The Brief

Time is up for Orange County governments to add measures to the general election ballot. Here are some of the major ballot measure items headed to voters in November.

Costa Mesa 

Costa Mesa voters will be asked in November if business license taxes should be increased for some large businesses making more than $500,000 in annual revenue.

Currently, large businesses have a $200 limit for taxes to operate in the city. For example, big box stores like Home Depot and Target in Costa Mesa only pay $200 a year in business license taxes. The change, if approved, could increase that to as high as $15,000 based on gross income.

Small businesses — which the city defines as those with $500,000 or less in gross income — will not be affected.

Irvine

In Irvine, voters will be asked whether the city should switch the local election system to ranked-choice voting in 2028.

The system would allow voters to rank their candidates in order of preference instead of casting a vote for one candidate.

If approved, the change would only take effect if the costs stay below 0.23% of the city’s general fund. If the switch goes above that amount, the ranked-choice voting system could be delayed until a future election.

Orange

Orange is currently a general law city bound by state law and mandates. Voters will decide if Orange should become a charter city, joining other municipal governments such as Los Angeles, Santa Ana and Huntington Beach.

Charter cities still have to follow state and federal laws, but can establish their own rules on issues such as mayoral authority, term limits and financial management.

Voters in Orange will also decide on a one-cent sales tax increase that, if approved, would last for 13 years.

The city of Orange is looking at increasingly dire budget conditions. In the 2024 election, voters narrowly rejected a 10-year half-cent sales tax measure estimated to generate $20 million in annual revenue.

San Clemente

Residents of San Clemente got a sales tax initiative measure on the November ballot that proposes a 1% sales tax increase. If approved, the increase could generate about $15 million in revenue for local beach restoration and wildfire prevention.

Over the past few years, coastal erosion has shrunk portions of San Clemente beaches. To fix the problem, experts have turned to costly sand replenishment projects.

In 2024, voters rejected a 0.5% sales tax increase.

Santa Ana

Santa Ana’s 1.5% sales tax increase — called Measure X — is supposed to decrease in 2029 and then completely go away by 2039. Public officials have said the loss of Measure X could mean the city loses millions of dollars in revenue.

Santa Ana voters will decide in November whether to make the Measure X tax permanent.

The tax measure was approved by voters in 2018. Money from the tax has helped the city fund street maintenance, public safety, youth services and homelessness services.

Westminster 

Voters in Westminster will be asked if the transient occupancy tax, paid for by hotel and motel guests, should be increased to 12%. The hike is expected to generate about $452,000 in revenue for general services, including homelessness, park maintenance, and public safety.

Families within the Westminster School District will decide if the district could issue up to $128 million in bonds for school repairs and upgrades.

What didn’t make it to the ballot? 

In Anaheim, three ballot measures failed: One would have asked voters if a 3% tax should be added to entertainment tickets, like theme parks and sports venues. The City Council also chose not to move forward with a ballot item that would have taxed rideshare trips to and from Disneyland. And a rent control ballot item fizzled, with organizers saying signature-gathering had been suspended to focus on strengthening the ballot language.

A sales tax measure in Fullerton didn’t garner enough support with the City Council to make it to the November ballot. The proposal was a 0.5% sales tax to fix the city’s roads, but some council members expressed concern over whether the city could be trusted to actually use the funds toward the repairs.

What’s next? 

County election officials will begin sending vote-by-mail ballots to registered voters starting Oct. 5, according to the California Secretary of State’s office.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

In the final few weeks of his last legislative session as California governor, Gavin Newsom is asking lawmakers to help reduce how much profit-making utility companies must pay out after wildfires.

His administration has for weeks floated to lawmakers a wide-ranging but still-vague package of bills to address the spiraling costs of wildfires that has made a slew of different interests unhappy.

Insurance companies have launched an ad campaign against what they call a potential “utility bailout,” that would leave them unable to recover from the power companies the costs of paying homeowners’ insurance claims. Attorneys representing fire survivors and other plaintiffs that sue utilities don’t want to see their fees reduced.

Wildfire survivors worry the governor’s proposal would prevent them from being made financially whole for suffering trauma. Local government leaders are demanding that they continue to be paid the full cost to rebuild incinerated infrastructure.

