The Brief

The Rose Parade kicks off New Years Day, when 39 colorful and intricately designed floats will glide down Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. And an army of volunteers is helping to decorate those floats in the final days before the parade.

In a warehouse in the small city of Sierra Madre in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, JoAnn Copp gently places green mums on a large sign that reads “Fiesta.”

“You want to get it on there without scrunching it too badly,” Copp said.

Copp lives in Costa Mesa, but has volunteered to decorate Sierra Madre’s Rose Parade float since 2011.

JoAnn Copp places mums on the Fiesta sign that will adorn the Sierra Madre Rose Parade Float.

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Mums for the Sierra Madre Rose Parade float.

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“ I just happen to like the camaraderie and creativity and everybody working together,” she said.

Next to her, Sierra Madre resident Corinne Flores puts the finishing touches on a piñata for the float — Sierra Madre’s theme this year is “fiesta at abuela’s house.” The Grammy-winning Mariachi Divas will perform on it and 16 folklórico dancers will flank the float.

 ”What I love about it is working with the other people that are here and getting to know some of the people both in Sierra Madre and folks that have come from really far, like one lady that came from North Carolina just to work on the float,” Flores said.

Corinne Flores puts the finishing touches on a piñata .

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Many of the volunteers came from afar to experience a part of the storied Rose Parade. Marty Antonellis splits time between Boston and New Orleans — her family of nine came from all over the country to work on Sierra Madre’s float.

“From New Orleans, Boston, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh…. I think I’ve covered them all,” she said with a chuckle. “It's just amazing because everyone wants to go to the Rose Parade at some point in their life.”

The whole family is planning to attend the parade, where Antonellis said they’ll cheer on the Sierra Madre Rose float that they all had a hand in creating.

Marty Antonellis fluffs carnations for Sierra Madre's Rose Parade Float.

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Fluffing carnations.

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A DIY effort

For Pasadena resident Diana Becker and her mother Eileen, who lives in Mobile, Alabama, volunteering together to decorate Sierra Madre’s float has been a holiday season tradition since 2012.

“ I come out to visit [Diana] at Christmas time and then we do the float,” said Eileen. “[Sierra Madre] is a wonderful place to do the float — it’s self-built, that’s the main thing, and  everybody gets to know everybody and we get to text each other sometimes during the year.”

Diana Becker and her mother, Eileen, volunteer every year to help decorate Sierra Madre's Rose Parade float.

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Sierra Madre’s float is one of only six that are “self-built,” or made independently. Burbank, Downey, La Cañada-Flintridge, South Pasadena and Cal Poly also fully build their own floats.

“We are absolutely the most DIY you could possibly imagine,” said Sierra Madre’s volunteer coordinator Hannah Jungbauer. “We want this to be as community driven as possible.”

The in-progress Sierra Madre Rose Parade Float on Dec. 30, 2024.

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A detail of a cat stretching that will appear on Sierra Madre's Rose Parade float.

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The Sierra Madre Rose Float Association, a nonprofit and all-volunteer organization, hosts Drag Queen Bingo twice a year to raise money for the float, which cost about $52,000 this year. Corporate floats, on the other hand, often cost at least $275,000 to build.

To cut costs, they use donated Christmas trees and succulents to decorate the float. They’ve used the same chassis since the 1980s. And after the parade, they sell as much from the float as they can — that’s why you may spot pieces of floats from past years decorating some Sierra Madre homes, such as a 10-foot tiki head in a yard from the 2020 float, or a cartoonish bear cub peering down from a tree, from the 2023 float.

Pieces of donated Christmas trees that will be a part of Sierra Madre's Rose Parade float.

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The other remaining floats you see along the parade route are built by two companies — Phoenix Decoration Co. out of Irwindale and Artistic Entertainment Services in Azusa. Award-winning float builder Fiesta Parade Floats is no longer a part of the parade after nearly a four-decade run.

The Pasadena Tournament of Roses Association cut ties with the company in June citing the company’s failure to meet technical and financial criteria. Fiesta Parade Floats has since shut down. Phoenix Decoration Co. is now overseeing the Kaiser Permanente float instead of Fiesta along with 16 other floats. Artistic Entertainment Services told LAist, it’s now overseeing a few of the former Fiesta customers as part of their 16 floats.

A bear cub from the 2023 Sierra Madre Rose Parade float on a tree outside a house in the canyon neighborhood of Sierra Madre.

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A brief history of the Rose Parade 

The first Tournament of Roses Parade was held back in 1890 and it was extremely quaint compared to today’s world-renowned affair. It was originally the idea of a small group of country clubbers in Pasadena, who wanted to promote the place they called “the Mediterranean of the West."

