The Brief

Most Los Angeles County departments would be required to reduce spending by 3% under an austere budget proposal unveiled Monday by the chief executive officer.

The $47.9 billion budget plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 reflects “extraordinary budget pressures” facing the county, according to a statement from the CEO’s office. Under the plan, the cuts total $88.9 million and include more than $50 million in savings from cutting supplies, delaying equipment purchases and reducing the scope of some programs.

The proposal does not include any layoffs but calls for the elimination of 310 vacant positions.

“This is a different budget. It’s reflective of us being in tough times,” Supervisor Janice Hahn said in an interview.

Some county departments will be exempt from the 3% cuts, county authorities said. They are: the Sheriff's Department, Public Works, Regional Planning and Mental Health. The Correctional Health Services Department, which provides healthcare in the jails, is also exempt.

Various unions and community organizations attended the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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Budget challenges

The proposed budget comes in response to mounting financial pressures — including from the recent $4 billion tentative settlement of thousands of childhood sexual assault claims against the county by people who were abused inside Probation Department-run juvenile halls and other county-run facilities over decades.

If approved by the Board of Supervisors, it would be the largest sex abuse settlement in U.S. history.

L.A. County is expected to pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year until 2030 to cover the settlement, then millions more each year until 2050-51. The Board of Supervisors is also expected to issue a bond and dip into its $1 billion rainy day fund to pay for the settlement.

In addition, the county is facing the potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding under the Trump administration.

Federal assistance makes up 13% of the county’s budget, and billions more flow into departments indirectly through the provision of health, mental health and substance abuse services to Medicaid beneficiaries and other programs, CEO Fesia Davenport said.

She noted the federal government already has notified the county Department of Public Health that more than $45 million in previously awarded COVD-19 grants intended to last through July of 2026 were being rescinded. The cuts are being challenged in court.

The January wildfires also are expected to cost the county at least $2 billion, mostly from cleanup and lost property tax revenues.

“We do expect FEMA reimbursement for some of the county’s losses. But those reimbursements can take years. So we will be on the hook to cover those expenses ourselves in the meantime,” Davenport said Tuesday.

She said a day earlier in a briefing to reporters that property tax revenues already were falling. Property sales tax revenue is forecast to drop to 233.9 million in 2025-26, from $450 million in 2022-23, because of a 41% decline in home sales in L.A. County since 2021.

“We are in uncharted territory with these simultaneous pressures on our budget,” Davenport said.

Firefighters and lifeguards rally outside of the Board of Supervisors meeting.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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Measure A funding

Despite the constraints, the budget is committed to sustaining the county’s essential safety net responsibilities, officials said.

The budget reflects the passage of Measure A — the voter-approved half-cent sales tax that replaced Measure H — which has already started to bring “an enhanced stream of funding” into the entire L.A. region to address homelessness, the CEO said in a news release.

The nearly $1.1 billion in projected Measure A revenues in this budget will be shared by the county's partners. It is expected to be distributed as follows:

• $382.8 million will go to the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency.
• $32.1 million will go to the Los Angeles County Development Authority.
• $96.3 million will go to local cities through the Local Solutions Fund. 
• And more than $500 million will go to the county’s own comprehensive homelessness services.

The budget also calls for spending $287.7 million for Care First and Community Investment, reflecting the board’s commitment to set aside 10% of locally generated unrestricted revenues annually to support social programs designed to keep at-risk people from going to jail.

The total Care First funding available for investment in communities and alternatives to incarceration is $571.6 million, including one-time unspent funds from previous years, according to the county.

Members of California Native Vote Project outside the supervisors meeting.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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In addition, the budget calls for adding six psychiatric mobile response teams to the 72 already in place. The teams provide non-law-enforcement-based mobile crisis response for people experiencing psychiatric emergencies.

“We’re still taking care of the safety net obligations that a county has,” Hahn said. “We’re still in good shape.”

Pressed about what services would be cut as a result of the 3% reduction in spending, the supervisor said she is confident departments would “get creative.”

“I think they’re going to do everything they can to not curtail services ... maybe they’ll just postpone certain things or defer certain things,” she said.

The proposed budget includes nearly $12 million to ramp up Measure G — the voter approved measure to expand the Board of Supervisors from five to nine members, create a countywide elected mayor position, and create a county Ethics Commission.

The budget also allocates funding for the Governance Reform Task Force that will guide Measure G efforts.

Home-care workers protested proposed cuts at Tuesday's meeting.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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Maria Diaz, a home-care provider, attended the supervisors meeting with her union SEIU 2015.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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What’s next?

On Tuesday, the county Board of Supervisors heard public testimony from more than four dozen people, including members of the home-care workers union. They warned supervisors against balancing the budget on the backs of the county’s low-wage workers.

