themarijuanaherald.com

Aug 23 2023

Legislation to legalize marijuana cafes in California has been amended in the second and ordered to a second reading.

In June the California Senate passed a bill to legalize marijuana cafes through its second reading, moving it to its third and final reading. Yesterday the Senate amended the bill and ordered it back to its second reading. The proposal has already been passed by the full Assembly, but will need to go back for one final vote if it’s passed by the Senate through a third reading, given it was amended.

Assembly Bill 374 would authorize locations where marijuana and marijuana products, as well as other food and drink products, can be purchased and consumed. The measure would also allow marijuana stores to hold live entertainment events.

The measure was approved in an overwhelming 64 to 9 vote on May 31 through the California Assembly.

According to its legislative digest, this bill would authorize a local jurisdiction “to allow for the preparation or sale of noncannabis food or beverage products, as specified, by a licensed retailer or microbusiness in the area where the consumption of cannabis is allowed, to allow for the sale of prepackaged, noncannabis-infused, nonalcoholic food and beverages by a licensed retailer, and to allow, and to sell tickets for, live musical or other performances on the premises. of a licensed retailer or microbusiness in the area where the consumption of cannabis is allowed.”

“Cannabis cafes in the Netherlands capitalize on the social experience of cannabis by offering coffee, food, and live music, all of those opportunities are currently illegal under California law,” says Assembly Member Matt Haney, the bill’s prime sponsor. “AB 374 will allow struggling cannabis businesses to diversity away from the marijuana-only ‘dispensary’ model and bring much needed tourist dollars into empty downtowns.”

Haney says “Lots of people want to enjoy legal cannabis in the company of others. And many people want to do that while sipping coffee, eating a scone, or listening to music. There’s absolutely no good reason from an economic, health, or safety standpoint that the state should make that illegal.”

Under current California law cannabis consumption lounges are not allowed to sell freshly prepared food, a rule that many call arbitrary and unnecessary. A November 2022 rules change allowed lounges to offer prepackaged food and beverages on a limited basis, but nothing freshly made or beverages ready to be consumed without opening.

Assembly Bill 374 would change this by explicitly allowing licensed marijuana consumption sites to that sell freshly made foods and beverages and host live events such as concerts and seminars. Some are dubbing this the “cannabis café” bill, as it would introduce Amsterdam-style locations that allow for marijuana to be consumed and food and beverages to be purchased such as coffee, tea and sandwiches.

The full text of Assembly Bill 374 can be found by clicking here.

themarijuanaherald.com/2023/06/california-senate-passes-bill-to-legalize-marijuana-cafes-allow-live-performances-at-marijuana-stores/

https://themarijuanaherald.com/2023/06/california-assembly-passes-bill-to-allow-marijuana-cafes/

www.latimes.com

Congressman nominates 27 Latino films for National Film Registry

Films by and about Latinos have often been left out of historical conversations including the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. But Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), along with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, has been trying to change that.

Castro has been working for years to help increase Latino representation in multiple industries across the U.S., including entertainment. Last week he sent a letter to Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and the National Film Preservation Board listing 27 Latino films that should be considered for this year’s selection.

The goal of the registry is to select films that showcase a variety of range and diversity of American film heritage.

“This is my attempt and the Hispanic Caucus’ attempt to celebrate their contributions so that people will rightfully see us for something other than just the stereotypes,” Castro said. “As an industry that is purported to be incredibly culturally progressive in all kinds of causes, [the entertainment industry] has in fact been regressive and detrimental to the development of new voices, and the Latino community has paid the price of that exclusion.”

Castro said that the lack of representation on the registry is harmful not only to the Latino community, but also to other marginalized groups. He said he carefully selected films that break common stereotypes placed on the Latino community.

“Given the film industry’s continued exclusion of Latinos, we must make a special effort to ensure that Latino Americans’ contributions to American filmmaking are appropriately celebrated and included in the National Film Registry,” Castro said in his letter.

Every year the registry adds 25 films from the list of nominees and in recent years has increased emphasis on films by people of color and women. Even with this increase, out of the 850 titles on the registry, only 24 of them are Latino films.

Ana-Christina Ramón, the inaugural director of the Entertainment and Media Research Initiative at UCLA, has dedicated much of her work to researching access and equity in the entertainment industry. She said that including Latino films on the list of nominees and in the registry is crucial.

“Latinx people have been living here since before it was the United States and they are part of the American experience, and so for them not to be included, I think it would be a travesty,” Ramón said.

Ramón also said it is not only about the types of diverse stories that are being told, but also who is getting the jobs to play those roles.

“These films not only tell the story about Latin culture, but they influence American culture as well,” Ramón said.

Castro said the film industry seems to be more exclusive with the diversity of its lists than the music industry because it’s “layered with more gatekeepers.”

“That’s what this work is about. It’’s a celebration of the culture, but also a reminder to Hollywood that we’re here, that our contributions matter, and that they are worthy of recognition,” Castro said.

One of the films on the Library of Congress’ nomination list is “Sleep Dealer” by director Alex Rivera, which was released in 2008. The Sundance award-winning film is a sci-fi thriller about a young man, Memo Cruz, played by Luis Fernando Peña, in near-future Mexico who tries to survive a “misguided drone attack.”

Cruz tries to find safety near the U.S.-Mexico border but finds out migrant workers are unable to cross the border. He then tries to connect his body to a robot in the U.S. to help find a better future.

For over two decades, Rivera, who is a MacArthur “Genius Grant” winner and professor at Arizona State University, has dedicated his career to telling adventurous Latino stories. He said that Latino stories are not given adequate support to be successful. He said there is no shortage of Latino stories, but the problem is that there is not enough interest in Latino stories from decision makers.

“It’s so important that someone like Rep. Castro is using his platform and his power to highlight the simple reality of our community as part of this country,” Rivera said.

The official list of films added to the registry will be announced in December.

Here are the films nominated by Castro:

“... and the Earth Did Not Swallow Him” (1994) “Blood In Blood Out” (1993) “Raising Victor Vargas” (2002) “Frida” (2002) “I Like It Like That” (1994) “Walkout” (2006) “Mosquita y Mari” (2012) “The Milagro Beanfield War” (1988) “Under the Same Moon” (2007) “American Me” (1992) “Tortilla Soup” (2001) “Mi Vida Loca” (1993) “Instructions Not Included” (2013) “Maria Full of Grace” (2004) “Girlfight” (2000) “La Mission” (2010) “Sleep Dealer” (2008) “Alambrista!” (1977) “Our Latin Thing” (1972) “Cheech & Chong’s Up in Smoke” (1978) “A Better Life” (2011) “Gun Hill Road” (2011) “In the Time of the Butterflies” (2001) “Roberto Clemente” (2008) “The Longoria Affair” (2010)

https://irle.ucla.edu/emri/

latimes.com/genius-fellows-latinx-files

asu.edu/20221027-genius-grant-fellows-launch-latino-filmmaking-lab-asus-poitier-film-school

www.nbclosangeles.com

The LA City Council voted Wednesday to approve a near-$1 billion package of raises and bonuses designed to improve recruiting and retention of LAPD officers, after acknowledging the new contract could limit the city's ability to fund other core services.

In a 12-to-3 vote, the council agreed to a near-13% increase in starting pay for new officers, 12% cost of living increases over four years, and a variety of bonuses and incentives that city officials said they hoped would slow the pace of existing officers' decisions to retire, resign, or transfer to other agencies.

“Our police department, just like other major city police departments, is enduring a hiring and retention crisis,” Mayor Karen Bass emailed reporters in a statement.

"I want to thank the leaders of the City Council for supporting this action and I look forward to working together to ensure that Angelenos are safe," the statement said.

An analysis provided to the council showed the new raises and bonuses, above the already-approved $3 billion LAPD budget, would cost an extra $123 million during this fiscal year.

It would increase another $75 million in 2024-2025, another $91 million in 2025-2026 and another $95 million in 2026-2027.

Each increase is on top of the previous year's, bringing the total impact to about $994 million at the end of the fourth year, not including overtime pay.

“It is unclear exactly how the city will pay for nearly $1 billion dollars in cumulative salary increases," Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez, one of the three "no"' votes, said before the council meeting Wednesday.

“If we approve the contract that's coming before us today, I fear that the city is committing to another four years where we cannot deliver on the most basic municipal services that our constituents need, things like keeping the lights on, picking up trash, paving the roads, let alone serving our most vulnerable population,” she said.

Hernandez was the only council member to vote no on the overall city budget earlier this summer, citing the significant increase to police spending.

Council members Hugo Soto-Martinez and Nithya Raman also voted against the police contract, and all three said the money would be better spent on housing, social services and creating a new crisis response system for mental health and other non-violent emergencies.

During the council meeting, the city's chief administrative officer, Matthew Szabo, who negotiated the with the officers' union, acknowledged the spending on police could limit the city's ability to pay for other employees' raises or programs.

“This contract represents an investment in LAPD in a significant way," Szabo said.

"It represents a very substantial financial commitment to recruiting officers and retaining officers, and, as with any major financial commitment, it will create choices in the future, and so, we’re making choices with this contract … that will be part of the competition for scarce resources," he said.

LAPD Chief Michel Moore posted a short message on social media praising the agreement.

"We cannot put a price on public safety," the message said.

"A competitive contract is one of the steps needed to keep our communities safe through retaining our current personnel, and attracting much needed new hires," it said.

Mayor Bass has said she wants to expand the size of the LAPD to 9,500 officers. At the end of June, the department had just under 9,000 officers, the lowest level in at least a decade.

The city reported earlier this year an average 20% employee vacancy rate across all departments, and unions representing workers at those other departments said many city employees were being overworked and underpaid. Many of their labor contracts will expire before the end of 2023.

latimes.com

The Supreme Court is being urged to weigh whether homeless people have a constitutional right to sleep on public sidewalks and camp in parks.

Judge Marsha Berzon, a senior liberal on the appeals court, cited Supreme Court decisions from the early 1960s which said that drug addicts and alcoholics may not be punished simply because they have an addiction. She said the same principle applies to the homeless.

“Just as the state may not criminalize the state of being homeless in public places,” Berzon wrote, “the state may not criminalize conduct that is an unavoidable consequence of being homeless — namely sitting, lying or sleeping on the streets.”

Four years ago, a wide array of California business groups and cities, including Los Angeles, joined appeals that urged the Supreme Court to review that ruling in a case from Boise, Idaho.

To their surprise and dismay, however, the justices turned down the appeal without a comment or dissent. They may have done so because Boise officials had repealed part of a key ordinance after losing in a lower court. The appeal may have been seen as moot.

But the non-decision left the constitutional dispute untouched, and the issue is now back before the high court in a new appeal from a small city in southern Oregon.

Grants Pass has a population of about 38,000, of whom 50 or as many 600 are homeless. Shortly after the 9th Circuit’s ruling in 2018 case from Boise, lawyers sued on behalf of several homeless people in the city who said they were harassed by police and ticketed for sleeping in a park.

In response, a federal judge ruled the city cannot enforce a strict ban on camping in its public parks, and that ruling was affirmed by the 9th Circuit in a 2-1 decision.

Writing for the majority, Judge Roslyn Silver said she was obliged to follow the circuit court’s precedent in the Boise case, which held “the 8th Amendment prohibits the imposition of criminal penalties for sitting, sleeping, or lying outside on public property for homeless individuals who cannot obtain shelter.”

That in turn launched the new appeal to the Supreme Court.

Lawyers who worked on the case are optimistic the court will take it up because the homeless problem — and its impact on cities — has gotten much worse.

Their appeal filed late Tuesday argues that the 9th Circuit’s ruling and the federal judges who have applied it “have erected a judicial roadblock preventing a comprehensive response to the growth of public encampments in the West. The consequences of inaction are dire for those living both in and near encampments: crime, fires, the reemergence of medieval diseases, environmental harm, and record levels of drug overdoses and deaths on public streets....Only this [Supreme] Court can end this misguided project of federal courts dictating homelessness policy under the banner of the 8th Amendment.”

Last month, the 9th Circuit Court’s conservatives blasted their liberal colleagues for refusing to reconsider their past rulings on the rights of the homeless.

“Homelessness is presently the defining public health and safety crisis in the western United States. California, for example, is home to half of the individuals in the entire country who are without shelter on a given night,” wrote Judge Milan Smith in a dissent joined by eight others.

“In the City of Los Angeles alone, there are roughly 70,000 homeless persons. There are stretches of the city where one cannot help but think the government has shirked its most basic responsibilities under the social contract: providing public safety and ensuring that public spaces remain open to all,” Smith wrote. “One-time public spaces like parks — many of which provide scarce outdoor space in dense, working-class neighborhoods — are filled with thousands of tents and makeshift structures, and are no longer welcoming to the broader community.”

The 9th Circuit’s active judges split 14-13 over whether to re-hear the case from Grants Pass, just short of the needed majority. But such a broad divide on the nation’s largest U.S. appeals court often appears to trigger a review by the Supreme Court.

