The Brief

It’s not unusual to see the word “disgraced” prefacing the former City Councilman José Huízar’s name in news headlines, blog posts, or op-eds.

After a lengthy FBI investigation, arrest, and an eventual 2023 guilty plea, Huízar, 55, will face a judge and a long prison sentence on Friday in regards to his historic city corruption trial that involved bribes from Chinese developers, tax evasion, extortion, and conspiracy.

Angelenos protested outside of his Boyle Heights home when he was arrested in 2020, calling him an enemy of the people, a sellout. But, things weren’t always this way.

Before the bribes, back-room deals, affairs, sexual harassment lawsuits, and before the FBI raid of his Eastside home and district office, his constituents considered the Mexican-born immigrant to embody the true values of the community.

Humble beginnings 

Born in 1968 in a rural town in Zacatecas, a mountainous state in central Mexico, José Huízar was the son of working-class parents. His mother, Isidra, worked at a meat packing plant, and his father, Simón, was a bracero, a farmworker who would work temporarily in the United States from Mexico.

Huízar’s paternal grandfather even had ties to Los Angeles; he, and many other temporary laborers from Mexico, were brought into the United States to help build the foundation of City Hall in the 1920s.

Huízar’s family brought him to the Eastside as a toddler to achieve their vision of the American dream, he said during a graduation speech at Princeton, his alma mater.

His coming of age in Boyle Heights wasn’t an uncommon one. He played baseball, got into fights in middle school, was a newspaper delivery boy while attending Salesian High School, and eventually turned his life around through the guidance of a mentor.

Huízar was accepted into the University of California Berkeley and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree 1991. His education then continued at Princeton, where he earned a masters degree in Public Affairs and Urban Planning in 1994, then at UCLA where the kid from the barrio attained a law doctorate in 1997.

Political strategy and a little bit of luck

Shortly after finishing law school, Huízar began to make political moves in Los Angeles. He was elected onto the Los Angeles Unified School District’s school board in 2001 and soon became president. His role had him expanding college preparatory courses district-wide and implementing a plan to construct over 130 schools in the city.

When sitting District 14 Councilmember Antonio Villariagosa was elected Los Angeles mayor and left an empty seat in his wake in 2005, Huízar saw an opportunity to make a bigger imprint on his city: to represent the neighborhoods on the Eastside and Downtown LA, the way he wanted to.

Huízar made history that special election year by defeating Nick Pacheco, the first Mexican-born politician to sit on the Los Angeles City Council, who was vying for his seat back after Villaraigosa trumped him at the polls in 2003.

His work in the communities he represented, and yes, even his appearances riding a horse in charro gear, caught the eye of his people. He would go out to events that mattered to his community. Huízar even had a statue erected near Olvera St. to honor the sacrifice and history of the braceros in 2019, a group that encapsulated his father’s identity. Huízar really seemed to care about his people in his district.

Councilman José Huizar and artist Dan Medina at unveiling ceremony of a bracero monument in downtown Los Angeles.

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His unapologetic Mexicanism was appreciated, especially by his constituents on the Eastside. So much so that when Huízar ran again in 2007, he was re-elected. He was re-elected again in 2011, and once more in 2015, that time in a landslide victory.

During his term, Huízar spearheaded plastic bag bans, fought for more pedestrian and cyclist representation, led solutions to address homelessness, and argued for more Metro service.

The recently enacted LA City Council term limit laws had benefited Huízar and allowed him to stay in office for fifteen years, giving him ample time to work towards passing legislation that benefited working-class neighborhoods, the unhoused, immigrant families, and to support education for all. Instead, shady business dealings were brewing behind closed doors and even in private bathrooms.

Bribery, scandals, and Huízar’s true colors

Downtown Los Angeles’ economy proved a challenge to any council member who was elected to oversee it. Huízar had his sights set on the historic neighborhood. Where many saw rundown theaters on Broadway, he saw potential to revitalize the historic stretch of downtown with high-end shops and countless Umami Burgers.

To better flesh out his vision, Huízar felt that development in downtown needed to accelerate. So when developers came knocking on his office door asking to “grease the wheels” of development in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars, Huízar quietly obliged. After all, his position on the Planning and Land Use Management Committee, situated him in the perfect place to make these shady deals a reality.

