The Brief

In November, Californians will vote for “the second-hardest job in the state behind the governor.”

That’s according to someone who has held the job twice: John Garamendi, who was the state’s first elected insurance commissioner in the 1990s and served again in the early 2000s. Garamendi, now a U.S. congressman, said the commissioner job is “complex, hard, detailed work.”

“There is no other task in any office in the state of California, except the governor, that has such significant power and the necessity to use the power to regulate the industry,” Garamendi said.

Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara is nearing the end of his second four-year term. In the past seven years, California experienced the biggest and most destructive wildfires in its history, which were a factor in insurance companies canceling homeowner policies or refusing to write new ones. With the insurance market out of whack, Lara last year put in place new regulations that include provisions insurers have long sought. Availability in the state is beginning to improve, though the commissioner said recently that he expects the recovery to take a few years.

The next insurance commissioner will have to balance availability with affordability. Premiums are rising. Many survivors of last year’s Los Angeles County fires are struggling to rebuild; they have sued insurance companies; and they have called for Lara to step down because they don’t think he has done enough to hold insurers accountable for delaying or denying their claims. Some insurers are still canceling policies. Many homeowners are continuing to turn to the last-resort FAIR Plan, which has seen a 146% increase in the number of policies since 2022.

“Affordability is only one piece of the very complicated puzzle,” said Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group. She said the insurance business is more complicated today partly because of new technology and participants in the market, such as third-party administrators for insurers and non-admitted carriers, which among other things are not subject to rate reviews by the Insurance Department.

If all that doesn’t sound like enough responsibility, California’s insurance commissioner also regulates auto, health, pet, ride-hailing and life insurance, as well as workers’ compensation.

Among the candidates who have thrown their hats into the ring are state Sen. Ben Allen and former state Sen. Steven Bradford, former San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Jane Kim and Patrick Wolff, a financial analyst with experience in the insurance industry.

New rules and fire aftermath 

Lara recently told the state Assembly Insurance Committee that the new regulations he put in place last year are showing signs of working — that insurers are writing policies in California again.

Those regulations include speeding up reviews and approvals of insurers’ requests to raise rates, and allowing them to factor in reinsurance costs and catastrophe models when setting rates in exchange for writing a certain percentage of policies in areas with high wildfire risk. Insurance companies including Mercury, CSAA and USAA have requested higher rates under the new rules and have received them, Lara told the committee.

He credited the rules with the availability improvements the department has seen so far, despite the deadly, multibillion-dollar disasters that were the L.A.-area fires.

“The market stabilized at a moment when it could have collapsed,” he told the committee last month, referring to the fires as the “event that reshaped everything.”

Lara told the committee that he expects his so-called sustainable insurance strategy — and the recovery from the fires — to take three to five years, and that California is already a year into that timeline.

Policyholders have also complained about delays and denials of claims with their insurers, prompting the insurance department to investigate market leader State Farm, as well as the FAIR Plan, over their handling of claims. Lara has backed new legislation and policies to address some of the problems fire survivors have experienced, including lack of smoke-damage standards and underinsurance.

So the next commissioner will have to handle the continuing aftermath of the fires, and either work with or modify the regulations Lara put into place.

‘Brutal’ balancing act

That will require engaging with competing interests: insurance companies, lawmakers, consumers and consumer groups.

Early in his tenure, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that Lara accepted donations from the insurance industry despite promising not to; he apologized and returned those donations. Since then, he has been accused of continued coziness with the industry and criticized for his overseas travel.

Former insurance commissioner Dave Jones, a Lara critic, said the next insurance commissioner needs to have “integrity” and “a seriousness of purpose.” Both Jones and Garamendi told CalMatters the commissioner must protect consumers while ensuring a viable insurance market, which almost everybody needs – whether they’re current homeowners, renters, business owners or property owners, as well as those who need insurance to buy a property.

Lara has often defended himself by saying he needs to communicate with the insurance industry that he regulates, and has criticized his predecessors as “armchair insurance commissioners.” He was not available for an interview, according to department spokesperson Gabriel Sanchez, who did not want to respond to the commissioner’s critics for this story.

Joel Laucher worked for the insurance department for more than three decades, focusing on insurers’ conduct — including briefly under Lara. He said the incoming commissioner will have to be diplomatic but firm with the industry.

