The Brief

The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing has reached iconic status long before its scheduled completion in Agoura Hills by the end of 2025. Not only will it be the largest bridge of its kind for wild animals to traverse in and out of the Santa Monica Mountains, it also has a Hollywood ready mascot in the late P-22. To top it off, the bridge has inspired a Lego set — before a single mountain lion has even set foot atop the decade-in-the-making structure, whose construction has required expertise from across a range of disciplines.

"We have everyone from wildlife biologist to horticulturalist to [expertise in] engineering [and] architecture," said Robert Rock from Living Habitats, the landscape architecture firm in Chicago that is designing the entire project. "We've got a soil scientist, a soil biologist, a mycologist."

A rendering of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, slated for completion in 2025.

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Courtesy of National Wildlife Foundation

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The Lego model of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing.

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Courtesy of Living Habitats

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As the folks responsible for the look, feel, functionality and the ecology of the real-life crossing, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Rock and his team are also behind its humbler, and admittedly a smidge less complex, Lego counterpart.

Disclaimer: if you want to get your hands on a set, you'd first need to cast your vote for the project — 10,000 supporters are needed — before Lego would consider mass-producing the set.

The Lego idea

The idea to create a Lego version of the wildlife crossing came to Rock on a muggy August day in 2022, when he was at the zoo in Chicago with his son. To escape the heat, Rock went into the air-conditioned gift shop, and on the display case were boxes of Lego sitting next to a few animal figurines.

"I had this kind of light bulb turn on in my head and I thought, 'huh, well, maybe we could create a Lego version of the crossing just as something fun,'" Rock said.

He knew just the guy to help make it happen — an old college buddy named Martin Egemo, who has picked up Lego as a hobby, someone who's built intricate sets and models off his imagination.

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Courtesy of Living Habitats

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"I still remember that [day]. Rob called me and he's like, 'Hey, I've got this crazy idea. What do you think?'" said Egemo, who's known in the Lego community as TMX. "I just thought, yes, this sounds awesome."

The building process

Over the next year, the team started to design and build their Lego crossing, a process that gave Egemo a crash course in the painstaking work done by Rock and Living Habitats to make the real-life crossing a reality. In exchange, he said, "I was able to help show them what Lego is capable of doing."

Like many creative challenges, the first order of business to making a Lego model from scratch was to understand the parameters.

"Honestly one of the biggest challenges was that we had to pick a scale to work in the Lego universe," Rock said.

"How big are we going to go with this? What is our true goal? What are we trying to showcase?" Egemo said.

A question Rock had posed to Egemo early in the process was whether the Denmark-based toy giant would ever consider manufacturing their set commercially. The answer from Egemo was yes, but only if they enter it into something called Lego Ideas, where 10,000 upvotes from the public will trigger an internal review of the project by the company.

The Lego model of the wildlife crossing features trees and animals that are part of the Southern California landscape.

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Courtesy of Living Habitats

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One of the competition's requirements is that a submission has to be made up of under 3,000 parts. Using that as a baseline, Rock and Egemo began to figure out other aspects of the model — which details to lose, which to amplify — down to how the layers of soil should look like at the bridge's cross-section.

"Our goal isn't to show 10 lanes of the freeway. Our goal is to really showcase all the different types of plants that they are going to source that came from the area itself. So we've got to use the right colors, the right shapes and sizes," Egemo said. "What are the animals that are going to be crossing this? How can we get those animals included?"

Egemo said he made a down-and-dirty prototype. "I just took Lego and started kind of playing around," he said.

Egemo's Iowa home office during the Lego build.

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Martin Egemo

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Then Rock and his team took what he did, supercharged the design and created a digital model that came with instructions on how to piece together the more than 2,300 Lego parts needed for the build.

"I think we had to go to something like 14 or 15 different vendors because of some of the colors that we used," Rock said. "You've got a lot of ochres and olive colors in the landscape. Finding those colors within the Lego world, sometimes that was a little bit challenging."

Soon, bags and bags of the bricks arrived at Egemo's home in Des Moines, Iowa. Organizing them alone — and by color — took between 10 to 12 hours.

Egemo estimated the construction itself took 16 to 20 hours over the course of about 10 days. The final product weighed in between 10 to 15 pounds, at a dimension of 23 by 10 by 8 inches.

Rock remembers seeing the finished model at Egemo's home for first time.

"In the line of work that I do, we understand scale, we understand the size of things," Rock said. "Seeing that in person, seeing the scale of it, the degree of specificity and the technical process that [Egemo] had to go through, I was kind of in shock."

The debut

The model was finished shortly before this year's P-22 Day festival held at Griffith Park in October, where Rock and Egemo had planned to unveil their miniature creation.

The two friends drove from Iowa to Los Angeles with the Lego crossing in the back of the SUV, because they had decided against shipping it. "Lego's strong, but we didn't glue anything," Egemo said.

Caltrans workers working on the construction of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing

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Courtesy of Caltrans

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On their way, they picked up a bunch of Lego for kids attending the festival to build their own versions of the real-life crossing.

"I'm not sure that there's a better way to tell the story of all of the passion that's bound up in this hopeful project than to imagine it through the ingenuity of a child, right?" Rock said.

As to Egemo, he finally got to see the inspiration behind his and Rock's yearlong passion project, as the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing sprouted to life from the 101.

"That was so cool driving on the freeway, seeing the construction in process, and knowing that in some way I'm a part of this, and it made it even more real," Egemo said.

