The Brief

Alejandra “Alex” Santamaria, a media sales veteran who most recently served as interim president/general manager and VP, Director of Sales for Univision Los Angeles, has been named president and CEO of LAist.

Santamaria takes over a nonprofit media organization that’s been struggling financially in recent years and has laid off staff two years in a row due to budget shortfalls.

Herb Scannell, LAist’s previous CEO, announced his retirement from the company in September and left the organization in April after five years.

LAist is the public-facing name for Southern California Public Radio, which includes the radio station LAist 89.3 (formerly KPCC), LAist.com and LAist Studios, the organization’s podcast unit.

In an interview, Santamaria said she was drawn to LAist’s mission of serving Southern Californians, which she also focused on during her career at Univision, specifically empowering Latino audiences.

Alejandra 'Alex' Santamaria will lead LAist beginning July 30, 2024.

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Brian Feinzimer

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For LAist

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“The representation and diversity that LAist brings to Southern California in their storytelling, in providing the facts in the news, and also the investigative reporting that has cracked open some things that really impact a lot of Southern Californians — it's exactly what excites me in terms of making an impact in a community,” she said.

As VP, Director of Sales for Univision Los Angeles, Santamaria was in charge of revenue for the company, which included two TV stations, four radio stations, and digital and social media properties.

“Stability and funding is going to be the key to be able to move the organization forward and thriving. And that's really what I'm hoping to be able to do with the team,” Santamaria said.

She starts at LAist July 30.

A background in sales

Last week, LAist laid off seven employees as part of a larger initiative to reduce an estimated budget shortfall of $4 to $5 million over the next two years. Combined with earlier voluntary buyouts, the organization has cut 28 people, an approximate 17% reduction of staff.

The organization also laid off 20 employees last year, an estimated 10% of staff at the time. A company statement issued Friday said the budget shortfall was due to “a decline in advertising, the end of our investment reserves, slower-than-anticipated digital monetization, and overall cost increases that have not kept pace with revenue.”

Santamaria says she plans to come into LAist with an open mind to see what opportunities exist to grow revenue.

Before Univision Los Angeles, Santamaria was also president and general manager of Univision Arizona, where she oversaw station operations, sales, and digital marketing for the group’s television, radio and digital entities.

“Based on my experience with revenue generation, the idea is really to try to turn over every rock and inform additional audiences as much as possible about the great work,” she said. “I really think that it’s important to be in front of those audiences and remind them of that.”

She says, for example, it’ll be important to think about what every given platform might offer.

“The media landscape is evolving. I think over the last 10 years, over the last five years, technology has really put a challenge to linear traditional media in that audiences are getting a little bit more spread out,” she said.

A born and raised Angeleno

The first in her family to be born in the U.S., Santamaria was raised in East Los Angeles. Her parents immigrated from Sonora, Mexico to Los Angeles, where her father found a job working in a factory.

From seventh to 12th grade, she was bused to the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, a magnet school in Mid-City. After graduating college from Loyola Marymount, she got her start in her media career as an intern at Univision Los Angeles in 1992. From there, she was hired as a research analyst, and moved up the ranks.

“My parents grew up watching Univision and that's how they figured out what were the things that they needed to do to grow and to thrive in Southern California,” she said. “So I have a lot of pride in being able to work for a company that wasn't just a traditional media company. It meant so much more.”

She currently resides in Manhattan Beach. She said she’s looking forward to joining the world of public media.

“I think that’s the beauty of LAist and public media — that even though there are challenges in funding… the audience is so passionate and really believes in the mission,” she said. “It’s trying to find that stability in funding to continue to do the good work that [they] do.”

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by Senior Reporter Elly Yu and edited by Senior Editors Ross Brenneman and Suzanne Levy. Under LAist's protocol for reporting on itself, no corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

Yu, like all LAist reporters, is a member of SAG-AFTRA. She did not discuss the way this story was reported with any SAG-AFTRA members prior to publication.

Los Angeles housing officials say they’ve averted a crisis that could have put thousands of families at risk of homelessness by the start of 2027.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of low-income Angelenos moved into apartments with the help of federally funded emergency housing vouchers. More than 4,300 households in the city and county still rely on those vouchers to subsidize their rents.

