The Brief

Jets are blazing across the sky in and around Huntington Beach on the first day of the Pacific Airshow that starts Friday and continues over this weekend.

In recent years, more than half a million visitors have come out to watch eye-and-ear popping aerial demonstrations from the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds and other renowned daredevils.

The event has also become a political lightning rod in the increasingly fractious beach city.

Why opinions are divided

Some say the airshow promoter got a suspiciously sweet deal in a recent legal settlement with the city. Others say Huntington Beach should support the airshow, and its hometown promoter, in any way it can.

At issue are questions of political quid pro quo, transparency and how cities determine whether and how much to support special events put on by private companies.

The backstory

Fans watch the 2021 Pacific Airshow in Huntington Beach.

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Michael Heiman

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Here’s a guide to what happened, why this matters for residents and what’s to come.

First the shorthand timeline:

• In October 2021, the city canceled the final day of the three-day airshow after oil began gushing from an underwater pipeline and moving toward the Huntington Beach shoreline. 

• A year later, in October 2022, airshow organizer Kevin Elliott sued the city, saying the previous year's cancellation amounted to a breach of contract. Elliott also supported the election of new city council members who promised to support the airshow. 

• Then, earlier this year, that new city council majority approved a minimum $5.4 million settlement with Elliott plus a potential additional $2 million if the city recoups money from the companies responsible for the oil spill. 

About Huntington Beach politics

The strong and distinct reactions to the deal from residents and officials in this city of 200,000 residents illustrate intensifying political divisions. While Huntington Beach is traditionally conservative, the electorate had been trending more purple in recent years. Then, in November, voters handed a solid victory to four ardently conservative candidates.

Huntington Beach Mayor Tony Strickland, a Republican former state legislator who ran Larry Elder's 2020 presidential campaign, said the settlement was good for the city.

"Anything that brings in $70 million to our local economy, that's worth it," Strickland said, referring to an economic impact report on the 2022 airshow.

On the other side, City Councilmember Dan Kalmick, one of three Democrats on the council, said Huntington Beach taxpayers got a "horrible deal." He and the other two Democrats on the council voted against the airshow settlement.

"The settlement, as publicized, goes well beyond any exposure the city had for cancellation of one day of an airshow, which it didn't even do," Kalmick said. He said multiple authorities — state, federal and local — agreed the airshow had to be canceled so that monitoring and clean-up crews could get to work.

Kevin Elliott, organizer of the Pacific Airshow and CEO of event company Code Four.

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What the airshow organizer says

Elliott, for his part, says he regrets that the airshow has gotten wrapped up in local politics. (We should note that after we published this story, it was announced that former President Donald Trump would do a flyover as part of Friday’s airshow lineup. Trump is on his way to the California Republican Party convention in Anaheim.)

Elliot told us that, at heart, he's a "plane brain" who's especially excited this year to watch the F-22 Raptor do "things that an airplane shouldn't do, including flying backwards and all kinds of really cool stuff."

"I just want to put on a great event and I want to go back to running my business and having a good time," he told LAist. "And staying out of the newspaper. That would be my goal."

The start of the problems: The oil spill

On Friday, Oct. 1, 2021 coastal authorities got a call reporting an oil sheen off the coast of Huntington Beach. Amplify Energy, ultimately responsible for the spill, later said it found out Saturday morning about the pipeline leak from one of its offshore oil platforms.

A worker with Patriot Environmental Services stands near bags of oil collected throughout Sunday morning near the mouth of the Santa Ana River and Talbert Marsh.

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Jill Replogle

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LAist

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That same Saturday, the Pacific Airshow went on, as planned as local officials tried to understand the extent of the oil spill and whether and when it might reach shore. By afternoon, boaters watching the airshow from the ocean began reporting oil in the water.

City and state parks authorities closed the water at many of the area beaches to swimming and surfing.

That evening, then-Huntington Beach Mayor Kim Carr appeared at a news conference with the city's marine safety chief, Eric McCoy, and several other officials. Carr said a decision about whether to cancel the third and final day of the airshow would be made the following morning.

At the time, the leak was estimated to be around 126,000 gallons of oil, which McCoy said was considered a major spill by the U.S. Coast Guard. Later estimates revised that down to a much smaller amount, around 25,000 gallons.

On Sunday morning, Oct. 3, 2021, the city announced that the airshow was canceled "in order to facilitate clean-up coordination efforts, and given the potential health impacts from the ongoing situation."

Beaches were closed and remediation workers were dispatched to mop up the oil that had already washed up on the shore and into several sensitive wetland areas. The coast reeked of petroleum.

A sign keeps beachgoers off the sand.

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Jill Replogle

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LAist

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Impact of the 2021 cancellation

The airshow cancellation was devastating for Elliott. "It was probably one of the worst days of my professional life," Elliott said. "What we had put together in 2021 was essentially the Super Bowl of air shows."

Plus, the previous year, 2020, the entire airshow had been canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Elliott, who also runs an event company called Code Four, said he lost "in the multi-millions" the day of the oil spill. "We put over $750,000 worth of catering in the trash," he said.

It was also upsetting for patrons, some of whom had spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on premium tickets for the last day of the show.

The airshow is free to watch from part of the city beach and nearby state beaches. But Elliott also sells tickets, for example, for seating on the Huntington Beach pier or for a private cabana on the beach. This year, prices range from $25 to more than $5,000 for a group.

Elliott said he eventually reimbursed everyone who had bought tickets "out of my own pocket."

