The Brief

Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have allowed California’s car dealers to tack on another $175 in fees to the cost of buying a vehicle.

On Monday, Newsom announced he wasn’t going to sign Senate Bill 791, which would have raised the fees dealers can charge to process Department of Motor Vehicles and other paperwork from $85 to up to 1% of the purchase price, capped at $260.

In his veto message, Newsom said the fee increase made little sense since a car buyer would be paying a dealership “for only minutes of data entry.”

“At a time when Californians are already struggling with the high cost of living,” Newsom wrote, “this bill would raise the document processing fee to three times the current $85 cap – far beyond what an inflation adjustment would justify.”

Brian Maas, president of the California New Car Dealers Association, said in an emailed statement that the state’s car sellers “were extremely disappointed” by the veto.

Maas said the current $85 cap on the document-processing fee is “by far the lowest in the country.” The now-dead fee increase, he said, would still have been at “the bottom quartile of such charges across the nation.”

Car dealers argue that the Legislature continually passes new laws that add to their costs. They say other kinds of businesses are allowed to recoup those costs through service charges, but dealers can’t because the $85 cap is set in state law.

The dealers were especially frustrated with Newsom’s veto because he also signed a measure this month that adds a number of requirements on car dealers that are intended to prevent buyers from getting suckered as they haggle over the price of a vehicle.

Notably, that measure, Senate Bill 766, creates a first-in-the-nation policy that allows a used car buyer to return a vehicle for a full refund within three days if the purchase price was less than $50,000. Dealers can charge a restocking fee.

The new law requires dealers to disclose the full costs up front, and it prohibits dealers from charging for add-ons that have no benefits to the buyer, such as free oil changes for electric vehicles — which don’t need oil changes.

The law takes effect Oct. 1, 2026.

Maas said “the Legislature continues to place more burdens on dealers. SB 766 only added significantly to those responsibilities, which makes the veto of SB 791 all the more disappointing.”

The California New Car Dealers Association has donated at least $3 million to legislators since 2015, according to the CalMatters Digital Democracy database.

How did the fee increase easily pass?

It was perhaps surprising that the bill to hike fees made it to the governor’s desk at all, given that legislative leaders from both parties had promised to lower costs this year.

Yet the Senate overwhelmingly passed an earlier version of the bill that was even more expensive. It proposed upping the fee to $500.

Only one of the Legislature’s 40 senators, Calabasas-area Democratic Sen. Henry Stern, voted “no.”

After CalMatters reported on the controversial measure passing the Senate, its author, San Jose Democratic Sen. Dave Cortese lowered the proposed fee in the Assembly first to $350 and then eventually to $260.

Cortese said in an interview the amount the Legislature settled on would have provided the minimum dealers need to recoup their costs to pay employees who might “spend an hour and a half filling out documents” state regulations require for a single sale.

“There’s 113 different documents now that we’ve created,” he said. “Every single one of them is legislative created. … We were trying to get fair remuneration for fair work.”

In the Assembly, the bill passed with only three Democrats – Alex Lee of San Jose, Jacqui Irwin of Thousand Oaks and Tasha Boerner of Solana Beach – voting “no.” Seventeen other Assembly members didn’t vote at all, which counts the same as voting “no.”

As CalMatters reported, Democrats almost never vote “no” on their colleagues’ bills. Instead, they typically don’t vote at all. In the Capitol, it’s seen as a more polite way of saying “no” and less likely to lead to retaliation from other lawmakers and lobbyists.

With so much talk of lowering costs this year, Cortese said he could understand why the governor wasn’t as receptive to his arguments about fairness to car dealers as his colleagues in the Legislature were.

“The perception was stalking us the whole way through, no question about it,” Cortese said. “And I can understand why the governor would be sensitive to that.”

Rosemary Shahan of Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety said she was “thrilled to bits” that Newsom vetoed the would-be “junk fee” increase and signed the law protecting car buyers from “the kind of bait-and-switch that goes on” when buying a vehicle.

She said the new three-day cooling-off period to return a vehicle will be especially helpful, allowing buyers to review their paperwork without pressure. They can also have their vehicles inspected by an independent mechanic to make sure they didn’t drive a lemon off the lot.

She called Newsom’s actions this year “huge wins for California car buyers.”

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

A divided Los Angeles Unified School District Board voted 4-3 Tuesday to issue preliminary layoff notices to more than 3,000 employees, as part of a reduction-in-force plan to reduce the budget after several years of spending more money than it brings in.

Even as California is poised to fund schools at record-high levels, Los Angeles Unified and other districts have grappled with increased costs. For example, LAUSD hired more staff to support students during the pandemic, and now the federal relief dollars that initially funded those positions are gone.

For the past two years, the district has relied on reserves to backfill a multi-billion-dollar deficit. The district projects a deficit of $877 million next school year, about 14% of the 2026-2027 budget.

Who’s being cut?

LAUSD staff estimate the proposed cuts impact less than 1% of the district’s more than 83,000 member workforce.

Notices would go out to:

• 2,600 certificated and classified contract management employees and certificated administrators. 
• 657 central office and centrally funded classified positions. More than a third of these are IT technicians, by far the largest group.
• The plan also calls for reduced hours and pay for several dozen positions.

District leaders have emphasized that an employee who receives a RIF notice will not necessarily be cut.

What's next?