Under the court’s rules, the lawyers who represented the homeless plaintiffs have 30 days to file a response to the appeal in City of Grants Pass vs. Johnson. If that schedule holds, the justices could decide in late fall whether to hear the case and issue a ruling early next year. scotusblog.com/cases/city-of-boise-idaho-v-martin

latimes.com

When Adel Hagekhalil speaks about the future of water in Southern California, he often starts by mentioning the three conduits the region depends on to bring water from hundreds of miles away: the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the Colorado River Aqueduct and the California Aqueduct.

Southern California urgently needs to buttress its water resources, he says, by designing the equivalent of a “fourth aqueduct” — not another concrete artery to draw water from distant sources, but a set of projects that will harness local water supplies and help prepare for more intense extremes as temperatures continue to rise.

“The organization is going through a transformation,” Hagekhalil told employees during a recent visit to a water treatment plant. “It’s all about us adapting,” he said, and the water district must prepare for hotter and drier times as global warming continues to undermine the region’s water lifelines in the coming decades. Our climate change challenge

If the Golden State is going to lead the world toward a better, safer future, our political and business leaders — and the rest of us — will have to work harder to rewrite the California narrative. Here’s how we can push the state forward.

For Southern California to adapt, Hagekhalil said, it will need to recycle more wastewater, capture stormwater, clean up contaminated groundwater, and design new infrastructure to more nimbly transport and store water, taking advantage of wet years such as this one to prepare for longer and more severe droughts.

Whether he is ultimately able to deliver on these ambitious goals could be determined in part by the actions of the board that hired him. The MWD’s 38-member board has a history of contentious politics, and resistance to change among some leaders might slow Hagekhalil’s efforts to revamp priorities at the district, where he oversees more than 1,900 employees and more than $2.2 billion in annual spending. Adel Hagekhalil speaks at Weymouth Water Treatment Plant in La Verne.

Adel Hagekhalil, general manager of the MWD, speaks at Weymouth Water Treatment Plant in La Verne.

But Hagekhalil, who previously managed sewer systems and street services for Los Angeles, has a reputation for being an affable, diplomatic manager who isn’t afraid to take on difficult tasks and values hearing from all sides. He has made headway building alliances to advance his goals. And he also has a disarming demeanor, with a playful streak and a knack for using slogans to market his priorities.

He took the job in 2021 after a bitter debate among board members, some of whom said they saw him as too inexperienced in Western state water politics. After the board narrowly voted to hire him, Hagekhalil sought to emphasize unity, and began wearing a blue lapel pin with the slogan “We Are One.”

He regularly hands out the pins to board members, employees and others.

“I’m a believer in branding,” Hagekhalil said. “And I believe that I probably am pretty good at doing it.”

Tracy Quinn, an MWD board member and chief executive of the environmental group Heal the Bay, said she thinks Hagekhalil is succeeding in bringing people together around a vision of holistic water solutions.

“Adel is a convener,” Quinn said. “It’s been really impressive to watch him do what he’s known for: building a bigger tent, bringing people in, getting buy-in.”

Hagekhalil earns $465,000 a year as general manager. The 58-year-old engineer regularly talks with top state leaders and members of Congress. He has built rapport with environmental activists by joining them in virtual meetings to hear their concerns about the climate crisis, conservation efforts and proposed infrastructure projects. Adel Hagekhalil listens during a meeting at the Diemer Water Treatment Plant.

Hagekhalil’s openness to listening is a welcome change and a sign that he is trying to take the MWD in a new direction, says Charming Evelyn, who chairs the Sierra Club’s water committee in Southern California.

Adel Hagekhalil, wearing glasses and a large gray suit, shakes hands with a man wearing a red T shirt while at a presentation

Hagekhalil, who has a reputation for being an affable, diplomatic manager. greets employees during a safety fair at the Diemer Water Treatment Plant in Yorba Linda.

His openness to listening is a welcome change and a sign that he is trying to take the agency in a new direction, said Charming Evelyn, who chairs the Sierra Club’s water committee in Southern California. She said she sees him as a “people pleaser,” who knows what each camp wants to hear and is careful not to antagonize anyone while trying to strike a balance.

“He is walking a tightrope,” Evelyn said, “trying to please the folks that have been there a very, very long time, that don’t like change, and trying to see how he can implement change in increments.”

She said she expects Hagekhalil’s campaign will be a difficult test, a “rough road.”

Hagekhalil is optimistic.

“I think it’s a great opportunity to really reshape the future and build the infrastructure for the next hundred years,” he said. “Time is not on our side. We cannot act with anything less than urgency.”

Hagekhalil said California’s current water challenges demand ambitious innovations on the scale of the works planned more than a century ago by William Mulholland, who led L.A.’s water department and oversaw the construction of the aqueduct that took water from the Eastern Sierra and enabled the rise of Los Angeles. Now, he said, Southern California needs a new “Mulholland moment,” but one based on a new ethic of developing solutions to withstand climate change. Adel Hagekhalil addresses employees during a safety fair at the Diemer Water Treatment Plant.

Adel Hagekhalil says Southern California needs a new “Mulholland moment,” but one based on a new ethic of developing solutions to withstand climate change.

:::

On a recent morning, Hagekhalil met with workers at the Robert B. Diemer Water Treatment Plant in Yorba Linda, where he spoke about the importance of workplace safety and the changes he is prioritizing. He talked about the climate adaptation plan the district is preparing to become more resilient and more self-reliant on local sources.

“What we did the last hundred years was great, but we know that the Colorado River is drying up,” Hagekhalil said. “The future is ensuring that everyone has safe, reliable water across the region, with no one left behind.”

After taking questions, Hagekhalil handed out raffle prizes, including water bottles and earbuds.

Then an employee drove him to the MWD headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. Walking into his office, he passed a wall with rows of black-and-white portraits of the 13 other men who have led the agency since its founding in 1928, followed by a color photo of Hagekhalil smiling.

He has used his office window, which overlooks the 101 Freeway, as a whiteboard of sorts, with a list of five bulleted words written in black marker on the glass: Empower. Sustain. Protect. Adapt. Partner.

Hagekhalil said he distilled his goals into these five categories, which he calls “anchors” to guide the organization. Five 'strategic priorities' written on the window of Adel Hagekhalil's office overlooking Los Angeles

Adel Hagekhalil has written his five “strategic priorities” in marker on his office window overlooking downtown Los Angeles.

In a series of meetings with managers, Hagekhalil discussed a project in the Antelope Valley that will store water underground, efforts to work with partner agencies to bank water elsewhere, and the district’s plans to rework its system to provide redundancy in areas that now rely solely on imported water from Northern California via the State Water Project.

He chatted by phone with Assemblymember Laura Friedman (D-Glendale) about a bill the district is supporting to prohibit the use of drinking water for grass that is purely decorative along roads and outside businesses.

Hagekhalil received an update on a planned project in Carson called Pure Water Southern California, which is slated to become the country’s largest wastewater recycling facility, at a cost of $5 billion to $7 billion. It’s scheduled to deliver its first water as soon as 2028, and later reach full capacity in 2032, treating 150 million gallons a day, enough to supply about half a million homes.

That recycled water is intended to help offset declines in supplies from the shrinking Colorado River — a goal that agencies in Nevada and Arizona have supported by contributing money for the planning work.

Hagekhalil said he expects the share of water that Southern California gets from imported sources, now about 50%, to shrink in the coming decades to roughly 30%. He said that will be driven by expected long-term declines in available supplies from the Colorado River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a gap that will need to be filled with other supplies.

The district also must prepare for more of the heat-supercharged “climate whiplash” conditions that California has been experiencing, he said, including the driest three-year period on record from 2020-2022, followed by one of the wettest winters in decades.

Even with the state’s reservoirs now nearly full, Hagekhalil said it’s crucial not to lose momentum on building infrastructure projects such as the water recycling facility, because the state could soon be dealing with even more severe bouts of dryness.

Last year, the drought situation was so dire that the district imposed mandatory water restrictions in areas that depend on the State Water Project, affecting nearly 7 million people and leading to a dramatic reduction in water use. Hagekhalil said the shortages could have worsened if the drought had persisted, and he intends to prevent a repeat of — or any scenarios like — the crisis of 2017-18 in Cape Town, South Africa, when residents lined up to fill jugs as declining reservoirs approached a feared “Day Zero.”

“I don’t want people ever to be in a place where they do not have water,” Hagekhalil said. “This cannot happen here.” Stripes of color representing the rising temperatures in California between 1850 to 2020

Hagekhalil’s values and views were partly shaped by his experiences growing up during the civil war in Lebanon, where his Palestinian family lived through bloodshed, hardships and water shortages. For a time in 1982, after Israeli troops invaded, they had no running water at home, so Hagekhalil would line up to fill two jugs at a communal spigot.

“When that water came out and you filled your jugs, you’re coming home, you’d have a big smile,” Hagekhalil said. “I know what the value of water is.”

Later, as fighting raged between the Lebanese military and militia fighters in 1984, his family was living in a second-story apartment when a rocket hit, ripping through the home and exploding on the floor below, killing many neighbors. Hagekhalil, who was then 19, said he remembers his mother had him lie in a bathtub and covered him so he wouldn’t be wounded.

When the family fled to an underground shelter, Hagekhalil carried his grandmother, who was ill. He also carried two suitcases and remembers stepping past dead bodies as he fled.

After a stint living in a hotel, Hagekhalil and his parents took a cab to Syria and boarded a flight out of the country. They moved to Houston, where Hagekhalil’s older brother was living, and embraced their new home.

“Deep inside, when you go through this trauma, it stays with you. And that’s why I don’t like to see people who are traumatized,” Hagekhalil said. “I want to help people.”

He said he isn’t particularly religious, but he follows the teachings of Islam in seeking to care for others. Early in life, Hagekhalil wanted to become a doctor to help save lives. Even though he ended up studying engineering, he said he sees his current work of ensuring people have clean water as being, in a way, about saving lives.

“To me, I’m the top surgeon now,” he said with a chuckle. “So it starts from my dream of being a doctor, to now probably being a water doctor.”

Continuing with the analogy, he said he’s working to “help heal this patient that we’re dealing with because of climate change, to make it continue for the future and live long.”

Doing that requires shifting the agency’s focus from being purely a water importer to being more of a regional steward and caretaker of water, he said, “a co-op to build this reliability system for everyone.” He said the transformation also requires changing the financial model from one that depends on selling imported water to member agencies, to one that will support investments in local infrastructure.

“ ‘How are we going to pay for it’ is going to be the biggest discussion that the board should take on,” he said.

While the agency’s former leaders helped spearhead a controversial state proposal to build a water tunnel in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, Hagekhalil has taken a different approach, saying he hopes to see more analysis of the long-term water-supply benefits that the project would bring.

“We can’t put all our eggs in that one basket. In the past, everyone was focused on the delta as the solution for our future,” he said. “We need to diversify. We need to look at other options.” Hagekhalil seen from behind looking out at a circular rotunda inside a building.

Hagekhalil takes in a view of the lobby at MWD headquarters. He says he’s working to “help heal this patient that we’re dealing with because of climate change.”

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

At the same time, Hagekhalil sees one of his key tasks as addressing the organization’s internal woes, including issues of discrimination and harassment of women, which last year led to a scathing state audit showing the district failed to commit resources to properly investigate complaints of misconduct, among other failings. Hagekhalil tells his managers they are crucial in “creating this culture of inclusion.”

This isn’t the first time Hagekhalil has campaigned for change. In his previous work for the city of L.A., he led various efforts, including reducing sewer spills and experimenting with efforts to cool streets by painting pavement a light shade to reflect sunlight.

At times, he showed his playful side. In the early 2000s, when the city launched a campaign urging restaurants to stop dumping grease into sewers, Hagekhalil dressed up as a superhero called the Grease Avenger, appearing at community events wearing a blue leotard, mask and purple cape. He said the gimmick worked, helping to raise awareness.

Now, his goals are bigger and his responsibilities are weighty. But he said he’s simply building on an approach he has always taken in his work: never saying no to a difficult task.

He said his style as a manager draws on a bit of wisdom he gleaned years ago from the title of a book about stress and spirituality by Brian Luke Seaward: “Stand Like Mountain, Flow Like Water.”

Hagekhalil said he thinks about being strong to face challenges but being “flexible, adaptable and welcoming like water.”

“You can move around the challenges you’re facing, and not be stopped in that effort,” he said.

California produces millions of tons of hazardous waste every year — toxic detritus that can leach into groundwater or blow into the air. It’s waste that can explode, spark fires, eat through metal containers, destroy ecosystems and sicken people. It’s dangerous material that we have come to rely on and ignore — the flammable liquids used to cleanse metal parts before painting, the lead and acid in old car batteries and even the shampoos that can kill fish.

It all needs to go somewhere.

But over the past four decades, California’s facilities to manage hazardous waste have dwindled. What’s left is a tattered system of older sites with a troubling history of safety violations and polluted soil and groundwater, a CalMatters investigation has found. Many are operating on expired permits. And most are located in communities of color, often ones with high rates of poverty, despite environmental justice laws meant to ensure that the most disadvantaged don’t also face the greatest pollution exposure.