His secret dealings quickly became a criminal enterprise, where developers could pay-to-play to get their downtown real estate projects in motion, as long as he and his people were taken care of. Evidence of hundreds of thousands of dollars in casino chips, fancy hotel stays, private flights, and escort services were all detailed in the FBI’s investigation into Huízar beginning in 2018.

His longtime assistant and partner in crime, George Esparza, played the middleman in his developer bribe scheme. Esparza delivered hundreds of thousands of dollars in developer bribe money, tucked away in liquor boxes, to Huízar’s Boyle Heights home, in exchange for breaks in the development legal process that Huízar oversaw.

Huízar’s family was also caught up in the webs he had been spinning for so long. His mother and brother both laundered bribe money for the pol, exchanging blank checks for cash between 2014 and 2017, the investigation showed.

The family man image that Huízar peddled to Angelenos faded fast. Allegations of misconduct, including sexual harassment and extramarital affairs became public. And in 2022, an L.A. Taco investigation showed Eastside youth he granted college scholarships to weren’t getting the funds they were promised.

Amidst the misconduct, the fraud, and schemes, his constituents in working class communities like Boyle Heights were fighting tooth and nail for more affordable housing, for better representation, and for the leader they thought they knew.

The cumulative history of his upbringing, his political squandering, his deceit and unwillingness to serve those most in need of an honest leader, have led Angelenos to this point.

The story is as tragic as it is appalling. To consider the potential of an immigrant leader in LA politics who fell flat, didn’t just disappoint people, it infuriated them, too.

It seems fair to say the slow-descent from grace, that Huízar was himself responsible for, eroded trust in local government and further widened the gap between political leaders and the people they were elected to serve.

“Huízar was a powerful career politician who swore an oath to defend the Constitution, faithfully discharge the duties of his office, and serve the interests of his constituents,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “Instead, time and time again, [the] defendant violated that oath and duty, choosing instead to place his own lust for money and power above the rights and interests of the people he was elected to serve.”

Several CD 14 candidates who are primed to take over Kevin de León’s City Council seat in November acknowledge that a lot of work needs to be done to fix the climate that Huízar set while in office. Nadine Diaz, a local activist, doctor, and CD 14 candidate, said that when she ran against him in 2015, she ran for equality and transparency. But now, she runs to address the corruption that Huízar embodied.

“I’m running again because the corruption hasn’t stopped,” Diaz said. “It’s gotten bigger.”

Huízar’s sentence hearing will take place on Friday, January 26, at the United States Courthouse on 1st St.. Along with a prison term, the court seeks more than $1.3 million in fines and restitution.

The man who used to be a young, dimple-faced kid from Boyle Heights, and who used to make the Eastside proud, is facing a nine to 13-year sentence in federal prison.

Proposition 40, also known as the billionaire tax, is the most contentious fight on Californians’ ballots this November.

The proposal to impose a one-time asset tax on the net worth of the state’s approximately 200 billionaires has divided Democrats, galvanized progressives and sparked fierce pushback from business groups and the state’s wealthy tech sector. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has poured more than $138 million into the campaign against the measure — including two countermeasures, Propositions 41 and 42 — and is among a handful of billionaires who have moved residences or business assets out of the state in an attempt to avoid the proposed tax. In total, opponents have raised more than $205 million to stop Prop. 40, according to campaign finance records.

It would also set up an entirely new system of taxes in a state that doesn’t traditionally tax wealth. That would be challenging to implement and experts say is sure to invite litigation. Here are some common questions and answers about how the measure would work.

How would the state assess the tax?

Aside from local taxes on real estate and some business equipment, California isn’t in the business of valuing and taxing personal property.

Prop. 40 would require the state, within six months, to create a way to assess the value of a wide range of holdings: billionaires’ stock, investment accounts and business interests, but also their art collections, wine vaults, cars and anything else that stores wealth.

“I have a client who has a machine gun collection,” said Jon Feldhammer, a San Francisco tax attorney who said he is advising several clients who would be or believe they could be subject to the billionaire tax.

The definition of wealth and property has to be broad to close possible loopholes, said Kirk Stark, a UCLA tax law professor.

“Otherwise there would be a very simple workaround, which is, if there’s something that’s exempt then you know there would be an incentive to just shift wealth from one form to another,” Stark said.

Ensuring those subject to the tax aren’t underreporting their assets would require the state’s Franchise Tax Board to hire more people for appraisals and auditing, Stark said.

