Effort to force L.A. Dist. Atty. George Gascón into recall election fails
JAMES QUEALLY, LAT: "A second effort to force Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón into a recall election fizzled out Monday after officials determined that the campaign to boot him from office failed to gain enough valid signatures.
To put Gascón’s job on the ballot, the campaign seeking his ouster needed to gather 566,857 valid signatures by mid-July; the figure reflects 10% of the people who were eligible to vote in the election cycle when he won office in November 2020. The L.A. County registrar-recorder/county clerk’s office said Monday that about 520,000 of the signatures submitted were valid.
While the campaign submitted roughly 715,000 signatures, some were inevitably going to be disqualified if they were signed by people who were not properly registered to vote in L.A. County or if a registered voter’s signature didn’t match the one on file with the registrar. In California, most recall drives see at least 20% of collected signatures disqualified, said Joshua Spivak, an expert on recall elections and senior research fellow at UC Berkeley Law School’s California Constitution Center."
Law to protect reporters at demonstrations appears flawed
Capitol Weekly, JOSHUA AALCIDES: “In late June, as protesters in Los Angeles took to the streets in opposition to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, journalists covering the demonstrations found themselves at the center of another issue of concern: the treatment of the press by police officers during protests.
Videos of officers using excessive force against journalists were posted online, prompting questions about the lack of progress on resolving a decades-old problem, including the May 2020 George Floyd protests.”
Adam Rose, chair of the press rights committee for the Los Angeles Press Club, has compiled a database of at least 11 incidents from that day where officers handcuffed, pushed, and hit several journalists, as well as interfered with their ability to report on the demonstrations."
Shifting stories, sudden amnesia by deputies mark Kobe Bryant crash photos trial
LAT, ALENE TCHEKMEDYIAN/MCHAEL FINNEGAN: “When he took the stand Monday in the trial over photos of the helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant, his daughter and seven others, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Rafael Mejia said he didn’t know whether victims’ bodies had been visible in photos sent to him by another deputy.
That uncertainty didn’t jibe with an interview Mejia gave sheriff’s investigators two years ago, when he described in detail body parts he’d seen in the photos.
A second deputy followed Mejia on Monday and gave similarly conflicting testimony.”
Spaghetti sauce is under threat as California water crisis slams tomatoes
KIM CHIPMAN, Mercury News: "California leads the world in production of processing tomatoes — the variety that gets canned and used in commercial kitchens to make some of the most popular foods. The problem is the worst drought in 1,200 years is forcing farmers to grapple with a water crisis that’s undermining the crop, threatening to further push up prices from salsa to spaghetti sauce.
“We desperately need rain,” Mike Montna, head of the California Tomato Growers Association, said in an interview. “We are getting to a point where we don’t have inventory left to keep fulfilling the market demand.”
Lack of water is shrinking production in a region responsible for a quarter of the world’s output, which is having an impact on prices of tomato-based products. Gains in tomato sauce and ketchup are outpacing the rise in US food inflation, which is at its highest in 43 years, with drought and higher agricultural inputs to blame. With California climate-change forecasts calling for hotter and drier conditions, the outlook for farmers is uncertain."
100-degree temps and haze headed to the Bay Area. When will the heat break?
The Chronicle, GERRY DIAZ: “While the Bay Area has seen a relatively cool and mild summer, over the next couple days the region is in for some of the smoggiest and hottest weather yet.
A combination of two weather systems is helping drive this quick shot of hot and hazy air into the wider Bay Area. A ridge of high pressure in the Southwest is drawing heat from the Mojave into parts of the Bay Area that neighbor the Sacramento Valley.
Meanwhile, northerly winds blowing around 2,000 feet (that’s about two Sutro Towers) above the Earth’s surface are bringing smoke from the Six Rivers lightning complex fire, burning in Humboldt and Trinity counties, into Central California and the Bay Area.”
Firefighters stop grass fire from reaching homes in Dublin
The Chronicle, MICHAEL CABANATUAN: “A wildfire that ignited Monday and was threatening structures near the dry, grassy hills between Castro Valley and Dublin was stopped thanks to an “aggressive initial attack” by fire crews, officials said.
The Eden Fire broke out along westbound I-580 east of Eden Canyon Road at about 4:30 p.m., according to Cal Fire and Dublin fire officials. Initial reports said it involved a car and two acres of vegetation. Within 20 minutes, it had grown to 20 acres, and was nearing structures and threatening residents.
Shortly after 7 p.m., Cal Fire officials tweeted that the Eden blaze was 30% contained and “holding at 50 acres.” The officials credited the victory to air and ground crews from Alameda County and local state units.”
