The Brief

The city of Los Angeles is overhauling how and where it places crossing guards before the start of the upcoming school year.

The L.A. City Council voted Wednesday to conduct a citywide assessment of elementary school crossings informed by:

• Safety data
• Equity measure
• And existing infrastructure

These metrics will now inform decision on where to place crossing guards. It's a significant change, moving the city away from its previous practice of only studying intersections where a school principal requested a crossing guard.

How we got here

The item passed with 11 “yes” votes. Council members Traci Park and John Lee voted against the update because they were concerned how it will affect current crossing guard assignments, and council members Bob Blumenfield and Adrin Nazarian were absent.

Laura Rubio-Cornejo, the general manager of the Department of Transportation, said at a committee meeting in June that the new approach will integrate the city’s crossing guard program into the same process it uses to evaluate the need for other school safety treatments, like speed tables and speed limit reductions.

“It would allow us to have a more comprehensive approach to addressing school safety that capitalizes and leverages all the different tools that we use to make the streets leading to schools safer,” Rubio-Cornejo said when the updated methodology was first considered.

While the updated methodology has generally been received positively for offering a more equitable and comprehensive distribution of resources, it’s still unclear if volunteers can fill in the gaps created by the city’s shortage of crossing guards.

The city has been able to place crossing guards at about two-thirds of the intersections requested, Rubio-Cornejo wrote in a budget memo this spring.

What’s changing

For years, school principals would request a crossing guard for an intersection around their school. Then, engineers working for the city would decide if a crossing guard was necessary based on the kind of intersection, number of lanes, speed limits and volume of vehicle and pedestrian traffic, according to the Department of Transportation.

In the June report, Rubio-Cornejo wrote that this system “inherently limits deployment…and may not address safety concerns at locations that have not been requested.”

To produce the new crossing guard assignments, the Department of Transportation will apply the same criteria it used previously to intersections within a 1,000-foot radius of all elementary schools — not just the ones identified by school principals.

The details

That’s the high-level description. There are a lot more details, but bear with us, it’s a bit complicated:

First, the Department of Transportation will extract elementary schools from a list of all schools within the city that it ranked by need of street safety intervention.

That list, which you can see starting on page 10 here, was created last year. It was based primarily on collision data. Other factors, including how the areas around each school scored on various socioeconomic, environmental and health variables, were also considered in the ranking.

Elementary schools, in ranked order, will then be categorized by geographic region. The purpose of this, according to the Department of Transportation, is to ensure crossing guards aren’t deployed to a different region than the one they were already assigned to.

The regions schools will be sorted into.

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City of Los Angeles

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Within each region, intersections within the 1,000-foot radii of schools with higher need will be prioritized. For those intersections, the Department of Transportation will apply the same criteria it used in its previous approach to assign crossing guards.

So, for example, if there’s a high-ranked school in the Western region with two unmarked crosswalks, each with several lanes of fast-moving traffic and a high proportion of students who are pedestrians, that school could get two crossing guards.

Carlos Torres, the director of the L.A. Unified School District’s office of environmental health and safety, said updating the methodology is a “good move.”

“There’s a lot of positivity in it because essentially they’re looking at a number of different factors,” Torres said.

L.A. Unified School Board Member Tanya Ortiz Franklin, whose district includes South L.A., said she’s in favor of the “more strategic, inclusive, equitable approach.”

“Principals are not equally overwhelmed,” said Ortiz Franklin, who has led school safety initiatives for the county school system. “In higher need areas, there tends to be a lot more on their plate, and so they’re not always able to get to everything in the same way that a calmer, school environment might lead to.”

Old system fueled frustration

John-Ryan Shea was walking his third-grader to school in November when he heard the screeching sound of brakes followed by a thud on Avoca Street and Yosemite Drive.

When Shea turned around, he said he saw a girl “thrown about 10 feet” after a car hit her at the corner of Rockdale Elementary School, an arts-focused magnet school in Eagle Rock.

Luckily, the girl survived the collision and was doing relatively OK, at least physically.

“The one thing I‘ll just never forget is her face,” Shea said. “Just how absolutely stunned she was that she got hit by a car.”

According to an LAist review of state-level data, seven children ages five to 11 have been killed while walking on the street on a weekday between 2013 and 2022 in the city of L.A. There have been several more collisions in the same time period that resulted in injuries.

