The Brief

More than a month before the Palisades Fire, then-Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley issued a dire warning: Her department was woefully understaffed, response times were high, equipment was in disrepair and emergency preparedness was suffering.

It's not clear whether a better funded agency would have slowed the firestorm. Firefighters faced gale force winds of up to 100 mph when the fire broke out.

What is clear is that day-to-day service calls — most of them for medical help — suffer because L.A. has one of the smallest big city fire departments in the country.

“In many ways, the current staffing, deployment model and size of the LAFD has not changed since the 1960s,” Crowley wrote in a November memo to the Board of Fire Commissioners.

The population of the city has grown to more than 3.9 million, from 2.5 million in 1960, but the number of firefighters has not grown proportionately.

Crowley has since been fired by Mayor Karen Bass, who last Friday cited the chief’s failure to increase the number of on-duty firefighters in the hours before the Palisades Fire and her unwillingness to participate in an evaluation of the department’s response to the disaster.

In a statement after her firing, Crowley did not address the Palisades Fire or the mayor’s accusations directly but said she based her actions “on taking care of our firefighters so that they could take care of our communities.”

But Crowley has not been the only one ringing the alarm that the LAFD is stretched to the limit.

Reports obtained by LAist through public records requests found rescue ambulances and fire trucks from the department’s 106 stations have scrambled from one call to the next with ever-increasing response times in recent years.

“It's not about one budget. It's not about one mayor. It's about decades of neglect of the LAFD,” said Freddy Escobar, president of United Firefighters of Los Angeles. “The 911 caller is going to pay the ultimate sacrifice because we don’t have the resources.”

Kristin Crowley was removed from her position as LAFD chief last week, but she plans to remain with the department.

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Myung J. Chun

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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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Longer response times

L.A. has just under one firefighter per 1,000 residents. Since 1986, the average number of firefighters in densely populated cities across the country ranged from 1.54 to 1.81 per 1,000, according to the National Fire Protection Association.

As calls for service have increased, so have response times. The overall response time for 90% of calls jumped more than a minute, to 7 minutes and 53 seconds, from 2018 to 2022, according to a 2024 Standards of Cover analysis by the International Association of Firefighters. The IAFF is a labor union of firefighters that also provides analysis of fire operations to local fire departments.

The National Fire Protection Association recommends a 4-minute standard.

Response times are especially complicated in L.A., according to a separate 2023 Standards of Cover report by Citygate Associates. Citygate is a consulting firm that evaluates fire departments across the country.

The challenges include a “hilly topography in some areas, and a public road pattern that, in certain areas, is geographically challenged with rivers, open spaces, and/or a lack of major cross-connecting roadways,” according to the report.

As areas continue to redevelop and add population, the department will need adjustments “just to maintain, much less improve, response times,” the report reads.

Medical calls dominate resources

L.A’s Fire Department responds to more than 500,000 calls for service per year. More than 80% are calls from people who need medical help. The department takes more than 600 people to hospitals every day. It treats hundreds more people on scene, and many of them are unhoused.

The LAFD responds to more than 66,000 calls per year related to the city’s unhoused population, according to the department.

“If we were a hospital, we would have the largest emergency room in the country,” Battalion Chief Eric Roberts said in an interview.

According to the Citygate report, fire trucks are too often busy with medical calls, stretching call times for fires and other calls. The consulting firm recommends expanding the use of lightweight pickup trucks to respond to less serious medical calls and small fires. They’re called fast response vehicles, and the LAFD has three of them.

“The alternative response program needs to scale massively and quickly to lower the workload placed on fire units back down to moderate and serious emergencies,” the Citygate report states. “Well over 100 new non-firefighter personnel must be hired and trained for alternative response measures to meet the service needs of the city.”

The report also recommends staffing 12 to 15 new rescue ambulances and building one new fire station — in the northern San Fernando Valley.

The International Association of Firefighters study recommends adding 32 rescue ambulances and 378 firefighters. In addition, the study recommended adding 62 new fire stations.

Neither study placed a cost on their recommendations.

Personnel by the numbers

Over the past five years, the number of sworn and civilian personnel at the department has stayed relatively constant, rising only slightly to 3,877, from 3,831, according to budget documents. But in the latest budget for the fiscal year that started July 1, 2024, the department lost 58 positions from the year before.

