The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to create a new citizen’s commission to look at expanding the size of the council, reducing the number of council meetings and other potential changes to city operations.
The 13-member commission will be charged with developing proposals for the November 2026 ballot that would revise the city charter, which spells out the powers and duties of city departments, offices and elected officials.
The idea of expanding the 15-member council has been circulating for a few years, with several council members signing on to the idea. Council President Paul Krekorian had hoped to send a council expansion measure to L.A. voters in November.
Although a council committee studied the concept over several months, its members never coalesced around a single strategy, leaving the question to the new commission.
Council expansion had drawn support from a number of civic groups, which argued that it would improve community representation at City Hall and diversify the membership of the council.
Godfrey Plata, deputy director of the nonprofit group L.A. Forward, said his organization and others were disappointed by the council’s failure to act.
“We thought it was procrastination to punt it over to a charter commission,” said Plata, whose group argued last year in favor of growing the council to 29 members. “But we’re certainly eager to continue a public conversation around it.”
Krekorian, who faces term limits at the end of the year, has continued to argue in favor of expansion, pointing out that the city of nearly 4 million has the same number of districts as nearly a century ago, when its population was much smaller.
Reducing the size of each district would make the council more responsive to residents, he said, while also reducing the influence of “institutional organized money” in elections.
“I think it even reduces the risk of corruption,” Krekorian said last week during an appearance at the Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum.
Krekorian said the new charter reform commission will also look at other issues, including the city’s handling of real estate development, the process of filling vacant council seats and the procedure for censuring or suspending elected officials who have engaged in wrongdoing.
Michael Feinstein, speaking on behalf of the Los Angeles County Green Party, called on the council to make sure the commission also looks at major changes to city elections, including a move to “ranked-choice” voting, which allows voters to rankcandidates in order of preference instead of choosing just one.
This time around, it’s not clear how wide-ranging the commission’s work will be. Although the council can forward topics for study, the commission will also collect input from a wide range of individuals and community groups.
Under the plan approved on Tuesday, Mayor Karen Bass will have the power to appoint four of the commission’s 13 members. Krekorian will select two, as will council President-elect Marqueece Harris-Dawson.
Those eight would be appointed in August and September, according to a timeline created for the commission. Once they convene, they would then spend three months developing a work plan and selecting five additional commissioners.
The commission’s schedule calls for it to spend much of 2025 deliberating and collecting public input. In January 2026, its proposals would be submitted to the council, which would then decide which ones would appear on the November 2026 ballot.
Feinstein, a former mayor of Santa Monica, criticized that arrangement, warning that the council will have the power to reject any of the commission’s proposals. He also faulted the council for allowing the commission to be populated by political appointees.
“This [process] embeds a direct City Council conflict of interest around deciding the future size and powers of the council,” he said in an email to The Times.
The charter reform commission is also expected to look at whether to shrink the number of council meetings — a topic that has exasperated some council members in recent months.
The city charter requires that the council meet at least three days each week. Councilmembers Katy Yaroslasvky, Tim McOsker and Eunisses Hernandez recently backed a ballot proposal to reduce that number to one day per week. But others on the council resisted the idea, saying it needed vetting from the soon-to-be-formed commission.
Separately, the council voted on Tuesday to approve language for two city charter amendments on the Nov. 5 ballot. One would establish an independent redistricting process for the Los Angeles Unified School District, which takes in 26 cities and is governed by a seven-member board.
The other ballot proposal is aimed at strengthening the city Ethics Commission, which enforces laws dealing with campaign fundraising, lobbying and other political activities. Under the proposal, the agency would receive a minimum of $7 million per year for its operations.
Backers say this would prevent elected officials from retaliating against the agency by cutting its budget. The proposal would also triple the fines for ethics violations and give the Ethics Commission the ability to hire its own lawyer in some cases.
A stay in Brian Maggi’s house, per the Airbnb listing, is what coastal California dreams are made of.
“Bathed in natural sunlight,” it reads, you can “enjoy unobstructed panoramic views of the ocean and Point Reyes.” You can bring your dog. Walk to the sand. Savor “the perfect getaway” in the 1928 “BoHo surf shack.”
The little house in Dillon Beach, a remote town in western Marin County, is a second home for Maggi, a software designer who lives full time in Livermore, a hundred miles southeast.
He and his wife stay here a few weekends a month: Enough time to befriend neighbors and know the gossip, like who put in a new hot tub and who moved here to please a girlfriend despite hating the foggy weather.
“We’re not full-time residents,” Maggi said, “but we’re not absentee owners.”
“We’re really fortunate, and I get it,” Brian Maggi says of owning a second home in Dillon Beach. But he says cracking down on short-term rentals hasn’t made houses more affordable.
When Maggi is not using the house, he rents it on Airbnb for about $300 a night.
That’s a pretty common practice in Dillon Beach where, according to county estimates, a whopping 84% of the town’s 408 housing units are second homes and 31% are used as licensed short-term rentals.
Are those vacation rentals ruining California’s rugged little beach towns? Or are they opening up the coast to people who can’t afford to live there? Depends who you ask.
In Marin County, on the northern end of the San Francisco Bay, short-term rentals have become a lightning rod amid an affordable housing shortage in one of the most expensive — and beautiful — places in California.
This month, the Marin County Board of Supervisors approved a hard cap on the number of short-term rentals it will allow in unincorporated places, including the bucolic towns hugging iconic Highway 1 and the Point Reyes National Seashore.
The ordinance imposes a cap of 1,281 short-term rentals for unincorporated Marin County, where there were 923 licensed as of January.
The county has placed specific limits for 18 coastal communities, most of which will be allowed no more than the existing number of short-term rentals — while some will have to reduce their numbers. The exception is Dillon Beach, a historic vacation town where the short-term rental market will be allowed to significantly grow.
Dillon Beach homeowner Paul Martinez walks home after surfing. “Rent it responsibly,” Martinez says about owners renting out their houses when they are not in town.
Mounted surfboards add to the charm of this colorful home in Dillon Beach.
In Point Reyes Station, population 383, there are 32 short-term rentals, according to the county. Under the new rules, 26 will be allowed. In Stinson Beach, the cap will allow the amount of rentals that currently exist: 192.
In Dillon Beach, vacation rentals will be allowed to grow 63%, from 125 to 204. The town has no school and the only businesses are a resort and its general store, which supervisors noted make for a different kind of community than many of the other towns dotting the Marin coastline.
County officials said they expect the number of existing short-term rentals to shrink through attrition. Current license holders will have to reapply and adhere to stricter regulations, which can include expensive septic upgrades. The new rules allow just one short-term rental property per operator, and licenses will not transfer to new owners if a property sells.
Debate over the issue has raised questions not just about limited housing in Marin, but also about whether Airbnbs have become a critical means of providing public beach access — a right enshrined in the California Coastal Act — in seaside towns with few hotel rooms.
“Please do not codify this anti-visitor, exclusionary behavior. Do not turn a region dense in coastal public recreational lands into an exclusionary playground that only the elite can access,” Inverness resident Rachel Dinno Taylor, founder of the West Marin Access Coalition, a citizens group that fought the measure, said in a speech last month before the California Coastal Commission.
The Coastal Commission regulates development in the Coastal Zone — which is generally the first 1,000 yards from the shoreline but extends a few miles inland in some areas — and increasingly is weighing in on local efforts to limit short-term rentals.
If it weren’t for vacationers — who fill the village with laughter and kids and wagons and dogs — Dillon Beach would be dead most days, residents say.
“Vacation rentals can provide important public access to the coast, especially where hotels are scarce. But without thoughtful guidelines, they can also have unintended impacts on local housing availability,” Kate Huckelbridge, executive director of the Coastal Commission, said in a statement to The Times. “We think Marin County achieved the right balance for their unique and world-famous coastline.”
The West Marin Access Coalition, many of whose members rent out their homes and so have a financial stake in the debate, argued the county did not have enough data to prove short-term rentals directly affect housing availability. Many residents rely upon income generated by their rentals to afford staying in their homes, Sean Callagy, a member of the coalition, said in an email.
The county’s new policy, he wrote, will “create hardships for low- and middle-income residents, worsen housing insecurity and deny visitors access to the coast.”
An aerial view of Stinson Beach in Marin County.
For years, high-demand destinations across California — including Los Angeles city and county, Palm Springs, Malibu, Ojai and San Francisco — have tried to rein in rental platforms such as Airbnb and Vrbo, citing the need to prevent housing from being converted into de facto hotel rooms .
In Marin County, the explosive growth in short-term rentals has been particularly divisive in smaller towns. There, the number of full-time residents is dwindling while millionaires’ second — and third — homes, many of which are used as seasonal rentals, sit empty much of the year.
That’s a cruel paradox when there are not enough affordable homes for people who work in those communities, proponents of the cap say.
In unincorporated Marin County, the median sales price of a single-family home rose 98% from 2013 to 2021, to $1.91 million, according to a countywide housing plan adopted last year.
“Housing affordability and housing supply were really the driving factor in why we’re addressing short-term rentals right now,” said Sarah Jones, director of the Marin County Community Development Agency. “There’s not housing being built. And the housing that’s available, people are just seeing that it’s more profitable and easier to use it as a short-term rental than to rent it out long term.”
Although Marin County has much open space, it has little room to expand housing. Roughly 85% of its land, including the Point Reyes National Seashore and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, is public space or agricultural land protected from development.
Marin County Supervisor Dennis Rodoni, who represents the scenic West Marin towns where vacation rentals are most heavily concentrated, said they have transformed “tiny communities where even losing a few homes is a big deal.”
“Our volunteer fire departments are losing volunteers,” he said. “Our schoolteachers, we’re having a hard time locating them in the community; they have to commute long distances.”
Visitors stroll through downtown Stinson Beach along Highway 1 in West Marin County.
The elementary school in Stinson Beach, he noted, is “having a hard time keeping its doors open” because so few children now live there. The town’s population, according to census data, plunged 38% from 2016 to 2022, to 371. In 2022, there were no children younger than 15.
According to county estimates, 27% of housing units in Stinson Beach are used as short-term rentals — many of which are in the gated neighborhood of Seadrift, a flood-prone sand spit.
The town has “become like Martha’s Vineyard on the West Coast,” said August Temer, co-owner of Breakers Cafe on Highway 1 in Stinson Beach. “It’s not people’s primary residence.”
August Temer, center, co-owner of Breakers Cafe in Stinson Beach, says as a business owner he likes Airbnbs and the tourists they bring. But it’s sad, he says, that his employees can’t afford to live in town.
Standing behind the outdoor bar on a windy afternoon last month, Temer, a 45-year-old who grew up in Stinson Beach, said that as a business owner he likes Airbnbs and the money-spending tourists they bring in. But it’s sad, he said, that none of his employees can afford to live in town and must commute — which makes it difficult to keep workers.
Mac Bonn, the general manager, said he drives 45 minutes “over the hill,” traversing a winding mountain road, to his home in Fairfax.
“We used to know this as very much a vibrant neighborhood,” says Bruce Bowser, seated with his wife, Marlie de Swart. “A lot if it’s thinned out. A lot of people are older and have passed or moved on.”
In nearby Bolinas, artist Marlie de Swart and husband Bruce Bowser welcomed the new rules, telling the Coastal Commission in a letter that their town “is being changed from a characteristic village to a vacation rental suburb.”
The county ordinance limits the number of short-term rentals in Bolinas to 54. There are now 63.
The septuagenarian couple bought their century-old house with picture windows and redwood ceilings in downtown Bolinas in 1992 for about $230,000. They were stunned when a nearby house recently sold for nearly $3 million after its owner died.
Alas, Google Maps directed tourists to Bolinas. And the Airbnbs kept them there.
Bolinas residents say neighbors have been replaced by short-term guests and empty second homes, making the town feel more like a vacation rental suburb than a cozy hometown.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
During the summers, De Swart said, the town is overrun by visitors whose cars idle on narrow streets for more than an hour as they wait to park. Neighbors have been replaced by short-term guests and empty second homes.
“We used to know this as very much a vibrant neighborhood,” Bowser said. “A lot if it’s thinned out. A lot of people are older and have passed or moved on. We used to look out on this valley, and there were a lot of lights at night. Now, it’s mostly dark.”
Sitting on the couple’s living room table was a copy of the Point Reyes Light newspaper. On Page 11 was a classified ad that read: “In Search of Affordable Home,” placed by their friend, Tess Elliott, the newspaper’s publisher.
“We are the publishers of the Point Reyes Light and the assistant fire chief at the Inverness Fire Department,” the ad reads. “Please help us become permanent residents and continue to contribute to the place we love.”
Elliott, 44, said she and her husband have been running such ads for years. The mother of two young children, Elliott and her family live in an Inverness house that has been “rented to us at well below market rate” for the last decade by “a generous family.”
“It’s very fragile,” she said of life as a renter in Inverness, a town of 1,500 on the Tomales Bay with 93 registered short-term rentals. “People with kids, like us, can only take that so long. You want some stability. You want to invest in a property.”
Lately, she said, “we aren’t feeling very hopeful.”
Frank Leahy, a software engineer, bought his house a mile northwest of the newspaper office in 2020 and got a short-term rental license just before the county, in 2022, enacted a two-year moratorium on new operating licenses.
