The Brief

Starbucks baristas at some unionized stores across the country are on strike, including locations in Southern California.

Workers at coffee houses in Long Beach, Santa Clarita and Seal Beach walked off the job Thursday on "Red Cup Day" — an annual event where the coffee chain gives out free reusable cups. They joined baristas at the Downtown Disney Starbucks, who started their strike on Saturday and closed down the store.

The strike is part of a nationwide dispute between the union representing workers at more than 550 of the coffee chain's locations and Starbucks, who have been bargaining a contract for more than a year. Last week, unionized baristas voted to authorize a strike, accusing Starbucks of refusing to budge on their demands for higher pay and better hours.

"The cost of living is only going up. We're trying to go to school, we're trying to pay bills and it's just not enough," said Mai Tran, a striking barista at the Downtown Disney location from the picket line on Tuesday. "We just want to serve coffee…and we can't."

Starbucks said in a statement that it's the unionized workers who are refusing to bargain.

"Our commitment to bargaining hasn’t changed," Starbucks executive Sara Kelly said in a statement last week . "Workers United walked away from the table but if they are ready to come back, we’re ready to talk."

Disagreement over wages

One of the big disputes is pay. Starbucks Workers United is demanding a wage bump for baristas that the company says is unreasonable.

Neither side has made their exact proposals public, but Starbucks claims the union's demands are exorbitant and that its current pay and benefits together come out to an average of $30 an hour for baristas, which it called the "best in retail."

The union says its members need higher take home pay to make ends meet, and that limited hours can mean baristas don't actually have access to Starbucks benefits. Workers also point to a recent tracker published by the labor group the AFL-CIO that found that Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol made 6,666 times the median pay of a Starbucks barista in 2024. Niccol was offered tens of millions to leave his post as Chipotle's top executive for Starbucks last year.

" I am on strike because I have just about had it with Brian Nichols, our CEO. His greed is out of control," said Christi Gomeljak, who added that she has worked at Starbucks for more than five years and makes just above $20 an hour. "It would be so easy for them to give us a contract and to treat us fairly."

The strike is open-ended, so it's unclear when it might end. The union has said more stores could join the strike in the days and weeks to come.

The former Huntington Beach city attorney is disputing allegations that he was fired for cause by the Trump administration after less than a year.

Why it matters

Michael Gates, a popular but controversial figure in Huntington Beach politics, told LAist on Friday he had made it known that he planned to resign prior to a supervisor telling him he no longer had a job.

Gates says he is going back to a job with the beach city.

How we got here

The Orange County Register published a story Friday, including a federal employment document, showing Gates was officially fired for cause. The document is undated and does not specify a reason.

The Department of Justice has not responded to LAist's records request for the documents.

The Register reported that a Department of Justice source said that Gates repeatedly referred to women colleagues by derogatory and demeaning names and had complained about the department employing a pregnant woman.

Gates said the allegations are a "100% fabrication" and that he is considering legal action for defamation.

Gates told LAist that the firing was an effort to reverse the narrative about a “dysfunctional” department.

“It was a very unprofessional environment,” Gates told LAist, adding that morale was low in the Civil Rights Division where he worked. “In terms of leadership, it was very dysfunctional,” he said.

This is a developing story. We'll have more reporting throughout the day.

Los Angeles County jails pared back access to life-saving opioid addiction treatment this fall during one of the system’s deadliest years on record, according to records obtained by CalMatters and interviews with staff.

The policy change came one week after Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit against the county over “inhumane” conditions across its jail system, citing a “shocking rate of deaths,” including overdoses.

In interviews with CalMatters, two Correctional Health Services physicians expressed alarm over the reductions, saying that even the slightest delay in treatment is “wildly dangerous” and can lead to more fatal overdoses.

“Patients are begging me for help,” said a physician who spoke with CalMatters on the condition of anonymity because of fear of professional retaliation. “I’m on edge, waiting to see if someone is going to die.”

