Good morning. It’s Monday, July 20.
- Pressure builds up along the San Andreas Fault.
- Sausalito city manager is arrested in burglary case.
- And a bizarre Amtrak station outside Palm Springs.
Statewide
1.
The last major quake to strike urban Southern California was the magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake of 1994. The San Andreas Fault, stretching 800 miles across California, has been strangely quiet. But new research estimates that key sections of the Southern San Andreas are at their highest level of tectonic strain in the last 1,000 years. “The San Andreas, in other words, is locked, loaded and inevitable,” wrote the Los Angeles Times.
2.
A coalition of billionaires is preparing to spend nearly $87 million on advertising in California to fight a proposed billionaire tax on the November ballot. The coalition, Building A Better California, has gotten two of its own tax-related countermeasures onto the ballot that could invalidate the billionaire tax if approved. Sergey Brin, the 52-year-old Google co-founder, has emerged as the leader of the effort. He is worth an estimated $276 billion, or enough to spend roughly $25 million a day, every day, for the rest of his life. N.Y. Times
3.
When people lament high housing costs of California, they usually mean coastal California. In much of the state’s interior — including cities such as Lemoore, Twentynine Palms, Delano, and Tulare — median home values fall below $350,000. The Los Angeles Times ranked California’s 10 most and 10 least affordable cities by the ratio of the typical home value to the median income level. The most affordable city of all: Ridgecrest, in eastern Kern County, where the median home is $253,900.
4.
President Trump has repeatedly claimed that noncitizen voting is rampant in America, and during a prime-time speech last Thursday he cited a startling figure: 278,000 noncitizens are registered to vote, he said, the majority of them in California. A new Reuters investigation, however, found that just 73 people have been convicted in federal noncitizen voting cases since 1996. Most of those defendants were lawful permanent residents who were misinformed about whether they were allowed to vote, court records showed.
5.
For road-trippers along Highway 101, Pea Soup Andersen’s has long been a beacon of small-town charm in a sea of fast-food sameness. But after more than a century, the landmark in Buellton is now experiencing “a humiliating end,” the Los Angeles Times reported. City officials recently approved the structure’s demolition after the restaurant closed in 2024 for lack of business and vandals subsequently ripped out its copper wires and pipes.
Correction
An earlier version of this newsletter mischaracterized the Northridge earthquake of 1994. It was the last major quake to strike urban Southern California, not all of Southern California.
Northern California
6.
Sausalito’s city manager, Elaine Forbes, was booked into jail Saturday on suspicion of felony burglary. According to the sheriff’s office, deputies responding to a call about a burglary found Forbes, 53, inside someone else’s yacht manipulating the controls “as if she was attempting to steal the vessel.” She told officers she was having a “bad morning,” said Lt. Domenick Yazzolino. In a statement, Forbes’ family attributed the incident to “a mental health crisis.” Marin Independent Journal | KTVU
7.
AJ and Lyndsey Lozano didn’t give much thought to their menu board when opening their new pastry and coffee shop on San Francisco’s Haight Street in May. They used artificial intelligence to create images of the offerings; the backlash was swift. A June 30 Reddit post with the title “Yum, slop” drew attention to the display, and a wave of vitriol followed. On July 2, the couple arrived to find that someone had scrawled the word “seriously” in red across the store awning. Lyndsey Lozano was flabbergasted: “Why is this such a big deal that it influences people on such intense level?” SFGATE
8.
A father and son are facing federal kidnapping charges after they zip-tied two U.S. Forest Service employees and held them at gunpoint for 15 hours inside a trailer near Mt. Shasta. Court records showed that Joseph Henrichsen, 49, had multiple past run-ins with law enforcement, including a case in 2022 when he was accused of hate crimes against his Russian and Ukrainian landlords in Bellingham, Washington. The case was dismissed after a psychologist determined that Henrichsen was experiencing delusions and likely could not understand the proceedings against him. Sacramento Bee | Redheaded Blackbelt
- “You can bring a rifle with you as long as you’re not pointing at me.” Listen to audio of the negotiation.
Southern California
9.
The man trying to build California’s biggest data center in the arid Imperial Valley once ran a strip club in Ohio called Go Go Girls Cabaret and was charged, though not convicted, with promoting prostitution. Sebastian Rucci’s colorful past has become a central theme in the fight over the proposed 950,000-square-foot data center. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he said his history is an asset. “Do I look like a guy that’s going away?” he said.
10.
Two years after losing her husband, Bonnie Doose of Riverside was desperately lonely. She met someone on a dating site. The man, who went by Dean Ramirez, said he was an oil rig worker with $7 million in the bank. He just needed some money to pay a tax lien that would unfreeze his fortune. By the time Doose figured out that she was being scammed, she had sent him $425,000. She never met Ramirez. “I’m not stupid,” said Doose, now 76, wiping tears. Press-Enterprise
11.
One day in August 2025, Kolby Aipa, a 20-year-old surfer from a prominent surfing family, rode on an E-bike alongside his friend’s pickup truck while holding onto the open passenger window, or “car surfing.” The driver, Brandon Soleau, hit 50 mph as he merged onto Pacific Coast Highway. Aipa lost control, fell, and died three days later. He wasn’t wearing a helmet. On Friday, Orange County prosecutors charged Soleau, 21, with vehicular manslaughter. “This is a stark reminder that every action and every decision have a consequence,” said Todd Spitzer, the district attorney. KTLA | L.A. Times
12.
“The whole thing just has a very apocalyptic feel to it.”
If you ever wanted to feel like a character in an end-of-the-world movie, step off a train at the Palm Springs Amtrak Station. Located 8 miles north of downtown in the open desert, a salmon-colored structure is surrounded by mounds of sand that rise like snow drifts. There is no staff, no ticket booth, no waiting room, and no connecting transportation of any kind. In summer, it’s dangerously hot. Why does the station exist? In short, planners overestimated its appeal to vacationers and the station is so cheap to maintain that there’s been no real pressure to shut it down. A pair of travel vloggers went to take a look. 👉 YouTube (~11 mins)
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