“It’s difficult to permit a new toxic facility. There’s going to be a lot of resistance to building a new one,” said Bill Magavern, the Coalition for Clean Air’s policy director, who advised on a state report in 2013 that examined California’s hazardous waste permitting process. “So the path of least resistance is keeping some of the old ones going.”

This conflict is playing out in Santa Fe Springs, a city of about 19,000 people in Los Angeles County that houses one of the state’s biggest hazardous waste treatment and recycling facilities, called Phibro-Tech. Last year, state regulators issued a draft of a new five-year permit for the company, which has been running on an expired one since 1996. Community activists and environmental groups are opposed.

Phibro-Tech is one of only 72 permitted destinations for hazardous waste in a state that had more than 400 in the early 1980s. Shipping records show it handles as much as 23,000 tons of hazardous waste a year from some of the biggest West Coast companies, including tech giants Intel and TTM Technologies.

But Phibro-Tech is also a company with a lengthy record of violating laws meant to protect workers, the environment and its neighbors in a low-income Latino community, according to hundreds of pages of inspection reports CalMatters obtained through government databases and public records requests.

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In recent years, California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control inspectors cited Phibro-Tech for leaking containers and cracked containment barriers. They identified poorly maintained wells that might allow toxic waste to seep into the environment and they dinged the company for failing to address one area of contamination on the site in a timely manner.

Among the pollutants state regulators have documented in soil and groundwater under and near the plant are trichloroethylene and hexavalent chromium — the cancer-causing chemical made famous in the movie “Erin Brockovich.”

Other regulators also found problems in the past decade. The Los Angeles basin’s air pollution agency cited the company after its equipment released ammonia gas, which can burn lungs if inhaled. Sanitation system regulators cited the company for discharging wastewater with excess contaminants into sewers, including copper, a hazardous element that can be toxic to aquatic life.

And occupational safety regulators cited the company for unsafe working conditions. Among the more serious incidents: In 2015, a worker making $15.70 an hour slipped in a puddle of spilled acid and got second- and third-degree burns on his legs, feet and genitals, workers’ compensation case file records and inspection reports show. Last year a cracked valve sprayed hydrochloric acid in another worker’s face, leaving him with breathing problems, those documents reveal.

The company’s representatives, in meetings with CalMatters, defended Phibro-Tech’s record. They want the state to approve a new operating document and blamed many of their regulatory violations on what they deem to be an ambiguous and outdated permit. The company has entered into agreements to fix problems found during inspections, and has addressed issues on site. They said residents are in no danger from operations and that contamination on site was from other companies — the legacy of a century of industrial operations there and nearby. And they touted Phibro-Tech’s role in recycling waste that would otherwise be dumped and lead to environmental damage from mining. (Every 55 pounds of copper the company is able to recover from the waste that electronics manufacturers send them is 10,000 pounds of earth that doesn’t need to be excavated in the hunt for precious metals, they said.) A white industrial plant looms in the distance. In the foreground are homes, which don't look far from the plant.

A tower from an industrial plant is visible from the Los Nietos residential neighborhood on June 7, 2023. Part of the community abuts an industrial park in which Phibro-Tech Inc. is also located.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters) Two photos are side by side. On the left is a street-view photo of a Spanish-style house with plants along one of the walls. A mural of the Virgin Mary is on that wall, just above the shorter plants. On the right, a photo of a male street vendor with medium skin tone pushes a cart. He wears a baby blue t-shirt, black baseball hat and dark blue denim jeans.

Left: A Virgen de Guadalupe painted on a home near Norwalk Blvd. in the Los Nietos neighborhood on June 8, 2023. Right: A street vendor in Los Nietos on June 7, 2023. This part of the community abuts the industrial park where Phibro-Tech Inc. is located.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters)

But that’s little comfort to some residents of Los Nietos, in unincorporated Los Angeles County, where the nearest home is roughly 550 feet from Phibro-Tech’s warren of aging tanks and labyrinthine pipes. It’s one of the most environmentally vulnerable areas in California, according to a complicated scoring system the state devised to account for exposure to pollution and health risk because of factors such as poverty.

More than 20 sites generating hazardous waste sit within a mile of this neighborhood, including companies that do chrome plating, manufacture radiators and make batteries.

“We are not a rich people,” said Esther Rojo, whose house is a thousand feet — as the wind blows — from Phibro-Tech. “So they put all of them over here in this area.” An older woman with medium skin tone looks off-camera with a slightly worried look on her face. She has brown shoulder-length hair and wears a patterned shirt with a black and white sleeveless vest over it.

Esther Rojo at her home in the Los Nietos neighborhood on June 7, 2023.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters)

A 2015 state law was supposed to do something about that — by requiring regulators to consider the “cumulative impact” on communities when making permitting decisions. Yet officials never actually adopted the regulations that the law required. The Department of Toxic Substances Control — which refused to be interviewed for this story — is poised to finalize the draft permit for Phibro-Tech later this year.

“We don’t know what to do,” Rojo said. “(Phibro-Tech) got the money. They got the power to stay here.” California’s tattered system

The rules for handling dangerous waste date back to the 1970s, when state and federal officials began trying to define “hazardous.” That’s when they passed laws and started crafting regulations branding certain material with the label based on characteristics including ignitability (would it burst into flames?), corrosivity (could it eat through a metal container?), toxicity (are you more likely to get cancer if you’re exposed to it?) and reactivity (is it unstable and likely to explode?).

Those regulations generally require that hazardous waste go to a specially permitted facility that can treat, store or dispose of the material. But while just about everyone wants consumer products that lead to the creation of hazardous waste, no one wants that waste dumped in their backyard.

In the past 40 years, the number of California facilities that have permits to treat, store or dispose of hazardous waste has dropped by more than 80% — while the number of places that generate this waste grew by more than 70% since 2010, according to a state report released last month. Only 72 permitted facilities remain statewide to handle the waste of about 94,500 generators. As some companies turn to more sustainable practices, California’s volumes of hazardous waste have dropped a modest amount since the 1990’s, state analyses of shipping records show. For example, California shipped about 11% less hazardous waste in 2015 than it did in 1995.

Officials and experts have long recognized that there’s little political will to open new sites to take toxic material. A 2017 state report discussed California’s longstanding efforts to reduce the generation of hazardous waste because of the “difficulty in gaining consensus in the siting of new facilities.” A woman with dark skin tone looks off-camera with a slight smile. She has long braided black hair and wears sunglasses. She has on a black and white long cardigan. She is in front of a lot of plants with big leaves.

Angela Johnson Meszaros, managing attorney at Earthjustice, outside of their offices in downtown Los Angeles on June 8, 2023.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters)

It’s also expensive to try to open a new site. Permitting can take years and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for companies who also “must pay taxes and any other expenses to maintain the property throughout time the permit is being processed, despite receiving no revenue from the facility,” according to the July report.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, roughly half the hazardous waste generated in California winds up in other states — often ones with weaker environmental regulations, according to a Department of Toxic Substances Control analysis of shipping records. (California’s standards are tougher than the federal ones. So waste considered hazardous in California can sometimes be disposed of at regular landfills in states like Arizona and Utah.) The average distance from a California hazardous waste generator to a destination facility is 500 miles, according to the July report.

CalMatters asked the Department of Toxic Substances Control when it last received a permit application from a company trying to open a business in California to store, treat or dispose of federally defined hazardous waste. “Based on a review of available information,” there doesn’t appear to have been any permit applications for a new commercial facility since the early 1980s, according to the agency.

The toxic material that stays in California goes to a relatively small collection of aging facilities, many of which have a history of regulatory violations and safety lapses, a CalMatters review of permitting and enforcement records found.

Using a list of permitted hazardous waste businesses in California and a database of shipping records, CalMatters identified 41 commercial facilities in California that received at least one shipment of hazardous waste last year. (The rest are largely a mix of military installations and operations that treat their own toxic waste before sending it to another facility, records show.) Among those 41 sites, 24 have been the subject of “corrective action” to clean contamination on their site (some tracing back to earlier owners), 29 were the subject of enforcement action by toxics regulators since 2010, and 11 are operating on expired permits.

“It can’t be that a system that’s held together at best by bubble gum and baling wire is the thing that we’re doing in a developed nation to manage hazardous waste,” said Angela Johnson Meszaros, a managing attorney with the environmental law organization Earthjustice.

State and federal law allows hazardous waste facilities to operate on an expired permit so long as they’re working to get a new one. Companies need to apply six months before the expiration date. But it takes years to process a permit. A recent state law changed that timeline and beginning in 2025 companies will need to apply two years before the expiration date. Still, that’s not always enough time to get it done.

Phibro-Tech’s permit expired in 1996 — making it the oldest so-called “continued permit” in California, state records show.

Johnson Meszaros said outdated operating documents are a safety concern and need to be overhauled “because we understand that you have to go back and look and change permits to address changes to the world around a facility.”

The reasons experts give for the permitting delays are myriad. Complicated and highly technical decisions are being made by a state department that’s long struggled with staffing and turnover, interviews with former agency employees and industry insiders, and a state report on the issue suggest. The process also can require extensive public engagement including open meetings and formal comment periods.

And environmental activists question how motivated companies are to speed the process when they can keep operating without a current permit.

Some advocates and former agency employees also say the Department of Toxic Substances Control tends to push off tough decisions. Regulators can be hesitant to deny a permit because the state needs to have a place to send its hazardous waste.

“For too much of its history (the department) bent over backward to keep facilities open even when they should have been shut down,” said Bill Magavern, who advised on a state commissioned review of the agency’s permitting process a decade ago.

In a prepared statement the department said it “does not take into consideration the state’s hazardous waste capacity when reviewing permit applications.”

“Decisions are based on the facility’s compliance with laws and regulations, and whether operations can be conducted in a manner that is protective of public health and the environment,” the statement said.

The toxics department did deny an updated hazardous waste permit in 2020 to General Environmental Management in Rancho Cordova. It was one of four permit renewals the agency denied since 2010 but the only rejection for a commercial facility authorized to take federally defined hazardous waste, state records show. The company argued in court filings that it didn’t deserve such an “unprecedented administrative decision,” and that its services were “particularly important to Califomia’s safe and effective management of hazardous waste” because there were so few permitted commercial sites left in the state. The facility had been the site of three fires and an explosion since 2011 due to mismanagement, regulators alleged in their own legal filings.

“When your thing is literally on fire, even (the Department of Toxic Substances Control) has to acknowledge it,” said Johnson Meszaros, the Earthjustice attorney. Phibro-Tech’s troubled record An aerial view of the Phibro-Tech Inc. plant in Santa Fe Springs.

An aerial view of the Phibro-Tech Inc. plant in Santa Fe Springs on June 9, 2023. The Los Nietos neighborhood is visible in the distance.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters) Two photos are side by side. On the left is a photo of a train line leading to the Phibro-Tech Inc. plant in Santa Fe Springs. On the right is a photo of industrial tanks and equipment at the Phibro-Tech Inc. plant.

Left: A train line leads to the Phibro-Tech Inc. plant in Santa Fe Springs on June 7, 2023. Right: Industrial tanks and equipment at the Phibro-Tech plant.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters)

Phibro-Tech sits on a 4.8 acre triangle of land just inside the border of Santa Fe Springs.

The site’s industrial roots stretch back to the 1920s. It was a railroad switching station, a foundry and a chemical company before Phibro-Tech’s operations started in 1984. (The company, whose parent corporation is headquartered in New Jersey, had a different name but the fundamental control has been the same since 1984, Phibro-Tech’s attorney said.)

The company’s specialty is recycling the corrosive liquids that electronics manufacturers use to etch patterns on the surface of microchips and circuit boards. Company representatives say it’s the only site west of the Mississippi that recycles so-called “spent etchants.”

The company separates out the metals and cleans the liquid — selling the treated etching solution back to the tech industry and making copper products for manufacturers.

“If not for Phibro-Tech, the California electronics industry would need to send all of its spent etch to landfills or deep wells at a significant cost to the environment, or ship it across country, making the industry less competitive,” according to a letter from the electronics manufacturing trade group IPC to state regulators in 2017.

Phibro-Tech also takes giant bags of rust from steel mills and old metal cans from canneries and uses them to make ferric and ferrous chloride — which are used to clean drinking water and control odor at wastewater treatment plants. It recovers metals such as nickel from liquid waste and sends it to smelters. And it treats brine from water treatment operations contaminated with hexavalent chromium. Some of its operations use raw materials and aren’t regulated under the hazardous waste permit.

The California Water Service Company, a large investor-owned utility, told regulators in a letter that Phibro-Tech was a “vital service” provider.

But records show decades of problems at the site. The Department of Toxic Substances Control’s online permitting and enforcement database shows the agency’s inspectors have identified violations at 32 different inspections since 1996. In 19 of those inspections the company was cited for so-called “Class 1” violations — the most serious designation suggesting a significant threat to people or the environment.