Leahy and his wife live full time in Inverness. But they travel a few weeks a year and list their house, with a bocce court out front, on Airbnb for $300 to $500 a night. Leahy said the county clamped down too broadly on short-term rental owners, conflating those who rent their homes full time and others who, like him, only rent a few weeks a year.
“I can name people who live up and down the street. If those were just rentals? It would be kind of weird,” he said. “I don’t have a problem with people wanting to rent out their home for a short amount of time.”
Leahy said short-term rentals are being scapegoated for the housing shortage in a place where it is prohibitively difficult to build.
About four years before they bought their home, he and his wife purchased an empty hillside lot nearby, planning to build a house. It took years to get all of the permits and to have the required bird, bat, geological and traffic surveys done. During that time, the cost to build rose by several hundred thousand dollars, he said. They gave up and sold the land.
On a chilly Wednesday morning last month, Dillon Beach was virtually silent — save for the plop-plop of sandals worn by a lone wetsuit-clad surfer walking home, and the tinkling of raindrops on Maggi’s windows.
With its gloomy weather, bad cell service and lack of jobs, Dillon Beach, on the south end of Bodega Bay, isn’t for everyone, Maggi said.
“A lot of the bugs in this place are its feature,” said Maggi, 54. “There’s no town. There’s no main drag. … This place has always been made of vacation homes. It’s not conducive to full-time living. It’s really far from everything.”
If it weren’t for vacationers — who fill the village with laughter and kids and wagons and dogs — the place would be dead most days, he said.
Maggi and his wife bought the house in 2020, when they and their adult children were going stir-crazy amid the pandemic. It was a financial stretch, but renting it out has helped. A gregarious Illinois native, Maggi joked that he had become a “California cliche” — a middle-aged guy with a beach house, a cool van, a border collie mix and a surfboard, even though he can’t surf well.
“We’re really fortunate, and I get it,” he said. But he finds it “kind of shameless” for the county to use the affordable housing crisis to justify cracking down on short-term rentals. The two-year ban on new licenses, he said, did not suddenly make houses cheap.
“You had this moratorium!” he said with a laugh. “How’s your affordable housing going?”
On May 7, Patrick Robinson took a boat out to Año Nuevo Island to survey the sea lions that come to birth on this rocky outcropping north of Monterey Bay.
The shore was littered with dead pups — babies that looked as though they’d been delivered too early and therefore were too weak and small to nurse, or had been dead at birth.
Similar observations were being made further down the coast on San Miguel Island in the Channel Islands — where massive colonies of sea lions gather every year — and as far south as Mexico.
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Robinson, the director of UC Santa Cruz’s Año Nuevo Reserve, said it’s not unusual to see some dead pups this time of year. He said sick or malnourished females occasionally stop on their way south to abort. But the numbers he was seeing were alarming. And with the peak of birthing season still several weeks away, it augurs a potentially serious and worrisome situation.
Stranding coordinators and biologists up and down the California coast say there is clearly something going on, but they still don’t know what.
Tests for bird flu — which has obliterated populations of sea lions and elephant seals in South America — are being processed. So, too, are tests for domoic acid, which has poisoned large numbers of sea lions in the past, as well as other common pathogens.
“In a typical year, one might expect to see 5 to 10,” dead pups, said Megan Moriarty, a veterinarian at UC Santa Cruz. “But we have now counted 250 to 300 dead sea lion pups” on Año Nuevo Island.
She said observations included dead or stillborn pups, aborted fetuses, malnourished pups, and adult females with dystocia — difficult births — who are also thin.
“Unfortunately, widespread premature dead pups have also been reported in the Channel Islands (San Miguel), which is a crucial nursery area for California sea lions,” she said. “The cause and impact of these mortalities remains unknown.”
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She and Sharon Melin, a research biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center, said there are many potential reasons for widespread sea lion pup mortalities, including environmental factors, such as malnourishment, lack of available food related to El Niño, infectious causes (bacteria, viruses such as leptospirosis, influenza, brucella, coxiella, and others), and toxins (such as domoic acid).
And although they both think testing for bird flu is warranted — considering it is a multi-species global outbreak — “we have not observed neurologic or respiratory signs in the sea lions at Año Nuevo,” Moriarty said.
“Reproductive failures and stillborn animals have not been a common finding with influenza A infections in marine mammals globally,” she said.
Melin said about 25,000 pups are born in the Channel Islands every year.
“In some years — particularly in El Niño years, or sometimes heatwave years or other oddities that go on in the environment — we’ll have something like 20% to 30% premature pups,” she said.
She said the pups born this time of year are often not “fully baked.”
“They could just stay in a little bit longer … and probably if you could put them in an incubator and take care of them, they might survive,” she said.
And when necropsies are done on these tiny pups, “you’ll see that the very last thing to develop fully are their lungs. … So they’re just not quite fully developed enough to breathe on their own and to be successful. They’ll sometimes live for a couple days at this point, but can’t nurse and don’t have the motor skills to hold their head up or nurse effectively.”
She said the mothers will usually try hard to get the pups to nurse, “they don’t know what’s going on, and they’re trying to figure out why they’re not nursing. So there’s kind of a lot of interaction that goes on there, but usually the pup will just end up dying after a short period of time.”
Michael Milstein, a spokesperson for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the most recent fisheries survey found “considerable declines in anchovy off the south half of the state, where most of the strandings are.”
He said observations of predators and seabirds were more scattered, “suggesting they are tracking more dispersed prey.” He said surveys farther north have not yet been completed.
This year, fishery managers decided to ban salmon fishing along the coast and in rivers for a second straight year, seeking to help chinook stocks recover.
Stranding coordinators and biologists say the good news is that the California sea lion population is healthy and robust; however, rescue centers are filling up with sick and malnourished pups.
The next quarter of a century will bring considerable climate danger to millions of Americans living in disadvantaged communities, who will not only experience increased exposure to life-threatening extreme heat but also greater hardships from reduced energy reliability, a new nationwide report has found.
The report, published Wednesday by the ICF Climate Center, examines global warming projections in Justice40 communities — those identified by the federal government as marginalized, underserved and overburdened by pollution. The Justice40 Initiative was established under President Biden’s strategy to tackle the climate crisis, which aims to funnel 40% of benefits from certain federal climate, energy and housing investments into these communities.
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But the report outlines a stark future for residents in these areas, including many in California.
Under a moderate-emissions scenario — one in which current fossil fuel consumption peaks in the coming decades and then starts to decline — at least 25 million people in disadvantaged communities will be exposed to health-threatening extreme heat annually by 2050, the report found.
Under a high-emissions scenario, reflecting unchanged “business as usual” greenhouse gas emissions, that number soars to 53 million people. Extreme heat is defined as at least 48 health-threatening heat days per year.
“We were a bit surprised at those numbers — they’re large and meaningful,” said Mason Fried, one of the report’s authors and the director of climate science at ICF, a global consulting firm. “The potential exposure of extreme heat does seem to fall disproportionately on disadvantaged communities.”
The report also notes that about 8 million people in Justice40 communities are already exposed to heat waves that can affect their energy systems, including triggering power outages. But by 2050, that number could rise to 34 million under a moderate-emissions scenario and 43 million under a high-emissions scenario.
Under a moderate-emissions scenario — the most likely one — 41 million Americans outside of Justice40 communities will also be exposed to 48 or more health-threatening heat days by 2050, and 44 million will experience energy-impacting heat, the report found.
The effects will not be equal, however. Many marginalized communities are already at a disadvantage when it comes to extreme heat for a variety of reasons, including the population’s average age and preexisting health conditions such as diabetes and heart disease, which can be exacerbated by heat.
Lack of tree canopy, lack of air conditioning at home or work and inefficient infrastructure can also play a part, said V. Kelly Turner, an associate director of urban planning at UCLA who did not work on the report.
“Everybody’s going to be exposed to more heat, so is the question really, how much more exposed? Or is the question, how many people are living with inadequate infrastructure to keep them safe when it is hot?” said Turner, who also co-directs the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation.
Even still, many Angelenos are better acclimated to higher temperatures than people in cooler parts of the state or country, Turner said.
“It’s about what you’re used to versus what you’re exposed to,” she said.
That’s why the report’s findings about energy impacts are particularly worrisome.
“It’s those northern latitude communities where this might become particularly difficult if the energy grid fails,” she said. “In Northern California [and places] where you aren’t thinking about heat all the time, that’s where maybe you’re not prepared as much.”
Indeed, the report’s projections show an intensification of potential exposure not only in traditionally hot areas, but in regions that historically have not experienced very high temperatures, such as the Northwest and Midwest. Fried referenced the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome, which caused more than 650 deaths in the U.S. and Canada.
“It’s a phase change,” he said. “It’s a fundamentally different kind of exposure, which could have outsize impacts in the future.”
In fact, the report shows, most of California will in some ways fare better than other parts of the country, such as Texas and the Southeast, which are expected to see some of the worst heat outcomes by 2050.
Only a smattering of Justice40 communities in the Golden State will see 48 or more health-threatening heat days under a moderate-emissions scenario, with additional communities appearing under a high-emissions scenario.
But the Central Valley and southeastern California light up like a summer fireworks show when it comes to energy-impacting heat days, the report shows — meaning many people in those areas could suffer from power outages and swelter without air conditioning or other forms of relief.
“It doesn’t take much, or a large increase in extreme heat, to get a tipping point there,” Fried said.
Increasing heat days could affect energy systems across the country by 2050, including in California. Projections are worse under a high-emissions scenario.
(ICF / ClimateSight)
The report outlines a number of high-level recommendations for policymakers, such as identifying at-risk communities and engaging stakeholders in the planning and preparation for these scenarios. It also points out that more federal funding is being made available to tackle extreme heat through Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Among those federal endeavors are two new national centers to support community heat monitoring and resilience, which were announced this week by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
One federal center will be based in Durham, N.C., and the other will be at UCLA and directed by Turner, who described it as “an all-hands-on-deck approach to learn from existing efforts to prevent the worst consequences of extreme heat.”
The center will work to get nonprofit organizations, cities, academic institutions and international and tribal communities into the same room to distill general and specific lessons and help determine the best paths forward, Turner said. It will also fund 10 communities over each of the next three years with the goal of providing recommendations to the federal government about how best to “support local communities as they transition to a more heat-resilient future.”
Turner said California and Los Angeles are doing a good job, but should look beyond efforts such as urban tree canopy improvements and cool roof and pavement installations. There is more to do, including deeper analysis of heat exposure in specific locales and regulations that can have an effect.
Her recommendations include rethinking how the Federal Emergency Management System evaluates heat risk and property damage; ensuring that vulnerable communities have the technical support they need to apply for grants and secure funding; creating low-income housing energy assistance programs; and passing legislation to provide cooling to all residents, Turner said.
She pointed to California’s plan to establish the first statewide ranking system for heat waves as a positive example, as well as new heat monitoring tools from NOAA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The ICF report comes at a moment when heat records are continually being broken around the globe, with 2023 going down as the planet’s hottest year on record.
What’s more, the 2050 projections are for a “typical year,” but Fried said recent experience has shown many years can be atypical due to El Niño or other effects that can make them far warmer, with even worse potential outcomes.
That’s why it’s not only important to help vulnerable populations prepare for a warmer future, but also to continue pushing to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and other sources of planet-warming emissions that are driving the scenarios depicted in the report, he said.
“If we take steps to mitigate emissions, we can do better than what’s pictured here,” he said.
Scores of emaciated brown pelicans, too weak to fly, have been found on Southern California beaches in the last month and taken to an Orange County rescue center, according to its director.
“We’re getting dozens of calls,” Debbie McGuire, executive director of the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center in Huntington Beach, said on Saturday. “People are finding them in parking lots and their backyards.”
The rescued pelicans, she said, “are coming in at half their body weight. They are also very anemic.”
So far, she said, it’s unclear why the pelicans, which feed on anchovies, sardines and mackerel, are suffering from malnutrition.
McGuire said that she contacted scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last week, who told her that there was “plenty of bait out there” for the birds to feed on.
“We don’t know the cause,” she said. “They are just all starving.”
Overwhelmed by the number of ailing birds, the wildlife center has been erecting pup tents to use as pens, she said.
In the last month, the center has taken in 89 brown pelicans, many of them quickly dying, McGuire said. More than 30 have survived, she said, as the center warmed them under heat lamps and gave them fluids.
She said the center sent tissue samples from the birds to labs for testing.
A similar spike in the stranding of brown pelicans up and down the California coast occurred in the spring of 2022. The cause has not been found.
The California brown pelican was listed as an endangered species decades ago after the spread of the chemical DDT caused the shells of their eggs to thin. The eggs became so fragile that nesting mothers crushed them.
After DDT was banned, the pelicans increased in number. The birds were removed from the endangered species list in 2009.
Wildlife officials say that anyone finding an ailing pelican should not touch or try to feed them. They urge people to instead call their local wildlife rehabilitation facilities. The Orange County center can be reached at (714) 374-5587.
Southern California’s rivers and creeks once teemed with large, silvery fish that arrived from the ocean and swam upstream to spawn. But today, these fish are seldom seen.
Southern California steelhead trout have been pushed to the brink of extinction as their river habitats have been altered by development and fragmented by barriers and dams.