In a December report, Crowley recommended adding 438 positions.

“I think it's important for us to look at what resources do we want to grow,” said Councilmember Tim McOsker, who sits on the city’s Public Safety Committee. “If we have new stations, if we have new apparatus, we need to have persons assigned to them.”

Part of the department’s short staffing problem dates to the 2008 recession, when city tax revenue plummeted. The department lost more than 10% of its positions and mothballed fire trucks.

“We reduced our resources in a way that we have not fully recovered from,” Roberts said.

McOsker agreed.

“Over a number of years — many, many years — we have not put enough money into the Fire Department,” McOsker said, adding that the Palisades Fire has increased urgency. The councilmember, whose District 15 includes San Pedro, Wilmington and Watts, said he thinks “everyone in the city recognizes that it's important to have adequate fire services.”

Calls for increased funding for the Fire Department come as the city faces budget problems. Four months into the fiscal year that began July 1, the city had already overspent its budget by nearly $300 million, according to the city administrative officer.

“We might have to shrink in other areas,” McOsker said.

Councilmember Traci Park, whose District 11 includes the Pacific Palisades, said the city will have to make some hard decisions.

“We can’t keep investing in and doubling down on programs that aren’t getting us results,” Park said. “And I feel like homelessness is a good example of that.”

The question is whether reducing spending on homelessness would increase the burden on the Fire Department.

More from Crowley

Crowley, who has elected to stay with the department in a lower rank, decried the loss of civilian staff and overtime variable staffing hours, warning the reduction has “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large scale emergencies.”

As the Palisades Fire was burning, Crowley said $17 million in cuts to her department in last year’s budget hampered the department’s response — in part because there are not enough mechanics to fix broken fire trucks.

A spokesperson for Mayor Karen Bass said the signing of a labor contract that boosted salaries for firefighters and the funding of new equipment resulted in a net increase in funding for the department of $110 million. But Crowley said it still wasn’t enough.

“We are screaming to be properly funded,” Crowley, the first woman and first gay person to lead the department, told a T.V. station during the first few days of the fire.

In that December report, she requested 438 new sworn and civilian positions for her department as part of a 7.6% increase in her operating budget.

Park, meanwhile, is seeking to place a bond measure on next year’s ballot that would increase funding for the Fire Department.

The councilmember’s proposal has been referred to the City Council’s Rules Committee.

LAist Senior Reporter Ted Rohrlich contributed to this report.

This story first appeared on Long Beach Post.

Long Beach Unified announced Thursday it expects to close Gompers and Edison elementary schools at the end of the school year, saying the campuses are underenrolled.

It’s the district’s latest effort to consolidate resources as enrollment continues to fall districtwide. LBUSD enrollment dipped below 60,000 students this year, the first time it crossed that threshold since the early 1980s.

Why the district wants to close schools

As enrollment declines, so does school funding, and LBUSD is taking drastic measures as operating costs exceed revenue. In a recent budget report, the district said it expects to draw nearly $45 million from its reserves this school year — the third year of deficit spending. Already, the district has reduced library support, mental health resources, and certificated and classified staff. Hoover Middle School closed last year due to low enrollment, the district said. Both LBUSD and the school board have signaled that more tough cuts are on the horizon; some are already here.

“It feels like a big loss,” said school board member Juan Benitez, whose district includes Edison Elementary. Yet he added that low birth rates will continue pushing enrollment down. The district and board have a fiscal responsibility to take action — not only to balance the budget, but to ensure students receive the best learning environment possible, which is difficult to maintain at schools with low capacity, he said.

Where students and teachers would go

If the school closures are approved by the board of education, the Gompers attendance boundary will be consolidated with three nearby Lakewood elementary schools: Cleveland, Holmes and MacArthur, according to a letter the district sent to families. Edison students would attend Chavez and Oropeza elementary schools, both within a mile of Edison’s downtown campus.

If families wish to send their children to different schools, they will receive priority in the school choice process, the letters added.

The campuses will not remain vacant, Benitez said. Edison may be used as a temporary site while other schools undergo modernization projects, and additional uses will be proposed for Gompers, he said. The Child Development Center currently housed at Edison will remain there for at least the next several years, he said.

