The Brief

Southern Californians are feeling squeezed by the rising costs of, well, everything. And now their local governments are asking for more money, too.

By LAist’s count, more than 30 cities or districts in Los Angeles and Orange counties are asking residents to approve tax measures on Election Day, Nov. 3, citing stagnant revenues that haven’t kept pace with the rising costs of insurance, maintenance and infrastructure projects, and employee pensions. Big cities, suburbs and small towns are all facing multimillion-dollar budget deficits and asking residents to open their wallets — or potentially see deep cuts to basic city services.

The list of local measures on ballots from Culver City to San Clemente includes sales taxes, hotel taxes, business taxes, parcel taxes and utility taxes. Some ballot measures would extend or increase existing taxes while others are brand-new.

Much of the answer to why so many tax measures are on the ballot lies in Proposition 13, which capped property taxes in 1978.

Before Prop. 13, cities and counties relied on property taxes for nearly all of their revenue. In the decades since, they’ve increasingly turned to other types of taxes. Hotel and utility taxes, for example, were essentially nonexistent before the mid-1970s, and sales taxes represented a small sliver of revenue. Even as these taxes have grown, they’ve struggled to replace property tax revenue.

State law caps the maximum combined local and county sales tax rate, and many Southern California cities are already at or near that cap, Coleman said. And sales tax isn’t as reliable as it used to be, amid the broader retail downturn and shift to a service-based economy (most services aren’t taxable in California).

All of that means cities are increasingly turning to “ticky-tacky, peculiar taxes” to come up with revenue, according to Kirk Stark, a professor of tax law and policy at UCLA.

The “conventional tax instruments” — property, income and sales taxes — are all limited by state law, Stark said. “Local governments that are hoping to satisfy demand for any kind of public expenditure have to turn to other, less conventional sources of revenue.”

This year, cities are asking Southern Californians to say yes to a wide range of taxes. Below, we look at three examples in South Gate, Orange and Diamond Bar.

South Gate: A utility users tax

South Gate is asking voters to approve something less common: a utility users tax, or UUT for short. If Measure SG is approved, the 8% tax would be added to bills for utilities such as electricity, water, natural gas, cable and phone service. The tax would bring in an estimated $10.4 million per year.

The city is facing a potential fiscal emergency and a $9.4 million budget deficit. Earlier this year, South Gate began cutting back services, including eliminating its crossing guard program and assigning fewer police officers per shift.

At a City Council meeting on the tax measure earlier this year, several residents spoke against the measure, with some calling the deficit a result of potential financial mismanagement that shouldn’t be pushed onto residents. Others said the monthly costs would simply add a new burden to already tight budgets.

“Being a homeowner here for the past 13 years, I have seen my utilities go up as well as the cost of living, my insurance for my house, and my car insurance go up. I believe there’s got to be a way to fix this problem without the UUT measure,” one resident told the City Council.

“I’m extremely frustrated that you now want to do electricity, water, sewer, cable, cell phone, gas. ... That hurts us. You’re passing that on to us, and that is absolutely not acceptable,” said another.

The only other utility users tax on the ballot in Los Angeles or Orange counties this year is in San Marino, where residents will decide whether to extend the city’s existing 5% utility users tax, which is set to expire on March 31, 2027, and increase it to 6%. Last year, the tax provided almost $2.2 million in revenue. As of 2021, a total of 162 out of 540 California cities and counties had a utility users tax, according to Coleman’s California Local Government Finance Almanac.

Orange: Hotel and sales taxes could go up 

Most people don’t book a hotel in their own city. That’s made hotel taxes an easier pill to swallow for voters, since the tax is mostly levied on visitors.

The city of Orange is asking voters to approve Measure J, which would raise the hotel tax from 10% to 14%. Orange is one of 10 cities across Los Angeles and Orange counties where voters will decide in November whether to increase or establish a local hotel tax, also known as a “transient occupancy tax.”

Orange residents will also vote on a 1-cent sales tax measure, as the city projects a $27.6 million deficit that it calls “one of the largest financial challenges in the city’s history.” The sales tax is expected to bring in $37 million annually, and the hotel tax would add $3 million.

Diamond Bar: A new 1-cent sales tax 

Diamond Bar voters will decide on Measure Q, a 1% local sales tax that would add a penny per dollar to purchases of taxable items. The city estimates the tax will bring in an additional $6 million annually, which could help plug a projected budget deficit of $5 million a year by 2030.

