The Brief

Karen Bass has announced the upcoming 2028 Olympics will be "no-car games," meaning venues will only be accessible by public transportation.

At a news conference in Paris Saturday, Mayor Bass said a goal for the games will be to make it more easily accessible by eliminating cars from the equation.

Bass said venues will be only accessible by public transportation. It will take more than 3,000 buses, according to the Associated Press, which Bass said will be brought in from all over the country.

Mayor Bass is in Paris for the closing ceremony of the 2024 games, where she will receive the Olympic flag officially passing the mantle of host from Paris to LA.

Mayor Bass and Casey Wasserman, chairman of the LA Olympics 2028 organizing committee, highlighted some of the planning that's begun for the event.

"We’re already working to create jobs by expanding our public transportation system in order for us to have a no-car games,” Bass told the press.

To accomplish the "no-car" Olympics, Bass says the city will request businesses allow their employees to work from home during the 17-day Olympic period.

After nearly a month of intense closed-door negotiations, California lawmakers on the last day of session killed a compromise bill that failed to insulate utilities when they cause catastrophic wildfires.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and the utilities had fought to significantly reduce what utility companies pay when they cause a wildfire. Last week Newsom struck a compromise with Senate and Assembly leaders that would have imposed no limits on fire survivors’ compensation or lawyers’ contingency fees for individuals’ lawsuits. It also would have retained insurance companies’ ability to sue utilities to recoup their costs for claims, and would have barred private equity firms from investing in insurance claims. The utilities’ stocks plunged since the deal was reached. The Assembly did not take up the bill on Tuesday, effectively killing it.

“The proposal before us does not yet deliver the relief, accountability or meaningful reform that Californians deserve,” Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas said in a statement on Tuesday, referring to “hundreds of hours” spent on the effort in the past few weeks.

'Here until January'

Newsom had hoped the bill would address his concerns over rising electricity rates and the potential for another utility bankruptcy in California in the event of more catastrophic wildfires. He hinted to reporters Monday night at the Capitol that he’s “here until January” and wasn’t done with his effort.

“I know we all hate utilities, so no one wants to defend a utility, but you’ve got to deal with reality," Newsom said. “This thing’s not going to get better on its own.”

His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment after the deal fell apart.

The compromise legislation, Senate Bill 492, was seen as a victory for some Los Angeles County fire survivors, consumer advocacy groups and insurance companies, all of whom urged the governor and lawmakers not to shift utilities’ possible costs to them.

“It’s tragic the way this all played out,” said Jamie Court, president of advocacy group Consumer Watchdog. “They negotiated a deal, and renege when the utilities didn’t like it.”

“We have invested hundreds of hours to fight back the utility bailout and the attacks on victims’ rights,” said Joy Chen, executive director of Every Fire Survivors Network. “If the speaker says his focus is on survivors, then we would expect that those attacks don’t come back in any legislation that comes out of any special session.”

Utility stocks drubbed

The high-profile campaigning in the past few weeks cost the state’s investor-owned utilities dearly. Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison stock plummeted and San Diego Gas & Electric shares fell in the past few days as Wall Street investors digested what some analysts called a “Sacramento strikeout” for utilities.

The chief executives of PG&E and Edison wrote to Senate Pro Tem Monique Limon and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas on Monday, telling them that the utilities had collectively lost $20 billion in market value since Thursday. They warned of possible waning investments and financial risks that “will have cascading impacts” on the state’s economy and climate ambitions.

The utilities did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

Lobbyists and some lawmakers likewise lamented Monday that decreased investor confidence in the utilities will lead to higher borrowing costs, which could mean job cuts and less investment in critical energy infrastructure.

“Workers got screwed, ratepayers got screwed, lawyers and insurance companies win,” said Scott Wetch, a lobbyist for the California Coalition of Utility Employees and the State Association of Electrical Workers, at an Assembly Utilities and Energy committee hearing.

“It is a big disaster that we were not able to come up with that structural reform,” said Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, a Democrat representing Thousand Oaks.

