California braces for post-Pelosi future
CALMatters, EMILY HOEVEN: "“We are mindful that we’re going to have to be more proactive as a state in terms of our efforts in Washington, D.C.”
That was Gov. Gavin Newsom’s delicately worded assessment of how California might fare differently under Kevin McCarthy — the Bakersfield Republican positioned to take over as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives after his party won a slim majority in the midterm elections — than it did under Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat who announced Thursday that she plans to step down from a leadership position next year even while remaining in Congress.
During a Thursday press conference in Napa Valley to highlight California’s firefighting investments and announce that peak fire season has ended in most parts of the state, Newsom said “no one has been more consequential in modern American history” as House speaker than Pelosi."
Largest dam removal project in U.S. history gets go-ahead in California
The Chronicle, KURTIS ALEXANDER: "The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission voted Thursday to allow the license of four dams on the Klamath River to lapse, giving the final major go-ahead to the largest dam removal and river restoration project in the nation’s history.
The vote by federal regulators opens the door for the first of the four hydroelectric dams to come down next year in what has been a two-decade effort to liberate the once mighty river that spans southern Oregon and Northern California.
The goal of the nearly half-billion-dollar project is to restore the health of flora and fauna in the vast Klamath Basin, particularly salmon. The fish once numbered in the hundreds of thousands there and boasted the third largest salmon run in the continental U.S. Removing the dams from the 250-mile waterway will open fish passage, improve river flow and uproot toxic algal blooms."
Amid pandemic, air quality remains critical environmental challenge
Capitol Weekly, AARON GILBREATH: "In 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, California’s greenhouse gas emissions dropped by almost 9%, and the state’s smoggy skies briefly cleared. This was particularly true during the pandemic’s first months, when schools closed, offices went remote, and statewide shelter-in-place orders kept millions of Californians at home. That spring, clogged freeways went vacant. Fewer semis rattled down roads. Many city streets remained relatively uncluttered as Californians’ cars stayed parked and drives clocked shorter distances.
California has the world’s fifth largest economy, but as the nation’s most populous state, its transportation sector—which includes peoples’ passenger vehicles, planes, along with the ships, trains, and trucks that transport goods—produces most of the state’s air pollution, not industry or power generation.
“What some people don’t realize is that goods movement is actually the biggest cause of air pollution in California,” Bill Magavern, the Coalition for Clean Air’s Policy Director, told me. “Almost all of the equipment that moves goods right now is powered by diesel—that includes trucks and locomotives, even a lot of cargo-handling equipment—and diesel exhaust is a huge toxic contributor to both smog and soot, which are the pollutants whose prevalence and impact on human health we worry about the most.”"
Another California desalination plant approved — the most contentious one yet
CALMatters, RACHEL BECKER :The California Coastal Commission tonight approved another desalination plant, despite citing its high costs, risks to Monterey Bay’s environment and “the most significant environmental justice issues” the commission has faced in recent years.
The commission’s divided, 8-to-2 vote came after 13 hours of debate at a Salinas public hearing packed with several hundred people, plus more crammed into overflow space. Many of the 375 who signed up to speak opposed the project — some in tears.
Much of the debate focused on the fairness of locating a for-profit company’s facility in the Monterey County city of Marina — which does not need the water and is home to designated disadvantaged neighborhoods. The expensive supply will flow to other communities, including the whiter, wealthy enclaves of Carmel-by-the-Sea, Pacific Grove and Pebble Beach."
California election results: The most interesting numbers
CALMatters, BEN CHRISTOPHER: "After a flurry of called races, victories proclaimed and concessions offered across 52 congressional districts, 100 state Assembly and Senate contests, nine statewide races for constitutional offices and seven propositions on the California ballot, it can be hard to wrap your head around what exactly happened.
Fortunately, we’ve boiled it down to a few pictures — a scatter plot, a bar chart, seating charts, color-coded maps — to show what this latest electoral exercise tells us about who wields power in the state Capitol, the state’s sharp political divisions and the mind-numbing magnitude of electoral spending.