Some of the violations were repeated through the years despite the company’s promises to change its behavior. In 1999 it committed to stop storing hazardous waste in unauthorized areas and yet inspectors found that “for at least 167 days following Respondent’s execution of the 1999 Consent Order, beginning within a week of that date, Respondent continuously stored hazardous waste outside permitted storage areas,” according to a 2003 consent order.

Enforcement records show regulators found waste stored in unauthorized areas again in 2005, 2008, 2011 and 2015.

“Phibro-Tech takes compliance very seriously,” said David Thaete, the facility’s environmental health and safety manager.

In a meeting with Phibro-Tech’s attorney, plant manager and Thaete as well as written responses to questions, company officials blamed some agency violations on ambiguities in the old permit and seemingly arbitrary or shifting enforcement.

For example, they pointed out that toxics regulators have known for years the site was treating material in certain equipment not permitted for handling hazardous waste and yet decades passed before regulators issued citations for some of those longstanding practices. (After inspectors cited the company in 2012 for operating one particular tank without a permit, the company got the tank — which had been in operation for years — permitted “and it now operates pursuant to the same procedures as before,” according to an email from the company’s attorney.)

Phibro-Tech representatives noted that after the company disputed certain violations, state officials reduced the severity of some and eliminated others from a scoring system the department created to hold troubled companies accountable. The reps also said the company has had fewer violations in recent years.

As for storing waste in unauthorized areas, a written statement from the company called the 1999 violation “a unique situation” when a competitor closed and Phibro-Tech suddenly got an influx of waste that exceeded its permitted storage capacity.

The later violations “can be considered to be ‘repeat violations’ only based on a very general characterization of storing hazardous waste in an unpermitted area, but the underlying facts do not compare,” according to the company.

It’s not just state toxics regulators who have found problems. Multiple cases of water sit in a house.

A stack of water bottles at Esther Rojo’s home, which sits near the Phibro-Tech Inc. plant, on June 7, 2023.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters)

The Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts identified 17 violations since 2015 including instances where Phibro-Tech’s wastewater had excess contaminants such as copper, and oil and grease, according to documents CalMatters obtained through a public records request. Most resulted in just a verbal warning and CalMatters found no evidence that the wastewater — which is treated before it’s released into the ocean — harmed the environment. In February, Phibro-Tech discharged nearly 7,300 gallons of wastewater with a copper concentration nearly 14 times the permitted limit, according to inspection reports. The sanitation districts didn’t issue a notice of violation for that release, which the company blamed on operator error. State toxics regulators did issue a citation.

Cal/OSHA, the agency that enforces workplace safety regulations, identified 13 violations in four inspections since 2015, its records show, though none of those violations were deemed “serious” — those that could cause a death, illness or serious injury and that the employer could have known about.

The company’s rate of worker injuries and illnesses has been worse than the industry average in recent years — more than double the average rate for hazardous waste treatment and disposal sites in 2019 — although it “has been trending downward,” according to an outside audit of Phibro-Tech that regulators required the company to file.

The company says it “takes occupational safety seriously,” rigorously trains workers and makes changes as necessary to keep them safe.

While workers can choose to leave the company, many residents nearby don’t have that choice. Neighbors to toxic waste recycler A man with medium skin tone poses for a photo, in front of the nearby plant. He is wearing a dark blue t-shirt and is holding a paper file box.

Jaime Sanchez of “Neighbors Against Phibro-Tech” near the processing plant in Santa Fe Springs on June 7, 2023.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters)

On a recent afternoon, several long-time Los Nietos residents gathered on Esther Rojo’s shaded patio to talk about the company. Sitting around a picnic table with instant coffee and pan dulce, talk often returned to the smells that come with living next to an industrial area — near hulking mystery tanks, rumbling tanker trucks and railroad cars.

Sometimes the odor that has wafted into yards and schools and bedrooms is chemical, like ammonia, and stings their throats when inhaled, they said. Sometimes, it’s like rotten eggs. It has come when kids are playing in the street on hot summer days. Parents call them inside where it becomes a game — running around, closing windows. The fortunate have air conditioners. The less fortunate sweat it out.

“Oftentimes the smells happen late in the evening or very, very early in the morning,” said Jaime Sanchez, 68, who has lived all his life in the community and is helping organize a loose collection of area residents calling themselves Neighbors Against Phibro-Tech.

Sanchez got involved in environmental activism around 2011. It was after Phibro-Tech pushed for an updated permit that would allow it to not only keep operating but also to start treating oily water in addition to the various chemicals already handled on site. His neighbor, Rojo, told him what was going on and he started attending community meetings.

“I was shocked and dismayed this was occurring in my own backyard,” Sanchez said. State regulators ultimately didn’t finalize a draft permit at the time, effectively allowing Phibro-Tech to keep operating on the expired one as the law allows.

His census tract has more of a “pollution burden” than 97% of the state, according to California’s CalEnviroScreen. That’s a tool the state developed a decade ago to begin tracking issues of environmental justice.

Sanchez’ Los Nietos neighborhood has more asthma, cardiovascular disease, unemployment and “linguistic isolation” than the majority of California, according to the scoring system. It also has greater-than-average smog, fine particles, traffic and risk from lead paint. The neighborhood scores 100 out of 100 for proximity to hazardous waste.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to blame the conditions — and certainly specific health problems — on any one company, environmental health experts say. Residents described mystery ailments, and can’t help but wonder if their industrial neighbors are to blame for what they experienced: asthma, itchy skin, rare liver cancer, a child with an autoimmune disease, a dog with seizures, dead birds. A row of blue (and one grey) semi-tankers parking on a lot.

Phibro-Tech Inc. semi-tankers at the Santa Fe Springs plant on June 8, 2023.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters) Two photos are side by side. On the left is a groundwater monitoring well at Phibro-Tech Inc. in Santa Fe Spring. On the right is an air quality monitor on a fence line at Phibro-Tech Inc. in Santa Fe Spring.

Left: A groundwater monitoring well at Phibro-Tech Inc. in Santa Fe Spring on June 8, 2023. Right: An air quality monitor on a fence line at Phibro-Tech.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters)

Phibro-Tech hired consultants to conduct several health risk assessments over the years, which the company submitted to regulators. The most recent filed with the toxics department are from 2015 and analyzed both ongoing operations as well as historical contamination on site. State regulators ultimately approved the assessments, which found no “significant health risk” to workers and nearby residents, according to the agency’s online permitting information site.

Company officials said they’re often unfairly blamed for sounds and smells from other industrial sites. They’re quick to cite the example of a resident complaining about a giant tower that was actually across the street from Phibro-Tech.

“We said ‘That’s not us.’ And she said ‘Yes, it is,’” the company’s environmental attorney Zachary Walton recounted.

But regulators have documented pollution in the soil and groundwater under the site, including trichloroethylene (TCE) and hexavalent chromium, chemicals that have been linked to cancer. Advocates said the company has been slow to clean up contamination — putting the nearby community at risk and calling into question the company’s commitment to health and safety. The state toxics department cited Phibro-Tech in recent years for failing to finish remediating one contaminated area in a timely manner that it — and regulators — had known about for decades, records show. (The company did clean the area and toxics regulators are assessing the results, records and interviews show.)

Phibro-Tech officials defended the company’s record on pollution. They say the toxic material found in soil on site was from other companies or locations. Groundwater contamination is part of a plume from an old chemical company nearby that migrated across the area, they contend, adding that there’s no evidence the current operations are causing any environmental damage.

Several long-time residents of Los Nietos said they only drink bottled water, fearing contamination. The community’s drinking water, which doesn’t come from the groundwater basin beneath Phibro-Tech, meets state and federal standards for contaminants, according to water agency data. Nonetheless its drinking water scores high for contamination compared to most of the state, according to CalEnviroScreen.

“We completely understand the concerns by the community,” said David Thaete, the facility’s environmental health and safety manager. The company has cleaned up historical contamination on site and continues to regularly monitor groundwater and inspect equipment, he said. He added risk assessments “have demonstrated that the conditions of the plant are completely protective of both our workers and the surrounding community.”

But given the environmental risks in the area and the company’s history of regulatory violations, residents don’t understand how the Department of Toxic Substances Control could let Phibro-Tech keep operating. There are five schools within a mile of the company.

“The Department of Toxic Substances Control’s mandate is to protect the public. In reality they do not,” Jaime Sanchez said. “They’ve maintained the status quo.” Systemic problems for hazardous waste watchdog A row of at least seven binders on the floor.

Binders with Phibro-Tech Inc.’s permit application at the Los Nietos Library, a Los Angeles County library in Whittier, on June 9, 2023.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters)

Officials have long tried to fix systemic permitting problems at the toxics agency, including the years-long delays.

In 2013 the department hired an outside consultant to review its permitting process. According to the consultant’s report, permit renewals averaged 4.3 years — and some took far longer. The report blamed staffing issues, a lack of standardized processes, unclear criteria for denial and poor management.

“As is readily apparent, there is a tension between monitoring existing facilities to ensure the protection of public health and the environment and ensuring that these existing facilities continue to operate so as to provide adequate capacity to prevent illegal disposal of hazardous waste,” according to the consultant’s report.

Among the concerns environmental groups raised to the report’s authors: lack of a clear standard for when to revoke or deny a permit. As a result, some companies limped along in a state of limbo.

Two years after that report, lawmakers crafted legislation to improve the permitting process and strengthen criteria for approval. The resulting law required that toxics regulators consider a company’s history of violations as well as environmental justice issues that a site’s operations might pose when deciding whether to renew a permit. The law required California to adopt regulations guiding how the Department of Toxic Substances Control would do that by the beginning of 2018.

But the agency has only partially complied with the law.

It created a scoring system to analyze companies’ past violations. A company with a certain number of serious violations — often those posing a significant threat to people or the environment — now needs to submit an audit and make changes as necessary. The most troubled risk being shut down. Phibro-Tech was required to submit an audit last year after posting one of the worst scores in the state. A photo of outside of the Phibro Tech office.

The entrance to the Phibro-Tech Inc. office in Santa Fe Springs on June 8, 2023.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters)

But more than five years after the deadline, California still hasn’t adopted another major piece of the law: regulations for considering “cumulative impact” on communities in permitting decisions. That means there’s no requirement to look at just how much risk residents in a place like Los Nietos are already facing when the state is deciding whether to allow a hazardous waste site to keep operating.

“It’s been frustrating because it’s been years already,” said Grecia Orozco, staff attorney at the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, an environmental advocacy organization involved in crafting the 2015 legislation.

Why does it matter? Every single one of the 16 commercial treatment or disposal sites permitted to handle federally defined hazardous waste and that received such shipments last year abuts a community of color with a high rate of poverty, state shipping records and demographic data shows.

“They’re the ones bearing the brunt of these harms,” Orozco said.

The Department of Toxic Substances Control refused to be interviewed for this story, but did email responses to a list of written questions.

“We acknowledge that there are industrial facilities too close to homes and schools, and that historic decisions made by governments and private industry have resulted in disadvantaged communities bearing the brunt of environmental harms,” according to the agency’s prepared response. “This is not fair, and we as a State have a lot of work to do to untangle and repair the damage that has been done.”

Asked about the status of regulations to make a review of environmental justice-related factors a requirement, the agency said in its statement that it plans to have a virtual meeting this summer to get more feedback from stakeholders.

Still, the future of those regulations is unclear.

The Department of Toxic Substances Control is also in the midst of a legislatively mandated effort to craft a statewide hazardous waste management plan. Its July report, part of that process, acknowledged the requirement for regulators to consider factors including “cumulative impact” when deciding where to let hazardous waste sites operate.

“While these are important regulations, as protection of our most vulnerable communities is paramount, their potential impact on the number of permitted hazardous waste facilities is an important consideration for the Plan to further examine,” the report stated. Officials should also consider whether the additional safeguards are “justified,” according to the report. Decision near for Phibro-Tech

Last summer, the Department of Toxic Substances Control released a draft of a new five-year permit for Phibro-Tech and solicited comments from the public.

“These new permit conditions would enhance protections and make them more enforceable,” according to a department statement.

Community and environmental activists met the proposal with heavy resistance. Earthjustice is now working with Neighbors Against Phibro-Tech to oppose the permit renewal.

Among the objections Earthjustice raised in its letter to state regulators were the pollution burden the low-income Latino community already faces, the company’s history of violations, the lack of a full environmental review for the new permit and that Phibro-Tech has been “very, very slow to address” soil and groundwater contamination on site.

The Los Angeles County Public Health Department also raised concerns, calling for more cleanup of contaminated soil at Phibro-Tech and more monitoring to ensure toxic chemicals don’t leave the site.

“Periodic monitoring for migration would provide crucial data to protect community health and safety,” according to a comment letter signed by Barbara Ferrer, the department’s director.

Phibro-Tech also submitted a letter to regulators. They asked for a 10-year permit, pointing out the agency recently approved new permits of that length for two facilities with an even worse record of violations than Phibro-Tech. “This establishes a precedent that requires a similar result for Phibro-Tech,” according to a letter signed by the facility’s health and safety manager, Thaete.