“Even if you’ve had a nice conversation with them, that shouldn’t hold you back from enforcing consumer protection laws, including levying fines or taking them to hearings,” said Laucher, who is now a program specialist at United Policyholders.

Robert Herrell worked at the insurance department for several years. He is now executive director of the Consumer Federation of California, another nonprofit consumer advocacy group.

His group and others have asked Lara to withdraw regulations that make it harder for intervenors — any members of the public who under California law can challenge insurers’ requests to raise premiums — to have an impact on the insurance department’s rate reviews. The commissioner has said the new rules, which the industry supports, are meant to improve efficiency and speed up rate reviews; the consumer groups say the rules are “designed to impede effective consumer participation.”

“It’s exactly the opposite direction of the way you ought to be going,” Herrell said.

Bach, of United Policyholders, signed onto those joint comments submitted in November by consumer groups, unions and others. But she said some of Lara’s critics are a bit too tough on him.

She said the commissioner has to be the “bad guy” on rate increases; hold insurers accountable while encouraging them to keep writing policies in the state; and communicate to consumers that the insurance department can be helpful but doesn’t have the capacity to give them individualized legal aid.

“We’ve never seen a market like this,” Bach said. “The balancing act is so brutal.”

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

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

A new California Supreme Court ruling on retirement pay for public employees centered on a small amount of money — just one week’s salary for a retired attorney — but it had the potential to be a much costlier decision for government agencies and taxpayers.

The question: How much accrued vacation time can retiring public employees cash out at the end of their careers in ways that boost their pensions? Former Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown took aim at that perk, among others, in his 2013 pension reform law, but it was unsettled in courts until now.

The California Supreme Court’s answer: Under Brown’s law, employees can count toward their pension formula whatever amount of vacation their contract allows them to cash out in a single calendar year.

That sounds simple, but some California government workers end their careers with two months or more worth of accrued vacation time — enough to cash out in increments over several years and increase their retirement pension by hundreds of dollars a month.

The case that reached the state Supreme Court turned on retired Ventura County Counsel Leroy Smith, who designated October 2019 to October 2020 as his final year of civil service and cashed out 240 hours of accrued time off over that period.

His contract allowed him to cash out only 200 hours a year and his pension plan, the Ventura County Employees’ Retirement System, would not count the extra 40 hours toward his retirement formula.

Smith and other retired Ventura County employees argued Brown’s law did not specify that the hours had to be in a single calendar year, and they should have been able to count leave cashed out over any 12-month period.

A state appeals court ruled against them two years ago. Two public safety unions appealed that decision, bringing the case to the high court. They argued that Brown’s pension law does not refer to a calendar year when it discusses cashouts.

“If the Legislature intended to restrict annual leave cashouts to a calendar year, it would have used the term “calendar year” instead of “each 12-month period,” attorneys for Ventura County attorneys and sheriff’s deputies wrote in a briefing to the court.

But the Supreme Court found otherwise, pointing to what justices described as the common meaning of a 12-month period and the broader context of what Brown and lawmakers were trying to accomplish when they passed the pension reform law.

At the time, California’s major pension funds were recovering from two successive blows — first the dot-com bust and then the Great Recession. The law Brown signed trimmed benefits, compelled employees to work longer to earn a full retirement and required them to kick in more money from their paychecks to fund their pensions.

The Supreme Court ruling conceded that Smith wanted just 40 additional hours to count toward his pension, but the justices noted that other employees could go much further if California allowed workers to “straddle” a calendar year with vacation cashouts. They could effectively double the pensionable cashout if they timed it correctly.

The justices wrote that it would be “perhaps not so inconceivable as to rank as absurd” to think the Legislature intended for that kind of pension boost in the pension reform law.

The new decision applies to workers and retirees enrolled in California’s county-run pension plans. They operate outside of the statewide pension funds, which are the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and the California State Teachers Retirement System.

A group of county pension funds wrote a brief to the court urging judges to limit pensionable cashouts to a single calendar rather than a movable 12-month period. They wrote it would be expensive for them to revise retiree benefits if the rules change.

“There is no reason to cause this confusion and undue burden to the (county retirement) systems,” they wrote.

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

Federal immigration agents used racial slurs, including “wet” and “tonks,” to identify people to target while sweeping through Los Angeles last year, according to text messages cited in a new court filing asking a federal judge there to bar agents from racial profiling.

