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An Orange County Superior Court judge on Tuesday denied a voter's request to halt a controversial recall election against a Santa Ana city council member.A couple of weeks ago, the Orange County registrar of voters realized the petitioners seeking to recall Santa Ana Councilmember Jessie Lopez hadn't gathered enough signatures to trigger an election. And more than 1,000 eligible voters didn’t get ballots.
But O.C. Superior Court Judge Craig Griffin denied the request Tuesday during a hearing in Santa Ana and scheduled another court date for January 2024.Tim Rush, who chairs the recall campaign against Lopez, said his group followed what they thought was the law."We did exactly as we were told by the election official," he said.
The ordinance replaces a ballot measure that would have required hotels to make vacant rooms available to unhoused people. Instead, it will require the city to consider how new hotel developments will affect housing, childcare, public transit and small businesses in the area. Hotel workers have engaged in rolling strikes since the July 4 weekend when their contracts expired. It's unclear how this new ordinance was reached or if it affects the negotiations going forward.
A few things must happen before the proposal becomes law. Unite Here Local 11 has to withdraw the original ordinance and the city attorney must review and send the proposal for city council approval by early December. Councilmember Bob Blumenfield was absent during Tuesday's vote.SAG-AFTRA negotiators say they have responded to the AMPTP’s “Last, Best & Final Offer,” noting that AI is one of “several essential items on which we still do not have an agreement.
He encourages veterans to attend conversational events for veterans like the one being hosted by Congressman Ted Lieu, who's a veteran, on Nov. 12. Veterans can registerTrust in the VA He says there are a number of resources for veterans when it comes to housing, including vouchers that subsidize housing and the Supported Services for Veteran Families Program, which provides funding to help pay for rent. And if an L.A.-based veteran becomes unhoused, they can call the Veterans Homeless Hotline and receive temporary housing and a ride on the day of:A historic blimp hangar burns in Tustin today.
In 1975, the hangars were entered into the National Register of Historic Places, based on their historic connection to World War II and other military conflicts. They were also recognized as two of the largest wooden structures in the world. The victim was identified as Paul Kessler of Thousand Oaks. According to the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office, he was attending a demonstration in support of Israel on Sunday at the intersection of Westlake Boulevard and Thousand Oaks Boulevard when he was involved in some kind of altercation with another protester. He then fell backward and hit his head on the ground, which caused swelling and bleeding around his brain, said Christopher Young, the chief medical examiner for Ventura County.
“These witnesses provided conflicting statements about what the altercation and who the aggressor was,” Sheriff Jim Fryhoff said in a news conference on Tuesday. “Some of the witnesses were pro-Palestine, while others were pro-Israel.” The sheriff’s office will be increasing patrols around mosques, Muslim community centers, and Jewish houses of worship. Authorities are also working closely with religious leaders in the community to provide support and assistance as needed, Fryhoff said.
The 6-foot-4-inch, 174-pound calf was born in September with help from a cooperative breeding program. The Masai Giraffe Species Survival Plan recommended pairing his parents, 12-year-old female Zainabu and 11-year-old male Philip, who also live at the L.A. Zoo. As of now, the calf is still figuring out his life at the L.A. Zoo. If you want to see him and the rest of the herd, the Masai giraffes are usually out and about in their habitat during the day.Scammers pulled off one of the biggest suspected frauds in U.S. history while laid-off workers scrambled to survive.
“It’s almost like a pendulum, where EDD has opened up the door, and fraud’s happening,” former California Auditor Elaine Howle told CalMatters this summer. “And then, ‘Oops, oh my God, there’s fraud. Let’s freeze all these accounts.’”kept raking in millions of dollars from the state’s troubled system.
Those inside the EDD during the early days of the pandemic remember the shock as the whole picture came into focus. Job losses quickly blew past all projections for normal recessions, said Greg Williams, the agency’s former deputy director of Unemployment Insurance.In the decades leading up to the pandemic, tragedy first propelled the EDD from an in-person, paper-based system to a network of call centers and online services that have repeatedly failed under pressure.
At first, the EDD was optimistic: “System is performing fantastic,” the agency’s IT director wrote the next day. “They set up a false choice between, ‘Get the money out the door as soon as you can send it out,’ versus, ‘Let’s spend a week matching data,’” Horowitz told CalMatters. “Not months, but a week matching data. And that’s the crux of the problem.”
“Fraudulent applications using these sources will not get flagged,” EDD task force co-leader Jennifer Pahlka wrote in her recent book “Recoding America”. “The data entered on the application will exactly match the sources the EDD checks against, because it is usually a copy of precisely that data.”The fraud panic was just beginning, but the chaos that followed would prove to be a money-maker for EDD contractors. That is, until some of them got targeted by scammers, too.
“They are telling us their limit to issue new cards is 22,500 per night,” EDD Director Hilliard wrote on March 26, 2020. “Starting this Sunday we expect about 465,000 new claimants that will need a card.”Weeks of emergency phone calls followed. At one point, a plan was hatched, then scrapped, for Bank of America to mail paper checks. State labor officials asked why the EDD didn’t have direct deposit, or online payments similar to Apple Pay’s digital cards.
“Were we aware that the fraud was out there? Yeah,” said Sheehan, a 30-year EDD veteran who retired in late 2018.“We didn’t put safeguards in place and made California an easier target, so people would come here to do their fraud.” Today, the EDD tells CalMatters in a statement that, “costs were greater than benefits at that time, and the existing system was catching cases flagged by the filters.” It is “not reasonable,” the agency added, to blame states for not predicting a fraud crisis on the scale of the pandemic.El Dorado County District Attorney Vern Pierson, who led a state insurance fraud working group at the time, remembers meeting with Henning Jr. to learn about the new fraud tool.
So goes a cycle of dire situations for unemployed workers, fraud panic and social spending fights still playing out today. Audits later found that, despite the expensive upgrades, employees continued using workarounds on patchy old tech systems that were not well integrated. The Bank of America debit cards, meanwhile, were rolled out without the security chips common in most consumer cards, which the bank told the state Senate Banking Committee was the EDD’s call.
Michael Bernick, who directed the EDD during the dot-com bust of the early 2000s, said the agency always struggled for sustained attention and resources from lawmakers who tend to move on to other priorities when unemployment is low. In late April 2020, then-EDD Director Hilliard wrote to federal officials about the agency’s decision to suspend its usual requirement that unemployment recipients manually confirm every two weeks that they are still looking for a job.
Photos of mail returned to the Employment Development Department included in a letter sent from former California State Auditor Elaine Howle to state legislative leaders in 2020.to 3.4 million workers for not mailing in required documents, even when photos from the time show stacks of unopened mail.
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