The Brief

Irvine’s ambitious project to use gondolas to criss cross Great Park has faced criticism after LAist revealed that contracts worth $700,000 were signed outside of public view.

Now, officials are pulling the curtain back and embarking on what might be described as a transparency tour.

“We could have done things better, I think, in terms of providing information,” outgoing City Manager Oliver Chi told LAist. “I think what we're really trying to do is rectify that and provide as much info and all the info that we have on the overall analysis we've done moving forward.” (Chi is set to become the new city manager for Santa Monica.)

At this week’s Great Park board meeting, officials said they have set up a website with more information about the public transit system. And they will make presentations at a slew of upcoming gatherings to discuss the project and have the public weigh in:

Happening at Irvine City Hall, 1 Civic Center Plaza

• 5:30 p.m., June 2: Making a presentation at the city’s Finance Commission meeting 
• 5:30 p.m., June 3: At the city’s Transportation Commission meeting

Happening at Hangar 244, 260 Corsair

• 9:40 a.m., June 5: At the city’s Mobility Summit 
• 6 p.m., June 9: At a Public Town Hall meeting 

How we got here

A rendering of a Swyft Cities gondola. Swyft Cities is currently working with the city of Irvine on the Great Park project.

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Courtesy Swyft Cities

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When an ambitious gondola transit system was unveiled in Irvine last month, it promised to have residents reaching for the skies and breezily bypassing traffic as it whisked them up and over the 1,300-acre Great Park below. Even better, city officials said: the company would donate services and equipment worth up to $10 million in the first year.

So what's the problem? LAist learned that the project has already cost taxpayers around $700,000, doled out via contracts that were signed out of public view.

“If there's any mistake, it's ultimately my responsibility. We didn't do enough,” Chi said.  ”We didn’t do enough outreach as has been made clear to us the last couple of weeks, and I think we're trying to rectify that at this point moving ahead.”

But does that mean everyone is on board now?

Not quite.

After staff finished presenting a comprehensive overview of the project Tuesday afternoon, Councilmember James Mai, who sits on the Great Park Board, raised questions about the quality of the work done so far.

“I don't see what much we have for $715,000. We got a demo unit and some marketing slides for $715, I would've spent it on something else,” he said.

The design mockups were particularly bad, he said: “These slides are basically AI. It's like somebody put a prompt on ChatGPT and generated some images here, it's not realistic, it's not real.”

Residents also lined up to blast the gondola project as being unrealistic, and shortsighted for serving just the park — and not the entire city.

After the meeting, LAist spoke with some of those residents.

Quan Narula, an Irvine resident said there are “many red flags” about the project “in terms of engineering feasibility, in terms of cost, in terms of the process of how rushed it was and the money that's already been spent on it.”

“I've never been involved in local politics before, but this is the one thing that just felt so wrong on so many levels,” he said. “It was important enough for me to speak out and come here.”

Leeza Bondarchuk, a CalPoly Pomona student in urban and regional planning and an Irvine resident,  said a gondola project is too limited.

”If they want to commercialize transportation, if they want to market transportation, they should have a bus system because after all, Irvine is a transit desert," she said.

She added that a gondola system just within the Great Park would isolate the neighborhood from other parts of the city.

Youssef Kaddeche, who sits on the city’s Transportation Commission and an activist with the transportation advocacy group RISE — Remake Irvine Streets for Everyone — said, “There are real, proven, scalable solutions that the city could be implementing that are not flashy, that are not sexy, but they're real and there are cost efficient.”

“ Instead we're pursuing the system that's completely unverified, completely questionable capacity claims,” he added.

(A city news release had stated that the gondolas can carry up to 10,000 passengers per hour, but on Tuesday, officials called that a “theoretical number.”)

Instead, Kaddeche said, the city should be expanding services like Irvine CONNECT, a free daily shuttle service.

 ”We can connect people not just within the Great Park, but outside of the Great Park into the Great Park,” he said. “So that we can reduce the need for parking, so that we can reduce traffic congestion.”

What’s next

One of the best things you can do to hold officials accountable is pay attention.

Your city council, board of supervisors, school board and more all hold public meetings that anybody can attend. These are times you can talk to your elected officials directly and hear about the policies they’re voting on that affect your community.

How to keep tabs on Irvine

• Irvine holds City Council meetings on the second and fourth Tuesday of each month at 4 p.m. in the City Council Chamber, Irvine City Hall, 1 Civic Center Plaza. For a calendar of 2025 meetings, click here.
  
• Great Park Board meetings are held in the same place and follow the same schedule, but take place at 2 p.m.
  