“It can be done,” he said. “But it’s going to take a huge investment of resources to actually pull it off.”

Franchise Tax Board spokesperson Andrew LePage declined to say how many staff the agency would need to implement Prop. 40. Currently, the board doesn't appraise property but sometimes auditors "examine asset values reported by taxpayers to ensure accuracy," he said.

Chris Parker, a former attorney for the tax board who now works as a tax attorney with the firm Baker Tilly, said the board has “no way of knowing anyone’s net wealth.”

Ariel Jurow Kleiman, a tax policy professor at the University of Southern California, doesn’t think the state would have a hard time putting the tax into effect. Stocks, which make up a substantial part of billionaires’ wealth, are easily valued, she said. For more “bespoke” property like art and jewelry, California could look to the Internal Revenue Service’s federal tax on inherited property.

“There are commonsense methods like looking at comparable assets or looking to available markets to see how comps are valued,” she said. “We wouldn't be asking people to reinvent the wheel here.”

Experts do expect disputes over the value of privately held businesses.

Feldhammer said many startup founders have raised money for their companies but haven’t yet sold any products. He criticized the ballot measure for defining a company’s worth as the most recent amount of investment money it raised, which diverges from how the IRS calculates an asset’s fair market value for the estate tax.

“How do you value a company that is not on the public market? It doesn’t even have a product yet. It’s not making any money,” he said.

He said he expects clients to mount lengthy legal challenges arguing the law overvalues their business holdings.

“These are people who have oftentimes plenty of wealth to spend on legal fees to put up the best defense money can buy,” he said.

Will billionaires leave?

The campaign against the measure warns that billionaires will flee California, depriving the state of billions of dollars in income tax revenue that helps fund the state budget. Experts say there’s no way to know whether the tax will spark a large-scale exodus.

Joel Slemrod, a University of Michigan economics professor who studies tax policy, said there’s very little evidence to gauge how billionaires could react to California’s tax, partly because the proposal is unique.

California experts considering the tax have looked at wealth taxes in European countries to try to discern the impact of Prop. 40. In 1990, 12 countries had wealth taxes. Today, only four remain. Many countries abandoned them because they were difficult and expensive to implement, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development. But Slemrod said those examples are “not immediately applicable” to Prop. 40 because they differed significantly in design: Tax rates were much lower, they were intended to be permanent and the money was not earmarked for special interests.

“I wouldn’t jump from the evidence we have to California,” Slemrod said.

But one issue that could matter significantly for California, Slemrod said, is that it is much easier to move assets between states than between countries, as sometimes happened in Europe. Spain allowed its provinces to enact wealth taxes and research suggests that rich people changed residences based on tax rates.

Researchers at the Hoover Institution, a conservative policy think tank, conducted an analysis suggesting Californians need not look at history to figure out Prop. 40’s impact. Tax flight has already happened. They estimate that billionaires representing 30% of the tax base have publicly said they have left, lowering state revenue estimates by $60 billion and permanently altering California’s income tax collection.

Feldhammer, the tax lawyer, said “a third to half” of his clients have left the state over the proposed tax. He declined to say how many clients that is. Other tax lawyers told CalMatters that clients who are worth less than $1 billion are also considering moving to avoid limiting their earning potential.

Billionaires who didn’t leave before Jan. 1 would face taxes on their assets anyway; the measure would apply to anyone who was a California resident on that date.

But Feldhammer said he expects people to sue over the measure’s retroactive nature, pointing to two U.S. Supreme Court decisions from the 1920s that held it was unconstitutional to apply the federal estate and gift taxes to assets transferred before those laws were enacted. In 1994, the court ruled that retroactive taxes could be constitutional in certain limited circumstances.

Asked how he’s advising clients who are considering leaving California, Feldhammer said there’s a “reasonable argument that the law may be unconstitutionally retroactive — but to take advantage of that, you’re going to have to leave.”

Would it allow the state to tax my retirement?

If you’re not a billionaire, no.

Even for billionaires, Prop. 40 exempts pensions and individual retirement accounts from the asset tax. There are some exceptions, most notably for Roth IRAs that contain more than $10 million.

Misleading advertisements from opponents claim the tax would allow California soon to eat into retirement savings for average Californians. They’re supporting Prop. 42, which would block the proposed billionaire tax by broadly banning any new taxes on personal property such as investment, retirement and pension accounts. Brin’s political spending group, Building a Better California, put it on the ballot, and unions representing firefighters, police and construction workers support it. (If both measures pass, whichever receives more “yes” votes becomes law.)

