The Brief

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday voted to immediately suspend all proposals for seismic work on a 52-story tower in downtown L.A. amid concerns about the cost of upgrades that may not be necessary.

The county got a deal when it purchased the Gas Company Tower on West 5th Street last year, paying $200 million for a building that was assessed at three times that amount before the pandemic.

The idea was to move county headquarters from the current Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration in the Civic Center into the tower six blocks south. The aging hall is badly in need of seismic retrofitting that could cost more than $700 million, according to county officials.

Other county offices would also move to the tower, reducing rent, county officials said.

County officials say the building complies with the earthquake code as it was written when the tower was built in the late 1980s. Bringing the building up to today’s standards would be optional.

But some supervisors are balking at an estimated $297 million for voluntary seismic upgrades to the tower.

“I was surprised that we would be proceeding with…optional seismic upgrades to the Gas Company Tower,” Supervisor Lindsey Horvath said at the meeting.

The board directed the county CEO to provide a written report back in 60 days that includes the financial sources for any retrofit and an occupancy plan for the tower.

Concerns about transparency

The county faces mounting financial pressures from federal funding cuts topping $1.5 billion over five years, continuing liability from child sexual abuse cases inside county juvenile lockups and foster homes, and $2 billion in costs related to the fires.

“I want a more surgical look at how we are spending our money,” Supervisor Hilda Solis said at the meeting.

Solis and Horvath wrote in their motion that the building was acquired so that the county could consolidate its operations and save money.

“However, there has been little to no transparency into what progress, if any, the County has made in occupying spaces in the Gas Company Tower after eight months of ownership,” the motion states. “Meanwhile, it continues to lease higher priced office space elsewhere to meet the needs of County departments.”

County CEO Fesia Davenport said there were no plans to move forward with spending the money on retrofitting the tower without board approval. She said the Department of Public Works had not yet asked for proposals to analyze what exactly the building needs.

Davenport also said she has not yet recommended the county retrofit the building.

“Under the code at the time the tower was constructed, it is considered seismically compliant,” she said. “Much of that building and space is turnkey and can be occupiable with minor investments."

County officials said it would take three years to occupy the building.

Future of Hahn Hall of Administration

Supervisor Janice Hahn, who was the lone dissenter on the purchase of the tower, noted the annual cost of operating the tower would be higher than the cost to operate all of the other leased space the tower would replace.

Davenport did not confirm that assertion.

“I think this cost is just the tip of the iceberg,” Hahn said. “I think there’s been a lot hidden from us.”

Hahn has a special affection for the current county headquarters. It's named after her father, legendary Supervisor Kenneth Hahn who served for 40 years on the board.

“I still question the purchase,” she said.

Davenport also said the future of the historic county hall was unclear. She said it's possible the county could retain the cavernous auditorium where the supervisors meet weekly and tear down the rest of the complex.

She noted the Mosk Superior Court building next door was also in dire need of earthquake retrofitting.

A California federal judge ruled today that President Donald Trump cannot demand that UCLA pay a $1.2 billion settlement that would have imposed severe limits on the campus’ academic freedoms and efforts to enroll an economically and culturally diverse student body or risk continued funding freezes on grants the system relies on for research

The decision by Judge Rita Lin is a preliminary injunction and represents a significant victory for University of California scientists, professors, graduate students and other researchers. They and a national professors association sued Trump in September, claiming that his settlement demand — the most sweeping to date in his war on exclusive universities — represents an “unlawful threat” of funding cuts to coerce the university system into “suppressing free speech and academic freedom rights.”

Lin agreed with that assessment, calling Trump’s actions toward the university “coercive and retaliatory.” Her ruling doesn’t just apply to UCLA. It largely ties the hands of the Trump administration to target the rest of the UC system for current and future research grants.

“Agency officials, as well as the president and vice president, have repeatedly and publicly announced a playbook of initiating civil rights investigations of preeminent universities to justify cutting off federal funding, with the goal of bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune,” Lin wrote in her ruling.

Lin wrote that this same playbook is occurring at the UC.