The toxics department expects to make a final permit decision in December. Given the history, many people expect further delays. And no matter the decision, an appeal seems likely. A photo of the outside of multiple homes. Telephone wires connect above their roofs.

Homes in the Los Nietos community visible from Esther Rojo's backyard on June 7, 2023.

(Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters)

In the meantime, hazardous waste continues to arrive at Phibro-Tech. And Los Nietos residents continue to meet at the local library or in backyards to strategize ways to be heard.

“We will continue to fight and we will continue to challenge them,” said Jaime Sanchez, the local activist helping organize his neighbors.

He’s happy at least his adult daughter managed to get away from Phibro-Tech and has since moved to Hacienda Heights, a diverse community in unincorporated Los Angeles County.

But he learned recently that she now lives just four miles from another hazardous waste facility, the state’s last major recycler of old car batteries — Quemetco. That company has its own history of contamination and violating environmental regulations. The facility’s permit expired in 2015.

“It’s a reminder that the struggle for justice remains,” Sanchez said. How we did it

CalMatters earlier this year investigated the large volume of hazardous waste California sends to its neighbors. Roughly half the toxic detritus generated in California crosses the border — often to states with weaker environmental regulations. Some advocates and officials decried the situation and called on California to handle more of its own waste.

We wanted to understand more about the infrastructure that exists in the state and whether it’s up to the task of handling more of this toxic burden. To do that we used the Department of Toxic Substances Control’s permitting and enforcement database — called Envirostor — to research permitted hazardous waste treatment, storage and disposal facilities. The database shows whether sites have expired permits, have documented contamination and if toxics regulators have found violations during inspections.

CalMatters also looked at shipping manifest data in a separate database called the Hazardous Waste Tracking System. The system shows the volume and type of waste permitted facilities receive. And we used a third tool, called CalEnviroScreen, that shows the pollution burden and demographic characteristics of census tracts around the state.

Combining the three tools, we were able to see where waste is going in the state, the safety concerns at those facilities, and the communities burdened with these operations.

We found the company with the oldest expired permit is close to getting a new one. To research the company, we read more than 1,000 pages of inspection reports and regulatory filings obtained from government databases and public records requests. We visited Los Nietos, the community neighboring Phibro-Tech, in June to talk to residents and toured the Santa Fe Springs facility and met with company representatives.

The numbers in the overall analysis are sure to change over time. Regulators are continuously updating the various databases — sometimes to correct errors. For example, during the course of reporting the number of permitted facilities dropped slightly and shipping data changed as new manifests were added to the system or corrected. Still, the analysis revealed that the state’s system for handling hazardous waste has a history of contamination and violations, and the communities most burdened typically have more people of color and a high percentage of residents living in poverty.

latimes.com

The scandal-plagued, corruption-prone Los Angeles City Council has struck again. You’d think a body that has had four members charged with corruption in three years would be eager to demonstrate its commitment to ethics and government oversight.

But last Friday, without any public discussion or reason given, the council unanimously rejected a seemingly well-qualified nominee to the Ethics Commission, which is the watchdog over the city’s elected officials.

It’s rare for the council to block a nominee to a city commission — appointments are typically approved without controversy. It’s even more unusual when the nominee has widespread support from neighborhood councils: Jamie York is a member of the Reseda Neighborhood Council and advocate for ethics and political reform who has worked in the past on political campaigns and as a fundraiser. She was nominated to the commission by City Controller Kenneth Mejia.

What makes this rejection especially galling is that the failure to fill the seat makes it impossible for the Ethics Commission to do its work, which includes enforcing campaign finance, contracting, lobbying and conflict of interest laws. The commission canceled its August meeting and will not be able to decide enforcement cases or move forward policy proposals because there are three vacancies on the five-member panel.

The mayor, city attorney, controller, council president and council president pro tempore each get to choose a commissioner, and the full council confirms the appointments. Council leadership hasn’t nominated commissioners for their two open seats (one has been open since December). Those vacancies along with York’s rejection mean the commission does not have a quorum to conduct business. The council must fill its two positions immediately.

As for the York nomination, there were no concerns raised publicly or privately with Mejia or York. At the council meeting on Friday, there no discussion, just a vote to disapprove the nomination initiated on the floor by Councilmember Monica Rodriguez and seconded by Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson.

In the days after the vote, some information has trickled out. On Tuesday, Council President Paul Krekorian said in a statement that he had reservations about appointing an outspoken advocate to the Ethics Commission — a quasi-judicial panel that makes enforcement decisions and metes out penalties when elected officials and candidates run afoul of ethics laws. The controller “certainly should have known that the job of an Ethics Commissioner is fundamentally different from that of an advocate,” Krekorian said.

York said she was told that organized labor groups lobbied against her appointment in part because she led the push for stronger regulations over — wait for it — lobbying by labor unions and others.

There was indeed a behind-the-scenes push from labor to oppose York, according to council staff. Asked about his vote against York at a neighborhood council meeting Monday, Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez said he didn’t support her because she opposes efforts to exempt union employees from having to register as lobbyists, Knock L.A. journalist Jon Peltz reported.

That labor groups were able to quietly kill an Ethics Commission appointment with no debate or discussion speaks to the power and influence of labor in L.A. politics, which is exactly why York and the Times editorial board oppose exempting union leaders from the more stringent lobbying disclosure rules.

If council members were concerned about York’s position on this issue, they should have aired those concerns publicly before taking the vote. Or at least given Mejia and York the opportunity to respond. Instead, the nomination was summarily tanked with no transparency.

This only builds the case for giving the Ethics Commission more independence from the politicians it’s supposed to regulate. There are too many examples of elected officials manipulating or trying to suppress the Ethics Commission. The City Council and mayor control the commission’s budget, which determines the size of its staff of investigators and enforcers. In 2018, a former Ethics Commission staffer filed a whistleblower complaint after being told by commission management that a council member had threatened to cut the department’s budget if it didn’t soften rules on gifts for politicians, according to a Times story.

The City Council can also refuse to act on the commission’s recommended changes in ethics law. The Ethics Commission has been trying for 15 years to pass revisions to the city’s lobbying law to make paid advocacy more transparent and the rules easier to enforce. The council repeatedly refused to consider the proposals, and they died.

The commission itself has recommended a dozen changes to the City Charter that would give it more independence, including setting a minimum budget so politicians can’t cut funding to pressure ethics staff. The LA Governance Reform Project, a group of political science scholars, has also recommended giving the commission power to bypass the City Council to put proposed policies on the ballot for voters to decide.

The latest controversy shows it’s time to reconsider the size and appointment process for commissioners. Other cities, such as Long Beach, have some ethics commission seats reserved for nonpolitical appointments who are not chosen and confirmed by the people they regulate.

For all the talk from City Council leaders that they’re pro-reform, incidents like this is more evidence that L.A.’s political culture is broken and needs a complete overhaul.

A new powerful antibiotic, isolated from bacteria that could not be studied before, seems capable to combat harmful bacteria and even multi-resistant 'superbugs'. Named Clovibactin, the antibiotic appears to kill bacteria in an unusual way, making it more difficult for bacteria to develop any resistance against it. Researchers from Utrecht University, Bonn University (Germany), the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF), Northeastern University of Boston (USA), and the company NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals (Cambridge, USA) now share the discovery of Clovibactin and its killing mechanism in the scientific journal Cell.

Urgent need for new antibiotics

Antimicrobial resistance is a major problem for human health and researchers worldwide are looking for new solutions. "We urgently need new antibiotics to combat bacteria that become increasingly resistant to most clinically used antibiotics," says Dr. Markus Weingarth, a researcher from the Chemistry Department of Utrecht University.

However, the discovery of new antibiotics is a challenge: few new antibiotics have been introduced into the clinics over the last decades, and then they often resemble older, already known antibiotics.

"Clovibactin is different," says Weingarth. "Since Clovibactin was isolated from bacteria that could not be grown before, pathogenic bacteria have not seen such an antibiotic before and had no time to develop resistance."

Antibiotic from bacterial dark matter

Clovibactin was discovered by NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals, a small US-based early-stage company, and microbiologist Prof. Kim Lewis from Northeastern University, Boston. Earlier, they developed a device that allows to grow 'bacterial dark matter', which are so-called unculturable bacteria. Intriguingly, 99% of all bacteria are 'unculturable' and could not be grown in laboratories previously, hence they could not be mined for novel antibiotics. Using the device, called iCHip, the US researchers discovered Clovibactin in a bacterium isolated from a sandy soil from North Carolina: E. terrae ssp. Carolina.

In the joint Cell publication, NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals shows that Clovibactin successfully attacks a broad spectrum of bacterial pathogens. It was also successfully used to treated mice infected with the superbug Staphylococcus aureus.

A broad target spectrum

Clovibactin appears to have an unusual killing mechanism. It targets not just one, but three different precursor molecules that are all essential for the construction of the cell wall, an envelope-like structure that surrounds bacteria. This was discovered by the group of Prof. Tanja Schneider from the University of Bonn in Germany, one of the Cell paper's co-authors.

Schneider: "The multi-target attack mechanism of Clovibactin blocks bacterial cell wall synthesis simultaneously at different positions. This improves the drug's activity and substantially increases its robustness to resistance development."

A cage-like structure

How exactly Clovibactin blocks the synthesis of the bacterial cell wall was unraveled by the team of Dr. Markus Weingarth from Utrecht University. They used a special technique called solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) that allows to study Clovibactin's mechanism under similar conditions as in bacteria.

"Clovibactin wraps around the pyrophosphate like a tightly sitting glove. Like a cage that encloses its target" says Weingarth. This is was gives Clovibactin its name, which is derived from Greek word "Klouvi," which means cage. The remarkable aspect of Clovibactin's mechanism is that it only binds to the immutable pyrophosphate that is common to cell wall precursors, but it ignores that variable sugar-peptide part of the targets. "As Clovibactin only binds to the immutable, conserved part of its targets, bacteria will have a much harder time developing any resistance against it. In fact, we did not observe any resistance to Clovibactin in our studies."

Fibrils capture the targets

Clovibactin can do even more. Upon binding the target molecules, it self-assembles into large fibrils on the surface of bacterial membranes. These fibrils are stable for a long time and thereby ensure that the target molecules remain sequestered for as long as necessary to kill bacteria.

"Since these fibrils only form on bacterial membranes and not on human membranes, they are presumably also the reason why Clovibactin selectively damages bacterial cells but is not toxic to human cells," says Weingarth. "Clovibactin hence has potential for the design of improved therapeutics that kill bacterial pathogens without resistance development.."

laist.com

With many of L.A.’s COVID-19 renter protections now gone, evictions in 2023 have been rising well above pre-pandemic levels. Due to new rental housing regulations put in place by L.A.’s city council earlier this year, City Controller Kenneth Mejia is now able to track where those evictions are playing out across the city.

Mejia’s office released a new data set on Monday showing that Hollywood, Fairfax and Downtown L.A. have had particularly high numbers of eviction filings. And about 13% of eviction notices in the data are for amounts less than $1,534, the fair market rent for an L.A. studio apartment, raising questions about compliance with a new city tenant protection rule.

“We hope this map and analysis informs policy makers and the public about our city’s housing/eviction crisis,” Mejia tweeted, linking to the data’s release.

Since late January, L.A. landlords have been required to send the city’s housing department written notice every time they file an eviction against a tenant. The data released by Mejia’s office shows that from Jan. 27 to July 31, the housing department received 39,677 eviction notices.

The vast majority of those notices (96%) have been for non-payment of rent. During the pandemic, the city’s tenant protections gave legal defenses to renters who couldn’t pay on time due to economic harms brought on by COVID-19. But those non-payment protections expired on April 1 — meaning tenants could face eviction for failing to pay rent from that point on.

Hollywood, Downtown L.A. and Fairfax are hard hit

Evictions have been filed all across the city in recent months, but the data shows some areas receiving particularly high filing volumes. ZIP codes in Hollywood (90028), Fairfax (90036) and Downtown L.A. (90015) have received the highest number of evictions.

City council districts with the highest number of eviction filings include Councilmember Kevin de León’s district 14, Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez’s district 13 and Councilmember Katy Young Yaroslavsky’s district 5.

Landlord groups have long complained that the city’s non-payment protections allowed tenants to live rent-freefor years. But the housing department data reveals very few examples of tenants racking up huge debts. Only about 6% of non-payment eviction notices were for amounts above $10,000.

Instead, the data shows that the median amount owed in non-payment cases is $2,678.84, suggesting that most defendants are only a couple months behind on rent.

City leaders are currently considering a policy that would provide free attorneys to many renters in eviction court, but that plan is still in early stages.

With homelessness in L.A. rising 10% over the past year according to a recent count, Mayor Karen Bass has said that the possibility of more tenants getting evicted makes her “concerned that we're going to have another spike in homelessness.”

Are new eviction rules working?

Just before local COVID-19 protections expired, the L.A. city council passed a host of new tenant rights, seeking to prevent the “eviction tsunami” renter advocates worried was coming.