The reduction in treatment also comes as the jails hold about 700 more people every day as a result of a tough-on-crime ballot measure voters approved last year. Proposition 36 increased sentences for certain drug and theft crimes, leading to a surge in jail populations and straining county resources, according to a Sept. 10 Correctional Health Services memo to the Board of Supervisors.

Los Angeles County allocates roughly $25 million annually for the treatment program. County supervisors this year gave the program an additional $8 million from opioid lawsuit settlements. That sum ultimately did not increase funding for treatment because the department used the money for a different need, according to a statement from the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.

“The overall (medication-assisted treatment) program funding remained the same” despite the extra money the department received, the statement reads.

In a Sept. 16 memo obtained by CalMatters, Chief Medical Officer Sean Henderson said Correctional Health Services “will be taking a pause on primary care in ordering buprenorphine.” The medication reduces cravings and prevents overdoses.

The new mandate restricts how quickly and broadly Correctional Health Services physicians can prescribe the medication. Priority will be given to people when they first enter the jail system — the largest in California — which houses roughly 13,000 people across nine main facilities. Everyone else who wants medication will be placed on a waitlist.

“It's misleading because we just put people on this list and then they stay on the list,” said a physician.

That means that if someone does not accept treatment upon arrival, they won’t be able to access it during the remainder of their incarceration, even if they change their mind, said both physicians who spoke with CalMatters.

Legal experts and physicians say there could be a myriad of reasons why people deny treatment when they’re first arrested and incarcerated. For example, a person could be unfit to make medical decisions if they are in active withdrawal.

Waitlist grew for opioid treatment

Between 2,350 and 2,650 incarcerated people in Los Angeles County receive medication-assisted treatment on any given day, said the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services in an email to CalMatters.

As of Sept. 15 — just one day before the policy change went into effect — 363 people were on a waiting list for treatment, the department said.

But that number skyrocketed to 835 people as of Oct. 31. The total includes 471 newcomers who have never been on the program; the remainder are people who asked to re-enroll after dropping out. As of October, the average wait time is 25 days, the department said. The department declined to answer how long the person waiting the longest has been in line for treatment.

In a statement to CalMatters, the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services said the policy change was intended “to help maximize the reach of (its) treatment program within the jails by leveraging the existing medical staff in the (Inmate Reception Center) where patient traffic is constant.”

The department maintained that medication-assisted treatment is “still available for all inmates, including those who may have declined treatment when they first arrived.”

“Length of incarceration varies for each inmate, from just a handful of days for some and many months for others; whether an individual will access (medication-assisted treatment) during their incarceration is based on their personal choice, unique case and the length of time they will remain incarcerated," wrote the department.

Melissa Camacho, a senior staff attorney at ACLU of Southern California, said the reduction in treatment is “mind boggling” in a year where there are record-breaking deaths.

“I’d like to know how many people who died from overdose deaths were on the waiting list,” she said. “Having a waitlist doesn’t matter if the waitlist is too long to get treatment.”

More money for L.A. jail health care

Medication-assisted treatment combines counseling with FDA-approved medications, including buprenorphine, methadone and naltrexone to treat certain substance use disorders. A 2021 report from the National Commission on Correctional Health Care found that drug and alcohol overdoses constitute the third leading cause of death in jails, following illness and suicide.

Los Angeles County was an early adopter of medication-assisted treatment in its jails. Since the program’s inception in 2021, roughly 25,000 incarcerated people have been treated with Suboxone, an oral form of buprenorphine administered daily by medical professionals. But reliance on Suboxone alone proved to be challenging because of staffing limitations, said the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services in an email to CalMatters.

That’s why, according to Correctional Health Services physicians, the current regimen only allows someone to access Suboxone for 30 days when they first arrive in custody. After that, they can receive a long-acting injectable form of buprenorphine that’s administered once a month.

Since July 2022, nearly 40,000 doses of injectable buprenorphine — which cost roughly $1,600 per shot — have been administered to incarcerated people, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.

In a Sept. 10 memo to the Board of Supervisors, Correctional Health Services’ Director Christina Ghaly said overdose deaths constitute at least 28% of deaths this year. That’s a steep increase since 2016, when they accounted for 9% of in-custody deaths.