The reduction in force vote is the first step in a monthslong process that could result in layoffs for a still-to-be-determined number of positions because impacted employees may be moved to other positions. Staff said the board would vote to finalize any un-rescinded layoff notices in May or June.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

About 15% of California households lack access to high-speed internet, according to the latest report from UC Riverside. Researchers pointed to affordability as one of the biggest barriers to closing the persistent digital divide.

Edward Helderop, associate director at UCR’s Center for Geospatial Sciences and report author, told LAist that the findings weren't surprising.

“A lot of American households and California households don't have high-speed internet available at home,” Helderop said. “It's sort of just an unfortunate reality that that's the case for the state of California.”

What does the report say? 

Nearly one in seven households in California doesn’t have reliable internet access, according to the report. The biggest barrier continues to be affordability. Even in urban areas, like Los Angeles, where broadband internet is more widely available, the average monthly cost can range from $70 to $80 per month.

But in rural areas, broadband internet is still widely unavailable because of a lack of infrastructure investments from private companies. Only two-thirds of rural households have broadband access at home.

“This digital divide represents not just a technological failure, but a profound barrier to economic opportunity, educational advancement, and civic participation that undermines California’s potential for shared prosperity,” the report states.

Experts also call for mandatory broadband data transparency — internet providers should be required to publicly disclose their service speeds, pricing, reliability metrics and coverage areas.

“Private telecom companies administering the service, they're under no obligation to maintain publicly available data sets in the same way that you might get with other utilities,” Helderop said. “There are issues with the fact that the advertised speeds don't really match up with the actual speeds that people experience at home.”

Researchers also recommend that broadband providers be regulated as utilities, like water and power, monitoring rates, quality and service obligations.

“When we regulate something like a utility, it comes with a few regulations that we take for granted,” Helderop said. “Something like a universal service obligation, in which the utility … their primary motive is to provide universal service, so to provide the service to every household in California.”

As a public utility, officials could ensure that providers are offering the same type of service to every household in the state, as well as regulate rates.

Why it matters 

Norma Fernandez, CEO at Everyone On, said access to affordable, high-speed internet is a basic necessity.

"Still, too many families, particularly those in under-resourced communities, predominantly of color, are still left out,” Fernandez said. “Expanding reliable connectivity means addressing affordability, investing in community-centered solutions, and ensuring that digital access is part of every policy conversation."

Digital equity advocates say they see the need from local families every day, but available data doesn’t reflect that.

“On the maps, families appear to live in ‘connected’ neighborhoods, but in reality, they still can’t afford to get online because the monopoly provider’s plans are unaffordable,” Natalie Gonzalez, director at Digital Equity Los Angeles. “The provider-reported broadband maps don’t match what residents experience on the ground, and that gap has real consequences.”

In L.A., for example, hundreds of thousands of households lack reliable internet, but only a fraction qualify for public funding because available data says they’re already served, Gonzalez added.

“Public investment alone doesn’t guarantee equity if the underlying data is flawed,” Gonzalez said. “When the only data regulators have come from the providers themselves, the providers end up defining reality. Communities are then forced to prove they’re disconnected, without access to the same information the companies use to claim coverage.”

Cristal Mojica, digital equity expert at the Michelson Center for Public Policy, said pricing data is intentionally obscured.

“It makes it harder for people to shop around between internet plans,” Mojica told LAist. “It makes it really challenging for our state legislators to be effective and make effective decisions around affordability when they have to try to dig around for that information themselves.”

What’s next? 

California has already invested $6 billion for broadband –called the “Middle-Mile” project –through Senate Bill 156. The 2021 law is the largest state investment in broadband in U.S. history to get more people online.

Helderop explained that broadband investments are typically made possible through grants or loans to private telecom companies, making the state’s investment critical.

“It's the first time that any state, or any government in the United States, is taking it upon themselves to build and then own the infrastructure at the end of it,” Helderop said. “I would say that's probably the primary reason that we don't have universal broadband available to households in the United States right now.”

When completed, the “Middle-Mile” project will open markets to new providers and reduce monopolies, Helderop added.

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s widow, Crystal Hefner, is raising the alarm over her late husband’s foundation collecting about 3,000 of his personal scrapbooks and his diary, which she says contain thousands of nude images of women, some of whom might have been minors at the time the photos were taken.

In a press conference Tuesday, Hefner and her attorney, Gloria Allred, announced they’ve filed regulatory complaints with California and Illinois attorneys general, asking them to investigate the foundation’s handling of the scrapbooks. The complaints were filed to both attorneys general because the foundation is registered to do business in California but incorporated in Illinois.

“I believe they include women and possibly girls who never agreed to lifelong possession of their naked images and who have no transparency into where their photos are, how they’re being stored or what will happen to them next,” Hefner said.

She added the diary includes names of women he slept with, notes of sexual acts and other explicit details.

Hefner said she was asked to resign from her position as CEO and president of the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation on Monday after raising concerns about the materials. She said after she declined to resign, she was removed from her role.

She said she was told the scrapbooks may be in a storage facility in California. Allred says they were informed that the foundation plans to digitize them, but it’s unclear what it plans to do with them.

“This is not archival preservation. This is not history. This is control. I am deeply worried about these images getting out,” Hefner said. “Artificial intelligence, deepfakes, digital scanning, online marketplaces and data breaches means that once images leave secure custody, the harm is irreversible. A single security failure could devastate thousands of lives.”

In addition to asking for an investigation into the foundation’s handling of the materials, it also asks the attorneys general to take appropriate actions to secure those images.

LAist has reached out to the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation for comment.