But L.A. officials have warned that federal funding to support this program will dry up at the end of December 2026, potentially leading to evictions and homelessness for tenants unable to pay the full rent on their units.

On Thursday, city and county housing authorities announced that increased federal funding and improved local budgets will now allow all emergency housing voucher holders to transition out of the temporary pandemic program and into the traditional Housing Choice Voucher program, widely known as Section 8.

“This is housing for the long term for these families,” said Marcie Vega, director of assisted housing programs for the Housing Authority of the City of L.A.

How many families are affected?

The city’s housing authority oversees leases for more than 2,700 emergency housing vouchers. The county’s housing authority oversees another 1,600.

Officials say as long as participants still qualify for federal housing aid, they will be able to stay in their current homes without having to complete an onerous amount of paperwork.

“The housing authority is doing the administrative work to transition these families over,” Vega said, noting that the plan is to complete the transition by September.

Tenant advocates who work with renters on the temporary program say the news will ease a lot of anxiety.

“Folks we've been hearing from are in desperate panic,” said Manuel Villagomez, an attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. “It's a huge relief.”

How voucher programs work

Participants use these vouchers to find apartments on the private rental market, which can be a challenge given how many L.A. landlords are reluctant to accept them.

Tenants typically pay about 30% of their income toward their rent, with vouchers covering the rest.

The number of renters with incomes low enough to qualify for a voucher is far larger than the amount of vouchers L.A. housing authorities can offer.

Cities rarely open their waitlists, and they often pick applicants by lottery for a spot on the list. Once tenants are on the list, they can wait for years before getting a voucher.

It’s hot out there, and it’s only going to get hotter.

National Weather Service forecasters issued a slew of alerts this week as a heat wave settles into Southern California with even hotter weather right around the corner.

A heat advisory is in effect until Tuesday for much of the region, with triple-digit temperatures expected in some places. Then, from Tuesday through Thursday, July 16, L.A. County and its neighbors to the north are under a more severe extreme heat watch.

An extreme weather warning is already in place for the Coachella Valley, where highs are expected to approach 115 degrees on Friday.

Southern Californians are no strangers to hot weather in the summer, but heat waves are getting hotter, longer and more frequent as the climate changes.

And the words forecasters use to describe these weather events has changed too. The NWS rolled out new heat alert language last year after the previous summer broke records for the hottest in U.S. history.

So, what exactly triggers these heat alerts? And what should you do about them? Here’s a guide:

Heat Advisory: Advisories are issued when temperatures are expected to be hot enough to cause discomfort and potentially lead to heat-related illnesses, especially for more vulnerable populations like young children and the elderly. During a heat advisory, consider staying in a cool place and limiting outside activity, especially during the day. For those who spend time outside, be sure to drink plenty of water and take breaks in the shade.

Extreme Heat Watch: Watches are essentially forecasts for upcoming periods of extreme heat. Forecasters say heat watches often cover wide areas and will be revised into more focused warnings and advisories as conditions become clearer over time. Watches are a good time to prepare for extreme heat by, for example, locating a nearby cooling centers if you don’t have access to air conditioning.

Extreme Heat Warning: Warnings are issued when heat levels are or will likely become extremely dangerous. Under extreme heat warnings, it's a good idea to avoid strenuous outdoor activity, stay hydrated and help loved ones and pets stay cool.

Not one-size-fits-all

Forecasters say it is important to keep Southern California’s diverse geography in mind when thinking about what these alerts mean.

L.A. County, for example, covers beaches, valleys, mountains and deserts. Some areas have tree cover, while others are mostly concrete and asphalt. Temperatures can vary a lot between those landscapes. It might be 80 degrees near the coast when it’s 100 degrees in the desert.

Not everywhere under a heat advisory, watch or warning will necessarily see the highest temperatures in the forecast either. But it is likely that some places within the alert area will.

Heat is also experienced differently from community to community. For someone accustomed to living in the desert, 100-degree heat may feel different than it would for someone who lives near the beach.

