding access to clean energy as fossil fuel pollution continues to accelerate climate change and is another hit to an industry that has faced significant setbacks in recent years from changes to state-level rooftop solar programs and the Trump administration’s cuts to clean energy incentives.

How we got here 

The state has offered incentives to large electric customers to install battery-storage systems since the energy crisis of the early 2000s. The latest version of the SGIP program aims to prioritize qualifying low-income residents.

In 2024, the state allocated $280 million in state funds to install solar and batteries for free on qualifying homes and apartments. The program is administered through the state’s investor-owned utilities and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. It officially launched last summer.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: Developers identify projects they can take on, then apply for funding via a first-come-first-served reservation system. If requested funds exceed the total funding, then a lottery is triggered. If their project is approved, the developer does the work and covers the upfront costs of the installation with the understanding they’ll get paid back through SGIP within a year.

What’s happening in LADWP territory?

Solar panels dot the parking area at the DWP building in downtown Los Angeles.

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Lawrence K. Ho

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Getty Images

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As soon as the SGIP program launched last June, large developers quickly flooded the application system.

Sunrun, one of the nation’s largest solar developers, submitted applications requesting as much as 97% of the total funds available in Los Angeles Department of Water and Power territory, according to public data reviewed by LAist. (Sunrun declined to be interviewed for this story. LADWP didn’t agree to be interviewed about the breakdown of applications.)

LADWP said it is in the process of reviewing the 451 applications it received. So far, DWP officials have approved one: $28,000 for a single-family home project, the utility told LAist.

Smaller developers told LAist they’re concerned that there is no cap on how much any single developer can receive through the program. General market versions of SGIP not targeted for low-income properties have developer caps of 20% of the incentive funds, according to the program’s handbook.

“The purpose of the program, I believe, is not to just enrich the biggest players or to allow them to have free project financing,” said Aaron Eriksson, owner of Escondido-based Solar Symphony Construction, which applied for projects in LADWP territory. “We all got kind of left out in the cold on that one.”

Robert Cudd, a research analyst with UCLA who has studied SGIP, said the program does incentivize developers lining up as many projects as possible ahead of time to “claim the largest possible share of that rebate pool.”

That’s often the case for similar programs that aim to serve low-income customers.

The state “is agnostic about who is doing this work,” Cudd said. “They just want to accelerate the energy transition.”

Only a few large companies — including Sunrun and GRID Alternatives, as well as growing startup Haven Energy — have developed specialized expertise in these kinds of complex programs that have higher upfront costs.

Small companies on the brink 

Delayed reimbursements have developers worried about projects in the works and about new paperwork requirements.

In February, the California Public Utilities Commission — five governor-appointed regulators who oversee the program — abruptly paused SGIP. In their ruling, they said that projects submitted varied widely in costs, with many exceeding incentives “significantly.”

The ruling flagged discrepancies such as the same wall battery reportedly costing as low as $8,600 and as high as $21,000. So the CPUC decided to require developers to submit additional receipts and documentation of their costs.

But developers LAist spoke with said only a fraction of applications were at the state’s predicted costs. The developers argue costs have gone up due to inflation, tariffs and cuts to clean energy tax credits. Projects serving low-income households also often require upgrades because of the buildings’ age.

Joshua Buswell-Charkow, deputy director of California Solar and Storage Association, a trade organization that represents more than 70 companies that participate in the SGIP program, said work is already underway in some cases.

“Some of our contractors are out literally millions of dollars right now,” he said. “ I'm worried that we're going to have folks go out of business because of this.”

That could be the case for Eriksson’s company, Solar Symphony. More than 100 of the company’s applications to install solar and battery systems at no cost to qualifying customers were approved by Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric. Now, Eriksson said, they don’t know if they’ll be paid for projects they’ve already installed.

“We were very excited by the potential to deliver truly no-cost, home-sited solar and batteries to California ratepayers,” Eriksson wrote in a statement to the public utilities commission. “The regulators effectively induced us to commit under one set of rules; we accepted and delivered — and now the terms are changing.”

Eriksson told LAist he could be out of business by June if the state doesn’t release the payments.

Other companies have indefinitely paused installing systems approved by program administrators.

“We've signed contracts with hundreds of low-income families. We've purchased the equipment,” said Vinnie Campo, co-founder of Haven Energy, one of the state’s largest SGIP installers, at a Public Utilities Commission meeting in late April. “Our crews are ready to install, but systems sold in good faith to customers … are sitting in warehouses instead of on homes.”

