One of the strange paradoxes of storytelling is that in order to speak to universal truths, you have to be as specific as possible. Stories and characters that try to speak to the general human experience aren’t going to hold as much resonance as a detailed account of a particular character and given circumstances.
I think that’s why I was drawn to the characters Deanna StandingCloud writes about in “Blood Quantum Physics,” a podcast play performing live at the Gremlin Theatre.
Produced by New Native Theatre and made up of seven episodes, the podcast follows the lives of several Native women living, working and dreaming in South Minneapolis. NNT is recording the live readings and will release the series as a podcast in 2025.
“If you’re from Minneapolis, you’re just going to be like, ‘Oh, my God, this is such a Minneapolis story,’” NNT artistic director Rhianna Yazzie said when introducing the series before a performance Sunday. “If you’re a Native woman in the community, you’re going to be like, ‘I can’t believe it’s so specific to the little details of what my life is like living in Minneapolis and being Native in this community.’”
A member of the Red Lake Nation of Anishinaabe, StandingCloud grew up in South Minneapolis and has worked as an educator and in cultural preservation and community building. She’s also a playwright and comedian. She began “Blood Quantum Physics” originally as a 10-minute play in 2017 and has expanded the work since then, eventually creating a 7-episode series.
StandingCloud’s deep knowledge of her community comes out in her writing. It appears in the way the characters talk about place and in the way they interact with each other, like the relationships between the younger Native characters and the elders, and the back and forth they play about passing down knowledge — sometimes to humorous effect.
In the world StandingCloud shows us, you meet someone and they tell you they knew your mother in the ‘80s. It’s a community where everybody knows everybody, and when there’s someone new in town — like a handsome Native from Canada who’s into the old ways, it’s of great interest.
StandingCloud has spent her career helping her community, and that understanding is reflected in the work.
That specificity of place and people is also indicative of the spirit of New Native Theatre, which is in its 15th season. Founded by Yazzie, NNT often develops work from artists in the Native community.
“So many community members have come to us, saying, ‘I want to write a story. I want to do this.’” Yazzie remarked on Sunday’s show. “And we’re like, let’s find a way to make that happen. And I think this podcast is a really fantastic example of that.”
There’s also a strong sense of the characters seeking deeper connection to their tribal identity. From applying to a Native language program to seeking out cultural practices like sugarbush (the Anishinaabe way of collecting sap from Maple trees), and sewing a ribbon skirt in honor of Missing and Murdered Women and Children, the women look to deepen their understanding of Native culture.
These stories are often funny, and they are heartfelt. We see the care and love the characters have for each other, and how they help each other with the day-to-day struggles they encounter.
The episodic nature of the series lends to the warm nature of the stories. We don’t see high drama, but rather the everyday struggles of people getting by. There’s romance, friendship, even adventure as the women work to improve their lives and find the small joys in life. It reminds me a bit of a television show that you watch because you like to see the characters live out their lives with humor and empathy.
Because the actors hold scripts and speak in front of microphones, they use their voices, rather than bodies, to help with characterization. Yazzie, who reads the stage directions, lends her voice at times for characters in the show, and she’s really quite a hoot. As Tina, a mother character tending to her family and friends as she strives to improve herself, Fawn Sampson emits a kindness in her portrayal.
NNT is showing the seven episodes in two different programs. The episodes are somewhat self-contained, so you can come to Part 1 or 2 and still be able to follow along. If you only make it to one of the two nights, don’t feel like “ you’re gonna miss out,” Yazzie said. “The only thing you’re gonna miss out on is more fun.”
Friday, Dec. 13 (part 2) and Saturday, Dec. 14 (part 1) at 7 p.m., Sunday, Dec. 14 (part 2) at 2 p.m., at Gremlin Theatre. ($35 or pay what you can.) More information here.
Sheila Regan
Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at [email protected].
In October, the Minnesota Star Tribune launched its Local News Fund, a charitable fund under the umbrella of the Minneapolis Foundation. The endeavor puts the newspaper into a new niche of nonprofit media, joining the ranks of MinnPost, Sahan Journal, Minnesota Public Radio, and the Minnesota Reformer, to name a few.
The Strib’s quirk is it is not transitioning to a nonprofit; it’s just created a vehicle for tax deductibility, something funders and high-net-worth individuals expect. Why does the newspaper need donations? Well, like all legacy media, the Strib struggles with an atrophying revenue model rooted in the loss of traditional advertising and circulation sources. Publisher Steve Grove is innovating like a madman to evolve, but industry trends make it challenging. Going hat in hand holds promise, he believes.