Topline:

The case: In September, the city settled a lawsuit brought forward by two brothers in their 70s who said they suffered serious injuries after an LAPD officer crashed into their car. Days before the $18 million settlement was reached, lawyers for the brothers said Feldstein Soto called an expert witness testifying for the plaintiffs and “attempted to ingratiate herself with him and asked him to make a contribution to her political campaign,” according to a sworn declaration to the court by the plaintiffs’ attorney, Robert Glassman.

The response: Feldstein Soto did not respond to an interview request. Her spokesperson said the settlement “had nothing to do” with the expert witness. Her campaign manager told LAist the city attorney had been making a routine fundraising call and did not know the person had a role in the case, nor that there were pending requests for her office to pay him fees.

What Jurado says: In a statement to LAist, Jurado said she wants to “make sure that the city’s legal leadership is guided by integrity and accountability, especially when their choices affect public trust, civic rights and the city’s limited resources."

What’s next: The motion needs to go through a few committees before reaching the full City Council. If it passes, the motion calls for the city attorney to “report to council in closed session within 45 days regarding the ethics breach violation and give updates to the City Council."

Every year in Santa Ana, Luis Cantabrana turns the front of his home into an elaborate altar in honor of La Virgen de Guadalupe that draws hundreds of visitors.

Along the front of the house, the multi-colored altar is filled with lights, flowers and a stained-glass tapestry behind a sculpture of the Lady of Guadalupe. Cantabrana’s roof also is lit up with the green, white and red lights that spell out “Virgen de Guadalupe” and a cross.

Visitors are welcomed with music and the smell of roses as they celebrate the saint, but this year’s gathering comes after a dark year for immigrant communities.

Luis Cantabrana stands in front of the stunning altar he built in front of his home in honor of La Virgen de Guadalupe. Every year, his display draws hundreds of visitors.

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Destiny Torres

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LAist

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Why do they celebrate? 

In 1513, the Virgin Mary appeared before St. Juan Diego between Dec. 9 and Dec. 12, asking him to build a church in her honor. Her image — a brown-skinned woman wearing a green veil with her hands together in prayer and an angel at her feet — miraculously appeared on his cloak.

To celebrate in Santa Ana, worshippers gathered late-night Wednesday and in the very early hours Dec. 12 to pray the rosary, sing hymns and celebrate the saint.

Cantabrana has hosted worshippers at his home for 27 years — 17 in Santa Ana.

The altar started out small, he said, and over the years, he added a fabric background, more lights and flowers (lots and lots of flowers).

“It started with me making a promise to la Virgen de Guadalupe that while I had life and a home to build an altar, that I would do it,” Cantabrana said. “Everything you see in photos and videos is pretty, but when you come and see it live, it's more than pretty. It's beautiful.”

The Santa Ana home's elaborate altar in honor of La Virgen de Guadalupe draws hundreds of visitors each year.

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Destiny Torres

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LAist

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Gathering in a time of turmoil 

Many also look to the Lady of Guadalupe for protection, especially at a time when federal enforcement has rattled immigrant communities.

“People don’t want to go to work, they don’t want to take their kids to school, but the love we have for our Virgen de Guadalupe,” Cantabrana said. “We see that la Virgen de Guadalupe has a lot of power, and so we know immigration [enforcement] won’t come here.”

Margarita Lopez of Garden Grove has been visiting the altar for three years with her husband. She’s been celebrating the Virgencita since she was a young girl. Honoring the saint is as important now as ever, she said.

“We ask, and she performs miracles,” Lopez said.

Claudia Tapia, a lifelong Santa Ana resident, said the Virgin Mary represents strength.

“Right now, with everything going on, a lot of our families [have] turned and prayed to the Virgen for strength during these times,” Tapia said. “She's a very strong symbol of Mexican culture, of unity, of faith and of resilience.”

See it for yourself

The shrine will stay up into the new year on the corner of Broadway and Camile Street.

California’s unemployment agency kept paying cellphone bills for 4 1/2 years without checking whether its workers actually were using the devices.

That’s how it racked up $4.6 million in fees for mobile devices its workers were not using, according to a new state audit detailing wasteful spending at several government agencies.

The Employment Development Department’s excessive cellphone bills date to the COVID-19 pandemic, when it shifted call center employees to remote work and faced pressure to release benefits to millions of suddenly unemployed Californians.

It acquired 7,224 cellphones and wireless hotspots by December 2020. State auditors analyzed 54 months of invoices since then and found half the devices were unused for at least two years, 25% were unused for three years and 99 of them were never used at all.

The investigation, which auditors opened after receiving a tip, identified 6,285 devices that were unused for at least four consecutive months, and said the department spent $4.6 million on monthly service fees for them.

From the beginning, the department had about 2,000 more cellphones than call center employees, according to the audit. The gap widened over time after the pandemic ended and the department’s staffing returned to its normal headcount.

As of April, the audit said the department had 1,787 unemployment call center employees, but was paying monthly service fees for 5,097 mobile devices.

“Although obtaining the mobile devices during COVID-19 may have been a good idea to serve the public, continuing to pay the monthly service fees for so many unused devices, especially post-COVID-19, was wasteful,” the audit said.

Department officials told auditors they were unaware of the spending, but auditors pointed to regular invoices from Verizon that showed which phones were not being used.

“We would have expected EDD management to have reconsidered the need to pay the monthly service fees for so many devices that had no voice, message, or data usage,” the audit said.

The unemployment department began acting on the auditors’ findings in April, when it canceled service plans for 2,825 devices. It has since implemented a policy to terminate service plans for devices that go unused for 90 days.

The California state auditor highlighted the mobile devices in its regular report on “improper activities by state agencies and employees.” The audit also showed that the California Air Resources Board overpaid an employee who was on extended leave as he prepared to retire by $171,000.

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