On March 27, one of those protections took effect: L.A. renters can now defend themselves against eviction if they’re behind by less than one month’s worth of “fair market rent” as determined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

But about 13% of non-payment eviction notices in the data are for amounts less than $1,534, the fair market rent for an L.A. studio apartment, raising questions about compliance with the city’s new eviction protections.

Notably, the data released by Mejia’s office pre-dates another huge change in L.A. housing policy. On Aug. 1, just after this data set ends, renters in the city faced a deadlineto pay back all the rent they had missed during the first 19 months of the pandemic.

Many tenants said they were unable to repay their pandemic rent debts by Aug. 1. But little financial help has been available to them. Only a new trove of data can show whether the repayment deadline triggered another spike in eviction filings.

What questions do you have about housing in Southern California?

www.latimes.com

The sea has long inspired a human attraction, perhaps even a compulsion, to be as close to the edge as possible. Its sheer power captivates us, even on its most turbulent days, and we can’t help but dream of calling the shore our own. To be out by the surf, to sense the very limits of where land can go, to feel the rise and fall of each wave like our own breath is to reckon with a force so alive it feels otherworldly. But the ocean is not “out there” beyond the shore, it is upon us, carving away at the coast each day despite our best efforts to keep the water at bay. We thought that with enough ingenuity we could contain the sea, but the rising tide is proving otherwise.

Studying this confluence of land, people and sea has kept Gary Griggs busy for much of his life. Seventy-six years old, with a shock of white hair and a long stride, Griggs has spent decades examining every inch of the California coast. An oceanographer, coastal geologist and longtime professor at UC Santa Cruz, he has a way of explaining erosion with the excitement of someone who’s seeing everything for the first time. The coast is always, has always been, changing, he likes to say. Every high and low tide brings new surprises.

On a quiet foggy morning in early March 2020, the tide was going out when Griggs set off for a stroll in Capitola. Reminiscent of an idyllic village on the Mediterranean, with pops of vintage California, this colorful little beach town on the northeast shore of Monterey Bay amuses him every time he swings by. The buildings and shingled cottages are bright pastel, the waterfront dotted with cafes and patio umbrellas. Palm trees and art galleries line the streets downtown, where tourists stop for trinkets and ice cream. On an old wooden wharf that juts 800-some feet into the water, kayakers can step from a tiny dock and paddle out to sea.

Griggs made his way to a set of townhouses that had been planted right on the sand, reportedly one of the first condominium complexes to have been built on the coast. Purple, pink and teal, with whimsical rococo plasterwork, the Venetian Court homes are an indelible snapshot of 1920s California. Steps from the wharf, they serve mostly as private vacation rentals today. A low concrete seawall — so low you could sit on it — is all that holds back the sea. Image of book cover for "California Against the Sea."

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He stooped down, placed his hand on the concrete and noticed it was damp. The ocean often surges over this wall and can flood the entire complex with debris. Poking around, he pointed to piles of sandbags and plywood propped against a number of front doors — humble defenses against the water that had already arrived. Patio chairs, also damp, were stacked into a corner next to a grill covered by a heavy-duty tarp. He pulled out a recent real estate advertisement and read it out loud:

Iconic home on the beach. 1st time on market in almost 50 years. 3 bed, 2, bath, offsite parking. Updated kitchen and baths. Stunning! Price Reduced | $4,800,000

“On the sand, on the sand, on the sand,” Griggs said. “Everybody wants to live on the sand.” He understands this pull to the water, a mark of wealth and well-being that goes hand in hand with today’s notion of the California dream. But by romanticizing the coast in all its vast and freeing splendor, we blind ourselves to the very forces that created this landscape in the first place.

He craned his head to inspect the colorful condo in front of him. Whenever the beach goes underwater and the waves move in, this corner building looks like the prow of a ship lost at sea. Griggs has photos of whitewash splashing halfway up the first row of windows. Next door, the aging wharf also braces against tempestuous surf. Big waves, just a few months prior, had shredded two pilings below the boat hoist. Even the concrete ballast broke. Officials scrambled together $25,000 for emergency repair work to keep the pier open. Rehabilitating the entire structure would cost on the order of $5 million to $7 million, and even that might not be enough to withstand the ocean in the hotter years to come.

In his more than 50 years of research, Griggs has examined every kind of human defense against the sea and documented both their successes and their many failures. When people seek his guidance on confronting the water, he has no easy answers. There are only so many ways to separate the ocean from what we want to call land, he said. And the true cost of forcing an unmoving line in the sand is proving to be magnitudes more than what California seems willing to pay. People walk through a storm-damaged section of a seaside grouping of buildings with facades of different pastel colors

People walk through a storm-damaged section of Capitola, Calif., in January, after a series of storms blasted the state.

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Just south of here, at Seacliff State Beach, an elaborate barricade built in 1926 was destroyed the very next winter and has since been rebuilt — and then damaged or destroyed — eight more times. The version in 1982 cost more than $1.5 million and lasted six weeks (it was designed to last 20 years). These cycles of wishful engineering and natural destruction have only continued to intensify. The observations Griggs jotted down on his walk, in fact, would become even more prescient than imagined. In less than three years’ time, barely a week into January 2023, huge swells, compounded by a series of record-breaking storms, would once again undermine the wall at Seacliff, pummel the Venetian condos and even tear Capitola’s wharf in two.

Griggs took another glance at all the plywood and sandbags in front of him and shook his head. Within just a few decades, Californians have managed to alter the shoreline in such a way that the realities of climate change seem unimaginably daunting. Collapsed buildings, flooded roads, shattered seawalls — all the problems that make the coast so fragile today are not by some fault of nature. A problem exists because our human-built world keeps getting in the way of the rising sea. But this current story of our coast does not have to end in disaster. We can choose to act, to reconsider, to determine a more sensible future. How we proceed can make all the difference, and it’s on all of us to forge a new ending. Stripes of color representing the rising temperatures in California between 1850 to 2020

There are only so many ways to face the rising sea. Seawalls are one option, but they come with hidden consequences. These hard-fought lines of defense force the sand before them to drown or wash away. For every new seawall protecting a home or a road, a beach for the people is sacrificed. Few issues today along the coast are as divisive and as misunderstood as seawalls, Griggs often explains. “All things being equal, responding to coastal erosion with a hard structure parallel to the shoreline is a decision or choice not to protect the beach at that location.”

Adding sand to disappearing beaches is another tactic. Dredges whir to life and idyllic coastlines from Santa Cruz to San Diego routinely turn into construction zones, with dump trucks and sand dozers pushing sediment for hours across the starving shore. This race against nature, however, lasts only so long as there’s money and enough sand. Elevating homes and roads is perhaps another option, but this, too, costs money — and requires reconfiguring entire communities in dramatic and unfamiliar ways.

Then there’s what scientists and economists and number-crunching consultants call “managed retreat”: move back, relocate, essentially cede the land to nature. These words alone have roiled the few cities and state agencies bold enough to utter them. Mayors have been ousted, planning documents rewritten, campaigns waged over the very thought of turning prime real estate back into dunes and wetlands. Many declared retreat un-American. To win, California must defend. Our climate change challenge

If the Golden State is going to lead the world toward a better, safer future, our political and business leaders — and the rest of us — will have to work harder to rewrite the California narrative. Here’s how we can push the state forward.

But at what cost? The California coast itself is a series of engineered landscapes — home today to almost 27 million people and all the ports, harbors and major cities that support a state that, if it were its own country, would be the fourth-largest economy in the world. There are limits, however, to this built environment, especially as the realities of sea-level rise force a more collective reckoning. Should California become one long wall of concrete against the ocean? Will there still be sandy beaches or surf breaks to cherish in the future, coastal road trips and oceanfront homes left to dream about? If business continues as usual and global temperatures continue to rise, more than $370 billion in property could be at risk of coastal flooding by the end of the century, the economic damage far more devastating than the state’s worst earthquakes and wildfires. Salt marshes — home to spawning fish, weary shorebirds and many of the world’s most endangered species — face complete extinction. Trapped between rising water on one side, pavement on the other, there’s little room left for these precious ecosystems. In just a few more decades, two-thirds of the beaches in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego — so deeply tied to the state’s heart and soul — could also be no more.

However you cut it, Griggs said, sacrifices lie ahead. In a world as finite as this one, every decision, big or seemingly small, is a choice to preserve one resource at the cost of another. So, when all that we treasure can no longer be saved, what becomes the priority? Stripes of color representing the rising temperatures in California between 1850 to 2020

Griggs still has to pinch himself sometimes, stunned by what he gets to do every day for a living. He’s often out examining the juts and crannies of the coast, usually with a binder of notes in hand. It still felt like winter that morning in March 2020 when he zipped up his Timberland vest, rolled up his sleeves, and went for a brisk walk to check out the shore. He had timed low tide just right at Capitola Beach, a flattened, manicured patch of sand along the mouth of Soquel Creek that is bookended by 90-foot cliffs. As the waves receded toward the fog-draped horizon, the water made room for a thin stretch of damp sand below the bluffs.

He walked past a red-lettered sign warning “DANGEROUS CLIFFS. Proceed at your own risk,” and hopped down to the wet, pebbled sand that had just emerged at low tide. He likes coming down here to see what new stories might be revealed in these ancient layers of rock. Inching his way toward the towering bluffs, Griggs explained how this area is a geologic microcosm of everything that could be possible on the coast. He paused at a large mound of broken sandstone and compacted mud. “This wasn’t here two weeks ago,” he said, craning his neck to see what section of the cliff must have collapsed. He pointed to a cavernous undercut that likely destabilized the bluff and noted the clusters of pampas grass, a fluffy, straw-colored weed that wedges its roots into the rocky cracks and joints. Whenever water makes its way into these cracks — from rain or big waves during high tide — the pressure builds until entire slabs of the cliff come crashing down.

He squatted down to take a closer look, brushing his hand over a slab of dark-gray mudrock embedded with a wallpaper-like print of white shells. These compacted layers of mollusk fossils always amaze his students, another humble reminder that everything California is standing and building on was underwater in a previous chapter of this planet’s history. He took a photo, then nudged aside another pile of sandstone. “Look,” he said, “these are all bone fragments. This one seems to be a piece of vertebra.”

Griggs stood up and took a mental assessment of the jumble of rocks. This is all part of nature’s process, he explained. The next high tide will sweep this huge pile of geological history into the ocean, where it will be ground down and eventually returned to the shore as fresh sand. Cliff erosion, and the occasional collapse, helps replenish beaches, but modern coastal living has disrupted this ancient process. Griggs motioned to the row of homes and apartment buildings at the top of the bluff: Engineers have tried all sorts of ways to hold back these cliffs, he said, but it’s not easy slowing down the forces of coastal erosion. “There used to be two rows of pine trees and a sidewalk with benches. It was called Lovers’ Lane. There were all these pictures of people sitting out there,” he said. “Well, the trees are gone, the path’s gone, the road’s gone.” Several homes have also had to move over the years — from earthquakes, from coastal erosion, sometimes both — but the people still living up there want to hold on to as much time as possible.

Time is funny like that. It can take tens of thousands of years to cycle through a geological epoch, just a couple of hundred for industrialization to make a mess of the planet, and only a decade or two to delude people into making decisions based on flawed time frames — whether it’s a 30-year mortgage or a political term that resets every four years. And in this moment when inconvenient realities like climate change have become so politicized, shortsighted individualism has further clouded our ability to plan ahead. We seem to have both no time and too much time to act, and so we spiral into paralyzing battles over the why, who, when and how.

Scientists by now have a fairly firm grasp of the geologic and climate pressures looming over the shore. What’s less predictable, Griggs said, is how people will choose to respond.

All this engineering, all this sacrifice: How many times will we try to overcome a force as vast as the sea? People spend years fighting to maintain a wishful line in the sand, yet a few extra feet of water here or there is hardly a shrug for the ocean. When you look at the coast with wise enough eyes, you can almost see the high-water lines of floods and disasters past ... lines foretelling the history we’re doomed to keep repeating, if we keep closing ourselves off to change.

Ask a Reporter: Inside the project

What: Times reporters Rosanna Xia and Sammy Roth will discuss “Our Climate Change Challenge” during a live streaming conversation. City Editor Maria L. LaGanga moderates.

When: Sept. 19 at 6 p.m. Pacific.

Where: This free event will be live streaming. Sign up on Eventbrite for watch links and to share your questions and comments.

latimes.com/2023-01-06/california-storms-wreak-havoc

https://lookout.co/santacruz/civic-life/story/2023-01-05/capitola-wharf-taking-a-beating-esplanade-taking-on-water

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-06-05/amount-of-warming-triggering-carbon-dioxide-in-air-hits-new-peak-growing-at-near-record-fast-rate

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-salt-marsh-climate-change-20180221-story.html

latimes.com

Stay out of the water.

Although Los Angeles County beaches managed to avoid significant damage from Tropical Storm Hilary, officials have warned beachgoers to avoid swimming, surfing and playing in ocean water due to unhealthy conditions.

