The Brief

Last week, a relic of military history in Orange County and an iconic structure to many local residents went up in flames.

"All of us who have lived in Orange County really in the past four generations...it's just been part of our landscape," historian and Orange County Historical Society President Chris Jepsen said of the World War II era wooden blimp hangar that caught fire early on the morning of Tuesday, Nov. 7.

"You see those hangars and you know you're home," Jepsen said during an interview this week with LAist's AirTalk, which airs daily on 89.3 FM.

A few days after the fire, Orange County declared a state of emergency after smoke and debris from the Tustin hangar fire tested positive for asbestos and other toxins. Schools continue to be closed in the area.

Bastions of coastal defense

Jepsen says the hangars were built in 1942 to house blimps that patrolled the U.S. coastline during World War II.

"The idea was they could keep an eye out for Japanese aircraft, or to some degree submarines coming toward our coast. These hangars, each one could house six large blimps inside it — fully inflated."

As the building burned, nearby residents, veterans and others with sentimental ties to the former Tustin air base flocked to the fenceline to get a final glimpse of the beloved hangars.

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At 17 stories high, more than 1,000 feet long, and 300 feet wide, the hangars were two of the largest wooden structures in the world when they were erected in 1942. They were built in a swift six months, as the country was eager to build up protection along its coasts. Jepsen says he's been inside the hangar that is now destroyed, and recalls being awe-struck at its scale.

"It's hard to wrap your brain around what you're seeing when you're in a place like that. It is so enormous."

Retired Marine Colonel Brian Delahaut was stationed at Tustin between 1983 and 1995. He told LAist's AirTalk, he remembers being awe-struck the first time he checked into the training squadron at the hangar.

"It was just absolutely incredible...when I checked in in the early 80s, the base was actually called...Marine Corps Air Station Tustin Lighter-than-Air (LTA). We all knew the buildings had been built...for the use of blimps, but the Marine Corps repurposed them and made them into helicopter hangars, so I don't think we appreciate what they were initially built for."

They’ve been mostly vacant since the base was decommissioned in 1999, sometimes serving as a shooting location for films and commercials. The hangars have been featured in television shows and films such as The X Files, Austin Powers, Pearl Harbor, and Star Trek.

The historic blimp hangar, at right, seen as it burned on Nov. 7, 2023.

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Orange County icons

AirTalk and LAist listeners also shared their memories of the hangars.

Listener Jeaniqua in San Diego says she grew up on base housing while her father served in as a helicopter crew chief in the Marines, and even recalls a ballet group she was part of holding a recital inside the hangar.

"It's really sad. We grew up in the shadow of [the hangars] so I have very distinctive and clear memories of the office spaces in there, and even just walking in. The offices were along the side and in the center it was that wide open space, and I remember....just looking up and it seemed like it went up forever."

Listener Tee in Irvine remembers living in an Irvine apartment at Jamboree and Alton and being able to see the hangars from her bedroom window there, and recalls her niece participating in the video for Michael Jackson's song "Hold My Hand" that was shot at the hangars.

"It's just strange that one hangar is now gone. I actually went over...and took pictures. It's unbelievable how basically it looks as if everything has caved in, except for the concrete structures on the end. It's just really sad...it's strange not to have those there because it is a part of the community."

What will be become of the burned hangar?

Local officials have not yet announced plans for what will happen to what remains of the structure, but Jepsen says he'd be surprised if anything is saved or reconstructed, given the condition it's in and some of the environmental concerns about asbestos exposure.

"These things were built in the 40s and some of the materials are cause for concern," said Jepsen.

At the moment, the South Hangar is awaiting environmental remediation before it's handed over from the Navy to the city of Tustin. Jepsen says while a lot of different forms of adaptive reuse have been discussed, there are no concrete plans at the moment.

A closer look at the damaged hull left behind.

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Listen to the conversation

The rent, as we all know, is too damn high.

So is California’s poverty rate.

The two things are related.

That’s the not-so-surprising finding of a new analysis published by the Pew Charitable Trusts: If California’s rents dropped to the national average, the state would slash its poverty rate by 30%. The child poverty rate would decline by 36%.

The report is meant to highlight an important, if sometimes overlooked, aspect of poverty: It isn’t just about how much a person makes.

