Adds billions in spending and 600+ new positions.
LAist is part of Southern California Public Radio, a member-supported public media network. For the latest national news from NPR and our live radio broadcast, visitThe L.A. County Board of Supervisors approved an amended budget for the 2023-24 fiscal year on Tuesday, adding hundreds of positions and more than $3.4 billion in spending.The new budget adds 666 jobs, bringing the total to more than 115,300 budgeted positions for L.A. County. It also includes $870.
The Department of Children and Family Services will get 123 new positions. Those jobs will help bring down adoption caseloads for social workers and help support caregivers, foster children and families. With fiscal year 2023-24 taken care of, L.A. County could be facing some serious budget challenges in the years ahead. According to the county CEO, it may have to pay more than $3 billion to settle childhood sexual assault claims filed under AB 218. That 2019 state law changed the statute of limitations for child sex abuse survivors and allowed them to file civil suits during a three-year window. That window closed on Jan. 1, 2023.explores former L.A.
At this point, Martinez’s mother, and other employees of Price Pfister, began to organize to keep the company in Pacoima. Martinez said she began to notice how few of the elected officials they contacted were Latino and how even fewer were women. This, she later said, was her political awakening. Her interest in politics sprang from a desire to help working class people like her parents.
Mike Trujillo, a veteran Democratic strategist who grew up in Martinez’s part of the San Fernando Valley, said voters felt she reflected them. “Things that I thought would be a no-brainer would take weeks, even months to get put on the agenda,” Raman said. “We had so many examples where even the most basic things would take a long time to get put through the council. And we couldn't always find any reason for why those delays would happen.”
The growing homelessness crisis in L.A. was another point of tension. In the fall of 2021, Martinez and the other moderates on the council voted in favor of maintaining a ban on homeless encampments near schools, parks, daycares and libraries. "The homeowners in my district would work really hard to have that little home," she says in the episode."People in Sun Valley are housekeepers, hotel workers, janitors, construction workers, they're the people who we rely on for the city to move forward. They don't deserve clean streets or a clean neighborhood? Are we being serious?"Over the next two years, relations on the council deteriorated, and Martinez found herself more and more frustrated and isolated.
By the fall of 2021, the tension on the L.A. city council reached a boiling point — just as the council launched into the once-in-a-decade process of redistricting, or drawing new council district boundaries based on new census data. For incumbents like Martinez, this process is live or die. You can lose huge numbers of voters who support you, or you can gain them.
The crash resulted in the shutdown of all the northbound lanes on the San Diego Freeway between Avalon Boulevard and the 110 Freeway.Health care workers at hundreds of Kaiser Permanente hospitals and medical facilities across the U.S. walked off the job on this morning in an effort to ramp up pressure on their employer to fix a staffing shortage that has intensified since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The unions allege Kaiser has engaged in unfair labor practices by refusing to bargain in good faith to solve the staffing crisis. Kaiser denies these allegations.Kaiser has asked workers to reject calls to walk off the job to prevent harm to patients. Dozens of Kaiser employees, energized by their union's momentum, joined the picket line at Kaiser's Springfield Medical Center in Virginia soon after the strike began.
The two sides reached a tentative agreement on Monday on a 40% increase to an education fund, that will support additional training for employees, according to the SEIU-UHW union in California. "The people of Kaiser Permanente have faced down the pandemic better than most frontline workers because we started from a different place," Kaiser said.
Despite her doubts, she returned that phone call — and it turned out to be not only for real, but also life changing. Dana Vanderford leads the Homelessness Prevention unit within the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services in Alhambra, Calif. "We have clients who have understandable mistrust of systems," Vanderford says. They've "experienced generational trauma. Our clients are extremely unlikely to reach out for help.
On this morning, though, it isn't long before Juarez gets someone on the phone. She is cheerful and patient with the man, knowing While most people need rent help, Juarez says that's not always the most urgent problem. She's used the allocated money for payday loan debt, appliances, laptops and, recently, an e-bike for someone whose mental illness made it difficult to take public transportation.
Theus says it will be difficult to find anywhere Brown can afford, so they'll have to try for a housing voucher to bring down his expenses. That, combined with boosting his income through food stamps and cash aid, are the best hope for making him self-sufficient. Brown says he's been blessed with this program and calls Theus a"lifesaver." But at night, it doesn't keep his mind from racing with a thousand worries.
Rountree expects to publish the study results in 2026, which is also when the program's funding runs out; most of its $31 million budget came from pandemic aid. She hopes there will be a strong case that it should be scaled up, and can be a model.
Across the street from their building is a park where people spend days on the green lawn and sleep in tents. Volantin says it hurts her heart to see. More inland, it will be in the mid 90s in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, and in the lower 90s in Orange County. In the high desert, expect temperatures to reach the mid 80s, but over in Coachella Valley, it will get up to 96.There are several wind advisories out for different parts of SoCal until 3 p.m.:Santa Monica mountains, winds between 15 to 25 mph, gusts up to 35 mph.On this day in 2021, hail and lightning battered the coasts.
Clearing it — prime suspects included metal casing, rocks, or a tree branch — would allow him to send cement and pea gravel into the hole, which reached hundreds of feet into Appalachian rock formations. Once an active oil well, now it was an environmental nuisance and the target of an ambitious federal cleanup program.
The exact number of orphan wells nationwide is unknown. In late 2021, The Interstate Oil and Gas Commission, a multi-state organization, had more than 130,000 orphan wells on record but estimated that anywhere between 310,000 and 800,000to help states handle their orphan well inventories. The first batch of that money has trickled down to states and has been distributed to contractors like Plants & Goodwin.
For the pluggers, the work is a bespoke combination: a little science and a lot of art. Sharp intuition, engineering know-how, grit, and luck imbue each effort. One capping can take anywhere from three days to three months, sometimes costing more than $100,000.Alot needs to happen to orphan wells before they’re plugged — at least on paper. The state has to identify them, the threat they pose, the costs to plug them, and search for any elusive owner to pin the costs on.
Still, the pace of contract creation in Pennsylvania has put pluggers in a precarious place. Plants said that when Pennsylvania received $25 million in its first batch of federal funding, he staffed up. A torrent of contracts were awarded but then stopped — leading from feast to famine. A six-month gap meant furloughs and mothballing equipment. “It costs contractors a tremendous amount of money to do all that,” he said. “You end up creating an incentive to not scale at all, just stay small.
Last year, Pennsylvania Deputy Secretary Kurt Klapkowski of the DEP’s Office of Oil and Gas Management addressed that anxiety bythat parties with significant outstanding violations, such as contractors with a poor service record or operators with environmental infractions, wouldn’t receive state contracts.
Plugging wells also requires skilled labor. Thus, the limited number of qualified workers is in high demand. That’s good for wages, but without a large workforce to fill positions as states push out contracts with increasing frequency, another problem arises: “You just get this arms race for the same small pool of workers,” said Plants. “That’s not actually helpful for scaling or expanding the supply side of this business.
Rigs used to plug wells can be hard to come by, too. Drilling technology may advance, but orphan well-plugging is frozen in time. The tech required is often vintage, which means pluggers are on the prowl for a shrinking number of rigs that may be older than the wells they plug. It’s not unusual for a plugger in New York to look as far as Texas for a used rig. Mong’s rig was from the 1950s.
After tubing and other detritus are pulled from orphan wells, workers flush out lingering oil and gas with water pulled from giant containers like this one.Out west, California is working to nurture a workforce at a much larger scale. Last year, the state legislature passed a law directing the California Workforce Development Board, or CWDB, to launch apprenticeship programs to train new classes of well pluggers. It could become a model for skilled labor creation.
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