Teachers on permanent contracts at Gompers and Edison will keep their jobs in the district, said Peder Larsen, president of the teachers union, and they will get precedence in school reassignments. But they may not learn their new school sites until April, once the school transfer and assignment process is underway, he said.

Families push back

The news has hit hard for families. Ashlee Napalan, an LBUSD teacher and a parent of three children at Gompers Elementary, said the news was “heartbreaking” and surprising, especially because Gompers underwent a significant remodel last year, including the installation of a new HVAC system, as well as fresh paint and new playground equipment, she said.

She described a tight-knit community at Gompers and said her children walk to school and play with other kids at the park across the street. When she told her son, a kindergartener, the news, she said he cried all night. “We’ve been really heavily involved with the school for seven years,” she said. “It’s a huge part of our lives.”

What happens next

Some parents have already begun organizing to oppose the move. A petition to keep Gompers open accrued more than 600 signatures in one day. Some parents said they plan to speak at the school board meeting on Oct. 7 when the issue will be presented to the board as an information item. The board is expected to vote on Oct. 21. Parents at each school have been invited to informational meetings in the coming month, according to the letters sent by the district.

Benitez said he is pushing for “ongoing, constant, clear responsive communication” to the families affected by these proposed changes. “The recommendation is not being taken lightly,” he said, adding that he — and the district — will be listening closely to students’ and families’ concerns.

Ahead of the midterm elections, Congress is scrambling to show that it understands voter concerns about AI data centers and their potential impact on electricity rates. But answering the question of how much of those costs will be shouldered by residential utility customers is surprisingly difficult to answer.

That uncertainty is at the heart of a growing fight on Capitol Hill, as lawmakers advance competing proposals aimed at protecting ratepayers in a debate that often belies the complexity of the underlying economics.

On Capitol Hill this week, Republicans have been trying to push through the Ratepayer Protection Act, sponsored by Ohio Republican Sen. Jon Husted. The bill would have state utilities consider holding "large-load" customers responsible for the increased costs.

Husted is in a heated reelection campaign against Democrat Sherrod Brown, who lost his Senate seat in 2024. Brown has made Husted's past support of data centers in Ohio a major campaign issue. The bill easily passed the House in September with strong bipartisan support.

Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer opposes the measure, saying its protections for ratepayers are voluntary. Instead, Schumer is promoting the GRID Savings Act, a similar bill authored by New Mexico Democrat Sen. Martin Heinrich, which he says has more teeth.

Several other data center and AI-related bills are at various stages in the legislative process.

The cost of AI is showing up in customers' bills

The question of how much of the energy and grid costs are being borne by ratepayers is a complicated one and has no universal answer, experts tell NPR. They say it varies by utility and state, but that in the end residential electricity customers will pay for a share of the AI buildout.

By one estimate, Maryland customers, for example, pay somewhere around $168 to $216 more per year on their electricity bills primarily due to the data center boom.

"We're talking tens to hundreds of millions of dollars [of infrastructure] that are being built by these local utilities," says Connor Waldoch, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Grid Status, which focuses on making electricity-market data easier to access and understand. "In many cases, it is just ultimately going to end up in customers' bills."

Tracking the impact of data center growth on residential bills isn't easy, however. How much of the increase is passed on to residential customers and when, depends on utilities' power-purchasing contracts, retail rates and regulatory decisions about who pays, according to Lucy Qiu, a professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.

PJM is a regional transmission organization that coordinates the electricity grid and wholesale power market across 13 states and the District of Columbia. It supplies power to Northern Virginia, home to the largest concentration of data centers in the world. PJM's Independent Market Monitor estimates that data centers have cost their 67 million ratepayers about $29 billion over roughly the past two years.

"Everyone pays those costs," says Ari Peskoe, director of the Harvard Electricity Law Initiative. "They're spread across the region to every business and resident that has an electricity meter."

An Amazon Web Services data center is shown situated near single-family homes in Stone Ridge, Va.

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How to determine who the grid infrastructure benefits?

Data center growth can push up wholesale costs of energy by increasing demand. This determines how much generating capacity utilities and regional grid operators need to secure, Qiu says. There are also costs with building new power lines, substations and other infrastructure to connect data centers to the grid. Determining how much of that exclusively serves data centers — and how much also benefits other customers — is part of the difficulty in determining who gets the bill, she says.