The L.A. County Department of Public Health has issued an ocean water quality rain advisory until 9 a.m. on Thursday, and noted that the warning period could be extended depending on further showers.

It is common for bacteria levels in coastal waters to increase after storms, as rainfall flushes contaminants such as litter, trash, fertilizers, pet waste, metals and car fluids from streets into the ocean via rivers, creeks and storm drains. Bacteria levels typically remain high for at least 72 hours after a storm. The risk of illness is higher for children and the elderly.

On Monday afternoon, public officials were still assessing damage to county beaches and facilities. Despite the storm breaking daily rainfall records across the region, local beaches appear to have escaped serious damage, officials said.

“Overall, we made it through OK,” said Nicole Mooradian, public information specialist with the county’s Department of Beaches and Harbors, in an email. “We saw erosion at our most vulnerable beaches, but it could have been much worse.”

Crews saw significant erosion at Redondo Beach, around the storm drains, she said, as well as some erosion around a parking lot at Point Dume in Malibu. A restroom in Topanga Beach suffered some internal damage too.

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A video captured by SkyCal on Monday morning released on CBS News showed storm damage near the Queen Mary in the Long Beach harbor, where pieces of a dock were destroyed. No boats appeared damaged, but large amounts of trash and storm runoff could be seen floating on the water.

In Santa Monica on Sunday, at least two large flows of street runoff some 15 yards wide rushed into the ocean, carrying trash and debris. In Marina del Rey, trash carried by stormwater flowed down Ballona Creek toward the ocean before city-maintained booms and a trash interceptor captured it.

Although large storms can affect drinking water quality, the county department of public health said it is not aware of any effects to local water systems. But it did advise homes or businesses supplied by private wells affected by flooding to look for debris and mud around the well. Visible damage to the well casing, a loose cap, and mud stains could indicate that water within the well and distribution system may be contaminated and affect drinking water quality.

“If well owners believe that their well has been contaminated, they should discontinue using their well water for drinking and cooking purposes and use only disinfected or bottled water and contact a qualified professional for service,” the county said in an email.

The tropical storm, the first to make landfall in Southern California in 84 years, broke daily rainfall records across the region. Los Angeles International Airport received 2.54 inches of rain and Long Beach Airport reported 2.62 inches, compared with their previous records of “a trace” of rain, weather service meteorologist Rich Thompson said. Culver City got 3.65 inches, Santa Monica 3.56, and the South Bay cities Redondo Beach and Hawthorne tallied 2.47 and 2.24 inches, respectively.

All state beaches in Orange and San Diego counties remained closed on Monday due to the storm.

http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/phcommon/public/eh/water_quality/beach_grades.cfm

http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/phcommon/public/eh/water_quality/beach_grades.cfm

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-08-21/hurricane-hilary-obliterated-daily-rainfall-records-across-souther-california

latimes.com

I’ve been to my fair share of live music performances, held everywhere from Radio City Music Hall to college dorm rooms. The first concert I saw was the Jonas Brothers in New York City’s Central Park (which 9-year-old me thought was totally epic). Still, I never predicted I’d find myself inside the dome of an iconic telescope, about to listen to a classical music concert.

Yet on a recent Sunday, there I was at the Mt. Wilson Observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains, awaiting the afternoon’s performers: the Zelter String Quartet.

“Be here now for these particular wavelengths of light and sound,” said Dan Kohne, a Mt. Wilson Institute board member, speaking to the audience from a makeshift stage on a deck in the dome. Just then, the steel walls of the dome slid apart, revealing the open sky. The audience ooh-ed and aah-ed as the dome began to slowly rotate and we watched the trees and clouds rolling past us.

On one Sunday each month, Mt. Wilson Observatory hosts a chamber music or jazz concert in the dome, which was founded in 1904 by the Carnegie Institution of Washington and designed by D.H. Burnham. The telescope housed inside it — the Hooker 100-inch telescope — was completed in 1917 and reigned as the world’s largest optical telescope until 1949. Famed astronomer Edwin Hubble used this very telescope to solve the long-debated spiral nebulae question by observing other galaxies to be separate from our own. When I entered the space, I was taken by the sheer size of the telescope, its peak reaching the top of the dome. Violinist Kyle Gilner grins while performing with the Zelter String Quartet.

Violinist Kyle Gilner grins while performing with the Zelter String Quartet.

The dome itself looks like a UFO that just touched down on Earth. Its stark white metal exterior feels downright extraterrestrial when juxtaposed with the trees and nature surrounding it.

The idea to host live music in the dome was born from a conversation in 2017 between Kohne and Cécilia Tsan, professional cellist and artistic director of the Mt. Wilson Observatory concerts. Kohne described the acoustics in the space as “extraordinary” and urged Tsan to bring in her cello to test it out. So she did. A Facebook video of Tsan playing a song in the dome received 39,000 views.

Kohne and Tsan decided to work together to take advantage of the unique acoustics and create a celebration of music and science.

“Both science and music let us journey into new worlds,” Tsan said.

At the concert, the seats were assembled in a semicircle facing the black-clad musicians: Carson Rick on viola, Allan Hon on cello and Gallia Kastner and Kyle Gilner on violin. A hush fell over the space as they began to play. They captivated the audience with their music, the instruments beautifully melding together and reverberating as one throughout the dome. With each swift move of their bows, the foursome took quick, synchronized breaths. The audience subtly swayed as they played music by Mendelsohn, Puccini and Todd Mason, often with their eyes closed and heads back, overcome with emotion and soaking in the echoing sounds.

I felt a sense of calm throughout the performance, combined with awe at the space itself and its ability to bring so many people together.

“Hearing the acoustics in the dome feels like you’re in direct contact with the universe,” Tsan said. “It’s soothing in a world that’s so chaotic right now.” A crowd enjoys the performance of a string quartet inside an observatory dome.

! The Zeller String Quartet performs in the dome housing the 100-inch (2.5-meter) Hooker telescope at Mt. Wilson Observatory.

Take your shot!

Sciencedaily.com

A paper recently published in Nature Energy based on pioneering research done at Illinois Institute of Technology reveals a promising breakthrough in green energy: an electrolyzer device capable of converting carbon dioxide into propane in a manner that is both scalable and economically viable.

As the United States races toward its target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, innovative methods to reduce the significant carbon dioxide emissions from electric power and industrial sectors are critical. Mohammad Asadi, assistant professor of chemical engineering at Illinois Tech, spearheaded this groundbreaking research.

"Making renewable chemical manufacturing is really important," says Asadi. "It's the best way to close the carbon cycle without losing the chemicals we currently use daily."

What sets Asadi's electrolyzer apart is its unique catalytic system. It uses inexpensive, readily available materials to produce tri-carbon molecules -- fundamental building blocks for fuels like propane, which is used for purposes ranging from home heating to aviation.

To ensure a deep understanding of the catalyst's operations, the team employed a combination of experimental and computational methods. This rigorous approach illuminated the crucial elements influencing the catalyst's reaction activity, selectivity, and stability.

A distinctive feature of this technology, lending to its commercial viability, is the implementation of a flow electrolyzer. This design permits continuous propane production, sidestepping the pitfalls of the more conventional batch processing methods.

"Designing and engineering this laboratory-scale flow electrolyzer prototype has demonstrated Illinois Tech's commitment to creating innovative technologies. Optimizing and scaling up this prototype will be an important step toward producing a sustainable, economically viable, and energy-efficient carbon capture and utilization process," says Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy Program Director Jack Lewnard.

This innovation is not Asadi's first venture into sustainable energy. He previously adapted a version of this catalyst to produce ethanol by harnessing carbon dioxide from industrial waste gas. Recognizing the potential of the green propane technology, Asadi has collaborated with global propane distributor SHV Energy to further scale and disseminate the system.

"This is an exciting development which opens up a new e-fuel pathway to on-purpose propane production for the benefit of global users of this essential fuel," says Keith Simons, head of research and development for sustainable fuels at SHV Energy.

Illinois Tech Duchossois Leadership Professor and Professor of Physics Carlo Segre, University of Pennsylvania Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Andrew Rappe, and University of Illinois Chicago Professor Reza Shahbazian-Yassar contributed to this work. Mohammadreza Esmaeilirad (Ph.D. CHE '22) was a lead author on the paper.

latimes.com

It was a week of robotaxi mayhem in San Francisco for the Cruise driverless car company — by turns bizarre, comic and alarming.

As a result, the California Department of Motor Vehicles said Friday it’s investigating “recent concerning incidents” involving Cruise vehicles while tapping the brakes on the company’s ambitious expansion plans.

The DMV didn’t say which incidents it’s probing, but over a seven-day period the events included:

— The bizarre, when a group of Cruise robotaxis drove together into the city’s North Beach district on the night of Aug. 11, froze in place, sat for 15 minutes blocking an intersection, then drove on. Cruise blamed cellphone service.

— The comic, when a Cruise robotaxi ignored construction signs on Tuesday and headed into a stretch of cement. Stuck in the wet muck, it was removed later by workers dispatched by Cruise.

— The alarming, when a Cruise robotaxi entered an intersection on a green light even as a fast-moving fire truck, lights flashing and siren blaring, approached. The truck struck the car, occupied by one passenger, who was transported to a hospital. Cruise said the passenger sustained “what we believe are non-severe injuries.”

The day after the injury crash, the DMV announced its investigation and said Cruise agreed to halve the size of its fleet, to 50 robotaxis during the day and 150 at night. In a prepared statement, Cruise said it looks forward to working with the DMV and posted its version of events online.

The company plans to populate the city with thousands of robotaxis. Another company, Waymo, has similar plans. Cruise is owned by General Motors, Waymo by Alphabet, parent company of Google.

The DMV did not say how long its investigation might take. Another DMV investigation, into whether Tesla falsely advertises its driver-assist technology as “Full Self-Driving,” has been ongoing for two years and three months.

The latest robotaxi incidents occurred on the heels of a controversial California Public Utilities Commission vote Aug. 10 to approve massive expansion of robotaxis in San Francisco.

State legislators are becoming fed up with the state of driverless vehicle regulation in California. A bill is moving through the Legislature that would require human safety drivers in driverless trucks for at least the next five years. State Sen. Lena Gonzalez has expressed concern about the way the DMV regulates Tesla safety.

DMV Director Steve Gordon, a former Silicon Valley executive, was appointed to the post by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Meantime, city officials in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Santa Monica and elsewhere are frustrated at how little control they have over robotaxi deployment in their cities.

The CPUC voted 3-1 to approve robotaxi expansion. The no vote was cast by Genevieve Shiroma, who said she was not against robotaxis but that it made sense to solve safety issues such as interference with emergency vehicles before expansion is approved.

Voting in favor of expansion was John Reynolds, whose previous job was that of top lawyer at Cruise.

All five members of the CPUC were appointed by Newsom. Newsom’s office declined to comment.

latimes/2023-08-12/cruise-robotaxis-come-to-a-standstill forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/08/17/cruise-robotaxi-drives-into-wet-concrete abc7news.cruise-driverless-car-sffd-fire-truck-accident theverge/2023/8/18/23837217/cruise-robotaxi-driverless-crash-fire-truck-san-francisco https://getcruise.com/news/blog/2023/further-update-on-emergency-vehicle-collision/ latimes.com/2022-05-26/dmv-tesla-year-long-slow-walk latimes/2023-06-01/driverless-trucks-california-dmv-mistrust-safety-regulations latimes.com/2023-08-10/cpuc-vote-on-robotaxi cpuc.ca.gov/about-cpuc/commissioner-john-reynolds

www.vox.com

Guatemala is on the verge of electing Bernardo Arévalo, a former academic and diplomat whose campaign has focused on fighting corruption, giving many graft-weary Guatemalans hope that building strong democratic institutions could be possible in the Central American nation.

Arévalo’s Movimiento Semilla (Seed Movement in English) pulled out a surprise win in first-round elections in June and will face off against conservative establishment leader and former First Lady Sandra Torres on Sunday. But Arévalo’s path to the presidency has been fraught, as establishment politicians used the court system to disqualify or challenge anti-establishment candidates.

Indigenous leader Thelma Cabrera, businessman Carlos Pineda, and Roberto Arzú were all barred from running in June’s contest by the Constitutional Court, Guatemala’s high court. Prosecutor Rafael Curruchiche began investigating Movimiento Semilla in July, just before the June elections were certified, claiming that some 5,000 of the signatures on a petition to form the party were fake.

Guatemala’s Supreme Judicial Court granted an indefinite injunction against the effort to bar Arévalo from running, but the decision could still be appealed to the Constitutional Court. And the injunction hasn’t stopped Torres from launching specious attacks against Arévalo, including that Movimiento Semilla is trying to steal the elections and that Arévalo will make Guatemala a Communist country.

Arévalo’s support has remained significant, and the court’s decision to allow Movimiento Semilla a place in Sunday’s elections have brought cautious optimism to Guatemalans and observers alike. Arévalo, the son of the nation’s first democratic president Juan José Arévalo, was raised abroad after a military coup overthrew his father’s successor. He was polling at 61 percent as of Wednesday, compared to Torres’s 31 percent, according to Fundación Libertad y Desarrollo, an independent think tank focused on Latin America.