Plaintiffs in the Vasquez Perdomo vs. Noem case filed a motion for a preliminary injunction on Monday, arguing that agents had conducted an “ongoing campaign of suspicionless and discriminatory detentive stops” across the Central District of California even after the high-profile street raids of summer 2025 had ceased. As one ICE agent admitted in a deposition, “We’re [still] doing the same thing [as “Operation at Large”] just with a different name.”

The filing includes evidence from months of discovery, including body camera footage and depositions of agents, ordered by U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong after the U.S. Supreme Court stayed an earlier temporary restraining order in the case last September.

Attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union, a coalition of advocacy organizations and private attorneys argue in the court filing that the new evidence undercuts the government’s argument to the Supreme Court that agents were relying on specific intelligence about individuals instead of race when deciding who to stop.

In bodycam footage, according to court documents, a Border Patrol agent at the Hollywood Home Depot says, “There was a guy, I’m pretty sure he’s wet he was just sitting in that minivan.”

In one text message cited in the filing, an agent says, “Yeah, just plug us in wherever you see some tonks and we’ll jump out.” In another message, an agent describes seeing “tonks everywhere selling food.”

“Tonks” is a derogatory term Border Patrol agents have used, reportedly derived from the sound a heavy item like a flashlight makes on a migrant’s skull. In 2019, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency for Border Patrol, issued guidance explicitly stating “the term ‘tonk’ is not appropriate” due to its derogatory connotation, according to emails and text messages disclosed to HuffPost under the Freedom of Information Act.

In one deposition an immigration agent bluntly says that the suspicious appearance they look for is “Older Hispanic male.” In their filing, plaintiffs' attorneys argue that immigration agents engaged in unlawful practices by not developing "pre-stop individualized, particularized assessment of reasonable suspicion" of targets, but instead used racial profiling to detain anyone they believed to be low-income and Latino. Such actions swept up U.S. citizens and violated the Constitution’s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizures.

The court filing made public Monday reveals a May 2025 directive from Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters telling field officers to “turn the creativity knob up to 11” and arrest more “collaterals.” That’s the agency’s term for people who aren’t the original target of an operation but who are encountered in the process.

ACLU attorneys said the agents’ practices, including racially profiling Latinos, were condoned and directed from the top.

“This was not a rogue method of operationalizing agency orders; it was precisely what agency leadership desired,” the filing states.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs said ICE doubled the ranks of its field teams, “thanks in part to recruitment ads employing white nationalist messaging.” The filing says some plaintiffs and organizational members, including those who are U.S. citizens, have already been stopped more than once.

While the filing relies on communications from agents’ cell phones, most agents involved in the L.A. raids have yet to turn over their devices.

Last month, during a contentious hearing, Frimpong weighed whether to hold the federal government in contempt for failing to comply with a court order to turn over agents' cell phones.

The government said in court that of 1,400 Border Patrol agents involved in Los Angeles operations last year, more than half reported using their personal cell phones.

The federal government said that it asked agents to upload any data from their personal phone to a government repository, a compromise created with its union designed to limit any workplace grievances. But only 88 agents volunteered to turn their phones in for forensic imaging, and none of them have been imaged yet.

Plaintiffs argued that the government deserved sanctions by “straight-up saying they will not comply with an order because their employees might complain if they do.”

Progress on the government phones hasn’t gone much faster. In court, lawyers for the federal government revealed they have only been imaging 3 government phones every 2 weeks, without knowing the exact number of government phones but estimating around “200-300 still to go.” That’s a rate that would take the government close to four years to comply with the court’s order.

“There’s enough to suggest that this is a system-wide practice of identifying people through racial slurs,” said Mayra Joachín, an attorney with the ACLU.

CalMatters has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment.

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

Southern Californians are in for a little relief this week after another muggy weekend.

The region is expected to experience a slight cooling trend over the course of the week, though forecasters say conditions will still be hotter than normal and continue to put people at risk of heat-related illness.

Highs in most of L.A. and Orange counties will be in the 80s and 90s through Friday. Some interior parts of L.A. County, much of the Inland Empire and the region’s deserts are expected to hit triple digits.

Don’t get too used to the — somewhat — milder temperatures either. Forecasters say the heat will soon return with a vengeance.