Their numbers have been declining for decades, and last week California’s Fish and Game Commission voted to list Southern California steelhead trout as endangered.
Conservation advocates said they hope the designation will accelerate efforts to save the fish and the aquatic ecosystems on which they depend.
“Historically, tens of thousands of these fish swam in Southern California rivers and streams,” said Sandra Jacobson, director of the South Coast region for California Trout, an organization that advocated for the listing.
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“Their numbers have dipped dangerously low due to impacts from habitat loss, fragmentation and urbanization,” Jacobson said. “This landmark decision provides critically important protections for this iconic species.”
The distinct Southern California population is one of eight varieties of steelhead trout in the state. They live in coastal waters and rivers from southern San Luis Obispo County to around the U.S.-Mexico border.
Steelheads typically grow to 2 or 3 feet and sometimes larger.
An adult steelhead trout in San Luis Rey River in northern San Diego County.
(California Department of Fish and Game)
The fish migrate upstream when winter and spring rains send high flows coursing through rivers and creeks. They travel to spawning habitats as far as 30 miles inland — as long as they don’t encounter a barrier along the way.
Unlike salmon, which are part of the same family, steelheads often spawn multiple times before they die.
Southern California steelheads were once caught by Indigenous people. In the early 20th century, anglers found that the fish were abundant in the Ventura and other rivers.
But over the past century, the Los Angeles River and other waterways were lined with concrete. Coastal marshes were hemmed in by development, and barriers and dams fragmented streams.
The Southern California steelhead population was declared endangered by the federal government in 1997. Reviews by federal and state agencies have found that the population has continued to suffer since then.
“The negative trend toward extinction has not reversed,” Jacobson said.
In a 2020 study, researchers found that there had been only 177 documented sightings of Southern California steelhead in the previous 25 years.
California Trout submitted a petition in 2021 urging the state to list the steelhead population as endangered.
Small numbers of fish continue to return to the Santa Clara and Santa Ynez rivers, as well as Malibu Creek, Topanga Creek and other streams from Santa Barbara to San Diego County.
Jacobson and other conservationists have been advocating for accelerating plans to remove obsolete dams that block fish, including Matilija Dam in the Ventura River watershed and Rindge Dam in the Malibu Creek canyon. They’ve also been seeking to expedite the removal of barriers on Trabuco Creek and the Santa Margarita River.
Other efforts to help steelhead trout include removing non-native species, reducing water diversions and groundwater pumping to ensure sufficient flows in streams and restoring watersheds’ natural ecosystems, Jacobson said.
“Southern steelhead are crucial indicators of watershed health,” Jacobson said.
She said restoring the “aquatic highways” the fish use to reach their spawning habitats will also bring benefits for people, including safeguarding sources of clean drinking water.
“I am hopeful for steelhead recovery,” Jacobson said. California’s classification of the population as endangered, she said, will help advance a state conservation plan and add urgency to the work of removing barriers in rivers.
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The steelhead trout that remain in Southern California face other threats, including warmer waters and more intense droughts and wildfires as a result of climate change.
“These are populations that are experiencing the warmest conditions, really on the leading edge of climate change effects. And then you layer on top of that just how densely populated Southern California is,” said Andrew Rypel, a professor of fish ecology and director of UC Davis’ Center for Watershed Sciences. “All of these steelhead streams in Southern California are extremely impacted.”
He said that with so many factors weighing against the steelhead trout, the additional protections could make a significant difference.
“It’s like the most challenging fish conservation issue I can imagine,” Rypel said. “How do you manage a whole landscape for fish conservation in the middle of one of the biggest urban areas in the world? It’s very challenging.”
This population of steelhead, he said, is effectively “up against the clock.”
Removal of barriers to spawning areas is key, he said.
“It’s a really cool fish. It’s a Southern California fish, and it’s up to the people of that region to watch out for it and to ensure that future generations are going to be able to watch this cool fish and protect it — and by way of doing that, protect the ecosystem.”
A San Francisco man suspected of vandalizing a Nob Hill mosque was arrested Wednesday evening while visiting the scene of his alleged crime for the second time in as many days.
San Francisco resident Robert Gray, 35, was booked on one felony count of vandalism with damage of more than $400 and a misdemeanor violation of civil rights by damaging another property. He currently sits in a county jail.
Neither Gray nor a representative were reached for comment.
San Francisco Police officers responded to a call from congregants of Masjid al-Tawheed mosque around 7:55 p.m. on Wednesday. Mosque-goers told police that Gray was the man who had vandalized their sanctuary on April 4, having recognized him for security footage.
Arriving officers detained Gray after they concluded he matched the description of the suspect wanted in the attack.
“Through the course of their investigation, officers developed probable cause [for] arrest,” Police spokesperson Paulina Henderson said in a statement.
Henderson said the investigation was still active and police were looking for more information.
Surveillance video obtained by the San Francisco Standard shows a man with a skateboard smashing multiple mosque windows on April 4.
The man returned to the mosque, according to the Standard, on Tuesday and Wednesday. During the latter incident, mosque congregants confronted Gray and distracted him long enough to call police, who arrived in time to arrest him.
“Community members were living in fear for the last two weeks,” said Yemeni American Aseel Fara, 24, a Masjid al-Tawheed mosque member and a San Francisco Immigrant Rights Commissioner.
Fara said the incident shocked many community members who emigrated to San Francisco because of its pluralistic society.
He said he received a call from another Bay Area mosque that suffered similar vandalism incident wanting to review surveillance footage to see if Gray was involved.
“You don’t expect this here,” he said. “This has been very divisive and hopefully we can begin to heal thanks to this arrest.”
The news of Gray’s arrest was celebrated by the Council on American-Islamic Relations Bay Area chapter.
“We are relieved that an arrest has been made in these distressing incidents,” CAIR Bay Area Executive Director Zahra Billoo said in a statement. “It’s important for our community to see tangible actions being taken to protect our places of worship, where everyone has the right to feel safe and secure.”
Billoo said that the number of complaints of Islamophobia made nationwide is at a 30-year high.
There were 8,061 reports received by CAIR last year. The organization said nearly half of those complaints took place in the last three months since the Oct. 7 Hamas’ assault on Israel that sparked a war, resulting in the killing of 30,000-plus Palestinians by Israeli forces. That number of Islamophobic complaints represents a 56% increase in incidents from 2022 to 2023, according to the organization.
“This arrest sends a clear message that hate-driven behaviors will not be overlooked and serves as a reminder of the ongoing challenges we face in combating Islamophobia,” Billoo said.
Thousands of Californians who won’t see their home insurance renewed by State Farm this summer are homeowners in Los Angeles County, with some upscale Westside neighborhoods hit hard, according to the insurer’s recent filings with the Department of Insurance.
A majority of the insurer’s customers in neighborhoods in West Los Angeles as well as in or near the Santa Monica Mountains including Bel-Air, Pacific Palisades and Woodland Hills are going to lose their coverage.
The State Farm move affects some of the county’s toniest neighborhoods — adding another layer of expense and financial risk for homeowners in areas that were already costly and imperiled by wildfires. Older homeowners and those with comparatively lower incomes who bought when housing was much cheaper could be hard hit.
Denise Hardin, president of State Farm, explained the company’s decision in a March 20 letter to Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, stating that rate hikes that were recently approved by the Department of Insurance amid high inflation would be insufficient to restore the company’s financial strength.
“We must now take action to reduce our overall exposure to be more commensurate with the capital on hand to cover such exposure, as most insurers in California have already done,” she wrote. “We have been reluctant to take this step, recognizing how difficult it will be for impacted policyholders, in addition to our independent contractor agents who are small business owners and employers in their local California communities.
“A financial failure of [State Farm] will detrimentally impact the entire market,” Hardin added, “an outcome we are all trying to avoid.”
The letter also included several pages of ZIP Codes and the number of homeowners who would lose their coverage this summer.
In Pacific Palisades, according to the letter, 69.4% of the 2,342 policyholders — or about 1,600 — will lose coverage. In Brentwood, 61.5% of State Farm’s 2,114 customers there will lose their policies, or about 1,300 non-renewals.
Of the 1,805 policyholders in Woodland Hills, 60% — or about 1,090 — won’t be renewed, while in Bel-Air, 67% of 987 customers, about 660 customers, will be affected,
Orinda in Contra Costa County and Los Gatos in Santa Clara County also will see a high number of policyholders lose coverage.
As part of its assessment, the insurer looked at communities in areas prone to wildfires as well as those at risk of fires following an earthquake, which included communities such as Beverly Hills and Westwood.
Thelma Waxman, president of the Brentwood Homeowners Assn., whose 1,200 members own about 4,000 properties, said it had been a stressful time for members, and for residents living near high-risk fire zones.
Losing State Farm coverage “is the No. 1 topic of discussion” among association members, she said. “Everybody is nervous.”
Last year, the association created its first California Fire Safety Council and worked closely with My Safe L.A., a nonprofit providing fire and safety education, as well as the Los Angeles Fire Department in an attempt to reduce fire risks in the area.
Waxman said the formation of the safety council was partly in response to insurance companies dropping policyholders in the state.
“At first we thought we could get a discount,” she said, “but then it became about trying to keep our policies.”
Waxman said she’d been urging residents who will lose their home insurance with State Farm to start shopping now for a new home insurance policy as it’s difficult to find insurers writing policies in the state.
State Farm said those losing their policies would be notified between July 3 and Aug. 20.
State Assemblywoman Jacqui Irwin (D-Thousand Oaks), whose district includes many of the affected neighborhoods, expressed concern but hoped that the state could end the crisis by altering regulations to encourage insurers to “return to the business of writing policies for Californians and their properties.”
Insurance companies have cited high inflation, catastrophe exposure, the cost of reinsurance (a type of insurance for insurance companies) and the limitations posed by decades-old insurance regulations as reasons for scaling back policies in the state.
Left with no other choice, a number of Californians have turned to the FAIR Plan as a last resort. Funded by the insurers doing business in California, the Fair Access to Insurance Requirement plan provides more limited coverage as a fallback for property owners unable to find conventional policies they can afford.
But the enrollment surge is putting a financial strain on the state insurer as it faces a potential loss of $311 billion, up from $50 billion in 2018.
State officials said the FAIR Plan had a surplus of $200 million and was at risk of insolvency should a catastrophic event occur.
Lara has proposed a set of new rules that would allow insurers to raise rates to cover reinsurance costs and projected losses from catastrophic fires, but also require that they provide coverage for more homes in California’s canyons and hills.
The proposals, which aim to move people off the FAIR Plan and slow the increase in premiums, have won support from insurance industry trade groups and some consumer groups, although some consumer advocates, such as Consumer Watchdog, have criticized the proposed rules.
In the letter to Lara, Hardin said State Farm would continue to cooperate with the state in finding a resolution to the home insurance crisis.
“We are acutely aware of the political challenges that the actions needed to improve [State Farm’s] financial position pose to broader reform efforts,” she wrote. “Please know that we have an ongoing desire and commitment to collaborate with you and your staff, as well as the Governor’s office, to achieve these reforms as quickly as possible.”
As evening fell in her Glendale apartment, Dara Bruce fed her pet rats George and Fred, poured herself a glass of water, and dialed a complete stranger to discuss the dangerous virus detected in his blood.
“Is now a good time to talk?” she asked.
Bruce is a volunteer in the enduring fight against hepatitis C. The stealthy killer claims the lives of roughly 14,000 Americans each year, even though it can be readily cured with a few months of pills. Many people have no idea they are infected, going years without symptoms before the blood-borne virus devastates the liver.
Yet public funding to combat hepatitis C is so scant that in Los Angeles County — an area more populous than many states — the crucial work of contacting those who are infected is being done by unpaid emissaries like Bruce through a fledgling initiative called Project Connect.
A partnership between USC and the county public health department, Project Connect trains volunteers to call people who have tested positive for the virus to make sure they know their results and encourage them to get the medication they need.
Sitting behind her desk lined with anatomy textbooks — the artifacts of the master’s degree in integrative anatomical sciences that she had just earned from USC — Bruce double checked that she had the right person before giving him the news. His reaction made her brighten.
“Oh, beautiful!” she exclaimed after the man told her he had been treated. “I love to hear that.”
It isn’t something she hears a lot. Among those contacted by Project Connect through mid-January, less than a third had been treated. That echoes the dismal statistics across the U.S., where only about a third of people who test positive start treatment within a year.
Across the country, the number of new hepatitis C infections reported annually more than doubled between 2014 and 2021, topping 5,000. That same year, more than 107,000 longtime infections were newly discovered, according to federal data.
Some untreated infections may clear up on their own, but many will endure, leaving people at risk of illness and death. People with long-term infections can develop cancer or end up with liver scarring so grave they need an organ transplant.
Experts say the high number of untreated patients is tied to obstacles such as doctors unnecessarily shunting patients to specialists and insurers making it difficult to obtain the pills, which can cost upward of $20,000.Many don’t realize they’re infected: One in six people reached by Project Connect volunteers didn’t know their test results.
The virus has taken an especially heavy toll on people who are often disconnected from health systems, including those who inject drugs or are unhoused. And many at-risk people are unaware of the threat, including baby boomers who were infected long before the virus had been identified.
Having an effective hepatitis C medication on the market isn’t enough to solve the problem, said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, an infectious disease specialist at USC. It has to reach the patients who need it.