“Of all the medical care that we offer in the jail, opioid use disorder treatment is by far and away the most life-saving measure we provide,” said a second physician who spoke with CalMatters on the condition of anonymity because of fear of professional retaliation. “It seems paramount to protect these services.”

'It seems like it's backtracking'

In a written statement, the Los Angeles County Chief Executive Office said the county increased funding for health care in jails by $33 million last year to $580 million. The office said the county has been making improvements to the jails that collectively expanded access to care.

“It is true that critical unmet needs remain, and the county is focused on working with (the county health department and jail health care) to meet their highest priority needs in an environment of extremely limited local funding and service reductions to public facing services across multiple departments,” the statement read.

The state’s lawsuit against the jail system claims Los Angeles County and Correctional Health Services failed “to address the unconscionable mass overdose incidents occurring inside (its) jails” and limited access to the medication-assisted treatment program.

According to the lawsuit, three dozen in-custody deaths — approximately one per week — had taken place in Los Angeles County jails this year by the time of the filing. At that rate, the lawsuit stated, this year will account for the highest number of in-custody deaths over the past 20 years.

“Although (medication-assisted treatment) is known to prevent opioid related overdose and deaths and reduce recidivism, (Correctional Health Services) has an exceedingly long waitlist and failed to offer continued maintenance of medication,” the attorney general’s office wrote in the complaint.

“Persons in custody who have overdosed report not having access to (medication-assisted treatment) or receiving their initial dose of the medication but then being placed on a waitlist for access to follow-up medication, with a delay possibly causing a relapse and avoidable withdrawal symptoms.”

Mark Benor worked as a Correctional Health Services physician from 2018 until 2023, as the department was ramping up its medication-assisted treatment program. During that time, he said he became known as “the Suboxone doctor” as he traveled all over the jails to interview people who wanted to participate in the program and submit orders for their treatment.

“They created something that is impressive in the biggest jail system in the world,” he said. “It seems like it’s backtracking.”

Cayla Mihalovich is a California Local News fellow.

This story was originally published by  CalMatters , a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that explains California policies and politics and makes its government more transparent and accountable

California is a major hub for data centers — the facilities that store and transmit much of the internet. But just how much these power-hungry operations affect the state’s energy use, climate and public health remains an open question for researchers.

A new report released this week by the environmental think tank Next 10 and a UC Riverside researcher attempts to quantify that impact — but its authors say the report is only an estimate without harder data from the centers themselves.

“We are just making these reports pretty much in the dark — since there's almost zero information,” said Shaolei Ren, an AI researcher at UC Riverside and co-author of the report. “We have extremely little information about data centers in California.”

Ren and his coauthors conclude that between 2019 and 2023, electricity use and carbon emissions by California data centers nearly doubled, while on-site water consumption slightly more than doubled. Much of the increases were attributable to the electricity required to run artificial intelligence computations. But many of the report’s estimates, including its health impacts, are based on limited data — a key issue researchers said they encountered repeatedly when crafting the report.

The report underscores a growing tension in the industry : advocates who support clean energy and experts who study energy demand agree the days of steady, flat energy use at data centers are over, but there’s far less consensus on just how sharply electricity demand will climb.

“In very simple terms, a lot of the uncertainty comes from: what is our life going to look like with AI in the next five years, 10 years, 20 years — how integrated is it going to become?” said Maia Leroy, a Sacramento-based advocate who focuses on clean energy and the grid. “Are we reaching a point where the use is going to plateau, or is it going to continue?”

Experts say more transparency is essential to better understand what resources data centers demand in California.

Liang Min, who manages the Bits and Watts Initiative at Stanford University, says the state should improve its forecasts for energy demand to support clean energy goals. Min, who investigates AI’s growing strain on the electric grid, told CalMatters that demand at power centers rises in rapid, unpredictable phases and can shift quickly with each new generation of hardware.

The California Energy Commission, which plans for energy use and the growth in demand, “can play a pivotal role,” in understanding and adapting to the demands of AI.

