The Brief

At a California State Senate committee hearing this year, the director of Caltrans, Tony Tavares, showed a simple chart that might have caused the assembled lawmakers some alarm.

It was a series of black bars representing the death toll on California's roads in each of the past 20 years.

Fatalities had been falling until 2010, when the bars started getting longer and longer. A blood-red arrow shot up over the growing lines, charting their rise, as if to make sure nobody could miss the more than 60% increase in deaths.

“We are working to reverse the overall trend,” Tavares said.

No legislators asked about the chart. No one asked the director what, exactly, his agency was doing about it.

Over the next three hours, the Senate Transportation Committee members asked instead about homeless encampments along roads, gas tax revenue, gender identity on ID’s and planning for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

The chart presented by then-CalTrans Director Tony Tavares at the March 11, 2025 Senate Transportation Committee hearing.

The committee chair said it was the legislature’s first informational hearing on the state’s transportation system in more than a decade. Yet only two senators — both Republicans with little legislative power in a state controlled by Democrats — even asked about dangerous driving, one following up with questions about a deadly stretch of road in her district and the other about a small California Highway Patrol program to target egregious behavior behind the wheel.

Over the past decade, nearly 40,000 people have died and more than 2 million have been injured on California roads. As an ongoing CalMatters investigation has shown this year, time and again those crashes were caused by repeat drunk drivers, chronic speeders and motorists with well-documented histories of recklessness behind the wheel. Year after year, officials with the power to do something about it — the governor, legislators, the courts, the Department of Motor Vehicles — have failed to act.

The silence, in the face of a threat that endangers nearly every Californian, is damning.

California has some of the weakest DUI laws in the nation. Here, DUI-related deaths have been rising more than twice as fast as the rest of the country. But this fall, a state bill to strengthen DUI penalties was gutted at the last minute.

When it comes to speeding — one of the biggest causes of fatal crashes — again the legislature has done little. For two years in a row, bills that would have required the use of speed-limiting technology on vehicles have failed.

Lawmakers did pass legislation a couple years ago that allows the use of speed cameras. But it’s just a pilot project in a handful of jurisdictions.

Marc T. Vukcevich, director of state policy for advocacy group Streets For All, considers it a win — but a modest one.

“This shit is not enough to deal with the size and severity and the complexity of the problem we have when it comes to violence on our roadways,” Vukcevich said.

Erika Pringle, at right, embraces Allison Lyman, whose son died in a collision, during a candlelight vigil as part of The World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims at the Capitol in Sacramento on Nov. 16, 2025.

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Fred Greaves

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Gov. Gavin Newsom declined an interview request. Last year, he vetoed a bill that would have required technology that alerts drivers when they’re speeding.

The state DMV, which is under his authority, has wide latitude to take dangerous drivers off the road. But it routinely allows drivers with extreme histories of dangerous driving to continue to operate on our roadways, where many go on to kill.

Steve Gordon, whom Newsom chose to run the agency in 2019, won’t talk about it. He has declined or ignored CalMatters requests for an interview.

The agency simply released a statement from him in March, after our first interview request, touting modernization efforts that reflect an “ongoing commitment to enhancing accountability and transparency while continually refining our processes to ensure California’s roads are safer for everyone.”

Neither Newsom nor Gordon has announced any major changes since then.

How a bill to fight DUIs fails in Sacramento

For a brief moment earlier this year, Colin Campbell thought the state might finally do something about the scourge that changed his life one night in 2019.

A repeat drunk driver slammed into his Prius on the way to the family’s new home in Joshua Tree, killing his 17-year-old daughter, Ruby, and 14-year-old son, Hart.

Campbell, a writer and director from Los Angeles, began advocating for California to join most other states and create a law requiring in-car breathalyzers for anyone convicted of a DUI.

At first he was encouraged when the bill coasted through two legislative committees. But then came the roadblocks.

The ACLU opposed the measure, calling it “a form of racialized wealth extraction,” according to a Senate Public Safety Committee report from July. In California, people forced to use the devices have to pay about $100 a month to a private company to rent them, though there’s supposed to be a sliding fee scale based on income.

Then the DMV told lawmakers that it could not “complete the necessary programming” for the law, citing possible technology delays and costs of $15 million or more.

The bill was gutted. California couldn’t do something that nearly three dozen other states could.

Campbell called the sudden reversal a shameful example of forsaking public safety for bureaucracy.

“Our lives were destroyed that night,” he said. “If these people's children had been killed by a drunk driver, there is no way they would be objecting to this.”

