The Brief

Among the most controversial bills that died this spring was a measure prompted by allegations that Gov. Gavin Newsom secured a lucrative benefit for a billionaire supporter by exempting his restaurants from a minimum wage increase.

Newsom dismissed the allegations as “absurd,” but KCRA 3 reported that the public might never get a full accounting of what happened because participants to the bill negotiations signed non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) that threatened them with legal action if they spoke about the issue.

The controversy prompted a bill banning NDAs for legislative negotiations, but the bill died last month even though only one Democratic member of the Assembly Committee on Elections voted against it. It failed because five other Democrats on the committee didn’t vote.

As CalMatters revealed in April, not voting is a common practice for California legislators. Last year, at least 15 bills died due to lack of votes instead of lawmakers actually voting “no” to kill them. So far this year, a database at CalMatters’ Digital Democracy indicates that at least 12 bills have died because lawmakers declined to vote.

Insiders say it’s a way for legislators to be polite to colleagues and perhaps avoid a “no” vote on their own legislation. But critics say it’s also a way for legislators to dodge responsibility for their decisions.

“Some will say that those bills were tough votes for lawmakers,” said Mike Gatto, a former Democratic legislator from Los Angeles. “But one must remember that the whole reason why the public elects these lawmakers is for them to take tough votes.”

The Legislature’s bill-tracking website doesn’t distinguish whether a legislator declined to vote, was absent or if the lawmaker announced they were formally abstaining from voting.

Now, with the launch of Digital Democracy, the public has easy access to video and transcripts that show just how often legislators are present in hearings and even engage in discussion, sometimes highly critical of the legislation, before staying silent during the call for a vote. Some legislators say the practice should be changed.

“I think it is appropriate for legislators to basically vote ‘yes’ or vote ‘no,’ ” Santa Ana Democratic Sen. Tom Umberg, a former federal prosecutor, recently told CBS News for a story done in collaboration with CalMatters. “But, you know, that is the system that we have. Should we change it? Probably.”

Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas and Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire didn’t respond to CalMatters’ requests to discuss whether the Legislature’s rules on voting should change.

Public safety, ratepayer protection bills die

Among the bills that died recently from California Democrats not voting were several involving public safety issues. They include a bill that would have prohibited sexually violent predators from being released into communities unless they had a place to live. Another would have increased penalties for property crimes. A third would have made it harder for police to charge people with a crime for filing false complaints against officers.

Another bill that died for lack of votes would restrict the controversial practice of gas and electric utilities from using ratepayer money for political lobbying. Senate Bill 938 was in response to a Sacramento Bee investigation last summer that revealed SoCalGas charged at least $36 million to ratepayers for political lobbying to oppose California policies aimed at addressing the climate crisis.

Environmentalists and utility watchdog groups were outraged, arguing that ratepayers’ bills should only reflect the cost to deliver electricity or gas to their homes. They said shareholders should foot the bill for political lobbying.

But Sen. Dave Min, a Democrat from Irvine, saw his bill to ban the practice fail in April before the Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee. The committee has 18 members, so the bill needed at least 10 “yes” votes to advance. In two separate votes, six members of the committee declined to vote. When combined with Republicans’ “no” votes, the abstentions were enough to kill Min’s bill.

At its April 16 hearing, Democratic Sens. Bill Dodd of Napa and Angelique Ashby from Sacramento questioned whether the legislation would help consumers since lobbying costs represent a small fraction of a utility’s expenses. In the end, they both declined to vote.

Joining them were fellow Democrats Josh Newman, Anna Caballero, Susan Rubio and the committee’s chairperson, Steven Bradford. Dodd’s office was the only one to respond to CalMatters’ interview request.

“I respect the author and his intent with the bill, but there were unanswered questions about the impact it would have on grants for fire prevention activities,” Dodd said in an emailed statement. “So I reserved voting ‘yes’ or ‘no’ until those questions were answered.”

Not voting on ‘Paneragate’ bill

Several legislators who helped kill the bill banning NDAs from legislative negotiations were also present during that hearing.