“The city’s challenge is simple: costs for city services are going up faster than revenues,” states Diamond Bar’s fact sheet on the measure, which cites rising public safety costs and $100 million in infrastructure and maintenance needs.

Several other cities have local sales tax measures on the ballot, including Santa Ana’s 1.5% sales tax extension and Los Angeles’ sales tax increase for the Los Angeles Fire Department, Measure FD.

“There’s a variety because circumstances among these local governments vary. The types of economies among governments vary, the local conditions, even the preferences for what type of revenue measure or tax measure might work varies,” Coleman said. “A local government that’s looking at one of these is going to look at a number of different options and consider what might be most palatable to the voters in their community.”

What’s on your ballot?

Our LAist Voter Game Plan is here to help guide you through the Nov. 3 election with guides to races across Los Angeles and Orange counties — and that long list of state propositions — to help you cast a ballot that’s in line with your own personal beliefs and values.

But the one thing we don’t do? We don’t tell you how to vote. That part is left up to you.

You can find it all at LAist.com/Vote.

Further reading

• Voter guide for parcel taxes in Culver City, Santa Monica, Las Virgenes Unified, San Marino Unified (LAist)
• City of Pasadena Measure PFD: What to know about the tax to support the Pasadena Fire Department (LAist)
• Los Angeles Measure FD: What to know about the proposed sales tax bump for the LA City Fire Department (LAist)
• Proposition 43: Making it harder to pass citizen-led local tax initiatives (LAist)

California’s Public Utilities Commission will decide on Thursday whether to claw back or keep $37.5 million in grant funding meant to bring fast, reliable internet to Catalina Island.

The island is home to more than 4,000 residents, and it draws thousands of tourists each year. Its slow, unreliable internet connection affects everything from remote learning to emergency response.

Lance Ware is CEO of AVX Networks, the company awarded the grant from the CPUC in December 2025. He told LAist host Nereida Moreno that the island depends on a very limited wireless internet link.

“When the town is busy, for instance, a cruise ship comes … the internet just gets crippled along with all the telephone services,” Ware explained.

Months after AVX Networks was awarded the grant, CPUC staff accused the company in July 2026 of breaking federal spending rules, citing insufficient justification and documentation for invoices.

The proposed plan would build the fiber-optic network under the San Pedro Channel from two points on Catalina Island to landings near Huntington Beach. Those cables will then connect to the Middle Mile Broadband Network in Stanton.

Where do things stand today? 

CPUC staff allege that AVX Networks violated several program requirements, according to records.

“Since the award, AVX Networks has not shown itself to have the requisite administrative, technical, and operational capacity to deliver on its project, and AVX Networks has failed to comply with the terms and conditions of its award,” the CPUC agenda item records state.

Ware said he “vehemently disagrees” with those statements.

“There are allegations on things in there that do not make sense to us in that we've had no due process or cure and correct period to address,” Ware said.

What’s next? 

If the commission terminates the contract and pulls the funding, Ware said the project will be delayed, but not stopped.

“This is not curtains down for us,” Ware added. “It's gonna take longer, and we'll have to find some other way to finance it, but we certainly haven't given up.”

Nereida Moreno contributed to the reporting of this story.

At the height of the Los Angeles fires in 2025, millions of residents were exposed in a 24-hour period to toxic lead levels from smoke that were 80 times higher than the typical background level, according to a new study.

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology compared the chemical composition of smoke from the Eaton Fire with that of a wildfire and found that the urban plume had more lead, arsenic and halogens (which include chlorine and bromine) linked to burning vehicles, building materials and electronics.

“The main, key finding is really that wildfire smoke is very different fundamentally from the urban smoke,” said Nga Lee “Sally” Ng, an author of the study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. With the new technology they used to measure what was in the smoke, they were able to “actually see the very detailed component of these particles that we are breathing.”

Co-author Haroula Baliaka said understanding the different chemical compositions of smoke from an urban versus a wildland fire helps bridge a missing gap in research. Wildfires are growing larger, more intense, faster-moving and more frequent largely because of drier and warmer weather associated with human-caused climate change. As urban growth and climate change push more fires into cities, researchers said monitoring and emergency response will have to adapt.

Ed Avol, professor emeritus in the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California who has researched the health effects of air pollution for decades, said significant exposure to heavy metals is consistent with what he’d expect, “but certainly surprising because we haven’t been able to document this sort of thing.”