“Over the next three to four years, 25% of our balance sheet needs to look different,” Grove says. He is not trying to tread water but actually grow the business (it’s already one of the largest newspapers nationally, with a newsroom of about 220, down slightly from Grove’s 2023 arrival). But by implication, Grove is clearly concerned about the stability of up to a quarter of his revenue. He would not share revenue data, but he did tell The New York Times that the newspaper had been losing 15% of its print subscribers annually, and he was working to make up the attrition with (lower margin) digital subscribers.
“[Philanthropy is] an imperative if you want to have a newsroom our size,” Grove says. He set a goal of raising half a million dollars in Q4, which owner Glen Taylor’s foundation will match. Grove says he and members of the paper’s board and leadership are already meeting with high-net-worth individuals and foundations.
Just before Thanksgiving the Strib posted a position for a VP of philanthropy to lead its development efforts. The business hired a head of philanthropic partnerships in April. Nonprofit fundraising is a notably labor-intensive endeavor.
The Strib is not the first newspaper to do this. Its initiative is modeled after one at the Seattle Times, which endows 27 journalists, Grove says.
The effort was not as badly received as you might expect at the area’s other nonprofit media, which range from the Minnesota Reformer, which raised over $90,000 locally last year, to MPR, which raised $83.5 million, according to its most recent tax filing.
MinnPost executive director Tanner Curl says he hoped the Strib’s entry into philanthropic fundraising would draw more interest to the sector, noting, “We have quite a bit of work to do to have journalism thought of as a critical community asset. We need to tell the story of the scale of the problem the profession is facing.” He says the Strib’s short-term goal, $2 million on an annualized basis, is a significant chunk of what’s being raised locally by smaller nonprofit media ($6.5 million roughly).
“It’s so important the Strib remain strong and robust,” adds Reformer editor-in-chief Patrick Coolican, “but I don’t see why they need to be competing for limited philanthropic dollars,” noting the paper is owned by a billionaire and seems quite robustly staffed. (Taylor has said publicly he expects the Strib to break even, indicating he may be unwilling to fund losses.)
Press Forward MN, a local branch of a national effort to philanthropically endow journalism, is currently sifting through grant applications and hoping to distribute up to $10 million under the auspices of the McKnight Foundation and the Minnesota Council on Foundations (MCF). Senior MCF manager May Yang says they will prioritize media outlets that serve underserved communities, but “we’re supportive of various business models and experimentation” like the Strib’s.
“If they can pull this off, it will be good for the community,” notes Mukhtar Ibrahim, founder of Sahan Journal and a consultant to Press Forward. “I want us to get beyond the scarcity mindset.” Sahan executive director Vanan Murugesan adds, “It’s important we normalize funding journalism as part of sustaining democracy,” and the Strib’s efforts do that.
What will be atypical is that, since it’s a for-profit business, donors won’t have the kind of transparency into the newspaper’s finances that they would even have at nonprofit behemoth MPR. Grove will soon find out if that matters to funders, but it’s working in Seattle.
Ultimately, MinnPost’s Curl believes the major challenge for the entire ecosystem is training funders to view media differently. “Our case is: Whatever your mission, your second priority should be media,” he says, “because we will be covering those issues and making the public aware of the primary need that you serve.”
The following is the first installment of “Reimagining Rural Cartographies,” a new Barn Raiser series exploring innovative and nontraditional forms of mapping. It is guest-edited by Lydia Moran and funded by Arts Midwest’s Creative Media Cohort program.
At the southeastern edge of the Twin Cities, the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers converge at a place known in the Dakota language as Bdote, “where two waters come together.” Millions of Minnesotans drive by this confluence on their way to the airport or as they cross the Mendota Bridge. Others hike or cross-country ski in Fort Snelling State Park, where it is located. But few non-Native Minnesotans know that the Bdote has been central to Dakota culture and spirituality for thousands of years—or why, lying in the shadow of Historic Fort Snelling, it is sometimes called the place of both genesis and genocide of the Dakota people.
In 2011, Dakota artist Mona Smith set out to change that with the Bdote Memory Map, which includes a spoken glossary of Dakota terms, resources for educators and videos of Dakota people sharing their knowledge of the Bdote.