On the other side are the politically influential utilities, who have drawn fury for their equipment sparking several of the state’s most devastating wildfires.

The state’s three investor-owned utilities, Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric, aren’t in imminent financial danger and last year saw profits rise. But fire costs have contributed to Californians paying the second-highest electricity rates in the country, and lawmakers and Newsom’s office worry that if it becomes harder for utilities to borrow money those bills will continue to climb. The utilities together provide power for about three-quarters of the state.

Newsom and the lawmakers say utilities are held responsible for too much after a wildfire and that bad actors like hedge funds are taking advantage to get a cut. If another devastating wildfire triggers damages too high for a utility to pay, the potentially resulting bankruptcy would make it even harder for victims to collect.

“The status quo doesn’t work,” Newsom said at a press conference last week when asked whether his proposal is in the best interests of fire survivors. “And we're trying to balance all of those needs in a very familiar process that will unfold over the course of the next few months.”

CalMatters asked the governor’s office whether the timeline Newsom mentioned was correct, considering the legislative session ends in three weeks. A spokesperson said the governor meant “the next couple of months of the legislative session,” and did not respond to whether Newsom will call a special session to address the issue.

As he mulls a presidential run, Newsom has political incentive to push through a deal. Opponents from the right are eager to paint California as unaffordable and lurching through disasters; further rate hikes or the specter of a utility bankruptcy wouldn’t help. But backing the utilities also comes with risks: Anger at the companies remains fresh after Edison was last week found by Cal Fire and the Los Angeles County Fire Department to be responsible for the January 2025 Eaton Fire that killed 19 people in Altadena.

The chair of a key Assembly committee, Democratic Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, is generally on board with Newsom’s proposals, but lawmakers in the Senate appear less certain. Fire survivors are urging them to slow down and commit to a more public debate.

“You cannot be ‘there are some bad actors’ and therefore we will have a secret bill,” said Joy Chen, who leads a group of Los Angeles wildfire survivors. “Then your bill is the bad actor.”

A familiar fight

It’s a redux of a bitter fight that has bookended Newsom’s time as governor.

He stepped into his role in the wake of devastating wildfires that tore through Northern California in 2017 and 2018, several of which PG&E was found to have been responsible for.

The utility was in a bind: Under California law it was strictly liable for fires that were getting more severe, partly due to climate change, and regulators were no longer letting the companies pass damages onto customers in cases where they were found careless.

Facing mounting suits from victims and insurance companies, the company in 2019 declared bankruptcy. Newsom quickly signed legislation to help buffer utilities from those claims, drawing accusations of a bailout. The state created a $21 billion wildfire fund, paid for half by utility shareholders and half by customers through a $2.50 surcharge on their monthly electricity bills, to pay victims’ claims, provided the utilities follow stricter safety regulations.

The remaining structure of a building burned from the Eaton Fire in Altadena. Jan. 8, 2025.

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Ted Soqui

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CalMatters

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Then in January 2025, during an intense windstorm, electricity arcing from a century-old out-of-service Edison tower in Southern California’s Eaton Canyon set dry brush ablaze. The resulting Eaton Fire, burning at the same time as the deadly Palisades Fire, claimed 19 lives and nearly 9,500 homes and other buildings. UCLA estimated losses at between $24 billion and 45 billion.

The state wildfire fund is expected to be drained once the costs of insurance claims, Edison’s multimillion-dollar voluntary settlements with survivors and numerous unsettled lawsuits are tallied. (Lawmakers extended the fund last year to address future fires, adding to electricity customers’ surcharges through 2045.) Profiteering hedge funds have sought to take advantage by buying up insurance claims.

Newsom’s goal is twofold: Limit who can make claims to the fund and limit how much they can get. In private briefings last week and a document outlining his package released Tuesday, his office said he would combine the cost reductions with bills to boost home hardening, help homeowners get off the state’s insurer-of-last-resort and re-enter the home insurance market, tie utility executive pay to safety and require shareholders to pay down customers’ rates for two summers.

Details of the package remain scant. The outline released Tuesday did not include proposed legislative language.