National Weather Service forecasters often consult with local emergency management, fire and public health authorities about the needs of their particular residents when deciding where and when to issue alerts.

When I was 16, my family moved to Madrid, where I got a crash course in Spanish culture — including a legal drinking age that happened to match my own. Lucky me. (For those wondering, it’s now 18).

In Spain, there’s a whole rhythm to drinking; it’s less about getting drunk and more about the intentionality of what you reach for and when. A vermouth before lunch to open the appetite. And after dinner, a gin tonic, (yes, that's gin tonic, the Spanish way — not gin and tonic) nursed slowly over a long conversation. And if things get loose, a kalimotxo: red wine and Coke, the drink Spanish teenagers have been mixing in plazas since before they were legally allowed to.

Over the last few years, a wave of Spanish drinking culture has been quietly making its way into L.A. Even José Andrés — the chef behind downtown's San Laurel, and probably the city’s most famous Spaniard — devotes a chapter of his new book, Spain, My Way, to how his countrymen drink, arguing it's inseparable from how they eat. It's a good match for L.A. too: like Spain, we have a Mediterranean climate — hot, dry summers made for chilled, low-ABV drinking.

You can now experience those rituals I first saw in Madrid — enjoying vermouth, kalimotxo, gin tonic — at spots around town. So why not get a taste of Spain… without booking a flight?

La hora del vermut

LAIE, a cava-based Spanish vermouth, served over ice with orange and an olive.

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Brook Olsen

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Courtesy LAIE

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Most of us will know vermouth as the splash in a good martini. But it can be so much more than that, if you know what to drink. "It's not just a mixer… it's something you can enjoy by itself," says Alex Cardona, co-founder of a Barcelona-based vermouth company, LAIE (pronounced El-ay-yeah) with California restaurateur Raj Nallapothola.

The traditional way to drink vermouth — or vermut — in Spain is the ritual known as la hora del vermut — the vermouth hour, a midday get-together to share the drink over a few snacks.

There are many different kinds of vermouth, from pale, dry blanco to sweet, dark rojo. LAIE is a rojo, light in color but finishing sweet, made by a longtime family producer just outside Barcelona. It drinks like a lighter-bodied wine, blended with more than twenty botanicals. If you've ever enjoyed an Italian amaro, you're almost there.

Serve it before lunch, over ice with an orange slice and an olive — and if you want to kick things up, a splash of gin.

Kalimotxo

Wine and Cola's five styles launched exclusively in L.A. this summer.

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Courtesy Wine and Cola

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In 1999, when I was a teenager in Madrid, I’d see young people in the evening filling the plazas in droves, corner-store box wine and two-liters of Coke in hand — and the municipal workers who'd hose it all down by morning, only for the scene to repeat the next weekend.

Yes, wine and Coke, known in Spanish as kalimotxo, apparently go very well together, and dates to the ‘70s Basque Country, where festival-goers mixed spoiled wine with Coke to save it. While my taste for wine wasn’t really developed at the time, I appreciated the ingenuity of the drink for what it was.

Now, a ready-to-drink, canned version is arriving in L.A., the straightforwardly named Wine and Cola. The brand is modernizing the kalimotxo for the U.S. market, according to CEO Dale Laflam, who works with beverage brands for a living and saw canned cocktails booming while wine sat flat. Putting a kalimotxo in a can, ready to grab from a cooler, was the obvious move.

It's a deliberate 50-50 wine-and-cola blend, built cola-forward so it lands even if you're not a wine drinker. The cola leads, with a dry wine hum underneath. It comes in five styles — Original, Diet, Cherry, Rosé, and a citrusy one that drinks like white wine and Sprite.

Most lean sweet, thanks to that cola-forward base; I'd have taken more cherry in the Cherry, but that's me. I found the citrus the most balanced.

If you need more convincing, the drink's got famous fans. Lady Gaga has said her go-to is red wine and Diet Coke — a kalimotxo by any other name — and soccer's GOAT, Lionel Messi, recently copped to loving red wine with Sprite, the lighter cousin behind the citrus can.

As Laflam puts it, the whole thing "sounds wrong, tastes right."

