The Brief

California may have a reputation as a bastion of blue, but there are only so many Democratic voters to go around.

Under Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to gerrymander California’s congressional maps to favor Democrats, no incumbent Democrat would take on more Republican voters than Rep. Robert Garcia of Long Beach.

Garcia’s new district, rather than stretching north from his home town into liberal Los Angeles County, would instead shift southward to encompass a coastal slice of conservative Orange County — notably, the conservative-leaning cities of Huntington Beach and Newport Beach.

Absorbing those GOP voters into the 42nd congressional district is a point of pride for the 47-year-old Peruvian immigrant, a gay progressive whose sharp-tongued condemnations of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk catapulted him into party leadership as the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, the chamber’s main investigative arm.

He also serves on the committee’s viral “DOGE” subgroup, where he and a group of fellow young progressives use their speaking time to lob sardonic rhetorical questions that cast the proceedings and the chairwoman, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, as absurd and even laughable.

“Are Bert and Ernie part of an extreme homosexual agenda?” Garcia asked Paula Kerger, president and CEO of the Public Broadcasting Service, during a hearing in March as his staffer held up a life-sized image of the beloved muppet duo.

If his party retakes control of the House next year, Garcia would almost certainly ascend to chair the committee, which has vast subpoena powers, and would become the face of congressional Democrats’ resistance to Trump.

But don’t expect Garcia, a former Long Beach mayor and City Council member, to back down from his anti-MAGA bully pulpit just because he would then represent a town whose city council has embraced the moniker “the MAGA-nificent seven.”

“Folks have asked, ‘Hey, you know, you're pretty progressive. Is this gonna impact the way you take on Trump or the oversight committee?’” Garcia told political commentator Katie Phang during a virtual fundraiser for Prop. 50 last month.

“Absolutely not,” he said.

Garcia’s certainty that he’ll win re-election next year, regardless of which maps are used, is precisely the problem with creating noncompetitive districts as Prop. 50 proposes to do, said state Sen. Tony Strickland, a Republican former mayor of Huntington Beach.

The city is currently represented by a Democratic congressmember, Rep. Dave Min of Irvine, who succeeded Democrat Katie Porter when she unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate last year. But since the district is currently drawn as a competitive seat, Strickland said, Min must win favor from at least some conservative voters if he wants to stay in office. That wouldn’t be the case for Garcia, should Prop. 50 pass.

Strickland and other local officials in coastal Orange County are skeptical that Garcia — a former Long Beach mayor who said he’s thrilled that his new district would include the entire city — will prioritize their cities’ needs, especially if he doesn’t need their votes to win.

“The problem with Prop. 50 is you have predetermined elections. You already know who your congressman is before election day,” Strickland said. “As a pretty conservative city, both Newport and Huntington will have one of the most liberal members of Congress. And I just don't think that's healthy.”

"We want to govern ourselves"

While Huntington Beach has long asserted its conservative tilt by resisting compliance with state laws they view as too liberal (such as housing construction requirements), the city in recent years has embraced the national culture wars and grabbed headlines for leading a conservative backlash to the state’s ruling Democrats in Sacramento.

Residents last March approved a ban on flying the rainbow LGBTQ Pride flag on city property. They greenlit a controversial ordinance requiring voters to bring ID to vote, which Attorney General Rob Bonta and Secretary of State Shirley Weber argue violates state election laws. (Oral arguments before an appeals court are scheduled for Oct. 22).

And a simmering battle over sexual content in children’s books and Huntington Beach’s public library came to a head in June.

The city council had previously approved a controversial ordinance establishing a community review board for library books — what critics dubbed a book ban — and also briefly explored privatizing the library, policies they saw as a counterbalance to the state Legislature’s ultraliberal, “woke” laws. But this summer, via special election, voters overwhelmingly supported repealing the review board and limited the city’s ability to outsource library services.

“We really just want home control. We want to govern ourselves,” said Huntington Beach Mayor Pat Burns. He doesn’t know Garcia personally, but as a former police officer in Long Beach he’s familiar with the former councilmember’s left-leaning politics.

“Hopefully he's open to helping us, but if he comes in and tries to break us, you know, break our community and try to crush our council in some way,” Burns said, speaking of Garcia, “well, we're going to resist. We're not going to get along.”

Garcia argues that the successful repudiation of the library crackdown is evidence that the city council’s right-wing approach doesn’t fully represent residents’ values.

“The vast majority of Huntington Beach are good, hard-working, middle-class folks that want a just future for themselves,” Garcia told CalMatters in an interview. “That's who I'm gonna represent.”

Garcia reiterated that he’s unafraid to speak out, even when he disagrees with decisions made in cities that he represents. Even so, he said he would be proud to represent everyone in his proposed new district and would fight hard to bring federal dollars home to support local projects. He said he would prioritize issues that “everyone cares about,” such as increased affordability, combating climate change and curbing corruption.