“You need people to be aware of their infection. You need people to be seen by a treating provider. You need people to get the medications prescribed,” he said.
The problem is that “this is a disease without resources,” said Dr. Prabhu Gounder, medical director of the viral hepatitis unit at the L.A. County Department of Public Health.
That’s a common complaint across the country. In a national survey conducted by hepatitis organizations, only 3% of local jurisdictions said they could make progress toward hepatitis elimination goals at the current level of federal funding.
“It’s incredibly dangerously underfunded,” said Anne Donnelly, a member of the California Hepatitis Alliance who works with the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.
The Biden administration has been pushing for billions of dollars to wipe out hepatitis C, arguing that the investment would pay off in the long run as Medicaid recipients avoid liver ailments that require costly care. An analysis released by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the initiative would save the federal government more than $13 billion over a decade, exceeding its upfront costs.
Nobody in public health is unaware of “what needs to be done to address hepatitis C,” said Sonia Canzater, associate director of the Infectious Diseases Initiative at Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. “The problem has always been the resourcing and getting the political and the social will behind it.”
In Los Angeles, Gounder said budget limitations have made it impossible to roll out a sweeping program for people with hepatitis C.
But “what if we were to just give them a call and make sure that they’re aware of their infection? Provide some education?” Gounder wondered. “That alone is not going to solve this epidemic. But we thought that was a low-resource thing that we could do to try to move the needle.”
The result was Project Connect. It began in April, tasking volunteers with reaching roughly 3,000 county residents, and is now adding another 3,000 cases to its rolls.
Klausner said the project relies on the part-time efforts of five university staffers and anywhere from six to 12 student volunteers, many of whom need to log hours of field experience for graduate degrees in public health.
The public health department taught them the rules about patient privacy along with some basics on the virus and its treatment. The USC volunteers now devote at least four hours each a week to and texting people about their test results, relying on reports that come into the county after patients test positive.
Learning about the ongoing toll of the virus “fired me up,” said Bruce, a 36-year-old former aerial arts performer.
Dara Bruce poses for a portrait in her home office inj Glendale on Jan. 11, 2024.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Her interactions with hepatitis C patients left her struck by “how prevalent it seemed to be across people from all different walks of life” — but also by the vast disparities in what had happened to people after they learned about their infections. “There were such different stories.”
Some people told her they wanted treatment but had no way to get to a doctor or couldn’t take time off work. There were also patients who didn’t feel a sense of urgency to get the pills, since it can take years for serious health problems to develop.
To them, it “just didn’t really seem like something they needed to get taken care of right now,” Bruce said.
More than 70% of the patients on volunteers’ lists can’t be reached, often because the phone numbers in their files were wrong. The team doesn’t have the resources to track people down in government databases or on the streets, the way that public health departments do for some other illnesses.
L.A. County’s public health department is not spending any of its own money on Project Connect, relying entirely on the USC volunteers and some support from county employees. Hiring a small team to tackle such work would cost roughly $250,000, Gounder estimated — not a massive sum but “not feasible with the budget we have.”
His viral hepatitis team gets roughly $1.2 million in grant funding from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the California Department of Public Health, but that must cover costs for hepatitis A and B as well as C.
In comparison, the county receives roughly $97 million in state and federal grants to address HIV. Gounder said funding for hepatitis C has been so scant that he cannot determine the exact number of cases in the county, but statewide estimates suggest it rivals or exceeds the number of HIV cases.
Both diseases can be deadly and put other people at risk of infection if left untreated. But the push to get antiretroviral treatment to HIV patients was bolstered by “an incredibly active community” that included wealthy people, said Dana Goldman, dean of the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy.
The same kind of mobilization hasn’t happened for patients with hepatitis C, he said, but “that doesn’t mean they’re any less deserving.”
Relying on volunteers has its limits: Among other things, it means the work can be interrupted during university breaks or exam periods, Klausener said. And phone calls only go so far: Among the untreated patients Project Connect was able to follow up with after three months, only 20% had gotten the pills.
Klausner believes the county has a responsibility to fund paid staff. And he wants the outreach teams to be able to schedule people for treatment and assist them with transportation vouchers, child care or other aid — the “linkage to care” he said has been missing.
But Bruce said that even a phone call can be meaningful for those on the other end of the line. “This is about listening to people and their stories,” she said.
In her Glendale apartment, Bruce asked if the man on the phone had time for a few more questions. The answers would help officials get a clearer picture of who is getting treated and who is not.
“I’m glad you’re a success story for treatment,” she told him before wishing him good night.
Bruce called the next number, only to be hung up on. She called again and left a message with her phone number.
In 2022, not long after a new owner bought the Highland Park rental home where Ana Lopez, 66, lives with her husband, the tenants began receiving offers to leave. At first it was about $22,000, she said. One of her neighbors took the offer and left. But Lopez, desperate to stay in the rent-controlled home where she has lived for more than two decades and pays $800 a month, repeatedly turned down the offers, even when the amount increased to $100,000.
After taxes, she felt, the money was not enough to remain long-term in her community, where the average monthly rent is more than $2,000 and the median sale price of a home is more than $1 million.
She’s felt pressured to go and has been informed that the owner plans to demolish the property. But, she says, “We’re going to keep fighting to stay in our home.”
Buyout offers — also known as “cash for keys” — have become a frequently used tool for landlords hoping to get tenants to leave rent-controlled apartments without going through a formal eviction process, which can take time, be costly and is governed by strict rules. But it has been difficult to say exactly how often renter buyouts happen across Los Angeles. Last week, data released by City Controller Kenneth Mejia’s office shed some light on the subject, showing that from 2019-23 nearly 5,000 “cash for keys” agreements were filed with the city.
Neighborhoods in Koreatown, Echo Park and Mid-Wilshire topped the list for the number of agreements. Lopez’s Highland Park neighborhood was also among the top ZIP codes.
In a statement, Mejia’s office said “tenant buyouts are a tactic that landlords use to compel tenants to move out of RSO (Rent Stabilization Ordinance) units or rent-controlled units, often so landlords can re-rent these units to new tenants at market-rate prices. In many cases, buyout amounts are not enough for tenants to afford continuing to live in the City of Los Angeles long term.”
Tenant advocates say the numbers reported to the city fall short of fully capturing the extent to which cash for keys is happening across the city. They note that the data include only agreements — not the offers, which often happen informally with a person knocking on the door or making a phone call. Even the agreements themselves, advocates say, may not end up being filed with the city.
“The number of such notices filed with LAHD is likely a tiny fraction of such agreements,” said Gary Blasi, professor of law emeritus at UCLA School of Law.
Landlords say the buyout agreements can be a useful tool, giving tenants an incentive to move and creating a win-win for owners, who get their units back, and renters, who leave with some money to help pay for housing going forward. The average amount of a buyout, according to the data was $24,704.
But tenant advocates say even that amount — or more — is often not enough to allow low-income families to continue living in L.A. neighborhoods where the cost of housing has soared in recent years, especially after taxes.
“When it comes as a lump sum you think, ‘That’s a lot of money’ but you also need to know what it’s going to cost you to stay housed on the open market,” Blasi said. “What looks to be like a big lump sum windfall could actually leave the tenant in a much worse situation than they are.”
Tenants and advocates also say that people who turn down the offers are often met with harassment by landlords.
“We’ve had tenants report that people come by their home every day at dinner banging on the door telling them they really should take the offer, or people who come by really late at night,” said Cynthia Strathmann, executive director for the nonprofit advocacy group Strategic Actions for a Just Economy. “And there’s other kinds of harassment, persistent neglect — a landlord will refuse to fix anything in the apartment and then really insistently offer them cash for keys until the pressure of living in an apartment that’s really in terrible condition will prompt the tenant to move.”
Strathmann said communities at the top of the controller’s list, like Koreatown and Echo Park, are ones where there’s an especially big difference between the monthly rent paid by a long-term tenant in a rent-controlled unit and what a landlord could command on the current market.
Chris Gray, president of the property management company Moss & Co., said cash for keys agreements became especially important tools for landlords after the pandemic, when many tenants racked up large amounts of unpaid rent debt.
“Landlords are in a tough position and all they want to do is get someone into their unit to pay rent,” he said.
An eviction through the courts can take months and cost tens of thousands of dollars in attorney fees, Gray noted.
“When you look at a whole picture like that, a landlord would be happy to forgive past rent debt of $30,000, $40,000, or whatever it may be, to get them out and avoid the whole eviction process.”
The city began regulating buyout agreements and collecting information about them in 2017 after tenant advocates began protesting what they saw as an increasing practice of property owners displacing residents of rent-controlled units without fully informing them of their rights.
The Tenant Buyout Notification Program requires landlords to provide information to renters when making a buyout offer. They must inform tenants that they are entitled to minimum compensation, which ranges from $9,900 to $24,650, depending on various factors including how long the tenant has lived in the home and whether they are elderly or disabled. Tenants are also told that they have the right to refuse or rescind the offer and to consult with an attorney or the housing department.
Under the program, landlords are also required to file any agreements with the L.A. housing department. Those filings are the basis for the analysis that was released by the controller’s office.
According to the data, buyout filings peaked in 2019, when there were 1,209 agreements. Last year there were 789 agreements filed with the city.
The buyout ordinance allows tenants to “bring a private right of action against a landlord who violates” the rules and to recover damages and a penalty of $500. But that’s a step many low-income residents are unlikely to take, Blasi said.
“I think the city should look again at the tenant buyout notification program and look to put some teeth into it and do some serious outreach to tenants and landlords about the existence of it,” Blasi said. “That can only help everybody who is operating in good faith.”
Some of those taking Ozempic or Wegovy are learning that too much of a good thing is never good.
Semaglutide, the medication prescribed under the brand names Ozempic, for treating Type 2 diabetes, and Wegovy, for weight management, works by mimicking the hormone GLP-1, which is released by the gut after eating. The hormone has several effects in the body, such as stimulating insulin production, slowing gastric emptying and lowering blood sugar.
It has been hailed for its weight-loss benefits, most conspicuously among celebrities. Oprah Winfrey recently said she uses weight-loss medication and lauded “the fact that there’s a medically approved prescription for managing weight and staying healthier, in my lifetime.” She said it felt “like a gift.”
But between Jan. 1 and Nov. 30 this year, at least 2,941 Americans reported overdose exposures to semaglutide, according to a recent report from America’s Poison Centers, a national nonprofit representing 55 poison centers in the United States.
California accounted for about 350 of the reports, or around 12%, according to Raymond Ho, the managing director of the California Poison Control System. Ho said the number roughly corresponds to the proportion of California’s population to the rest of the country.
The nationwide number of semaglutide overdoses this year is more than double the 1,447 reported in 2022, which was more than double the 607 semaglutide overdoses reported in 2021.
There were only 364 reported semaglutide overdoses in 2020 and 196 in 2019, less than 10% of the number that occurred so far this year.
America’s Poison Centers released the data with a disclaimer that the figures likely represent an undercount in the number of cases involving semaglutide, as the center only included those voluntarily reported to poison control centers.
“It is an alarming trend from a poison center perspective,” Ho said. “We get the usual dosing error calls, and all of a sudden there’s an explosion of people calling much more regularly about this.”
The use of semaglutide and other GLP-1 imitators has surged in popularity over the last year as a quick and effective way to manage weight loss. More than 4 million prescriptions for semaglutide were issued in the United States in 2020, according to federal data, and usage of the drug has continued to grow since then.
Dr. Stephen Petrou, an emergency medicine physician and toxicology fellow with California Poison Control, said there were multiple factors contributing to the increase in overdoses.
“Not only is there rising social popularity” of the drug, Petrou said, “but there’s also wider FDA indications for use.”
Semaglutide was patented by the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk in 2012 and has been available in the United States since the FDA approved it in 2017. The drug was originally released as Ozempic for Type 2 diabetics to manage blood sugar levels. Moderate weight loss was found to be a common side effect of the drug, and the FDA approved a different formulation of semaglutide, called Wegovy, for that purpose in 2021.
Ho and Petrou said the different formulations of semaglutide could help explain why it has led to so many more overdoses than other drugs of its class. Both are administered via weekly injections, with Wegovy in single-use pens and Ozempic in needles that can vary in dosage. Standard dosages range from 0.25 mg to 2.4 mg for weekly injections, depending on the prescription.
“Someone who is unable to get Wegovy can resort to using Ozempic instead, because it is the same medication, but they may start to [adjust] their dose” upward, Petrou said. “That’s when they might encounter problems.”
Ho and Petrou said the vast majority of semaglutide overdose reports are accidental, either due to patients not waiting a week between doses or by misunderstanding dosing instructions. Unlike the GLP-1 hormone, which is rapidly metabolized by the body, semaglutide and similar medications have much longer half-lives, meaning the medication can build up inside the body if not enough time elapses between doses.
Furthermore, semaglutide can also be taken orally as a daily pill — sold under the name Rybelsus — but overdoses are rarely reported.
“We’re not seeing cases of mis-administration or toxicity or overdose with that medication,” Petrou said.
Ho and Petrou explained the signs of semaglutide overdose can resemble those of hypoglycemia, also known as low blood sugar. Symptoms can begin with increased heart rate, sweating, dizziness and irritability. More serious cases can cause confusion, delirium and coma.