“Anti-poverty programs will be much more effective if we address people’s expenses, and rent is the number-one line item for most Americans,” said Pew researcher Alex Horowitz.

Case in point: CalFresh, the state’s food stamp program, saw an increase of $13.1 billion in benefits between 1989 and 2023. Over that same period, rising rents ate away 78% of that increase, according to the analysis.

California’s official poverty rate, which currently matches the national average of 10.7%, has always been a misleading stat. Using another official measure that takes into account each state’s housing costs, the percentage of Californians living in poverty rockets up to 17.8% — the second highest rate in the country after Louisiana.

That makes bringing down rents an especially effective anti-poverty program. If the state’s rents fell by 20%, child poverty would decline by roughly a quarter, the report found.

Twenty percent may seem impossibly ambitious in a state where rents often only seem to go in one direction (with some noteworthy exceptions), but that’s roughly how much typical rents declined in Austin and Minneapolis between 2021 and 2025. Pew researchers attribute that feat of affordability to local policy changes that have allowed for more housing construction.

Those policies — allowing for denser housing in cities, reducing parking requirements for new developments, encouraging the construction of ADUs — mirror many of the laws adopted at the state level in California. Those laws have yet to result in a major increasein new housing, but proponents are optimistic that a building boom is on the horizon.

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

The largest planned deportation program in U.S. history swept up more than 38,000 people in California since February 2025. The federal government purchased detention facilities, in part to avoid scrutiny from local governments. Protests erupted against the detentions and the facilities, and police dispersed those protests with the help of stun grenades.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday signed a package of immigration bills that Democrats aim to disrupt the deportation program in California, limit the tactics of immigration enforcement agencies and open up federal agents to civil liability. The most significant bills will likely be tested in federal court.

They range from prohibiting immigration agents from using electric shock gloves to creating a bill of rights for people held in detention and extending the state’s power to investigate conditions inside detention centers.

The new laws come in the midst of an escalation in Trump’s deportation plan, with weekly immigration arrests hitting new records across the state.

“This is about stepping up where the federal government has failed our communities,” Newsom said in a written statement. “We will continue protecting our people, upholding the rule of law, and making clear that if the federal government operates in California, we will hold them accountable.”

The most sweeping change would allow anyone to sue federal agents for violations of their constitutional rights. Under federal law, the only legal relief available now to people who sue agents of the U.S. government is a “Bivens” action, named after the 1971 U.S. Supreme Court case in which a man successfully sued drug enforcement agents who violated his Fourth Amendment right against illegal search and seizure.

Supporters of the bill, which they call the No Kings Act, say it “closes that accountability gap [by] providing for a clear statutory pathway to sue any official — federal, state, or local — who violates the Constitution.”

“ICE and Border Patrol have terrorized California communities with impunity. That ends today,” Sen. Scott Wiener, the San Francisco Democrat who wrote the law, said in a written statement after Newsom signed it.

The bill’s opponents, which include dozens of California law enforcement agencies, argue that the law isn’t necessary, and that it will “promote second-guessing of a public employee’s actions made in good faith.”

The actions of immigration enforcement agents — including whether they are acting within their duties when they detain or kill someone, and whether they are following the laws of the state in which they’re operating — are at the center of court battles between California and the Trump administration.

The January fatal shootings of two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were protesting the Trump administration’s deportation program in Minneapolis, underscored the stakes for California Democrats who demanded more accountability of federal agents. Dozens of people have been injured in protests, or when the agents misidentify a person as a deportation target.

When an unarmed person in California is shot and killed by a police officer, the state attorney general can investigate the shooting under a 2020 program. Newsom signed a law that duplicates that legislation, but applies it to immigration agents who kill unarmed people.

The state program would face an immediate legal problem stemming from an 1890 U.S. Supreme Court case that forbids states from prosecuting federal law enforcement officers acting in the course of their duties. That case played a critical role earlier this year when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against a California law Newsom signed last year that tried to compel masked federal agents to identify themselves.

Other new California laws focus on conditions in immigrant detention centers. Detainees have complained of filthy drinking water, among other issues — most of them confirmed by investigations by counties and civil liberties groups. The private detention facilities provide water for sale in their canteens, but the prices were significantly marked up.