Even if the law had passed, DMV data suggests that California judges would have mostly ignored it.

State law says judges have to require in-car breathalyzers for people convicted of repeat DUIs. Last month, the DMV issued a report reinforcing what a similar report laid out two years earlier. Judges across the state ordered the devices just one-third of the time for repeat offenders. In 14 counties, they ordered the devices less than 10% of the time for second-time DUI offenders. The counties are: Alameda, Colusa, Glenn, Lassen, Los Angeles, Madera, Mono, Plumas, Sacramento, San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz, Sierra, Tulare and Yuba.

DMV officials did not answer questions about what, if anything, the agency was doing about it.

We reached out to all 14 counties’ courts. Only eight responded to questions.

Chris Ruhl, executive officer for the Glenn County Superior Court, said the court is looking at local changes.

“Given the light CalMatters is bringing to this issue … the Glenn Court will review its current DUI sentencing practices,” according to a statement.

Glenn was one of a number of counties — including LA, Alameda and San Luis Obispo — that also suggested it wasn’t their judges’ responsibility to issue a court order. They said they only needed to notify the DMV of the convictions.

However, the law is clear: It’s the judge’s job to order the offender to use the device, said Jerry Hill, the retired Bay Area Democrat who wrote the bill.

When he worked in the Capitol, Hill said he also saw little urgency to rein in intoxicated driving.

“If you ask any legislator, they are going to say it’s a terrible, terrible thing,” he said.

But he said committee chairs and staff members who set the tone and write analyses often shied away from increasing criminal penalties.

“That’s where we see a lack of understanding, in my view, of the devastating effect of drunk driving in California,” he said.

Lawmakers say next session could bring change

A number of lawmakers said they are aware of the carnage on our roadways and plan to do something about it this coming legislative session, maybe.

Sen. Bob Archuleta, a Democrat from Norwalk who sits on the Transportation Committee, lost his granddaughter to a drunk driver just before Christmas last year. He said he recently met with representatives from Mothers Against Drunk Driving and is considering possible bills.

“This is not a Republican issue, a Democrat issue, an independent issue — or political issue. This is a life-saving issue,” he said. “We should all take it as seriously as the family that lost a loved one.”

Democratic Assemblymember Nick Schultz of Burbank said he is considering introducing at least one measure next year to address loopholes and weaknesses in state law.

Schultz, who started his career prosecuting DUI cases in Oregon and now chairs the Assembly’s Public Safety Committee, said he is weighing several potential measures that would address issues CalMatters highlighted in its reporting this year, including lengthening license suspensions after fatal crashes, lowering the bar to charge repeat drunk drivers with a felony, strengthening breathalyzer requirements and making sure vehicular manslaughter convictions get reported to the DMV.

“People are tired of seeing the needless loss of life on our roadways,” Schultz said. “There’s no way to legislatively make someone make the right choice. But what we can do is create an incentive structure where there are consequences for bad decisions.”

In the absence of more leadership at the state level, road safety advocates — many of whom joined the cause after losing a loved one to a preventable car crash — are taking it on themselves to try to force change. They’re meeting with lawmakers and officials, holding public events, telling their stories.

At far right, Fumiko Torres speaks about losing Rayanna Diaz while standing alongside other family members during a candlelight vigil as part of The World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims event at the Capitol in Sacramento on Nov. 16, 2025.

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Fred Greaves

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CalMatters

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Allison Lyman stands at a table honoring her son Connor, who was killed in a traffic collision, before the start of a candlelight vigil as part of the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims at the Capitol in Sacramento on Nov. 16, 2025.

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Fred Greaves

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Jennifer Levi started working with MADD after her son, Braun, was killed in May while he was out walking with friends in Manhattan Beach. She said they’d only recently relocated to the area after the family home burned down in the Palisades fire, destroying “all of Braun’s pictures, videos from when he was born.”

The driver who killed her son was allegedly intoxicated and had a prior DUI arrest.

“The worst day of my life is now my life’s work. I will not stop until California changes,” Levi said.

In the months since her son’s death, Levi said, she’s met with any officials or influential people she could — current and former lawmakers, district attorneys, local council members, a lobbyist, and members of the media. Among the changes she wants: to make it easier to charge repeat DUI offenders with murder when they kill someone, to make fatal DUIs a violent felony and to increase penalties for hit-and-run fatalities. As CalMatters reported in October, California law often treats drunken vehicular manslaughter as a nonviolent crime with minimal time behind bars.

Levi calls her push to reform the system “Braun’s Bill.”