“If they have hypoglycemia, the good majority of them will have to be admitted to the hospital and monitored and watched closely, because of how long these drugs last,” Ho said.
Ho encourages everyone who is prescribed semaglutide to thoroughly read the medication’s label and follow the dosing instructions listed.
“We always say this: The dose makes the poison,” Ho said.
Anyone who needs emergency poison assistance or has other poisoning-related inquiries can call the national Poison Helpline at (800) 222-1222 or visit the Poison Help website.
The U.S. Department of Transportation on Monday announced a $140-million fine against Southwest Airlines following the company’s disastrous 2022 travel season that was highlighted by thousands of canceled flights and millions of frustrated fliers.
The fine, assessed for “numerous violations of consumer protection laws,” was “30 times larger than any previous DOT penalty for consumer protection violations,” according to a DOT statement.
Southwest canceled nearly 17,000 flights and stranded more than 2 million passengers during last year’s Christmas and New Year’s holidays, according to DOT.
During the travel crisis, “Southwest confronted unprecedented operational, volume-related challenges yet acted with diligence and in good faith,” the airline said in a statement Monday.
Southwest has put in place “significant investments and initiatives that accelerate operational resiliency, enhance cross-team collaboration and bolster overall preparedness for winter operations,” President and Chief Executive Officer Bob Jordan said.
Though it’s hard to imagine a worse outcome for air travelers than last year’s debacle, newly released data show that passenger complaints filed with the DOT across all airlines more than doubled in the first five months of 2023 from the same period in 2022.
The data, analyzed by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, showed a 109% year-over-year increase in complaints against airlines from January through May. The number of air travelers increased 14% in the span.
More than a third of the complaints addressed flight scheduling, including cancellations, delays and issues with connections, the data showed. About a fifth of the complaints related to problems with refunds.
The third most common complaint was lost or damaged items. These were similar in proportion to complaints from 2022, PIRG noted, but the volume of complaints increased dramatically.
A separate document, the DOT’s Air Travel Consumer Report, notes that the number of mishandled bags jumped in September 2023 to 198,256, with a rate of .53 bags mishandled for every 100 passengers flying. This is up from 177,304 bags and a rate of .48 bags for every 100 passengers in September 2022, according to the most recent DOT data.
The agency will have to adjust, as “consumer complaints are not returning to pre-pandemic levels,” the report states.
Complaints in 2020 reached the highest levels ever recorded, but 2023’s total will be significantly higher if the trend from January through May continues.
With the Christmas travel season ramping up, fines like those imposed on Southwest Airlines could give travelers some comfort.
“If airlines fail their passengers, we will use the full extent of our authority to hold them accountable,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Lakers basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was scheduled to undergo hip surgery Saturday after falling down at a concert in Los Angeles, according to a spokesperson.
Abdul-Jabbar, 76, was treated Friday night by Los Angeles Fire Department paramedics and transported to a local hospital, his business partner and spokesperson Deborah Morales said in a statement provided to The Times.
“Last night while attending a concert, Kareem had an accidental fall and broke his hip,” Morales said.
“We are all deeply appreciative of all the support for Kareem, especially from the Los Angeles Fire Department who assisted Kareem on site and the amazing medical team and doctors at UCLA Hospital who are taking great care of Kareem now,” Morales added.
The Lakers superstar and six-time NBA most valuable player has added to his stellar basketball career as a writer, activist and humanitarian who has spoken on a number of social justice causes. He is the author of more than a dozen books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 by former President Obama.
Abdul-Jabbar writes about sports, politics and culture on his Substack newsletter and has written a number of opinion pieces in other publications, including The Times.
In a first in California Mega Millions history, two tickets purchased from the same Chevron station on Ventura Boulevard in Encino hit the $395-million jackpot, potentially creating controversy over the retailer’s share of the winnings.
The chances of winning a Mega Millions jackpot stand at an astonishing 1 in 302,575,350. The prospect of two separate transactions winning with the same numbers at one location can seem implausible, especially considering there are 23,000 lottery retailers across the state.
Whoever owns the two tickets would split the jackpot, but it is still unclear whether the two tickets were purchased by the same person or two players, which could result in controversy over whether the gas station owner is awarded $1 million or more for selling the tickets.
As of Monday, the jackpot has yet to be claimed, according to lottery spokesperson Carolyn Becker.
The identity of the person or people who purchased the tickets remains unknown. However, Becker said the lottery’s gaming system meticulously tracks each transaction statewide, and the law enforcement team investigating the winnings knows whether it was a single transaction or two separate ones.
The California Lottery isn’t revealing this information to “protect the integrity of the security review process once there’s a prize claim.” Potential jackpot winners coming forward must undergo a vetting process, involving a California Lottery law enforcement officer interview to verify that they are legitimate winners.
“It’s a really rigorous vetting process, particularly for these big jackpots, to make sure that the winner is actually the right winner and not some bad actor trying to claim to be the winner,” Becker said.
Becker said it could take weeks or months to release the information regarding the number of transactions. The identities will also be disclosed, adhering to California laws that require the lottery to publicize the winner’s complete name and location within a year.
Although two winning tickets being sold in one location is unusual, Becker said it is not impossible.
“Perhaps one person wanted to try their luck on two different rows for whatever reason, or maybe a couple of buddies wanted to try their chances with the same exact numbers,” Becker said.
When store manager Nitessh Karla arrived at the gas station Saturday morning, a barrage of voice mails greeted him, with one from state lottery officials telling him his store had sold the winning tickets.
“I got a telephone call [saying] ‘Your store hit the jackpot.’ Then I checked the machine and found out someone won the lotto,” Karla said.
Apart from the occasional Scratcher winner collecting a smaller jackpot, Karla said he had never witnessed a win like this in his nine years at the store.
Karla is skeptical that two customers purchased the winning tickets.
“Personally, I think it is the same guy. Maybe he forgets he already bought it and buys it again,” Karla said.
How the tickets were purchased is pivotal to whether Karla’s store receives only $1 million or nearly $2 million in lottery bonuses.
A retailer who sells a winning ticket is eligible to receive a bonus of half of 1% of the jackpot, capped at $1 million. But if a retailer sells two tickets that both win on the same game, it could be considered two transactions and result in more than $2 million in bonuses.
Becker said this bonus payout is “unprecedented in California in terms of a jackpot of this magnitude.” The California Lottery’s legal team is reviewing the regulations’ language, she said.
“Our lawyers are looking at it because if it’s one person, the retailer will get a million dollars,” Becker said. “The question is, do they get more than that? Do they get two bonuses that add up to more than a million dollars?”
The winning numbers for Friday’s game were 21, 26, 53, 66, 70, and the Mega number 13. This was the 10th Mega Million jackpot won in 2023.
The jackpot for the next Mega Millions drawing Tuesday will be $20 million.
With the store’s newfound notoriety, Karla said he has seen an increase in customers buying lotto tickets and Scratchers, hoping the store’s luck hasn’t dried out yet.
For as long as people have watched tents take over sidewalks and RVs deteriorate under freeways, politicians have been making promises about solving homelessness in Los Angeles.
And for just as long, those same politicians have been breaking them.
This is undoubtedly why, back in March, as Mayor Karen Bass was approaching her first 100 days in office, only 17% of Angelenos believed her administration would make “a lot of progress” getting people off the streets, according to a Suffolk University/Los Angeles Times poll. Far more — 45% — predicted just “a little progress” would be made.
I was thinking about this deep well of public skepticism while listening to Bass, all smiles in a bright green suit on Wednesday morning, enthusiastically explain why the progress she has actually made is a reason for renewed optimism.
Flanked by members of the L.A. City Council outside a school in Hollywood, she announced that her administration had, in its first year, moved more than 21,694 people out of encampments and into interim housing. That’s an increase of 28% over the final year of former Mayor Eric Garcetti’s administration, taking into account the work of various government programs, including Bass’ signature one, Inside Safe.
In addition, the majority of those directed to motel and hotel rooms, congregate shelters and tiny homes have decided to stay, rather than head back out onto the streets.
“We have tried to set a new tone in the city. This is an example of that new tone. Forty-one people used to sleep here, and now it’s clear,” Bass said Wednesday over the shrieks of schoolchildren. “Students and parents don’t need to walk around tents on their way to school, and the Angelenos who were living here do not need to die on our streets.”
It was a convincing message, backed up by a thick packet of numbers distributed to reporters at City Hall a few hours later.
But numbers are funny. They can be crunched in many ways and interpreted to mean many different things.
As my Times colleague David Zahniser pointed out, all of the people who now live in interim housing are still considered homeless by the federal government. And while Bass had originally thought most of them would be there for only three to six months, it’s now looking more like 18 months to two years. Permanent housing is that scarce.
So, numbers-wise, don’t expect a decline in the next annual homelessness count, which is scheduled for January. There might even be an increase, thanks to the expiration of pandemic-era tenant protections. As of the last count, there were more than 46,000 unhoused people living in the city, mostly in encampments.
But again, numbers are funny. They tend not to mean half as much as what people see and experience for themselves, just like the disconnect between public perceptions of crime and actual crime data.
So, when Bass declares at a news conference that “we have proved this year that we will make change,” and she talks about the encampment that used to be where she’s standing, and all the encampments that her administration has cleared, even if a few more tents have popped up down the street, skeptical Angelenos just might believe her.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s not such a bad thing.
“What I see most powerfully is increased hope,” Va Lecia Adams Kellum, chief executive of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, told reporters on Wednesday. “Hope among the folks who are living in those encampments who had given up and [thought] they’ll always live in that level of despair. Hope that the community now believes that we could possibly get out of this terrible crisis.”
Kellie Waldon, 54, cries near what’s left of her encampment, left, as Skid Row West is dismantled under the 405 Freeway along Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles in October. Waldon was hoping to receive housing through the city’s Inside Safe program, like others in the encampment had. “You get your hopes up and you don’t know what to believe,” Waldon said.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Hope is a thing difficult to quantify, especially among people who have been homeless for years, and have suffered so much and have been let down so often by government.
I’ve talked to some who took a chance and decided to leave their tents and RVs, and are now thrilled to be in a motel room with a door, running water and air conditioning. Others have had it with curfews and jail-like rules, and are getting tired of waiting on promised permanent housing.
I’ve also talked to those who have been booted out of interim housing for one reason or another, and are back on the streets. They are feeling hopeless, like many cash-strapped Angelenos who are on the verge of an eviction.
But peak hopelessness? That’s what we saw on the first days of December.
At a hastily called news conference, Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore announced that officers were searching for a man who had fatally shot three homeless people — one sleeping on a couch in an alley and another while pushing a shopping cart.
“This is a killer preying on the unhoused,” Bass said.
Moore and Bass didn’t know then, but their suspect, Jerrid Joseph Powell, had already been arrested by Beverly Hills police after a traffic stop in which his $60,000 BMW was linked to a deadly follow-home robbery.
Police have yet to elaborate on Powell’s alleged motive, but Bass brought up the horrific case several times on Wednesday — and with good reason. Violence and acts of cruelty against people living on the streets are increasingly common not just locally, but nationally.
Advocates blame this trend of nastiness on the pandemic-era surge in homelessness, particularly in unsheltered homelessness, and the subsequent spike in interactions between housed and unhoused residents. Fear and frustration can lead to dehumanization and that, in turn, can lead to violence, said Dr. Margot Kushel, director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative.
“I do really worry that it’s become normalized in public discourse to speak about people experiencing homelessness as, like, a problem for those who are not homeless — as opposed to fundamentally a massive societal failure that’s left usually older, vulnerable people terrified and totally unprotected,” she told me. “And I do think that there is a connection, like the more we dehumanize people, the less protected they are.”
Stephanie Klasky-Gamer has watched this happen in real-time as president and CEO of L.A. Family Housing. The seeming permanency of encampments, and the trash, fires and unsanitary conditions they often generate, have led to what she describes as widespread impatience.
“I don’t mean big, systemic impatience, like ‘I wish we could end homelessness faster,’” she said. “It’s the ‘I’m just sick of seeing you in front of me’ kind of impatience.”
On some level, she gets it, though. As does Kushel. As do I.
“It has to be OK to say, ‘Yeah, this sucks that I’m walking my kids to school and I’m walking over people in tents,’” Kushel told me. “But there has to be a way to hold that with being able to recognize how we got to this position and also how we’re going to get out. And to sort of restore [our] collective humanity.”
For Klasky-Gamer, this has meant focusing on what has changed since Bass became mayor.
“I know how much good is getting done,” she told me. “The frustration I may feel at seeing the tent every day I turn the corner, at least I can temper it knowing that 10 people yesterday moved into an apartment. These three people haven’t. But these 10 did.”
RVs in an encampment along West Jefferson Boulevard near the Ballona Wetlands in Playa del Rey in 2021.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
The mayor has told me many times that getting people off the streets isn’t just a humanitarian imperative — and, as a serial killer reminded us, a safety imperative. It’s also a demonstration to a fed up public that progress is possible.
“What distresses Angelenos the most are encampments. That’s where people were dying on the street,” Bass told reporters. “And to me, what was clear, was that we come up with a way to get people out of the tents.”