Many Dakota people consider the Bdote their place of origin. For centuries, women traveled to give birth at the confluence on an island called Wita Tanka (Great Island). In English, Wita Tanka has been named Pike Island after Zebulon Pike, who negotiated the 1805 Treaty and signed it here. That treaty ceded 100,000 acres of Dakota land, including the Bdote, where the U.S. government built Fort Snelling. It was signed by only two of the seven Dakota leaders present.
In November 1862, in the wake of the U.S.-Dakota War, over 1,600 elders, women and children were forcibly removed by the U.S. Army from their homeland, marched 150 miles northeast and imprisoned in a concentration camp at the Bdote. Hundreds died over the winter. Their families buried them inside the teepees where they were held, the only unfrozen ground. That spring, the U.S. government boarded the survivors into steamships and sent them into exile at the Crow Creek reservation in present-day South Dakota.
In 2011, I was developing K-12 curriculum in the Office of Equity in St. Paul Public Schools. I was asked to create a field trip based on the Bdote Memory Map. In collaboration with local Dakota educators and the Minnesota Humanities Center, I developed the Bdote Learning Experience, which is now a required unit in St. Paul’s fifth-grade social studies curriculum. Teachers learn directly from Dakota educators by taking the Bdote field trip, then lead their students on Bdote trips. Since 2011, over 20,000 St. Paul students have been taught to understand Minnesota history from a Dakota perspective. The Minnesota Humanities Center began offering Learning From Place: Bdote, its own public version of the Bdote field trip in 2013. Since then, over 2,700 people have taken one of these trips.
What follows is a conversation with three trip leaders, each of whom brings their personal connection with Dakota history and culture to the trips.
Ramona Kitto Stately is Dakota, from the Santee Dakota nation, who have lived in exile since 1863. Ramona is one of the project’s original collaborators and has led over a hundred Bdote trips. Her great-great-grandmother, Pazahiyayewin, gave birth at the Bdote in 1860. Two years later she was imprisoned there in the concentration camp before being exiled. From 2002 to 2016, Ramona helped organize the biennial Dakota Commemorative March, a 150-mile, six-day walk that retraced the forced march of 1862 in order to bring healing to Dakota communities.
Tanaǧidaŋ Winyan (Tara Perron) is a Lower Sioux Dakota and White Earth Ojibwe artist and educator. She comes from a lineage of women whose understanding of Minnesota was built foraging plant medicines. Her great-great-grandmother was the medicine woman for Dakota Chief Little Crow’s band, and ran the first ferry service across the Mississippi River at St. Anthony Falls.
Marlena Myles is an enrolled member of the Spirit Lake Dakota tribe in North Dakota. A self-taught artist, she often combines elements of traditional mapmaking with current technology. Her augmented reality installations throughout the Twin Cities metro area reveal the significance of different locations in Dakota history and culture. Her Dakota Land Maps remap portions of Minnesota with traditional Dakota place names.
From left to right: Ramona Kitto Stately, Tanaǧidaŋ Winyan and Marlena Myles. Credit: Courtesy of Barn Raiser
Mapping involves stepping back and looking at place from different perspectives. How does that bigger lens contribute to your own understanding of place?
Ramona Kitto Stately: When we use traditional knowledge, we understand that the land is a relative, not a resource. We’re not limited to five senses, and we use the idea of communicating through energy. The land tells us a story, both visually and through this energy of communication. By standing on the land, we can learn its history and stories through what our relatives tell us.
The Dakota have been in Minnesota for thousands of years, and our observations reveal a different way of knowing place than white narratives written by white men who had no connection to place. In Minnesota, the invisibility of the Dakota began with the removal of the people, and with them the oral histories, the language and the connections to place, through systematic land theft and genocide. One way to erase history is by removing Indigenous people and creating a new story, a new history of place.
Tanaǧidaŋ Winyan: My family has land where we forage in Ely, Minnesota. We talk about where to [forage] based on how things looks and the plants we know. It’s like, “When you go past the wild blueberries, you take a right.” That’s how we remember things. Thankfully the wild blueberries are still at the same spot. But, over hundreds of years, plant locations change. When I talk to my great aunties about foraging along the same path my grandmother foraged, it’s hard for them to explain where to go. The medicines aren’t here anymore, or they’re not in the same place, so we have to go by heart memory.