Seven representatives of solar companies, including a lawyer representing multiple companies in Southern California, expressed their concerns at that meeting.

Lionel Rodriguez of Glendale-based Solar Optimum was one.

“Many people are hurting,” Rodriguez said, “and it's destroying the integrity of our company and also the customer's trust.”

In early May, in response to such concerns, the Public Utilities Commission released another ruling saying administrators can start paying developers when certain documentation has been submitted but that they still could audit any company that receives funds. Meanwhile, utilities have until the end of June 2028 to spend the funds, or else they’ll be returned to the state’s general fund.

When Eduardo Mira started his senior year at Ánimo Pat Brown Charter High School, he thought politics was a “fool’s game.”

“All I saw from the media was just negativity and division and, like, political violence,” Mira said. “Nothing good, but now I do see the beauty in it.”

Mira credits government and economics teacher Joel Snyder with helping connect the problems he sees in the Florence-Firestone neighborhood surrounding the school, including pollution and sidewalks littered with dog feces, to potential solutions in local government.

“We focus on some of the nitty-gritty work of democracy that's not as election-focused,” Snyder said of his curriculum. “Then hopefully we are able to turn those skills into an argument for why their legislators matter, which translates to voting in the future.”

For example, Snyder asks local elected officials and their representatives to visit his class and his students have traveled to the State Capitol. Last school year, his classes participated in a program where community members 16-and-up got to vote on how Los Angeles County spent $500,000.

However, research on civics education indicates classes like Snyder’s are the exception, not the norm at many schools.

Researchers who study youth civic engagement, including Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at USC, point to a lack of related education as one factor in persistently low youth voter turnout.

“[Students] turn 18, and all of a sudden we magically expect them to not only know how to vote, but to think it's important and want to vote,” Romero said.

Schools struggle to teach civics

American schools are struggling to teach the basics of democracy.

One indication is that students' proficiency on the National Assessment of Educational Progress civics test is dropping— only 1 in 5 eighth-graders met the standard in 2022, the most recent results available. Students’ civics understanding is also declining globally.

California requires students to take a one-semester American government and civics course to graduate, but the quality of the class and student engagement varies. For example, schools that enroll low-income students are less likely to offer related extracurricular activities, including student media and government.

In 2020, the California State Board of Education created an award for students who “demonstrate excellence in civic learning,” in response to legislation signed in 2017.

In L.A. County, about 3.7% of graduating seniors earned the State Seal of Civic Engagement in the 2024-2025 school year compared to about 5% of graduates across California.

“We somewhere along the line disconnected the notion of high schools and K through 12 schools as like, bedrocks of teaching democracy and democratic practice,” said Snyder, the social studies teacher in South L.A. “I think a lot of that nationally is a real fear of folks looking or feeling like they're being partisan.”

More than a third of teachers who responded to a recent survey by nonprofit iCivics reported changing or removing lesson plans because of the current political climate and 1 in 5 have considered leaving their job.

“Whatever we can do to support teachers to feel comfortable and safe to prioritize talking about civics period … I think is really important,” said Romero, of USC.

Even Snyder, who's been a teacher for more than two decades and written publicly about his approach to civics education, paused during our interview to consider whether to share that as part of his class, students register to vote. He estimated about 1,000 students have registered to vote in his class since California started allowing students as young as 16 to sign up to be automatically added to the voter rolls at 18. An LAist review of the state’s preregistration program found relatively few eligible teens participate.

School as a ‘primary connector of American democracy’

Snyder said the 2016 election marked a shift in his approach to teaching civics.

“The last decade has been a lot of thinking of myself as the primary connector of American democracy to not only my students, but to their families in our broader community,” Snyder said.

Residents of the Florence-Firestone neighborhood are primarily Latino and Black and about 40% were born outside the United States. More than half of adults have not graduated from high school, according to data compiled by L.A. County.

Eduardo Mira, 17, said Snyder's class changed how he viewed politics. "Now's my chance to intertwine with politics because eventually politics will intertwine with your life,” Mira said. “I know that every single choice really does matter and can affect your life.”

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Jacky Hernandez, 18, said homelessness and rent are top of mind as she thinks about voting for the first time this year. “We have all these houses, but people can't afford to rent or buy a house in this economy right now.” Hernandez said.

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LAist

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About five times a year Snyder asks students to start conversations with family members about class topics from the principles of democracy to the three branches of government and the legal immigration process.

Mira, the graduating senior, said as a result he’s talked about politics with both conservative and liberal members of his family.