One of the new laws extends California’s authority to investigate private detention centers, a power it uses for annual reviews of medical care inside the facilities.

Here are some of the immigration-related bills Newsom signed into law:

• Civil lawsuits against federal agents: Senate Bill 747, the so-called No Kings Act, allows civil lawsuits against officers over alleged civil rights violations.
• Banning electric shock gloves: Assembly Bill 2760 prohibits federal agents from using electric shock gloves. Lawmakers advanced the bill quickly in response to reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement bought thousands of the weapons.
• Civil rights for detainees: SB 942 declares a bill of rights of people held in immigrant detention centers, including access to healthcare and healthy food.
• State investigations: SB 1399 extends a law that empowers state agencies to investigate conditions in immigrant detention centers.
• 911 calls: SB 423 requires government agencies to release details of emergency calls coming from immigrant detention centers. The bill was prompted by CalMatters’ reporting on alleged sexual assaults at Otay Mesa Detention Center.
• Access to state property: AB 1807 prohibits immigration agents from using state-owned property.
• Shooting investigations: AB 1806 requires state prosecutors to investigate shootings by federal immigration agents.
• Crowd control: SB 937 forbids law enforcement agencies from using flash-bang grenades to break up protests.

CalMatters reporter Wendy Fry contributed to this story.

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

A federal judge has now granted Paramount’s settlement agreement with 12 states that sued over the company’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, allowing the companies to soon close their $81 billion mega merger.

In a Wednesday order, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ruled that the proposed consent decree was a “fair, reasonable, and good faith approach to address the competitive harms” alleged by the states’ lawsuit. Paramount previously called the antitrust challenge the last hurdle ahead of closing its Warner merger, and signaled that it aims to close its Warner acquisition as soon as early October.

Shortly after Martínez-Olguín’s ruling on Wednesday afternoon, the company announced that Ynon Kreiz — current chief executive at toy giant Mattel — will join Paramount on Oct. 5 and serve as co-CEO alongside David Ellison of the combined company.

A Paramount-Warner marriage will bring together two of Hollywood’s last five legacy studios. HBO Max, a library full of titles including “Harry Potter” and cable networks such as CNN will also find themselves under the same roof with CBS, the likes of the “Top Gun” franchise and the Paramount+ streaming service.

Top prosecutors from 12 states — led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta — sued in July with an initial goal of blocking the merger altogether. They alleged a Paramount-Warner combo would “extinguish competition” and lead to fewer choices for consumers, particularly movie theatergoers and cable customers.

Last week, the states agreed to settle these claims through new commitments from Paramount, including pledges to increase film production in the U.S. over the next five years, commit millions of dollars to a fund aimed at supporting workers displaced by the merger and establish new editorial monitoring of CNN and CBS.

When announcing the deal on Sept. 21, Bonta said the settlement was about “protecting people’s careers, the lives they’ve built here in California, the livelihoods their families rely on,” while maintaining it was not a vote of support for the merger.

Many critics of the tie-up, however, quickly decried the deal as capitulating to corporate pressure and said the proposed terms were too weak. Martínez-Olguín didn’t greenlight the terms right away — maintaining at a hearing on Thursday that the court isn’t merely a “rubber stamp” on a settlement of this kind and that she, like many others, still had questions.

The judge granted outside critics of the settlement — including members of the Block The Merger coalition and the League of United Latin American Citizens — a brief window to share their opposition with the court through amicus briefs. She also instructed Paramount and the settling states to respond to a letter from Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, who called for a more thorough review of the deal.

By Wednesday’s order, however, she concluded that the hopes for settlement terms to go further “do not rise to the level of legal violations upon which the Court can reject the parties’ negotiated resolution.”

The Block the Merger coalition on Wednesday maintained the settlement was a “toothless” deal.

“Allowing the Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. Discovery merger to move forward with no meaningful structural remedies will cost jobs, mute creativity, weaken independent journalism, and damage our First Amendment rights,” Block the Merger said in a statement. But, the coalition added, “if there is one discernible benefit to the approval of this corporate takeover, it’s that people are now wide awake and paying attention –- and their anger is not going to fade away.”