I am invested in our plant nation and uplifting the voice of the plant medicines. I’m fighting for the right to harvest on our traditional homelands, which is now illegal under Minnesota law. Uplifting traditional medicines and teaching the ways to the young ones are important to me. What does that look like for us as Dakota, and for Native people in general, to be able to forage and harvest on our own lands?
Marlena Myles: The work I create teaches people about the Dakota’s significance to the land. I’ve created a series of Dakota land maps that include the historic and present-day names of places. I also use modern technology, such as augmented reality, to show how our stories and understandings of the world are embedded within the land itself. We didn’t have a written language prior to the arrival of Europeans, so geography stores our history and our knowledge, and all the different ways that we see ourselves as Dakota people. Modern technology can help people see the world through Dakota eyes.
I grew up in South Minneapolis in a place called Little Earth. I didn’t see many places around that showed it was Dakota homeland. When I created these maps, I felt like it was important to include modern places in Dakota, because anything can be seen from a Dakota perspective. Every now and then someone will make a comment like, “I didn’t know they had light rail back in the day.” They only see Native people as being “back in the day.” I’m like, “Yeah, we still live today, so why should we talk about ourselves as only in the past?” It’s important to merge the past and present, because for Dakota people, the past and present and the future are always with us.
What are some of the complexities of the concept of mapping?
RKS: When we place a map on top of somewhere, it doesn’t challenge us to dig deeper or understand place. A map causes us to think in one or two dimensions, rather than include more holistic ways of knowing, like our star knowledge and connection to our burial mounds. What does the name Indian Mounds Park tell us? Dakota people know that something powerful, something very sacred, lives in this place. Non-Native people who make the maps don’t understand that third dimension.
MM: As Dakota people we see all things as interconnected. A lot of the places on earth have names that relate to the plants that grow there to [indicate] areas where people would harvest. Some of the plant knowledge that Tara’s ancestors taught her helps guide us through the seasons, what we should be harvesting, what ceremonies to have and when to tell stories.
Our creation story on Earth at Bdote, where the Mississippi River meets the Minnesota River, that’s also connected and told to us by the stars. We believe what’s above is reflected below, a system of thought called kapemni. The Mississippi and Minnesota rivers are reflected above as a spirit road, which is the Milky Way. That’s the road we travel when we come into this world, and it’s the road we leave to return to our ancestors. We have the Big Dipper, which we call the Oceti Ŝakowiŋ constellation. The Oceti Ŝakowiŋ is also the name for Dakota/Lakota people—the seven bands. The stars will always remind us how to be good relatives, how to take care of the next generations and how to honor our ancestors.
How is mapping related to renaming?
RKS: One of the things that a [non-Native] map does is erase Indigenous people’s history. So, when we look at our sacred sites, our place of creation—which we call Bdote—on a map it’s called Fort Snelling. That makes it more difficult for us, as people who have been exiled for 160 years, to go back and say, “What do each of these places mean?” Bdote reminds us in our DNA, our soul memory, that this is a place of power. It reminds us of our traditional lifeways, our ways of knowing. Right next to Bdote we have the island Wita Tanka, known as Pike Island. That name erases the fact that this is a birthing island, a place of such power that we brought life into this world at that place. The plants and other relatives remind us of [that place’s power], because of the medicines that grow there.
TW: When I think about mapping, I think about how our Dakota language brings life to the space that we’re talking about. When you rename something after a white man, it’s like a statement of ownership. To me it feels prideful and egotistical. All renaming was very purposeful and methodical, and it did exactly what it was intended to do. It erased the memories of the life that was there prior.
MM: Joseph Nicollet traveled through Minnesota in the 1830s and created maps of this whole area. He was friends with Dakota and Ojibwe people, as well as my great-grandfather, Chief Waanatan. Nicollet’s map is the only map created by a European that includes Native names. He understood that it was important to document the ways we talk to the land and how we talk about the land. He felt honored to give my ancestors a copy of the map when he completed it because he felt like it belonged with Dakota people. Maps of Minnesota created after that time period were all based on his map. A lot of the mapping I do comes from Nicollet’s map that he created with Dakota people.
People might think renaming Lake Calhoun to Bde Maka Ska, which the Minneapolis Park Board voted unanimously to do in 2017, is a modern way of thinking. But even in the 1850s there was a push to keep Dakota names for places. Some people wanted to rename the Minnesota River the St. Peter River, and some old maps show that. Naming things after the first white person to see it erases Native history. We might think that the times we live in are very special to us, but it’s important for people to realize that renaming or keeping the Indigenous names is not a modern phenomenon. That’s the reason why the Minnesota River still has its original name.