The legal battle that followed

The following year, 2022, Elliott asked the city to give him a break on some of the fees and other expenses involved with putting on the airshow — as the city had in previous years. Specifically, the city had previously credited Elliott up to $110,000 in parking revenue generated over the airshow weekend toward his bill for permits, reserved parking, and extra public safety staff needed for the event.

Elliott's city bill for the 2022 airshow, according to a presentation at the time, was expected to be around $257,000.

This time, though, Elliott made a last-minute request that all of the city's parking revenue generated by the airshow be credited toward his bill, with no cap.

The city council at the time denied his request by a vote of 6 to 1 and decided to revoke the parking credit completely. City officials and staff at the time noted that Huntington Beach didn't grant this kind of credit to the organizers of any other big events in the city, including the U.S. Open of Surfing, which has drawn crowds similar in size to the airshow, although over a longer period of time.

Former Councilmember Mike Posey told LAist the parking "subsidy … was always supposed to be temporary" until Elliott could attract a corporate sponsor for the airshow. A smaller, previous iteration of the airshow, before Elliott took it over, was sponsored by Swiss watchmaker Breitling.

But Elliott saw the city's decision to revoke the parking subsidy as the latest in a series of efforts, starting with the 2021 post-oil spill cancellation, to shut the airshow down.

The following month, Elliott sued the city and then-Mayor Carr.

In his complaint, he alleged the 2021 cancellation amounted to a breach of contract and damaged the airshow's reputation. He also claimed that subsequent actions taken by Carr and the city, including removing the parking subsidy, were retaliation for Elliott raising concerns about the cancellation.

Elliott told LAist he felt slighted after investing heavily in the airshow to try and make it profitable and to bring tourism benefits to the city.

"I wish that the city had come forth and said, 'Hey, you've been a great partner to the city, you're a local kid … we understand that you've been damaged by this and we want to try to do the right thing.' But instead they basically told me to pound sand and left me with no choice but to protect my interests."

Initially, the city tried to get the lawsuit dismissed, claiming it had no factual basis. But then it seemed to do an abrupt about-face, settling with Elliott for at least $5.4 million, to be paid out incrementally through January 2029. What changed?

How the air show became a hot-button campaign issue

A seat on the Huntington Beach city council is generally considered a non-partisan position — a candidate's political party is not listed on the ballot. But Huntington Beach had traditionally had a conservative-leaning council. That changed after the 2020 election, but not the way you might think.

Tito Ortiz, a mixed martial arts fighter and staunch conservative, won a seat on the council in 2020 and then resigned six months later. In his place, the council appointed left-leaning attorney Rhonda Bolton, giving Huntington Beach's city government a majority Democrat block.

They passed pro-housing measures and voted to fly the Pride flag outside city hall every June — with the support of the council's moderate Republicans. A backlash ensued.

A group of residents attempted to recall six of the seven council members in 2021. But the effort failed to make it to the ballot. They set their sights on the 2022 general election.

The Lincoln Club and several other conservative political action committees coalesced around a slate of four conservative council candidates — Strickland, Casey McKeon, Pat Burns and Gracey Van Der Mark — dubbed by supporters the "Fab 4," plus city attorney Michael Gates, who was running for re-election. (Huntington Beach is one of the few cities in California where voters elect their city attorney.)

They paid for mailers and signs saying the candidates would "save" Huntington Beach — and "save" the airshow.

On Oct. 27, 2022, the candidates held a "victory rally" at the Huntington Beach pier. Elliott's company, Code Four, provided the sound and some of the signage for the rally, he said.

Elliott said the work was "pretty simple" and cost him less than the $1,089 that the four city council candidates claimed as in-kind contributions in campaign finance disclosures.

Elliott did not donate money directly to any of the four council candidates or city attorney Gates. (His company Code Four did give money, the maximum $4,900 allowed, to the 2022 winning campaigns of state Republican state legislators Diane Dixon and Janet Nguyen.)

"Franky, I supported them as much as I could without creating any kind of a conflict of interest for them," Elliott said of the council candidates. "Because, you know, they campaigned on saving the air show and I've invested millions and millions of dollars in saving this air show for the city, so our interests were pretty aligned in that regard."

But looking back — post-election and post-airshow settlement — some political opponents and civic watchdogs see the rally and Elliott's work on it as part of a suspicious pattern.

"I have substantial questions about the relationship between the four newly elected council members, the city attorney and Elliott," said Kalmick, one of the liberal council members.

Kalmick also pointed to several photos from the 2022 airshow posted to Facebook showing Elliott and his wife posing on the beach with the "Fab 4" candidates. (Elliott said he regularly invites candidates, council members and many others to the show, "Democrats, Republicans, my mom's friends, you know, my friends that were my teachers in the first grade.")

All four council candidates and city attorney Gates won their election in November.

The settlement and concerns about quid pro quo

In March 2023, Gates, the city attorney, filed a request in Orange County Superior Court to have Elliott's airshow cancellation lawsuit dismissed. Gates and deputy city attorney Lauren Rose argued that the city was "legally permitted to cancel the Airshow due to unforeseen circumstances rendering performance impossible due to health and safety reasons."

They also said this about Elliott's claim that revoking the parking subsidy was retaliation: "it is speculative and unsubstantiated how this was in any way connected to [Elliott's] negative comments regarding the City's reaction to the unexpected and disastrous oil spill."

But less than two months later, Gates, Elliott, Strickland and two of the other conservative council members held a news conference announcing a settlement. "Ladies and gentlemen, we saved the airshow," Strickland said to applause.