As demand grows, policy responses lag

In Sacramento, efforts to add transparency and guardrails around data centers have struggled this year. California lawmakers shelved most consumer and environmental proposals aimed at data centers, even as they approved a plan to regionalize California’s power grid to help meet demand from the sector. They set aside two bills focused on curbing data centers’ energy use — one requiring operators to disclose their electricity use and another that offered clean power incentives .

Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a separate proposal that would have required data center operators to report their water use, even after the bill was weakened. In the end, Newsom — who has often highlighted California’s dominance in the artificial intelligence sector — signed only one measure, allowing regulators to determine whether data centers are driving up costs .

Mark Toney, who leads The Utility Reform Network and supported the transparency measure, has questioned whether data centers justify the costs they’re pushing onto ratepayers.

He warned of the centers’ “voracious consumption of energy and water, increased carbon emissions, and jacking up ratepayer bills.”

Hard facts about data centers are tough to find in California because most rent out power, cooling and floor space to other companies, said Ren, the UC Riverside researcher. Such colocation facilities don't run their own servers or technology, so they report less information publicly than data centers built by major tech companies in other states.

While estimates vary, California has the third-most data centers in the country, after Texas and Virginia. DataCenterMap , a commercial directory that tracks data centers worldwide, lists 321 sites across the state. More in California are expected in coming years.

The centers operate around the clock and often rely on diesel backup generators to maintain service during power failures — a practice that adds both greenhouse gases and local air pollutants. They also consume energy and water depending on their cooling methods.

Rising data-center demand, and rising questions

F. Noel Perry, the businessman and philanthropist who founded Next 10, said his organization's report shines light on what is fundamentally a black box. “To solve a problem, we have to understand what the problem is,” he said.

“We've seen the proliferation of data centers in California, in the U.S. and across the world — and we also are seeing major implications for the environment,” Perry told CalMatters. “The real issue has to do with transparency — and the ability of elected officials and regulators to create some rules that will govern reductions in emissions, water consumption.”

The report estimated that data centers used 10.8 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023, up from 5.5 terawatt-hours in 2019, accounting for 6% of the nation’s total data center energy use. Unless growth is curbed or better managed, the report’s authors project demand could rise to as high as 25 terawatt-hours by 2028, equal to the power use of roughly 2.4 million U.S. homes.

Carbon emissions from the sector nearly doubled during the same period, climbing from 1.2 million to 2.4 million tons, researchers estimated, while on site water use grew from 1,078 acre feet in 2019 to 2,302 acre feet in 2023. That’s enough to meet the annual water needs of almost seven thousand California households.

The report’s authors also estimated the public health costs from air pollution associated with data centers have potentially risen, from $45 million in 2019 to more than $155 million in 2023, with the burden expected to reach as high as $266 million by 2028.

Most of those costs stem from indirect pollution produced by fossil-fueled power plants that supply the grid. But authors pointed out that regions dense with data centers — particularly Santa Clara County, home to Silicon Valley — could face higher localized risks from diesel backup generators.

Dan Diorio, vice president of state policy for the Data Center Coalition, said the report exaggerates the impact of backup diesel generators, which are tightly regulated and rarely used in California, minimizing their contributions to air pollution. Data centers don’t control the water used in electricity generation, said Diorio. Since those water impacts don’t happen on site, it’s not fair to blame that on the centers themselves.

“It paints a skewed picture of this critical 21st-century industry,” Diorio said in a statement.

Diorio said the report also overlooks how cooling technology varies by region and has become more efficient in recent years.

But the authors say their findings underscore the need for uniform reporting standards for data centers’ energy and water use. The report said California should establish ongoing local monitoring and review of data centers — and make the findings public.

Ren, the UC Riverside researcher, said that California’s cleaner grid and stricter pollution rules are helping blunt some environmental impacts of data centers already.

“California — versus the national average — is doing a better job due to the cleaner grid,” he said.

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

Bone-colored bluffs and jagged cliffs line the Monterey shoreline where chalky sand meets redwoods.

