Good morning. It’s Friday, March 17.
- Gov. Gavin Newsom called out over misleading aid pledge.
- The battle over cars in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
- And San Diego deputies’ tasing of diabetic leads to payout.
Statewide
1.
“A slap in the face.”
In the flooded farmworker town of Pajaro on Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that financial relief had been secured. “It’s important to reinforce today, March 15th, the United Way was able to get $42 million from USDA, and they’re starting to send out $600 checks for farmworkers,” he said. But reporters later discovered that the money was not for flood assistance; Newsom was referring to a pandemic relief grant awarded last fall. Another problem: the county’s share of the money is only $300,000. KQED | Mercury News | S.F. Chronicle
2.
Other storm developments:
- Federal scientists released an updated map for California on Thursday that showed 64% of the state free of drought. That’s up from 57% last week, and 2% at the start of the year. U.S. Drought Monitor | Bloomberg
- A video showing a man’s walk to his Tahoe condo, along a narrow winding corridor of snow, went viral. “I’ve seen huge snow years,” Miles Clark told SFGATE. “But something is weird about this one.” @snowbrains
- Further south, the drone photographer Giannandrea Boiani captured a scene early Thursday that elicited comparisons to Hawaii. It showed the ephemeral Mildred Falls, above, near the mountain town of Julian. More views. 👉 @SunsetsSanDiego
3.
In an exposé, former staffers portrayed Marianne Williamson, the Beverly Hills author and spiritual advisor who is running again for U.S. president, as an emotionally abusive boss prone to explosive bouts of anger. “It would be foaming, spitting, uncontrollable rage,” one person said. Williamson, the staffers said, would throw phones at people and scream so loudly that hotel staff knocked on her door. In one episode, she ended up in an urgent care facility after pounding a car door. Williamson called the accusations “slanderous.” Politico
4.
Dispatches from the homelessness crisis:
- Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Thursday that the state would distribute 1,200 “tiny homes” for the homeless. There are more than 171,000 homeless people in California, meaning the program represents shelter for 0.7% of them. A.P. | SFist
- Mayor Karen Bass said Los Angeles is on track to have 4,000 homeless residents housed by next week, when she reaches her 100th day in office. “We have disproven that people do not want to leave the streets,” she said. L.A. Times | L.A. Daily News
- During a City Council meeting in Sacramento on Tuesday, a lawmaker was overcome by emotion while discussing a projection that evictions would double the number of people on the street. “This is staggering,” she said through tears. See the video. 👉 YouTube (~3 mins)
5.
“We’re not in the room. We’re not even in the darn elevator.”
Latinos account for 40% of California’s population. Yet Cisco Systems, the multinational tech giant based in San Jose, has none on its board of directors. Neither does Intel, the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer, in Santa Clara. Across California’s 505 largest publicly traded companies, Latinos only make up 3.7% of the boards of directors. The imbalance has persisted even as companies have diversified their board with Black and Asian directors. L.A. Times
6.
Teresa Watanabe, a reporter at the L.A. Times, welcomed a style change at her newspaper: Articles will no longer refer to the mass incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II as “internment.” She wrote, “No, my parents were not interned. They were not ‘evacuated’ or ‘relocated,’ even worse euphemisms. They were incarcerated. They were imprisoned in remote Idaho facilities ringed with barbed wire and guard towers manned by armed soldiers who were their fellow U.S. citizens.” L.A. Times
Northern California
7.
Gov. Gavin Newsom announced plans to incorporate Scandinavian incarceration policies at one California’s most notorious prisons, with the goal of “ending San Quentin as we know it.” Inmates serving death sentences will be relocated to other facilities, while the prison adopts a program of job training and rehabilitation under the new name, San Quentin Rehabilitation Center. Newsom described the vision as “a new model for safety and justice — the California Model.” L.A. Times | A.P.
8.
There have been skirmishes over cars in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for nearly as long as there have been cars. But after the pandemic opened people’s eyes to the possibility of pedestrian-friendly streets, the no-car contingent has become ascendant. Even so, their rivals are not surrendering. “This isn’t over,” said Dede Wilsey, a socialite and philanthropist pushing to reopen the park’s JFK Drive to cars. The Washington Post produced a great feature on the movement to remake America’s city streets.
9.
On this week’s California Sun Podcast, host Jeff Schechtman talks with Malcolm Harris, author of the new book “Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World.” Harris argues that Silicon Valley essentially exists to shore up inequality. Apple, he said, is a company whose whole enterprise revolves around the domination of labor: “When we think of Apple as, ‘Oh, that’s where Steve Jobs goes to invent things,’ that’s a misrepresentation and we don’t understand our own role in the world.”
Southern California
10.
William Carr is a pharmaceutical salesman and Type 1 diabetic who wears an insulin pump to help combat the disease. One day in 2018, his blood sugar plunged and he flopped over while eating a meal at an Encinitas diner. Five deputies arrived. When Carr was unresponsive to their commands, they pinned him to the ground, kneed him in the head, tased him four times, and put him in handcuffs. Now the county has agreed to pay him $196,500 to settle an excessive force lawsuit. CBS 8 | S.D. Union-Tribune
11.
The awesome scope of George Lucas’s billion-dollar museum is finally taking form in Los Angeles. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will hover like a low-flying spaceship, with enough gallery space to fill one and a half football fields. It takes 15 minutes to walk across the campus. “We are committed to creating an incredibly complicated building,” said Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the museum’s director. It’s expected to open in 2025, seven years after the ground was first broken. N.Y. Times
In case you missed it
12.
Five items that got big views over the past week:
- A Wall Street Journal report revealed that Elon Musk is secretly building his own utopian town on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. Chap Ambrose, who lives nearby, flew drones over the site seeking clues. YouTube
- In the 1990s, Marlena Fejzo suffered from a rare and debilitating illness during two pregnancies. But her doctor thought it was all in her head, she said. Infuriated, Fejzo made it her life’s work to find the condition’s true cause. N.Y. Times
- “It caused a mini tsunami.” While on a walk along a tributary of the Eel River in Humboldt County on Tuesday, a couple captured dramatic video of a cliff wall collapse. Redheaded Blackbelt
- Cerritos College’s basketball coach fulfilled the dream of a player who is deaf and autistic, putting him in a blowout game with two minutes left. But he wasn’t officially allowed to play. Officials responded by suspending the coach, ordering Cerritos to forfeit the game, and stripping the player of his uniform. L.A. Times
- For more than a decade, the sidewalk in front of Susan Meyer’s San Francisco Victorian has been a cheerful little hub, with a bench and an adorable Little Free Library. Then one anonymous person complained and a notice appeared: remove it all or pay $1,400 for an “encroachment” permit. S.F. Chronicle
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