CalMatters contacted the state’s three major utility companies. San Diego Gas & Electric did not respond. PG&E and Edison referred questions to Nathan Click, spokesperson for the utilities’ campaign, which is called Wildfire Victims First and has been blanketing the state with ads telling Californians to urge their lawmakers to act.

Click, who is also a political spokesperson for Newsom, did not answer specific questions, including whether utilities are meeting directly with lawmakers. Instead, he shared statements from a handful of business groups and a powerful electrical workers’ union urging lawmakers to advocate for the proposed liability reduction.

In addition, the chief executives of PG&E and Edison have said they plan to take action to protect their shareholders if California lawmakers do not pass legislation to limit their fire liability. They did not specify what they planned to do.

Over the past four years PG&E, Edison and SDG&E collectively spent $5.2 million on California political campaigns, sponsored travel for lawmakers and donations to officials’ favored charities, according to CalMatters’ Digital Democracy database.

PG&E also has the fifth-highest spending on lobbying in the 2025-2026 legislative session and was the top spender from April through June. In the first half of this year, the three utilities reported spending nearly $7 million to influence Newsom’s administration, the Legislature and their regulators at the California Public Utilities Commission.

Limiting damages

Newsom suggests chipping away at utilities’ liabilities by limiting attorneys’ fees, reducing the amount of money local governments can recoup to rebuild burned infrastructure and curbing how much some victims can receive in damages.

His proposal would set up a state-administered “fast pay” program to prioritize wildfire fund payouts for survivors whose loved ones are killed, who are injured or whose properties are destroyed. To participate, claimants would likely need to give up their right to sue the utility — trading an often lengthy wait through litigation to get comprehensive damages in exchange for the relief of a quicker payout.

For other victims “in harm’s way,” the Tuesday outline suggests allowing up to $150,000 in damages.

Newsom’s office and Petrie-Norris, who generally supports the idea, said they do not intend to limit emotional distress claims for survivors they deem legitimate but those kinds of damages should be curbed for others.

“If you were part of a disaster no one’s going to say you can’t make a claim,” Petrie-Norris, an Irvine Democrat who chairs the Assembly utilities committee, said. “If you did not actually experience a disaster, what non-economic damages should you be entitled to?”

Petrie-Norris and Newsom are concerned about billboard attorneys who seek clients to file lawsuits against utilities and the wildfire fund; one study has found attorneys are likely to get 30% to 40% of victims’ payouts. Groups representing survivors and attorneys argue it’s not so clear who should count as a victim. Residents who lost no property and stayed in their homes miles away could still be harmed by smoke inhalation, for example.

Chen said she was “stunned” after she was briefed by the governor’s office last week and was told that only people who are evacuated and have their house burn down would be eligible for non-economic damages.

“Let’s say someone was out of town, but their house burned down so they didn’t evacuate,” she said. “But they lost everything, so they have to rebuild. So you won’t compensate them for pain and suffering?”

Newsom also wants to stop investors from buying claims and prioritize small business claimants over corporations, but his office has not explained how to accomplish that.

The proposed bill package has so incensed some wildfire victims that opponents of the plan have shrugged at arguments that some claimants are taking advantage of the Wildfire Fund.

“The utilities are finding a lot of creative ways to avoid responsibility. That’s it,” said Graham Knaus, chief executive of the California Association of Counties. “We should not be opening the door for them to escape accountability.”

Shifting costs

Another component of the outline released Tuesday could affect homeowners across the state. Newsom is proposing to limit — or eliminate entirely — insurance companies' right to recoup money from utilities when a utility-caused fire forces those insurers to pay out homeowners' claims.

The process is known as subrogation. The two powerful industries have been at odds over it for years.

Utilities and insurance already clashed in 2018 when utilities unsuccessfully backed a bill to loosen a unique California legal doctrine that holds power providers strictly liable for wildfire damages near their equipment even if they aren’t found responsible for the fire.

“We’re a well-resourced industry, but not like (the utilities),” Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, recalled. “Their lobbying spend was just crazy.”

Denni Ritter, vice president for the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, said eliminating subrogation could impede the progress that has been made due to the regulations California adopted last year to address insurance availability problems.