'Folks miscalculated'

Some lawmakers pushed back Monday, referring to the limited amount of time they had to work on the bill, which they said centers the interests of fire survivors.

“If you expect to back us into a corner, and then approve something without an opportunity to amend it, to talk to our constituents, to talk to groups that are impacted by it, this is the outcome,” said Assemblymember Chris Rogers, a Ukiah Democrat, at the hearing.

Assemblymember John Harabedian, a Pasadena Democrat, on Monday called the Wall Street reaction “hysteria.”

“The market had false expectations,” he said at the hearing. “Folks miscalculated exactly what could get done” in the last few weeks of the legislative session, he added.

But on Tuesday, Harabedian said the bill does not help survivors and issued the following statement: “This proposal only rearranges the chairs on the deck of the Titanic when all Californians are desperate for meaningful utility reform.”

Yue Stella Yu and Kate Wolffe contributed to this report.

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

Is this the year that Gov. Gavin Newsom allows students without legal status to legally work at California’s public colleges and universities?

A state bill with wide support from Democrats but opposed by Republicans seeks to do just that by adopting an untested legal theory that argues a 1980s federal law banning employment for people without legal status doesn’t apply to state agencies. But university leaders and Newsom worry that acting on the theory could put the state on another collision course with the Trump administration.

The bill easily cleared the Legislature Friday, including a "yes" vote from one Republican. The bill now heads to Newsom’s desk.

Assembly Bill 713 by Assemblymember José Luis Solache, a Democrat from Lakewood, is seemingly straightforward: The University of California, California State University and community colleges cannot disqualify students without legal status from campus employment. If it becomes law, it would kick in Jan. 6.

The systems together enrolled an estimated 60,000 students without legal status in 2023 and most were in the community colleges. Some attend private colleges and wouldn’t be covered by the bill.

Leading the charge for this right to work on campuses are students without legal status, immigration rights groups and legal scholars. Access to safe working conditions for students without legal status is a high priority because they’re ineligible for federal Pell grants — up to $7,400 annually — and federal student loans that come with more borrower protections than ones offered by private lenders. California awards eligible in-state students tuition waivers regardless of immigration status, so many students without legal status can at least attend a public institution tuition-free.

“While California has a longstanding commitment to expanding access, affordability, and student success in higher education, our undocumented students continue to face significant financial and structural barriers,” Solache said at a bill hearing in June.

Newsom vetoed a similar bill in 2024, echoing a chief worry put forward by the University of California: Any effort to employ students without proper status would incur the wrath of the Trump administration, which could attempt to pull some or all of the $17 billion in annual federal support the system gets.

The state’s Department of Finance is recommending a "no" vote on Solache’s bill. The fear of federal litigation and budget cuts are the main reasons why.

The University of California abandoned its own review of employing students without legal status in 2024 for those reasons. Students at the public meeting cried and shouted at the board’s regents when they made the decision.

Some Republicans cited the risk of the Trump administration cutting federal higher education funding as a reason for their opposition to the current bill.

“If we're going to move something forward like this that then threatens 100% of all of the students, I think that's irresponsible for us as legislators,” said Assemblymember David Tangipa, a Republican from Fresno, at a January bill hearing. He voted "no" on the bill Friday.

After Newsom vetoed the 2024 bill, which sailed through the Legislature with minimal opposition, some students sued the University of California. A state appellate court ruled that UC's argument that the federal government might sue the system was an abuse of discretion under the state’s law banning employment and housing discrimination. The court said UC’s policy of not hiring students without legal status was legally indefensible unless it can show that federal law requires the UC to continue its policy of not hiring them. The UC appealed, but the state Supreme Court let the appellate ruling stand. Still, the court ruling was silent on the soundness of the legal theory that the state can hire workers without legal status.

The court ordered UC to pay more than $500,000 in legal fees on behalf of the plaintiffs, a student and a former lecturer.

It’s unclear if Solache’s bill can even force the UC to comply if it becomes law. Since 1879 the state constitution has granted the system a high degree of autonomy.