 ”You'll be surprised by how much Democrats want the economy to get better and how much Republicans want to increase education too,” Mira said. “It's really engaging. It shows that we really do care for the same issues, but we're just divided. We're not united.”

Mira, and another senior Jacky Hernandez, said discussions about current events are part of what makes Snyder’s classes so interesting.

“ I feel like sometimes in certain classes, we just get, like, packets or books and just told, ’Oh, just read it and look over it,’” said Hernandez, who’s taking AP government. “But we're not getting told about, like, what's actually happening in the current times that does affect our future.”

Both remembered talking about the No Kings protests and Charlie Kirk’s killing in class. The latter topic contributed to the investigation of hundreds of educators nationwide, including in California.

“It really did get me engaged and really made me realize, like, ‘wow, politics really is everywhere,’” Mira said.

He and Hernandez also signed up as student poll workers for the upcoming election.

“Honestly, I didn't care about voting [before],” Hernandez said. “I didn't see the importance of it. I just thought it was like, ‘oh, you find a candidate, you pick what you like, and that's what you do.’”

Now she feels differently. Hernandez said homelessness and expensive rent will be top of mind when she votes for the first time in June’s primary.

“We do make a difference,” Hernandez said. “Eventually we are gonna take the role of the older people and our voice does matter.”

Three candidates for the job of leading Los Angeles laid out competing visions this week for how they would handle the city’s homelessness crisis and disagreed about Inside Safe — Mayor Karen Bass' program for moving people off the streets.

During part of a two-day forum Monday, Bass defended her signature program, which clears tent encampments by offering motels rooms and other temporary shelter, as well as her administration's record on homelessness.

She promised, if she won a second term, to build a larger temporary shelter system and to fix problems that have slowed payments from the city to nonprofit organizations.

“L.A. has decreased street homelessness two years in a row, 17.5%,” Bass said, speaking to a gathering of homeless-service providers. “The only reason that happened is because of everybody in this room.”

A day later, Councilmember Nithya Raman and tech entrepreneur Adam Miller suggested alternatives to Inside Safe, noting its cost.

Raman said she would scale up a different city program — Time Limited Subsidies, sometimes referred to as rapid rehousing. The program provides temporary rental assistance at about one-third the cost of Inside Safe, according to the city administrative officer.

Miller said he would phase out Inside Safe entirely and replace it with tiny-home villages at a fraction of the price of Bass' program.

Homelessness is a major issue for voters in the June primary. More than 43,000 people remain unhoused in the city of L.A. despite years of record city spending — about $1 billion annually in recent years, according to the City Controller’s Office.

Fourteen candidates are running for L.A. mayor. The top five leading contenders were invited to the forum held in downtown L.A. and hosted by homeless shelter operator Hope the Mission.

Candidates Spencer Pratt and the Rev. Rae Huang declined to participate.

Mayor Karen Bass spoke Monday at the Original Pantry Cafe in downtown L.A. at at event hosted by homeless shelter Hope The Mission.

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Aaron Schrank

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Housing First?

The candidates disagreed on “housing first,” an approach to homelessness assistance that prioritizes getting unhoused people into permanent housing without first requiring them to be sober, employed or meet other conditions.

Bass said she believes in the policy but argued the city has applied it too rigidly for decades, leaving people unsheltered while they wait years for permanent housing to be built.

“I agree with the notion of housing first, but I don't think people should be on the street waiting for you to build something,” Bass said.

Raman, an L.A. City Council member since December 2020, said the question isn't what comes first but what each person needs. The biggest gap right now is mental health resources, she said.

“When I see someone who's on the street who has deep mental health challenges, I can't get any help for them,” Raman said. “I can't get somebody out there to help them.”

Miller, who is CEO of homelessness nonprofit Better Angels, said L.A. needs to move away from housing-first policies in favor of more temporary shelters coupled with treatment and other support.

“Housing first doesn't work,” Miller said. “We have to stabilize them in interim housing first with services and then move them to permanent housing.

"That's the only way we're gonna keep people off the street.”

L.A. City Council member Nithya Raman spoke Tuesday at the Original Pantry Cafe downtown.

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Inside Safe

Since late 2022, the city has spent more than $390 million on Inside Safe to clear 121 homeless encampments and place about 5,800 people into interim housing, according to the regional Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, known as LAHSA.

About 25% of those people are currently living in permanent housing, according to LAHSA. About 30% of them reside in temporary shelters. About 40% have returned to homelessness.