Rockdale parents had been campaigning to get a crossing guard at that intersection to no avail, despite warning that a collision like the one in November was bound to happen. Shea said drivers at the intersection regularly run through the four-way stop sign, and an LAist reporter observed that the stop and speed limit signs near the intersection are obscured by vegetation.

A public comment submitted about the new crossing guard methodology details more than two years of email communications between concerned Rockdale parents, local officials and Department of Transportation staff.

Today, the intersection is one of the nearly 240 in the city where, under the outgoing system, requests for crossing guards weren’t fulfilled.

The gray area of volunteers

A looming question about the city’s program is whether parents can volunteer to provide crossing guard services at locations otherwise not covered, like the one near Rockdale.

The city has said it is unable to administer a volunteer program itself while employing people to provide the same service because of labor rights issues.

The city added in its June report about the updated methodology that it could train volunteers that schools themselves manage to “augment the crossing guard program.”

That was news to Torres at L.A. Unified, who said the city has been “ very adamant there are no volunteer crossing guards.”

Torres, who LAist interviewed in June, added that the idea the city put forth about volunteers hasn’t been “vetted” by his office and that he hasn’t heard anything from the city on volunteer crossing guards that he can recall in “recent times.”

LAist reached out to the L.A. Unified to confirm there hasn’t been communication since the interview about volunteer crossing guards but hasn’t heard back.

It was only during budget negotiations in the spring, when the more than $10 million program was primed to be slashed, that City Council members learned it’s possible that volunteers can provide crossing guard services, as long as they’re managed by the school or school district.

“That’s the opposite of everything I’ve been told,” Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, who presided over the hearings, said. “I’ve talked to school board members who were very frustrated that they can’t [have volunteer crossing guards].”

Potential “heartache”

The crossing guard program emerged from the budget negotiations intact, which meant that Secorra Gagau, a Hollywood-based crossing guard supervisor, could expect to continue doing the job she loved.

“A lot of times, besides their family, we're the first face that [kids] see going to school,” Gagau said. “They are so excited to tell us about their morning and what they have planned at school.”

For Park, the connection communities develop with crossing guards was enough to vote against the updated methodology, which is likely to result in a reshuffling of resources.

“I just can’t explain to my constituents that we may lose crossing guards where they have long been deemed necessary and essential,” Park said in June.

Torres agreed that there will be “growing pains” if the city’s forthcoming evaluation determines a crossing guard is better served elsewhere.

“ It's gonna cause a little bit of heartache,” he said.

Why we are limited in evaluating the impact of the change

Neither the Department of Transportation nor the school district would send data on where crossing guards were placed last school year, despite multiple requests.

LAist believes it’s important to have that list to evaluate how the updated methodology affects where crossing guards are placed in the future, so that data is now being pursued through a public records request.

How to watchdog your local government

• One of the best things you can do to hold officials accountable is pay attention.
  

• Your city council, board of supervisors, school board and more all hold public meetings that anybody can attend. These are times you can talk to your elected officials directly and hear about the policies they’re voting on that affect your community,

  • Read tips on how to get involved.
    

Karen Bass became the first Los Angeles mayor to serve on the influential governing board for the region’s lead homelessness agency when she appointed herself to it three years ago.

Since joining, the mayor has skipped more than half of the meetings held by the L.A. Homeless Services Authority Commission, according to an LAist analysis of public records.

LAist reviewed three years of meeting records and found:

• Bass missed 13 of 21 LAHSA Commission meetings held between mid-August 2025 and now.
• Since Bass named herself to the board in late 2023, she’s been absent for 25 of 47 meetings.
• That's well more than enough to trigger potential removal under the agency's bylaws.

The Mayor’s Office told LAist that, regardless of Bass' attendance record, she has kept up to date on what LAHSA — which is responsible for managing the region’s homelessness response — has been doing.

But the optics could be a problem, especially as Bass fights for reelection in November and as LAHSA, which has been under intense scrutiny, fights for its survival in and out of court.

LAHSA Commissioner Justin Szlasa told LAist that attendance at the commission meetings, which require a majority of commissioners for a quorum, is important, whether it’s the mayor or any other appointee.

“That’s why we have a commission,” he said. “It's not just about achieving a quorum. It’s about people who are focused on considering the issue, tracking the things as they unfold and being part of that deliberative process.”