Some will dismiss that. They’ll insist that all her administration is doing is reducing visible homelessness to score easy political points. And that instead of doing the hard work of actually helping L.A.’s most vulnerable residents get back on their feet, the mayor is hiding them so that they’ll be forgotten and abandoned in interim housing.
In this city, defined by its haves and have nots, I understand the cynicism and skepticism. But that’s why what Bass does next, namely expanding and stabilizing the city’s crumbling supply of permanent housing, will matter even more than what she has done thus far.
“We’ve got to somehow make people believe again that this is solvable,” Kushel told me, “and it is solvable.”
Hope can be elusive. But Annelisa Stephan was looking for it anyway when she came to the Ballona Wetlands on a recent Saturday morning.
She and more than 100 other volunteers — many of them from the nearby neighborhoods of Playa Vista and Playa del Rey — had descended on the Westside ecological reserve to dig holes, spread soil, and put in plants and trees.
Just a few months ago, RVs had been parked here along Jefferson Boulevard, bumper to bumper in a sprawling encampment that dozens of unhoused people had come to call home.
They built a close-knit community, looking out for one another and mourning one another after deadly fires. But they also decimated the Ballona Wetlands’ freshwater marsh with everything from battery acid to trash to human waste, and scared off nearby residents who once walked the trails.
And then one day, after almost three years, the encampment was gone, replaced by concrete barricades and metal fencing. The residents were mostly sent to interim housing and the RVs were mostly towed away.
“It’s like, hard to know what to think or feel,” Stephan told me. “I’m happy that the land is being stewarded, but just sad about the suffering that so many people face.”
She lamented the “fervent, anti-homeless mania” that she has heard from some of her neighbors.
“It’s just been really a painful time,” Stephan said.
Not far away, L.A. City Councilmember Traci Park, whose Westside district includes the Ballona Wetlands and got elected on promises to aggressively crack down on homeless encampments, was more circumspect.
“At the end of the day, everybody wants the same thing, which is to get folks off the streets and into safe settings and connected to the help that they need,” she said. “There’s a lot of different points of view about how we get there. And I think that’s where a lot of the conflict and the division lie.”
She paused, as traffic whizzed by on Jefferson Boulevard.
The U.S. Census Bureau released the 2022 American Community Survey this week. The survey, which looks at demographic data in five-year increments, introduced several new detailed tables and demographic breakdowns. We looked at some trends in the data.
Nearly 6 million people 65 and older live in California, a figure that is slowly growing. In the last five years, 716,000 people became senior citizens in the state. That number will nearly double by 2030. Los Angeles County is home to roughly a quarter of the senior citizens in the state.
As the cost of living increases, the number of Golden State senior citizens in poverty is also rising, with nearly 14% of Los Angeles County senior citizens living below the poverty line. The national poverty rate declined significantly to 12.5% during the five-year period from 2018-22.
Across the country, housing costs continue to rise. Financial planners advise that no more than 30% of household income be spent on housing costs. The latest data show that is far from the reality for 41% of homeowners with a mortgage in Los Angeles County. For homeowners without a mortgage, roughly 16% are house burdened. It’s also not easy for renters. More than half of renters spend more than 30% of their household income on housing costs.
The data also point to how the pandemic changed the way people work. In Los Angeles County, the number of people working from home tripled from more than 270,000 to 810,000 in just five years. That number tracks with the rest of the state’s pool of people working from home, which tripled from 1 million to more than 3.2 million. For those having to commute into the office daily, the mean travel time to work has stayed the same with most L.A. County residents getting to work in 30 minutes (although most L.A. city residents would laugh at this figure.) The number of unemployed people in the county has gone down by 4% since 2017 with roughly 300,000 without work.
The new American Community Survey includes updated race data. They show the county has grown in its Asian and Latino population. Roughly 1.4 million people identified as Asian in Los Angeles County, up 2.4% from a decade ago. Those who identify as Latino and Hispanic account for nearly half of the population of the county. The county lost 80,000 Black people over the last decade.
When she met a jagged-eared German shepherd puppy named Pickles at the Palmdale Animal Care Center, rescuer Alyssa Benavidez thought the former stray was being overlooked by adopters and wanted to find him a home.
To draw attention to the playful 10-month-old, Benavidez recorded videos of Pickles to post online — in a red bandanna with heart designs, rolling on his back for belly rubs, a red rose rope toy in his mouth.
The shelter, though, did not give her a deadline when she emailed to ask how much time she’d have to work on his exit plan before he would be put down.
A day after her inquiry, on Valentine’s Day, Pickles was euthanized.
Shelter volunteer Alyssa Benavidez managed to rescue German shepherds Cupid, foreground, and Mindy to foster while they await permanent homes. Others were put down before she could save them.
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
The Palmdale shelter, the newest of seven run by Los Angeles County, was touted when it opened in 2016 as a state-of-the-art facility that would relieve overcrowding and reduce the number of dogs being euthanized at the nearby Lancaster shelter.
But the two shelters now euthanize more dogs — and at a higher rate — than other county facilities, as well as those operated by Los Angeles, Long Beach and other municipalities, a Times investigation found.
Together, the Palmdale and Lancaster shelters’ dog euthanasia rates have nearly doubled in recent years — from about 15% in 2018 to 28% through this August. They’re on track this year to kill dogs at nearly twice the average rate of the other five county-run facilities.
A lucky pooch is led out of the Palmdale shelter’s kennels to meet a new foster.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The Palmdale and Lancaster statistics are especially striking compared with those in the city of L.A., which has six shelters with dog euthanasia rates that range from 3% to 11%.
The L.A. County Board of Supervisors has pressed the Department of Animal Care and Control to reduce euthanasia at its shelters. But department director Marcia Mayeda said in a June report to the board that severe staffing shortages were hampering efforts to provide basic animal care and bring down euthanasia numbers.
The Palmdale and Lancaster shelters euthanized 1,576 dogs in the first eight months of this year, accounting for 60% of those put down at the county’s seven shelters.
“We’re so understaffed at both care centers that I can’t say that one is markedly better or worse than the other,” Mayeda said in an interview. “They’re both really suffering.”
Department records show that more dogs are being euthanized across the entire county shelter system because space is limited and there aren’t enough being rescued or adopted to compensate for those coming in.
Visitors look over lists of available animals at Los Angeles County’s Palmdale Animal Care Center. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Fliers describe dogs available for adoption at Palmdale Animal Care Center. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
At the Palmdale shelter in particular, limited public access to kennels may be a factor. Most dogs are kept in an area that the public can visit only with a staff or volunteer escort. People wanting information about dogs available for adoption can view a corkboard pinned with the animals’ photos, but those are often dark or of poor quality. The time from when dogs enter the shelter until they’re euthanized for lack of space or interest is briefer than at other shelters, The Times found.
The Times analyzed documents obtained through public records requests on more than 14,600 dogs euthanized since 2018 in the seven shelters operated by the county — which has contracts with 45 cities to provide animal care andcontrol services. The reasons cited for killing the dogs were that they were too sick or injured to treat, or too dangerous to be safely adopted; that there was not sufficient kennel space to house the animals; and that there was no interest from potential adopters.
Some of the many dogs that have been euthanized at the Palmdale shelter amid overcrowding and other issues.
(L.A. County Animal Care and Control)
The Palmdale shelter euthanized 981 of its 3,429 impounded dogs last year, and is on track to reach those numbers again this year: Through August, the shelter had put down 765 of the 2,694 dogs that had entered.
Lancaster has surpassed last year’s figures, having euthanized 811 of 2,895 dogs that came in through August of this year. Last year, it put down 738 of the 3,718 dogs impounded.
The two shelters each took in more than 330 dogs a month on average through August this year, making them the highest-intake county shelters.
Under department policy, euthanasia cannot be performed while the facility is open to the public without explicit permission, unless the animal is injured or suffering. Time stamps on records reviewed by The Times appear to show that euthanasias were performed during those hours for nonmedical reasons at most county shelters.
Palmdale and Lancaster, in particular, consistently entered time stamps that appear to show animals were being put down during public hours — some months, dozens of times — since the shelters reopened for walk-ins in May of last year. The number of euthanasias performed during those hours at the Baldwin Park shelter could not be determined because many of its time stamps were missing from records.
Animal Care and Control Deputy Director Raul Rodriguez said that veterinary staff often update computer records after completing all procedures, so the time stamp may not accurately reflect the time of euthanasia. He said he could not say for certain when the procedures were carried out in specific cases.
Department records also show the two Antelope Valley shelters failed to follow their own department’s process to enlist help from rescue groups before putting a dog down. But the guidelines have been haphazard and have evolved.
For example, it has long been the department’s practice to ask those organizations whether they can take dogs that are most at risk.
But only in January did the department adopt a policy requiring shelters to reach out to rescue groups. And a department spokesperson said it was not until February that shelter staff members were briefed on the new requirement.
Now, Mayeda said, “if there is an error, it would be an anomaly.”
The Times reviewed a number of cases at the Palmdale and Lancaster shelters that showed no indication that rescue requests were made. The paper’s request for complete records of such rescue requests for all of the county shelters is pending.
Mayeda said she could not recall any disciplinary actions against staff at the Palmdale or Lancaster shelters based on not complying with the new policy.
In April, Mayeda instructed shelters to send three requests to rescue agencies before an adoptable dog is put down.
::
Babs and Bugs were two stray Belgian Malinois picked up Jan. 21 and kenneled together at the Palmdale shelter.
The 1-year-old dogs were euthanized less than two weeks later, recorded one minute apart during walk-in hours, to make room for other dogs coming in, according to shelter records.
The shelter did not send out rescue requests, known as “pleas,” for either dog even though Palmdale’s behavior team had approved the two for adoption — with restrictions, according to the records. Bugs was required to go to an adults-only home with no other dogs, Babs to one with no children under high school age.
Raul Rodriguez, deputy director of the Department of Animal Care and Control, attributes Palmdale’s high euthansia rate in part to its high intake of dogs and small size relative to county shelters such as Baldwin Hills’.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Rodriguez, who oversees three northern L.A. County shelters, including Palmdale and Lancaster, said Babs and Bugs were euthanized because they showed behavioral problems during their time in the shelter, lunging at other dogs through their cages and then each other.
Some experts who work with rescue dogs argue it’s unfair to judge a dog’s behavior in a loud, stressful shelter environment, saying it doesn’t reflect how it would do in a loving home.
“To me, the easy way out is to euthanize — and I think that is unacceptable,” said L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, whose district includes the Antelope Valley.
She added: “I think that we need to hold administration more accountable,” and “rather than react, be more proactive” in saving animals.
Restrictions adopted during the pandemic to reduce overcrowding prioritized the intake of dogs that were sick, injured or dangerous to the public, Rodriguez said. He said euthanasia decisions are made at weekly meetings among top shelter officials, including members of the behavior, medical and management teams. They review a list of dogs and make decisions based on how long they’ve been housed, as well as their behavior and medical history.
He attributed the higher euthanasia ratesat the Palmdale shelter to its small size: It has 68 dog kennels, but through August this year had taken in more dogs than larger shelters, including Baldwin Park, which has more than 190 dogkennels, and Downey, which has 180.
Department officials said more dogs than usual were coming into the Lancaster shelter, which has 176 kennels — blaming the influx partly on the closure earlier in the pandemic of the Mojave shelter about 30 miles away in Kern County. Strays that once would have been taken there are now being brought to Lancaster, they said.
A dog is returned to its kennel at the county’s Lancaster Animal Care Center after a play date with a prospective adopter.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
The number of dog deaths at the Palmdale shelter has angered some local officials, who also complained about a $400,000 increase last fiscal year in county charges to manage shelter and animal control services. The city’s total annual budget for shelter services ended up at $1.4 million.
Palmdale city officials earlier this year hired two animal shelter consulting firms, Animal Arts and Team Shelter USA, to provide recommendations on how to better serve the community, including what it would take to open a new city-owned shelter or pet resource center.
Their report, provided to Palmdale officials in September, has not yet been released publicly.
“It’s hard to stomach, to pay so much money to euthanize,” Palmdale City Councilman Austin Bishop said earlier this year. “The cost is going up every year, and services keep going down.”
::
When it opened, the Palmdale facility — equipped with all indoor kennels, a spaying and neutering clinic, a grooming room and turf play yards outside — was hailed as a model for other shelters.
“I want everyone to know that we’re gonna do 100% adoption. … Our goal is to really have a ‘no kill at all’” shelter, Barger said at the facility’s one-year anniversary event.
Kat Ramsburg greets her new foster dog at the Palmdale Animal Care Center.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Benavidez, who in addition to working with rescue groups is also a shelter volunteer, said that is far from how things have turned out.
“It’s a death camp there,” she said.
Patricia Saucedo, a longtime Palmdale resident, was one of the shelter’s first volunteers. She now “networks” dogs, posting their photos, videos and personality descriptions online to help find them homes.
She remembers Palmdale’s promise and the expectation that preceded it.
“It really just kind of backfired,” Saucedo said, criticizing the shelter’s design and size. Too many dogs are hidden away behind too many doors, and the shelter is understaffed, she said.
As of June, there were 13 animal control attendants, animal control officers and clerks at the Palmdale shelter and 18 in Lancaster. But county animal welfare officials said in a report that month that the two shelters would need more than triple the number of staff in the next five years to reduce euthanasia.
