The Brief

It’s hard for the eye to settle on any one item on a visit to the Huntington Library, so vast are its treasures. In one display case, you have the Ellesmere Chaucer, which dates from the 15th century, one of the most important copies of The Canterbury Tales in existence. In another, you have the Gutenberg Bible, which started a printing revolution and changed the world.

With much discussion these days about national documents and their whereabouts generally, we wanted to find out what it takes to preserve these pieces of history.

Thomas Gainsborough's The Blue Boy (ca. 1770) installation view in the Thornton Portrait Gallery at The Huntington; Kehinde Wiley's A Portrait of a Young Gentleman (2021) installation view in the Thornton Portrait Gallery at The Huntington

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Joshua White/The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

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Kristi Westberg is the senior book and paper conservator at The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. For the past eight years, she and a team of experts have been in charge of handling the library's oldest and most precious documents.

Huntington also houses modern treasures, like the papers of science-fiction pioneer Octavia Butler. It also has ancient work.

"We have the oldest printed book on exhibition at the Huntington and that was printed in 1085," Westberg told LAist's news program AirTalk, which airs on 89.3 FM. The book about 40 feet long.

What goes into taking care of them? How do you display them responsibly? And, crucially, when handling, gloves or no gloves?

First, it's important to distinguish the material you're working with.

Parchment or paper?

Yemenis attend a historical Quranic manuscripts fair at Al-Kabir Mosque on March 20, 2023 in Sanaa'a, Yemen. The five-day fair showcases 39 handwritten copies of the Quran manuscripts written on paper and 26 manuscripts written on parchment, all date back to different periods in Islamic history.

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Mohammed Hamoud

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Getty Images

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"Parchment is actually made from animal skin," says Westberg. It's removed from the animal, along the flesh and hair, then stretched like a drum and pulled very thin. Paper, on the other hand, can be made from a variety of materials. Really nice paper, Westberg said, is made from cotton rag. This used to be the main form of paper produced. But that changed with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, when people started to make shortcuts.

That's when paper started being made with wood pulp, which is very acidic and less durable but significantly cheaper to produce. There's a misconception, Westberg says, around paper. A lot of people think older books present the biggest challenges when it comes to conservation, but it's actually newer books. Have you ever left your newspaper out in the sun and seen the paper turn yellow?

"That happens with more modern papers," Westberg said. Believe it or not, 14th- and 15th-century books are usually in much better shape.

Proper storage is key

"Books and library materials kind of like the same environment that humans like," says Westberg. If you're like most people, that means an indoor space that is not too hot, not too cold, and not too humid. Westberg and her team at The Huntington Library keep the documents stored at a temperature no higher than 72 degrees and maintain 30-50% humidity.

You may also notice the dim lighting when you visit their exhibition. Light damage, says Westberg, is cumulative and irreversible. "We can repair a lot of things but we can't bring the ink back." To prevent light damage, items are rotated every 3-6 months, pages are turned frequently and of course, the mood is set to dim.

One of the most common questions Westberg fields is about gloves — Should you wear them to protect documents from the oil on your hands? It depends, she says. For most instances, gloves aren't necessary and can actually lead to more damage. When handling an extra-fragile document, Westberg says it's important to be able to feel it. "You might not realize how fragile it is."

A photo of the Ellesmere Chaucer, a famous early 15th century manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" on display at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, CA.

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Courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

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With gloves on, one would love that sensation to know what you're handling. What she generally recommends is clean, dry hands. "No lotion, no sanitizer," she adds. Photographs can be an exception as they can be more reactive to the oils on our hands. In those instances, wearing gloves is best.

Why is preservation so important?

Preservation of culture, protection of rights, to promote learning and knowledge — there are a lot of reasons to preserve historical documents. We have repositories all around the world, each with their own special records and slice of history. They also have their own special challenges when it comes to preservation. Westberg says it takes "informed and measured decisions" to keep these materials alive, and we may be better off for it. Every day, Westberg and her team watch scholars and historians come and go from the library, which is actively trying to digitize certain documents so more scholars around the world can access them.

Westberg was planning to go into graphic design, but while working a job at a special collections library, it was the conservators who caught her eye. She asked them what they were up to, they explained their job, and that was it. "I was hooked. I was sold."