“If people don’t show up, they can’t do that,” Szlasa said.

Wendy Greuel, the former L.A. city controller and a member of the commission, said Bass’ attendance record hasn’t been a problem.

“There’s never been a mayor that has understood more the issue of homelessness and been as engaged as Mayor Bass,” said Greuel, who was reappointed to the commission by Bass after being named a decade ago by former L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti.

“Her voice, whether in a commission meeting or outside of the commission meeting, has been important and greater than any mayor in my history,” she told LAist.

Why the LAHSA Commission matters

The members of the LAHSA Commission make policy and funding decisions for the agency, including approving its nearly $500 million budget and its contracts with local shelters and nonprofit service providers. LAHSA directs 86% of its funding to those providers, and commissioners are responsible for overseeing how hundreds of millions of public dollars are spent.

Representation on the commission is split evenly between city and county. L.A.’s mayor chooses half the commission’s voting members. Each of the five county supervisors choose one appointee.

Commissioners are unpaid volunteers, most of whom have full-time jobs and other responsibilities.

According to the bylaws, commissioners who are absent four times within a year may be subject to removal. The elected official who appointed them “shall be notified that an appointment needs to be made to fill a vacancy.”

But LAHSA said it did not notify Bass’ office about her own pattern of absences, or any other commissioner. The agency has interpreted the bylaws to give it discretion on whether or not to make those notifications.

“The Commission and its committees have consistently achieved a quorum and fulfilled their responsibilities, so LAHSA has not notified the City or the County regarding commissioner attendance,” said Ahmad Chapman, LAHSA’s communications director, in a statement.

At least six of 10 members must be present to open the public meeting or for the group to vote on anything.

A spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office told LAist that Bass’ four other appointees “alerted her when her attendance was needed,” and kept her informed about its activities.

“It is unprecedented for a mayor to sit on the Board of LAHSA,” Ilanna Morales said in a statement. “She was on the Commission to make key decisions and participate in key discussions that impacted the City.”

A LAHSA Commission meeting on April 25, 2025. Mayor Karen Bass was not in attendance.

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LAist

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How LAist checked attendance

LAist reviewed three years of meeting records and found that other commissioners had four or more absences over a single 12-month period.

Those records show that one of Bass' appointees, Tanisha Saunders, missed 12 of 21 commission meetings between Aug. 15, 2025, and Aug. 15, 2026. Since Bass appointed Saunders in May 2023, Saunders has been absent from 18 of 53 LAHSA Commission meetings, with an uptick in absences this year, according to an LAist analysis of meeting records.

Saunders is a former foster youth and a former child development advocate who manages a permanent supportive housing site for an affordable housing nonprofit in Venice, according to her biography on LAHSA’s website. She did not immediately respond to LAist’s interview requests, or questions about her attendance record sent by email.

Greuel told LAist that Saunders is an important voice on the board.

“I value the perspective Commissioner Saunders brings to the Commission, including being a person with lived experience and a full-time job who understands firsthand the systems and communities affected by our decisions,” Greuel told LAist.

“If she has a conflict due to her work schedule or other obligations, she routinely confirms proactively whether the meeting has a quorum so her absence will not impact the commission's work," Greuel continued.

Bass reappointed Saunders to the commission in May to serve through 2029. 

Last month, county Supervisor Holly Mitchell replaced her appointee Yasmine-Imani McMorrin on the commission. McMorrin, a Culver City Council member, had missed half of the 22 meetings held over the previous year. It is unclear whether that’s the reason she was replaced.

Neither Mitchell nor McMorrin responded to requests for comment.

Szlasa, an entrepreneur and homelessness policy advocate, said a seat on the commission is more than a part-time job. He has argued the agency should offer an optional financial stipend to the commissioners.

“This is a lot of time, a lot of commitment,” Szlasa told LAist. “It’s something valuable that’s happening and the commissioners should receive a stipend, if they opt for it, for the meetings they attend.”

In addition to the 21 LAHSA Commission meetings over the past year, commissioners are also assigned to working committees focused on specific subject areas. Each of those groups has its own regular meetings.

For example, Saunders serves on the audit committee, which directs internal audit reviews of LAHSA’s spending, policies and performance. Saunders missed just one of 13 audit committee meetings during her time, according to public records.