According to a February report by Los Angeles' city administrative officer, the average nightly cost of an Inside Safe motel room is about $225.81, or roughly $82,420 a year. That’s compared to $86.37 per night for other shelter options.

Bass defended the program but said it needs to bring down costs. She said she’s exploring the possibility of building and operating shelter sites on city-owned land to reduce leasing costs.

Raman said people are staying in temporary shelter for more than a year — comparing it to being left in an emergency room.

“I believe in encampment resolution,” she said. “What I don't believe in is bringing people indoors and then just leaving them there with no support and no resources.”

Miller said he would try a different approach, tiny-home villages, but acknowledged that ending Inside Safe would take time.

“You can't turn it off Day 1 because we’d have too many people that are back on the street,” he said.

The average construction cost of a tiny-home village is about $42,000 per unit, according to the nonprofit A-Mark Foundation.

Adam Miller, CEO of homelessness nonprofit Better Angels, argues L.A. needs a political outsider to get the homelessness crisis under control.

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Ending homelessness 

Each of the candidates expressed a desire to make big reductions in the city's unhoused population over the next few years, and perhaps eliminate it entirely.

Bass pointed to a 17.5% reduction in street homelessness over two years and said her goal for a second term is to end unsheltered homelessness — meaning those living on the streets — not just manage it.

“There's no reason for us to have street homelessness by the end of the next four years,” she said. “There just really isn't.”

Raman said she shares that ambition. She had already pledged to reduce street homelessness by at least 50% before the 2028 Olympics and "eliminate long-term encampments."

“I think we can end street homelessness in this city," she said, "but we cannot just pay lip service to it.”

Miller’s campaign platform includes a goal to reduce street homelessness by 60% and reduce homeless encampments by 80%. Miller has not previously held an elected government office, but he argued the city needs fresh leadership more than it needs political experience.

“L.A. has lost hope,” he said. "We need to have the belief that this is a problem that can and should be solved.”

The primary is June 2. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, the top two vote-getters will advance to face each other in a November runoff.

Esther Mejia and Kelly Merchant had a question Friday afternoon for their professors: Where were you?

The UC Riverside public policy students were among the likely hundreds of thousands in California who lost access to the all-important academic software Canvas when it was brought down by a hacker group Thursday afternoon. Losing Canvas meant losing assignments, tests, and required reading material along with a way to communicate with instructors. The timing was especially bad for UC students, who were hunkering down for midterms or finals.

“This is a very crucial time for students to be able to access their coursework. So I definitely do think that professors should reach out,” Mejia said in an interview. “And they did not.”

Merchant heard from only one professor by Friday who addressed the downed website. She learned about the hack attack on the social media site Reddit after she was logged out of her account while finishing an assignment.

The Riverside students’ experience underscores just how central Canvas has become to higher education in California — the outage likely affected more than 1 million of the state’s university students. The hack has raised serious questions about how schools should be vetting and balancing their use of online platforms, to what extent they may be held liable for breaches, and what role policymakers should play in protecting student data and regulating edtech.

By Monday evening, the company behind Canvas had told customers, including the University of California, that it had struck an agreement with the hacking group. In an email shared with CalMatters by UC's systemwide Office of the President, the company's CEO stated that “we reached an agreement with the unauthorized actor involved in this incident” that returns data and assures it is no longer held by the attacker nor any other outside parties. Further, “we have been informed that no Instructure customers will be extorted.”

CalMatters asked the company, Instructure, if it paid a ransom, but did not immediately hear back.

The attack seems to have begun on or around April 29, when Instructure “detected unusual activity,” according to a class-action suit filed in a Texas federal court. The attack exploited a vulnerability in Canvas’s free tool for teachers.

On May 4, some Cal State campuses experienced a brief shutdown but were operational within 20 to 30 minutes, the university system said.

By May 7, Thursday, the platform was offline. The University of California system blocked access to Canvas the same day, and wrote on its website that it won’t “be restored until we are confident the system is secure. We understand this disruption is concerning.”

The hackers, a group calling itself ShinyHunters, claimed to have obtained sensitive data, including billions of messages, and threatened to release the data if they weren’t paid a ransom. The CEO of Instructure has said that core “learning data (course content, submissions, credentials) was not compromised” and Cal State has said that Canvas does not store social security numbers.

On the evening of May 7, one of Merchant’s professors, she said, shared the material students needed to complete an assignment due Friday. The professor did so using a Discord group they created for the class at the beginning of the term. Merchant appreciated the initiative, but observed that not every student checks Discord as regularly as they would their email account.