"The previous city council was not business-friendly and not airshow-friendly," he went on. "The Fab 4 …saved the airshow by putting the hard work and leadership required to solve this conflict."

In dollars, what they put in is $4,999,999 of city funds spread out over seven years, with the first payment of $1,999,000 due before July 31.

The city also agreed to:

• Forfeit $194,945 in fees still owed by Elliott for the 2021 airshow.
• Refund him $149,200 from the 2022 airshow, when the city council declined to give him the parking subsidy. 
• Reinstate the parking subsidy, starting at a minimum, rather than maximum, of $110,000. Plus, waive parking fees for up to 600 spaces for airshow setup and takedown.
• Pay Elliott up to an additional $2 million of any money the city recovers from the oil companies responsible for the 2021 spill. 

Those are the details in the settlement summary released to the public. Gates has declined to make the full settlement public, raising questions about what else the city may have agreed to.

A legal push for more transparency

Gina Clayton-Tarvin, a local school board member and former city council candidate, has sued Gates under state public records law in an effort to get the full settlement released.

Gates told LAist earlier this year that he hasn't released the full settlement agreement because there's still pending litigation in the airshow saga and doing so could compromise the city's position in that litigation. "But if a judge were to order the release of [the settlement], I'm happy to release it," Gates said.

Both sides of the settlement say it was a tough negotiation and neither side got everything they wanted. "We get a lot more as a city than we're giving out," Strickland said. "It's not even a close call."

Earlier this year, a former Huntington Beach mayor and a former planning commissioner tried to intervene to halt the settlement agreement. Thus far, they haven't been successful, although Lee Fink, a lawyer working with them, has said they haven't given up.

At the same time, Elliott hasn't dropped his lawsuit against former Mayor Carr for her role in canceling the 2021 airshow. In his complaint, he said Carr "unilaterally" canceled the airshow because of her personal feelings towards Elliott, and in order to garner media attention to “further her own political career.”

Carr told LAist earlier this year that the claim was bogus. "He's created a completely fantastic tale of somehow I unilaterally canceled the air show," she said. "As the mayor of Huntington Beach, you do not have the authority to issue permits, consequently, you don't have the authority to cancel permits."

She said she didn't understand why the city would offer millions to settle what she called "an easily dismissible lawsuit." Then she corrected herself.

"Well, I do understand why the new council majority would settle. I mean, [Elliott] is their friend, their ally," Carr said. "To me, it smacks of corruption, definitely feels like a pay to play."

What about the oil company responsible for the spill that caused the 2021 airshow to be canceled? Amplify Energy recently settled a $45 million class action lawsuit with impacted businesses and property owners.

Elliott's company was not part of that settlement, but he said he's been "in very intensive pre-litigation settlement discussions" with the company.

The city of Huntington Beach also plans to pursue money from Amplify. How much could come back to city coffers after the Pacific Airshow gets its $2 million cut is unknown.

Fink, the lawyer, said his clients would likely be enjoying the airshow this weekend. "No one’s against the Airshow," he wrote in an email. "The Airshow will go on regardless of the litigation. But people are against a $7 Million giveaway to a political supporter under the guise of a settlement agreement in a frivolous case."

An outgoing California State University president, one of two administrators at the center of a multi-million dollar discrimination lawsuit, may transfer to a different Cal State job while the university pays his salary and benefits. The Cal State Board of Trustees will review the transition plan and decide whether to approve the president’s emeritus status Wednesday.

The proposed new job and salary for Cal State San Bernardino President Tomás Morales will be announced at the Wednesday meeting, according to Cal State spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith. Morales received $655,626 in pay and benefits in 2024, the most recent figure available from TransparentCalifornia.

Cal State recently spent $12 million settling the lawsuit in which two female employees at Cal State San Bernardino said they were harassed and discriminated against based on their gender by two male university administrators: Morales and former Palm Desert campus dean Jake Zhu. Cal State continues to deny any wrongdoing. Zhu is an emeritus faculty member, a title given as a gesture of appreciation for service contributed to the university, and Morales remains in good standing with the university.

Morales resigned at the end of the school year and, because of his good standing, is eligible to receive a coveted executive transition package with faculty retreat rights. That means he can continue to work as a university faculty member.

This Wednesday, a Cal State Board of Trustees committee will view a presentation on Morales’ transition plan. Later that day, the full board will discuss Chancellor Mildred Garcia’s recommendation to grant him the title of president emeritus.

A ‘cesspool of gender harassment and discrimination’

The two women, Clare Weber and Anissa Rogers, both formerly worked as high-ranking administrators at Cal State San Bernardino. Weber was appointed deputy provost and vice provost of Academic Affairs on the main campus in 2017, and Rogers served as associate dean at the satellite campus in Palm Desert starting in 2019. During the 2021-22 school year, Weber and Rogers each confronted their male supervisors with what they believed was strong evidence of a gender pay gap and sex-based bullying in their workplaces. Both were pressured to resign almost immediately, they alleged in a 2023 lawsuit that calls the Cal State system a “cesspool of gender harassment and discrimination.”

Rogers, then-associate dean at Palm Desert working under Zhu, was terrified a firing would ruin her reputation and career prospects, and agreed to resign. Weber, then-vice provost of academic affairs, refused and was fired.

In their joint lawsuit, they sued the Cal State Board of Trustees, Zhu and Morales.

“The lawsuit shows systemic, sexist bullying,” Weber said in an interview. “It was primarily from President Morales.”