Proponents of Prop. 42 say their measure would protect the pensions and retirement accounts of teachers, firefighters and middle-class workers from being taxed before they withdraw the money.

“A new tax on Californians’ retirement and life savings would be devastating,” Robert Gutierrez, president of the California Taxpayers Association, said in a press release.

There are no active proposals to tax those accounts on the ballot or in the Legislature. Lawmakers who have floated such wealth taxes in the past have gotten nowhere.

Still, Brian Marvel, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, which supports Prop. 42, denied being deceptive and said it’s “within the realm of realization” for California to tax middle-class workers’ retirement accounts.

“I think it’s more important to be proactive in this area,” he said.

How would the money be used?

Proponents say the billionaire tax is intended to backfill federal cuts to the state’s expansive Medi-Cal health program for low-income residents. State officials project the cuts, enacted as part of President Donald Trump’s 2025 budget bill known as H.R. 1, could amount to $30 billion a year.

The initiative gives the Legislature broad authority to decide how to spend the money. Of the revenue, 90% percent would be put in a special fund for healthcare; the other 10% would be put in a special fund to pay for schools and food assistance like CalFresh, which was also targeted by federal cuts.

If the money is used to keep Californians on Medi-Cal, that could mean spending it on the private health insurance companies that the state contracts with to administer low-income residents’ coverage.

There is some debate over whether the money would actually offset the cuts to Medi-Cal and how strictly the language bars lawmakers from using the money for anything else.

Opponents such as the California Medical Association and Planned Parenthood recently circulated a memo arguing there’s no guarantee the money would replace the federal funding cuts, because the proposition also allows the money to offset state cuts to Medi-Cal. They warn that would allow lawmakers and the governor to use the new tax money to maintain state funding levels for Medi-Cal and free up the state’s general fund to pay for other things.

Lawmakers and governors have in the past used special new funds to simply replace existing funding. Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, did it with mental health funding created by a voter-approved tax on millionaires, and then-Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, did it with health funding created by the state tobacco tax. More recently, doctors and hospitals accused Newsom of using a different healthcare tax to backfill the general fund. They placed Proposition 35 on the ballot in 2024 to earmark the money. Voters approved it, but the groups say some funding was still diverted.

But proponents of Prop. 40 said that concern doesn’t make sense: Those budget maneuvers, they said, are usually done to address state budget shortfalls, while Prop. 40 was already written to create funding for a shortfall.

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

A medical helicopter transporting a patient crashed off Catalina Island, killing two people and leaving two hospitalized, authorities said Thursday.

Rescuers continued searching Thursday for a fifth person who was aboard the aircraft and went missing after the Wednesday night crash.

The Coast Guard, area firefighters and divers with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department were among emergency personnel who worked through the night, Coast Guard Capt. Stacey Crecy said at a news conference.

“We’re still doing an active search for the person who’s missing and then in addition to that, the divers and the remote operated vehicle are going to get a look at more of the wreckage and hopefully if there’s a sunken fuselage … we’re hoping to get a better picture of that this morning,” Crecy said.

The cause of the crash was not immediately clear. Crecy said the helicopter went down shortly after takeoff and hit the water a short distance from the island.

Authorities were working on identifying the victims, she said.

“We believe that the medical aircraft was transporting a person off the island for additional medical care on the mainland,” Crecy said, adding she did not have more information on the transport or the patient.

First responders were called to the crash shortly before 8 p.m. Wednesday and pulled four people from the water. Two were pronounced dead at the scene and two were brought in stable condition to hospitals on the mainland, the Los Angeles County Fire Department said.

Firefighters on the island were able to get to the scene quickly by boat, Crecy said.

The National Transportation Safety Board said it is investigating and identified the helicopter as a Eurocopter EC-135-P2.

Authorities said the helicopter was submerged in 240 feet (73 meters) of water off Catalina, which is located about 22 miles (35 kilometers) off the mainland of Los Angeles County.

The helicopter was believed to be operated by REACH Air Medical Services of Sacramento, California, KTLA-TV reported. A spokesperson for its parent company, Global Medical Response, told the station that it was aware of the accident and was gathering information.

Global Medical Response did not immediately return a message seeking comment Thursday morning.