By May 9, Saturday, UC Riverside mostly restored access to the platform, with other universities coming online in the following days. Mejia had a quiz and assignment due Monday at 2 p.m. She received a note from the professor of that class only at 9 a.m. that day through Canvas, she said. The professor granted a two-day extension.

Merchant wants more professors with a communication back-up plan, especially since Canvas has been down before. “Whether it’s a cybersecurity thing or routine Canvas maintenance, it’s going to continue to be a risk. And we have to prepare for it.”

“These situations are fluid and campuses and UCOP communicated as quickly and completely as feasible,” said UC Office of the President spokesperson Stett Holbrook.

For many colleges and high schools, Canvas has become indispensable, with teachers using it to give quizzes, message students, post grades, and more.

Almost 9,000 colleges, K-12 schools and school districts, and offices of education around the world were reportedly affected by the Canvas outage, according to the hacker group and other media, along with likely millions of students and teachers. California seemed to be hit especially hard. The institutions relying on the system and affected by the cyberattack included Stanford, at least some campuses at the University of California, USC, all 22 California State University campuses and all 116 of the state’s community colleges.

The number of students ultimately affected by the breach could be staggering. The Cal State system alone enrolls more than 400,000 students. The UC system, where hackers claimed to hit six of 10 campuses, enrolls about 300,000. The hacker group listed the Los Angeles Unified and Fresno Unified school districts as among their targets — they too enroll more than 400,000 students combined.

Deputy chancellor of the LA Community College District, Nicole Albo-Lopez, told CalMatters that Canvas was being used by students in thousands of courses, including as a “repository for gradebooks, sharing of course materials, and messaging.” The district is among the largest community college districts in the country, with nearly 200,000 students annually.

Canvas, she said Friday, still hadn’t informed them of what’s been exposed in the hack. “We’re supposed to receive specific information about what was accessed in our specific system, but we have not received that yet,” she said.

‘Eggs in one basket’

One expert said the incident highlights the problem of relying on “all-in” solutions for online education tools.

The attraction of software like Canvas is that it allows institutions without technical expertise to easily manage everything on a single platform. But the hack shows the danger of relying on such centralized systems, where a breach of one company exposes the data of the countless institutions that rely on it.

“The beauty of these software as a service systems and what they sell is, ‘Hey, your staff members don't need to run this, we'll just handle it,’” said Jake Chanenson, an education technology researcher and PhD student at the University of Chicago.

In the best case, those companies have diligent cybersecurity teams protecting student data.

Many schools without tech departments, by contrast, may only be equipped to give any new tools “a cursory, at best, privacy and security assessment,” Chanenson said. Small schools, especially, may then struggle to recover from a breach or outage.

But a centralized system also means that only a single point needs to be hacked for every school that uses the software to be affected.

Chanenson, who is currently researching “critical infrastructure" in schools, said that “when you put all your eggs in one basket across schools, it makes these targets very attractive.”

One state lawmaker wants a legislative audit into California's heavy reliance on Canvas. “The Canvas breach exposes the growing risks of concentrating massive amounts of student records, academic systems and institutional operations into a single platform," said Sen. Melissa Hurtado, a Democrat from Bakersfield, in a written statement.

What now?

It may be too early to identify the consequences of the hack for schools and for Canvas. It’s still not clear, for example, how the breach happened, or the full extent of data that was compromised.

At minimum, schools will want to reassess how much information they’re willing to give over to third-party software companies in the name of efficiency. Those companies, Chanenson said, should also take a look at their policies around data collection and retention to minimize how much sensitive information they store.

“You think in your head that any data set that you have has a non-zero probability of being leaked or breached or some sort of privacy loss, then you want to start thinking about things like data minimization,” he said.

Past data breaches have led to legal consequences for the companies and institutions involved, including action by state attorneys general. There are federal legal protections for data belonging to children under 13, through the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, as well to students, under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. In California, the Student Online Personal Information Protection Act protects data for K–12 students. Lawmakers in the state are also actively considering additional data protections.

The state has grappled with previous compromises of school data. Los Angeles Unified School District has faced a series of class-action lawsuits related to data privacy breaches. Most recently, the district disclosed last year that a telehealth vendor it worked with experienced a breach.

Chanenson points out that schools are prime targets for hackers since they hold immensely sensitive data but often lack the technical prowess of other large institutions, like banks.

“They’re happening with enough of a frequency that it’s more of a when, not an if,” he said.

CalMatters reporter Adam Echelman contributed to this story.

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