Many grieving families share a similar goal: for those they lost to be remembered by a state and society that seem indifferent. That desire was on display last month during an event in Sacramento to mark the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims.

On a cold Sunday evening in mid-November, after a break in the rain, dozens of relatives of people killed in car crashes gathered on the dark steps of the state Capitol for a candlelight vigil. They fought to keep photos on posterboards upright in the gale-force winds. Family by family, they ascended the steps, stood above a display of orange cones lit with strands of white lights and addressed the onlookers, talking about their loved ones and what was lost — children left without their mother, mothers without their children, a wife left without the love of her life.

“Every day I live and I wake up and I pretend like I’m happy. Every day I wish my stairs would make noise. I miss being called mom,” said Angel Dela Cruz, whose 17-year-old son Edward Alvidrez Jr. was hit by a truck while riding a dirt bike in Madera County in 2022.

“I hope we all get justice,” she said.

The event ended with a moment of quiet reflection and a prayer before the families put away their pictures and walked off, the Capitol behind them locked, silent.

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

On an overcast morning in July, marine biologist Greg Rouse knelt next to a large tide pool near La Jolla’s Bird Rock.

“This place is incredibly diverse in habitats,” Rouse said, scooping a sample of seawater into a plastic bag.

A few miles down the beach, in his seaside lab at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, Rouse separated the sampled water into a petri dish.

At first glance it was just water and some floating ocean debris.

But when Rouse slid the petri dish under a microscope, hundreds of nearly-microscopic animals burst into life on a high-resolution monitor: shrimps and snails, pillbug-like isopods, worms of all sorts of different shapes, and at least one bright-orange sea slug.

Sampling tide pools like this is fairly routine for Rouse, but lately, it has been part of something bigger. Rouse is leading the first phase of an effort to document California’s intertidal ecosystems.

That means logging every organism found in the tidal seawater, sand and rocks from San Diego to the Oregon border over the next two years.

“It's a baseline of what is here right now,” Rouse said. “It's a shame we didn't do this 20 or 40 years ago. But in those times, we didn't really have the DNA technology and the cost efficiency that we have these days.”

The project, called the California Intertidal Biodiversity DNA Barcode Library project, is ambitious. Nothing of this scale has been attempted in the U.S. It’s being led by a coalition of top research institutions, including Scripps, the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, the California Ocean Protection Council and the Southern California Coastal Research Project.

The goal is to create a comprehensive picture of California’s tidal habitats by focusing on the algae and invertebrates that live in them, including their DNA profiles. Scientists say that will let them more effectively track changes in those ecosystems.

Scientists building the biological library are focused on the nearly microscopic invertebrates and algae that live in California's tidal regions, which are less well understood than more visible fish, birds and mammals.

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Lucas Brady Woods

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The intertidal region is made up of the narrow strip of coastline that alternates between being submerged at high tide and exposed at low tide. It’s habitats are some of the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including rising water temperatures and sea levels.

The two-year project launched with $10 million in state funding earlier this year but kicked into high gear this summer.

Last month, Rouse led a group of dozens of scientists to the tide pools, where they pulled more than 7,000 samples from the area around Bird Rock.

“Anything we could see, we took. But also we took a lot of stuff you can't see back to the lab and had many people on microscopes finding all the tiny creatures,” Rouse said. “Because most of the diversity is actually too small to see.”

Testing is still underway, but so far the samples represent 1,600 species of invertebrates and algae, hundreds of which could be new to science.

Biological library housed in L.A. 

Once collected and analyzed at Scripps, the physical specimens and their DNA profiles will be sent to the L.A. County Museum of Natural History where they will be stored in a massive library.

The museum was chosen in part because it has the largest collection of invertebrates in the U.S., outside of the Smithsonian Institution.

The project will be focused on invertebrates and algae because fish, mammals and other big, visible animals have been sampled plenty. Scientists say there is a major gap in the understanding of the tiny tide pool organisms that play a key role in the wider ecosystem.

“It's all about a food chain … and we don't have a good grounding of who's eating whom,” said Regina Wetzer, curator of marine biodiversity at the Natural History Museum. “It's a whole cascade of networks that feed the larger things that are carnivorous fish or that are birds."

A nudibranch mollusk, a type of sea slug called Vassyeria, was one of the thousands of organisms collected recently in La Jolla. It's seen here under a microscope.

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Greg Rouse

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Scripps Institute of Oceanography

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Among the new species found by the recent tide pool sampling is this polychaete scaleworm, seen here under a microscope.

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Greg Rouse

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Scripps Institute of Oceanography

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Protecting the coast

Building this biological library is not just for the sake of expanding scientific understanding. It’s also practical.