Gin tonic — and the art of the sobremesa

Bar manager Gerard Belmonte builds Telefèric's gin tonics, including the color-changing Ibiza.

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Gab Chabrán

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LAist

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After a lovely Spanish dinner — a paella, maybe, or a chuletón with patatas and piquillo peppers — the meal doesn't really end. It eases into sobremesa, the long stretch of table time after the plates are cleared, and that's when the gin tonic arrives.

Yes, that’s right. Spain loves their gin tonics. It isn't Spanish by birth (it was actually started by British officers in India drinking quinine-laden tonic to beat malaria), but Spain adopted it and made it a national obsession, where the drink is poured over ice in big balloon glasses and loaded with botanicals.

At the Telefèric Barcelona resturant in Long Beach, at 2nd & PCH, with locations in California and Arizona, drinking gin tonics is a nightly ritual. It's owned by the Padrosa family, and the lineage traces back to their original location in Barcelona.

"We always do a gin tonic after dinner," bar manager Gerard Belmonte told me. "We keep it on the table for three, four hours, talk with people. It's a good digestive, too — that's in our culture."

Belmonte walked me through three of the house pours, each of which pays homage to a different corner of Spain. The Catalan is the driest — mostly gin and tonic, garnished with juniper, rosemary, grapefruit, and a touch of lemon for a clean, refreshing finish. The Galicia gets a blue stripe of Bombay Sapphire's edible paint brushed inside the glass, then builds on Nordés, a Galician gin with Atlantic notes, with cardamom and bay leaf. And the Ibiza — named, Belmonte says, for the island's party-and-good-vibes energy — starts with Bombay Premier Cru infused with butterfly pea tea and a touch of edible silver dust. As it's built, the drink shifts from blue to purple, shimmering like a magic potion out of Harry Potter.

The private immigration detention company GEO Group has settled a landmark case over conditions in one of its Central Valley detention facilities. It has agreed to pay more than $100,000 over allegations the company failed to keep detained immigrants safe when they worked inside the facility.

The settlement, signed in May and announced Tuesday, is a victory for immigrants’ rights groups that have pushed California lawmakers to attempt to regulate conditions inside the federal government’s privately-operated detention facilities.

Eight such facilities now operate across the state and the number of detained immigrants has spiked during the second Trump presidency.

During the pandemic, lawmakers passed a measure allowing state inspectors into the facilities. In 2022, after receiving complaints from advocates and detained immigrants at the Golden State Annex facility in McFarland, state workplace safety inspectors from Cal/OSHA opened a case at the center and cited the GEO Group with workplace violations, alleging the company failed to prevent the spread of COVID-19 among detainees who work there, and ensure other safety measures.

It was the first known time the state has treated immigrant detainees as workers and their detention facility operators as employers subject to state labor laws.

Immigrants held in ICE custody are detained on civil violations, not imprisoned for crimes. But in detention, where they can participate in a “voluntary work program” cleaning the facility, preparing food or cutting other detainees’ hair, they are only paid $1 a day. Detainees often participate in order to afford food at the centers’ commissaries or calls to their families.

As part of the settlement between GEO Group and Cal/OSHA, the company has agreed to improve its disease control plans for detainees and stopped fighting a ruling by state regulators last year that said the company was subject to state labor laws. GEO Group did not respond to a request for comment.

“Individuals who perform work in these facilities are entitled to workplace safety protections, and this settlement reinforces Cal/OSHA’s commitment to enforcing those protections and safeguarding vulnerable workers,” agency spokesperson Denisse Gomez wrote in a statement.

Detention facility operators and federal immigration officials have continued to clash with state and local regulators over conditions. Last month, a federal judge sided with San Diego County health officials and ordered the Department of Homeland Security and its contractor CoreCivic to allow a county inspector into the 1,400-bed Otay Mesa Detention Center near the Mexico border. That company last week sold the facility and another one in Kern County to the federal government, CalMatters reported.

And amid several federal lawsuits challenging the practice of paying just $1 a day for detainee work, GEO Group succeeded last month in getting ICE to update its standards for detention contractors, the Washington Post reported. The new standards state detainees “are not entitled to wages or benefits under applicable wage laws or labor regulations.”