The Brief

Barry Stewart’s daughter and her three friends from Pepperdine University died when a young man allegedly driving 104 mph down Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu crashed into them in his mother’s BMW.

Six months later, Stewart sat last week beside Malibu’s state senator, Ben Allen, and urged lawmakers to approve a bill that would add Malibu to a short list of California cities testing out automated cameras to ticket speeders.

Malibu, Allen said, is one of the nation’s deadliest cities for car crashes for one reason. “A primary factor in every one of these incidents was high-vehicle speed,” he told the Senate Transportation Committee last week.

At least 60 people have been killed on the picturesque Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu since 2010, most of them on a roughly two-mile residential stretch known as Dead Man’s Curve, where Stewart’s daughter, Peyton, died along with sorority sisters, Niamh Rolston, Asha Weir and Deslyn Williams.

“This bill is California legislators’ opportunity to save lives without harming anyone and without curbing the freedom of any, any law-abiding Californians,” Stewart said.

The committee’s members voted 14-1 to advance Senate Bill 1297. Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill, AB 645, that allowed Los Angeles, San Jose, Oakland, Glendale, Long Beach and San Francisco to start similar five-year speed-camera pilot programs.

A man walks by bouquets of flowers on the Pacific Coast Highway today in Malibu where four Pepperdine students were killed when they were struck by a car Tuesday evening.

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None of the cities have started fining drivers, since the legislation passed last fall requires the municipalities to first create local policies, hold hearings and then have public information campaigns before speeders get automated tickets.

Cities across the state already deploy automated red-light cameras, which snap photos of the face of a driver and their vehicle. Tickets are typically handled by the traffic department located in the criminal division of the local courthouse.

Under the six cities’ pilot programs and the one proposed for Malibu, the cameras will snap pictures of a vehicle’s license plate instead of a driver’s face. The speeding tickets a municipality would issue wouldn’t count toward a driver’s traffic record and appeals would be handled in civil court.

Fines start at $50 for drivers who go at least 11 mph over the speed limit and rise to $500 for those speeding more than 100 mph — though amounts can be reduced depending on the motorist’s income.

Civil liberty groups, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, oppose the speed camera programs, citing privacy and government surveillance concerns. California’s police officers’ union also opposes the programs.

“Law enforcement officers often use discretion and provide drivers an opportunity to mitigate the violation,” Brian Marvel, Peace Officers Research Association of California president, wrote in a letter opposing the bill. “Verbal and written warnings are often given in place of a ticket. They assess the situation, and after a conversation with the driver, they decide if a verbal or written warning is a better course of action. This discretion saves many low-income individuals and senior citizens their hard-earned dollars. Law enforcement exercises discretion; cameras do not.”

Assemblywoman Laura Friedman, a Democrat from Burbank who authored last year’s speed-camera bill, told the Los Angeles Daily News last year that the union has concerns the cameras will eventually replace officers’ jobs.

Sen. Roger Niello, a Republican representing the Roseville area, cast the lone “no” vote last week, saying the bill didn’t go far enough.

“I’m just very doubtful that that’s going to be effective,” Niello said. “In areas like that, we need overwhelming enforcement on the road. … They speed, they get a picture sent to them and they get a ticket and no points (on their driving record). And I don’t think that’s enough of a consequence.”

But Stewart told the committee that cameras would give understaffed local law enforcement more flexibility, and reduce the number of deadly collisions like the one that killed his daughter and her friends.

“Electronic enforcement would free scarce personnel to handle other offenses, the ones that require actual live deputies,” he testified.

Debris is seen along the Pacific Coast Highway near where a crash killed four Pepperdine seniors.

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Allen, the bill’s author, told the committee that data from the Federal Highway Administration shows that speed cameras reduce crashes on urban streets by 54%. The hope, he said, is the cameras would keep Malibu from another tragedy like the one “where these four wonderful, young women were mowed down.”

Sheriff’s investigators said Fraser Michael Bohm was traveling at 104 mph when he veered into three parked cars that collided with the four women who were standing near the parked vehicles.

Bohm, 22, was released from jail after posting $4 million bond. He has pleaded not guilty to four counts of gross vehicular manslaughter and four counts of murder. His attorney told reporters that Bohm wasn’t going as fast as law enforcement officials allege and another car was involved in a possible road rage scenario. According to the Los Angeles Times, a local sheriff’s official told reporters there was “no evidence” that the crash stemmed from an alleged road rage incident.

California clocked its second-worst snowpack on record Wednesday, a potentially troubling signal ahead for fire season.

It’s an alarming end to a winter that saw abnormally dry conditions briefly wiped from California’s drought map in January, for the first time in a quarter-century.

Though precipitation to date has been near average, much of it fell as rain rather than snow. Then March’s record-breaking heat melted most of the snow that remains. The state’s major reservoirs are nevertheless brimming above historic averages and are flirting with capacity, and a smattering of snow, rain and thunderstorms are dousing last month’s heat wave.