Without a clear baseline to reference, said Dean Pentcheff, project manager of the Diversity Initiative for the Southern California Ocean, scientists have been largely operating in the dark.

“To responsibly manage the shore and manage our resources and manage the life on it, we need to know who's where and who's who,” Pentcheff said. “And right now, for the intertidal [zone], we don't know that.”

The DNA library will lay the groundwork for new, powerful tools scientists can use to monitor changes in the tidal ecosystem.

One of those is environmental DNA, or E-DNA, the biological detritus that naturally sloughs off organisms. Collecting samples of water or sand, and the E-DNA in it, can provide a quick snapshot of an ecosystem when compared to a baseline.

At L.A.'s Natural History Museum Regina Wetzer, left, a curator, and Dean Pentcheff, head of the Diversity Initiative for the Southern California Ocean, discuss the logistics of building the tidal "biolibrary."

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Lucas Brady Woods

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LAist

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“That's a list of all the organisms that are there, but you can't put a name to any of them unless you have a reference library to look it up in,” Pentcheff said. “So our job in this project is to cruise up and down the state and create that library of genetic reference sequences to enable environmental DNA to be used in the future.”

The library will also be designed to allow for different levels of DNA sequencing, from basic DNA profiles, called barcodes, that are quick and easy to produce, to much more complex profiles that provide detailed information on an organism.

Backed by California taxpayers 

The tools the project is expected to unlock have also galvanized the officials in charge of protecting the state’s marine environments.

“Where are invasive species showing up? What's happening with species range shifts as things migrate northward? Those are the kinds of questions that we can answer, start to answer with a lot of this information,” said Mike Esgro, a member of the California Ocean Protection Council who oversees the state’s Marine Protected Areas.

California’s Marine Protected Areas cover about 16% of California’s coastal waters. They are specific geographical areas in the ocean or around coastal estuaries designed to protect and conserve marine life and habitats.

Esgro hopes the DNA library, and emerging tools like E-DNA that rely on it, will improve how officials manage these places. For example, it could help officials better understand which ones are most vulnerable and identify additional marine environments that need state protection.

It could even help scientists figure out how to shift tidal habitats inland to compensate for rising sea levels.

He also wants to see continued collaboration with state agencies like the Ocean Protection Council and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

And he hopes the California project, which he calls the “Noah’s Ark of intertidal diversity,” can serve as an example. Scientists in California are already looking at other possible DNA libraries focused on insects and fungi.

“The climate crisis is very real. It's very urgent. We're seeing the impacts right now,” Esgro said. “And so I think adopting that kind of mindset of — ‘We gotta go big; we gotta swing for the fences’ — that's crucial.”

This story first appeared in the Boyle Heights Beat.

Air regulators on Thursday ordered Lineage Logistics to strengthen odor-control measures, expand air monitoring and improve communication with residents as cleanup of the burned warehouse continues.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District hearing board unanimously approved an abatement order on the second day of a public hearing into a series of air quality violations tied to the June fire in Boyle Heights.

The board did not require Lineage to pay any financial penalties, which several elected officials, including Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, had requested in light of the numerous air quality violations it had been issued.

Lineage is required, among other things, to:

• Each day remove 10%, or about 8.8 million pounds, of the food waste stored in the facility at the time of the fire; 
• Conduct more monitoring for airborne pollutants further from the warehouse; 
• Increase communication with the community, including providing updates on the cleanup in Spanish.

Many of the order’s requirements had already been implemented at the site, Lineage representatives said, while the community communication plan and increased air quality monitoring is expected to happen within five days.

Representatives for AQMD said the order was designed to strike a balance between swift food waste removal and work to control the odors plaguing the community. AQMD focuses specifically on air pollution regulation.

Dominic DiCarlo, Lineage’s vice president of global safety and compliance, said that he believes all of the rotting bulk food items will be removed by next week, without citing a specific date. He added that it would take another week to remove the rest of the material and fully disinfect the facility.

Bass ordered that all biohazard food waste be removed from the facility by Aug. 14. It’s unclear if Lineage will meet the mayor’s deadline.

DiCarlo said the company expects to spend between $80 million and $100 million on the cleanup and remediation of the burn site. He claims that about 80% of the approximately 88 million pounds of food stored at the facility has been removed to about 10 landfills and recycling facilities in Southern California and Arizona.

“This order will ensure that there are enforceable conditions on [Lineage] as it completes this cleanup project, which will minimize odor impacts on the community and expedite removal of food waste which is the source of these odors,” said Josephine Lee, senior deputy counsel for AQMD.

