Top Stories
Judge Orders Companies to Pay $1.1 Billion in 13-Year-Old Lead Paint Lawsuit
The companies argued that there were other causes of lead poisoning that weren’t related to lead paint. But the judge said generally-accepted scientific evidence indicated otherwise. “Each Defendant certainly knew or should reasonably have known that exposure to lead at high levels, including exposure to lead paint, was fatal or at least detrimental to children’s health,” Kleinberg wrote. read more
Court OKs First Eminent Domain Seizure for High-Speed Rail Project
Property owners are beginning to make way for a project that may not get built. The State Public Works Board (SPWB) voted 3-0 Friday to let the agency use eminent domain to make the first seizure of property it needs for the bullet-train. It won’t be the last. It has been estimated that 20% of the 370 or so parcels the state needs to obtain will end up being taken via this last resort. read more
Tribune Unveils Newest Plan for Draining Assets from Los Angeles Times
The publishing unit is being systematically stripped of its assets and revenue streams, saddled with new debt and left to run a business with many of its centralized Tribune business functions lost. The SEC filing says that Tribune will extract an unspecified payoff from the new publishing unit, once it is spun off, and expects the “dividend” to be funded “with proceeds from debt financing that we anticipate arranging prior to the distribution.” read more
California State Auditor Says Education Is at “High Risk”
Education joins a heavyweight list of horribles that includes: deteriorating infrastructure, escalating state employee pensions and health care, shaky emergency preparedness, inadequate workforce planning, an uncertain supply of electricity and suspect oversight of the state’s information technology. read more
FBI Charges 18 Current and Former L.A. Sheriff's Deputies
Federal authorities charged 18 current and former department members Monday with excessive use of force and obstruction of justice.
The charges span five separate criminal cases that began as a probe of illegal conduct by deputies in jails and expanded to civil rights violations that included unlawful arrests. The U.S. Attorneys Office, in announcing the charges and 16 arrests, said that higher-ups are also implicated. read more
Judge Orders New Palmdale Elections Because of Bias; Other Cities May be Next
Fifty-four percent of residents in the high-desert city of Palmdale, just north of Los Angeles, are Latino. But, as usual, none of the city council members elected last month is. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mark Mooney said that is a direct result of the system used to select the council—a citywide vote rather than by-district—and declared it a violation of the state Voting Rights Act. read more
L.A. Sheriff’s Department Hired Dozens of Officers It Knew Had Bad Records
Many of the officers, who had jobs patrolling parks, hospitals and county government facilities, had committed serious offenses that probably should have disqualified them from becoming sheriff’s deputies. Almost 200 had failed to get hired by other law enforcement agencies for various deficiencies, around 100 had been involved in acts of dishonesty, like falsifying police records, and at least 15 had been caught trying to manipulate their lie-detector tests. read more
$10 Million Lawsuit Dropped but Lawmaker v. Lawmaker Smackdown Continues
Harkey filed the lawsuit after Wyland made disparaging remarks about her and her husband, Daniel Harkey, at a local Orange County Tea Party gathering in July. Weyland’s subject was her husband’s troubled investment company, Point Center Financial, which declared for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier in the year after four years of investigations and lawsuits. read more
12 Years Later, Whistleblower MD Wins Suit over Abuse at State Developmental Disabilities Center
Problems at the state’s Sonoma center for developmentally disabled patients were so bad that it was stripped of its license to operate last December after a series of stories detailing abuse and incompetence almost won a 2012 Pulitzer Prize for California Watch and reporter Ryan Gabrielson.
However, long before that, Petaluma physician Dr. Van Peña, a 10-year employee, was raising a ruckus about conditions there.
But instead of getting an award 12 years ago, he got fired. read more
Judge Puts Two Roadblocks in the Way of High-Speed Rail Project
Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael P. Kenny barred the state from selling $9 billion in rail bonds approved by voters in November 2008 because the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s finance committee failed to explain its reasons for authorizing the offering. He also ordered the state to come up with a new strategy for raising the estimated $68 billion needed to complete the system. read more
State Repeals Standard for Toxic Furniture Flame Retardants It Once Championed Nationally
The old standard required that foam cushions in upholstered furniture be able to resist a candle flame for 12 seconds. Manufacturers met that standard by using chemicals. Now, the state will follow a standard proposed by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission that advocates the use of specially designed, fire-resistant fabric instead. The new rules will be phased in next year. read more
State Sues SAP over Failed Payroll System in Yet Another Tech Meltdown
The project, MyCalPays, is supposed to replace the poorly-connected computer systems that the controller’s office uses to pay approximately 240,000 civil service employees. Vince Brown, the project’s former chief operating officer under former Controller Steve Wesley, told the committee, “I think everyone knows that at some point that payroll system is going to blow up for good.” read more
California’s Hazardous Waste Lost in a Flurry of Blurry Carbon-Copy Paperwork
A review by the newspaper of the Department of Toxic Substances Control’s (DTSC) procedures for tracking the material found that it can’t account for 1% of the material that has been shipped during the past year. That might not sound like much until you consider it adds up to 174,000 tons of waste, enough to fill 23,000 trucks. read more
San Diego County Quietly Scanning Faces for Its Growing Surveillance Database
A 10-month-old pilot program funded by the Department of Homeland Security uses facial recognition technology to search for matches in a growing database that includes 348,000 arrestees. The program was rolled out at the beginning of the year without public hearings and little media attention. The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) says officers have run 5,629 queries through the database as of November 1, with nearly 2,000 coming from the San Diego Police Department. read more
San Diego County Quietly Scanning Faces for Its Growing Surveillance Database
“Facial recognition creates acute privacy concerns that fingerprints do not,” Senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota) said at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law. “Once someone has your faceprint, they can get your name, they can find your social networking account and they can find and track you in the street, in the stores you visit, the government buildings you enter, and the photos your friends post online.”
read more
California’s Gold Mine Legacy: 10,000 Years of Toxic Mercury Sloshing Down
California has known for a long time that it has mercury contamination in its water supply, much of it washing down from areas around long-closed gold mines.
But a new study says that contrary to conventional wisdom, the toxic flow from the Sierra Nevada mountains has not ebbed and that global warming poses a new risk of amping up the spread of mercury through water and the food chain. read more