The high pressure system that’s been driving much of this summer’s weather has retreated eastward, forecasters say, allowing for the cooling trend. But the system is expected to migrate back toward Southern California this week and bring the heat with it.

Temperatures will tick up steadily from Friday to Sunday, when parts of the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys are expected to reach 100 degrees or higher.

Dangerous beach conditions

Meanwhile, forecasters continue to warn of dangerous currents and surf at the beach.

For the last several weeks, Southern California’s beaches have been pummeled by strong rip currents, big waves and surging tides.

Officials are particularly concerned about the hazardous conditions as people flock to the beach to escape the heat

Lifeguards performed nearly 2,000 rescues over the weekend in L.A. County alone, according to the county Fire Department’s lifeguard division.

And the upcoming weekend is expected to present similar hazards for beachgoers. South-facing stretches of coastline will experience the most severe currents and waves.

Officials recommend checking surf conditions before heading to the beach and, if you do go in the water, stay near lifeguards and listen to their instructions. It’s also a good idea to stay off of tidal rocks and jetties.

If you end up caught in a rip current while swimming, relax, stay calm and float as much as possible to conserve energy. To escape the current, swim parallel to the beach, then at an angle toward the beach. Do not try to swim against the current. If you can’t reach the shore, call and wave for help.

The surf conditions are being driven by a series of tropical storms churning hundreds of miles to the southeast in the Pacific Ocean.

One of them, Hurricane Fausto, has been pushing its storm surge towards Southern California since it formed off Central America on July 16. Since then it has moved toward Hawaii, becoming a Category 2 hurricane over the weekend. It is now weakening.

This week, another storm, Hurricane Genevieve, is running parallel to the Mexican coast about 500 miles off the tip of Baja California. Genevieve was briefly classified as a Category 5 hurricane on Monday.

The storms, along with swells originating from storms in the Southern Hemisphere, have combined to create dangerous surf here.

“It's been definitely a long period of very frequent and hazardous rip currents,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Bryan Lewis.

There is also a chance the surge could cause minor coastal flooding.

Civilian commissions that review the conduct of local law enforcement agencies have long been criticized for lacking teeth.

One way to remedy that is to give the civilian groups subpoena power so they can compel witnesses to testify or a department to provide documents.

Law enforcement agencies, including the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, have pushed back against that idea. But in 2020, L.A. County voters approved Measure R, which gave subpoena power to the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission.

Six years later, the commission is still having trouble getting the department to comply.

“L.A. County voters said loud and clear in 2020 we wanted real oversight with subpoena power.. for real accountability of the largest Sheriff’s Department in the nation,” said Hans Johnson, chair of the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission. “We still don’t have it."

A big part of the delay is state labor law that requires the county to meet and confer with the union that represents sheriff’s deputies about the impacts of any changes in the law, including subpoena power.

It's a process that has taken years.

Johnson and others accuse the union and county lawyers of dragging their feet. He said the commission is supposed to have independent and unfettered oversight of the Sheriff’s Department, which has a history of deputy misconduct.

The oversight commission has gone to court to challenge the meet-and-confer requirement.

Others cite additional factors that may be causing problems and slowing the process, including the number of agencies involved and the fact that the oversight committee doesn’t have authority to use lawyers that are independent from the county.

The Sheriff’s Department has said it cooperates with the oversight commission to the extent the law allows.

A beating leaves unanswered questions

The oversight panel wants access to several case files.

In 2024, an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy pleaded guilty in federal court in connection with beating a transgender man in Whittier a year earlier. The incident was caught on video, and the deputy admitted later that he retaliated against Emmett Brock, a 23-year-old high school teacher who was on his way home from work when he gave the deputy the middle finger.

Prosecutors said Deputy Joseph Benza III punched Brock repeatedly and bashed his head onto the pavement.

In a plea agreement, Benza admitted to one felony count of deprivation of rights under color of law. The FBI found a group of deputies had exchanged text messages with Benza discussing how to cover up his action, according to the Los Angeles Times. Eight deputies were relieved of duty as a result, the Times reported.

But after reviewing the incident, the process left the oversight commission with questions, according to Johnson.

Why did the initial internal review of the Feb. 10, 2023 incident find that Benza had committed no violations of department policy?

Why was a sergeant who had been involved in the incident allowed to head an internal investigation into what occurred?

