The Brief

The state of California is launching an investigation stemming from the Eaton Fire to determine whether race, age or disability discrimination were factors during the emergency response in the historically Black community of west Altadena.

“We'll be looking at whether the systems and structures at play contributed to a delay in the County’s evacuation notice and possible disparities in emergency response… , ” state Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement Thursday.

The investigation follows reporting by the Los Angeles Times that found west Altadena received late evacuation alerts when compared to east Altadena. Eighteen of the 19 people who died in the fire lived in west Altadena, and nearly half of all black households in Altadena were lost, according to a fire survivors group.

The fire burned more than 14,000 acres and destroyed more than 6,000 structures.

The investigation is “a trailblazing move for civil rights and environmental justice,” the group Altadena for Accountability said in a statement.

Bonta said in the statement that residents in the community reported consistently — and the county-commissioned McChrystal Group After-Action Report confirmed — that west Altadena did not receive any emergency evacuation orders until at least nine hours after the Eaton Fire ignited.

Fire survivors welcomed the investigation.

“Losing my home and seeing my parents lose theirs was devastating,” said fire survivor Gina Clayton-Johnson. “I’m heartened today knowing that we have a real pathway to answers and accountability for what went wrong. This is a big day for all fire survivors today and victims of climate change disasters in the future.”

The civil rights investigation is expected to assess Los Angeles County’s emergency response through a disparate impact analysis — meaning it does not have to find discriminatory intent in order to prove violations of civil rights protections occurred.

“There is a long history of marginalized communities receiving less support during times of crisis," said fire survivor Shimica Gaskins. “This may be the most consequential act taken by any official in California for accountability since the fires ravaged Los Angeles.”

County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who represents Altadena, welcomed the inquiry as well.

“The concerns raised by residents of West Altadena deserve to be taken seriously and examined thoroughly,” Barger said in a statement. “If there were gaps, we must acknowledge them. If there were disparities, we must confront them. And if systems need to change, we must change them.”

BagelFest, the regularly sold-out New York bagel festival, is heading to L.A. for the first time. BagelFest West takes over the Audrey Irmas Pavilion in Koreatown on April 12, featuring 15 specially picked bagel bakers from west of the Rockies, with early bird tickets on sale now through March 1.

The organizers say L.A. was the obvious choice for expansion.

"We are seeing a global bagel renaissance, and there are so many skilled, talented artisans bringing this amazing food into their local communities on the West Coast," said BagelUp founder Sam Silverman. "We wanted to lower the barrier to entry and give all of these incredible shops a chance to get some of the spotlight they so deserve."

Silverman pointed to L.A.'s range of styles as a draw — "ranging from a classic New York style to Courage Bagels paving the way of this new wave, to Calic Bagel doing a Korean stuffed bagel. There's just so much diversity."

The local angle

Carlos Perez, owner of Boil and Bake in Costa Mesa, was the first West Coast vendor to exhibit at BagelFest in New York two years ago.

"It was fun to get feedback from New Yorkers, especially 'cause bagels have always been their thing," Perez said. "They would go, 'California?' and then they would try it and go, 'Oh, that's actually pretty good.'"

Now that the festival is coming to his turf, Perez sees it as validation.

"Having them put this project together here, it speaks to the culture that L.A., Southern California has built in bagels," he said. "When they told me, 'Are you interested?' I said, 'What do I sign? Let's go.'"

Silverman says this West Coast iteration is an experiment of sorts.

"This first event is going to be a much tighter, high-touch, curated version of what we've built in New York, with the goal of dipping our toes into the market and then eventually building up to that same scale," Silverman says.

The weekend begins with a Saturday night mixer at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, part of a new partnership with the temple's Jewish Food Lab to "celebrate the bagel's origins as a Jewish food," Silverman said. Sunday features a morning industry session followed by a public session from 1 to 5 p.m., with sampling, demos, panels and competitive awards, including Best of the West, Best Bagel, Best Sandwich, Most Creative, Rising Star and Schmear of the Year.

The awards carry weight. Past BagelFest winners include PopUp Bagels, which took Best Bagel in 2021 and 2022 and is now scaling toward 300 locations nationwide, and Starship Bagel, a two-time James Beard nominee that won Best Bagel in 2023 and 2025. A dedicated kids' area rounds out the afternoon with hands-on activities.

"The response from the bagel shops, the businesses and the media has been frankly overwhelming," Silverman said. "It's such a testament to how actively people on the West Coast want to engage and participate."

Perez sees the scene only heading in one direction.

"I can only see it growing," he says. "For the longest time, all we had were the chains. It's nice that now we have other options."

The full exhibitor lineup will be released in the first week of March. Tickets start at $65 (use code EARLYBAGEL for 18% off through March 1), with $199 all-access passes that include parking. Find them at https://www.bagelfest.com/tickets.

When Conrado Guerrero, a Lincoln Heights resident, walks his dogs or brings his nieces and nephews to the park at night, he has to bring a flashlight.

“There’s a light pole right in front of my house, and it was out for over a year. We had to put an extra light just to make sure that our street was not dark,” Guerrero told LAist on Monday, when crews began the process of installing 91 solar streetlights in Lincoln Heights and Cypress Park using discretionary dollars from the office of L.A. City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez.

A few days later, on Wednesday, the L.A. City Council voted to progress a strategy to increase the city’s streetlight repair and maintenance budget, which essentially has been frozen since the late 1990s.

The strategy involves another council approval and convincing property owners to pay more in a yearly assessment on their property tax bill. If it works, Miguel Sangalang, head of the Bureau of Street Lighting, said the city could double its streetlighting field staff, expedite repairs to aging infrastructure and purchase more solar streetlights to help eliminate the growing scourge of copper wire theft.