Criminal justice advocates urged the supervisors to shift money away from law enforcement and into more social programs.

Further public hearings on the budget will be scheduled for next month.

Los Angeles Dodgers owner Mark Walter and multiple insurance companies he owns have been sued, alleging they failed to disclose an ongoing federal probe to customers while directing policyholders’ money into Walter’s other companies.

The lawsuit lists Walter, Delaware Life Insurance Co., Clear Spring Life and Annuity, TWG Global Holdings and Walter’s Guggenheim Partners investment firm as defendants.

Ira Rosner, a 67-year-old Florida man, brought the class-action lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Miami on Wednesday. He purchased a policy from Delaware Life in April and he had until late May to withdraw his money without penalty. However, the company did not disclose the investigation to him until June,

Rosner is seeking a jury trial in the lawsuit that seeks damages for negligent misrepresentation, breach of contract and aiding and abetting fraud.

TWG Global didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.

Walter has been under investigation since last year by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and the Securities and Exchange Commission following a whistleblower complaint regarding alleged misrepresented loans made between companies within his business portfolio.

TWG Global Holdings is the holding company through which Walter controls Delaware Life, Clear Spring Life and Annuity Co. and his stake in Guggenheim Partners. TWG Global denied any wrongdoing involving the probe in a statement last month.

Walter and co-owner Todd Boehly sold their stakes in English Premier League club Chelsea this week. Last month, Walter agreed to sell the Los Angeles Lakers in a surprise move less than a year after buying the NBA franchise from the Buss family. The deal is under review by the league.

The Dodgers have been adamant that Walter has no plans to sell the baseball team.

Compton Unified Superintendent Darin Brawley has won a national education prize recognizing his leadership in improving student achievement in the district.

Brawley will receive the 2026 Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize in Education, which includes a $50,000 award, at a ceremony in New York City in November.

The McGraw Center for Education Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, which administers the prize, cited the “extraordinary impact” of Brawley and the two other recipients. Brawley won for his work in K-12; prizes are also awarded for higher education and lifelong learning.

“At a time when schools and communities are confronting profound educational challenges, three visionary leaders are demonstrating what meaningful change can look like,” the McGraw Center said.

With about 20,000 predominantly low-income Black and Hispanic students, Compton was singled out nationally for test scores in math and reading that did not fall back during the COVID-19 epidemic and continued to exceed the national and state averages since.

The center noted that Compton’s graduation rates increased from 58% to 94%, and college acceptance rates exceeded 95% during Brawley’s 14 years as superintendent. It also highlighted the district’s expanded college and career pathways and innovative industry and community partnerships.

Last year, EdSource detailed an unusual drama program at Compton’s Dominguez High. Another EdSource article this year highlighted the inclusion of student-centered “calming corners” and learning stations in school renovations.

The McGraw prize, named after the CEO of the McGraw-Hill education publisher, has been awarded since 1988. Other recent California recipients have included Debra Duardo, Los Angeles County schools superintendent; Jody Lewen, president of Tamalpais College, who introduced academic programs at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center; Stanford University professor and researcher Roy Pea; and Sol Khan, creator of a worldwide free online education and tutoring platform.

The higher education prize went to Shai Reshef, who founded the University of the People, the first nonprofit, tuition-free, accredited online university, and the lifelong learning prize was awarded to Michael Webber, a nationally recognized professor of mechanical engineering and public policy at the University of Texas at Austin.

This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for their daily newsletter.

This story first appeared on Long Beach Post.

Inside three water tanks in a tucked-away room at the Aquarium of the Pacific, biologists are tasked with bringing back a population of frogs that once thrived across the state’s mountainous streams but has since reached the brink of extinction.

It’s a program that’s nearly closed out its fifth year with a major milestone: more than 1,000 frogs raised and released into the wild.

That’s more than five times as many mountain yellow-legged frogs — named for the lemon-hued streak along their hind legs — believed to be in the wild when last recorded in 2019, reduced to small pockets of wild streams in the San Gabriel, San Bernardino and San Jacinto Mountains. By the time the frog was listed under the federal Endangered Species Act in 2002, fewer than 100 adults remained in Southern California. A count in 2020 put the number at about 188 in the wild, though biologists say that figure has almost certainly shifted since.

The species’ collapse is tied to a compounding list of threats: wildfire, mudslides, pesticides, fungal disease, habitat loss and the appetites of non-native trout, bullfrogs and crayfish. It’s a decline so severe that biologists consider the species among the rarest vertebrates on Earth.

Staff at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach are working to change that math, one tadpole at a time.

In the latest release, about 653 of the endangered frogs were returned to their native mountain habitat by staff from the Aquarium of the Pacific, the Los Angeles Zoo and the U.S. Geological Survey. Of those, 394 had been head-started at the aquarium — its largest release of the species yet, bringing its total to 1,032.