"It really depends on the scale of the upgrade and also how utilities are doing the accounting of that different share, whether it's being used solely by the data centers or also being shared by other customers," Qiu says.

No "single, clean number"

Even so, "a single, clean number" that applies nationwide is just not possible, Harvard's Peskoe says, because "a lot of the data about how much particular data centers are paying is hidden behind non-disclosure agreements."

Those NDAs have become a major sore spot on the local level, as residents opposed to new data centers call out local officials for the secrecy that has surrounded many deals. A study last year by the University of Mary Washington found that NDAs had been signed in 80% of Virginia localities where there were existing, approved or proposed data centers.

In an email to NPR, Jeremy L. Slayton, a spokesman for Dominion Energy, which serves Loudoun County, Va., home to about 250 data centers, said, "We recover costs for distribution and transmission infrastructure from customers."

"These assets are core to the reliable electric service we provide our customers. All costs we recover from customers are reviewed and approved by the Virginia State Corporation Commission," he said, referring to the independent state agency that regulates public utilities.

Added costs of building out in a hurry

There is still another factor at play, University of Maryland's Qiu says. The data center industry is in a hurry and waiting for new power-generation technologies doesn't seem to be in the cards. As a result, to meet the demand, utility companies will likely need to opt for less efficient power plants and those costs will be passed onto consumers over time, as well.

One other consideration is optics, Waldoch of Grid Status says. Big customers like AI data centers pay less per kilowatt hour for power than residential customers do. Think of it as a volume discount. In the current environment where 70% of Americans are worried that data centers will increase their electricity bills, Waldoch says, "If you're saying, hey, this data center is actually paying a lot less for electricity than you are, even though it matters much less to them ... it's not like that's palatable for a lot of people at this point."

Benefits of the AI buildout

But not all price increases in recent years are linked to data centers, Qiu says.

"The fuel cost ... is a very important factor," she says and some of those new substations and power lines were going to need to be replaced anyway due to things like extreme weather events.

Qiu also notes that the U.S. power grid needs upgrades to accommodate higher demand for things like electric vehicles. The AI boom "can accelerate the upgrade of the grid infrastructure," she says.

There's also evidence, Qui says, that resiliency — the ability to survive high-impact events such as extreme heat and to recover from outages — is better for people living near data centers due to the robust infrastructure those facilities require. "So if there's a data center, it actually helps … improve the local grid reliability [and] reduce the power outages," says Qui.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Long before it drew sound bath seekers from around the world, the Mojave Desert’s Integratron was one man’s bid to extend human life, guided, he said, by beings from Venus.

A collection tracing the history of the white-domed landmark built by George Van Tassel and the postwar UFO movement he helped lead has now found a home at the Huntington.

The Mojave Desert became a major hub for UFO contactees after WWII.

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How a ufology archive reached an institution best known for its manicured botanical gardens and classical portraits is a story decades in the making, bringing together a pool deck contractor, a historian and a podcaster.

“This isn’t just a UFO collection,” said Jack Wager, the L.A.-based host of Otherworld, a popular podcast examining the paranormal. “This is connected to the history of the desert, aerospace, and Southern California in general.”

Who was George Van Tassel?

In the 1950s, the Mojave was becoming an important gathering spot for those who claimed contact with extraterrestrials.

Van Tassel had left a career as a flight inspector in Southern California's burgeoning aeronautics industry for the desert community of Landers where his family operated the Come On Inn cafe by an airstrip, and he organized UFO conventions.

George Van Tassel and his wife Eva ran the Come On Inn cafe in the Mojave Desert.

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In a 1964 TV interview, he described a close encounter of his own with a crew of humanoids from Venus.

“They were about five foot six,” Van Tassel said. “They came about to my eyebrows, and they could have walked in our clothes down any of our streets, and we would not have paid any attention to it.”

Van Tassel said one of the beings, named Solganda, gave him the idea to bathe people in electromagnetic energy to recharge their cells and live longer.

He began building the Integratron a few miles from his home in the late 1950s, funded by proceeds from his publications and conventions, along with donations. It was rumored that Howard Hughes, for whom he worked as a flight inspector, had contributed $40,000 — worth about half a million today.