Bass served on the same audit committee for several months, until January. She did not attend a single meeting, recording five straight absences before being replaced by another commissioner.

Why another elected official left the LAHSA board

While Bass was the first L.A. mayor to appoint herself to the LAHSA Commission, she was not the first or only elected official to do so.

County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath appointed herself to the commission nearly a year earlier. Horvath told LAist she originally appointed herself to the board to try to reform LAHSA, encouraging her colleagues to do the same.

“Broken systems can’t be reformed from the sidelines,” Horvath said.

After serving two years, Horvath said she determined LAHSA could not make necessary changes. She last attended a meeting on Nov. 15, 2024, and said her commission experience "helped drive the County’s decision to fundamentally change the homeless services system."

Within months of Horvath resigning from the commission, the Board of Supervisors voted to divert more than $300 million in annual funding from LAHSA. By then, a string of reviews found LAHSA had failed to properly manage the tax dollars she and other regional leaders have entrusted to it.

Horvath told LAist she worked to stop "millions of County dollars from flowing through LAHSA when it failed to deliver the accountability and results taxpayers deserve.”

LAHSA's future remains deeply uncertain.

In June, the Trump administration suspended LAHSA from federal grant activity, citing financial mismanagement. LAHSA sued to overturn the suspension, and a judge paused it. A trial is now set for April 2027.

A tent in downtown Los Angeles on June 11, 2026. Mayor Bass has said eliminating street homelessness is a top priority.

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How homelessness factors into the race for mayor

Bass is running for reelection in November and one of her key promises is to make progress on homelessness. After celebrating two years of decreases in the annual homeless count, this year's annual count found street homelessness rose 8% in the city of L.A. That increase has weakened Bass’ pitch to voters.

Bass says she’s still working to end street homelessness. She's promising a shift away from pricey motel rooms to cheaper types of shelter and services for unhoused Angelenos, including on city-owned land.

“We actually need to transform the entire system,” Bass said last week at a mayoral debate hosted by the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association. “The city needs to be in control.”

“Right now, one of the fundamental dysfunctional features of the system is it's governed by the city, it's governed by the county, and it's governed by LAHSA,” Bass continued.

As of this year, LAHSA is funded primarily by the city of L.A., which now provides 73% of the regional homelessness agency’s budget. City officials have been slowly considering L.A.’s next steps for managing the city’s approach to homelessness, including whether LAHSA will remain involved.

Bass made absenteeism an issue in mayoral debate

During last week's debate, Bass brought up meeting absenteeism, accusing Councilmember Nithya Raman, her rival on the November ballot, of skipping Los Angeles City Council meetings specifically — and missing “thousands of votes.”

Raman said some of her absences were because she was attending other board meetings she served on as a city representative. Raman noted that Bass had appointed her to serve on some of those boards.

“Other council members have outside appointments, too,” Bass fired back. “You are not the only one. But they find their way to work.”

Bass serves on various governing boards, including chairing the board of directors for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. She has faced some criticism for absences on the Metro board.

Metro has a reserved board seat for L.A.’s mayor, making that role a requirement of Bass’ full-time job — unlike the LAHSA Commission.

Bass’ self-appointed three-year term on the Commission expired June 30. LAHSA and a spokesperson for Bass’ office said she is still a member, but did not confirm whether she had formally reappointed herself.

The next LAHSA Commission meeting is scheduled for Friday.

How to attend

When: Friday, Aug. 28 at 9 a.m.

Where: LAHSA, 637 Wilshire Blvd., 1st Floor commission room, Los Angeles

How to watch remote: Live stream link

By the time Democrat Xavier Becerra left Washington, D.C., more Americans than ever had health insurance, owing partly to his work over the years to pass, defend and expand the Affordable Care Act.

It's an achievement the former congressman and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services often touts as he campaigns for California governor against Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News commentator.

But should Becerra cruise to victory in November, as polling suggests, he will face what may be the steepest decline in health insurance coverage in a generation, one that will land especially hard in his home state.

Federal cuts mean more people uninsured

By 2030, the number of uninsured Californians under 65 is expected to nearly double from 2.4 million to 4.6 million as recently enacted state and federal cuts to Medicaid and ACA marketplaces begin to roll back historic gains in health coverage, according to a May analysis by the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center. The anticipated rise in the uninsured population could have broad implications for hospital systems, insurers and the economy.