Still, Garcia also repeatedly noted that the proposed district would still be solidly Democratic. He effused confidence that he would handily win re-election next year and, he hopes, help Democrats retake control of the House.

Democrats have come under fire for drawing the new maps behind closed doors without input from the public or the independent citizens redistricting commission. But Paul Mitchell, the election data guru and redistricting expert who penned the proposed maps, said that in redrawing Garcia’s district to include coastal Orange County, he and his team hewed closely to proposals that advocacy groups previously presented to the independent commission.

Moving Garcia’s district to Orange County was crucial to shore up support for three vulnerable Democrats — Min along with Representatives Derek Tran and Mike Levin — and creating two newly redrawn districts, currently held by Republican representatives Ken Calvert and Darrell Issa, that Democrats believe they can flip.

“That was a critical piece of the puzzle,” Mitchell said in an interview. “It facilitates everything in Southern California.”

Fellow California Democrats have sung Garcia’s praises for graciously allowing his district to go from one that Vice President Kamala Harris won by more than 32% last November to one in which Democrats only have a 10 percentage point registration advantage.

“Robert Garcia is an incredible team player,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, chair of California’s Democratic congressional delegation, in a written statement. “He’s taking in some historically Republican neighborhoods, but it’s still going to be a Democratic district.”

During the same virtual fundraiser in September, Garcia told viewers that taking on more Republican voters was “the right thing to do” because “our democracy’s at stake.”

“This is not a moment for us to worry about not having competitive seats or about being in Congress for a lifetime,” Garcia said. “This is about winning the majority to protect people and to save our country.”

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

A Trump administration official on Friday signaled a potential rollback of the racial and ethnic categories approved for the 2030 census and other future federal government forms.

Supporters of those categories fear that any last-minute modifications to the U.S. government's standards for data about race and ethnicity could hurt the accuracy of census data and other future statistics used for redrawing voting districts, enforcing civil rights protections and guiding policymaking.

Those standards were last revised in 2024 during the Biden administration, after Census Bureau research and public discussion.

A White House agency at the time approved, among other changes, new checkboxes for "Middle Eastern or North African" and "Hispanic or Latino" under a reformatted question that asks survey participants: "What is your race and/or ethnicity?" The revisions also require the federal government to stop automatically categorizing people who identify with Middle Eastern or North African groups as white.

But at a Friday meeting of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics in Washington, D.C., the chief statistician within the White House's Office of Management and Budget revealed that the Trump administration has started a new review of those standards and how the 2024 revisions were approved.

"We're still at the very beginning of a review. And this, again, is not prejudging any particular outcome. I think we just wanted to be able to take a look at the process and decide where we wanted to end up on a number of these questions," said Mark Calabria. "I've certainly heard a wide range of views within the administration. So it's just premature to say where we'll end up."

OMB's press office did not immediately respond to NPR's request for comment.

Calabria's comments mark the first public confirmation that Trump officials are considering the possibility of not using the latest racial and ethnic category changes and other revisions. They come amid the administration's attack on diversity, equity and inclusion programs, a push to stop producing data that could protect the rights of transgender people and threats to the reliability of federal statistics.

In September, OMB said those Biden-era revisions "continue to be in effect" when it announced a six-month extension to the 2029 deadline for federal agencies to follow the new standards when collecting data on race and ethnicity.

Calabria said the delay gave agencies more time to implement the changes "while we review."

The first Trump administration stalled the process for revising the racial and ethnic data standards in time for the 2020 census.

The "Project 2025" policy agenda released by The Heritage Foundation, the conservative, D.C.-based think tank, called for a Republican administration to "thoroughly review any changes" to census race and ethnicity questions because of "concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas."

Advocates of the changes, however, see the new categories and other revisions as long-needed updates to better reflect people's identities.

"At stake is a more accurate and deeper understanding of the communities that comprise our country," says Meeta Anand, senior director of census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. "I am not concerned if it's reviewed in an honest attempt to understand what the process was. I am concerned if it's for a predetermined outcome that would be to ignore the entire process that was done in a very transparent manner."

Edited by Benjamin Swasey
Copyright 2025 NPR

A large black bear that was relocated earlier this year after being found under a house in Altadena is up to his old tricks again.

The bear, nicknamed Barry by the neighbors, was found last week under a different Altadena home, and wildlife officials are using a caramel- and cherry-scented lure to entice the roughly 550-pound male bear out of his hiding spot.

So far, they’ve been unsuccessful.

Cort Klopping, information specialist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, told LAist the bear seems to be spooked by increased activity around the home, including media crews outside and helicopters overhead.

“It seems as though in this case, this bear has found this poor guy's crawlspace as a comfortable, safe-seeming, warm enclosure for denning purposes,” he said.