Bentley-Smith said the university system has already thoroughly reviewed all of the lawsuit’s allegations and resolved the matter through the settlement.

Weber and Rogers have submitted a public comment to the board of trustees imploring them to scrutinize Morales’ “good standing” before approving the proposed transition plan.

Cal State president accused of berating women

The lawsuit alleged Morales was notorious for routinely harassing and acting aggressively toward female Cal State employees. He ranted at women, excessively criticized and undermined them, attempted to intimidate them, and held women to higher standards than men, the suit complaint read.

But faculty concerns about Morales began years before the lawsuit. A 2016 survey revealed that over 60% of Cal State San Bernardino employees felt the campus climate had worsened under Morales’ tenure. The faculty senate wrote in a 2017 resolution of “no confidence” in Morales’ performance that the survey results indicated an environment of toxicity, fear and distrust had formed under Morales’ tenure, which they added was rife with bullying, favoritism and retaliation.

Two months before his appointment as Cal State San Bernardino’s president in 2012, while Morales served as president of the College of Staten Island, more than half of that college’s senators also approved a resolution of “no confidence” in his leadership.

“It was a ‘his way or the highway’ vibe, particularly for women. I was berated and put down and yelled at. I had other colleagues that experienced the same thing,” Weber said.

Walking on eggshells around Morales caused her stress and made it difficult to do her job, Weber said.

“Sometimes I got to feeling isolated, like I was the only one, and I think probably other women did too,” Weber said.

In late May 2022, a California State University Employees Union study demonstrated that white male Cal State employees earn about 3% more than men of color, 5% more than white women and 7% more than women of color.

Weber wanted to see if a similar pattern applied to her job. She conducted research, consulted a compensation specialist in the campus’ human resources office, and determined that she was the lowest-paid female vice provost in the Cal State system. She also found that, with the exception of one female, and one male who made about $3,000 less than Weber, every female Cal State vice provost made less than every male vice provost.

Weber met with her boss, then-interim Provost Rafik Mohamed, in June 2022, where she planned to discuss her concerns over the pay gap she’d identified.

“I was scared,” she said. “I had my data, I had notes ahead of time. I wrote little encouraging messages to myself before I was in the meeting.”

At the same time, she felt she had reason to be hopeful. She’d just spearheaded and secured the university’s regional accreditation, kicked off a new strategic plan, and, only a few weeks before, earned the highest possible score on a mid-year performance review: “exceptional leadership.”

At the meeting, Mohamed attempted to assign her additional job duties, the suit alleged. In response, Weber asked for a 12% equity raise and suggested there was a pay disparity among genders at the university.

Mohamed told her he would pass the concerns along. Weber also emailed the university president, Morales, with the same raise request. Four weeks later, Mohamed told Weber she would have to resign, with Mohamed stating he “could not” work with Weber, the suit alleged.

Weber wrote an email to Morales protesting.

“I explicitly raised concerns that these female Vice Provosts were being paid less because of their gender,” she wrote. “I have been shocked and saddened that CSU’s response to my complaints was to subject me to unprecedented and unwarranted criticism and then – just a month later – ask me to ‘resign’ from my position. This is highly offensive and totally discriminatory, and retaliatory.”

She asked Morales to rescind the resignation request and open an investigation into the pay equity concerns.

Weber was fired the next day, she said. She retreated to a faculty position as required by her original appointment letter.

Mohamed did not respond to CalMatters’ request for comment.

Morales’ office referred CalMatters to the Cal State San Bernardino Office of Marketing and Communications, which did not respond to a request for comment.

Discrimination also alleged at Palm Desert campus

Cal State San Bernardino hired Rogers in 2019 as an associate dean — her dream job.

“When I interviewed, it was perfect,” Rogers said. “Then I quickly realized that I had just been immersed in hell.”

From day one, Rogers said she perceived the culture at San Bernardino’s Palm Desert campus as male-driven and discriminatory. The campus dean, Zhu, stuck out to her in particular with his penchant for screaming at people, especially women.

Men who worked for him would model his behaviors in his presence and at staff meetings, even those who were normally kind and supportive, Rogers said. Women struggled to speak up in meetings without being interrupted, yelled at, called “too emotional” and “sensitive,” or belittled, she said. By contrast, men were always treated with respect, she said. Eventually, Rogers said she gave up presenting her own ideas and began sneaking them in through a male colleague, from whom the ideas were often accepted.

In addition, several employees declared in the lawsuit under penalty of perjury that Zhu would publicly treat Rogers like a secretary or assistant, though she was the second-highest ranking employee on the satellite campus.

“It was awful,” Rogers said. “I hated going to work every day. My anxiety increased. I was constantly on guard.”

Tensions boiled over at an informal meeting with the dean and several of Rogers’ colleagues in October 2021, at which Rogers was not present. According to various attendees who reported back to Rogers during the meeting via text and later that day in person, several men ganged up on a female interim associate dean, interrogating her for around 25 minutes about her preparations for an upcoming campus visit with a Cal State trustee. Zhu watched the verbal onslaught and did not act, various female employees who walked out of the meeting in protest alleged.

That same day, Rogers approached Zhu in his office and told him Cal State needed to do a better job at disrupting sexism. Zhu told her she could train the men to behave differently, the suit states, though the male employees involved reported to the dean. Zhu told a different faculty member who complained to him about the meeting, social work department chair Deirdre Lanesskog, that the men were probably just trying to impress him, the suit alleged.