Its rugged coastline, including beloved destinations such as Big Sur, is well-known California iconography protected by the California Coastal Act for nearly 50 years.

In a push to address the state’s gripping housing crisis, the California Coastal Commission last week approved a rule change to make it easier to build affordable housing in Monterey and elsewhere along the hundreds of miles of the Pacific coast.

It was the latest effort by the powerful state agency to combat its poor reputation among housing advocates and Democratic leaders who see it as an obstacle to drastic housing reform in California’s coveted coastal regions. While minor and uncontroversial, the amendment was one of a few shifts the commission has made in recent months in an effort to be viewed as playing a part in addressing the state’s crippling housing crisis.

It released a report for the first time in 2024 that showed local governments were responsible for approving the vast majority of permits in coastal regions, and this year the agency worked with housing activists to make it easier to build student housing in coastal cities. Nor did the coastal commission oppose the landmark housing reform law that excludes most new developments from environmental review.

“I think it’s going to have a real-life change,” Susan Jordan, a longtime conservation activist and founder of the California Coastal Protection Network, said of the regulatory amendment at the meeting.

Reputation rehab: Steps toward more housing

Twelve people — six local elected officials and six members of the public — vote on the independent, quasi-judicial state agency tasked with conserving more than 800 miles of the California coast and keeping it open to the public. Its authority spans about 1,000 yards inland from where the land meets the water at high tide.

The commission has faced relentless scrutiny in recent years for not permitting enough affordable housing in coastal cities, or doing so too slowly, as state lawmakers have stripped numerous housing regulations to make it easier to build more apartments.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, a critic of the commission, and other Democratic leaders have appointed three pro-development local officials this year to help get more housing and other developments approved along the Pacific coast.

In October, Newsom appointed wealthy real estate developer Jaime Lee to replace Effie Turnbull Sanders. An attorney appointed by former Gov. Jerry Brown, Sanders was lauded by environmentalists for heralding environmental justice policies to the agency.

Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas , a Salinas Democrat, named two pro-development appointees to the commission in May: Chris Lopez, a Monterey County supervisor, and Chula Vista councilmember Jose Preciado.

Ray Jackson, a Hermosa Beach councilmember, was appointed earlier this year by Democratic Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire of Santa Rosa, and is largely a skeptic of big developers.

In a unanimous vote last week, Peciado, Lopez and Jackson each approved changing the commission’s rules to give affordable housing projects in coastal areas more time to be built, from two to five years after permits are issued. Lee was not at the Nov. 6 meeting.

Staff and commissioners hailed the change as a step in the right direction for affordable housing developments that cannot be financed quickly enough under the previous two-year deadline.

“I think next year would be a good opportunity to roll out an education campaign in the Legislature to highlight some of the movements we made toward this,” Commissioner Linda Escalante said. “I don’t know if we can have a white paper that we can walk around with and figure out some of the reputation issues that we have.”

A history of protecting the coastline

Critics of the commission point to the exorbitant coastal housing prices, some of the highest in the country, and the disproportionate number of white residents, as exacerbating the housing shortage. To some, the commission’s priorities have not matched the urgency of lawmakers and local officials to help solve the cost problem.

Two-thirds of coastal residents are white, about twice as many as in the state as a whole, according to an analysis by Nicholas Depsky at the United Nations Development Programme.

Fewer than 2.5% of California residents live in coastal cities, or “coastal zones,” which comprise less than 1% of land in the state but are home to some of the most valuable real estate in the world, from Malibu to Marin.

Waves break near beach homes in Malibu on Dec. 28, 2023.

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Damian Dovarganes

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AP Photo

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The Coastal Commission began as a 1972 ballot initiative in the shadow of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, one of the worst environmental disasters in the country at the time. Amid a broader national environmental movement, there was greater concern about how to protect California’s coveted shoreline in the midst of unregulated offshore drilling and fears of relentless development that would mirror Miami’s coastline.

Four years later, the state Legislature made the commission permanent with the Coastal Act to protect its natural habitats and keep beaches open to the public.