“One of the real advantages of this study is that it had the opportunity to make measurements sort of hour-by-hour across the sampling network. And typically we make measurements of airborne particulates and so forth a couple of times a week, at best,” said Avol, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Thousands of structures burned, releasing toxic chemicals

The two wind-whipped infernos in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades that ignited on Jan. 7, 2025, killed at least 31 people and destroyed more than 16,000 structures, mostly homes, and everything in them — cars, paint, furniture, chemicals under sinks and more. Millions of people were exposed to smoke, which across the entire United States has been linked to tens of thousands of deaths annually. A recent study found that metal mixtures in the leftover smoke, ash and debris from the deadly 2023 Maui wildfires were harmful to the lung health of people living nearby long after the burning ended.

During the fires, researchers measured trace elements of fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, every hour reported by instruments in the Atmospheric Science and Chemistry mEasurement NeTwork ( ASCENT ), a relatively new network of air quality monitors across the U.S. that measures the size and chemical composition of these particulates in real time. Ng said ASCENT is the U.S.'s first measurement network able to measure the chemical composition of airborne particles in real time.

Researchers were able to see what chemicals were in the smoke, track how its composition changed over the fire’s course, and distinguish emissions coming from burning structures. From there, they estimated how many people across Los Angeles were exposed to the heavy metals, particularly lead, during the fire’s first days.

They compared the typical value of lead before the fires and the chemical makeup of smoke from a 2024 fire in Riverside County that burned mostly vegetation with data from the Eaton Fire plume. Contrasted with the wildfire smoke, the plume from the LA fire contained 50 times more lead, three times more arsenic, and seven times more halogens. At the peak of burning, about 7 million people were exposed for 24 hours to lead levels more than 80 times what’s typical.

Lead is a neurotoxin that can stunt children’s development, lower IQ scores and increase blood pressure in adults. Scientists still don’t know how short-term, high exposure to lead impacts human health. Arsenic exposure is associated with various cancers.

Yaguang Wei, assistant professor in the department of environmental medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who researches the health impacts of air pollution, wildfire smoke and severe weather, said their findings reinforced some conclusions of a recent study he co-authored that found, in part, that PM2.5 from wildfire smoke was more toxic than particulates from other sources.

“I think their findings are not surprising,” said Wei, who was not involved in the study. When fires burn properties, they’re also burning “a lot of lead on your wall paint and the plastics and electronics and those are very toxic” when they burn, he said.

Monitoring, policies and emergency response need to adapt, experts say

Wei said the study has “important policy implications.” He thinks governments should take stronger actions to protect public health during these fires by investing in more wildfire monitoring and public alerts, and having more prescribed fires.

For Avol, the study is a reminder of our “strange and increasingly dangerous new world” where urban and wildland intersect — and increasingly catch fire.

“It reminds us to be cautious and be concerned and, you know, think about what we can do to minimize this. We’re not going to stop using all these materials containing metals and halogens and so forth in our homes,” he said. “How do we protect people from being exposed to that?”

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

The Los Angeles City Council voted 13-0 Wednesday to ban new oil wells and phase out all existing ones within 20 years, the final vote needed to pass the citywide ban.

For community residents and environmental advocates, this has been a long time coming — the push to enact this ordinance began over a decade ago.

“To every single one of us, this is what this means: That we hopefully will inherit a safer Los Angeles, a healthier city, not just for us, but for generations to come,” said Ashley Hernandez, a community organizer and Wilmington resident.

Hernandez was among dozens of demonstrators who gathered outside City Hall Wednesday morning for a rally ahead of the council vote, holding signs with slogans like “Clean air & health over big oil wealth” and “Together we can stop the climate emergency.”

Ashley Hernandez spoke about the ban on oil drilling creating a healthier city for future generations. She spoke at a rally before the L.A. City Council voted to ban new wells and phase out existing ones.

(

Kevin Tidmarsh

/

LAist

)

The backstory

The city of L.A. first moved to phase out oil drilling in 2022. That motion was later overturned after Warren Resources, an oil company, sued the city, arguing that only the state could enact such a policy. A state law passed last year explicitly granted cities the right to ban oil drilling, and the L.A. City Council again took up the cause. L.A. County is planning a similar ban.

The push to close the wells

Councilmembers Katy Yaroslavsky, Heather Hutt and Adrin Nazarian spoke in favor of the ban at the morning rally.