Torres is the head of the Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE) party, which has long been entrenched in Guatemalan politics, including, reportedly, the less savory side, like trading votes in congress for favors and jobs. This is Torres’s third bid for the presidency, after failed efforts in 2015 and 2019, and over the years she has more closely aligned with outgoing President Alejandro Giammattei, according to InSight Crime, an investigative outlet reporting on issues in Latin America.

Arévalo’s message is powerful in a deeply corrupt nation

Torres’s coziness with the political establishment, both as a legislator and as a confidant of the unpopular Giammattei, signaled that a Torres presidency would be much the same as Giammattei’s. In a country with unstable democratic institutions — a situation aided by US meddling in Guatemalan politics under progressive leftist President Jacobo Arbenz — as well as serious inequality and violence, Arévalo’s success seems like a revelation.

In the first round of elections, Semilla was the underdog; Torres was widely expected to be a frontrunner, as was Zury Ríos, a populist legislator and the daughter of General Efraín Ríos Montt, a right-wing military dictator who took over Guatemala in a 1982 coup. Many Guatemalans were also expected to avoid voting to protest the corruption in the process.

But Semilla and Arévalo — upstarts offering Guatemala the chance to “vote different” — resonated with voters for reasons beyond Arévalo’s political pedigree, primarily because of his message that corruption would not be tolerated under his watch.

Guatemala suffers from the serious, interconnected problems of violence, inequality, and government corruption. Powerful interests, and especially business interests, can easily persuade the government to cater to their demands — increasing inequality and setting up the government as a mechanism for enrichment.

There was, starting in 2007, an attempt to address Guatemala’s corrupt politics under the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala, or CICIG, which confronted and prosecuted criminal organizations as well as corruption in the government, as Vox previously reported:

Under CICIG, Guatemalan prosecutors were tasked with investigating crime at the highest levels, even bringing corruption charges against a former president and vice president, among others. It was enormously successful, providing a model for other Latin American countries where similar problems — state capture, organized crime, and graft — have been allowed to flourish with impunity.

Former President Jimmy Morales, himself dogged by accusations of corruption, refused to renew CICIG’s mandate in 2019. CICIG’s efforts were already under attack by corrupt and powerful forces within the country; under Morales and Giammattei, anti-corruption judges and officials have fled Guatemala following arrests and threats of prosecution.

Arévalo has made tackling corruption the centerpiece of his campaign, particularly speaking out against CACIF, the Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Financial Associations, which in June he accused of “underpinning the economy of privilege” — defined in Arévalo’s words as “the economy in which the success of a group or company depends on the level of contact or political clout it has with a powerful politician, with a minister.”

But his anti-graft message, as well as his clear-eyed view of what’s possible given powerful and antagonistic interests, has resonated in urban areas and, increasingly, smaller towns as well.

Arévalo faces obstacles, even if he wins

Guatemala’s democracy is young; it has a strong, entrenched history of dictatorship, civil war, and corrupt and weak institutions which are extremely difficult to overcome, especially in just one presidential term — the limit under Guatemala’s constitution.

Inequality and poor social services, a struggling economy, and a legacy of violence following a 36-year civil war and violent dictatorships have allowed multiple armed groups to terrorize Guatemalan society. Those groups, according to InSight Crime, comprise street gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18, but also involve former and current police officers, as well as members of the military and intelligence officers. The groups mostly engage in illegal drug smuggling, but also “human trafficking, kidnapping, extortion, money laundering, arms smuggling, adoption rings,” and other illegal businesses.

They are also entrenched in the government, with connections to powerful people “ranging from local politicians to high-level security and government officials,” Insight Crime reports.

Even if he wins, Arévalo could face renewed calls for prosecution or attempts to overturn the election, even after the results are posted. But in a Friday interview with El País, he remained positive that his ideals would win out.

“We believe that democratic institutions must be reestablished,” Arévalo said. “We have to re-found the process that this corrupt political class has hijacked from us.”

Many links in article

psychologytoday.com

Online: Kaytee Gillis

Jessilyn slumped on the couch, eyes cast downward. "I heard from my mother last week," she said, her first time making eye contact since she had sat down 10 minutes before. I tried to hide my excitement at her willingness to go deep, instead trying to reflect a sense of neutrality and openness.

"We haven't talked in fifteen years. Maybe twenty," she began. "She left when I was about sixteen. My dad was violent, abusive really. He drank a lot. She couldn't handle it I guess, so she left. Last I knew she had remarried and had a couple other kids a few years back."

During this session with Jessilyn, she relayed a painful conversation with the mother who abandoned her when she needed her most:

I don't know why I opened this door. I knew it would upset me. But I asked her why she left so many years ago. I just came out and asked her. And do you know what she said to me? She said "you don't know how hard it was for me, Jessilyn. Living with that man. I just couldn't do it anymore.

Hard for her?! I thought. Like, she was an adult. She left a teenage girl who was barely able to drive, with this man who was so dangerous that she had to leave. What about me?!

But of course I didn't say this to her at first. I think I was in shock, honestly. She literally kept talking about how hard it was for her and how much better her life was once she got away, how much happier she is now... I couldn't even respond.

Most people would be able to see that Jessilyn's experience was traumatic. Being left with a parent who was abusive and violent, and being unable to escape, is unthinkable. Even though she was a teenager, and not a small child, this experience nonetheless changed - and completely traumatized- her. But still she spent years unable to see this experience for what it was. Instead internalizing the shame and self-blame in ways that she struggled to articulate. Her mother's refusal- or inability- to see her daughter's experiences as traumatic compounded her feelings of shame and reinforced the trauma she had experienced.

Eventually Jessilyn was able to ask her mom those terrifying three words: "what about me?" Her mom's response was that of shock and immediate denial. In her mother's eyes, she herself was the true (i.e. "only") victim of the violence and trauma within the home. During the very limited conversations that the mother and daughter had, Jessilyn's mother would say things such as "Your experience couldn't have been that bad, you turned out alright." or "You have no idea what I went through, you should be happy that I got out."

“She just won’t believe me! She can’t see what happened in my childhood and how that affects me today,” Jessilyn cried out from her spot across from me on the couch. “How do I move on if she can’t even understand the pain of my experiences, and how her leaving made it even worse for me?”

Many people come to me desperate to heal and move forward from their trauma history, yet struggling when it comes to convincing their caregivers what happened.

Sometimes, caregivers who also experienced trauma, such as in the case of Jessilyn's mother, are so stuck in their own experiences that they are unable to see the bigger picture.

In reality, Jessilyn's mother would not have to deny her own history in order to validate her daughter's. She could acknowledge her own experiences of abuse while recognizing that her daughter also experienced them- yet was powerless to leave due to being a child. However, mother was unable to focus on any reality other than her own.

Many of my clients get stuck trying to convince their caregivers of their pain because they believe they need that acknowledgement to heal. In truth, few will receive the validation they seek from their experiences this way.

This lack of validation can come from many sources, but it is often our caregivers’ own defense mechanisms keeping them in the denial stage—denial of their own actions (or inactions) but also denial of their own history of trauma that they unfortunately repeated. Shame comes in when confronted with the truth, and self-defenses take over in absence of self-esteem. They replace that shame with self-doubt, outward blame, and even rage.

This is where our own internal tools will need to take over and make up for that lack of external support and understanding from our caregivers so we can heal.

Remember, you do not need to convince others of your truth in order to move forward. No one has to acknowledge our mourning or grief for it to be authentic. Of course, this is easier said than done. Not being understood or believed comes with a feeling of invisibility, which compounds many survivors' trauma.

Instead, move towards self-validation. When working with clients with this experience, we focus on self-validation as a form of healing. Focus on acknowledging and validating your history. Whenever you feel the beginnings of denial or self-gaslighting creeping in, stop and say "no, I will not deny my history. What happened to me was traumatic, and I am allowed to feel this way." Validating your own history is a crucial part of the healing process.

Adapted, in part, from the book: Breaking the Cycle, the 6 Stages of Healing from Childhood Family Trauma.

PT.com Therapist Directory

Links:

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psychologytoday/self-esteem

psychologytoday/anger

psychologytoday/grief

psychologytoday.com/gaslighting

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/ci39645386/executive

psychologytoday.com

Online: Harper Collins Author Profile

The foundation for verbal abuse in an adult-on-adult relationship is an imbalance of power; one person has it and is highly motivated to keep it and continue to control the relationship.

It’s important to remember that verbal abuse—whether it’s of the overt or covert variety—is highly motivated and goal-oriented as well as consistent, despite the fact there will likely be so-called “honeymoon” periods where the amount of abuse decreases or stops entirely.

While the person who is the target of the verbal abuse will likely believe that the respite reflects a change of heart on the abuser’s part, the sad truth is that it’s usually a tactic to keep the target emotionally confused and hopeful and, most important, fully committed to staying in the relationship.

Understanding the Imbalance of Power in an Abusive Relationship

While a healthy and satisfying adult relationship would be based on a partnership model, in verbally abusive relationships, one person seeks to maintain control. That’s made possible by certain factors such as these:

• One person has a greater emotional investment in the relationship than the other.
• The abuser exploits what he or she knows about the target’s insecurities and self-doubts to control the him or her.
• One person has greater financial resources than the other or the target is financially dependent on the abuser; each affects both the decision to stay or to leave.
• The abuser and the target have children and the target is concerned that any action of her/his part will involve the abuser’s retaliation and that the children will be hurt emotionally or psychologically.

Verbal Abuse can be Subtle or Covert to Maintain Control

The culture tends to picture verbal abuse as loud, involving yelling, put-downs, name-calling, and shaming; while verbal abuse certainly can and does take these forms, it’s the more subtle forms of verbal abuse that are more likely to entrap you and render you feeling powerless. That was certainly true for Casey, now 42:

“My ex-husband never raised his voice or called me a name; instead, he undermined me at every turn in subtle ways. Plans I’d made or initiated were always changed because he had a ‘better’ idea or solution that included everything from dinner reservations to renovating our kitchen and family vacations. He dismissed any complaints I had by telling me that I was ‘sensitive to rejection’ and that I was ‘emotionally over-reactive;’ it took me years to recognize that he was effectively shutting me up and shutting me down without ever saying so. There wasn’t a single domain in our lives where he didn’t insist on having the final say and, for a long time, I honestly believed that I had little or nothing of value to contribute to him or anyone. I went into therapy and when my counselor suggested I was being abused, I pushed back and denied it but it was the truth. When I tried to talk to him about it, he laughed at me and then refused to discuss it further. I was lucky, though. I ‘only’ wasted six years of my life with him.”

Among the more difficult-to-recognize forms of verbal abuse are:

• Blame-shifting: The abuser exploits your own self-doubts or insecurities by making whatever has happened your fault; that leaves the abuser with zero responsibility and more control and often makes you feel that you should apologize. A true sleight-of-hand.
• Brinksmanship: Threatening you with leaving or asking why you just don’t leave if you’re so unhappy. This is enabled by the abuser’s knowledge that you aren’t ready to give up on relationship and that you’re still hopeful a corner can be turned.
• Stonewalling or ignoring that you’ve said anything. This will put you into a defensive crouch and perhaps feeling panicked; this often ends up with your being a peacemaker and apologizing for something you didn’t do.
• Gaslighting: Telling you that your perceptions are dead wrong or that you’re projecting or making things up. Again, this preys on your insecurities as well as your hopefulness that things will get better somehow.

Will Your Abuser Ever Change?

Again, this comes down to motivation. We’ve seen how control is established through verbal abuse so the question becomes this: What’s in it for the abuser to stop?

If you find yourself in this situation, do speak to a counselor about strategies and what he or she thinks can happen given the nature of the relationship. Be cognizant of the possibility that confronting your verbal abuser may lead to escalation and remember that verbal abuse is always the foundation for physical abuse even if your relationship has never included it.

Do examine your expectations and ask yourself the following questions, answering as honestly as you can:

• Is he/she willing to acknowledge the verbal abuse without resorting to defensiveness or blame-shifting?
• Is he/she willing to hear you out thoughtfully without pushing back, dismissing your remarks, objecting, or starting a fight?
• Will he/she accept your pointing out verbal abuse and instituting respectful boundaries?
• Is he/she willing to go into counseling and commit to working on change?
• Is he/she willing to work on new ways of communicating and resolving conflict?
• Is he/she willing to commit to a partnership model of relationship?
• Is he/she willing to commit to a series of steps you mutually decide on if he/she backslides into old behaviors?
• If there are children involved and they have been targets, is he/she willing to apologize for past behaviors and willing to work on acquiring new parenting skills?

The truth is that if the answers to any of these questions is “no,” it will not be possible to repair or recover the relationship.

psychologytoday.com/therapy

Psychologytoday.com/forgiveness

Psychologytoday.com/gaslighting

Psychologytoday.com/motivation

Psychologytoday.com/parenting

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