According to the report, Palmdale would need 39 more staff positions and Lancaster 44. The rest of the county shelters are similarly short-staffed, the report said.
Mayeda, the county animal department’s director, said she did not expect the board to approve all of those positions.
“They asked me what I needed, and this is what we need,” she said, adding that they’ll do their best with what they have. She said that the euthanasia rate in the Antelope Valley is still lower than it was more than a decade ago in 2010.
The county purchased about six acres from Palmdale to build the shelter, but used only a fraction of the land for the $20-million, 25,500-square-foot building, one of the smaller of the seven shelters. Much of the land sits unused.
After The Times began asking questions about the Palmdale shelter’s euthanasia rates, the Board of Supervisors passed a motion, written by Barger, asking that the department look into expanding the facility, saying its limited housing capacity was inadequate to serve the region.
Star was euthanized at the Palmdale shelter right before Patricia Saucedo posted a profile of the terrier online, recommending her as “super sweet, mellow and affectionate.” Shelter records said Star had tried to bite staff members.
Saucedo recalled an early case that, for her, caused concern about euthanasia decisions: Star, a 7-year-old terrier with one ear, was surrendered to Palmdale in June 2018 by her owner.
“This little lady is Palmdale Shelter’s longest resident,” Saucedo wrote on her Facebook page, Paws of Sunshine, about seven weeks later. “Super sweet, mellow and affectionate. She’s a bit shy when you first meet her, but once you spend some time with her and give her some love, you can see what a happy girl she truly is.”
She paired Star’s description with photos and a video of a small, scruffy terrier jumping up onto a bench to sit beside her for chest scratches.
An hour before the post published, Star had been euthanized for her behavior, according to shelter records, which said she was fearful and noted several instances when she tried to bite staff.
Saucedo thought Star had been timid, but not aggressive.
She was stunned that Star was put down, she said, because she seemed so adoptable.
Two of the many dogs of all ages that have landed at the Lancaster Animal Care Center.(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
::
Some rescue groups, volunteers and animal advocates say the shelter system’s public visiting hours can discourage prospective adopters. Before August, the seven county facilities were open for appointments and walk-ins only a certain number of hours each day. Visitors are now allowed to walk in from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, but shelters are no longer open Sundays or on Wednesday evenings for prospective adopters who work during typical business hours, something Mayeda attributed to staffing shortages.
“The responsibility doesn’t lie just with the animal shelters and the animal rescues,” says Kery German, Palmdale’s public safety supervisor, seen speaking with with City Councilman Austin Bishop. The city now has a low-cost spay and neuter program to help address the boom in the area’s dog population.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
But the operating hours don’t fully explain why euthanasia rates are higher at the Antelope Valley shelters.
Kery German, the city of Palmdale’s public safety supervisor, says some of the difference may be due to the nature of the dog population in the area. She and others who work with shelters said shepherds, huskies, bully breeds and other large dogs that have bigger litters are more popular in rural Antelope Valley communities than in city centers.
Those rural areas also have become dumping grounds for unwanted animals from elsewhere. That, German said, along with irresponsible backyard breeders and owners who don’t have their pets fixed, results in more homeless animals. The city has started a low-cost spay and neuter program to help remedy the problem, and since June last year has altered about 1,400 animals.
“The responsibility doesn’t lie just with the animal shelters and the animal rescues,” she said.
Data from the county’s Department of Animal Care and Control show pit bulls and German shepherds are the most common breeds put down at most county shelters — and they’re euthanized at even higher rates in the Antelope Valley.
In May 2022, a senior animal services department staff member complained to top officials about kill practices in Palmdale and Lancaster, including the euthanization of dogs for what were cited as behavioral reasons, according to an email reviewed by The Times. The staffer did not respond to requests for comment.
“I’ve noted that Palmdale and Lancaster have a disproportionately large amount of euthanasias labeled as behavior,” the senior staffer wrote, adding that they had decided to look more closely at the numbers for those shelters. “I find it to be significantly concerning.”
The staff member wrote that a “large amount of animals” are either never assessed or are approved for public adoption but then euthanized for behavioral reasons. The staffer created a list of 58 animals, a majority of them dogs, euthanized at the two shelters from February through April 2022.
Tundra had been cleared for adoption before he was put down, reportedly because he couldn’t be kenneled with other dogs and the Palmdale shelter was too full to give him his own.
One of those dogs, a gray and white Siberian husky named Tundra, had been approved for public adoption with no restrictions, but Palmdale shelter records indicate he was euthanized due to aggressive behavior, with no requests sent to rescue groups on his behalf.
The department’s behavior team described him as tense around other dogs but friendly with handlers, and medical staff wrote that he did not appear aggressive.
“Fearful tense did ok going slow NO signs of aggression,” a veterinary technician wrote the day he came in.
Rodriguez, the department’s deputy director, said Tundra could not be kenneled with other dogs and the shelter was full, so he was euthanized.
Asked about the staff member’s email, Chief Deputy Director Danny Ubario, Mayeda’s second in command, said that both shelters were at capacity at the time and that dogs were put down for a “combination” of reasons, though the records system only allows a single justification to be entered.
“We did look at it,” Mayeda said of the staffer’s complaint. “I don’t think that there [were] any errors or mischaracterizations or misuse of the system.”
The number of dogs euthanized due to a limited number of kennels has increased in Palmdale and Lancaster. Department records show the Palmdale shelter put down more than 330 dogs last year due to space constraints or because all other options to find them homes had failed — the most at any shelter. The shelter had already surpassed that number as of August this year.
In Lancaster, the number of dogs euthanized for those reasons was on track to more than double — from 231 for all of last year to 422 through August of this year, the records show.
One of them was Blue, an 11-month-old mutt with white socks and pointy ears. In February, networker Danielle Vogt sent an email to the Lancaster shelter about Blue and another pup for whom she hoped to find foster homes.
Blue was euthanized at the Lancaster Animal Care Center.
Increasingly anxious after not hearing back for a week, Vogt decided to foster Blue herself. That’s when she learned Blue had been euthanized a day earlier. No rescue requests had been sent on Blue’s behalf.
Devastated, Vogt alerted Barger’s office. Shelter staff explained the oversight by saying that Vogt had provided the wrong animal ID number in her inquiry.
“We recognize that we can do better based on what transpired with Blue,” Ubario wrote to her, adding that the shelter had put into place a new protocol to better monitor emails.
Kristin Loch, who works at a rescue in the Santa Clarita Valley, said she fields calls daily from owners who need help giving up their dogs.
She typically sends them to county shelters in Castaic or Agoura rather than to the Palmdale location despite the longer drive, because the dogs will have a better chance of leaving the shelter alive, she said.
The Times identified several dogs featured at adoption events or online that were euthanized within days.
Stormy was deemed “unable to place” and euthanized two days after the Palmdale shelter posted the young husky’s photos online.
In February, the Palmdale shelter posted three photos on Instagram of Stormy, a 1½-year-old Siberian husky with black-and-white fur who had entered a month earlier because her owner was moving.
Two days after the post went up, Stormy was euthanized, according to department records. The reason given: unable to place.
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Since January, county shelters have been required to reach out at least once to rescue organizations for most dogs facing euthanasia. The policy change came after Bowie, a 4-month-old terrier at the Baldwin Park shelter, was put down without any rescue requests, sparking outrage from many rescue groups and the public.
Earlier this year, state Assemblymember Bill Essayli (R-Corona) introduced a bill named after Bowie that would have required California shelters to provide at least a 72-hour public notice on their websites before euthanizing adoptable animals. It did not pass, but Essayli said he plans to reintroduce similar legislation.
The euthanasia of Bowie, 4 months, at the Baldwin Park Animal Care Center drew outrage and inspired county policy changes on reaching out to rescues, as well as state legislation named for the pup.
(Los Angeles County Animal Care and Control)
The inconsistency of the plea system has frustrated some rescue workers, who say the Palmdale shelter doesn’t always indicate which dogs are in most urgent need.
The German shepherd Teo, for example, entered the shelter the first week of January. On Feb. 4, the shelter sent out what was marked a “1st rescue plea” in an email to rescue groups, which suggested others would follow.
Teo was euthanized three days later.
Rodriguez said the dog had been on his second round of medication to combat a contagious upper respiratory infection, and that factored into the decision to put him down.
Benavidez has volunteered at the Palmdale and Lancaster shelters since 2017, walking and playing with animals, introducing dogs to potential adopters, cleaning kennels and preparing food.
She had been monitoring Angel, a 2-year-old black German shepherd, who was kenneled in the back at the Palmdale shelter, in an area that required an escort.
She said she expected to see a rescue plea, but it never came. She later learned he’d been euthanized because there was no longer space for him.
Benavidez wasn’t the only one who’d wanted to save Angel. The personwho turned him in told shelter officials her mother would adopt Angel if he became a candidate for euthanasia, according to department records.
Shelter records don’t mention efforts to contact the woman or her mother, whose names were redacted.
Rodriguez said it was erroneous to assume from the records that no outreach had been made, but also acknowledged that any attempt to reach the family would have been noted.
He added that Angel’s behavior — he had lunged at other dogs and had to be kenneled alone — factored into why a rescue request wasn’t sent for him, even though the behavior team had approved him for adoption.
The Times also found mistakes in several emails from the Palmdale shelter to rescue groups and networkers and on its website — including deadlines listed that had already passed or dogs marked with the wrong identification number or breed.
One email was marked as both a second and third plea, and the deadline to save the dogs had come and gone two days before it was sent out. Another message included a photo of a 1½-year-old black pit bull, but described a 7-year-old Siberian husky.
Rodriguez said the Palmdale shelter has had to rely more on public adoptions because overburdened rescue groups are pulling out fewer dogs than before the pandemic. According to figures provided by the department, groups rescued 303 dogs from Palmdale in 2022, compared with 898 dogs in 2018.
Sixteen kennels at the facility, though freely accessible to the public, are behind a door, next to a sign that says “Dog adoptions,” and visitors may not realize they can enter.
That was the case on a July afternoon, when Kayzanique Palms and her brother came to the shelter hoping to interact with the pups but left thinking they could only see photos of its dogs. They didn’t know until a reporter told them that there were two rows of kennels they could walk through behind the marked door. The rest of the kennels require an escort.
Dog rescuer Alyssa Benavidez shows a frame from her video of Pickles, a 10-month-old German shepherd that was put down at the Palmdale animal shelter.
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
Pickles, the German shepherd puppy who was euthanized on Valentine’s Day, was in one of the publicly accessible kennels when Benavidez first saw him. Shelter staff had recommended in his file that he be placed in a home with no other dogs, though Benavidez saw him kenneled with another dog in the shelter with no apparent issues. She remembered worrying that a note like that would deter adopters.
She emailed the kennel sergeant, asking when time would be up for Pickles and another dog as she hastened to find them homes.
In an email exchange reviewed by The Times, the kennel sergeant, Nelson Gonzalez, said that Pickles had already had a rescue plea sent out and that he’d been featured as pet of the week by the Board of Supervisors.
“He didn’t give me a direct answer,” Benavidez said. “They put the dog down the next day.”
Gonzalez did not respond to a request for comment.
In California, the Hayden Act, a set of animal welfare laws approved in 1998, requires that in most cases a shelter must release a dog to a rescue group that has requested it, rather than putting it to sleep. Benavidez said she wasn’t given that opportunity.
A department spokesperson said that because the networker never asked for more time or said she had someone ready to take Pickles home, and because the facility was full, the dog was put down.
“That one really killed me, because I felt like there was something that I could’ve done, but they didn’t really give me a chance,” Benavidez said.
George LeVines, The Times’ deputy director for data and graphics, contributed to this report.
An investigation published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. found discrepancies between emergencies at California immigrant detention facilities that were reported to local authorities and those reported publicly by the federal government.
The study, led by Dr. Annette Dekker, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at UCLA, analyzed about 1,200 emergencies from 2018 through 2022 at three detention centers: the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County, the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego and the Imperial Regional Detention Facility east of San Diego. Most of the patients involved were men, and the median age was 39. Local authorities responsible for emergencies at two other facilities in California did not provide data.
Private prison companies manage seven immigrant detention facilities in California on behalf of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with space to detain more than 7,000 people.
Psychiatric emergencies made up just 48 of the EMS responses reviewed by Dekker and four other California doctors — less than 4% — despite significantly higher rates of such complaints reported by ICE during the same period.
At each facility, the number of psychiatric emergencies reported to EMS was less than or equal to the number of suicide attempts reported by ICE. When other ICE-reported mental health issues that required observation were added to that total, Dekker said, there was a tenfold increase over the total reported by local EMS agencies.
Dekker said she believes that discrepancy could be interpreted to mean that all but the most extreme psychiatric crises are being appropriately treated by in-house medical staff. A 2021 California Department of Justice inspection review highlighted significant mental healthcare deficiencies at all three facilities, including understaffing and care delays.
“It’s possible someone has a suicide attempt that doesn’t require EMS, but speaking as an emergency physician, there are a lot of different psychiatric emergencies — some related to [suicidal] ideation, some related to psychosis — so it is odd to me that the number of EMS-reported psychiatric emergencies isn’t higher,” Dekker said. “Why aren’t the medical staff reaching out for more help?”