Does mapping ever benefit Native people?
MM: Not all mapmaking has been bad for Native people. We have the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Land Trust because the reservations were plotted out, and we know who owns which land. To this day, my mom gets papers every month that show all our ancestors who originally owned the land, and which of their descendants are still related to us through that land.
TW: I also see that side of it. On my Ojibwe side, after my dad’s passing, we were given names of Ojibwe ancestors that we’d never seen in writing because the government bought one of my great-grandmother’s family lands. We were given a narrative, a story about our history, because the government kept maps.
MM: Maps can erase Native people, and they’re used as a system of colonialism. But there’s also complexity embedded within those systems that still have a Dakota perspective, [such as the perspective on] creating friendships. That’s how the first maps that Nicollet made were created. And creating kinship—that’s why the land still connects families on reservations to this day.
How are Dakota history and culture being shared throughout generations?
RKS: Oppressed people have a healing journey, and part of that is being able to tell our own story, to learn our language and not be punished [like we were] within boarding schools.
We have generations of healing that I see happening. I see my father, who doesn’t speak Dakota, even though he was born and raised in Santee by parents who spoke fluent Dakota and who made sure that he didn’t go to boarding school. He was also raised by a Dakota-speaking grandfather who was born in 1859 at Wita Tanka, and he was always proud of his Dakota ancestry and history. He was also a rule follower, because that was the way to stay in line—you don’t want to rock the boat. He comes from this generation of rule following, even though he wanted the truth to come out. In his lifetime, he made sure that our family knew our history, which was beneficial to the next generation [because we were able] to do things like the Dakota Commemorative March.
In 1972 we had the passage of Indian Education and, in 2023, the Minnesota Indigenous Education for All Act. We have the right to learn our history in the public school system and now we’ve got the right to ensure that every person living in Minnesota learns this history. That’s huge, you know?
Through the generations, you see a little more freedom. Marlena uses technology to tell this story in a new way. Tara tells this traditional story about medicine in a way that’s so visual and energetic that it touches your heart and your soul, and you don’t forget it. I love to listen to the younger generations because they dream bigger. There’s less constraints and more freedom and ability to exercise that power as Dakota people, or as Indigenous people, to tell our stories.
TW: My grandmother, Haza Inyankewin—whose English name was Betsy St. Clair—was born in the fall of 1802. [Tanaǧidaŋ uses the term grandmother for all great-grandmothers in her lineage.] I hear stories about her canoe ferry service, about how she might have hidden her canoe near a big rock, so she knew where it was if she put it underwater or if she put a whole bunch of plants over it. When my aunties carried seeds in their skirts during the forced march of 1862, that was another way of mapping, right?
I love teaching young kids that a map can be kept in your heart through storytelling. [I say,] “Here’s the United States, and it’s a whole bunch of divisions. If you look at it on a map, it kind of looks like dead space, like a whole bunch of lines. But when you draw Turtle Island as a turtle, each piece means a lot. It’s a whole turtle. It shows that there’s life.”
For my own kids, who are now teenagers, when I tell them stories about my dad, who is no longer here, it’s one thing to tell it in my home. It’s another thing to take them down to the ring of cottonwood trees where he prayed to his mom when she left. Now I go there to pray to my dad, and they can go there to pray for me. The cottonwoods have been here and will be here.
MM: The Dakota land maps I’ve created are in lots of different schools. At Art-A-Whirl [a local art festival] this year, a little boy who was not Native came up to the table and got super excited when he saw the map. He was like, “This is in my geography class!” He was pointing out every Dakota place that he really liked and was speaking the names in such an excited way. Sharing this knowledge with the younger generations ensures that the Dakota language will be spoken in the next generations, that these places will have their significance renewed. Seeing this non-Native little boy, his excitement, showed me things will be different in the future. Changing your mindset about maps or Native people changes your mindset about living as a human being on this interconnected planet. Scientists are wondering if the Earth itself is a living organism. Native people have always had that way of thinking, but scientists are acting like they’re having this big breakthrough. They’re learning from Indigenous people. I think it’s a way that people are starting to decolonize themselves and heal from colonial narratives, by changing the way they treat Native people and acknowledging Native history. That’s the first step in opening your mindset to being more interconnected as a human being.