Early tensions between then-Gov. Jerry Brown and the commission brewed when he slammed its members as "bureaucratic thugs” in 1978, just years after championing its creation. Brown would spend his final years in office, nearly 40 years later, roiled by criticism from environmentalists who accused him of appointing commissioners who were too pro-development. Those fears were heightened with the ousting of executive director Charles Lester in 2016, a strong advocate for coastal protection.

Scrutiny of the commission has accelerated in the Newsom administration, as the governor has publicly chided the agency for its broad powers. After the Los Angeles fires, he swiftly moved to suspend all of its authority over rebuilding efforts in the Pacific Palisades, which abut the coastline.

Last year, the commission rejected billionaire Elon Musk’s proposal to increase the number of SpaceX rocket launches off the Santa Barbara coast while criticizing his support of President Donald Trump. Newsom said he was “with Elon” after the company filed a lawsuit for political discrimination. The case is still pending.

Lee, the newest commissioner, hails from Los Angeles and has built a reputation as a prolific builder known for revitalizing Koreatown. Her real estate company, Jamison properties, has built 6,600 multifamily units and is one of the largest private landowners in Los Angeles, according to its website.

Lee did not return emails and phone calls seeking comment from CalMatters.

The new appointments have made many pro-housing advocates hopeful. “We now have three out of 12 voting members who are appointed to the commission in this period when many legislators and the governor want reform at the commission to design more affordable housing,” said Louis Mirante, a lobbyist with the business coalition Bay Area Council. “That tells me that these members will probably move that vision forward.”

Lopez, who has emphasized his support for affordable housing on the coast since joining the commission, said the optimism is warranted.

“I think that that excitement is well placed given where we’re sitting at right now and given the voice that the speaker and the governor are giving at this issue and wanting to see a remedy to it,” Lopez said. “And I do feel it’s the reason I was put here was to have that conversation at the forefront.”

Environmental advocates watch

Environmentalists have mostly been quiet about the new appointments. Instead, they are waiting to see how they vote before raising the alarm.

“While there have been concerns expressed within the environmental movement, at this point we have no idea how this commissioner (Lee) will be,” said Jennifer Savage, associate director of Surfrider Foundation, a coastal protection advocacy group. Lee was not an obvious choice for many, but Savage is optimistic that she’ll support coastal protection.

“It’s actually not that surprising that the governor would appoint someone with housing expertise,” given the political climate, she continued.

A longtime local water authority official and current administrator at San Diego State University, Preciado said part of his pitch for the role to top Democratic leaders was that he wanted to see more of the coast developed to help create jobs and homes for working-class families.

“We have a keen interest in developing the California coast in such a way where underrepresented communities that live on the coast have more access,” Preciado said of himself and Lopez.

Wealthy coastal residents have long sparred with the commission over violations for blocking public access, such as Silicon Valley billionaire Vinod Khosla, who has been entangled in a slew of legal fights with regulators and coastal groups for years over access to Martins Beach near Half Moon Bay.

An empty road leading to Martins Beach near Half Moon Bay on Aug. 29, 2017.

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Karl Mondon

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Bay Area News Group

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Many commissioners and staff view protecting public access and conservation as their primary purpose rather than housing policy.

Conservationism is out of style, even among Democrats, which has led support for the commission to dramatically shift in recent years, according to legislative director Sarah Christie.

To some commissioners, lawmakers’ push to rip away more and more of its housing authority is a misguided attempt to simplify a complex issue. They point out that 80% of coastal cities and counties have their own coastal laws and are not subject to the commission.

“It’s creating a lot of chaos and dysfunction at the local level and is making it harder,” Christie said of the movement toward slashing housing regulations. “In the Legislature’s enthusiasm and zeal in order to effectuate housing more quickly, they’re kind of stepping on themselves.”

Jackson, a commissioner who represents the South Bay, said lawmakers need to focus more on affordable housing rather than increasing supply more broadly.

Special environmental considerations and its highly sought after nature are what make the coastal zone uniquely expensive, Preciado said. “I think that a broader view, a more objective view, is that developing on the coast is different than developing in urban areas.”

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