In February, Miranda Dietz, the labor center's healthcare program director, told legislators the changes could end up costing California about 200,000 jobs, mostly in the healthcare industry.

Hospital executives have begun reporting more unpaid medical bills, and experts warn health plans will raise premiums further as they're left with enrollees who are, on average, sicker and more expensive to cover.

"It's triage," said Jessica Altman, executive director of Covered California, the nation's largest state-run health insurance marketplace. "That's what the next governor is walking into."

California achieved one of the most dramatic drops in its uninsured population in the nation, largely credited to the state's robust adoption of the ACA. If tapped to lead the wealthy, progressive state, Becerra would wrestle with how uninsured Californians get care and who pays as the Trump administration shrinks a federal safety net he once oversaw.

Becerra has some experience pushing back against Washington, D.C. As California attorney general, he successfully defended many provisions of the Affordable Care Act, including access to birth control.

Becerra said he would issue an executive order to keep those affected by federal cuts insured. But he has not detailed how the state would backfill as much as $30 billion in federal funding California stands to lose annually.

At a policy forum hosted by Politico this month, Becerra promised Californians would not lose health coverage despite federal cutbacks, saying he would push the industry to eliminate waste from "attorneys, accountants, pencil pushers" that cost consumers billions.

"I'm going to ask them to help me extract some of that waste and put it into healthcare, which helps us cover the cost of keeping Californians insured," he said.

His opponent, Hilton, is trying to appeal to voters opposed to President Donald Trump, despite receiving the president's endorsement, and has stumped on cutting off coverage for Californians without legal status, which is paid for with state funds. Hilton has vowed to use those savings to issue state income tax breaks, calling it an immediate antidote to high costs.

Steve Hilton, the Republican candidate for governor of California, campaigns at a Sheraton hotel on July 27 in Pomona.

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"We all understand that the healthcare system is a mess and needs major reform," Hilton said in an interview. "The quickest thing we can do on healthcare costs is actually to tax people less."

Left behind?

In 2010, Becerra was part of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's leadership team and helped whip up votes to pass the law. He also had a hand in crafting it, though his attempt to include a government-backed coverage option failed.

A decade later, when lawmakers considered him for the nation's top healthcare job, Becerra said his primary mission would be to carry out President Biden's vision to expand access and cut costs under the Affordable Care Act.

Before the ACA, some 50 million Americans — roughly 1 in 6 — were uninsured. Within a few years of the law's passage in 2010, its expansion of Medicaid eligibility and financial aid to lower-income marketplace enrollees helped slash the U.S. uninsured rate by nearly half.

Millions more gained coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic after Becerra implemented a freeze on Medicaid disenrollment and administered generous but temporary tax credits that put the cost of Obamacare plans within reach for more people.

As Biden's health secretary, Becerra launched aggressive public awareness campaigns, loosened enrollment rules and distributed hundreds of millions in grants to pay consumer assistants, also known as healthcare navigators, to help enrollees wade through paperwork.

"One of the common things we would hear from him as a leader was, 'Who's being left behind?'" said Benjamin Sommers, a Harvard health policy professor who was a deputy assistant secretary under Becerra.

Under Biden and Becerra, the percentage of people with health insurance reached a historic high of 92%, or 310 million Americans having health coverage in 2024.

Republican response

But conservatives said those policies inflated enrollment by attracting fraudulent and wasteful coverage. In response, the second Trump administration has tightened enrollment windows and toughened income reporting.

"It's simple and easy to say, well, the numbers are up so the program must be working," said Edmund Haislmaier, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "My argument would be that's the wrong metric."

Last summer, the GOP-led Congress passed Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Republicans argued preserves Medicaid for those who need it most while rooting out fraud and waste. Altogether, the law is expected to cut Medicaid spending by $900 billion-plus over a decade.

Congress also allowed enhanced premium tax credits for Obamacare plans to expire last year, spiking premium payments for middle-income Americans and driving down enrollment by nearly 3 million this year.

"We are now witnessing almost a wholesale reversal of pretty much all those policies" that helped cover millions more Americans, said Sabrina Corlette, co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University.

For Eric Maciel, the $800 cost of a Covered California plan is too much. To avoid injury, the 28-year-old stays home more and rarely plays pickup soccer at the park — the other players, he added, can get pretty rough.

"That's another car note," Maciel said. "I'd be left with nothing."