“We’re at this precarious time,” Ritter said. Because the state now allows insurance companies to consider catastrophe modeling and reinsurance costs in pricing their premiums, some insurers have resumed writing new policies in California, and the number of policies in the last-resort FAIR Plan is growing at a slower rate, according to the state insurance department.

But if they can’t recover the costs of wildfire claims, Frazier and Ritter said insurance companies will raise premiums, which would affect homeowners even in areas with low fire risk.

“We don't understand how they're not embarrassed to suggest that the answer to their problem is to shift their costs over to other people,” Frazier said. “Why should a homeowners insurance customer in a dense urban environment have to pay considerably more?”

Sen. Ben Allen, the Democratic chair of the Senate utilities committee and a candidate for insurance commissioner, said he doesn’t want to make that tradeoff if the package doesn’t include other benefits for consumers or taxpayers.

Petrie-Norris said it could be worth it.

“If I can save you $2 on your utility bill and your insurance bill goes up by $1, that seems like a smart thing for us all to do,” she said. But we've got to make sure that's true and whether there are unintended consequences.”

Jeremia Kimelman and Digital Democracy engineer Andrew Chan contributed to this story.

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

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass surprised some transit advocates during a speech at Union Station last month when she proclaimed she wants to develop a "long-term financial strategy and plan" to make public transit on L.A. Metro free for everyone.

The announcement was met with hesitant applause.

In a follow-up statement, the mayor’s office told LAist, “Going fare-free is important to reducing the financial burden on working Angelenos and making Los Angeles a more accessible, affordable city.”

The mayor’s office said Bass plans to introduce a motion to explore what further steps are needed to eliminate Metro fares. Her office did not provide answers to follow-up questions asking whether that motion would go before the Metro Board before or after the election in November, when Bass is running for reelection.

Bass’ announcement comes just a few years after Metro executives said free transit would cost more than $1 billion annually for the region. At the same time, the agency, which is facing mounting political pressure to strengthen fare enforcement, is pouring tens of millions of dollars into taller fare gates that are designed to make it harder for riders to skip out on paying.

Bass’ history on a fare-free Metro

Bass’ July speech, which she made to outline her priorities for her second tenure as Metro Board chair, isn’t the first time the mayor has signaled support for a fare-free transportation system.

When she campaigned for mayor in 2022, Bass told StreetsblogLA that she believes fareless transit “will give people the freedom of mobility with no barriers to entry.” She reiterated that she supports a move to a fareless Metro in a 2023 interview with the L.A. Times. 

Mariana Luna leads the fareless transit campaign for Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, or SAJE, which has long advocated for a fare-free Metro. Luna said Bass’ speech in July reaffirming support for fareless transit was unexpected, but exciting nonetheless.

“We would really love to see some sort of action and not just leave it as a promise during her campaign season,” Luna said.

On the other side is the rider advocacy group Enforce the Fares. Alex Davis, a Metro rider and member of the group, said going fare-free is the opposite direction the agency should be heading.

“It will distract and even set Metro back from tackling the stuff that will actually improve the lives of transit riders,” Davis said, adding that ensuring fares are collected can lead to improved service reliability and system safety.

Bass’ opponent in this year’s mayoral race, former ally and current L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman, does not include fareless transit as part of her publicly available transportation platform, which calls for Metro system expansion and service reliability improvements. Raman’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment about her thoughts on fareless transit.

Metro says fareless transit would cost region $1 billion

Though not a novel concept, support for free transit in L.A. County gained momentum during the pandemic, said Brian Taylor, a research professor of urban planning and public policy at UCLA.

“There was concern with contact between operators and passengers,” Taylor said. “So there was a public health aspect to it that led not to go fare-free, but actually to stop enforcing fare payment. That sort of revived the fare-free movement.”

Days after stay-at-home orders began in March 2020, Metro temporarily suspended bus fare collection and permitted rear-door entry to minimize contact between drivers and passengers.

In response to the financial challenges imposed by the pandemic, former Metro CEO Phil Washington assembled a task force that studied the possibility of a universally fareless transportation system.

In February 2021, when Washington announced he was stepping down, Metro touted his support of free transit for the county. 

A few months later, the idea didn’t seem so possible.

According to a September 2021 staff report, a fully fareless rail and bus network was estimated at the time to cost $1.1 billion annually for Metro and local transportation agencies that rely on the same TAP payment system.