The background and Wednesday’s vote

Most of the city’s Bureau of Street Lighting budget comes from an assessment that people who own property illuminated by lights pay on their county property tax bill. That yearly fee, which is around $53 for most single-family homes, has been stuck for three decades because of state law.

A third-party study from 2024 found that the assessments the bureau currently collects equate to 45% of what it needs to “properly maintain and operate the system,” according to a summary of the report from the City Administrative Officer.

The city can’t approve a higher fee without gaining approval from property owners. That’s where Wednesday’s vote comes in.

The L.A. City Council agreed to extend a contract with a consultant who will prepare what’s called an engineer’s report, which will quantify the proposed assessment increases for each parcel and show how the extra revenue will help the Bureau of Street Lighting meet the cost of maintaining service and implementing improvements.

Councilmembers Heather Hutt, Monica Rodriguez and Katy Yaroslavsky were absent for the vote. The rest of the council voted in favor of the item.

Sangalang told local leaders Wednesday that he hopes to return to L.A. City Council in March with the engineer’s report, as well as a more detailed public outreach plan. At that point, L.A. City Council would have to approve the engineer’s report and vote in favor of sending out ballots to the more than half a million property owners that would be impacted.

If all goes according to plan, property owners could receive ballots in April. The city’s timeline has been pushed back in the past, though.

Sangalang said the assessment increase, if approved, would also come with a “three-year auditing mechanism” that would ensure the city is “using every dollar as wisely as possible.”

Sandy Steers, an environmental advocate and head of the nonprofit Friends of Big Bear Valley who helped build a legion of fans for the area’s bald eagles, has died.

The nonprofit announced on social media “with heavy hearts and great sadness” that Steers, the organization’s executive director, died Wednesday evening. The organization did not share Steers’ age, saying she referred to herself as “ageless.”

More than a decade ago, Steers’ fascination with the first recently recorded bald eagle chick hatched in Big Bear Valley led to years of planning and fundraising to install a camera in the eagles’ nest overlooking Big Bear Lake.

The cameras are now part of a popular YouTube livestream run by Friends of Big Bear Valley and followed by tens of thousands of fans around the world who watch eagles Jackie and Shadow each season, particularly when they lay eggs and care for their offspring.

“Something about Jackie and Shadow, or the view, or the whole thing — it just kind of took on a life of its own,” Steers told LAist in 2024.

Friends of Big Bear Valley told LAist Thursday that Steers had an enormous heart, loved nature and wanted to help connect people with it.

“She was fiercely protective of all wildlife in Big Bear Valley and everywhere,” Jenny Voisard, the organization’s media manager, said in an email. “She was an amazing leader. She was a calming, healing and creative soul.”

Tributes for Steers from the Big Bear bald eagle community started pouring in immediately.

“This feels almost like California lost its very own Jane Goodall,” one commenter wrote on Instagram.

“She wrote beautifully and made us feel like we were on a branch next to the nest keeping watch,” another wrote on Facebook.

Sandy Steers spoke at a bald eagle fan party in Big Bear Village in June 2024.

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Makenna Sievertson

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LAist

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Steers’ stories

Steers once told LAist that after bald eagles started staying in the valley year-round, she used to stand for hours in a parking lot with a spotting scope studying the nest each day.

In 2012, she watched Big Bear Valley’s first recently recorded bald eagle chick grow up. Steers has said she believed that chick was Jackie.

Steers also watched as the chick’s parents, a pair of bald eagles known as Ricky and Lucy, lost sets of eggs and eaglets in subsequent years.

“What happened? Why didn’t they hatch?” Steers said previously. “I wanted to know, you know, could I have saved them?”

The famous bald eagle parents, Jackie and Shadow, caring for their eggs in March 2024.

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Friends of Big Bear Valley

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YouTube

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U.S. Forest Service biologists shared Steers’ desire to see up close what was happening in the nest. They started researching how to install cameras in Big Bear, similar to those on Catalina Island nests, Steers said in 2024.

After two years of planning and fundraising, Friends of Big Bear Valley got Forest Service permits and installed the eagle nest camera in October 2015. The nonprofit later launched its YouTube channel.

Steers said few people watched the livestream during the first year, but there was something about the set-up that started to draw others in.

The nonprofit also began telling stories on social media about what was going on in the nest and in Jackie and Shadow’s lives. The stories quickly took off and brought more eyes to the livestream, she said.

“I did it trying to keep people informed and educated about the eagles,” Steers has said. “Because that's what our mission is, educating people about the environment and protecting it that way, by people knowing what's going on.”

Sandy Steers, right, on May 31, 2022 in Fawnskin.

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Myung J. Chun

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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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The community she created

With Steers leading the charge, Friends of Big Bear Valley’s community of bald eagle fans has grown from a few dedicated viewers to more than 1 million followers on Facebook alone.

Thousands of people now regularly tune in to watch Jackie and Shadow, especially when egg-laying season, which typically starts in January, brings new life to their nest.

Steers hosted educational talks about the Big Bear bald eagles, taught classes about the nonprofit’s environmental work and dedicated much of her time to sharing what she loved about nature.

By 2024, Steers had become almost as notable a name in the Big Bear eagle community as Jackie and Shadow.

When LAist attended a Big Bear bald eagle fan party that summer, many people made sure to snap a photo with her, the woman behind the phenomenon, before heading home.

“There is a big hole right now,” Voisard said. “She was dearly loved by her team at FOBBV and by so many that continue to share with us what she meant to them. That has been wonderful to see.”