The four Democratic Assemblymembers on the elections committee who declined to vote on the NDA ban are Marc Berman of Cupertino, Steve Bennett of Oxnard, Akilah Weber of La Mesa and Matt Haney of San Francisco. Evan Low of Cupertino, who’s running for Congress, was absent for the hearing. The absence is recorded on the Legislature’s tally of votes the same as the lawmakers who stayed silent. None of them responded to interview requests.

It was a controversial bill in part because it dealt with a scandal about the governor that broke in February when Bloomberg News reported that the Panera Bread chain appeared to be exempt from a new law that raised the state’s minimum wage to $20 for fast food workers. In the Bloomberg investigation, sources said the Newsom administration sought the exemption to benefit a billionaire Panera Bread franchise owner who is a major Newsom donor.

After KCRA revealed that negotiators working on the minimum wage bill were required to sign NDAs, Republican Assemblymember Vince Fong introduced the bill to ban the practice for legislative negotiations. Labor groups opposed the bill, and business groups were split. Fong, who is running for Congress, didn’t return a request for comment.

During the hearing, Assemblymembers Berman and Weber spoke with the bill’s author, but still declined to vote.

“This is an extremely important bill that deals with a very important issue,” Weber said in the hearing. She also suggested the bill was drafted too quickly and she had questions about “whether or not the bill was too broad.”

Gatto, a former Democratic Assemblymember, said it was especially galling that lawmakers refused to vote on the non-disclosure agreement bill, given the legislation “itself involves the sanctity of the (legislative) process.”

“It just feels dirtier somehow,” Gatto said.

Overcrowded cells, moldy food and lack of medical care are some of the issues plaguing a California detention center amid the recent onslaught of immigration raids by the Trump administration, according to Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, who on Tuesday toured the facility in Kern County.

About 1,450 people are currently being held at the California City Immigration Processing Center, according to officials. Schiff and Padilla expect more to be brought to the facility as the Trump administration ramps up immigration enforcement across the country.

The Kern County facility has the capacity to hold 2,500 people, but it already appears short-staffed and lacking proper medical supplies, like insulin for people with diabetes, the Democratic senators said after their congressional oversight tour.

The majority of the detainees they met at the facility do not have a prior criminal records and were detained at their immigration appointments.

The senators toured the facility and met with staff for roughly six hours Tuesday. They left the tour concerned about the conditions at the facility.

“A lot of the concerns we heard were about very valid healthcare issues not being addressed. The staff here acknowledged there’s been gaps,” Schiff said.

Some of the detainees said they became ill after eating moldy food and drinking water while in custody.

“I’m leaving here even more concerned than I was when I arrived,” Padilla said. “If the administration is true to their word, the population here is only going to grow. So the need to address nutrition, medical attention, mental healthcare is only going to grow.

Detainees from across Southern California are being held at California City Immigration Processing Center in Kern County.

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Marina Peña

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The LA Local

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Some of the men and women being held at the facility were detained in Los Angeles County, but others were taken from other parts of the country.

“That is absolutely a concern, not just for people from within the state of California to travel long distances, unable to see a family member, but I met a number of detainees here from elsewhere in the country,” Padilla said. “So access to their counsel prior and certainly to their family members is only exacerbated, to that effect.” 

Padilla asked, “Why are people from other states being sent here? We also hear people from California being sent to other states.”

Last year, 32 people died while in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to reporting from The Guardian. Some died in detention facilities, field offices and others died after they were transferred to hospitals for medical treatment.

At least six people have died while in ICE custody this year, according to Padilla and Schiff.

“In terms of getting the standards enforced to make sure they’re being upheld, that requires oversight, and it should be more than the two of us coming out to the detention facility without the power of the subpoena,” Schiff said. “Congress should hold hearings about the conditions in these detention facilities.”

The California City Immigration Processing Center in Kern County is roughly 100 miles north of Los Angeles and operated by private-prison contractor CoreCivic. 