• You can also watch City Council meetings remotely on ICTV via Channel 30 live or via replay. (You can also find videos of previous council meetings there). Here are instructions to watch via Zoom.
  
• The public comment period happens toward the beginning of meetings. You can fill out a "request to speak" form here.
  
• The city generally posts agendas for City Council meetings on the previous Friday. You can find the agenda on the city’s website or sign up there to have agendas sent to your inbox.

Go deeper

A gondola project in Irvine has already cost taxpayers $700K. Here's why that matters
How to watchdog your local government

As Los Angeles homeowners grapple with the expense of rebuilding after last year’s devastating fires, an L.A. City Councilmember is putting forward an idea that could lower some costs.

Councilmember Traci Park, who represents the Pacific Palisades, has introduced a motion to explore waiving part of the city’s portion of the local sales tax for fire victims who purchase rebuilding materials in the city.

The 1% of the local 9.75% sales tax that goes into the city’s general fund would be given back to consumers under the proposal. The waiver could apply to lumber, appliances and other rebuilding goods purchased within the city.

The motion, introduced Friday by Park and seconded by Councilmember John Lee, says: “The City should do everything within its power to alleviate the financial burden for these residents and businesses in order to facilitate their return and stabilize the Pacific Palisades community.”

Would it make much of a difference? 

Economists told LAist the proposal could help many homeowners mitigate the high cost of rebuilding, but likely wouldn’t tip the scales for under-insured, under-resourced property owners.

“It wouldn't hurt if it's very well designed and easy to use,” said Alexander Meeks, a director at the Santa Monica-based Milken Institute. “But I'm not sure if it's really going to tackle the scale of the financial challenge that survivors are facing.”

Meeks noted that the tax waiver wouldn’t lower up-front costs such as environmental testing, architectural design and permitting. And it may not help homeowners sourcing raw materials from outside the city.

Zhiyun Li, a UCLA Anderson School of Management economist, said the waiver could help some homeowners justify the additional cost of rebuilding more fire-safe structures.

“Homeowners must typically pay out of pocket to upgrade to IBHS+ standards, which are more stringent,” Li said. “The tax waiver could encourage upgrading to IBHS+ standards or investing more in mitigation, thereby reducing future risk and improving the likelihood of maintaining insurance coverage.”

What’s next for the proposal? 

The proposed tax relief would not be available to properties that have been sold since the fires started in January 2025.

The motion has been sent to the City Council’s budget and fire recovery committees. If approved by the full council, it would require the city administrative officer, the Office of Finance and the city attorney to report back to the council within 60 days on options for crafting a tax relief plan.

The motion calls for the report to consider factors such as how to minimize the burden of administering the tax relief, what documentation homeowners would have to submit and what it would cost the city to oversee the program.

Senate and House Republican leadership have resurrected a stalled plan to fund the Department of Homeland Security after a record 47-day funding lapse.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said in a joint statement on Wednesday that the House will take up a measure passed by the Senate last week to fund most of DHS except Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol through the end of September.

Republicans would then attempt to fund ICE and Border Patrol for three years using a party-line budget reconciliation bill that would not require support from Democrats.

"In following this two-track approach, the Republican Congress will fully reopen the Department, make sure all federal workers are paid, and specifically fund immigration enforcement and border security for the next three years so that those law-enforcement activities can continue uninhibited," Thune and Johnson wrote.

The agreement comes nearly a week after House Republicans dismissed an identical plan, refusing to take up the Senate-passed measure and instead passing a 60-day short term funding bill for all of DHS that had little chance of overcoming Democratic opposition in the Senate.

Johnson called the agreement a "joke" and President Donald Trump declined to publicly endorse the deal. Trump had previously resisted any package that did not include his push to overhaul federal elections known as the Save America Act.

"I think any deal they make, I'm pretty much not happy with it," Trump told reporters last week.

Democrats welcomed the agreement as in line with their pledge not to give ICE any more money without reforms after immigration enforcement agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis. But the deal does not include any of the policy demands Democrats are pressing for, such as a ban on masks for immigration enforcement officers and requiring warrants issued by a judge, not just the agency, to enter homes.

"For days, Republican divisions derailed a bipartisan agreement, making American families pay the price for their dysfunction," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., wrote in a statement Wednesday. "Throughout this fight, Senate Democrats never wavered."

Trump seemed to bless the revived plan earlier Wednesday, writing on social media that he wants a party-line bill to fund immigration enforcement on his desk by June 1.