“Seven hundred fifty-nine of these active wells sit just steps from homes, churches, parks, hospitals and other places that our residents visit and congregate on a daily basis,” Nazarian said.

Richard Parks,  president of Redeemer Community Partnership in South Los Angeles, said his family and several of his neighbors who live near oil drilling sites where odor-neutralizing chemicals are sprayed into the air have faced health consequences, including miscarriages.

“We were left to wonder, did we lose these children because of the way these oil companies were operating in our community?” Parks said.

For South L.A. resident and high school senior Isabella Galbraith, the fight to close oil wells has lasted most of her life. She said she participated in her first protest, advocating for the closure of the Jefferson drill site, when she was just 5 years old. (That site has been closed and is now being developed into a park.)

“It's not normal to struggle to breathe. It's not normal for all of your family members to have asthma, to be getting cancer,” Galbraith said. “It's a daily reality for all of us, and it shows up in the little ways, and they have big, lasting consequences.”

What’s next

Oil companies have already said they plan to fight the ban, arguing that the ordinance constitutes a taking of private property without compensation and a violation of their rights.

Meanwhile, Parks said he hopes the city continues to take action on oil wells, including revoking conditional use permits for nuisance oil drill sites and using the authority of the L.A. Fire Department to plug idle oil wells.

Meanwhile, Yaroslavsky also advocated for the wells to be properly plugged and cleaned up.

“We need to make sure these wells are properly plugged and these sites are cleaned up, and we need to make sure the companies responsible for this pollution are held accountable,” she said.

Local residents are already looking to the future of what these sites could be once they’re shut down and cleaned up.

“I'm looking at … the future of these sites. Maybe these could be parks that our communities desperately need,” said Wilmington resident and rally organizer Wendy Miranda. “I'm just really excited for Wilmington, for South L.A., for other communities that have oil drilling near them to see that this will no longer be in our neighborhoods.”

A federal judge on Tuesday agreed to keep the Trump administration’s suspension of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority on hold, allowing the joint city-county agency, known as LAHSA, to keep running key homelessness systems while it hands its federal roles to L.A. County.

That means federal homelessness money will continue to flow to the L.A. region through LAHSA while the agency’s lawsuit over the suspension plays out.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter’s order came at the joint request of LAHSA, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and a regional planning group called the L.A. Continuum of Care. The decision came as Carter’s earlier order blocking the suspension was set to expire Tuesday.

LAHSA sued the federal housing department, HUD, in June. The L.A. Continuum of Care joined the lawsuit on LAHSA’s side.

Lawyers for both sides told the court they’re close to settling LAHSA’s entire lawsuit. “In terms of a settlement agreement, we are 90% there,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, adding that a signed settlement agreement could be ready in about two weeks.

Their joint request, filed Monday, came the same day the L.A. Continuum of Care voted to make L.A. County the lead agency for the region’s homelessness database (in a 253-43 vote) and its system for matching unhoused people with housing (in a 219-38 vote).

With those votes, the county’s new homelessness department has now been formally selected to take over all four federal roles currently held by LAHSA — in a process ordered by Carter. The group picked the county earlier this month to run the annual homeless count and manage the region’s applications for federal homelessness funding.

In court Tuesday, Carter said the city and county have “bickered” for years, and that LAHSA was created “to solve that problem but was just a punching bag on many occasions.”

Sarah Mahin (center) speaks earlier this year about the launch of the new county homelessness department she will direct. Standing behind her are L.A. County Supervisors Kathryn Barger (left) and Lindsey Horvath.

(

David Wagner/LAist

)

What does all of this mean for how L.A. homelessness will be addressed?

In the short term, not much will change for people seeking shelter and services. LAHSA will keep running the system used to match people with housing and the database where outreach workers log the people their organizations help.

But the handoff to L.A. County will happen in stages. Shayla Myers, an attorney for the Continuum of Care, told the court the settlement would include “staggered transition times.”

HUD’s lawyers said the database and housing matching system would move last, no later than the end of next year.

Once the transition is complete, one government will be in charge of the region’s core homelessness systems. That’s a big shift.

For years, these roles have been held by LAHSA, a joint agency overseen by both the city and county, which made it hard to hold anyone accountable when the system fell short.

The shift in overseeing the homeless count will be one major change for the region. The timing hasn’t been announced and is being worked out in settlement talks. For now, LAHSA plans to run the next count in January, according to the agency’s leadership.