CoreCivic and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment about Tuesday’s tour. The California City facility has not been inspected by the federal government since it started to receive detainees in August.

Padilla, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Immigration Subcommittee, and Schiff toured the facility as masked agents continue to carry out an unrelenting wave of immigration sweeps across the country. The senators spoke to reporters outside the remote detention center, one year after President Donald Trump was sworn into office for his second term.

“Today marks the first anniversary of the second Trump administration, and if there’s two takeaways from his first year,” Padilla said, “one is the economic chaos and uncertainty that so many working families are feeling, and the second clearly is the cruelty of a mass deportation agenda, which has included a lot of indiscriminate detentions, arrests, deportations, many without due process.

”The facility is the largest detention center in California. Up until March 2024, the facility served as both a state and federal prison, but was taken over by ICE last year.

A CoreCivic officer stood guard near the facility parking lot throughout the morning. A gaggle of news reporters waited outside the facility’s barbed wire fence for the tour to be complete. The oversight visit comes as some Democrats in Congress consider various restrictions on funding for ICE operations and two weeks after federal agents shot and killed Renee Good in  Minneapolis during an immigration operation. The latest estimates show that more than 73,000 people are being held in ICE custody .

If you’re a typical American, you get home from work and start flipping switches and turning knobs — doing laundry, cooking dinner, watching TV. With so many other folks doing the same, the strain on the electrical grid in residential areas is highest at this time.

That demand will only grow as the world moves away from fossil fuels, with more people buying induction stoves, heat pumps and electric vehicles.

That’s a challenge for utilities, which are already managing creaky grids across the United States, all while trying to meet a growing demand for power. So they’re now trying to turn EVs from a burden into a boon.

More and more models, for instance, feature “vehicle-to-grid,” or V2G, capabilities, meaning they can send power to the grid as needed.

Others are experimenting with what’s called active managed charging, in which algorithms stagger when EVs charge, instead of them all drawing energy as soon as their owners plug in. The idea is for some people to charge later, but still have a full battery when they leave for work in the morning.

A new report from the Brattle Group, an economic and energy consultancy, done for EnergyHub, which develops such technology, has used real-world data from EV owners in Washington state to demonstrate the potential of this approach, both for utilities and drivers.

They found that an active managed charging program saves up to $400 per EV each year, and the vehicles were still always fully charged in the morning.

Utilities, too, seem to benefit, as the redistributed demand results in less of a spike in the early evening. That, in turn, would mean that a utility can delay costly upgrades — which they need in order to accommodate increased electrification — saving ratepayers money.

How it works

Active managed charging works in conjunction with something called “time of use,” in which a utility charges different rates depending on the time of day. Between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m., when demand is high, rates are also high. But after 9 p.m., they fall. EV owners who wait until later in the evening to charge pay less for the same electricity.

Time-of-use pricing discourages energy use when demand is highest, lightening the load and reducing how much electricity utilities need to generate. But there’s nothing stopping everyone from plugging in as soon as cheaper rates kick in at 9 p.m. As EV adoption grows, that coordination problem can create a new spike in demand.

“An EV can be, on its own, twice the peak load of a typical home,” said Akhilesh Ramakrishnan, managing energy associate at the Brattle Group. “You get to the point where they start needing to be managed differently.”

That’s where active managed charging comes in. Using an app, an EV owner indicates when they need their car to be charged, and how much charge their battery needs for the day. (The app also learns over time to predict when a vehicle will unplug.) When the owner gets home at 6 p.m., the owner can plug in, but the car won’t begin to charge. Instead, the system waits until some point in the night to turn on the juice, leaving enough time to fully charge the vehicle by the indicated hour.

“If customers don’t believe that we’re going to get them there, then they’re not going to allow us to control their vehicle effectively,” said Freddie Hall, a data scientist at EnergyHub.

The typical driver goes only 30 miles in a day, Hall added, requiring about two hours of charging each night. By actively managing many cars across neighborhoods, the system can more evenly distribute demand throughout the night: Folks will leave for work earlier or later than their neighbors, vehicles with bigger batteries will need more time to charge, and some will be almost empty while others may need to top up.