Take these charts with a grain of salt for now. There are still 1.5 million ballots left to tally, as of late Thursday. That’s all part of a tried, true and prolonged process that often has the rest of the nation waiting for weeks on California’s vote totals."
GOP elites want to turn from Trump. Will the base let them?
LAT, MELANIE MASON: "Forget the scathing editorials from conservative media blaming former President Trump for the GOP’s mediocre midterm. Never mind their underwhelmed reception to his 2024 presidential launch. Disregard the major donors who are bailing this time around.
Keith Korsgaden is firmly on board for a Trump reprise. He’s quite sure he’s not alone.
“There are 74 million people that voted for Donald Trump in 2020, and those 74 million of us still feel the same way — that he’s one of us,” Korsgaden said. The Visalia restaurant owner has been a Trump supporter since that momentous descent down Trump Tower’s escalator in 2015."
How Karen Bass prevailed against Rick Caruso’s $100-million campaign
LAT, BENJAMIN ORESKES/JULIA WICK: "As autumn settled over Los Angeles, Rep. Karen Bass suddenly found herself in a tight race with developer Rick Caruso.
The double-digit lead that polls showed she built through the summer had crumbled under a multimillion-dollar onslaught of attack ads. Clips of her giving a speech to a meeting of Scientologists over a decade ago aired in heavy rotation. Spots appeared on all platforms about a USC scholarship she received, which was being mentioned in the corruption prosecution of a city official.
Bass offered explanations for both, but had little money to respond with advertising of her own."
Moderate Joel Engardio just won an S.F. supervisor’s seat after three failed bids. What changed this time?
The Chronicle, JD MORRIS/ST JOHN BARNED-SMITH: "Joel Engardio’s third failed attempt to win a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors had been over for just a few months when he decided to dive once more into the city’s fractious political waters.
It was early 2021 and Engardio, a resident of the Lakeshore neighborhood near Lowell High School, started fielding calls from concerned parents. They were incensed at the actions of the city school board, which had voted to rename 44 campuses and end the longstanding merit-based admissions system at Lowell.
The parents who reached out to Engardio shared his belief that the board had gone off the rails, courting political controversy in the middle of the pandemic at the expense of students’ educational needs. Parents wanted to do something, and they thought Engardio, who had just come up short in his November 2020 bid for the District Seven supervisor seat, could help."
COVID in California: California COVID cases jump 36% ahead of expected surge
The Chronicle, AIDIN VAZIRI: "Bay Area health officials on Wednesday said a substantial increase in flu activity and other respiratory viruses since the start of the month has led to a spike in emergency department visits and is already putting a strain on health systems across the region. It’s the first year health agencies are facing not just COVID-19, but increased influenza cases and unusually high levels of RSV, a common viral illness that can cause trouble breathing for infants and young children, and in older adults.
Record number of Americans missed work in October
More than 104,000 Americans missed work in October due to childcare problems, according to new data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The figure, one of the highest record figures by the agency, is likely linked to a nationwide increase in COVID-19, influenza and other respiratory viruses, which has led to a spike in emergency department visits and is putting a strain on health systems across the region."
COVID, flu and RSV spikes are straining Bay Area hospitals — and it’s hitting ‘our youngest children’
The Chronicle, AIDIN VAZIRI/MATT KAWAHARA: "Bay Area health officials on Wednesday said a substantial increase in flu activity and other respiratory viruses since the start of the month has led to a spike in emergency department visits and is putting a strain on health systems across the region.
“This is the first year where we’re not only facing COVID but also increased influenza activity and unusually high levels of RSV,” Dr. Sarah Rudman, deputy health officer for Santa Clara County, said during a press briefing. “These are two other types of viruses that can also cause possibly the same respiratory symptoms as COVID, but can also cause severe respiratory disease — or even life-threatening disease.”
The Santa Clara County health department said that the percentage of emergency department visits for influenza-like illness is three times higher this year than it was during the 2019-2020 flu season, before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, the agency has launched a wastewater data dashboard to monitor flu concentration in the county — one of the first of its kind in the U.S."