What is the legal theory being tested?

The bill, like its predecessor that Newsom vetoed, takes its cues from a team of UCLA scholars who advanced a theory in 2022 that a federal law banning employers from hiring workers without legal status doesn’t apply to state employers. The architects of the legal argument say the law in question, 1986’s Immigration Reform and Control Act, never actually listed state agencies as employers covered by the law.

Other laws passed by Congress clearly included states in restrictions that also applied to the private sector or federal employers. The omission, the UCLA scholars say, means Congress never intended to tie the hands of state agencies on whom they can hire. An analyst at the state Senate’s judiciary committee also noted that Congress may be unable to dictate whom states can hire, because that undermines protections for states’ rights.

Student advocates then persuaded the UC Board of Regents to consider adopting that legal theory so students without legal status could obtain campus jobs. But momentum for that policy stalled, culminating with the UC dropping the plan.

Student voice

Some students have found a way to work while enrolled despite the ban on campus jobs.

Working without proper immigration status is not illegal, but employers cannot knowingly employ individuals who lack proper legal status, wrote University of Oklahoma law professor Kit Johnson in a 2022 law article. Employers often take advantage of the legal precarity of immigrants without legal status by paying them less than they’d earn with proper legal status.

A legal workaround, she writes, is for such immigrants to form limited liability companies, or LLCs. That business structure makes them consultants hired for a job, as opposed to employees.

Some students without legal status at the UC did just that, or they formed similarly structured cooperatives. But not every campus student can form an LLC or knows to do that.

Is student data safe from federal inquiry?

Backers of Solache’s bill and the Senate’s judiciary committee analysis say students without legal status employed at a campus aren’t at greater risk of immigration action despite concerns raised by skeptics of the proposed policy to hire them. The judiciary committee wrote that state agencies arguably aren’t required to verify employment eligibility for roles that aren’t funded by the federal government. They also say federal and state laws bar universities from sharing personal student information without that student’s consent.

But public California universities have shared student and personnel information with the federal government under the Trump administration’s investigations into alleged campus antisemitism. Critics say the administration exploited antisemitism accusations to coerce campuses across the country into settlements that align with the conservative values of the White House. The Cal State system settled with staff and faculty unions after they sued over the disclosure of personal information, promising to alert workers before their information is released to federal authorities investigating antisemitism.

Advocates of the bill also argue that the risk of apprehension and deportation is not reason enough to oppose it. Students understand the risk and that doesn’t change if they work legally or not.

Bill addresses questions the appellate court wouldn’t

As a result of the lawsuit students and advocates filed against the UC, the court sided with the plaintiffs because it found that the university’s employment policy discriminated against students based on their immigration status, which state law prohibits. It challenged the UC to provide an argument for why it thinks the federal government would go after the system for establishing this policy. Importantly, the court did not order the UC to begin hiring students without legal status.

“The UC now has to either end the discrimination against undocumented students or defend its decision to do so by reference to federal law, neither of which it has done to date,” wrote Ahilan Arulanantham in an email. Arulanantham is one of the UCLA scholars behind the legal theory and a counsel in the plaintiffs’ lawsuit against the University of California.

Omar Rodriguez, a UC spokesperson, wrote in an email that the "UC is evaluating its options in light of the court’s ruling and will take appropriate action when that evaluation has concluded.”

“UC does not have a position on AB 713,” he added.

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

Two litters of a rare southwestern rattlesnake were born at the L.A. Zoo last month. The six New Mexico ridge-nosed rattlesnake pups are the first to be bred under a multi-agency recovery program that started two years ago. 

The shy, gray-and-tan snake lives in isolated mountain ranges in Arizona, New Mexico and Northern Mexico and is considered “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act.

" Conservation … isn't just about protecting the animals that look most similar to us or that are the easiest to like,” said Byron Wusstig, the L.A. Zoo’s reptile curator. “It's about preserving that ecosystem as a whole.”