The building took its unique shape over the desert but was not fully done by the time Van Tassel died of a heart attack in 1978, said La Crescenta-based architectural historian Daniel Paul.

“I sometimes wondered if he was starting to try certain things on himself, and maybe that messed up his heart a little bit,” Paul said.

Paul dug into Van Tassel’s life after the Integratron’s current owners — sisters Joanne, Nancy and Patty Karl, who transformed the dome into a destination for sound baths — hired him to secure a listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Integratron is known for today as a destination for sound baths after it was purchased in 2000 by its current owners including Joanne Karl, seen here.

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Robert Gauthier

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In his application to the National Park Service, Paul said he credited the Integratron design to the architect Howard P. Hesse, Van Tassel and, in parentheses, Solganda, “because that's what George Van Tassel always said where this guidance came from.”

The Park Service officially listed the Integratron in 2018. Afterward, Paul got a voicemail from a stranger complimenting him for citing Solganda.

A watercolor illustration of the Integratron

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How a pool deck contractor ended up with the Van Tassel archive

The caller was Don McKinney, a contractor from Morongo Valley who resurfaced pool decks and, as a side quest, had amassed a vast collection of Van Tassel memorabilia.

Donald McKinney collected the items of Integratron creator George Van Tassel for decades.

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Otherworld Instagram

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“I thought that Van Tassel was the most colorful person that I ever knew,” McKinney said.

McKinney said he met Van Tassel in 1969 when he was 19 and, with friends, visited the older man’s home by a massive boulder called Giant Rock. They went to an underground room where Van Tassel said he received communications from outer space.

“I pulled a book off the shelf and saw a flying saucer in it and asked, 'George, if these were real?'” McKinney recalled. “And he says, ‘Absolutely.’”

McKinney hasn’t seen a UFO in the years since, but believes those who say they have.

In the early 2000s, a potential pool job brought him back into Van Tassel’s world.

Giant Rock, the boulder by where George Van Tassel worked and lived.

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Jack Wagner

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A Van Tassel associate named George Riddle was seeking construction quotes and, in the course of talking, revealed he had a trove of Van Tassel belongings, everything from a model of the Integratron to a photo McKinney remembered seeing at the Come On Inn cafe.

“I just fainted, practically, and bought as much stuff as I could," McKinney said.

Archival materials from the post-war ufology movement in the Southern California desert are now part of the Huntington collection.

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By the time McKinney called Paul, he had spent a dozen or so years storing the items in the high-desert home he shares with his wife, Dayle. He later invited Paul to come see it all.

“I drove down there and met him, and I thought, 'Oh my gosh,'” Paul said. “I knew right away Don was the real deal.”

A podcast taping and a race to save the tapes

Several years later, Paul brought the story to a new audience.

On a May 2025 episode of the podcast Otherworld, he joined Wagner to talk about the Integratron. When Paul mentioned McKinney’s desert archive, Wagner wanted to know more.

After the taping, he called McKinney and found out that he had 120 reel-to-reel tapes of Van Tassel's channelings. Wagner was instantly worried about their survival.

“They don't have a huge lifespan, and the Eaton fires had just happened,” Wagner said. “I remember thinking, ‘Man, like, there should at least be a digital copy of these tapes.’”

Wagner headed to McKinney’s house to preserve the audio and flew in his producers Theo Schafer from New York and Theo Krantz from New Mexico.

Otherworld producers Theo Krantz and Theo Schafer joined host Jack Wagner at the home of Don McKinney to preserve his reel-to-reel tapes and other recordings owned by George Van Tassel.

The trio discovered much more than tapes. They also found Integratron blueprints and materials from Van Tassel’s career in aeronautics. They document their trip in a video posted on Otherworld's Patreon.

What happens to the collection now

Wagner told Paul the collection belonged in a museum. Paul agreed and reached out to a friend at the Huntington, Anne Blecksmith, associate director of the library, who then told her colleagues.

A pair of Huntington curators went out to the desert to see the collection themselves. An appraisal followed, then a purchase for an undisclosed amount.

Aside from audio recordings, the Otherworld team were floored by the amount of other items chronicling the desert's UFO history.