“With every day that passes, UCLA continues to be denied the chance to win new grants, ratchetting up Defendants’ pressure campaign,” she wrote. “And numerous UC faculty and staff have submitted declarations describing how [the Trump administration’s] actions have already chilled speech throughout the UC system.”

Lawyers for the federal government had argued that a federal court cannot block a federal agency from making a decision that hasn’t occurred yet, such as whether to approve new funding for a pending grant.

“Notably, plaintiffs’ fears about future grant suspensions and their claims about the likelihood of constitutional violations are entirely based on speculation about an opening settlement offer between the federal government and UC,” U.S. Department of Justice attorneys wrote to Lin .

The legal documents in the case spanned 700 pages and included written testimony from more than 70 UC professors, staff workers and graduate students.

The settlement demand and lawsuit

Trump’s settlement demand is a 27-page document sent to UCLA in early August that would have required the top-ranked public university to hire a senior administrator to review diversity, equity and inclusion efforts; limit campus protest; bar the campus medical center from performing gender-affirming surgeries or hormone therapy on minors; deny admissions to foreign students with “anti-Western” sentiment and other restrictions.

The public was first able to see the document in late October after some scholars filed a separate lawsuit in state court to force UC officials to disclose the settlement demand.

The settlement demand emerged a few days after the Trump administration froze more than $500 million in health and science research funding to UCLA over allegations that the campus tolerated antisemitism and enrolled students using racial preferences. Had UC agreed to its terms, the Trump administration would have released the frozen funds back to UCLA.

However, months before Trump sought the settlement, UCLA had already taken steps to address antisemitism on campus after its leaders commissioned a task force to recommend ways to create a more welcoming environment for Jewish students.

Lin faulted the administration for disregarding UCLA’s efforts. The agencies did not “mention the remedial steps UCLA had already taken to address the issues described,” Lin wrote.

UCLA is legally barred by state and federal law from admitting students using racial preferences. Trump’s demands would have also blocked UCLA from a practice the U.S. Supreme Court condoned: allowing students to discuss their racial identity in their personal essays.

But almost all of that funding that Trump froze in July had since been restored after a separate wave of legal filings prompted Lin to temporarily undo Trump’s cuts in August and September .

Lin has emerged as a key bulwark for UC researchers as she’s ordered the Trump administration several times to undo hundreds of millions of dollars in science funding cuts to the University of California, including roughly $500 million in science and health grant funding suspensions to UCLA alone. Between June and today, she’s sided with UC researchers and staff four times in rebuffing the Trump administration’s efforts to halt funding to scholars. Her initial ruling that has served as a basis for other preliminary injunctions against Trump was upheld by a panel of judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

UC faculty associations, among the plaintiffs in the case, wrote to Lin that some of its members who don’t have tenure and are international scholars now hesitate to teach issues related to Israel and Palestine or lead lessons on the health effects of climate change. Other scholars say they fear taking part in protests or other free speech activity due to fears about the government’s reprisals.

“I am a mother, and the threat of jail time or federal involvement or oversight in campus policing would give me new fear” about protesting, wrote Hannah Appel, an anthropology professor at UC Santa Cruz, in a court document .

Faculty groups also argued that a $1.2 billion hit to UCLA would affect the whole system, as UC leaders would likely pull funding from other campuses to help UCLA absorb the loss. UCLA’s budget is around $13 billion , including its medical and hospital programs, while the UC system’s is more than $50 billion — and a third of that comes from federal sources.

UC President James Milliken called the situation “one of the gravest threats in UC’s 157-year history.”

The ruling and evidence in detail

Lin’s written ruling mirrors the comments she made during a 90-minute hearing last week, in which she said that the Trump administration has told universities, including the UC, that “if you want the funding restored, then agree to change what you teach, change how you handle student protests [and] endorse the administration’s preferred views on gender.”

“Defendants have submitted nothing to refute this,” she said then..