Medical reviews aren’t required unless a detainee dies in ICE custody, the report notes.
“Systematic substandard care has been identified as a factor associated with these deaths, including a lack of recognition of severe illness, medical staff dismissal of concerns about individuals’ health, and delays in activating external emergency care,” the report states. “These findings suggest that there are near misses not captured in death reviews.”
ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Detainees cannot access 911 and must rely on staff to call on their behalf. Broadly, death reviews show that some responses to requests for help have been delayed.
At the Adelanto and Imperial facilities, the rates of EMS-reported emergencies were lower for women than men. But at Otay Mesa, the rate was significantly higher for women, including 12% of emergencies related to pregnancy concerns.
An ICE directive issued on July 1, 2021, says “ICE should not detain” people who are pregnant, postpartum or nursing and should ensure their expeditious release from custody. Seven EMS-reported emergencies for pregnancy-related concerns were recorded after the directive took effect, “indicating that Otay Mesa continued to house pregnant individuals despite ICE directives,” the report noted.
Authors of the JAMA report said it is unclear whether the higher rate of emergencies among female patients at Otay Mesa represents higher rates of illness or better detainee health monitoring. But the 2021 California DOJ inspection noted that all three facilities “impermissibly house female detainees in restrictive housing under conditions disparate to those of male detainees.”
More than a quarter of patients at all three facilities had at least one abnormal vital sign reading during their encounter with medics — most frequently an elevated heart rate. Among all three facilities, the top three primary symptoms reported by patients were chest pain, abdominal pain and altered mental status. Traumatic injury was also among the issues most frequently reported by EMS providers.
The rate of emergencies at all three facilities increased amid the pandemic despite efforts to reduce capacity at the facilities during that time.
Between January 2019 and December 2021, there were 742 EMS-reported emergencies. During the same period, ICE reported 1,481 medical emergencies. Dekker said the discrepancy suggests that EMS data fail to capture the total number of medical emergencies occurring in ICE facilities.
Unlike ICE, publicly funded healthcare systems such as Medicare and Medicaid have greater government oversight that requires them to report more rigorous metrics, Dekker said. She said recent ICE facility reports contain less data than in years past and no longer include metrics such as off-site medical emergencies and the number of suicide attempts.
“I have walked away with significantly more questions than when I started,” Dekker said of the report. “The bottom line is that we need expanded reporting from ICE on health outcomes to understand what’s going on.”
TSA screened 2,907,378 people traveling through U.S. airports, the highest single-day number ever. Air travel has taken three years to surpass the heights reached in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Wherever we land [on a final number], we’re fully back to the year-over-year increase we were seeing before the pandemic,” a TSA official said.
During the 2019 Thanksgiving weekend, nearly 2.9 million passengers flew in a single day. Even before Sunday, that record was broken this year, with the previous busiest day occurring on June 30, the Friday before the Fourth of July holiday.
Since TSA’s inception in 2001, passenger volume consistently increased by more than 4% yearly until January 2020, when travel numbers plummeted due to the pandemic. Officials said the numbers had modestly increased over the last three years.
During the early months of the pandemic, airline travel nearly ground to a halt, forcing carriers to lay off or furlough thousands of workers. As of September, the U.S. airline industry employs nearly 808,000 full- and part-time workers, surpassing pre-pandemic levels by 8.7%, according to federal data.
Airlines for America, a trade group for all major U.S. air carriers, said airlines have worked for months to ensure they would be prepared for the high volume of travel for this year’s holiday season. Airlines have continued aggressively hiring, adjusting schedules and improving communication with passengers to combat the increased demand for air travel, according to the group.
John Heimlich, an economist for Airline for America, said the group predicted early in the pandemic that it would take until 2023 before the industry returned to pre-pandemic volumes. He said the industry is on track to surpass the 2019 number and anticipates further growth in 2024, albeit at a slower rate.
Los Angeles International Airport also saw its busiest Thanksgiving holiday travel period since 2019, as it welcomed 2.46 million travelers over the last week and a half. Officials said several days saw more than 220,000 passengers move through the terminals.
Of the 51,332 scheduled flights across the country Sunday, fewer than 0.5% were canceled, according to flight tracker Flight Radar 24.
AAA predicted that 4.7 million people would fly over the Thanksgiving holiday period, the highest number of Thanksgiving air travelers since 2005 — a 6.6% increase compared with 2022.
“I’m optimistic that what we saw over Thanksgiving is emblematic of the kind of demand we’ll see this winter,” Heimlich said. The demand “is going to be very strong.”
Charles E. Young, the fiery, fiercely outspoken chancellor of UCLA credited with turning the campus into an academic powerhouse, died of natural causes Sunday at his home in Sonoma, Calif. He was 91.
At the helm of UCLA for 29 years, Young oversaw its transformation from a small regional campus to one of the nation’s premier research universities.
“During his long tenure, Chuck Young guided UCLA toward what it is today: one of the nation’s most comprehensive and respected research universities and one that is profoundly dedicated to inclusiveness and diversity,” UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said in a statement announcing Young’s death.
When Young started in the job at the age of 36 in 1968, he was the youngest chancellor in University of California history. When he retired in 1997, he would be one of the longest-serving leaders of an American university.
UCLA grew rapidly under his watch. Its annual operating budget increased tenfold to $1.7 billion. The number of undergraduates increased from 19,000 to 24,000. And the number of endowed professorships rose from one to more than 100.
At the time of his retirement, the president of the American Council on Education called Young “one of the most admired and respected figures in American higher education.”
Young regularly sparred with his bosses on the UC Board of Regents.
Just months after becoming chancellor, Young famously refused to fire political activist Angela Davis, then an acting professor in UCLA’s philosophy department, despite pressure from the regents after they learned she was a member of the Communist Party.
Young would call the episode a “seminal moment” in his career, catapulting him into the national spotlight and allowing him to clearly carve out a position on academic freedom.
And when the board debated how to implement a ban on affirmative action in admissions, Young, a staunch supporter of affirmative action, rallied loudly against the plan. He often spoke publicly about the importance of ensuring public universities are easily accessible to students of color.
“The notion that we’re doing it for ‘them’ is wrong,” Young said a year before he retired. “This is something we do for all of us.”
Through the years, the academic leader widely known as “Chuck” rode out the turbulence of campus radicalism and state politics. He was a commanding figure who came to be recognized as a superb manager with an exceptionally quick mind. And he lived down early skepticism that he was too young, too much the hand-picked choice of his predecessor, Franklin D. Murphy, and not enough of a scholar to last long amid the intellectual battles of academia.
Charismatic and sometimes hot-tempered, Young defied the image of a bookish academic leader. He sought to run UCLA more like a private institution and was a respected fund-raiser who developed a network of high-profile entertainment friends such as composer Henry Mancini, movie producer Walter Mirisch and actor Charlton Heston.
Young earned a doctorate in political science from UCLA — only eight years before becoming the campus’ chancellor — but he had little or no work published in academic journals.
“Young makes no pretense of being a scholar,” said a 1968 article in Time magazine about his selection by the Board of Regents to head UCLA. He was chosen, the magazine said, “primarily because of his record as an administrator who can get along with students,” during a time of heightened political tension because of the Vietnam War and the growing Black empowerment movement.
By the time he retired, UCLA’s faculty had doubled and the school’s operating budget was more than 10 times larger than when he started. On his watch, the number of endowed professorships climbed from one to nearly 120.
During his reign, UCLA emerged as an athletic powerhouse, winning 61 men’s and seven women’s NCAA Division I team championships in an array of sports. He was not a distinguished athlete himself — his main achievement in organized sports was playing football in his senior year of high school. But he was an enthusiastic spectator at UCLA athletic events, rarely missing a home football or basketball game.
Early on, Young earned praise for his sympathetic handling of student unrest. A few months after he became chancellor, two student members of the Black Panther Party were killed on campus in an alleged dispute over the leadership of the Black Studies Center. Young helped calm the jittery school. Later, during Vietnam War protests, he refused to allow police to clear out students who had occupied administration offices.
But one of Young’s most dramatic challenges came shortly after his formal inauguration as chancellor on May 23, 1969, when he defied UC regents by refusing to fire Davis over her membership in the Communist Party. The regents themselves eventually ousted Davis at UCLA, although she later returned to the UC system to teach at UC Santa Cruz and, in 2014, nearly a half-century after her ouster from UCLA, triumphantly returned to campus as a Regent’s Lecturer in gender studies, a prestigious appointment.
Young’s defense of Davis’ right to work at UCLA led to what he later described as an emotionally draining series of confrontations with then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, who urged regents to oust Davis.
In 1970, Young told The Times, “At some point there has got to be a time when somebody in this university stands up and says, ‘I’ve had it. I’ve had enough.’ This is a real case of academic freedom because Angela Davis is an undesirable character to much of the public…. The place where you find out whether the system works is in the tough cases, not the easy ones everybody agrees with.”
Years later, Young elaborated, saying, “I was not supporting Angela Davis, I was supporting the principle. Angela Davis was a mediocre scholar and a mediocre lecturer and a mediocre person, as far as I could tell.” Other academics, however, had a far more favorable view of Davis, whom they saw as an important intellect whose call for anti-racist action is only now being embraced.
Over his long tenure, Young encountered criticism over financial and compensation issues. An associate, a UCLA vice chancellor, was prosecuted, fired and forced to repay the university’s fund-raising foundation $85,000 in disallowed expenses. Investigations found no impropriety by Young in that episode or with UCLA donors paying the rent for the chancellor’s summer beach house, yacht club membership or vacation trip to Tahiti — but criticism mounted.
In the early 1990s, particularly after an unsuccessful bid to become president of the UC system, Young was faulted by critics for becoming a disengaged chancellor who was living like a highly paid corporate CEO. A Times investigation in the mid-1990s found that Young and his top aides in some cases were instrumental in giving special consideration in admissions, at the request of donors and other well-connected figures, to less-qualified or rejected applicants.
Young, in turn, occasionally unleashed his temper on his opponents. He triggered a brief flap with then-UC Regent Ward Connerly, a foe of affirmative action, by comparing him to the late Jesse Helms, a staunch conservative Republican senator from North Carolina who had voted against civil rights legislation. Young, though an ardent supporter of affirmative action, later apologized to Connerly.
When he announced his plans to retire, Young was widely praised for elevating UCLA’s stature, but some critics said his departure was overdue.
Young endured turmoil and tragedy in his personal life. He was arrested for drunk driving after a car wreck near the campus in 1975, during a period of personal problems. Later on, he called it a “near-crisis situation” and admitted he had a problem with alcohol, which he resolved by getting sober.
Young was born in San Bernardino on Dec. 30, 1931, the only son of two psychiatric nursing aides at Patton State Hospital in Highland. His parents separated when he was a child.
In his oral history, Young recalled a childhood of growing up in a rural, orange-growing region. He taught himself to read by age 4 and got his first job at a local packinghouse at 12.
He attended San Bernardino Valley College, where he met his first wife, Sue Daugherty. They married in 1950, when both were 18.
Young soon dropped out of school and took a job in the appliance department of a department store. He was then called to active duty with the Air National Guard during the Korean War and served in Japan.
After his stint in the military, Young returned to San Bernardino Valley College and became a determined, standout student. He went on to receive his bachelor’s degree at UC Riverside, where he was the new campus’ first student body president. From there he earned a master’s and a doctorate in political science at UCLA.
After serving as a congressional fellow in Washington, D.C., Young joined the staff of UC President Clark Kerr in 1959. In that role, he worked on the creation of the state’s master plan for higher education, which continues to guide policy in California.
In 1960, the same year he earned his doctorate with a dissertation on legislative redistricting, Young went to work on the Westwood campus as an assistant to Murphy, then the school’s new chancellor. He quickly moved up the ladder, eventually becoming vice chancellor for administration and a full professor in the political science department before being named by UC Regents to succeed Murphy in 1968.
Two years after retiring from UCLA, Young accepted what was to be a short-term interim appointment as the president of the University of Florida in Gainesville, but he wound up staying for four years. Later, at age 72, he became president of an educational and scientific foundation in Qatar, a stint that lasted slightly over a year.
In the fall of 2008, at the age of 76, Young returned to UCLA to teach an undergraduate public policy and political science course on the history of the American presidency. That same year, Young was asked by philanthropist Eli Broad to help lead the Museum of Contemporary Art out of financial peril after its endowment shriveled from $40 million to $6 million in just nine years.
Seemingly unable to retire for long, Young agreed in 2017 to take over as superintendent of the public school district in Sonoma, where he and his wife retired to be closer to family. The K-12 district was battered by financial difficulties and led by what he believed was a dysfunctional school board.
But his affection for UCLA never waned, and he returned again and again, sometimes simply to stroll across the campus.
“I’m amazed at the fact that I can wander around this campus and be treated like an old friend,” Young said. “And I think, in a way, that’s the accomplishment.”
His wife of 51 years, Sue K. Young, a major force in UCLA fundraising, died in 2001 after battling breast cancer for years. One of their two children, Elizabeth, died in 2006 after suffering a cerebral aneurysm while walking on the beach near Malibu.
Young is survived by his wife, Judy Cornell, whom he married in 2002, and son, Charles Jr. In a statement Sunday, UCLA said it is planning an event in the coming months to celebrate his legacy.
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