An employee said under penalty of perjury in the lawsuit that Jolene Koester, who served as Cal State’s interim chancellor from 2022 to 2023, worked for Cal State to “coach” Zhu in late October 2021. A few days after approaching Zhu, Rogers also reported to Koester that Zhu exhibited sexist conduct and bullying.

In November 2021, Mohamed instructed Rogers to tell colleagues she was resigning, citing a “leadership issue” he did not elaborate on, according to the lawsuit. He told her that was her only option if she hoped for career advancement, the suit states. On January 1, 2022, she resigned and retreated to faculty.

“I call it fired,” Rogers said. “They told me, ‘Either leave or you will be fired.’”

The joint lawsuit by Weber and Rogers split into two trial proceedings. A jury awarded Rogers $6 million in damages in October 2025 and Weber settled for $6 million in lieu of a trial. In court, Zhu defended his leadership techniques and said he treated everybody in the same way.

“I raised voices to make a point, to change the tones, not in the malicious way or discriminatory way,” he said according to court transcripts.

While testifying, Mohamed admitted that he did not report various complaints regarding Zhu’s alleged gender mistreatment because he saw the accusations as “low-grade bias,” despite being a mandated reporter of sexual harassment under Cal State policy.

“Everybody has bias. We all harbor biases that are just ingrained in us from how we’re socialized, how we are brought up, the environments that we were reared in,” Mohamed said. “The allegation of bias in and of itself, in my view, does not require a reporting of bias, an alleged bias to Title IX. It’s the action on that bias that triggers that requirement to report.”

Mohamed did not reply to a request for comment on his role in either of Rogers’ and Webers’ departures. Mohamed announced his retirement on July 16 in an internal email to faculty reviewed by CalMatters.

Zhu did not respond to CalMatters’ request for comment.

Executive transition package up for approval

After Zhu retired in June 2023, he retreated to faculty and is now an emeritus faculty member.

Morales is slated to get an executive transition package that would enable him to retreat to faculty and stay on the university’s payroll until he starts another Cal State job. All university executives who complete this program must remain in good standing at the start and throughout the transition assignment, according to a 2022 trustee agenda item.

Executives are rendered ineligible if it is found that they violated university policy or engaged in serious misconduct, per the item.

San Bernardino’s chapter of the California Faculty Association urged the board of trustees not to approve executive transition benefits for Morales in a May statement.

The lawsuit “raises serious questions about whether President Morales should be regarded in good standing for those benefits,” said Thomas Corrigan, a communication and media professor and the union chapter’s communications coordinator. “Dr. Rogers’ and Dr. Weber’s case really stands out as a moral outrage with exceptional financial, reputational and human costs.”

After Weber and Rogers filed their joint lawsuit in March 2023, Weber said, Cal State finally kickstarted its investigation into her 2022 pay gap complaint. The university system sent her a pay analysis two months later, stating there were seven vice provosts who earn a lower salary than Weber, including four men.

The university’s analysis, Weber said, was a “sham.”

“They had a male vice provost listed as earning zero pay. They had people that were at a lower rank than me in the comparison, people that would report to me,” Weber said.

Weber said that Jeanne Durr, former interim associate vice president of Human Resources at Cal State San Bernardino, conducted the analysis; Durr did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

In July 2023, the California State Auditor published a report assessing how the Cal State system responds to sexual harassment allegations. The auditor found several campuses closed sexual harassment cases without providing a reason, and did not consistently discipline perpetrators. The report listed 16 recommended reforms for the Cal State system, including developing standardized guidelines for sexual harassment investigations, regularly reviewing compliance with sexual harassment policy, and universalizing the case management system used by each campus.

In 2024, a new law, Assembly Bill 1790, set a legal requirement for Cal State to follow the recommendations by July 1, 2026. As of July 2026, one recommendation has not been carried out: establishing a system to collect and analyze sexual harassment data from all campuses. The Chancellors’ Office plans to complete this by June 2027.

Weber taught sociology for an additional four years at Cal State San Bernardino until she stepped down as agreed upon in the lawsuit settlement.

“My faculty colleagues were wonderful,” Weber said. But “I would be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid when I went to campus. I had numerous panic attacks. I chartered my route around campus so that I wouldn’t run into any of the administrators that harmed me.”

Rogers left her faculty position at the university within about two years.

“In the end, it killed any desire I had to ever move forward in my career. I have absolutely zero interest, which is too bad. I was hoping to be at least a dean in my career trajectory, (but) I won’t touch that,” Rogers said. “I’ve lost faith in systems.”

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

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Federal agencies that terminated more than a thousand research grants at the University of California last year admitted that they used keywords related to diversity, gender, vaccine hesitancy and COVID-19 to screen for projects that ran afoul of the Trump administration’s priorities.

It’s an admission that lawyers for the research professors say is proof that the agencies illegally canceled nearly $2 billion in grants. And that’s a major development in a lawsuit filed by UC researchers against the Trump administration to permanently get their grants back.

The researchers’ legal team is now asking the judge in the case to skip a trial and formally declare that the White House repeatedly violated the constitution, including the First Amendment. A court hearing on whether that'll happen is scheduled for Oct. 20.

The federal agencies made the admission about the keywords in signed stipulations filed in federal court last week in a case called Thakur v. Trump that’s been ongoing since last spring.

The stipulations in the court filing show the agencies “did not terminate any grants based on alleged noncompliance with the terms of the grant” and instead used “general criteria, rather than grant-specific assessment of each award’s compliance, or performance,” the lawyers for the plaintiffs wrote.