Californians watching Wednesday night’s gubernatorial debate would be forgiven for thinking the candidates for governor are President Donald Trump and the Democratic Party.

Trump was the central topic in the debate between Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton, with Becerra repeatedly tying Hilton to Trump’s policies on immigration, taxes, housing, the environment and Big Tech. Hilton also tried to tie Becerra to outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom and California Democrats at large, whom Hilton blames for business and housing regulations that contribute to high costs.

Becerra mentioned the president, who is widely unpopular in California, more than a dozen times during the hourlong debate on CNN.

“You’re going to end up with Trump results if you follow Steve Hilton’s plans,” Becerra said when asked about Hilton’s proposal to eliminate income taxes for middle-class Californians. He pointed out that Hilton’s plan to drop income taxes on the first $150,000 in earnings also includes a tax cut for the state’s wealthiest earners, comparing it to federal tax cuts enacted by Trump.

Similarly, when Hilton said he would wait to assess whether California needs to more aggressively regulate artificial intelligence companies, Becerra linked his response to Trump’s inaction, saying “if you listen closely, you can hear Donald Trump in that response.”

Becerra also said he would impose limits on AI data centers in communities that oppose them. Hilton noted that Becerra’s campaign has received donations from the biggest artificial intelligence companies, Anthropic and OpenAI.

Trump endorsed Hilton during the contested primary election, but the former Fox News host has since tried to distance himself from both the president and the Republican Party, running ads telling voters they can dislike Trump and still support him. Last week, in an acknowledgement that opposition to Trump is dragging down Republicans’ approval rating, Hilton's campaign released a poll claiming he was “unscathed from (the) Republican collapse.”

On Hilton’s proposal to expand oil drilling in California, Becerra brought up Trump’s effort to expand drilling off the state’s coast.

On homelessness, Hilton noted Becerra once graded Newsom an “A for effort” on the issue despite homelessness increasing during his terms, while Becerra countered that Trump has blocked federal funding for local homelessness agencies.

It’s a predictable strategy for Becerra, who enjoys a double-digit lead over Hilton in the heavily Democratic-leaning state where voters also disapprove of Trump by wide margins. The Democratic candidate and former U.S. Health and Human Services secretary has laid low since getting the most votes in the crowded all-party primary election in June, making few public appearances and agreeing only to one debate. Hilton criticized Becerra for repeatedly mentioning national politics, arguing the Democrat isn’t offering Californians any concrete solutions to the nation-topping cost of living.

“All you ever say is ‘Trump, Trump, Trump,’” Hilton said. “And that’s nothing but an insult to every Californian who is desperate for something to change in this state.”

The candidates traded insults throughout the night. Hilton cited reports that Becerra’s colleagues in President Joe Biden’s cabinet had “described (Becerra) as an idiot.”

Then, in several testy exchanges over immigration, Becerra, the son of Mexican immigrants, tied Hilton to Trump’s aggressive nationwide immigration raids and mass deportation campaign.

“You seem to welcome immigrants who look like you, but deport immigrants who look like me,” Becerra said. Hilton, a British immigrant and former adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron, bristled at the comment, calling it “disgraceful.”

Hilton praised the deportation campaign last January as “perfect” during an appearance on Fox News. He has previously described himself as “pro-immigration.” On Wednesday night, he dodged questions on whether he would undo the state’s sanctuary law limiting police cooperation with immigration agents and direct California officers to assist in Trump’s campaign.

Instead, he said, he would prefer to “turn down the temperature” on that debate.

The candidates argued over the best way to increase housing construction.

Hilton wants to build 10 new cities and allow more new construction on undeveloped land to avoid battles between the state and residents and local governments that are resistant to new development.

“We have got so much space that we could be building in,” he said.

Becerra said to address the housing crisis, he would reduce administrative and bureaucratic hurdles to getting construction permits, boost down payment assistance programs and stop Wall Street investors from competing with would-be homeowners. He pointed to the lawsuit he filed as state attorney general against the city of Huntington Beach to force it to approve new housing.

“No locality should have the right to try to stop all of our people in California from having the housing they need,” Becerra said.

They found common ground on how to keep the film industry in California amid competition from other states and countries. Los Angeles County has lost about 50,000 film and TV jobs since 2022. But while both candidates support expanding the state’s film tax credit to lower the cost of producing in California, they still each got in a dig over who to blame.

“Who’s been in charge when all those jobs have gone?” Hilton said.

