News Analysis: After primaries, California takes on unique role in battle for control of Congress
MELANIE MASON and SEEMA MEHTA, LA Times: "The warmup act is over. On to the main event.
Attention now turns to the general election in November, and over the next five months, California will play a significant role in the battle to control the U.S. House.
For Democrats, winning the most competitive congressional seats here is nothing short of essential in their uphill bid to retain the chamber. Their hope lies in exploiting political mismatches — districts that backed President Biden in 2020 but have a Republican member of Congress — and California offers more of these opportunities than anywhere else in the country."
Gov. Gavin Newsom and the race for the top prize
CHUCK McFADDEN, Capitol Weekly: "Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared flatly that he is not interested in running for president.
“I have sub-zero interest,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board recently. “It’s not even on my radar.” Right.
Newsom is good-looking, relatively young at 54, has a beautiful wife, has climbed the slippery pole of politics from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to mayor of San Francisco to lieutenant governor to national prominence as governor of the nation’s most populous state. Traditionally, the governor of California is often viewed as a presidential contender."
Fear over crime and homelessness in California paid off in some primaries. Will it carry over to November?
LAT, JAMES QUEALLY, MELANIE MASON, LAURA J. NELSON: “Less than three years after earning a major win for a national movement seeking to elect progressive prosecutors, San Francisco Dist. Atty. Chesa Boudin was recalled from office Tuesday night.
In Orange County, Republican Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer trounced his progressive challenger by a more than 3-1 margin and will avoid a November runoff despite multiple scandals, including the release of a video in which he used a racial slur.
And in a Los Angeles mayoral contest where U.S. Rep. Karen Bass once seemed dominant, it was billionaire developer Rick Caruso who wound up leading the primary field after a campaign focused heavily on public safety and policing.”
Former Sacramento police chief named to team reviewing Texas mass shooting response
MICHAEL McGOUGH, SacBee: "Former Sacramento police chief and county inspector general Rick Braziel was among nine experts tapped Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Justice to probe the law enforcement response to the mass shooting last month that killed 21 people including 19 students at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Braziel served as Sacramento’s police chief from 2008 to 2012 and as the watchdog overseeing the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office from December 2015 to November 2018. He now runs a locally based public safety consulting firm, Braziel Consulting Inc., according to the firm’s website and Braziel’s LinkedIn page.
The Justice Department and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday named Braziel and eight others to a team of experts that will conduct a “critical incident review” of the response."
The ghosts of L.A.’s unbuilt freeways — a wide median here, a stubby endpoint there
PATT MORRISON, LA Times: "Maybe you can hear them whispering, as your tires hiss along freeway concrete: the almost-weres, the might-have-beens, the freeway ghosts of Los Angeles, the thoroughfares dreamed up, planned for, but never built.
There are more — oh, so many more — than you might have wished or feared, even in the cloverleaf heart of Freeway L.A.
The Whitnall Freeway, the Industrial Freeway, the Temescal Freeway, the Laurel and Topanga and Malibu Canyon freeways, the Sierra Freeway, and the legendary Beverly Hills Freeway, discarded like an unproduced screenplay when such stars as Lucille Ball and Rosalind Russell gave it a big N-O."
Bay Area cities have spent millions cleaning up their stormwater. With controversial new guidelines, state regulators say the job isn’t finished
The Chronicle, ANDRES PICON: “Every time a storm hits the Bay Area, trash in the region’s streets and creeks gets swept by rushing water into an underground stormwater system, where much of the litter flows through a network of pipes until it reaches San Francisco Bay.
The trash can linger in the Bay or smaller bodies of water for thousands of years, contributing to the widespread pollution that is threatening wildlife and degrading the health of local environments and communities. Environmental advocates say that while it’s difficult to estimate the amount of trash that makes it to the Bay each year, and different cities generate varying amounts of litter, it’s clear that trash pollution is a persistent problem.
Bay Area cities have spent tens of millions of dollars in the past decade addressing the problem, and say they have made substantial progress. But state regulators say that cities haven’t done enough, and last month approved new regulations requiring them to eliminate virtually all of the trash from their stormwater systems in three years.”
COVID in California: More people getting reinfected as new variants emerge, data shows
The Chronicle, CATHERINE HO/ANNA BUCHMANN/AIDIN VAZIRI: “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee on Tuesday recommended the agency grant emergency use authorization for the COVID-19 vaccine made by Novavax. If approved, it would become the fourth coronavirus vaccine available in the U.S., along with the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson versions. California’s chief justice, Tani Cantil-Sakauye, has tested positive for COVID-19 and has mild symptoms, court officials say.
Here are the latest updates:
S.F.’s COVID positive test rate hits second-highest level ever
The coronavirus test positivity rate in San Francisco, which tracks the percentage of tests coming back positive for COVID-19, topped 14% on Wednesday, according to city data analyzed by The Chronicle. That is the second-highest rate the city has reached to date.
The seven-day average climbed up to 18.9% this January during the winter surge before dropping to 2.4% in mid-March. It has been rising steadily since and is now far higher than the statewide average of 8.9%. A rule of thumb among infectious disease experts is that 5% is considered “too high,” according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. Read the full story.”
S.F.’s COVID positive test rate hits second-highest level ever
The Chronicle, AIDIN VAZIRI: “The coronavirus test positivity rate in San Francisco, which tracks the percentage of tests coming back positive for COVID-19, topped 14% on Wednesday, according to city data analyzed by The Chronicle. That is the second-highest rate the city has reached to date.
The seven-day average climbed up to 18.9% this January during the winter surge before dropping to 2.4% in mid-March. It has been rising steadily since and is now far higher than the statewide average of 8.9%.
A rule of thumb among infectious disease experts is that 5% is considered “too high,” according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University.”