The L.A. Zoo is one of three institutions working to breed the snakes so their offspring can be released back into the wild as part of Project Obscurus (the rattlers’ scientific name is crotalus willardi obscurus). This year’s litters are the first zoo-bred pair in the project and the result of pairings made about a year ago. The pups’ parents were collected from the mountains of Sierra San Luis, Mexico, for breeding.

What's life like for the snakelets?

Unlike most egg-laying reptiles, rattlesnakes give birth to live young and “hang out” with the neonates for the first few weeks of life. Wusstig said the baby ridge-nosed rattlesnakes have been basking in the light on top of their mom and sipping water that beads up on her scales. The pups snack on centipedes in addition to bite-sized pieces of the mice and quail that adults eat.

“There is a bit of parental behavior that happens with rattlesnakes that we still have a lot to learn about, but it's really interesting to observe,” Wusstig said.

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Luc Myers

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Courtesy LA Zoo

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In the coming months, Project Obscurus will decide whether these snakes are released back into the wild or remain in the breeding program.

“Success won't be measured by how many individuals we can breed here in the zoo,” Wusstig said. “Ultimate success is getting the populations in the range where they're most threatened in Arizona and New Mexico, getting those to have sustainable populations … that are genetically diverse and stable in the long term.”

Can I see the babies?

The zoo’s ridge-nosed rattlesnakes are quarantined to prevent them from picking up illnesses that could spread to wild populations once they’re reintroduced to their native environment. However, the zoo has several other species of rattlesnake that you can safely observe from behind panes of thick glass.

Computer science, nursing and electrical engineering are among the most lucrative fields of study for recent California undergraduates, who on average earn well over $100,000 four years after graduating in these majors.

That’s according to a new analysis of federal earning data by The HEA Group, an education research organization. The report found that, on average, recent California graduates who received a bachelor’s degree earned nearly twice that of high school graduates, reinforcing that bachelor degrees help expand opportunities for greater economic mobility.

More students are questioning the economic value of higher education amid rising costs to attend college in California. Last year, students who lived on campus reported an 18% increase in their overall expenses compared to the previous year, according to a California Student Aid Commission report.

Growing skepticism of higher education’s value partially inspired Michael Itzkowitz, The HEA Group’s president, to conduct its analysis. He said students should enter post-secondary education with their “eyes wide open” about both the cost of the degree and its potential payoff.

“Before students consider additional levels of education, it’s important that they know what kind of investment they’re gonna make upfront, but also what kind of payoff they’re gonna have on the back end,” Itzkowitz said.

Different degrees, different values

STEM degrees, those related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics, are among the highest paying fields. Itzkowitz said that federal earning data of graduates from California colleges and universities was generally consistent to what he has observed nationally.

Those who earned a degree in mathematics and computer science earned an average salary of $138,785 four years after graduation — the highest of all the majors included in HEA’s analysis.

Other top earners included bachelor’s degree holders in computer engineering and nursing, which resulted in annual incomes of $125,120 and $123,693, respectively.

The analysis included nearly 277,000 graduates who received federal student aid. It found the most popular major is business administration, management and operations, which translated to an average salary of $74,271 four years after graduation.

Itzkowitz cautioned against using the database to determine the value of a particular major.

“A social work degree and an engineering degree exist for very different reasons, and both have different kinds of societal value that goes beyond the paycheck,” he said. “This is about being better informed of the outcomes before students spend the next two to four years of their life earning a degree.”

For students using the HEA database to make decisions about their field of study, it is important to consider what university they are attending, he said. A bachelor’s degree from one institution will lead to different outcomes compared to the same degree from other colleges.

The HEA analysis of roughly 3,000 bachelor’s, associate’s and certificate programs in California found that spending more time in school had economic benefits.

On average, those who obtained an associate’s degree earned on average $23,942 more than those with a certificate. Bachelor’s degree holders earned $34,769 more on average than those with an associate’s degree.

“I would argue it suggests that college is certainly still worth it when it comes to economics,” Itzkowitz said.