Listen to the conversation

California voters will soon be asked whether they want to keep taxing the incomes of the rich.

And they’ll be asked whether to start taxing the accumulated wealth of the even richer.

Wait, there’s more. They’ll also get to weigh in on whether we should ban wealth taxes altogether, subject the money raised by future taxes to a state spending cap and make it harder for voters to pass certain local taxes.

That doesn’t include any of the other propositions on the November ballot that are likely to affect the state budget. Nor does it include the roughly 300 tax and bond measures that will be popping up in local elections across the state.

And you thought tax season only came in April.

With 14 measures in total, the 2026 California ballot is a busy one. Voters haven’t been presented with this many choices in a decade. It’s an especially active year for tax-related measures — those that hike taxes, cut them, introduce new ones, jettison old ones or change the rules by which taxes are approved and enacted.

Five of those are on the ballot this time around, the most since 1994.

Altogether they have the potential to reshape the state’s finances, beef up or starve some of our largest public spending programs, change the rules around taxation and — if opponents of the proposed wealth tax are to be believed — trigger a Randian exodus of the state’s wellest-to-do.

The 'black hole' on the ballot

Though five tax measures are on the ballot, voters are really just seeing three big questions.

The first: Should California be the first state in the nation to introduce a wealth tax?

That question is “the black hole into which all political energy is going right now,” said Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, a group that advocates for low taxes.

Three measures — Propositions 40, 41 and 42 — provide opposing answers.

Prop. 40 would slap every Californian with a net worth of at least $1 billion (all approximately 200 of them) with a one-time 5% tax on their wealth, excluding real estate and retirement accounts.

This isn’t an income tax, which skims off a share of a person’s earnings, but a tax on the assessed, unrealized value of investments. Think of this like the property tax that homeowners pay on their houses, except it applies to stocks, bonds, business shares, Bugattis and the occasional machine gun collection.

A sign displayed at the Billionaire Tax Now booth at the 2026 California Democratic Party State Convention in San Francisco on Feb. 21, 2026.

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Jeff Chiu

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AP Photo

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The Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates that the measure has the potential to raise tens of billions of dollars. Almost all of it would be set aside for the state’s public health insurance programs, which are bracing for dramatic federal cuts.

That’s assuming the measure passes and survives the blizzard of inevitable legal challenges. Though a number of countries have introduced wealth taxes at either the national or regional level, California’s would be the first in the United States.

No surprise, many of the state’s billionaires are pushing back hard. They’re doing that in the usual way, with literally hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign spending. But they’re also doing it with two additional measures on the ballot itself. Prop. 41 would, among other things, ban the state from collecting taxes that circumvent a 1970s state spending limit, which Prop. 40 is written to do.

Prop. 42 would ban new taxes on financial assets, private businesses and most other forms of wealth outright — an explicit reversal of Prop. 40.

If both the wealth tax and either of the countermeasures are approved by the voters, the one with the higher vote tally becomes law. That’s why the wealth tax could go down in defeat even if a majority of voters support it.

But voters shouldn’t think of Props. 41 and 42 as mere “no” votes on Prop. 40, said Kayla Kitson, a tax policy analyst at the California Budget & Policy Center, a left-leaning think tank. Prop. 41 would also require the state’s auditor to conduct a “pre-election” analysis of any program set to be funded by a future tax measure and then make recommendations on how to cut costs by 10%.

Beyond banning future wealth taxes, Prop. 42 would also prevent future taxes from applying retroactively before a tax is approved. That could remove the state’s ability to keep people or businesses from avoiding a tax they know is coming, said Kitson.

Two more tax questions

The other two tax measures have nothing to do with the wealth tax. One would make permanent a boosted income tax rate for higher earners. The other would make it harder for local governments to raise certain taxes in the future.

The high-earner tax is the third, and possibly final, installment in a decade-long electoral trilogy.

First proposed by former Gov. Jerry Brown as a temporary solution to fund education in the fiscal hangover of the Great Recession, the measure sticks a higher tax bracket on the state’s top 2% of earners. Re-authorized by voters in 2016, the tax has https://lao.ca.gov/ballot/2025/250421.pdfgenerated between $5 billion and $16 billion annually. Most of that money has gone to schools.