They’re all still getting the lower prices with time of use rates, but they’re not taxing the grid by all charging at 9 p.m.

“The results are actually very, very promising in terms of reducing the peak loads,” said Jan Kleissl, the director of the Center for Energy Research at UC San Diego who wasn’t involved in the report. “It shows big potential for reducing costs of EV charging in general.”

Active managed charging would allow the grid to accommodate twice the number of EVs before a utility has to start upgrading the system to handle the added load, according to the report. (And consider all the additional demand for energy from things like data centers.) Those costs inevitably get passed down to all ratepayers. But, the report notes, active managed charging could delay those upgrades by up to a decade.

“As EVs grow, if you don’t implement these solutions, there’s going to be a lot more upgrades, and that’s going to lead to rate impacts for everyone,” Ramakrishnan said.

Vehicle-to-grid technology

At the same time, EVs could help reduce those rates in the long term, thanks to V2G, a separate emerging technology.

It allows a utility to call on EVs sitting in garages as a vast network of backup power. So when demand surges, those vehicles can send power to the grid for others to use, or just power the house they’re sitting in, essentially removing the structure from the grid and lowering demand. (And think of all the fleets of electric vehicles, like school buses, with huge batteries to use as additional power.)

With all that backup energy, utilities might not need to build as many costly battery facilities of their own, projects that ratepayers wouldn’t need to foot the bill for.

Active managed charging and V2G could work in concert, with some batteries draining at 6 p.m. as they provide energy, then recharging later at night. But that ballet will require more large-scale experimentation.

“How are we going to fit in discharging a battery, as well as charging it overnight?” Hall said. “Because you do want it available the next day.”

To cut greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible, the world needs more EVs. Now it’s just a matter of making them benefit the grid instead of taxing it.

Next month, Los Angeles Unified School District leaders will vote on layoffs at central offices and school sites as part of a plan to save $1.4 billion over the next two years.

The district’s fiscal stabilization plan outlines three categories where layoffs are likely: central office ($150 million), unfunded positions ($60 million) and the Student Equity Needs Index, or “SENI,” ($99 million), which supports schools with higher-need students. District staff said the exact number and types of positions will be provided to the board in the coming weeks.

 “It is not a forgone conclusion that people will lose jobs,” said Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. For example, he said staff may be reassigned to vacant positions or given the opportunity to transfer to another school.

How did we get here

LAUSD is spending more money than it brings in. There are more than 40% fewer students compared to the early 2000s and the district has not closed schools or significantly reduced staff as costs have increased. LAUSD hired more staff to support students during the pandemic, but the federal relief dollars that initially funded those positions are gone.

For the past two years, the district has relied on diminishing reserves to backfill a multi-billion-dollar deficit. Most recently, the district pulled $496 million from its reserve.

 “Every available reserve of the district is being used to either offset reductions that otherwise would've happened or to pay for cost increases that we're expecting over the coming years,” said chief financial officer Saman Bravo-Karimi.

Several still-unknown factors will shape LAUSD’s spending plan, including the outcome of stalled contract negotiations with the district’s teachers union, the final state budget and changes to federal education funding.

Weigh in on LAUSD’s planned layoffs

The Board is scheduled to vote on the layoffs at its Feb. 10 meeting and impacted staff will be notified by March 15, as required by California law.

The mostly cloudy skies today are courtesy of a low-pressure system that brings a 30 to 50% chance of showers to the region. It will be dry today, but we can't rule out a slight chance of showers tonight.

Today's temperatures will be cooler, with highs mostly in the mid- to upper 60s for the beaches and coastal communities. The valleys will see temperatures between 68 to 73 degrees and up to 74 degrees over in the Inland Empire.

High temperatures in the Coachella Valley will reach 70 to 75 degrees. Meanwhile, in the Antelope Valley, temperatures there will remain between 58 to 66 degrees.

The National Weather Service says any showers will be light to moderate come Thursday into Friday morning.