Lawyers for the UC professors now contend that the admission proves three wide-ranging constitutional violations:

• By using keyword searches to review hundreds of grants and terminate them en masse rather than reviewing them individually on their merits, the Trump administration targeted research it found politically disfavorable, which is a First Amendment violation.
• In terminating 283 Department of Energy grants from states where a majority voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, and leaving untouched hundreds of grants that went to “red” states, the Trump administration wrongly punished researchers for merely living in states the White House politically opposed.
• And by terminating billions of dollars in grants, and never rerouting that money to other grant opportunities, the Trump administration violated the constitution by not spending money in ways Congress specifically required through laws it passed on how research funds should be used.

CalMatters emailed the U.S. Department of Justice, which acts as the legal defense for the federal agencies, on July 16 to ask whether it agrees that the federal grant-making agency stipulations mean the Trump administration violated the constitutional rights of researchers. A spokesperson for the Justice Department didn’t respond by publication time.

History of lawsuit

The judge in this case, Rita F. Lin, has repeatedly sided with the UC professors and issued several preliminary injunctions forcing the federal agencies to restore the grants while she reviews the full merits of the case. This includes the restoration of hundreds of grants at UCLA that the Trump administration sought to suspend over its allegations that the university tolerated antisemitism and permitted transgender women to compete on women’s sports teams.

Those allegations were also the subject of a demand from the White House for UCLA to pay $1.2 billion or experience an additional cascade of research freezes. However, months before President Donald Trump sought that settlement, UCLA took steps to address antisemitism on campus, including commissioning a task force to recommend ways to create a more welcoming environment for Jewish students.

Lin, a Biden appointee, faulted the administration for disregarding those efforts by UCLA in a preliminary injunction for a different but related lawsuit. The Trump administration’s justification for terminating the grants did not “mention the remedial steps UCLA had already taken to address the issues described,” Lin wrote.

Lawyers for professors in the Thakur case now want Lin to make a final ruling, rather than a preliminary one, ordering the grants to be restored. Even if that were to happen, the federal agencies could decide to appeal Lin’s ruling to a higher court.

The stakes are “huge,” lawyers for the professors in the Thakur case wrote. If the White House is “allowed to terminate this funding, the researchers, graduate students, and program staff that relied on the grants to pursue their lives’ work will all suffer significant damage to their reputations and careers.”

The lawyers warn of lifesaving cures that will never be developed, new understandings of diseases that will go unexplored and the decline in the country’s global standing as an international juggernaut in publicly funded research.

Using keywords to target disfavored grants

The agencies admitted to using keywords in various ways, according to a CalMatters review of the new court filings.

The Department of Transportation identified six grants for projects worth about $42 million to terminate because they sought “transportation equity,” prioritized “disadvantaged communities,” or focused on “diversifying the transportation workforce” and “equity.”

The termination of three of those grants led by a UC Davis professor resulted in 77 researchers abandoning 79 in-progress projects. Lawyers for the plaintiffs wrote that the project leaders were also forced to lay off or scramble to replace funding for more than 40 graduate and undergraduate research assistants.

The National Institutes of Health admitted to using an internal search tool to flag UC grants that mentioned “health equity,” "work force diversity," "structural racism," and "sexual orientation." The NIH alone suspended or canceled more than 1,000 UC grants, including nearly 700 at UCLA, related to vaccines, cancer research and disparities in health outcomes.

That figure is newly disclosed in a court filing — last year, UCLA indicated that closer to 500 NIH grants were terminated. The health research agency also declared that it’s possible that DOGE, the short-lived federal office that billionaire Elon Musk led in 2025, used AI to target grants for termination.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs wrote to the judge that these admissions show the agencies “identified the viewpoints they wanted to suppress, searched the grants they funded for those that expressed those viewpoints, and terminated those grants on that basis.” That violates the researchers’ First Amendment rights, the lawyers wrote.

The Environmental Protection Agency, one of the named agencies in the suit, is in the process of settling with lawyers for the UC professors to avoid further litigation.

A separate federal district judge in Massachusetts last week dealt the Trump administration a blow in its ability to terminate grants and withhold federal funding. The White House relied on a legal phrase in many of its funding cancellations — “no longer effectuates . . . agency priorities.”

California and 22 other states sued, arguing that there’s no law or right for the federal government to cancel funding based on new program goals and White House desires after the grants were already awarded.

The judge agreed.

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

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

For weeks, the Boyle Heights cold-storage warehouse fire has been known simply as the Lineage fire. It’s a label that leaves out a key detail: Lineage Logistics doesn’t own the warehouse. It leases it. 

The building belongs to Chill Build Los Angeles I LLC, one of several entities associated with Indianapolis-area developer Gary Edwards. While Lineage has been the public face of the cleanup, Chill Build has largely remained out of public view. 

In its first statement since the fire, the company confirmed with The LA Local it has met with regulators, spent millions on the response and believes responsibility for repair and recovery efforts rests with Lineage.

“Lineage Logistics is the lessee of the entire property. They are responsible for all aspects of maintaining and repairing the facility. Lineage Logistics is in charge of the recovery efforts, communicating with residents, and reporting progress directly to city and county regulators.” 

Lineage did not respond to questions before publication about its relationship with Chill Build, the division of responsibilities between companies involved or whether it coordinated public communications with the property owner.