Additional Resources
Sherry Kempf is a writer and educator. Her work has appeared in Minnesota Poetry Calendar, ArtWord Quarterly, The Font, Minnesota Parent and River Teeth. She lives in Minneapolis with her family, and is currently seeking representation for her novel, June in Alaska.
It was one of the first virtual gatherings of Minnesota legislative leaders ahead of a session that will require a level of bipartisanship not seen for at least four years. One body is tied. One body has a single-vote DFL majority. A must-pass budget comes amidst a tight surplus followed by a deficit. The governor’s presence on a national presidential ticket likely exacerbated the state’s partisan divide.
So how did it go during a Tuesday panel discussion sponsored by lobbying firm Frederickson?
Not so well, as bipartisanship was mostly absent during a 60-minute rehash of the partisanship that led to a chaotic end of the 2024 legislative session and continued during the fall election.
The state House will likely be tied 67-67, but DFL speaker-designate Melissa Hortman scolded her GOP counterpart for challenging two elections that Democrats won.
The state Senate will retain a one-vote DFL majority, but Senate GOP assistant minority leader Jordan Rasmussen noted that one majority member remains charged with a felony and shouldn’t be a member.
Hortman accused Rasmussen of spreading “a thick layer of hypocrisy” by pointing out the charges against Sen. Nicole Mitchell, who is charged but not yet tried or convicted, while not seeming to care that Republican President-elect Donald Trump is a convicted felon.
House GOP-speaker-designate Lisa Demuth said a bipartisan budget is possible if tax hikes are taken off the table and the House takes a look at the 38% increase in spending in 2023 by DFL budget writers.
Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy lectured Demuth after the Cold Spring Republican said the House will be where the action is because anything that passes the Legislature must first get a bipartisan vote in the House.
And so it went. During questioning from Humphrey School of Public Affairs Dean Nisha Botchwey, Murphy of St. Paul got the closest to a come-together moment when she said she was grateful for the interim between sessions.
“It gives you time to heal up and let go of the fights of the prior session,” Murphy said. But she said it in response to a question about a bonding bill, something that failed in 2024 when Republicans and Democrats couldn’t agree on issues that had little to do with selling bonds to pay for construction projects.
The 2025 session convenes Jan. 14. By then, Hortman and Demuth should have completed their so-called power-sharing agreement to manage a tied House. But they have already indicated with the appointment of co-chairs for all committees and the use of the titles of co-speaker that it will look differently from 1979 when one party got the speaker job and the other was given control over top committees.
Still, nothing passes — no bill, no agenda, no challenge of a parliamentary ruling — without at least one vote from the other party. Even if Demuth’s legal challenges to the elections of Rep. Brad Tabke over missing ballots and Rep.-elect Curtis Johnson over his residency are successful, she would still lack a parliamentary majority to pass bills.
Hortman seemed to allude to those election challenges when she answered a question about power sharing.
“I think every single member of the Legislature has a choice, whether they want to be petty and small and personal and partisan or whether they want to focus on the work the people of Minnesota sent us here to do,” the Brooklyn Park representative said. By sending a divided Legislature to St. Paul, voters said they want “a little from column A and a little from column B.
“And if we respect the voters and respect that they have asked for divided government … then we will look for ways to find win-wins instead of partisanship,” she said.
Yet when given an opportunity to identify areas where that compromise can occur, both Hortman and Demuth struggled. Hortman said the budget, something that must pass unless lawmakers want state government to close for business July 1. The next budget will spend less than the current spending plan because up to $5 billion of the current budget is being spent on one-time costs such as rebates, hero checks for pandemic workers and some cash construction spending.
But even at that she warned that it could break apart if Republicans raise what Hortman termed “socially divisive issues” and try to “hold issues hostage for a party’s ultra-partisan social issues.” And she suggested Democrats would resist any failure to include inflationary increases in agency budgets and public education spending.
She mentioned mental health services and continuing the state’s work that has led to a reduction in drug overdose deaths as issues of mutual interest.
Demuth said she was confident that a budget deal would be reached but then called for examining the increases adopted by the DFL majorities in 2023 and 2024.
“No family budget went up by 38%,” Demuth said. “We need to look back at what was done last, at the increases that were made.” While the panel was being held, House GOP co-chairs sent letters to agency heads asking for information on new public jobs, jobs that were funded but never filled and unused office space due to work-from-home policies.
“I’d hope Democrats would take tax increases off the table,” Demuth said.