Health economists say Maciel is the type of customer insurers need to stabilize their risk pools: young, healthy and less costly.

Hilton criticized state leaders for passing a revised provider tax he asserts will send premiums soaring and said he wants to inject more competition into California's health insurance market — but he offered no specific ideas.

Playing defense

Higher-than-expected state costs coupled with federal cuts have prompted California to retreat on healthcare coverage. Federal funds account for one-third of the state's budget and more than 60% of spending by Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program.

Xavier Becerra served in the House of Representatives when the Affordable Care Act passed and as health secretary under President Biden. He's the frontrunner in California's governor's race.

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Gov. Gavin Newsom has frozen enrollment for immigrants without legal status, enacted monthly premiums for some, and plans to only temporarily backfill federal assistance for legal immigrants and refugees.

Newsom and Democratic lawmakers agreed to delay some cuts until July 2027, leaving the next governor to weigh further rollbacks against increased taxes. Becerra, a California native born to Mexican immigrants, opposes what's known as the billionaire tax, on November's ballot. This month, he said he supported legislative efforts to penalize large corporations whose workers rely on Medi-Cal, arguing that taxpayers are subsidizing employers' low wages and paltry benefits.

County governments, which are legally required to provide healthcare to uninsured residents too poor to afford care, are lobbying lawmakers for funding to treat what they describe as a fresh deluge of patients who need free care.

"It's a pretty big cliff if all this stuff goes into effect," said Dietz, the labor center's healthcare program director. And there's a choice whether to make it less bad and maintain coverage for folks."

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

Writer Aida Salazar did not spend endless hours on devices as a teen. She grew up in the 1980s, way before TikTok and Instagram. But she has raised teens, a boy and a girl. She felt she lost them to their screens during the pandemic.

“To the point where they were harming themselves on different levels,” she said.

The antidote to the overconsumption of screens, she and her husband realized, was found when they spent time outdoors near their home in Oakland.

“We went to the redwoods, or we went to the ocean, or we went somewhere else where they were my kids again,” she said.

Salazar, who has received numerous awards for some of her 10 YA books, has drawn on that experience for her latest work, Stream.

It’s written in first person rhyme in the voices of the two main characters, a teen boy named Elio and Celi, a girl. (Both appear in Salazar's previous YA novels).

In this book they’re both eighth graders who live separately in Oakland. After their parents realize the extent of their tech dependency, they take the drastic action to send them to rural Mexico for an IRL shock.

“To detox digitally in a rancho, or a place that has no running water, no electricity, and of course, no internet,” said Salazar.

Out of their digital element

Salazar was born in the Mexican state of Zacatecas and grew up in Maywood, in Southeast L.A. County, before earning a master’s degree in writing from CalArts.

The rural Mexican setting of Stream is partly based on her mother’s hometown in Zacatecas, where she wrote some of the book. The title is inspired by a vibrant stream there that once sustained the community but is now in the shadow of crumbling adobe homes.

The cover for the YA book Stream, writren by Aida Salazar.

The book begins with Elio’s narration that brims with excitement about his last day of school.

The first page of the YA novel, Stream.

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Celi’s narration of that last day is more dream-like.

A page from the YA novel, Stream.

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In Mexico, out of their digital element, some connection blooms which, Salazar said, may be love.

Adults can read the book, she said, but it’s meant for teens to read in order to see how Elio and Celi struggle to balance digital and in-person relationships as well as connection and disconnection to nature and their families.

“I don't want our young people especially, to lose their understanding of their source, of who we are as natural beings connected to land, to ancestors, to legacy,” she said.

She believes nurturing the stream of connections to those things will go a long way towards helping teens rise above the various social and environmental challenges they will face in their adult lives.

A battle over a first-of-its-kind tax on billionaires is heating up in California, with tech moguls pumping millions of dollars into a campaign to defeat it and union leaders who support the measure insisting the state's very wealthiest residents should pay their fair share.

Voters in November will be asked whether to pass the ballot measure, known as Proposition 40, which imposes a one-time 5% tax on the assets of the nearly 250 billionaires in the state. Backers say the new revenue would mostly fund healthcare services.

The tax was envisioned by union leader Dave Regan, who said millions of the state's neediest patients could lose health insurance in the coming years, driven largely by President Trump's 2025 tax and spending bill. Dubbed by the White House the "One Big Beautiful Bill," the law slashes federal funding to California and other states.