Revenue from fares has decreased since the report was published. Last fiscal year, Metro brought in $175 million in fares, and the agency is projecting $25 million less in fare revenue this fiscal year. That’s compared to the $250 million Metro was, on average, collecting annually in pre-pandemic years, which the agency used to come up with its 2021 estimate.

The 2021 Metro report also detailed that a fareless system would require changes to how the state allocates transit funding, since state funding is dependent on local fare revenue.

In 2024, the Metro executive who oversaw the push toward fareless transit said the agency’s analysis was verified by an outside auditor.

“To be fiscally responsible, we can’t offer a completely fareless system,” Devon Deming, the deputy executive officer of fare programs, said at a July 2024 Metro Public Safety Advisory Committee meeting.

While a fully fareless approach never launched, the initiative resulted in providing K-12 and community college students free rides on Metro and fare capping, which establishes $5 as the maximum a rider pays per day.

It also resulted in making it easier for people to enroll in Metro’s assistance program for low-income riders, which offers 90 days of free rides after sign-up followed by 20 free rides per month.

Metro riders load their tap cards at Union Station in Los Angeles.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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Metro invests in stopping fare evasion

As Bass is pushing for a free system, Metro officials have been moving in the opposite direction by making it physically more difficult to catch a free train ride.

In response to customer feedback about improving fare compliance, Metro began installing taller faregates in 2025. The 7-foot-tall plexiglass, paddle-door gates are designed to be more difficult to jump over or duck under and are equipped with motion sensors. So far, they’ve been installed in 26 rail stations across the Metro system.

Metro spent more than $14.7 million installing the faregates in the last fiscal year and has budgeted $15.5 million to continue installing additional faregates throughout the system.

“We’ve seen a tremendous increase in the fares and the taps where these investments have been put in place,” Chief Bill Scott, who oversees Metro’s Department of Public Safety, said, referring to the statistics that the agency has shared with its board about the taller faregates.

The faregates were highlighted several times during Metro’s State of the Agency event in July, where the mayor announced her fare-free initiative.

Before Bass spoke, L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger said the gates support a safer system.

“Our new faregates have significantly increased paid ridership while reducing reported issues,” said Barger, who is also first vice chair of the Metro Board. “There is a correlation.”

In a written follow-up statement to LAist, Barger said that any potential changes to Metro’s fare policy need to be weighed against the “important reality” that “fare enforcement and access control measures are associated with reductions in crime across the Metro system.”

Does it make sense to go fare-free?

According to Taylor, the UCLA professor, there’s a good economic case to be made for transit systems to go fareless when a large share of its riders are low-income and when the percentage of operating costs covered by fares falls below roughly 10%.

Both conditions are there for L.A. Metro, he said.

SAJE made a similar argument in a 2023 report.

Luna, the assistant director of organizing and advocacy for SAJE’s fareless transit campaign, said she hopes Bass will push to offer a pilot program that would make transit free for those who already qualify for the agency’s low-income assistance.

Making Metro free will negatively impact customer experience, group says

Last year, the rider advocacy group Enforce the Fares launched a campaign to push Metro to restore the number of fare checks transit security officers perform on trains and buses, saying that the physical fare infrastructure investments cannot scale to all parts of the system.

Fare enforcement is tied directly to safety, the group says. Following a surge in violent crime on the system in 2024, Metro reported to its board that 96% of those apprehended for committing a violent crime on the system between April 2023 and March 2024 did not pay fares.

According to the group’s accounting of Metro data, the agency's contracted law enforcement and security officers verified riders paid their fares hundreds of thousands of times per month between 2014 and 2018. That number plummeted to an average of 5,000 verifications per month in 2025.

There’s also been a drop in the amount of fares that pay for the day-to-day operations of the system. In fiscal year 2016, Metro could reinvest the fares it collected to pay for 22% of its operational expenses. In the latest fiscal year, that figure dropped to 6%, according to agency financial reports.

In a report to its board, Metro staff attributed this drop to the “expanding rail system and the declining fare revenues.”

Fare checks have increased in recent months. In May, Metro reported conducting more than 19,000 fare checks. 