Hortman avoided direct confrontation with Demuth when she aimed most of her harshest rhetoric at Senate Republicans and Rasmussen, the deputy leader for what is now the only minority caucus in the Legislature. It was Hortman, a House member, who criticized the senator for saying that Mitchell should not be in the Senate and it was Hortman who complained that Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson linked the capital construction budget to the Equal Rights Amendment.
“It’s a bit rich to be lectured by a Republican about people’s criminal backgrounds when we have a felon in the White House, who is a serial sexual assaulter and a racist,” Hortman said. (Murphy repeated her position from last session, that Mitchell should be able to serve until her case is ruled on by a court).
For his part, Rasmussen raised the issue of the final day of the 2024 session when DFLers put all remaining work into a single bill and passed it in just hours over the loud objections of Republicans. DFL leaders blamed Republican filibustering, but the Senate was mostly out of commission on the penultimate day when Sen. Omar Fateh essentially boycotted the floor to put pressure on his fellow DFLers for passage of his ride-share legislation.
“That type of approach, that tenor, that partisanship is not going to lead to a productive session,” the Fergus Falls Republican said.
Murphy, meanwhile, had to remind those watching the panel that there are two houses of the Legislature and that Democrats still control the Senate.
“I believe we will return to a framework that is familiar in Minnesota where the House and the Senate operate somewhat separately from one another,” the St. Paul DFLer said, a reference to the way the two chambers worked during the trifecta when one party controlled all three levers of power.
She pushed back at Demuth’s assertion that because bipartisan agreement is needed to pass items like a two-year budget in the 67-67 House, those deals need to be adopted by the Senate and signed by Gov. Tim Walz.
“It’s important to remember that in a tied House of Representatives we need to know the bills that are passed off the House floor and sent over to the Senate basically are the final decision,” Demuth said.
After saying that her no-compromise positions are that nothing passes that weakens elections or “strips people of their basic human rights,” Murphy noted that the Senate is not in a tie, that the DFL won a majority.
“We’re gonna work with the House. We’re gonna work with the governor,” Murphy said. “But I think it is false to assume that what the House passes is going to become law because the Senate has a perspective and so does the governor. And those things have not been nullified by the election.”
Former state Sen. Steven Bradford steps out into the bright and blazing Westlake sun. Wearing a dark gray suit and armed with a roll of tape, he affixes a poster to the side of a streetlight. It reads: Jahnay Bryan, 23, missing from Los Angeles since Oct. 16.
The longtime politician shakes his head. Two months is far too long for a young Black woman to be missing without any word of progress on solving her case, he says.
“When Black young women and children disappear, resources are not committed to find them,” he asserted to The Times. “We need to ask ourselves, why is that?
Steven Bradford, former California state senator, joins an effort Tuesday to canvass the neighborhood where Jahnay Bryan was last seen.
(William Liang / For The Times)
Black youth make up about 40% of all cases of missing people in America but just 15% of the country’s overall youth population. That disparity prompted Bradford to author legislation in 2023 to create the Ebony Alert system to help law enforcement find missing Black youths ages 12 to 25.
An Ebony Alert was issued for Bryan on Nov. 19, noting that she was last seen near the 2000 block of West 8th Street.
Several weeks later, there is no update available on her case, according to an LAPD spokesperson.
Fed up with the lack of progress, Bryan’s family members and Bradford joined forces with volunteers from the Black and Missing Foundation to hold a community search event in hopes of gleaning a clue that might lead to her whereabouts.
On Tuesday, the group of volunteers canvassed the neighborhood where Bryan was last seen, taping up posters, handing out fliers and talking to shopkeepers and passersby.
Jahque Bryan-Gooden, left, speaks to Karinda McKenzie, right, and Tyra Jones about the search for her sister as loved ones and others canvass a Los Angeles neighborhood.
(William Liang / For The Times)
“It feels incredibly eerie to be standing in a place where someone last reported seeing my sister,” said Jahque Bryan-Gooden at the start of the search. “I’m glad to be surrounded by community and no longer feel alone trying to find answers.”
Bryan graduated from Cornell University in 2023 before moving back home with her mother in eastern Pennsylvania. There, her sister said, Bryan gradually cut off all communication with friends and family.
This fall, Bryan moved to Los Angeles, where she last communicated with her ex-boyfriend in October via email. Bryan-Gooden remains hopeful she will find her sister. Although they hadn’t spoken for about a year before her disappearance, she says she misses her deeply.