He said the space is “somewhere for this bear to kind of hang its hat when it's relaxing.”

How the bear returned

Wildlife officials can tell it’s the same bear who was lured out from under an Altadena house after the Eaton Fire because of the tag number on his ear.

The bear was trapped and relocated about 10 miles away to the Angeles National Forest in January, but Klopping said he’s been back in the Altadena area for around five months.

The male bear after it was removed from under an Altadena home earlier this year.

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The bear spooked a SoCal Gas crew who stopped by for repairs after the Eaton Fire in January.

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The Department of Fish and Wildlife fitted the bear with a temporary GPS collar so officials could keep track of it. The collar came off a couple months later while the animal still was living in the forest.

The bear is believed to have been spotted around the home last Tuesday, Klopping said, and the owner reached out to wildlife officials a few days later for help.

“I’ve seen pictures of this bear, and I’m shocked to be under that house,” homeowner Ken Johnson told LAist media partner CBS LA.

Officials said they were hopeful the bear would move along on its own. They encouraged the homeowner to set up a camera on the crawlspace and line the area with ammonia soaked-rags or a motion-activated wildlife sprinkler system to deter the bear from returning, Klopping said.

“These are all actions that would not harm the bear, not harm people, but they would make it less comfortable for the bear to be there,” he said.

But the bear stayed put.

“Right now, it seems like it's stressed,” Klopping said. “It seems like it's scared, and therefore, it's not really wanting to leave the security of where it is at the moment.”

The hope ahead

A pair of wildlife officials stopped by the home Thursday to set up the sweet-smelling lure and camera so the department can keep an eye on the bear’s activity remotely.

Barry didn’t take the bait immediately, Klopping said, but officials are hopeful the animal will feel more comfortable leaving the crawlspace once activity around the home dies down a bit.

Klopping also is warning people in the area to secure access points on their property so the bear just doesn’t move in there next.

“If I were in that neighborhood, I would be doing everything in my power to make sure that my crawlspaces would not be accessible,” he said, including covering it with something stronger than the wire mesh the bear got through before.

Bears also are extremely food motivated, and Klopping said they can smell your leftover chicken in trash cans on the curb from 5 miles away.

He encouraged residents to be mindful of trash that could be an easy meal for wildlife, as well as pet food and hummingbird feeders, which Klopping said biologists have seen bears drink “like a soda.”

You can find tips on how to handle a bear in your backyard here and resources from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife here.

There’s a new way you can track pollution in your neighborhood.

The SoCal Clean Manufacturing Coalition, a climate advocacy group, has released a map with the locations of more than 1,800 fossil fuel-burning industrial boilers across Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties. Many are at universities and hospitals, as well as some apartment complexes like the Park La Brea apartments in the Miracle Mile.

The map is part of an effort to push the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which regulates our air quality, to pass rules to require these large boilers to be phased out.

Why do these boilers matter?

Industrial boilers aren’t exactly the poster child of pollution, but they do play a role in Southern California. Boilers come in different sizes, and although there are electric types, many still burn fossil fuels to generate hot water, steam and, as a byproduct, nitrogen oxide.

South Coast AQMD says that makes it a source of pollutants. Nitrogen oxide contributors are not only a problem for smog and respiratory issues but also for the agency’s effort to meet federal air quality standards.

That’s why last year the agency approved new requirements for certain buildings to use zero-emission water heaters and boilers when they need replacement.

Teresa Cheng,  California director for Industrious Labs, a coalition member focused on creating cleaner industries, says these rules were for smaller “baby boilers” and that the coalition wants to see that applied to larger ones, which are covered under the agency’s 1146 and 1146.1 rule.

The push has caused concern in the gas industry. The California Fuels and Convenience Alliance, which represents small fuel retailers and industry suppliers, says boilers are essential in a wide range of manufacturing facilities that need high heat, like food processing, fuel production and more.

“CFCA is deeply concerned that requiring industrial facilities to abandon gas-fired boilers at the end of their useful life before the market is technologically or economically ready will still have severe consequences for manufacturers, workers and consumers,” the alliance said in a statement.

The organization says many facilities already have invested in “ultra-low” nitrogen oxide technology and that requiring a switch to zero-emissions equipment could destabilize the industry because of costs.

See the map

The map includes the number of boilers in each place, including how many aging units, and their permitted heating capacity. (That metric essentially correlates with how much pollution it can release.)

Cheng says the map is being shared to make the “invisible visible” so residents can know what’s around them. Most boilers are in communities that already deal with environmental pollution problems.

Boilers are even close to K-12 schools, like Glendale’s Herbert Hoover High School, which has its own.

“ These boilers have a very long lifeline,” she said. “If the air district doesn't pass zero-emissions rules for these boilers, we actually risk locking in decades more of pollution.”