Scott, with Metro’s Department of Public Safety, said Metro’s security officers conducted 20,000 fare checks in July and that “it’s trending that way in August.”

In a statement, Bass’ office said she does not support transit security officers performing fare checks and wants them focused on ensuring public safety.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

It’s the first day of school across the Los Angeles Unified School District, and students on the Eastside are returning to their classrooms after an unusual summer break dealing with the aftermath of the Lineage cold storage warehouse fire in June. 

Summer school sites were relocated, baseball games were canceled, and instead of spending time outside, some children spent the past two months behind closed doors to avoid the unhealthy air, mounting stench of rotting food, and hordes of flies and rats in their community.  

“[This summer] was horrible, like living through another pandemic,” said Lizandra Jimenez, who lives in East L.A. two blocks from the Lineage warehouse with her 11- and 14-year-old sons. “It was hell where we were isolated from information, where we had to endure a smell, where we had to endure the heat.

"My sons were anxious because they wanted to go outside but we couldn’t, and there was no information about air quality,” she said.

Students and families arrive at Eastman Avenue Elementary School in East L.A. on Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2026.

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Jacqueline Ramirez

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Boyle Heights Beat

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That worry about air quality lingers for Jimenez, whose children attend Griffith STEAM Magnet Middle School and Roosevelt High School less than 3 miles away from Lineage. She said she also worries about the safety of the students who attend Eastman Avenue Elementary, the LAUSD school closest to the warehouse, where she works as a school supervision aide. 

LAUSD has assured that campuses near the site have been thoroughly cleaned and deemed safe for students to return. With schools now open, the cleanup at the warehouse continues as Lineage rushes to meet L.A. Mayor Karen Bass’ Friday deadline to remove the rotted food waste from inside.

LAUSD says campuses are safe to return

Over the past few weeks, LAUSD has provided updates and hosted webinars to inform parents on the cleaning and environmental testing efforts it conducted for the more than 50 schools within a 3-mile radius of the Lineage warehouse. 

Those efforts included: 

• Deep-cleaning school campuses including floors, walls, furniture, drinking fountains, lunch pavilions, playgrounds and walkways.
• Replacing all MERV-13 HVAC filters and placing air purifiers in all classrooms and offices, and;
• Independently testing air quality, water, dust and soil samples.

A white van with South Coast AQMD branding sits on the playground at Eastman Elementary in East Los Angeles.

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Steve Saldivar

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The LA Local

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The district said air monitoring will continue at Eastman Elementary School and Stevenson Middle School for the duration of the cleanup.

A 561-page environmental assessment report released Tuesday by the LAUSD Office of Environmental Safety concluded that the Lineage fire did not result in widespread contamination at nearby schools and thus, were safe for students and staff.

The report did, however, find lead levels in the soil at City Terrace Elementary School and Christopher Dena Elementary School that exceeded California’s acceptable threshold. The district said it does not believe the findings are tied to the warehouse fire. 

As students return to campus, LAUSD said there will be masks available for students and staff upon request, school principals will decide whether students should remain indoors based on odors and outdoor conditions, and psychiatric social workers will be available on-site to support students.

Lineage says cleanup is 90% complete 

Meanwhile, Lineage said it is on track to meet the mayor’s 45-day deadline to remove all the food waste from the site by Friday. As of Monday, the company said they had removed 90% of the food waste. 

“At ninety percent, we are in the final stretch, and we will continue to tirelessly work until the work is done,” Jeff Rivera, chief operating officer of Lineage, said in a statement. 

The company said it expects to spend $80 million to $100 million on the cleanup. 

Last week, the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s Hearing Board unanimously approved an abatement order requiring Lineage to strengthen odor-control measures, expand air monitoring and improve communication with residents. 

Parents’ and teachers’ worries linger 

For weeks, parents and teachers across the Eastside have been calling on LAUSD to have stronger protections for students and to be more transparent about environmental testing results. The groups, including Eastside Padres and United Teachers Los Angeles, have also called on Lineage to leave the community permanently. 

Alma Lagunas speaks on a megaphone along with members of Eastside Padres at a town hall regarding the fire at the Lineage warehouse at Stevenson College and Career Preparatory in Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, Calif. on July 9, 2026.