The Writers Guild of America, which had filed its own suit shortly after the states in July, also reached a settlement agreement with Paramount last week — concluding that it couldn’t continue its legal fight alone.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Inglewood is staring down the barrel of a $30.8 million budget deficit next year, the city’s largest in at least two decades, but officials said locals don’t need to be worried. 

Inglewood’s budget ballooned after SoFi Stadium opened in 2020. City officials roughly doubled their spending from the general fund — the pot of money that pays for basic services from police to parks. 

Revenue also boomed in the first few years after the stadium’s opening, but since then hasn’t quite kept up with what’s been spent. 

City officials downplayed the projected deficit last week, saying in reports and presentations that reserves of more than $150 million will cover the gap this year and that they expect increased tax and other revenues to help take care of the problem in the future.  Mayor James Butts said locals have no reason to worry, and that the city’s reserves have enabled officials to be ambitious in their planning. 

Whether they have to dip into those savings at all depends on how locals vote for a ballot measure on Nov. 3. Officials predict Measure AT could wipe out the deficit entirely by bringing in as much as $45 million to $50 million extra in taxes on tickets to major events.

But_, if Inglewood continues to spend more than it takes in over the coming years and pulls too much out of its reserves, city officials could be pushed to lay off staff and cut funding for services, as they did during a fiscal crisis 15 years ago.

The City Council approved the budget proposal in a 4-0 vote at its Tuesday meeting. Councilmember Eloy Morales Jr. was absent.

Here’s a breakdown of Inglewood’s budget

Inglewood’s annual general fund revenue has grown by about $100 million over the last 10 years, driven in large part by increased property taxes and admissions tax.

But that growth has plateaued over the last five years, while expenditures continued to grow. The city plans to spend $279 million out of its general fund this year, more than double its annual spending prior to 2020.

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The city’s total budget is $675 million. It includes the general fund as well as special funds that pay for things like major construction projects and affordable housing.

Police take the largest bite out of Inglewood’s general fund, followed by the public works and parks departments.

Outside the general fund, the city has also budgeted $239 million for capital projects.

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Some of Inglewood’s largest sources of general fund revenue are property tax, sales tax and admissions tax. 

Property tax revenue has grown by leaps and bounds over the last five years, according to budget documents, but admissions tax and sales tax haven’t matched the growth.

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Officials hope city reserves and a ballot measure will fill the deficit

Inglewood has had budget issues before. The deficit approached $18 million in 2010, just before Mayor James Butts was elected, while reserves fell to around $11 million.

This time around, officials say Inglewood has over $150 million in reserves. 

Butts said those reserves have allowed the city to take an aggressive approach to improving streets, traffic lights and other city infrastructure.

“We put the money there because we want the city to be rehabilitated,” Butts said.

Pulling from reserves, though, isn’t something a city can do indefinitely. City Manager Louis Atwell wrote in a budget report that staff expect tax revenue to keep increasing and new developments to give the city an additional boost. With staff keeping an eye on operating costs, Atwell wrote, those revenues would narrow the city’s budget gap down the line. 

This year’s election could also come into play. The two city ballot measures voters will see — AT and BB — are the product of a larger battle between the city and its stadiums over billboard advertisements and the development deal that brought SoFi Stadium to Inglewood.

Either measure could have a substantial effect on the city’s books. 

Inglewood currently pulls in a 10% tax on SoFi Stadium tickets, but with an annual ceiling on how much the city can get. Measure AT, backed by billboard company WOW Media, would remove the cap and add a new 2.5% tax for the Intuit Dome.

Officials estimated it would bring in between $45 million and $50 million extra annually, more than enough to cover the city’s current deficit. Atwell cautioned, though, that the figures aren’t guaranteed and could depend on economic conditions, the timing of the measure’s roll-out and other factors. 

On the flip side, officials said Measure BB could curtail billboard fees and ratchet the deficit up to almost $39 million. 

The initiative would ban most commercial advertising on the large video billboards that have cropped up along the city’s main roads. Measure BB would cut off a revenue stream that, according to past budget documents, has brought the city between $3 million and $7.5 million. 

City officials itemized how much Inglewood made from billboards in each of the last 10 years, but did not do so in this year’s budget. 

The ballot measures are just a few items on a packed Inglewood ballot that includes elections for mayor, two city council members and three Board of Education trustees.