Chill Build was on scene in the first 16 hours of the fire

Records obtained by The LA Local show senior city inspectors from the L.A. Department of Building and Safety (LADBS) met with Edwards on site on June 24, notifying him that the city would order removal of all fire-damaged portions of the building and require permits before any reconstruction. A photo from a follow-up visit on July 1 shows Edwards standing with inspectors outside the warehouse, the same day the city issued a second order requiring Chill Build to submit a full remediation and monitoring plan, along with weekly progress reports. 

LADBS acknowledged receiving The LA Local’s questions about why its enforcement orders were issued to Chill Build and how the agency determines whether property owners or tenants are responsible for code enforcement actions, but did not respond before publication.

Chill Build confirmed it met with the Los Angeles Fire Department multiple times at the property from June 18 to July 6. A spokesperson said the company provided $6.2 million in funding to retain specialty contractors, equipment and resources to help extinguish the fire. 

Senior LADBS inspectors Robert Chavez and Mark Rude speak with property owner Gary Edwards at Chill Build’s warehouse in Boyle Heights on July 1, 2026.

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Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety

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The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health has also opened three additional inspections tied to the fire, including one involving Chill Build, according to its public database. A Cal/OSHA spokesperson confirmed the inspections but said the agency could not share further detail while they remain open.

The owner of the warehouse

Chill Build purchased the property in March 2017 for $43 million before developing it into the roughly 500,000-square-foot cold-storage facility that now sits fire-damaged. 

A review of city permits list Chill Build Los Angeles as the owner throughout construction, and at least 10 permits name Victory Unlimited Construction LLC — another company owned by Edwards — as the contractor. 

One permit lists Chill Build as owner and applicant for the rooftop solar array, the same system linked to fires in both 2024 and again in June. 

A review of corporate filings shows Edwards listed as manager, member, agent, or governor of at least a dozen companies operating under the Chill Build name across multiple states. Chill Build Los Angeles did not comment further on Edwards’ relationship with the Chill Build entities.

Chill Build Los Angeles has also been named as a defendant in at least two lawsuits filed over the fire, alongside Lineage, Altus Power, and Pearce Services.

Has Chill Build engaged with the community?

While Chill Build says communication with residents is the responsibility of Lineage, the company said it donated $2 million to national nonprofit Baby2Baby’s Disaster Relief & Emergency Response Program on June 24, providing air purifiers, diapers, formula, wipes, children’s N95 masks, food and hygiene products to support impacted children and families. 

“Our commitment to the community then and now has been to contribute our time, expertise and resources to protecting the health and safety of the firefighters, first responders, and our neighbors in Boyle Heights and the surrounding communities,” the company told The LA Local. “We continue to maintain an active on-site presence supporting the safe cleanup and mitigation of environmental impacts, wherever and whenever needed.” 

But that outreach has not extended to local leaders. Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, whose district includes Boyle Heights, said the property owner should take a more public role as recovery efforts continue. Her office said it has not had direct conversations with representatives from Chill Build since the fire. 

“If an organization has responsibilities related to this property — whether as an owner, operator, contractor, or another responsible entity — it should be at the table,” Jurado’s office said in a statement. “Residents deserve direct answers, regular progress reports, supporting documentation, and the opportunity to ask questions of the people responsible for this recovery.”

Why responsibility for the fire isn’t straightforward 

Determining fault for the fire itself is complicated. Lineage has said it believes the blaze started while subcontractors Pearce Services tested a rooftop solar system owned by Altus Power. Pearce Services confirmed its crew was doing that rooftop work and Altus says the cause hasn’t been determined. Cal/OSHA has opened inspections naming Lineage, Pearce, Altus, Chill Build, and refrigeration contractor Chillest Industries. 

In its statement, Chill Build said Altus, its contractors and other service companies have contractual relationships solely with Lineage Logistics.

Susan Phillips, a Pitzer College professor who has tracked warehouse fires since 2021, said that kind of tangle is common. “All of these entities are trying to protect themselves financially,” she said. “It just gets to the point where everyone is accountable, and no one is accountable.”

Cold-storage warehouses are typically run under industrial leases that split maintenance, repair and operational duties between owner and tenant, with separate agreements sometimes covering rooftop solar or outside contractors. Attorney Gary Praglin, who handles environmental contamination cases, said responsibility usually flows from those lease terms — but landlords don’t get to opt out when there’s a public health risk next door.

“Landlords cannot turn a blind eye,” Praglin said. “The cleanup can result in further damage. Millions of pounds of rotten food, smelling up the area. A landlord can’t just let that happen because people are being exposed.”

Lineage has said it is racing to meet Mayor Karen Bass’ 45-day deadline to remove millions of pounds of spoiled food waste from the site. 

Despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent to curb homelessness, the number of people without a home in Long Beach rose for the second year in a row — with a larger spike for people who are “chronically homeless” and typically most difficult to keep in permanent housing, officials announced Monday.

It’s a reversal of fortune for a city that two years ago declared it had “turned the tide” on homelessness. Since then, Long Beach has seen at least 10% more people living on the streets, and homelessness has increased in six of the last seven years — even with successes in expanding its shelter system and moving people into permanent housing.

Monday’s report relies on a “Point in Time” measurement, a local census of people in shelters and living outside, and those reporting chronic problems in finding shelter.

Conducted by hundreds of volunteers during three days in January, the count found 3,729 people were living in interim housing, a car, van, RV, tent or makeshift shelter in Long Beach — a 3.7% bump compared with 3,595 people counted the previous year and more than double the number of those reported in 2019.