The concept design for Sierra Madre's Rose Parade float.

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The group of men who made up the original social club invited East Coasters to a mid-winter holiday festival, where they could escape the cold and watch chariot races, jousting and other games under the warmth of the California winter sun. In 1913, the event featured a race between a camel and an elephant (the elephant won).

Sierra Madre is one of the oldest participants in the parade — the city entered its very first float in 1917. Keeping their float self-built, according to the city’s float association, is one way they continue to honor that local tradition.

The Orange County Registrar of Voters is sending teams to emergency shelters to make sure people can still can vote in the June 2 primary even if they are under evacuation orders because of the Garden Grove chemical spill threat.

The backstory

Some 40,000-50,000 people in and around Garden Grove were ordered to evacuate last Friday after a tank holding thousands of gallons of a toxic, highly flammable chemical threatened to explode. The evacuation area was sharply reduced Monday evening after public safety officials discovered pressure in the tank had been relieved.

But many Garden Grove and Stanton residents in the immediate vicinity of the tank, owned by the aerospace company GKN, are still under evacuation orders. Some fled their homes without even the bare essentials, much less their mail-in ballots for next week’s election.

How evacuees can vote

If you left your mail-in ballot at home, you can go to any of Orange County’s 38 vote centers and request a replacement ballot. You can find the locations of those centers here.

The O.C. Registrar on Tuesday also sent two teams to the emergency shelters in nearby Fountain Valley — at Freedom Hall and Los Amigos High School — to print replacement ballots for evacuees who need them. Those ballots can be mailed, dropped off at a vote center or placed in one of the county’s official ballot drop boxes. You can find the locations of those drop boxes here.

The drop box at Chapman Sports Park, which is within the evacuation zone, is unavailable. Registrar Bob Page said ballots were collected from the box when evacuations were first ordered. Page said his office has resumed retrieving ballots from two other drop boxes that were within the initial evacuation zone.

Conductor Daniel Harding will take over as the Los Angeles Philharmonic's music director next year, the organization announced Tuesday.

The appointment follows three years of intense speculation about who would succeed Gustavo Dudamel to oversee the influential orchestra, including concerts at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, The Ford and with Youth Orchestra Los Angeles.

Harding’s tenure starts in the 2027-28 L.A. Phil season. The Oxford-born conductor is currently music director of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Italy and is well-known in L.A. as a guest conductor.

“ Daniel is a musician favorite during his last couple of times here during that Hollywood Bowl,” Kim Noltemy, L.A. Phil president and CEO, told LAist’s AirTalk Tuesday. “ He's a brilliant musician. He is absolutely committed to the idea of music education and helping develop the audiences of the future.”

Harding said in a statement Tuesday that making music with LA Phil musicians is a thrill and inspiration.

“So many great artists have found possibilities here that don’t exist anywhere else, and I come to California full of excitement for what we will discover and create together,” Harding said.

Harding will be the creative lead behind a team of acclaimed musicians, according to the L.A. Phil.

“This is gonna be the ultimate dream team,” Noltemy told AirTalk.

Esa-Pekka Salonen introduces Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, then 26, back in 2007 as his successor.

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That includes Dudamel, who has led the orchestra since 2009 and will make his debut as the director of the New York Philharmonic this year. He was appointed last week as LA Phil’s artistic and cultural laureate.

It also includes LA Phil creative director Esa-Pekka Salonen, who was the Phil's music director for 17 years between 1992 and 2009, conductor-in-residence Anna Handler, creative chair John Adams and others.

“We are taking a non-traditional approach to all of the artistic strategy — essentially by having a team of brilliant people working together to create a season that really inspires people and meets various audiences where they are,” Noltemy said.

Harding will conduct eight weeks of programming in his inaugural 2027-28 season, according to the LA Phil. That will increase to 12 weeks of programming in the seasons to follow.

Listen to the interview

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

When it comes to California’s climate future, the most important figure in the state’s chaotic governor’s race may not be any of the candidates on the debate stage. It may not even be outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom, or President Donald Trump.

Instead, it might just be Chevron, the multinational oil company that was founded in the Golden State more than 100 years ago. It is among the largest producers, refiners, and sellers of petroleum products in a state rapidly shifting toward electric vehicles. Depending on which candidate is talking, the company is an example of how Big Oil is strangling consumers or an example of how climate regulations are strangling the state economy.

The behemoth — it reported $12.3 billion in profit last year — took the spotlight last month when an interviewer asked leading Democratic candidate Xavier Becerra about Chevron’s contributions to his campaign. The former state attorney general and Biden-era health secretary gave what seemed to be a candid response:

“Chevron, that’s the problem with politics. They’re not the bad guy. Does everybody here drive an electric vehicle? You need Chevron. I need Chevron. My people of the state of California need Chevron … Chevron wants to give me a check, that’s — that’s their prerogative.”