Twenty-one labor unions and faculty associations sued Trump and 15 agencies, including the top providers of science research funding — the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, NASA and the Department of Education that together award the UC more than $4 billion annually . The UC system itself is not part of this suit but has received sustained pressure from students, staff and faculty — including hundreds of Jewish ones — to reject Trump’s settlement.

“This agreement violates the very foundations of higher education,” the UC undergraduate student association wrote to Gov. Gavin Newsom, UC’s president and campus chancellors in November.

Faculty and staff wanted a return of all terminated grants and a block on denying funding to any pending grants that were preliminarily approved by science panels but were stalled for seemingly political reasons.

Other faculty, staff impact

The UC has cut the hours or laid off more than 250 lecturers and librarians since Trump began his term this year, said Katie Rodger, the president of UC-AFT, the union of lecturers and librarians at the UC. Lecturers are a core part of the instructional staff at UC but generally lack guarantees of continuous employment that other professors enjoy.

The federal fiscal picture is a reason why at least some lecturers have received pink slips. The “School of Humanities has incurred budget reductions over the last four years, which have been compounded this year by national and state level budgetary impacts and planning projections indicate substantial future budget shortfalls,” said a termination letter at UC Irvine this past spring.

And while lecturers do not lead labs that receive federal grant funding, they work in them. The loss of grant funding “already has and it will continue to impact us going forward,” Rodger said of lecturers during an interview. The union in August wrote a letter to UC’s director of labor relations leadership demanding that the system cease negotiations with Trump over the settlement.

Meanwhile, the dean of the largest college at the UC — the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis — wrote to faculty last month that it’s dealing with a $20 million budget shortfall across this year and next, after absorbing a loss of $6.7 million the past five years. “Budgets for faculty and graduate student employment will reflect these reductions,” the dean, Estella Atekwana, wrote. That would affect most lecturers.

Several scholars and staffers wrote to Lin that the administration was freezing funding on pending grants that UCLA researchers would have likely received if Trump didn’t target the campus. One of those projects was supposed to go to Marcus Roper, a mathematics and computational medicine professor who submitted a grant to research how to better  predict vision loss in adults with diabetes.

The proposal also included a program to teach K-12 students how to apply algebra to analyze eye health. Roper showed in court filings that two grants he submitted won the recommendations of the agency’s program directors, but those were pulled when the Trump administration suspended all of UCLA’s existing NSF and National Institutes of Health grants. Even after Lin ordered Trump to restore the existing grants the agency suspended at UCLA, NSF personnel told Roper they were ordered to pause approval of funding for new grants .

Also at UCLA, the NSF preliminarily approved the renewal grant for a math research program that’s been funded for 25 years, but also pulled it in July . If the program isn’t reupped again, Richard Bartlebaugh, a video producer, will lose his job months before he’s eligible for his pension and the program will close in May of 2026, he wrote to Lin . “In this scenario, my time at (the institute) will have represented a four-year and eleven-month career misstep.”

Trump didn’t follow rules, lawsuit said

Catherine Lhamon, formerly the top official during the Obama and Biden administrations at the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education, wrote to Lin that the way the Trump administration pulled funds was illegal.

“What (the office) cannot do under the law — and what we never did — is move to immediate fund termination.”

But that’s what the administration did. And as Lin noted in her ruling and comments during last week’s hearing, Trump officials bragged about it.

“We’re going to bankrupt these universities, we’re going to take away every single federal dollar,” said Leo Terrell on a FOX News program in March . Terrell heads the Trump administration’s multi-agency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism . His interview was submitted by lawyers for the UC workers as evidence. “The academic system in this country has been hijacked by the left, has been hijacked by the Marxists” he also said.

Llamon, who’s now a faculty member at UC Berkeley, wrote that federal law requires the agency to go through a lengthy process of warning a campus of any civil rights violations, such as ones dealing with antisemitism, and allow the campus to come to a settlement with an action plan. Sometimes the Office for Civil Rights leads an investigation at the school and encourages campus leaders to undertake policy changes. All of that occurs before the federal government pulls funding from a school.

While in charge, her office struck deals to combat allegations of antisemitism at numerous universities, including the UC.