San Jose’s historic City Hall just dodged a wrecking ball. Will someone save it?
BANG*Mercury News, GABRIEL GRESCHLER: "Like a teenager or a fresh haircut, historic preservationist Ben Leech thinks old buildings go through a similar “awkward phase” before they’re truly appreciated.
And for Leech, San Jose’s former City Hall is like a middle schooler with a bouffant. But he still wants it around.
“We’re right in that awkward adolescence,” said Leech — leader of the Preservation Action Council of San Jose — about the 1950s-era Modernist structure that’s been sitting empty for nearly two decades. “Like all buildings that survive a certain amount of time, they’re seen as obsolete before they’re seen as a historical asset. The next generation comes to embrace it.”"
California auditor slams universities for not returning Native American remains, artifacts
Sac Bee, SAWSAN MORROR: "The University of California is not moving fast enough to return human remains and cultural artifacts to Indigenous tribes, the state auditor said in a new report it released on Thursday.
The report is the second in three years from the state auditor on the UC’s compliance with a 1990 federal law governing the return of Native American remains and a similar 2001 state law.
It found that despite some recent improvements, the university system is not doing enough to return items, some of which the UC system obtained more than a century ago."
California community college enrollment plummets to 30-year low
LAT, MICHAEL BURKE/DANIEL J WILLIS/DEBBIETRUONGD: "Enrollment at California’s community colleges has dropped to its lowest level in 30 years, new data show. The stark decline has educators scrambling to find ways to meet the changing needs of students, who may be questioning the value of higher education as they emerge from harsh pandemic years.
Since pre-pandemic 2019, the 115 campuses have collectively lost about 300,000 students, an alarming 18% drop that portends significant enrollment-based funding cuts if enrollment does not increase.
That uncertainty has put the financial viability of some colleges at risk. But the crush of pandemic-fueled changes has also pushed the system to an inflection point, which may force the colleges to reimagine themselves in ways that jibe with students’ priorities and needs. “What we’ve seen is that higher education as a whole has been disrupted forever,” interim Deputy Chancellor Lizette Navarette told a state Assembly hearing this week."
More Twitter workers flee after Elon Musk’s ‘hardcore’ ultimatum
AP: "Twitter continued to bleed engineers and other workers after new owner Elon Musk gave them a choice to pledge to “extremely hardcore” work or resign with severance pay.
While it’s not clear exactly how many of Twitter’s already-decimated staff took Musk up on his offer, the newest round of departures means the platform is continuing to lose workers just at it is gearing up for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, one of the busiest events on Twitter that can overwhelm its systems if things go haywire.
Hundreds of employees signaled they were leaving ahead of a Thursday deadline set by Musk, posting farewell messages, a salute emoji or other symbols familiar to Twitter workers on the company’s internal Slack messaging board, according to employees who still have access to the board. Dozens also took publicly to Twitter to announce they were signing off after the deadline."
Twitter users are sending out ‘last tweets’ amid another worker exodus and fears the site could go dark
The Chronicle, ROLAND LI/JORDAN PARKER: "Turmoil at Twitter reached a new level on Thursday, as users witnessed in real time the mass resignation of staffers in the wake of Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover. Some questioned whether the social media company would survive the exodus of staff on top of previous layoffs of around 3,700 workers.
“Goodbye Twitter” and “#RIPTwitter” were trending with more than 60,000 combined tweets, and hundreds of workers reportedly left on Thursday after Musk’s 2 p.m. deadline to commit to his strategy or resign. Some users speculated that they were sending out their last tweets and that the social network would soon stop working.
Departing workers took to the social network, sharing sentimental, humorous and defiant messages."
Opening a Bay Area restaurant is notoriously hard. Is it getting worse?
The Chronicle, ELENA KADVANY: "Nigel Jones has spent nearly $1 million and three years to open Calabash, a groundbreaking Oakland restaurant that will serve Afro-Caribbean, Malaysian and Persian food under one roof.