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Jack Wagner

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For Erin Chase, the Huntington's associate curator of architecture and photography, said the collection has strong cross appeal.

“Maybe it's about cultural history. Maybe it's about desert ufology. And maybe it's about alternative spirituality,” Chase said. “The hope is that someone will find something in there that's meaningful to them.”

Huntington's associate curator of architecure and photography Erin Chase (l.) examines the Integratron model with library director Sandra Brooke Gordon.

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Today, the newly named McKinney Collection of George W. Van Tassel Papers is housed in climate-controlled rooms under tight security as staff prepares it for public access.

Selections, including the Integratron model, will be spotlighted at the Huntington’s Strange Science event on Oct. 30 and Oct. 31. Paul and Wagner will share the stage on both nights to talk about Van Tassel.

In May, Donald McKinney (bottom right) visited the archive he'd kept in his desert home for more than two decades with historian Daniel Paul (bottom right), Otherworld podcaster Jack Wagner and his wife Dayle.

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Donald McKinney

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The Integratron’s current operators welcomed the archive’s arrival at the Huntington. They’ve worked to share the landmark’s history with visitors, but “we cannot be the museum,” said Kristine Atkinson, who helps run the Integratron for her mother, Nancy Karl, and aunts.

“We absolutely know that we couldn't possibly be the end-all, be-all about George Van Tassel,” Atkinson said. “It's too much. It's too big.”

As for McKinney, he got to visit the Huntington for the first time in March with his wife, along with Paul and Wagner, whom he now counts as friends.

The collection’s new home brings relief and joy.

The leather band Don McKinney hand-crafted will stay on the Integratron model at the Huntington. He points to the "F = 1/T," the formula he said was behind the Integratron.

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Jack Wagner

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“We can go to the store and not worry that there's going to be a fire or theft,” McKinney said. “It's just a major blessing all the way around because such good people have control over it.”

His own handiwork is now part of that history. A leather band that McKinney, a skilled leatherworker, crafted still wraps around the base of the Integratron model for visitors to see.

Doctors and health insurers filed a lawsuit Friday alleging Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature violated the law when they approved a healthcare tax that could substantially increase insurance premiums for Californians.

The lawsuit claims the recently passed tax on health plans, known as the managed care organization tax or MCO tax, circumvents a 2024 initiative that limits healthcare taxes and directs revenue toward specific purposes. The California Medical Association and California Association of Health Plans filed the complaint with the California Supreme Court.

“California voters passed Proposition 35 and made it law. The state does not get to ignore that law simply because following the law is inconvenient,” medical association CEO Dustin Corcoran said in a statement.

Newsom’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. H.D. Palmer, a spokesperson for the Department of Finance, said in a previous statement to CalMatters that the state wanted to balance the affordability concerns of privately insured patients against large-scale federal Medi-Cal cuts.

Newsom stopped short of opposing the 2024 initiative when it was on the ballot, but he warned at the time it would “hamstring” the state budget.

For more than 20 years, California has levied taxes on health insurers to help fund Medi-Cal, the state’s insurance program for low-income people. The state historically taxed private health plans at a lower rate than Medi-Cal insurers, but in June, the Legislature passed a bill substantially raising the tax on private plans.

Health insurers said they will pass the cost directly on to consumers, spiking premiums by about $100 per person each year. That means a family of four could pay a $400 annual increase. That would come on top of the rate increases people typically see year to year.

“California is breaking the law by blowing through a tax limit voters put in place to protect Californians and businesses from higher health care costs,” said Charles Bacchi, CEO of the health plans association.

Doctors, hospitals, clinics and Medi-Cal insurers have argued for many years that the revenue from the tax should go toward improving Medi-Cal. They said that the state was inappropriately using the money to replace general fund spending, and that many providers were being paid far less than their services cost. In 2024, they asked voters to approve a limited tax that would be reserved for Medi-Cal improvements.

But Congress last year changed the rules on taxes used to generate revenue for healthcare, including the ones imposed on health plans. Rather than lose the money generated by the tax, Newsom proposed and the Legislature agreed to submit two taxes to the federal government for approval: one that complied with the 2024 initiative but would be rejected by the feds, and one that complied with federal regulations and largely disregarded the initiative.

Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit www.chcf.org to learn more.

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