But experts now warn that California’s case of the missing snowpack could herald an early fire season in the mountains.

On Wednesday, state engineers conducting the symbolic April 1 snowpack measurement at Phillips Station south of Lake Tahoe found no measurable snow in patches of white dotting the grassy field.

“I want to welcome you call to probably one of the quickest snow surveys we’ve had — maybe one where people could actually use an umbrella,” joked Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources. “We’re getting a lot of questions about are we heading into a hydrologic drought? The answer is, I don’t know.”

State data reports that California’s snowpack is closing out the season at an alarming 18% of average statewide, and an even more abysmal 6% of average in the northern mountains that feed California’s major reservoirs.

Only the extreme drought year of 2015 beat this year’s snowpack for the worst on record, measuring in at just 5% of average on April 1st, when the snow historically is at its deepest.

“I think everyone's anticipating that it will be a long, busy fire season,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network.

“Without a snowpack, and with an early spring, it just means that there’s much more time for something like that to happen.”

‘It’s pretty bizarre up here’ 

In the city of South Lake Tahoe, which survived the massive Caldor Fire in the fall of 2021 without losing any structures, fire chief Jim Drennan said his department is already ramping up prevention efforts.

“It's pretty bizarre up here right now. It really seems like June conditions more than March,” Drennan said. “People are already turning the sprinklers on for their lawns.”

Without more precipitation, an early spring may complicate prescribed burning efforts. But Drennan said fire agencies in the Tahoe basin can start mechanically clearing fuels from forest areas earlier than usual.

“That means we can get more work done,” he said.

It also means homeowners need to start hardening their homes now, said Martin Goldberg, battalion chief and fuels management officer for the Lake Valley Fire Protection District, which protects unincorporated communities in the Lake Tahoe Basin’s south shore.

Goldberg urges residents to scour their yards for burnable materials, create defensible space and reach out to local fire departments with questions. The risks are widespread — from firewood, wooden fences, gas cans, plants, pine needles — even lawn furniture stacked against a house.

“In years past, I wouldn't even think of raking and clearing until May,” Goldberg said. “But my yard's completely cleared of snowpack, and it has been for a couple weeks now.”

‘A haystack fire’

Battalion chief David Acuña, a spokesperson for Cal Fire, said fire season is shaped by more than just one year’s snowpack.

Climate change has been remaking California’s fire seasons into fire years. And California’s recent average to abundant water years have fueled what Acuña called “bumper crops of vegetation and brush.”

“Most of California is like a haystack. And if you’ve ever seen a haystack fire, they burn very intensely because there's layers of fuel,” Acuña said.

Like Quinn-Davidson, Acuña wasn’t ready to make specific predictions about fires to come.

But John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at UC Merced, said the temperatures and snowpack conditions this year offer a glimpse of California in the latter decades of this century, as fossil fuel use continues to drive global temperatures higher.

How this year’s fires will play out will depend on when, where and how wind, heat, fuel and ignitions combine. But it foreshadows the consequences of a warmer California for water and fire under climate change.

“This,” Abatzoglou said, “is yet another stress test for the future in the state.”

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

Thousands of immigrants who are lawfully in California are set to lose their food assistance benefits, known as CalFresh, starting this month.

The new restrictions stem from H.R. 1 — also known as the “Big Beautiful Bill” — which Congress passed last year.

The changes remove eligibility for certain noncitizens, including people with refugee status and victims of trafficking. It also applies to immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan who have special immigrant visas for helping the U.S. government overseas.

 ”These are folks … many of whom have large families that we have a commitment to as a country because we welcomed them and invited them here to find a place of refuge,” said Cambria Tortorelli, president of the International Institute of Los Angeles, a refugee resettlement agency. “They’re authorized to work and they’ve been brought here by the U.S. government.”

The federal spending bill, H.R. 1, made sweeping cuts to social safety net programs, including food assistance and Medicaid. In signing the bill, President Donald Trump said the changes were delivering on his campaign promises of “America first.”

Officials estimate 23,000 people in Los Angeles County will be affected. The state estimates about 72,000 immigrants with lawful presence will be affected across California.

CalFresh is the state’s version of the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Undocumented immigrants have not been eligible to receive CalFresh benefits.

State officials say noncitizens who are currently receiving benefits will continue to get them until it’s time to renew their benefits — adding that people might be able to receive benefits again if their legal status changes to lawful permanent residents.

Who the changes apply to:

• Asylees
• Refugees
• Parolees (unless they are Cuban and Haitian entrants)
• Individuals with deportation or removal withheld
• Conditional entrants
• Victims of trafficking
• Battered noncitizens
• Iraqi or Afghan with special immigrant visas (SIV) who are not lawful permanent residents (LPR)
• Certain Afghan Nationals granted parole between July 31, 2021, and Sept. 30, 2023
• Certain Ukrainian Nationals granted parole between Feb. 24, 2022, and Sep. 30, 2024