“Termination of funds was, as is required in statute and regulation, a last resort, and in the thousands of complaints my office received, we never needed to take this step,” she wrote.

An unusually strong storm system has reached Southern California, raising fears that the rain could unleash a threat that has been lingering in the burn scars of wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles communities in recent years.

Called debris flows, these fast-moving slurries of floodwater and sediment can hurtle down slopes carrying cars, trees and even boulders with them.

They’re like “a flood on steroids,” said Jason Kean, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s landslide hazards program. “It’s really hard to stop these things. The best thing to do is get out of the way.”

Forecasters expect the heaviest rain Friday into Saturday night; predictions are for wet days through next week. Storms may stretch from Santa Barbara County south to Los Angeles County, and could spread inland to parts of Orange County and the Inland Empire.

Burn scars — slicked by fire and stripped of plants — are especially vulnerable. A storm after the Thomas Fire in 2018 spurred debris flows in Montecito that killed 23 people. And in February, a debris flow in the Palisades Fire burn zone swept a Los Angeles Fire Department member and his SUV into the Pacific Ocean .

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Works warns that there’s a risk of moderate debris and mudflows capable of blocking roadways and endangering some structures in the burn scars of almost a dozen fires — including January’s Eaton, Hurst and Palisades fires.

The county has issued evacuation warnings, as well as some targeted evacuation orders for specific properties “at higher risk for mud and debris flows impacts.”

The public works department says that most burned properties have been cleared of fire debris, and the rest have been shored up with gravel bags and other materials to keep debris in place.

Gov. Gavin Newsom also announced today that more than 400 personnel and resources including fire engines, helicopters and search and rescue teams have been pre-deployed to Southern California counties.

“It’s a pretty serious situation,” said National Weather Service meteorologist David Gomberg.

By Friday morning, the storm had already unleashed up to 5 inches of rain in parts of Santa Barbara County, Gomberg said, and Southern California is bracing for more.

There’s also the possibility of thunderstorms, small tornadoes, and a worrying amount of rain hitting the Eaton and Palisades burn scars. Even just a half-an-inch to 0.6 inches of rain could trigger a debris flow in these areas, said Gomberg, who added that his office is forecasting between half an inch to one inch per hour in these areas.

“And the more you exceed the threshold, the probability of a more damaging debris flow increases,” he said.

We spoke with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Kean, an expert on debris flows after wildfires, about what to expect. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

As this storm really takes hold in LA and Southern California, I'm hearing a lot of concern about it hitting areas that burned this past year, including in the Eaton and Palisades fires. Why is this such a big concern? What could happen?

Last January those fires removed much of the vegetation on really steep slopes, and that made those slopes really vulnerable to erosion during intense rainfall. That protective blanket of vegetation is gone, and heavy rain can rapidly make a flash flood. And that flood, in some cases, can pick up material and turn into what we call a debris flow — which is like a flood on steroids.

Damage along Tanoble Drive near Mendocino Street is visible after heavy rainfall triggered multiple mudslides in the Eaton Fire burn scar area in Altadena on Feb. 14, 2025. Photo by Joel Angel Juarez for CalMatters These burn areas are still vulnerable, even though it's now many months after the fire and there have been flows already. There's still plenty of material that could be mobilized. So the threat’s still there. And so we know they're bad actors, and we’re concerned they could be bad actors again.

I’m hearing a lot of different terms: mudslide, debris flows, landslide. What are the differences, and which ones are the burn scars at risk for? 

Landslide is an umbrella term that captures all kinds of mass movements, from rock falls to debris flows — these floods on steroids — to big, slow movers. The type of flow that we're most concerned about in a recent burn area is a debris flow. It's also called a mudslide. But geologists don't like to use the word mudslide as much because it sounds like there's some mud on your driveway — not a big issue, not something that could kill you. And these things, if you're in the wrong spot at the wrong time, they can cause serious damage.

You called it a flood on steroids. What happens in a debris flow? 