The tax expires in 2030, which is why the California Teachers Association, the state’s largest K-12 public school educators’ union, was eager to put its permanent renewal on the ballot this year. If it fails, the union will have two more chances.

Hence, Proposition 3, which would make the boosted tax rates for individually earned income above $360,000 per year a perpetual part of the state’s tax code.

Proposition 43’s backstory also goes back nearly a decade.

The measure would hike the share of votes needed to pass certain local taxes. Specifically, these are taxes that raise money for a specific program or purpose and that are placed on the ballot by citizen signature-gathering efforts, as opposed to local elected officials. If Prop. 43 passes, this very particular type of tax would need the support of at least two-thirds of local voters.

Business groups and anti-tax advocates have been wanting to put some version of Prop. 43 on the ballot since 2017 when the state Supreme Court ruled that so-called citizen-initiated special taxes only need a simple majority of the vote to pass. The anti-tax advocates got close two years ago, but were stymied by another court ruling. This year, the measure finally made it, but only after negotiations with the Democrats in the Legislature pared it down, applying the rule to future taxes only.

California tax measures tend to fail

This all makes for a tremendously confusing voting experience for most Californians.

That’s probably bad news for the supporters of these measures, since uncertain voters tend to err on the side of “no,” said Mark Baldassare, survey director at the Public Policy Institute of California.

“When voters aren’t sure how to proceed, staying with the status quo and letting someone else decide at a later date is a safe bet,” he said.

That may partly explain why tax measures, which are inherently complicated and tend to come with unpredictable consequences, fare especially poorly on the ballot. Since 2000, a solid majority (57%) of non-tax ballot measures have passed compared to a mere third of tax propositions.

The sheer number of open questions surrounding the proposed wealth tax (Is it constitutional? Can the state effectively implement it? Will all the billionaires flee to Florida?) puts it on shakier footing with an electorate that tends to reject uncertainty, said Baldassare. A narrow majority of 52% percent of likely voters said they supported the measure in a recent PPIC poll.

The tax on high earners in Prop. 3, may face better odds because it makes permanent an existing tax rather than introducing a new one. In the same poll, 58% of likely voters indicated that they would support the measure.

“When people see the words ‘renew’ or ‘extend’ it gives them a sense that this is the status quo, we’re not being asked to make a change here,” he said.

But Prop. 3’s backers shouldn’t take too much comfort in that. Support for propositions tend to decline as Election Day approaches. The sheer number of tax measures on offer could also inflict voters with “tax fatigue” leading them to vote “no” across the board, said Baldassare.

Then there’s the general political vibe.

Earlier this year, PPIC asked a sample of Californians whether they preferred lower taxes and fewer services or higher taxes and more services.

Fifty-five percent said they’d prefer the lower tax bill.

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

Food assistance to pay for groceries is still available to many low-income California families who receive summer food assistance for their kids.

Nearly $106 million of the federally funded SUN Bucks benefits are still unspent — but eligible families have just a few weeks left to tap the money, according to the California Department of Social Services. The benefits are only available to households that have already gotten the SUN Bucks in the mail this summer.

Families must spend the funds within 122 days of receiving them, or they expire and return to the federal government.

The program works like this: Every summer, California sends eligible low-income families electronic benefits (EBT) cards preloaded with $120 in food benefits per child. The state provides two meals a day to all public K-12 students, and the cards are meant to help families afford groceries for their kids throughout the summer when school is out.

Families receiving SUN Bucks cards have kids who are eligible for a free or reduced school lunch or who are enrolled in other assistance programs such as Medi-Cal or CalFresh. This year the state automatically mailed cards to the families of 3.8 million children.

Though the state tries to remind families about the benefits through text messages and other nudges, households sometimes still leave a lot of money on the table. Last year, nearly a quarter of the summer food benefits — $118 million — went unspent, according to records from the Department of Social Services obtained by New York-based public policy consultant David Rubel and shared with CalMatters. And nearly a fifth of cards mailed out last year were never activated by the recipients.

Many of the cards this year haven’t expired yet because California mailed SUN Bucks to families in different batches throughout the summer. If a family got a card in mid-June, they may only have a couple of weeks left to use the benefits. The last cards were mailed out in late July and expire in mid-November.