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Isaac Ceja

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Boyle Heights Beat

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On Aug. 6, UTLA, the union representing LAUSD teachers, sent a letter to the district demanding that it expand resources and share the data before the first day. (LAUSD ended up posting its report on testing efforts on Tuesday.)

Following the fire, Jimenez said her family endured headaches, sore throats, congestion and irritated eyes for days. Now, she said she hopes LAUSD has taken the necessary steps to ensure that doesn’t happen again. 

“Who’s going to solve this for us? Or why?” Jimenez asked. “We’re not to blame.” 

Two of the Trump Administration’s top cabinet officials visited a faith-based homelessness program in Los Angeles Tuesday to call for a shift in the region’s approach to the unhoused crisis.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner held a news conference at the Dream Center amid tensions with local officials.

The L.A. region’s lead homelessness agency, known as LAHSA, is currently suing the federal housing department after HUD suspended it from federal grant activity in June.

Turner said Tuesday the federal government wasn’t backing down on that.

“LAHSA does not receive another dollar until there’s accountability and transparency, and the right partners have come around for us to work with,” Turner said.

HUD has formally invited homeless service providers to apply directly for the federal homelessness funding, bypassing LAHSA entirely.

The federal government is pushing to partner more with faith-based homeless service providers like the Dream Center, which have not historically relied on much funding from the federal government, or from the state, county or city.

Turner and Kennedy toured the Echo Park facility, a 14-story converted hospital building, and spoke with several residents in transitional housing or recovery, LAist observed.

“I saw the success upstairs with their clients,” Kennedy said Tuesday. “They're doing it better than us, and we need to start recognizing it.”

Kennedy and Turner presented the suspension of LAHSA as part of the Trump Administration’s broader push against fraud in public benefits spending, mostly involving Medicare.

Funding battle

The Trump Administration suspended the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority for alleged mismanagement in June, pending a federal investigation.

That effectively cut off the agency that administers federal homelessness dollars from performing many of its roles. For example, HUD says that suspension means LAHSA cannot apply for up to $240 million in funding in a grant competition this year.

LAHSA is suing to overturn the suspension and to pause it in the meantime to prevent funding losses the agency said could cause 11,000 people to lose publicly-funded housing.

In a court hearing last Thursday, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter acknowledged legitimate concerns about LAHSA’s history of dysfunction and said he wanted to avoid catastrophic funding disruptions.

LAHSA says letting providers apply directly to HUD, without relying on LAHSA or some other agency to coordinate and prioritize the funding request would be unfair and disastrous.

Carter has not issued an injunction order, as of Tuesday evening.

HUD Secretary Scott Turner at the Dream Center Tuesday

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Aaron Schrank

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LAist

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Why the Dream Center? 

Dream Center in Echo Park is a large Pentecostal Christian nonprofit that does residential recovery and housing for families. The center, associated with the Assemblies of God denomination, has been operating for more than three decades.

Pastor Matthew Barnett is the co-founder and CEO. He said in the news conference that the facility in Echo Park provides recovery treatment and transitional housing to about 600 people.

“I feel that sadly, over the last few years, there's just been a prevailing overall theme in LA that people can't change,” Barnett said. “Let’s just get them out of sight. Let's put them in housing somewhere, but can they really change? Well, 70% of the people that live at the Dream Center are graduates of the recovery program,” Barnett claimed.

Unlike many local service providers, the Dream Center does not rely on taxpayer funding to serve unhoused Angelenos, but private donations.

“ Places like the Dream Center that have not asked for money, that have just done the work, it's made it very, very difficult for us to function in this city of expenses that are rising,” Barnett said.

Local officials respond

There were no local elected officials present at the event.

L.A. County voted last year to divert $300 million in county homelessness funds away from the city-county homelessness agency LAHSA and administer those dollars itself with a new county homelessness department.

After Tuesday’s news conference, L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath said the county government has been working to fix the problem, while the federal government has not.

“Publicity stunts are no substitute for the hard work the County has already done to move away from the broken LAHSA system, establish new and accountable oversight of taxpayer dollars and change how we measure success from dollars spent to outcomes achieved,” Horvath said, in a statement.