A new guide from a group of local scientists helps Angelenos affected by the 2025 L.A. fires navigate questions about soil testing and clean up.

The guidelines are based on soil tests conducted by USC CLEAN and Community Action Project Los Angeles on more than 6,000 lots in and around burn zones in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena.

Sujeet Rao, the health and well-being practice director at Public Exchange at USC, who contributed to the guide, said it's a response to questions that he and other contributors knew residents had.

“We all came together … to help fire affected families understand and navigate questions they may have about environmental contamination related to the fires,” Rao said.

The guide includes information about soil contamination, testing, cleanup methods and ways to reduce your exposure risk.

The dangers of soil contamination

When the Eaton and Palisades fires burned down houses and garages, items including paint, kitchen appliances and car batteries released dangerous substances into the environment.

Exposure to these substances can increase the risk of respiratory, neurological and reproductive problems, as well as certain cancers.

Lead was the most common concern, according to the scientists’ testing.

Rao said that’s worrying because lead is a neurotoxin.

“What that means is that [for] especially young children whose brains are still developing or women who are pregnant, lead can affect the development of the brain,” Rao said.

Should you test your soil? 

Rao said it’s hard to say whether any specific property needs soil testing or cleanup, but gave some general guidelines.

If your house burned, definitely.

If you saw ash in the air, on the ground or otherwise near your house during the fires, get your soil tested.

If not, testing is likely unnecessary.

Other things to consider are the age of the houses that burned and their proximity to your property.

“We do know that if you’re in a neighborhood that has a lot of old housing, it is more likely that there is lead that could have been mobilized,” Rao said. “The inverse of that is, in the Palisades, we generally see much lower levels of lead contamination because the housing there tends to be so much newer.”

What to know about soil testing

The guide suggests two main options for going about testing.

One option is to hire specialists to come to your house to collect and test samples.

The other option is collect samples yourself and submit them to a testing program, such as USC CLEAN.

In the testing results, look for contaminant levels that exceed the residential limits set by the Environmental Protection Agency or the California Department of Toxic Substances Control.

Both account for how the area is used, including whether children are playing outside or people are gardening.

Cleanup methods

If your soil test results are above the EPA or DTSC limits, the guide offers four main methods to clean it up.

1. Excavation: Removing the soil, throwing it out at a disposal facility and replacing it with clean soil.
2. Capping: Putting clean soil, gravel or another physical barrier between the contaminated soil and the people and animals who may come into contact with it.
3. Immobilization: Adding compost, phosphorus or other materials to stop the spread of contaminants.
4. Bioremediation: Putting plants, bacteria or fungi into the affected soil to break down biodegradable contaminants.

Some soil remediation can be paid for through insurance. Costs will depend on the size of your yard and which contaminants are present. The guide estimates that the least costly options are capping and immobilization, which can run around $10,000.

The full soil remediation guide is on the Consortium website.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Thursday that he is once more trying to limit the number of people who are born in the country who can become American citizens, in a sign that even after his first attempt at limiting birthright citizenship was rejected by the Supreme Court, he’s ready to try again.

The president said he was signing two executive actions on immigration, including one limiting the number of people eligible for U.S. citizenship after being born in the United States.

The written executive order released later Thursday was narrower in scope than the previous one shot down by the Supreme Court and appeared to focus on restricting automatic citizenship to specific categories of people, including children born to adults with connections to foreign embassies or organizations, as well as anyone considered an “alien enemy” of the United States.

It also aimed to restrict birthright citizenship to anyone whose parents “engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship.”

A second order seeks to curb what Trump called “birth tourism” by increasing restrictions on visitors to the U.S. who want to obtain visas to give birth while in the country.

Trump said he thought his latest actions would be constitutional.

“I thought we were going to win it at the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, we had a bad decision, very unfair decision. Our country suffers because of it and we’re ending it a different way,” Trump said.

In June, the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s previous efforts to declare that children born to people in the U.S. illegally or temporarily aren’t American citizens, and upheld a broad conception of birthright citizenship.

On Trump’s first day in office of his second term, he signed an executive order aimed at ending birthright citizenship, which allows anyone born in the United States to automatically become an American citizen.

Trump’s administration was immediately sued by opponents who said the executive order went against the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, which makes anyone born in the country a citizen, with very limited exceptions.

The executive order was blocked by several lower courts and never took effect.

In June, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s order by a 6-3 vote. But the vote was too close for many immigration advocates and legal observers who felt the legal question of birthright citizenship was a long-settled issue.