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

Gasoline prices have been edging up for days in the state and are expected to soar 50 cents a gallon in Southern California this week. Bay Area prices could rise 30 cents. GasBuddy.com attributes the spike to “a convergence of fuel supply problems.” A lawsuit filed by Persian Gulf Inc. alleges, "For years Californians have seen tremendous spikes in gasoline prices, seemingly untethered to normal market forces of supply and demand.”   read more

Demand increased exponentially after Brown announced 25% mandatory cuts statewide in April and called for 50 million square feet of lawn to be ripped out. That would save 2 billion gallons of water a year. The program was expanded by $350 million the next month and was projected to triple the turf removal called for by Brown. The money went fast.   read more

Legislation to regulate e-cigarettes was eviscerated in an Assembly committee, where another bill to raise the age limit for purchasing tobacco was raised from 18 to 21. Earlier, another piece of tobacco legislation, Assembly Bill 768, aimed at banning smokeless tobacco, including e-cigarettes, at baseball stadiums was amended to apply just to weeds jammed up one’s nose and stuffed in one’s mouth.   read more

“Significant gaps and inconsistencies exist in available voluntary and mandatory data sources, both in terms of duration and completeness of reporting that limit assessment of the impacts of hydraulic fracturing,” the report says. The uncertainty has prevented the state from getting a handle on potential health and environmental risks from fracking.   read more

A lot of children from low-income homes are not seeing dentists. The California State Auditor reported in December that 56% of the 5.1 million children enrolled in Medi-Cal (California’s version of Medicaid) received dental care through the program in 2013. The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) expanded the rolls of the insured but not necessarily access to doctors and dentists.   read more

They are really good drugs, with high cure-rates for a debilitating and deadly infection that an estimated 750,000 Californians have. It is said one the drugs, Sovaldi, can cure more than 90% of patients with the most common type of hepatitis C. Price estimates for months-long treatments have ranged from $65,000 to $189,000.   read more

This audit updates the 2011 report and found in general that the department is “making progress” overseeing county efforts to protect children from abuse and neglect. But it still has a problem with sex offender contact. “Of the nearly 25,000 potential address matches, Social Services could not initially provide documentation for more than 8,600 to demonstrate that any outcomes had been reached," the report said.   read more

The End of Life Option Act, which passed on a 23-15 vote in the Senate, needed 10 votes in the 19-member Assembly committee to advance and minority Republicans weren’t going to help. Five Latino Democrats indicated they would not vote for the bill and, despite overwhelming support in the state and nation for right-to-die legislation, the authors were compelled to pull it back.   read more

Although the California Geological Survey shows the Hollywood fault from West Hollywood to Atwater Village, down the Sunset Strip, to be active, the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety has accepted evidence to the contrary and declared it safe enough to build Hollywood’s tallest buildings upon. It’s their call.   read more

The justices told prosecutors if they want to look at something in police files, they need to follow the same procedures everyone else does when they encounter the Peace Officers Bill of Rights. Since Pitchess v. Superior Court in 1974, that procedure involves asking a judge for specific information in an unseen file and keeping your fingers crossed.   read more

The board voted to “not do new business for a period of five years with Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS as specified, and further direct that the County unwind existing relationships with these five banks to the greatest extent feasible.” That means the county won’t buy the banks’ commercial paper or investment services, and will withdraw whatever funds it can from them.   read more

Assembly Bill 258—co-sponsored by the Americans for Safe Access (ASA), passed overwhelmingly in the Legislature and signed recently by Governor Brown—prevents hospitals from denying transplants to candidates based on their use of medical marijuana. Around 1,150 Californians currently on organ transplant lists use medical marijuana and people were being kicked off lists after waiting for years.   read more

Poway has to reduce its water use 32% and officials say the push to hit that mark was responsible for the wasted water. Water usage was down 45% in May, best in the state, and the tank’s unused contents percolated during the unusually warm weather we’ve been having lately.   read more

New rules from California’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) last week, which affect 75% of the state’s residential electricity customers, shift costs from heavy users further down the food chain, flirt with time-of-use charges (endangering granny’s air-conditioned studio apartment in the midday heat), back off from larger egalitarian solar support and essentially de-subsidize low-income consumers.   read more

Over the weekend, the Los Angeles Times reported that it looked at documents related to a 16-page tax board report in June 2014 that was the basis for a decision in August to revoke Blue Shield’s tax-exempt status. But the report has not been made public and the decision wasn’t known until the Times reported it in March.   read more

Sacramento Mayor (and former NBA star) Kevin Johnson filed a lawsuit to prevent the release of e-mail exchanges with lawyers over his involvement with the now-bankrupt National Conference of Black Mayors (NCBM). He was president of the organization for its final year, until May 2014. He formed a new organization, the African American Mayors Association, afterward amid a hail of lawsuits in a sea of vitriol.   read more