The phrase “I need Chevron” soon appeared in anti-Becerra videos by the likes of climate hawk Jane Fonda, implying that the candidate was saying he needs Chevron to get elected. Progressive billionaire Tom Steyer, Becerra’s lead Democratic opponent, urged him to return the contribution and said he is “doing [the] bidding” of Big Oil. Representative Katie Porter, another leading Democrat, said in a statement that she “hasn’t made millions off Big Oil or taken their checks.”

Becerra is not entirely wrong. California consumes around 13 billion gallons of gasoline annually, all of it specifically formulated to meet the state’s stringent clean air standards. Most of it comes from just six refineries, and Chevron owns two that account for one-third of the state’s production. That gives the company and its peers tremendous leverage. But California’s gas consumption has declined by about 15% from a peak in 2004 due to improved fuel economy in conventional vehicles and growing adoption of electric vehicles. It could fall by half over the next two decades.

The primary is June 2. The challenge for the next governor will be to continue the energy transition while retaining the infrastructure needed to move and refine oil. This has never been accomplished in a place as large as California, which was the world’s fifth-largest economy in 2025. The risks are tremendous: If the state moves too quickly, it could create shortages and price spikes for drivers already paying the highest prices in the country. If it moves too slowly, it could lock in decades of air pollution and hinder global climate progress.

“It’s messy,” said Emily Grubert. She is a civil engineer and sociologist at Notre Dame who has studied fossil fuel transitions and advised the state government on oil infrastructure. “As soon as you realize that actually transitioning away from fossil fuels means you have to close things, people get really freaked out.”

Newsom spent much of his governorship going after Big Oil, an effort that included a series of executive actions to restrict fracking in Kern County oil fields. When the war in Ukraine sent gas prices surging, Newsom and Democrats in the Legislature passed a series of bills to stop what he called “price gouging.” These laws empowered a new oil-focused watchdog agency, created a tool that could impose refinery price caps, and required refineries to maintain certain storage reserves, all of which cut profit margins for Chevron and others. The new refinery rules added to multiple carbon taxes that make selling gasoline in California more expensive.

However, there is some evidence refiners have overcharged Californians. Even after accounting for state taxes, environmental fees, and production costs, a gap remains between gas prices in the Golden State and everywhere else. This gap appeared in 2015 after a refinery fire in Torrance and has come to be known as the “mystery gasoline surcharge.” It now averages about $1. Last fall, a state regulator concluded that refiners’ monopoly power may be the reason for the price spikes.

Oil companies accused Newsom of trying to regulate them out of existence, and many threatened to leave. Two major refiners, Wilmington and Benicia, announced last year that they would close their operations, forcing a state that already imports about 60 percent of its oil to rely on imports of gasoline refined in Asia. Chevron relocated its corporate headquarters from the San Francisco suburb of San Ramon to Houston in 2024, and it has delivered a series of ominous warnings this year as climate regulators have revised the state’s almost 15-year-old carbon tax.

“The proposed regulation will cripple the survivability of the state’s remaining refineries, which will result in California losing the entire industry,” Andy Walls, the president of Chevron’s refinery business, wrote in an open letter to Newsom in March. The implication was clear: unless you relax your regulations, we will leave the state and strand you without gasoline. That would mean paying Asian refiners to produce more of the state’s specific blend, at significant cost.

The Newsom administration spent much of 2025 trying to work out a grand bargain with the industry. The Legislature eased rules governing drilling in Kern County oil fields, helping maintain a stable supply of crude to refineries, It also delayed implementing a refinery profit cap, and allowed the temporary sale of gasoline with higher concentrations of ethanol. The state’s climate regulator has also suggested giving refineries free allowances under the state’s cap-and-trade system, even if it means less money for big projects like high-speed rail and sustainable housing. The idea is to give investors enough certainty that they’re willing to remain in California even as the state uses less gasoline.

Experts believe it will take a lot more than that to manage inevitable changes.

“You actually can’t have a smooth and safe and effective transition without some form of coordinating function for that decline,” said Grubert. She believes a degree of state ownership of refineries will be necessary to keep facilities open if they stop being profitable. The wrong approach, she says, would be to respond to each potential a refinery closure with ad hoc subsidies and state support, since that would allow refiners to extort the state one by one. 

That point was reinforced this month by a report from the California Energy Commission that has not received much notice. The analysis of the state’s shaky fuel system found that “California cannot sustainably manage this transition through repeated crisis interventions at an asset-by-asset level.” It suggested options that included “legal obligations to operate,” “centralized planning of closures,” and “direct state management or ownership of assets.”

