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

The PUC undertook its own review of the e-mails, and 80 e-mailers, and determined no one still working there had committed an offense deserving of suspension or firing. PUC Executive Director Timothy Sullivan wrote to employees on May 27 that 54 individuals required no “corrective action” and the rest would be handled, because it is a personnel matter, without public comment.   read more

Gerard Anderson, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and co-author of the study, said: “There is no justification for these outrageous rates, but no one tells hospitals they can’t charge them. For the most part, there is no regulation of hospital rates and there are no market forces that force hospitals to lower their rates. They charge these prices simply because they can.”   read more

The state Assembly voted unanimously for AB 287, which helps clarify for the buyer that a vehicle is under recall, but would only restrict the sales of recalled used cars that are classified as “Stop Sale-Stop Drive,” around 1% of sales. Consumer groups argue that there is something fraudulent about heavily advertising a vehicle as “CarMax Quality Certified, which means every used car at CarMax must pass a Certified Quality Inspection,” when it has known defects.   read more

The worst was Covered California, but Community Colleges, the Department of Human Resources (CalHR) and the Franchise Tax Board were all found to be profoundly deficient. Covered California had 55 website pages with distinct violations out of 57 reviewed. More than 300 serious violations were found on the website and some content was “totally inaccessible” to users.   read more

The city asked the state nicely earlier in the year to include it in a program that lets Northern California entities get away with just 4% cuts because they are taking their water from surface sources, like rivers that are going to dump their contents in the sea if not snatched. That didn’t happen. Riverside gets its water from underground, not the surface, and that’s a critical difference to the state.   read more

Californians have long been big fans of payday loans, short-term borrowing of under $300 at an annual rate of 459%. That adds up when you’re paying $15 to borrow $100 for two weeks. But lately, California borrowers have been borrowing more dollars under even more onerous conditions. Auto title loans increased in California 140%, from 38,148 to 91,505, between 2011 and 2013.   read more

The “emergency” action was taken in response to a public uproar over the widespread use of traffic fines and attached secondary fees to fund basic court functions. Many of the Superior Courts regard the charges as budgetary necessities in light of massive cutbacks by the state and mismanagement of the judiciary’s limited resources. That isn’t changing. They will continue.   read more

“What we identified as the major barrier was a lack of willing landlords,” Christina Margiotta, vice president for Community Impact at the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, told KPCC. She said 500 veterans had vouchers and nowhere to go. L.A.’s rental market is excruciatingly tight, with small vacancy rates, skyrocketing rents and a shortage of affordable housing. That is not going to change for the better anytime soon, and could get worse.   read more

Fifty-two years ago, an aerospace company in El Cajon, near San Diego, received permission from the county to store its toxic waste in an impervious sump, but no one apparently bothered to ask how the storage unit was constructed. Its predecessors on the property had already been stashing waste water underground for a couple decades. The sump was found to be constructed with a concrete base and redwood walls, which did not contain the 7,000 gallons of waste poured into it monthly.   read more

The question is: What constitutes an emergency? The county Department of Planning and Development is expected to decide that within days and Energy Division Director Kevin Drude told the Santa Barbara Independent that the permits would be granted if the situation was deemed a threat to public health or essential public services. That scares critics like Environmental Defense Center chief counsel Linda Krol, who said, “We’re coming out of one disaster; we don’t want to walk into another.”   read more

Although marijuana is dirty enough to make the Obama administration cringe, it was not dirty enough for the appellate court judges. They cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s Johnson v. Yellow Cab Transit Co. case that stated unclean hands “does not mean that courts must always permit a defendant wrongdoer to retain the profits of his wrongdoing merely because the plaintiff himself is possibly guilty of transgressing the law.”   read more

Nechodom, the husband of former California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown in December 2011 after the dismissal of Acting Director Derek Chernow for taking a harder line on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) than his boss wanted. At the time, industry critic Dan Bacher called it “a move that reeks of political cronyism and demonstrates the inordinate power of the oil industry.”   read more

The draft report touches on possible reasons why very few problems, relatively speaking, were found: “These factors include: insufficient pre- and post-fracturing data on the quality of drinking water resources; the paucity of long-term systematic studies; the presence of other sources of contamination precluding a definitive link between hydraulic fracturing activities and impact; and the inaccessibility of some information on hydraulic fracturing activities and potential impacts.”   read more

CalHFA Board Chairman Matthew Jacobs is using the controversial 1986 Ellis Act to kick out 17 tenants from four rent-regulated building, according to CityWatch, in a move that has become standard operating procedure for apartment-building flippers and developers. CalHFA provides financial assistance for poor and working-class first-time home buyers and participates in the rental market through loans to developers building multifamily housing.   read more

Chief Gregg Suhr said his department just finished clearing a big backlog back to 2003, and is still trying to recover from scandalously bad behavior in the crime lab that put 1,400 criminal cases at risk in March. The chief noted that the 10-year statute of limitations had passed on the hundreds of cases tied to the rape kits and said the lab’s limited resources should be directed at cases that can still be prosecuted. The D.A.’s office disagreed.   read more

Two dozen environmental groups sent a letter to the governor protesting his decision: “The damage that has occurred to date is unacceptable—more than 40 miles of the coast fouled with oil, at least 80 dead birds and 45 dead marine mammals, two popular State Parks closed and 138 square miles closed to fishing. Now is the time when we need the greatest possible protections for the coastal environment, not a weakening of California’s signature coastal protection law.”   read more