Flash floods are bad, and they can cause lots of problems, too. They can get even worse if they pick up enough sediment to turn into the consistency of wet concrete. But it's worse than just concrete, because it can contain boulders the size of cars. And, very close to the mountain front, it can move very quickly — faster than you can run. And when it gets all bulked up with debris, the rocks, the gravel, the mud, trees, the flow can be a lot bigger. It just turns into a different animal.

Now, debris flows pack a bigger punch than floods, but thankfully, they don't have as long of reach. So usually, the debris flows are confined really close to the mountain fronts. That's where they put those debris basins to catch them. But if there isn't one protection like that, then they can travel downslope and impact neighborhoods, and then flooding can extend even further down.

Is there something about Southern California that makes it higher risk?

Southern California's kind of the world capital for these kinds of events. It's got this combination of very steep topography, like the San Gabriel Mountains that just shoot right up, Santa Monica mountains, Santa Ynez — very steep topography. It burns fairly frequently. And then there are a lot of people living very close to the mountain front, so that's what puts the risk up.

The thing about a burn area is it takes much less rainfall to cause a problem than it would in unburned conditions. So we've now made the slopes really vulnerable. They're extra steep. There's a lot of people there. That's why the risk is so high.

We've seen debris flows in Northern California burn areas as well. It's not just a Southern California problem, and it's not just a California problem.

Is there anything that could have been done to reduce this risk? Anything that should be done now? 

Not long after the fires, in particular the Palisades Fire, (there were) a number of fairly widespread debris flows that disrupted the roads. There were also, in the Eaton fire, floods and debris flows there. Thankfully there's a dense network of LA County debris basins, which are designed to catch the material before it enters neighborhoods, and those largely saved the day.

Planners have planned ahead and put in these debris basins — these big, giant holes in the ground — designed to catch the material. That's the best defense against these. They're not everywhere, but there is a good network of protection. Other than that, it's really hard to stop these things.

What should people who live near the recent burn scars know? What should they do now, as the rain starts? 

The best thing you could do is, if you're really close to a drainage in one of these burn areas, is to get out of the way. You're going to get a heads up from the National Weather Service, who's closely monitoring the rainstorms. They know how much rain it's going to take to cause a problem, and they'll get out warnings, and local authorities will reach out to get people out of the way. So there's a lot of eyes on the situation. And so at this point, the best thing to do is listen to the weather service, listen to local authorities.

If they ask you to get out of the way, take their advice. These things can happen really fast if there is an intense burst of rain, a flash flood, where debris flow can start within minutes.

So there is no escaping a debris flow once it starts? 

It's pretty difficult. If you have a two-story home and you happen to be there at the wrong time, get up to that second floor for sure. Fight like heck if you get trapped in one. But best to be out of the way.

This story was originally published by  CalMatters , a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that explains California policies and politics and makes its government more transparent and accountable

Los Angeles homeless services providers say new funding shifts from the Trump administration are coming at a time when efforts to lower the number of people experiencing homelessness in the region are already facing difficult cuts.

Under the changes rolled out this week , federal funding through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development — known as HUD — will be shifted away from “housing-first” strategies that aim to get unhoused people into permanent housing and moved toward efforts that will first require participants to undergo drug treatment or seek work.

Rowan Vansleve, president of Hope The Mission, said L.A.’s homeless numbers could spike as current funding runs out and providers await the result of new funding applications.

“It could leave the most vulnerable — like people with disabilities or serious health issues, mental health issues — left out, which is really scary,” he said.

Ryan Smith, president and CEO of the St Joseph Center, said the federal cuts come amid “tectonic” shifts for L.A.’s homeless services system. Funding from voter-approved Measure A is replacing previous county funding, and the region’s lead homeless services agency is being wound down in favor of a new county homelessness department.

“This is a perfect storm of real challenges we're seeing,” Smith said. “Increased need for housing, for mutual aid, for the types of services that we get to do every day, but a lack of resources to make that happen.”

At last count , more than 72,000 people are experiencing homelessness across L.A. County. Resources for many, including families , have been stretched thin or exhausted, threatening to reverse what officials describe as progress toward reducing those numbers.