If a family receives both SUN Bucks and the traditional CalFresh food assistance program, Social Services spokesperson Jason Montiel says the state recommends they use the SUN Bucks first because they expire soon.

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

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Want more information on CD9 candidates? Read our CD9 Voter Guide and watch our break down of each candidate (in English and Spanish) on Instagram.

The differences between the two candidates for L.A. City Council District 9 became crystal clear for South L.A. residents during an energetic community forum in South Central on Saturday. 

Attendees, who braved the extreme heat, told The LA Local they were happy to hear candidates Jose Ugarte and Estuardo Mazariegos discuss transportation, housing and making the community safer. 

“It was exciting,” said Sandy Ramos, a local attending her first ever forum. Ramos said Mazariegos focused on building housing and community aid, while Ugarte was oriented toward neighborhood safety and cleanups.

Gio Garcia, chair of the local Voices Neighborhood Council, said Ugarte’s platform is built around leveraging existing systems, while Mazariegos wants to make deeper changes to those systems. 

Garcia helped organize the forum along with the rest of the collection of community groups called the CD9 Coalition. LA Local reporter LaMonica Peters and youth journalist Charli Padilla moderated the CD9 candidate forum. Mayor Karen Bass and her challenger, District 4 Councilmember Nithya Raman, also spoke during the event. 

Whoever of the two candidates comes out on top after polls close on Nov. 3 will replace departing Councilmember Curren Price, Ugarte’s old boss, who is terming out after 12 years representing the district stretching from downtown L.A. through South Central.

Ugarte and Mazariegos are both Latino immigrants who each said they came to the US as undocumented children. Either would be the first non-Black councilmember for District 9 since 1963. 

The two candidates reflect a larger demographic shift in the district, which historically was the center of Black political power in L.A., but today is nearly 80% Latino. Both candidates have stressed the importance of Black-brown solidarity during their campaigns. 

Residents of the district have pushed for the city to do more to make a safer community, address homelessness and deliver basic services from street repairs to trash pickup. At times, community members have taken the issues into their own hands with neighborhood patrols and street cleanups. 

Ugarte, a former aide to Price, wants to ban RVs in neighborhoods, build a rail line down Slauson and hire more police officers. Community organizer Mazariegos wants to build more housing, hire young people to clean streets and bring social workers into some traditional police domains.

Locals have also worried if the Olympics in two years will actually bring dollars to local businesses and workers, or if the international attention will gloss over the neighborhood while driving more intense policing. The district is home to L.A.’s cornerstone Olympic venues, including the Crypto.com Arena, Exposition Park and L.A. Memorial Coliseum. 

County election officials have already begun mailing ballots out to voters, and voting will continue until Nov. 3. Voters can mail their ballots, drop them in dropboxes, or vote in person once vote centers open on Oct. 24.

L.A. County residents need to register to vote by Oct. 19 in order to cast a ballot for this election. 

Mazariegos wants to bring social workers into policing, Ugarte wants more community police officers

Jose Ugarte, right, candidate for LA City Council District 9, speaks during the candidate forum that also featured his opponent, Estuardo Mazariegos, that took place at A Place Called Home on Oct. 3, 2026.

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J.W. Hendricks

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The LA Local

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Mazariegos said the district is over-policed, and that too much funding goes to paying for officers instead of other services. As an alternative, the candidate proposed bringing social workers into situations historically in the domain of police.

“We need to ensure that when there is a mental health crisis, it’s a social worker showing up. When we have a family crisis, it’s a social worker showing up,” Mazariegos said.

Ugarte, by contrast, said the city doesn’t have enough officers and that police response times have grown too long. He wants more women officers and more officers with college degrees, more officers on foot, horseback and bicycles and a greater focus on community policing.

“I want an officer to just walk by and patrol to make sure that our community feels safe and secure,” Ugarte said. 

Ugarte would ban RVs, Mazariegos would audit homelessness spending

Jose Ugarte, right, a candidate for LA City Council District 9, speaks during the candidate forum that also featured his opponent, Estuardo Mazariegos, that took place at A Place Called Home on Oct. 3, 2026.