"We are going to work as fast, and as focused, as possible to replenish funding for our Border and ICE Agents, and the Radical Left Democrats won't be able to stop us," Trump wrote.

Despite the shutdown, ICE has been minimally impacted because Republican lawmakers approved $75 billion for ICE through another party-line budget reconciliation bill last year.

Congress is on a two-week recess, but the Senate and House could move to fund all of DHS except ICE and CBP as early as Thursday using a procedure known as unanimous consent that allows the chambers to circumvent formal voting as long as no member objects.

Even during a recess when most members are not in Washington, this could be unpredictable, especially in the House, where many hard-line conservatives oppose a deal that does not fully fund DHS.

"Let's make this simple: caving to Democrats and not paying CBP and ICE is agreeing to defund Law Enforcement and leaving our borders wide open again," Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., a member of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, wrote on X. "If that's the vote, I'm a NO."

If a member does object, that could require waiting for another vote when all members are back from recess.

Claudia Grisales contributed reporting.
Copyright 2026 NPR

California clocked its second-worst snowpack on record Wednesday, a potentially troubling signal ahead for fire season.

It’s an alarming end to a winter that saw abnormally dry conditions briefly wiped from California’s drought map in January, for the first time in a quarter-century.

Though precipitation to date has been near average, much of it fell as rain rather than snow. Then March’s record-breaking heat melted most of the snow that remains. The state’s major reservoirs are nevertheless brimming above historic averages and are flirting with capacity, and a smattering of snow, rain and thunderstorms are dousing last month’s heat wave.

But experts now warn that California’s case of the missing snowpack could herald an early fire season in the mountains.

On Wednesday, state engineers conducting the symbolic April 1 snowpack measurement at Phillips Station south of Lake Tahoe found no measurable snow in patches of white dotting the grassy field.

“I want to welcome you call to probably one of the quickest snow surveys we’ve had — maybe one where people could actually use an umbrella,” joked Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources. “We’re getting a lot of questions about are we heading into a hydrologic drought? The answer is, I don’t know.”

State data reports that California’s snowpack is closing out the season at an alarming 18% of average statewide, and an even more abysmal 6% of average in the northern mountains that feed California’s major reservoirs.

Only the extreme drought year of 2015 beat this year’s snowpack for the worst on record, measuring in at just 5% of average on April 1st, when the snow historically is at its deepest.

“I think everyone's anticipating that it will be a long, busy fire season,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network.

“Without a snowpack, and with an early spring, it just means that there’s much more time for something like that to happen.”

‘It’s pretty bizarre up here’ 

In the city of South Lake Tahoe, which survived the massive Caldor Fire in the fall of 2021 without losing any structures, fire chief Jim Drennan said his department is already ramping up prevention efforts.

“It's pretty bizarre up here right now. It really seems like June conditions more than March,” Drennan said. “People are already turning the sprinklers on for their lawns.”

Without more precipitation, an early spring may complicate prescribed burning efforts. But Drennan said fire agencies in the Tahoe basin can start mechanically clearing fuels from forest areas earlier than usual.

“That means we can get more work done,” he said.

It also means homeowners need to start hardening their homes now, said Martin Goldberg, battalion chief and fuels management officer for the Lake Valley Fire Protection District, which protects unincorporated communities in the Lake Tahoe Basin’s south shore.

Goldberg urges residents to scour their yards for burnable materials, create defensible space and reach out to local fire departments with questions. The risks are widespread — from firewood, wooden fences, gas cans, plants, pine needles — even lawn furniture stacked against a house.

“In years past, I wouldn't even think of raking and clearing until May,” Goldberg said. “But my yard's completely cleared of snowpack, and it has been for a couple weeks now.”

‘A haystack fire’

Battalion chief David Acuña, a spokesperson for Cal Fire, said fire season is shaped by more than just one year’s snowpack.

Climate change has been remaking California’s fire seasons into fire years. And California’s recent average to abundant water years have fueled what Acuña called “bumper crops of vegetation and brush.”

“Most of California is like a haystack. And if you’ve ever seen a haystack fire, they burn very intensely because there's layers of fuel,” Acuña said.

Like Quinn-Davidson, Acuña wasn’t ready to make specific predictions about fires to come.

But John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at UC Merced, said the temperatures and snowpack conditions this year offer a glimpse of California in the latter decades of this century, as fossil fuel use continues to drive global temperatures higher.

How this year’s fires will play out will depend on when, where and how wind, heat, fuel and ignitions combine. But it foreshadows the consequences of a warmer California for water and fire under climate change.

“This,” Abatzoglou said, “is yet another stress test for the future in the state.”

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