“Donald Trump,” Becerra said.

“The Democrats,” Hilton said.

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

Recent storms have brought an epic run of big, surfable waves to Southern California. But they’ve also wreaked havoc on beaches, surfside homes and coastal infrastructure.

The prospect of El Niño bringing even more volatile weather raises a serious question about the chosen venue for surfing at the 2028 Olympics: Will there still be a beach at Lower Trestles when the Games roll around?

The World Surf League held its annual competition this month at Trestles, a beach south of San Clemente that straddles Orange and San Diego Counties. The competition took place a few days after Hurricane Marie’s remnants hit the Southern California coast.

High tides and big surf shut down coastal rail tracks just north of Trestles. Waves pummeled beachfront homes in nearby Dana Point, rendering at least 10 of them uninhabitable.

At Lower Trestles, the surf break where the competition took place, seawater flooded the narrow beach, washed out the access road and pooled around several of the temporary structures.

Compared with other parts of the coast, the damage was minimal. But as sea levels continue to rise, organizers of the 2028 Olympics will need to address some tough questions, especially with more hurricanes and what forecasters are calling a “Super El Niño” on the way: Where will ticket holders watch the event? How much infrastructure can the beach hold? And how will organizers get equipment there?

Getting to Trestles Beach generally requires a long walk or bike ride from the nearest parking lot. Its lack of development helps keep the area resilient to extreme weather.

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What makes Trestles a world-class surf beach

SoCal Olympic surfing hopefuls were stoked when LA28 organizers announced the surfing event would take place at Lower Trestles.

“It’s a dream,” said local pro Griffin Colapinto, who was surrounded by autograph-seeking kids as he exited the water during the Trestles competition earlier this month. Colapinto, who’s from San Clemente, competed for the U.S. at the 2024 Paris Games.

“Focus on getting there, and then go for gold,” he told LAist of his dreams for LA28.

The potential hometown advantage excites surfers like Colapinto. So does Trestles’ reputation for delivering consistently good waves. People familiar with surf competitions say that dependability is clutch for international sporting events that depend heavily on environmental conditions.

The relatively pristine San Mateo Creek watershed is the secret to Trestles' world-class waves.

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The spot’s consistency stems from its location at the mouth of San Mateo Creek, within San Onofre State Beach. When flowing creeks and rivers meet a slower-moving body of water — in this case, the ocean — they drop heavy materials like rocks and boulders, which eventually form a cobblestone reef.

This is a defining feature of prized surf spots along the California coast, said Chad Nelson, CEO of the Surfrider Foundation, a coastal conservation group.

“That's true at Rincon, at Cardiff, at Malibu,” he said. “All these iconic places are these cobble river mouths.” That underwater topography makes for amazing waves, Nelson said.

Also key to the excellent waves at Trestles is the lack of development upstream along San Mateo Creek. Nelson called it “one of the last natural surf spots in urbanized Southern California.”

Its isolation — there is no paved public road leading to the beach, much less a beachfront parking lot — bodes well for the area’s resilience to extreme weather. At the same time, it presents some conundrums for staging a major international sporting event.

‘We’ve had way worse’

Matt Riggs has helped set up the beachside infrastructure for many surf competitions at Trestles. He said the damage from Hurricane Marie in 2020 was "way worse" than this year's hurricane of the same name.

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The beach at Lower Trestles is a narrow strip of sand, about 30 to 40 feet wide, backed by protected wetlands. The coastal railroad runs through the wetlands behind the beach.

On each of the four days before the World Surf League’s competition began earlier this month, the tide at south Orange County beaches was high enough to flood part of the beachside competition area.

On one of those mornings, Matt Riggs, a contractor for the event, was out at the beach early with a small tractor, hauling sand and dirt to rebuild the beachfront access road the surf had washed away.

“I'll probably have to do [it] again tomorrow morning since there's another high tide and another swell,” he told LAist. Riggs and other workers also had to resecure some of the elevated structures used for watching and judging the competition.

But he said the damage wasn’t bad compared to flooding at the competition a few years back. “We’ve had way worse,” he said.

“These stairs here,” Riggs said, pulling up a photo of a previous year's damage on his phone, “they fell into the ocean.” (edited)

Planning around unpredictable weather

Much is still unknown about the planning efforts for the Olympic surfing event in 2028. How many tickets will be sold? How will spectators get to the beach? What about the many journalists who will want to cover the event, and all of their equipment?