The Iran war will accelerate a decline in both the supply of, and demand for, oil. Gas retailers like Chevron are already struggling to find additional imports of refined fuel, and some experts predict shortages if the Strait of Hormuz does not open within weeks. Meanwhile, electric vehicles continue gaining market share, and Newsom plans to roll out subsidies for them this year. Wider adoption of these vehicles, and hybrids, will further crimp demand, making any remaining refineries more likely to shutter.

Chevron’s Kern River Oil Field near Bakersfield is one of the largest oil fields in California. The state’s climate policies have helped reduce gasoline demand by more than 15 percent over the past decade.

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All of this helps explain the showdown between the leading Democrats in the governor’s race, who are each trying to find a lane in a field that at one time included more than 50 candidates.

Becerra has given lip service to clean energy, but many public statements suggest a friendliness toward oil producers. As attorney general, he initiated a few lawsuits against petroleum companies, and supported other state climate lawsuits, but punted on major investigations. He has focused his gubernatorial campaign on vows to fight Donald Trump and protect healthcare, and has made controversial promises to freeze utility and insurance rates. On decarbonization, he has noted that “climate action only succeeds if it is affordable, reliable, and fair.”

After the chaos of the early primary, many oil producers have decided that Becerra is their candidate. Chevron last month contributed the maximum allowable amount of $39,200 to his campaign, the first time in a decade it has backed a gubernatorial candidate. Last week, the company contributed another $500,000 to an independent political committee supporting Becerra. California Resources Corporation, the state’s largest driller, also gave $500,000 to a Becerra committee. And gas companies like Sempra are among the donors to an anti-Steyer political committee that has raised more than $24 million.

Steyer, meanwhile, has made attacking Big Oil the focus of his campaign, as it was during his 2020 presidential run. He says he would lower gas prices by activating the refining profit cap that Newsom has declined to use, investigating what is causing high gas prices (something the state has already done), and taxing private jet fuel. When refineries “inevitably” close, he says he will stockpile an oil reserve and import more refined fuel for as long as California needs it.

Steyer has also had to address his own fossil fuel ties. The hedge fund he founded, Farallon Capital, remains a major player in coal power finance abroad, including in Indonesia and Australia. Steyer still holds a stake in the firm, which he left in 2012, but his campaign says he no longer receives dividends from its fossil fuel investments.

California uses a “jungle primary” in which the top two candidates advance to the general election, regardless of party. The latest poll shows Becerra essentially tied with former Fox News host Steve Hilton, a Republican, with Steyer trailing at around 15 percent. The most likely outcome is that one of Becerra or Steyer will make it to the general election. (The other Democrats, including Porter and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, trail behind in the double digits.)

Railing against Big Oil has long proven to be good politics in California. But in the wake of Trump’s second election victory, Democrats have sought to downplay climate issues and focus instead on affordability. The question in the governor’s race is how best to achieve that in the long run. Is it better to use a bully pulpit against companies like Chevron in an effort to break their market power, or conciliate them in the hope that they don’t flee?

Mike Madrid, a veteran California political operative, believes Becerra’s approach will resonate more with the young and Latinos, both of whom often decide statewide elections.

“This attack on Chevron, it works for the base Steyer already has,” he said. “Young Latino working-class men are the demographic most affected by gas prices. Do you think they’re saying we need to get rid of Chevron? Of course not.”

Steyer’s campaign may not get him over the line in the primary, but he has at least been consistent. In a 2013 blog post for this very publication, he celebrated the result of the Virginia governor’s race, where a climate-focused Democrat beat a fossil-fuel friendly Republican with help from Steyer’s own war chest.

“A new political dynamic is emerging,” he wrote at the time. “Climate change is a winner, not a loser,” and is “no longer electoral Kryptonite.”

If Chevron has its way, next week’s primary results will prove otherwise.

California foster youth and children who have lost a parent to COVID can now apply for a trust fund to help them begin their adult lives.

The Hope, Opportunity, Perseverance and Empowerment (HOPE) program, created by the state Legislature in 2022, will invest $3,000 per child in a trust fund that they can access when they are 18. About 56,000 children could benefit from this program, according to a state press release.

“For California’s most vulnerable children, early financial support can help counter the long-term impacts of poverty and instability, and create a foundation for long-term financial security,” said California State Treasurer Fiona Ma, who serves as chair of HOPE. “HOPE is designed to provide that equitable access and make a lasting impact.”

Children who have spent at least 18 months in foster care or have had family reunification services terminated, and children who have lost a parent or primary caregiver to COVID can apply for funds at hopeaccount.ca.gov.

For more information, contact HopeForChildren@treasurer.ca.gov.