Public health officials and academic experts say the increase reflects a sharp rise in rents, the conclusion of some pandemic-era programs and the abrupt end or delay of millions in health department funding.

But efforts to house people, which include hundreds of millions of dollars spent on shelter, permanent housing and outreach, have failed to stem the number of street encampments, as reflected in the report and interviews with outreach workers and shelter operators.

There are some bright spots: More unhoused people are living in shelters or interim housing than last year, about 30.6% versus last year’s 27.5%. That comes as Long Beach has increased the beds in its shelter system by 12%, bringing it to a total 1,521 shelter beds locally. The city also reported that 1,702 people were moved into permanent housing.

But the proportion of people newly homeless within the past year also rose slightly, to 12.4% from 10.9%, while the share of people self-reporting as chronically homelessness, meaning long-term or repeated bouts of homelessness tied with mental illness or substance use, rose by double digits to 58% from 46.7%.

At the Multi-Service Center, which recently reopened after renovations, staffers say they are taking in an enormous amount of newly homeless people — more than twice the amount observed in the Point in Time count.

Last year alone, the facility saw more than 3,000 new people — at least 20 to 30 new people on a daily basis.

Meanwhile the situation outside Long Beach has grown more favorable, or at least stayed flat. Pasadena’s homeless population dropped by four people this year while Orange County saw just over 1,000 fewer people this year than in 2024 — a 13.7% drop in their biennial report.

While it has yet to report this year’s count, Los Angeles County last year saw a 4% drop in its homeless population — the second decline in a row.

In struggling to explain the continued growth of homelessness in Long Beach, public health officials acknowledged that the reasons are not fully known, but pointed to the growing body of evidence that housing costs are an underlying cause.

Homeless respondents have consistently reported that a high cost of living, followed by familial strife and mental illness, is the primary reason they’re living on the streets. Forty percent said financial and employment were their top reason, followed by family disruption and mental health.

There is also a massive demand in Long Beach for rental subsidies. In the three months of a new rental aid program — which officials say will only be able to help 250 households a year — the city has already received more than 3,500 applications. Of those, about 50 households have been enrolled.

City officials also pointed the finger at federal cuts to the Emergency Housing Voucher program. The program, launched in 2021, provides housing for 582 households locally — particularly for those considered chronically homeless or at risk of falling back into homelessness.

But funding for the program is set to run out, far faster than expected, as rising rent costs have coincided with a Republican-led Congress unwilling to renew it.

Local housing officials say they can only transition 125 households to a different voucher program, leaving 375 households without help once the EHV program’s funding runs dry in October. EHV recipients will be given at least 60 days’ notice before their rental assistance runs out, officials added.

Federal housing aid reaches only about one in four eligible households in Long Beach. About 8,000 households in Long Beach rely on federal housing choice vouchers.

There’s also an increasing shift, officials say, of unhoused people who come from outside of Long Beach.

More than half of the people surveyed, 50.9%, said they had lost stable housing somewhere other than Long Beach, a finding city officials said reinforced the sense that homelessness in Southern California does not respect municipal boundaries.

It’s a trend seen elsewhere in the city. Jeff Levine, who runs the Long Beach Rescue Mission, said many people entering his shelters come from Orange County and downtown Los Angeles, saying the former lacks amenities and the latter is too dangerous.

The mission’s four shelters, which combine for 227 beds, routinely turn away 5 to 6 single people and 10 to 12 families a day. They most commonly see single parents with kids, which are hardest to place in the city.

“There’s nothing for them,” Levine said. “Our referral is going to be downtown Skid Road to the shelters out there… And the dads that show up with kids, nobody really is talking about that.”

The mission’s outreach team, which scours encampments the first Tuesday of each month, say they are noticing an uptick in tents, lean-tos and tarps along freeways, under overpasses and flanking the train tracks that run through West and North Long Beach.

It’s the kind of sequestered places far from a highway, where people have died from overdoses while waiting for paramedics, even after using Narcan multiple times. “They’re out there in the middle of nowhere,” Levine said.

He and some others argue that permissive policies around encampments are worsening the crisis.

The mission runs a strict, one-year recidivism program, that forces participants to wake up early, take classes, work around the facility and do their best to stay clean. Of those who finished — less than 40% — about 87% are financially stable and housed a year later. Levine says that accountability forces many to fix their situation.

On Friday, friends, family and shelter attendees celebrated the most recent graduates — eight people who spent the past year at the facility. They range in age, height, background and story.

One came to the city after 10 years in Memphis. Another drove in with a bag of clothes from Las Vegas. One worked at a mission in Orange, and one came without any surviving family.

One graduate, Akeem Cain, will turn 40 this month. He came to the mission a year ago, homeless, 105 pounds and less than a year into the unexpected death of his mother.

Cain, had already completed the program once in 2017 and thought he had repaired his life. Then the devil came around, he said, “and it tore me apart.”

“I had it — a job, everything,” Cain said. “It didn’t work out right. Years go by. I thought I was going to make it. Lost everything, relationship, family, lost my job. I lost it all.”

With six months or so left until he must move into his own place, Cain is terrified of going back out on his own. He has a job, but it’s not an ideal commute — 90 minutes on the train to downtown LA. He and his girlfriend are estranged, his daughter recently turned 11, and he still is grieving his mother.

“I’m scared, you know, I’m scared,” Cain said. “I don’t know what’s my first step to get out there in the world when I leave this this place. I know they will still be here, and they will have my back, but am I gonna have my own back when I’m out there? That’s the question.”