Good morning. It’s Wednesday, March 9.
• | Gov. Newsom proposes tax rebate to offset surging gas prices. |
• | How the first lottery class is doing at elite Lowell High School. |
• | And Santa Barbara County rejects bid to restart offshore oil rigs. |
Statewide
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Moses Olanrewaju Omolade and Maurice André San-Chez held a hunger strike to stop school closures in Oakland on Feb. 5.
Ray Chavez/Mercury News via Getty Images
Public school enrollment was already falling before the pandemic. But after 2020, the decline turned precipitous as schools lost more than 160,000 students. How shrinking enrollment is reverberating around the state:
• | In Los Angeles, the public school population has shrunk by 40% in 20 years, forcing officials to now decide which schools must close. Parents and teachers are bracing for the worst. L.A. Times |
• | In Oakland, falling enrollment has corresponded with a surging charter school movement. Oaklandside talked to four parents about why they opted out of the district. |
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Over the years, state legislators have added a series of carve-outs to the environmental law known as CEQA in an effort to save projects from delays. There’s one for bus lanes, another for affordable housing, and a third for stadiums. Student housing could become the next exemption after a neighborhood group used CEQA to effectively freeze enrollment at UC Berkeley. Some are arguing that it’s time to overhaul the environmental law rather than rely on what one researcher called “Swiss cheese CEQA.” S.F. Chronicle
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During his annual State of the State address on Tuesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed a tax rebate to offset surging gas prices. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the Bakersfield Republican, called on the governor to increase drilling in the state to lessen American dependence on Russian oil. Newsom rejected that idea. “We need to be fighting polluters, not bolstering them,” he said, “and in the process of so doing, freeing us once and for all from the grasp of petro-dictators.” Sacramento Bee | Bakersfield Californian
As of Tuesday, a gallon of gas in California was the nation’s highest at $5.44. Here’s how to find the cheapest gas in: Sonoma County, Sacramento, the Bay Area, and Southern California.
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Michael Schaefer, 84, was jailed for spousal abuse. He was ordered to pay nearly $2 million to former tenants for being a slumlord. He was accused of stalking the “Everybody Loves Raymond” actor Brad Garrett and ordered to stay at least 100 feet away from him. He’s been disbarred in California and Nevada. Yet over the weekend, the California Democratic Party endorsed Schaefer for a state office. S.F. Chronicle
Northern California
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The reporter Nathan Heller spent a semester with the first class chosen by lottery at San Francisco’s storied Lowell High School after it dropped selective admissions. Teachers acknowledged that more ninth graders were struggling. “I’m at the end of my rope in what I can offer,” one said. But in a history class led by a dogged teacher named Rebecca Johnson, students who started the semester doing F work eventually began turning in assignments in the B range. “In the past, we would ask, you know, Are these kids ‘Lowell’?” Johnson said. “They are Lowell. These are Lowell students. And, to me, that says that anybody can be a Lowell student.” New Yorker
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During the pandemic, Vallejo placed homeless people in hotels as part of Project RoomKey, a program intended to protect the medically vulnerable living on the streets. But a searing investigation found that at least four people died, including three people who weren’t found for days. Trash and feces were allowed to pile up in hallways. In one case, a son desperately tried to reach his mother after she called and moaned over the phone as if in pain. No one could open her door. Vallejo Sun
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Pacifica is ground zero in California’s management of coastal erosion.
Carolyn Cole/L.A. Times via Getty Images
A recent “This American Life” episode told stories from places slowly coming apart. A woman named Jane in Pacifica, where the rising sea has devoured the cliffs below homes, described waking up one morning to find that part of her bedroom was dangling in midair. “The cliff was gone,” she said. California officials have warned coastal communities across the state that Pacifica is a window into the future they must plan for. This American Life
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Christopher Reynolds said there is new energy at Fort Bragg’s Noyo Harbor.
A Michelin-starred restaurant perched at the edge of wild Mendocino coastline, a “damp netherworld” along the Noyo River, and a Yurok-led trip down the Klamath River in a redwood canoe. The travel writer Christopher Reynolds shared 22 of his favorite Northern California destinations. L.A. Times
Southern California
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Oil rigs hovered off the Santa Barbara coast.
Gregoire Neveu
Santa Barbara County officials on Tuesday rejected a bid by ExxonMobil to restart three 1980s-era offshore oil platforms that were shut down in 2015 after a pipeline leak caused the worst coastal spill in 25 years. ExxonMobil had requested permission to set up interim trucking routes as repairs are made to the ruptured pipeline. In a 3-2 vote, county supervisors said environmental concerns outweighed the benefits. Noozhawk | A.P.
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The story of an Orange County couple who barely escaped Ukraine with their newborn daughter generated national headlines. Many wondered what happened to Lilya, the Ukrainian surrogate who gave birth to the baby. The building she was staying in was hit by Russian fire. Come stay with us, the California couple said. But Lilya declined. Her husband is fighting the Russians, she said, and she would too if she didn’t have to stay with her daughters. L.A. Times
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Indian Wells organizers added Novak Djokovic to its tournament schedule on Tuesday, despite doubts about whether the Serbian would be allowed to play in the unofficial “fifth grand slam” in the Coachella Valley. Djokovic, ranked No. 2 in the world, chose to miss the Australian Open rather than get vaccinated against Covid-19. The U.S. requires that visitors be immunized to enter the country. The men’s first round starts Thursday. ESPN | Desert Sun
Today I learned
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Topaz Solar Farm is one of the world’s largest solar farms. Completed in 2014, it has 9 million solar panels geometrically arranged across more than 7 square miles of the Carrizo Plain in San Luis Obispo County. That’s equivalent to four and a half Golden Gate Parks. It’s so big that it creates an unmistakable burst of reflected sunlight in weather satellite video, as captured here in 2019. 👇
Gif created from video captured by the GOES-17 satellite.
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