LAHSA has run the count for about two decades, and its accuracy has faced repeated scrutiny. In August, the L.A. City Council unanimously called for a review of this year’s count, citing possible errors.

How did we get here? 

HUD suspended LAHSA from federal programs in June, citing alleged financial mismanagement. The federal housing department announced proposed penalties against the L.A. Continuum of Care, saying it wanted to have local service providers apply directly to HUD for funding.

LAHSA sued later that month, calling the suspension “a baseless attempt to eliminate” both the agency and the L.A. Continuum of Care. LAHSA argued HUD’s stated reasons were a cover for the Trump administration's goal of dismantling the regional system. The L.A. Continuum of Care joined the lawsuit on LAHSA’s side, arguing that “HUD’s actions threaten to dismantle the very role Congress assigned to local Continuums of Care.”

In August, Carter, the federal judge, blocked the suspension through Oct. 27 to avoid disrupting funding for homeless services amid a transition away from LAHSA.

He also ordered the L.A. Continuum of Care to start looking for replacements for LAHSA in four key federal roles. As of this week, that selection process is complete, and the parties in the case agree LAHSA needs to keep running key homelessness systems until those roles move to L.A. County.

The court’s order Tuesday keeps the suspension on hold until the end of the lawsuit. It also blocks HUD’s proposed penalties against the Continuum of Care for now, so local providers won’t be forced to apply to HUD directly.

HUD and local officials are now ironing out a transition plan. HUD’s lawyers said the responsibilities would fully move away from LAHSA no later than the end of 2027.

Carter Hewgley is chief strategy officer for the county’s Department of Homeless Services and Housing, which will take over the responsibilities from LAHSA. Hewgley said at Monday’s meeting the department “is committed to a transition plan that preserves vital subject matter expertise and continuity of services.”

LAHSA budgeted about $24 million to run all four of these roles in the current budget year, according to a report from the county’s chief executive officer.

The union representing LAHSA workers, SEIU 721, told LAist that 79 unionized LAHSA employees currently work to support those federal roles.

LAHSA spokespeople did not immediately respond to requests about staffing.

Bill Essayli, First Assistant United States Attorney for the Central District of California, speaks on the phone outside the United States District Court in Los Angeles in December 2025.

(

Patrick T. Fallon / AFP

/

Getty Images

)

What will happen next with the lawsuit?

HUD, LAHSA and the L.A. Continuum of Care will continue negotiating a settlement.

Essayli said Tuesday morning the parties had agreed to more than two dozen provisions, with four or five still left to work out.

HUD’s attorneys said the department needs assurances that federal money will be spent properly during the transition, but flagged that the agency doesn’t have the funds to pay for a court-appointed monitor.

In settlement negotiations, one of the last sticking points was “harm reduction,” which refers to programs that aim to make drug use less dangerous. Harm reduction strategies can include using public money to distribute clean pipes or syringes.

Essayli said that going forward, “federal dollars can no longer be used for harm reduction.”

Myers, the L.A. Continuum of Care’s attorney, argued that harm reduction is already covered by HUD’s current funding rules and doesn’t need to be part of the settlement.

Carter's order Tuesday requires HUD to process the region’s pending funding application — for about $240 million — as usual.

HUD's current rules bar federal grant money from going to organizations that knowingly distribute drug paraphernalia or knowingly allow illicit drug use on their property.

HUD’s broader funding guidelines are being challenged in federal court in Rhode Island. In the meantime, a federal appeals court has allowed HUD to move forward with them.

HUD's June notice suspending LAHSA did not mention harm reduction. It cited LAHSA's alleged failures in financial management, internal controls and safeguards against conflicts of interest. It also described what HUD called “repeated false statements” to the federal agency.

On Tuesday in a downtown L.A. courtroom, the federal judge pressed the parties to quickly settle their remaining differences.

“Ultimately, you hold the cards in terms of approval,” Carter told HUD’s lawyers. “You have to be happy with this.”

When the parties returned to court Tuesday evening, HUD attorney Bill Doolittle told Carter the remaining issues had essentially been worked out, and that settlement terms would be circulated soon, according to three people who were present.

Carter also weighed in on a separate deal between the city and county of L.A. over how the city will use the systems once the county takes over.

In court Tuesday, he displayed the agreement’s terms and warned that deals like it “cannot supplant my rulings.”

“It’s essential to this court that we have a centralized authority, one place of accountability,” he said. “We don’t want a decentralized LAHSA situation again…We’re done with that.”