Back-to-school in San Francisco: Data shows severity of teacher shortage, absenteeism, low reading scores
The Chronicle, JILL TUCKER/ALEX K. FONG: “The first day of school typically offers students, teachers and administrators a fresh start, the year ahead full of possibilities and hope.
But as San Francisco’s 49,000 students pour into classrooms for the first day of school Wednesday, the district will once again be juggling the ongoing fallout from the pandemic, financial woes, a bug-infested payroll system and a teacher shortage, among other challenges.
While it’s difficult to capture the health of an entire school district with a handful of numbers, the Chronicle pulled together some data to give a sense of where San Francisco’s schools stand on a range of issues.”
L.A.’s back-to-school challenges: low test scores, scramble for teachers, missing students
LAT, RICHARD BLUME: “Los Angeles school officials began the new school year Monday with a sense of urgency over the pending release of low and declining standardized test scores, a scramble to get the best professionals helping students and the ongoing search for an estimated 20,000 “missing” students.
Supt. Alberto Carvalho responded to these massive challenges by promising a “year of acceleration” in the nation’s second-largest school system. Part of that initiative was undertaken in a public event last Friday as counselors and administrators, including Carvalho, worked the phones and hit the streets to identify students who have missed too much school, failed to reenroll or never enrolled in the first place.
“Obviously, we cannot teach the absent child,” Carvalho said Monday at the end of the first day of classes. “That is why we have launched the iAttend initiative that began last week with our first day of recovery, a day that’s going to be repeated for as long as we need it.”
New York wants to charge up to $23 to enter parts of Manhattan. What happened to S.F.’s congestion pricing plan?
The Chronicle, MICHAEL CABANATUAN: “While New York careens toward a congestion pricing plan that would charge a toll to enter its busiest business district, San Francisco has temporarily hit the brakes on a similar plan.
With stated goals of easing gridlock, improving safety for pedestrians, bicyclists and drivers, reducing air pollution and raising money to help improve transit, San Francisco was studying a plan to charge drivers entering a downtown zone $6.50 — with discounts based on income.
That was in 2019, when traffic came to a standstill downtown during the morning and evening commutes. When the pandemic hit, traffic vanished during the shelter-in-place orders, dipped again with last winter’s surges, then slowly started returning.”
Sellers strike? Some homeowners are backing out of a slowing housing market
LAT, ANDREW KHOURI: “As the housing market has slowed across Southern California and the country, sellers have had to adjust their expectations.
Homes that would have received dozens of offers at the beginning of the year get just a few these days. Other properties receive none, forcing owners to slash their asking price and relinquish dreams of record profits.
Now, some would-be sellers are calling it quits all together. Those decisions essentially cap how high inventory can climb, with broad implications for current homeowners and future buyers.”
Where do San Francisco’s Millennials move to the city from? Here’s what the data says
The Chronicle, SUSIE NEILSON: “Where do San Francisco’s Millennials move here from? Mostly other places in California. But many moved from other large cities like Seattle, Chicago and New York, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau. And young adults from a couple of places, Hawaii and Boston, arrived in numbers far larger than their populations would suggest.
The bureau, in partnership with Harvard University, recently published data that allows a detailed window into the migration patterns of young adults — specifically those born between 1984 and 1992, comprising the bulk of the so-called “Millennials.” While the oldest of these adults are now entering middle age, the data specifically tracks migration by looking at where each person was when they were 16 years old, and where they were at age 26.
According to the data, about 1 in 20 Millennial San Franciscans were living in the L.A. metro area as teenagers (5%), and 3.5% were from Sacramento originally. San Jose, San Diego and nearby Santa Rosa rounded out the top five California origins for the San Francisco area’s youngish adults.”
How L.A. became the land of the single-family — and singular — home
LAT, PATT MORRISON: “Across the COVID epoch, as we’ve been expanding our range from house-hunkering to house-hunting, we’ve needed decoder rings to translate real estate-speak, a language that’s especially complicated in Los Angeles. How many ways can you hint at the idiosyncratic, even quirky or strange, without scaring off buyers? How to interpret “eclectic”? “Imaginative”? “Distinctive”?
Every home is distinctly the resident’s, but especially in L.A., some of our peak individual inventiveness, along with architectural talent, have been devoted for decades to the single-family home.
That’s what enticed the multitudes here in the first place. You move to New York despite the prospect of living in 400 square feet of a human sandwich. You move to Los Angeles in part because you expect to reign over your own kingdom in miniature — a house, a patio, a chicken adobada in every pot, and an orange tree in every garden.”
