Month: February 2025

Thorn West: Issue No. 226

City Politics

• As many criticize the city’s lack of wildfire preparedness in advance of the Santa Ana winds, Mayor Karen Bass has today fired LAFD chief Kristin Crowley. The LA Times covers the firing in the context of a “sense of disarray that has enveloped City Hall.”

• Children’s Hospital Los Angeles stopped offering several forms of gender-affirming care, in response to a Trump administration executive order threatening the funding of any medical institution that provided this care to transgendered youths. The hospital has now partially reversed that decision, following weekly protests.

Housing Rights

• The LA City Council postponed voting on a motion that would offer eviction protections to Angelenos economically impacted by the wildfires. It will revisit the issue in March. A similar measure did pass at the County Board of Supervisors. That motion applies countywide, but only protects those who specifically lost work. Tenants in Maui, devastated by wildfires in 2023, suffered a variety of cascading displacements, despite the passage of stronger tenant protections than LA is considering.

• The California FAIR Plan, a state-administered fund that provides fire insurance to property owners in high-risk areas, has run out of money in the aftermath of the wildfires. This triggers a condition that allows the fund to collect an additional $1 billion from insurers. Half of this cost may be passed onto consumers, with the state’s approval.

Education

• This week, a Los Angeles Unified School District policy went into effect that bans student phone use during school hours.

• The Trump administration’s terrorization of immigrant communities is depressing school attendance, per CalMatters.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• A member of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department Civilian Oversight Commission has resigned, amid a conflict pitting the oversight body against county attorneys, LASD, and the State Attorney General’s office.

• In San Francisco, an effort to bolster recruitment to the Police Department has failed, as a growing percentage of cadets are dropping out of the police academy.

Transportation

• A long-awaited discussion about how Los Angeles will implement Measure HLA was delayed; the City Council’s Transportation Committee has been drawn into the efforts to block an affordable housing development, and ran out of time.

• The Trump administration has signaled that it will sabotage a California high speed rail project. At Union Station, a press conference by the U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was shouted down by project advocates.

Thorn West: Issue No. 224

State Politics

• Amid fears that his administration will withhold federal aid, Governor Newsom met with President Trump in Washington DC.

• Newsom announced that Casey Wasserman, currently serving as chair of the Olympics Committee, will also lead a private-sector wildfire recovery program, known as “LA Rises,” along with Magic Johnson and Dodgers owner Kevin Walter. In Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass appointed Steve Soboroff, former chair of the police commission, to lead the recovery effort in Pacific Palisades. It isn’t yet clear how the multiple city and state efforts will be coordinated.

City Politics

• At a press conference with Mayor Bass and other local leaders, President Trump demanded that Pacific Palisades residents who had lost their homes be immediately allowed to begin the process of rebuilding, before they could be safely cleared of toxic debris. His subsequent executive order implemented an “unprecedented” short time frame for debris removal.

Health Care

• Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles to demand that the hospital reverse its recent decision to stop offering gender-affirming care to transgender youth. The hospital’s decision was a capitulation to an executive order from President Trump threatening to derail federal funding to medical institutions that provide this form of health care.

Immigration

• A week of protests at City Hall, as well as student walkouts, all in opposition to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies, gained media attention after protestors briefly shut down the 101 freeway.

• A leaked document obtained by the LA Times indicates that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is planning a “large scale” flood of “immigration enforcement actions” this February in Los Angeles.

Environmental Justice

• Video evidence strongly implicates Southern California Edison equipment as the cause of the Eaton fire. Spokespeople for the private utility company initially denied responsibility, and even attempted to shift blame to a nearby encampment, but have now acknowledged irregularities with their equipment at the time of the fire.

• Rain earlier in the week caused debris flows in the burn scar of the Palisades fire, triggering a weeklong shut down of a stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway. Heavier rain is expected this week.