ICE agents have reportedly claimed to be police officers to gain consent to enter a person’s home – a tactic that is viewed as unethical, but within the powers granted to the officers. Civil rights groups supported Kalra’s bill, looking to stymie the Trump administration’s promise to use any and all available tools to deport undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes. Many groups fear Trump will expand deportations to include all undocumented immigrants, their families and relatives.   read more

California kicked off the new millennium with an energy crisis, exacerbated, if not precipitated, by manipulation of the national natural gas market, which led to the eventual collapse of Enron. The high court’s decision clears the way for states, businesses and consumers to sue energy suppliers for decade-old losses.   read more

The firm’s relationship with city officials is at the heart of the investigation. Until 2009, three of Urban Logic’s principals held top positions at Beaumont City Hall. Urban Logic has provided planning and development services to the city of 36,000, 80 miles east of Los Angeles, for 20 years. They also handle financial, engineering and wastewater management services.   read more

The bill would have preserved affordable housing and limited evictions by forcing new property owners to wait five years before invoking the 1986 Ellis Act, which lets landlords evict tenants and sell the apartment buildings. The Act was originally intended as a way to allow landlords to exit the rental business without undue hardship. But speculators have used it to flip buildings in San Francisco’s overheated real estate market and driven eviction rates higher.   read more

“In spite of ongoing water concerns and high land costs, Rabobank expects California almond growers will continue to increase plantings and total production, leading to a rise of about 2 percent and 3.5 percent per annum, respectively, over the next decade,” according to Vernon Crowder,‎ senior vice president and senior analyst. And the water shortage has only made things better. “Drought conditions and the stronger US dollar have increased the price of almonds for all buyers,” he wrote.   read more

Olympus sent out warning letters in January 2013 to hospitals across Europe, asking them to sign and return a form acknowledging they were spreading the word about difficulty in cleaning the specific part of the scope. But, somehow, the word did not make it across the giant watery expanse that separates the two continents in any meaningful way, although it was not totally unknown. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) told the Times it learned of the European letters last summer,   read more

The plaintiffs claimed to be aware of at least 30 instances of discrimination and abuse. The lawsuit cited instances of Uber charging blind passengers a cancellation fee after drivers refused to accommodate their guide dogs. The fees were refunded after the passengers complained in writing. One blind woman was allegedly denied a ride 12 times and others were abandoned in inclement weather when the driver saw their dogs.   read more

The court struck down a four-tiered pricing plan used by San Juan Capistrano’s water agency because it violated Proposition 218, a ballot measure passed in 1996 at the urging of fiscal conservatives that prohibits local governments from levying new or increased tax assessments on property owners without local ballot voter approval by said property owners. The California Supreme Court extended the reach of the law in 2006 to local water, refuse and sewer charges.   read more

A new report from the City Administrative Officer (CAO) studied the homeless landscape in 2013 to see how Los Angeles addressed the “serious challenges” of providing shelter, mental health and medical care, protection from disease, security for personal property and other “critical matters.” What the CAO found was an emphasis was on policing, although the first attempt to quantify the city’s efforts was possible only where it was able to “estimate or track spending.”   read more

Oakland lost arbitrations "time and again" because the City Attorney's office "has generally done a poor job of representing the City’s interests,” according to the report by court-appointed investigator Edward Swanson. In addition to doing a lousy job of representing the city in disciplinary cases, the office has a “dysfunctional” relationship with the police department that “has only exacerbated problems with the discipline system.”   read more

The California Second District Court of Appeal rescinded, without comment, an earlier seal it put on excerpts from the report contained in a legal document, thus extending an odd process of now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t transparency that continues to leave family, friends and the community ill-informed about what happened to Kendrec McDade three years ago.   read more

The Ratepayer Advocate said Edison should pay the money because of recently discovered information that the head of the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) met secretly with a top Edison executive in Europe and agreed on a multi-billion-dollar framework for settling who should pay for the abrupt San Onofre nuclear plant closure: ratepayers or shareholders. Ratepayers ended up paying 70% of the $4.8 billion cost.   read more

National polling shows more than 75% of people think vaccinations should be required, and it looked like legislation introduced in February was going to do that. But last week, the rubber hit the road when a very vocal minority showed up at a committee hearing to argue against passage of Senate Bill 277 and told lawmakers they were facing the prospect of 13,000 people with vaccine exemptions pulling their kids from public schools en masse. The legislation was put on hold for a week.   read more

Katharine Mieszkowski and Lance Williams at The Center for Investigative Reporting put a lot of the blame for a lack of transparency about water on a 1997 change in the California Public Records Act pushed by wealthy folks in the Silicon Valley who didn’t want the California Public Records Act to expose their utility usage data.   read more

The end is near for Delta smelt in the wild. They were once the most abundant fish in the estuary. While they will be mourned, their passing will be accompanied by a certain horror at what the demise of this indicator fish means for the Delta ecosystem. They were the poster child for short-sided neglect and awful water policy, and the vanishing canary in the coal mine warning of impending devastation.   read more

Researchers analyzed 8,500 solar projects in San Diego between May 2007 and April 2013 and found the broad range of financial subsidies had little correlation with the number of adoptees. The growth in popularity would have been about the same without them, the report concludes. Giving units to lower-income folks would provide a lot more cheap power and toss in a little income redistribution on the side.   read more

Attorneys for nine growers arrested on conspiracy marijuana charges in Northern California in 2011 argued that the law they were being prosecuted under was unconstitutional because marijuana is grouped with the harshest drugs which, by definition, have “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.” The judge said, “This is not the court and this is not the time. . . . The questions raised by the defense are for Congress to resolve.”   read more