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J.W. Hendricks

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The LA Local

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Ugarte wants to ban RVs, campers and trailers from residential neighborhoods.

The candidate said he wants unhoused people to get mental health, detox and job training resources before the city provides housing. Many California homelessness service providers currently use a “housing first” approach, based on the logic that services are less effective if a person doesn’t have housing. 

“The last seven years haven’t worked, so I’m taking a different approach,” Ugarte said.

Mazariegos countered that homelessness in L.A. has increased because public dollars are being misused.

“The first step is holding accountability at the top by auditing and making sure that every homeless service, every dollar is being spent the right way,” Mazariegos said. “Enough of the corruption.”

Mazariegos said he wants to solve homelessness by increasing wages and lowering rents in order to stop people from losing their homes. 

Mazariegos wants to hire locals for cleanups, Ugarte wants to start business improvement districts

Estuardo Mazariegos, left, speaks during a candidate forum that also featured his opponent, Jose Ugarte, right, that took place at A Place Called Home on Oct. 3, 2026.

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J.W. Hendricks

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The LA Local

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Mazariegos wants to increase the city’s budget for services like cleanups and to hire young locals to do the community cleanups around the clock, seven days a week.

“We could feed two birds with one hand,” Mazariegos said. He swiped at Ugarte for the lack of local services while Ugarte was working under Price.

Ugarte agreed that South Central hasn’t been getting the services it needs due to past funding cuts. 

He wants city services to be fully funded, and to bolster city efforts with with business improvement districts, a type of self-funded organization that pays for services like maintenance and security with taxes on property owners.

“You see the trash everywhere,” Ugarte said. He said with the Olympics coming, cleanup crews should be working all the way down Figueroa Street and Vermont Avenue to Slauson Avenue.

Ugarte wants to  keep pushing developers for local hiring, Mazariegos wants to tap into major event revenue

Ugarte touted his work in Price’s office to get developers to commit to local hiring when they build major projects. He referenced his plan to bar RVs from residential neighborhoods, saying that the L.A. Chamber of Commerce told him all they want is clean and safe areas to do business.

“I have a plan to clean up the district,” Ugarte said. “If the government and politicians have not done that for small business, we failed it.”

Mazariegos said he wants to make it easier for local small businesses to afford brick-and-mortar spaces.

He said he wants to tap into the flow of money into the district’s entertainment venues by putting a surcharge on tickets to events — like Laker games, concerts and the Olympics — then divert that money back into local businesses and parks.

“We need to make sure that money isn’t being extracted and that it’s coming back to the neighborhood,” he said. 

You can read more about both candidates in The LA Local’s voter guide for District 9.

Gov. Gavin Newsom this week vetoed a bill that would’ve stopped the Department of Motor Vehicles’ practice of keeping excess proceeds from the sales of towed cars.

The DMV’s handling of the money came under scrutiny following a CalMatters investigation that showed the agency had kept millions of dollars in proceeds without notifying the cars’ owners.

People who can’t afford the fines and fees after their cars get towed sometimes leave their vehicles at the storage yards, which can sell cars to recoup the costs through what’s known as a lien sale. The DMV can keep the money.

State law does not require the agency to tell people that they could claim their money, and after three years, owners lose their right to the money.

The bill by state Sen. Kelly Seyarto, a Republican from Murrieta, would have forced the DMV to turn those funds over to the state Controller’s Office to be treated like unclaimed property. It was passed by the Legislature.

“I support the author’s goal of helping vehicle owners recover excess proceeds that rightfully belong to them,” Newsom wrote in his veto statement. “However, this bill divides responsibility between two state agencies without establishing a clear process.”

The governor said the bill would force new costs without clearly getting more funds into the hands of car owners. He noted that the DMV has now created a tool to make it easier for car owners to find out if they’re owed money. The agency’s tool mimics one created by CalMatters.

As originally written, Seyarto’s bill would’ve required the department to notify owners within 14 days of receiving the surplus, but that provision was removed as the bill was amended in the legislative process.

Most lien sales don’t cover the towing and storage fees. However, CalMatters found that the DMV collected more than $8 million from nearly 5,300 cars sold at auction between 2016 through the fall of 2024.