LA28 declined an interview request for this story. But spokesperson Jacie Prieto Lopez emailed a statement saying, in part, “We are actively monitoring developments. … With less than two years until the Games, we remain focused on our shared planning efforts to ensure the safe and successful delivery of the 2028 surfing competitions."

One of LA28’s closest planning partners is California State Parks, which leases the land that includes Trestles from the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton. Scott Kibbey, State Parks superintendent for the Orange Coast District, noted that surf competitions have taken place at the spot for decades. They’ve had to adjust, he said, as the coastal environment shifts.

“This is a dynamic area,” Kibbey said. “Right now we're looking at a beach that is much narrower than it has been in recent years, and we're letting nature kind of dictate how we plan for future events.”

The last few years have been busy for Kibbey and his staff, as storms and rising seas have posed increasingly thorny challenges. In June, heavy surf and high tides caused a lifeguard stand to collapse at Crystal Cove State Park. One of the park’s historic beachfront cabins was also damaged, and the public access trail flooded.

“Old Man’s,” a beloved surf spot at San Onofre State Beach south of Trestles, has suffered severe erosion in recent years, forcing officials to rethink public access to the beach.

At the same time, record-high temperatures, fueled in part by El Niño, sent visitors flocking to state beaches this summer, straining staff and infrastructure.

“Our state park resources, our staff have been hit incredibly hard,” Kibbey said.

High winds and rough surf didn't deter beachgoers in Malibu this summer.

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Environmental concerns

Kibbey said sustainability is at the forefront of planning for the Olympic surfing event. Surfers and others who cherish the spot will be watching closely, given past environmental activism at Trestles, plus concerns that erupted over the previous Olympic surfing event at the Paris 2024 Games, which took place in Tahiti.

Two decades ago, surfers, conservationists and members of the Acjachemen Nation joined to fight a toll road that would have cut through San Mateo Creek, potentially destroying some of the tribe’s most sacred sites and ruining Trestles’ perfect waves. A few years into the project’s public approval process, several thousand people showed up to a California Coastal Commission hearing to voice opposition to the project.

“It was an epic fight,” said Nelson from Surfrider. Given that history, Nelson said his group met the news that Trestles would host Olympic surfing with a mix of excitement “and a little bit of trepidation.”

Nelson noted that surf competitions at the famed big wave spot Mavericks in northern California have brought problems in the past. In 2006, hundreds of spectators walked out onto the reef and scaled coastal bluffs to watch the contest, trampling the delicate ecosystem.

At a Mavericks' event in 2010, huge waves tore through contest infrastructure, knocking people off one of the watch towers and injuring 15 spectators.

Environmental concerns also tinged preparations for the Olympic surfing event at the 2024 Paris Games, especially over the drilling of a new judging tower into the delicate coral reef.

“That was definitely a cautionary tale,” Nelson said. Still, he added, “I'm pretty confident that we're going to be able to find a solution down here that's well managed and takes this special place into consideration.”

Erosion has also shut down train traffic through San Clemente State Beach numerous times in recent years.

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Jill Replogle

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El Niño ‘not all bad’ for coastlines

After Hurricane Marie, the cities of Laguna Beach, San Clemente and Dana Point declared states of emergency to address coastal damage. Orange County and Gov. Gavin Newsom followed with their own emergency declarations, in part to prepare for potentially worse damage from even stronger El Niño effects in the coming months.

The Orange County Transportation Agency recently announced plans to place 690,000 cubic yards of sand on beaches just north of Trestles in hopes of protecting the coastal rail corridor.

Kibbey, the State Parks superintendent, said the expected heavy precipitation from El Niño could also bring some benefits. If San Mateo Creek flows strong enough to reach the ocean, he said, “it would bring a bunch of sand here naturally.”

Its beach may be narrowing, but Trestles has actually fared much better than its neighbors, thanks largely to its natural state, Nelson from Surfrider said.

“Usually the problem isn't coastal erosion,” he said. “It's when coastal erosion meets human infrastructure.”

No matter what Trestles looks like in 2028, Nelson thinks the Olympic spotlight will bring more benefits than drawbacks.

Surfing is one of the only Olympic sports “completely reliant on the health of the coastal ecosystem,” he said. “If a million people learn the lesson that we need to protect our coasts and protect our ocean, or millions, then I think that's probably ultimately to our advantage.”