He originally hoped to open it at 2300 Valdez St. in September 2019. That got pushed to April 2020. Then October 2022.
Calabash is finally nearing an actual opening date, but it’s been a grueling, stressful road to get there — exacerbated by a city approval process slowed by the pandemic, Jones said. He blamed delays on slow communication and staffing issues at the city."
Driver is released after arrest in deputy recruit crash that sheriff called ‘deliberate act’
LAT, ALEXANDRA E PETRI/RICHARD WINTON/BRITTNY MEJIA: "A 22-year-old Diamond Bar man was released Thursday night after he had been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder of peace officers in a crash that injured 25 recruits on a training run Wednesday in South Whittier.
Jail records show that Nicholas Joseph Gutierrez was released at 9:49 p.m. and that his initial arrest Wednesday has been deemed a detention. The records cite California Penal Code 849(b)(1), which authorizes police to release arrestees from custody without first being arraigned if there are insufficient grounds to make a criminal complaint.
Investigators are continuing to develop the case against Gutierrez but are not legally allowed to hold a suspect in custody for more than 48 hours without presenting the case to prosecutors, said Sgt. Gerardo Magos, an L.A. County Sheriff’s Department spokesperson."
A top LAFD official fled a crash but got rewarded instead of disciplined
LAT, PAUL PRINGLE: "Late on a Sunday night, Ellsworth Fortman, an assistant chief for the Los Angeles Fire Department, walked out of Marci’s Sports Bar and Grill in Santa Clarita and climbed into his Dodge Ram pickup truck for the drive home.
Fortman had traveled less than a mile when he slammed into a parked Toyota Corolla, propelling it 160 feet into a parked Mercedes-Benz. Fortman’s truck careened into a curb and toppled a streetlamp, sending live electrical wires onto the pavement. He then backed up and barreled off.
The events of that January 2020 night — documented in LAFD and law enforcement reports — led the district attorney’s office to charge Fortman with misdemeanor hit-and-run and driving without a valid license. An internal inquiry concluded that he was under the influence of alcohol at the time of the crash, failed to ensure no one was injured before fleeing and put the public in danger from the fallen electrical lines, a Times investigation has found."
S.F.’s Muni Central Subway: Everything to know about riding the new transit line
The Chronicle, RICARDO CANO: "The first Muni Metro trains will take riders underneath the long-awaited Central Subway starting 8 a.m. Saturday.
The $1.95 billion, 1.7-mile extension of Muni’s T-Third Street line is San Francisco’s first major rail transit expansion since the initial segment of the T line opened in 2007. It will open almost four years later than originally planned.
The Central Subway will take Muni riders to four new stations — three of them underground — in South of Market, Union Square and Chinatown along Fourth and Stockton streets."
Now tech layoffs are slowing Bay Area housing market as prices fall even more
BANG*Mercury News, ETHAN VARIAN: "Add tech company layoffs to the list of headwinds facing the Bay Area housing market.
Rising mortgage rates, recession fears and a volatile stock market have all tamped down home sales and prices in recent months from record-setting pandemic highs.
Now, entering the traditionally slow winter real estate season, growing uncertainty in the region’s leading industry is giving would-be buyers another reason for pause."
Court blocks San Jose from clearing beleaguered homeless camp, for now
BANG*Mercury News, MARISA KENDALL: "A federal judge has temporarily blocked San Jose from clearing a beleaguered encampment in Columbus Park — moving yet another fight over the treatment of homeless residents off the street and into the courtroom.
The court order, issued Wednesday, bars the city from towing vehicles, seizing personal possessions or removing people from the camp — at least for now — over concerns that residents’ belongings and make-shift dwellings will be destroyed and they’ll be left with nowhere to go. The court will hear from activists and the city in the coming weeks, at which point it will decide whether to extend the block or allow the camp to be cleared.
“We need a judge to step in and say, ‘hey, that’s not cool, it’s not right,'” said Scott Largent, who used to live at the camp and has been helping spread the word of the order among residents. “There’s so many civil rights being violated over there, it’s shocking.”"