The frogs were bred at the Los Angeles Zoo’s breeding program, then transferred to Long Beach as tadpoles, where aquarium staff reared them through metamorphosis into froglets and frogs. The process typically takes one to two years, though the species can remain in its tadpole stage for up to five years, making a given frog’s age something of a mystery even to the people who raised it.

A tadpole chills by the rocks in a tank at the Aquarium of the Pacific, where it is being raised before being released into the local mountains, Tuesday, Sept., 15, 2026

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Thomas R. Cordova.

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Long Beach Post

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Inside the aquarium, the water is engineered to mimic the mountains it’s standing in — kept near 60 degrees in summer, the temperature currently found in the streams the frogs call home, and cooled to around 52 degrees in winter, with reduced UV exposure to simulate the season’s shorter, dimmer days.

The aquarium’s involvement began in 2021, in the aftermath of the 2020 Bobcat Fire, which tore through the central San Gabriel Mountains and destroyed an estimated 95% of the frog’s remaining usable habitat.

“They had salvaged some tadpoles from the fire-impacted areas, and they ended up bringing a handful of them here,” said Erin Lundy, with the aquarium’s conservation team. “And then we also had some captive-bred ones from the L.A. Zoo that year, and that was our first group.”

Since then, the team has expanded to include the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which help monitor populations and oversee releases.

Erin Lundy from the Aquarium of the Pacific looks into a tank at frogs as she gets them ready to be released into the local mountains Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2026

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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As the aquarium’s tadpole numbers have grown, some are now sent to the Santa Ana Zoo each October to continue growing until they’re ready for reintroduction. Frogs are carefully separated by genetics and population of origin, so each can be released back into its native range and preserve healthy genetic lines.

“I think that we have some responsibility to give the animals the best chance that they could possibly have,” Lundy said, “but this is certainly a species that without a good amount of human intervention would not exist to this day.”

Much of the aquarium’s work is now focused on an even more elusive threat than fire: chytrid fungus, a microscopic pathogen that attacks the keratin in amphibian skin, blocking the salt absorption frogs rely on and eventually causing cardiac arrest. It has driven amphibian populations to collapse worldwide, and mountain yellow-legged frogs appear especially vulnerable to it.

“Some amphibian species over time have developed a resistance to chytrid, and so part of the intention of growing so many animals is hoping to find what gene that is that introduces some chytrid resistance,” Lundy said. Researchers are testing whether frogs can be inoculated before release, or whether introducing different microbes to their skin might help them fend off the fungus on their own.

Tadpoles swim in a tank at the Aquarium of the Pacific as they are raised before being released into the local mountains, Tuesday, Sept., 15, 2026

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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Lundy has now been on three of the aquarium’s release trips, watching frogs she has cared for — some for years — carried up into the mountains and set loose into the streams they were bred to repopulate. It is, she says, a strange kind of joy.

“It’s a little bittersweet because, oh no, I’ve been taking care of you for so long, but that is the point, so it feels a little bit like Christmas Day,” Lundy said.

Not every frog leaves the same way. Some, she said, shoot off into the current without so much as a pause. Others linger at the water’s edge beside her for a few minutes before finally disappearing beneath the surface.

“Almost feels like they’re saying goodbye,” she said.

Keno’s Restaurant in Anaheim Hills is a family-run business with a vintage feel — and a 15-pound burrito on the menu.

General Manager Shauna Reyes joined Austin Cross on AirTalk, LAist 89.3's daily news show, to talk about what customers can expect at the decades-old steakhouse that has a cafe twist.

About the owners

Vintage photos of Keno's, back when it first opened, and was a 24-hour restaurant.

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Courtesy Greg Rogers

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Keno's originally opened in 1972, gaining enough popularity to expand into a small chain of restaurants. Gus Cooper helped build and operate the Anaheim Hills location since its opening in 1980. The Anaheim Hills location eventually changed hands to Gus' nephew, Steve Cooper, in 1993. Steve Cooper and his family have been running Keno's ever since.

What it's like being a Keno's customer

Photo of Keno's lounge and steakhouse section.

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Courtesy Greg Rogers

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According to Reyes, the ambiance and customer connections are what set Keno's apart.

You can experience the cafe, with a bustling diner feel, or step into their steakhouse, which has a fireplace Reyes says was inspired by the Peppermill in Las Vegas.

Restaurant details

• Keno’s has a live event schedule that includes solo acoustic sets and a Frank Sinatra cover artist.
• In addition to the 15-pound burrito, you can also find a 32-ounce Tomahawk steak on the menu.

Menu items we tried

• The Lumberjack Breakfast
• Monte Cristo
• California Chicken Sandwich
• Tomahawk Steak
  

What should we try next?

What should we try next?