"Proposition 40 was developed specifically to backfill those cuts from the One Big Bill that are scheduled to take effect in the next five years. It is a five-year solution to that plan," said Regan, who is the president of the SEIU United Healthcare Workers West.

If passed, the measure would direct 90% of the tax revenue to fund healthcare services and the other 10% to food assistance and public education across California.

"We're not even talking about the top 1%, we're talking about the top 0.0001%, the billionaires: 250 individuals in California, $2.4 trillion worth of wealth, and that's an amount of money equivalent to the annual income of all Californians who are not billionaires, including extraordinarily wealthy people," Regan said.

But the populist fervor fueling supporters of the measure is being met with a growing coalition of resisters, from tech billionaires to other unions and some state Democrats. That includes Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has said the tax would hurt the state's economy, which is powered by profitable tech companies in Silicon Valley that have spawned many of the billionaires who would be taxed under the measure.

Opponents of the tax argue it offers a short-term fix to a long-term problem and could ultimately backfire.

"I'm not against taxes. But this is not the right tool. What we need to develop is something that is stable and consistent," said René Bravo, president of the California Medical Association, in an interview with NPR. "Human beings need and deserve health care that is financed in such a way that you're not increasing the insecurity."

Bravo argues Proposition 40, if passed, would make patients more unstable by providing them with bridge coverage now, but no longer-term solution — making it difficult to plan out medical coverage over many years. Bravo also said he does not trust state lawmakers to spend most of the new revenue on healthcare, speculating that they could direct the money to other pet projects.

"Not accurate, not true," responded union leader Regan. He said voters face a choice between more immediate healthcare funding for Californians or none at all, and that a third way being proposed by some critics is not on the ballot.

Will billionaires leave California if wealth tax passes?

Another major rift between both sides of the fight is whether the first-of-its-kind state wealth tax would drive billionaires out of California.

It's a crucial issue, since California's Chamber of Commerce estimates 1% of the state's residents pay nearly 50% of all personal income taxes.

Few disagree that a mass flight of the ultra-rich would throw California's budget into a tailspin, but the measure has sparked a fierce debate about whether billionaires will actually pack up and leave the state.

French economist Thomas Piketty, who has written extensively about disparities in international wealth, has argued that what's known as "capital flight" is often overstated in debates about wealth taxes. "If one builds a fortune while relying on the country's infrastructure, education, and health systems, there is no reason that one should so readily escape the collective obligations that fund these systems," Piketty wrote last year about a proposed wealth tax in France aimed at the ultra-rich.

Adam Michel, who studies tax policy at the libertarian Cato Institute, believes taxing high income earners will be destructive for the state.

"A wealth tax of this magnitude will be bad for California and for California taxpayers. We should expect not just targeted billionaires to leave, but anyone that expects to be a billionaire or expects to be the target of aggressive taxes like this in the future to leave," he said.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, one of the richest people in the world, agrees.

He has poured $102 million into a group known as Building a Better California, which he co-founded with former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt. The group has also received millions of dollars in funding from venture capitalist John Doerr, crypto executive Chris Larsen and others. Building a Better California's mission is to defeat the effort, in part by supporting a separate ballot measure that would invalidate the wealth tax. Other tech billionaires, including Palantir founder Peter Thiel, who no longer lives in California, have funneled millions of dollars into other groups hoping to topple the measure.

A spokesperson for Building a Better California did not return a request for comment, but Brin told The New York Times: "I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don't want California to end up in the same place."

Brin recently moved to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. Critics of the tax say there will only be more billionaires leaving California if voters pass the measure.

Union leader Regan calls Brin's move political theater. He pointed out that the wealth tax applies to California residents who lived in the state in January of this year, so moving out of state would not allow anyone to dodge the tax, nor would relocating after November, if the ballot measure prevails. Bloomberg estimated the tax could personally cost Brin around $13 billion.

Regan said Brin owes his success in part to government-backed research that helped create Google and insisted that a one-time 5% tax would not be overly burdensome for the tech mogul.

"You are now one of the five wealthiest people in the world in the state that made you rich, enormously rich," said Regan as if speaking directly to Brin, noting that California "needs to stabilize its healthcare system."

Some polls show that Californians are nearly evenly split on the tax.
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