S.F. June voter turnout expected to reach 45%, higher than for school board recall
The Chronicle, ROLAND LI: “San Francisco officials expect to eventually count ballots from around 225,000 voters for the June primary, representing 45.4% turnout, higher than the two previous elections this year.
The successful recall of District Attorney Chesa Boudin, which saw over $10 million in fundraising from both sides and national headlines, and other races brought in more voters compared with February’s school board recall and April’s state Assembly race.
Voters appeared to return ballots closer to election day compared with recent races. As of Monday, only 109,193 ballots had been received by mail, but the city Department of Elections said more than 100,000 mail-in and provisional ballots were left to process. An additional 18,733 residents voted in person on Tuesday.”
Will the L.A. school board runoff revert to the familiar mudslinging, big-spending format?
LAT, HOWARD BLUME: “Tuesday’s primary left the outcome of two Los Angeles school board races in doubt, setting the stage for a general election campaign that could prove less polite and more expensive.
The most financially competitive race will be in District 2, where voters must replace Monica Garcia, who is stepping down because of term limits. In that contest, Rocio Rivas, who finished first in the primary, will face Maria Brenes.
“I really did receive a lot of positive energy and support all throughout our district,” Rivas said at a campaign gathering Tuesday night. “People are out there — invested — and really want to be there for our public schools.””
Thien Ho’s DA race lead confirms a Sacramento truth: The capital is conservative on crime
Opinion, MARCOS BRETON, SacBee: "On law and order issues, Sacramento County has traditionally leaned conservative, which made the capital of California impervious to the “defund police” movement.
The Sacramento region has also been shocked by two mass shootings in recent months, a proliferation of homelessness in the last decade, and new spikes in violent crimes. So when the legal and law enforcement community rallied around the county’s elite prosecutor, Thien Ho, in his run for district attorney, it figured that Ho would be tough to beat. The early election results from Tuesday night’s primary confirmed this, with Ho maintaining a commanding lead over progressive challenger Alana Mathews.
Ho was up nearly 20 percentage points at last count, which sets him up to make history. A Vietnamese immigrant who fled his birth country with his family in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Ho is on his way to becoming the first person of color to lead a Sacramento district attorney’s office that is more than a century old."
Can arts education help kids heal from the trauma of the pandemic?
EdSource, KAREN D’SOUZA: “California has long been famous for its creativity, the engine driving everything from the entertainment industry to the tech sector. But decades of budget cuts, and a laser focus on core subjects, have pushed the state’s public schools to cut arts education to the bone over the years.
Now, two years of trauma during a pandemic that’s stolen more than a million lives and the fresh horrors of a spate of mass shootings, experts say, underscore the pressing need for more paths to social-emotional learning in schools. That’s a key reason former Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Austin Beutner, supported by many educators and artists, is championing a mandate to restore arts and music education to the public schools, as a way to help children grapple with their feelings about growing up in a time of tragedy.
“Talk to any social worker, the first thing they do with a child in trauma is ask them to draw a picture,” said Beutner, who stepped down after three years at LAUSD. “The arts are a key part of the therapeutic process.””
Oakland estimates a cost of more than $20 million per year to shelter 1,000 people at former Army base
The Chronicle, SARAH RAVANI: “It would cost more than $20 million a year for Oakland to temporarily shelter 1,000 homeless people on the city’s former Army base, according to a staff report that also detailed toxic pollution at the site.
The report unveiled at Tuesday’s City Council meeting said building a cabin community, or tiny home village, for 1,000 people at the site would cost millions to construct and $22.5 million per year to operate. Building a safe site for RVs to park on the former Oakland Army Base would cost about $5 million to construct and $18 million a year to operate.
The report also found that the 22-acre site is contaminated with lead, arsenic, kerosene and other toxic substances — resulting in an unsafe environment to house people there.”
They pour drinks. They clean rooms. Latin American workers wish they had more say at Summit of the Americas
LAT, CINDY CARCAMO: “When Ana Diaz, a Salvadoran immigrant who lives in Van Nuys, found out she would be mixing cocktails for world leaders at the ninth Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, she got excited.
“I could probably serve Mrs. Kamala Harris or Mr. Biden,” the 48-year-old said she thought to herself.
Diaz is scheduled to work as one of the bartenders at the closing ceremony Friday evening at the Los Angeles Convention Center — the nerve center of the summit, which brings together political leaders, civil society organizations and business executives from North, South and Central America and the Caribbean.”
BART reports major delays after computer failure shuts down system for an hour
The Chronicle, ANNA BUCHMANN: “A computer failure shut down BART for an hour early Thursday, creating a “major delay” systemwide for Bay Area commuters.
The computer issue began at 4:45 a.m., the transit agency said, and at about 5:20 a.m., BART tweeted that riders should “seek alternate forms of transportation at this time.”
At 5:50 a.m., the transit agency reported that trains were running again and service was being restored.”
A violent L.A. gang, an FBI informant and the truth behind a deadly fire
LAT, MATTHEW ORMSETH: “The middle-aged man took the witness stand and was asked to recall an afternoon 29 years ago.
“I do remember that day,” he said.
He had been eating with his friends at a burger stand in Westlake when firetrucks and ambulances screamed by, he said. They followed the lights and sirens and saw the fire.”
Jan. 6 committee gets a prime-time spotlight. Will people watch?
LAT, STEPHEN BATTAGLIO: “It’s showtime for the Jan. 6 House select committee.
For the last year, the group has been hearing testimony on the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and the involvement of then-President Trump as an alleged instigator determined to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
On Thursday, the findings will get a prime-time TV platform, a rarity for such proceedings, with three broadcast networks, the Fox-owned TV stations, several cable networks and a myriad of streaming outlets presenting the opening hours.”