And what steps has the Sheriff’s Department taken to ensure such a coverup doesn’t happen again?

In an effort to get those answers, the commission issued a subpoena to the department in February 2025 seeking use-of-force reports, body-worn camera and bystander footage as well as witness statements related to the incident. The Sheriff’s Department refused to comply, according to Johnson.

“It was another failure by the Sheriff Department to respect and comply with oversight,” Johnson said.

On the advice of county lawyers, the department cited state laws and rulings by the L.A. County Employee Relations Commission that require the county to meet and confer with labor unions that may be affected by the subpoenas before complying with them.

“California labor relations law, the County’s Employee Relations Commission (ERCOM), and recent court decisions legally obligate the County to meet-and-confer with its union partners,” county counsel said in a statement.

The executive director of the Association of Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs said the negotiations should be fairly simple: “How is the deputy going to be compensated? How are they going to be notified? Should they appear in their uniform? Should they appear in a suit?”

Other reasons for the delay

County counsel said lawyers for the county and union “have communicated extensively” and met seven times regarding Measure R.

Yet the statement didn’t say why the negotiations had not concluded six years after Measure R was passed.

One possible reason, according to Hsieh, is the number of parties involved in the negotiations, which includes the Sheriff’s Department, the county Board of Supervisors, the Civilian Oversight Commission, the county chief executive office and two labor unions.

“This is a multi-party process and because of that there are a lot of different interests,” he said.

Robert Bonner, a former federal judge and one-time chair of the oversight commission, argued the meet-and-confer requirement is a stalling tactic by the deputies union and shouldn’t apply to the issuance of subpoenas.

“These subpoenas are issued under state law. There is no meet and confer obligation whatsoever,” Bonner said. “The county counsel’s argument is weak.”

The meet-and-confer requirement under labor law can be an obstacle for effective oversight of law enforcement organizations, according to Cameron McEllhiney, executive director of the National Association for the Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement.

“Labor laws, officer bill of rights — all of those can become impediments to oversight,” McEllhiney said. “It's a challenge everywhere.”

County lawyers also represent both the Sheriff’s Department and the Civilian Oversight Commission in negotiations.

The current chair of the commission said that’s a conflict of interest.

“County counsel is not acting in the interests of pursuing oversight in Los Angeles County through the COC,” Johnson said.

Bonner agreed, saying the county counsel’s office can’t fairly represent the interests of both the Sheriff’s Department and the oversight commission.

“It's taking a position that is adverse and in conflict with the commission’s position with respect to enforcing its subpoenas,” Bonner said.

A Los Angeles Grand Jury came to a similar conclusion. In a report last month, the panel also found that county counsel’s representation of both the Sheriff’s Department and the Civilian Oversight Commission does constitute a conflict of interest..

“Recent trends in oversight now call into question whether they can equally and fully represent the ‘public interest,’” the report stated.

“County Counsel is conflicted in equally representing the BOS [Board of Supervisors], LASD and the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission,” the report continued “Accordingly, we recommend: COC would have its own legal staff, i.e., no longer represented by County Counsel.”

In a statement to LAist, county counsel denied any conflict, and essentially said it's not a conflict because, technically, the commission is an extension of the Board of Supervisors.

The statement read: County counsel’s legal advice to the oversight panel does not create an attorney-client relationship “separate and distinct” from counsel’s relationship with the Board of Supervisors, “so it is not possible for a conflict of interest to exist when County labor issues are at issue.”

It continued: “In fact, the courts viewed the COC and Sheriff as all one County entity for the purposes of labor issues.”

What’s next?

The oversight commission, meantime, decided to go around county counsel in an attempt to enforce the Brock subpoena and two others — one involving the beating of Joseph Perez in July 2020 in East Valinda and one involving the fatal shooting of Andres Guardado in June of 2020 in West Rancho Dominguez.

Perez has filed a wrongful death lawsuit that is pending. The Guardado family won an $8 million dollar settlement with the county.

The commission hired Bonner on a pro bono basis to file a lawsuit against the Sheriff’s Department seeking enforcement. The suit was filed last month.

In January, a new state law took effect that said civilian law enforcement oversight panels were entitled to confidential personnel records.

The law has triggered new meet and confer negotiations between county lawyers, the Sheriff’s Department and the union representing deputies.