“She is unwavering in her values,” Bryan-Gooden said. “She approaches any situation that’s challenging with confidence and determination.”
Bryan-Gooden reported her sister missing on Nov. 13, and an Ebony Alert was issued on Nov. 19.
Malik Royster holds a poster of the missing woman during the Tuesday event.
(William Liang / For The Times)
Bradford said law enforcement is capable of issuing an alert for a missing person instantaneously,” but added that “it seems like there’s always a delay when it comes to people of color, and specifically African Americans.” The LAPD declined to comment on why it took six days to issue Bryan’s alert.
Bradford also pointed to the stark contrast in how law enforcement and the media responded to the case of Hannah Koyabashi — who was also reported missing in Los Angeles in November — and that of Bryan.
Kobayashi’s disappearance received international media coverage. Last week, LAPD Police Chief Jim McDonnell held a news conference and announced that a police department discovered she had voluntarily crossed the border to Mexico.
Kobayashi “disappeared almost in the exact same time frame,” he said. “How does one race rise to the level of national attention and Miss Bryan’s case barely gets a whimper?”
Bryan’s case has been written about by KTLA, NBC and The Times. A Google search shows more than 100 news articles have been published about Kobayashi since she was reported missing on Nov. 11.
Natalie Wilson, co-founder of the Black and Missing Foundation, said that media attention can play a key role in helping solve missing persons cases.
“Many times, a reporter will reach out to law enforcement to get an update on the case, and then you start seeing traction, you start seeing them reaching out to the family, conducting interviews and searches,” she said. “That’s why media coverage is so important.”
Grace Lee becomes emotional while putting up a flier. The participant in Tuesday’s event said her own sister went missing two years ago.
(William Liang / For The Times)
Increasing attention to missing persons cases was a key reason Bradford pushed for the establishment of the Ebony Alert system.
Since it was enacted in California in January, 32 alerts have been issued and 27 young Black people found, Bradford said. States including Massachusetts and Tennessee are now looking into enacting their own version of the system.
Still, there are many instances in which a young Black person is eligible for an Ebony Alert and one is never issued, he said. Often, missing Black youths are victims of sex trafficking and are classified as juvenile prostitutes, he said.
“Instead of listing them as abducted, they are listed as runaways,” he said.
Bryan-Gooden said she was worried her sister might have been a victim of sex trafficking. Several weeks ago, someone called the phone number on Bryan’s missing persons poster and said they had seen her in Los Angeles living with someone whom they believed to be a pimp.
“When I heard that, my heart dropped,” she said.
Bryan-Gooden is, however, feeling a renewed sense of hope following the community search on Tuesday. She said two shopkeepers reported recently seeing someone who matched Bryan’s description.
A passerby stops to comfort Jahque Bryan-Goodman.
(William Liang / For The Times)
Anyone with information on Bryan’s whereabouts is asked to contact Det. Avalos in the LAPD Missing Persons Unit at (213) 996-1800 or leave an anonymous tip at (800) 222-8477. The Black and Missing Foundation also has an anonymous tip line on its website.
Luigi Mangione, the man suspected of killing the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, underwent surgery and was reported missing in San Francisco before the shooting.
Brian Thompson, 50, CEO of the healthcare insurance giant, was gunned down last week in Midtown Manhattan, spawning a five-day manhunt that eventually led to Mangione’s arrest at a McDonald’s restaurant in Altoona, Pa.
Questions about Mangione’s alleged motives and background have swirled in the media since his arrest Monday. As prosecutors worked to bring him to New York to face charges, new details emerged about his life and his capture.
The 26-year-old Ivy League graduate from a prominent Maryland real estate family was charged with murder hours after his arrest. In New York, he also faces two counts of carrying a loaded firearm, one count of possessing a forged instrument and one count of criminal possession of a weapon.
In Pennsylvania, Mangione was initially charged with possession of an unlicensed firearm, forgery and providing false identification to police.
Before his court appearance in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, Mangione struggled with deputies. Emerging from a patrol car, he spun toward reporters and shouted, “This is clearly unjust and an insult to the intelligence of the American people!” He was forced inside by members of the Blair County Sheriff’s Department.
At the court appearance, Mangione’s attorney contested his client’s extradition to New York. The judge ruled that he had 14 days to file a writ of habeas corpus to determine whether the state’s detention was valid; if approved, a new hearing would be scheduled. Pennsylvania has 30 days to get a warrant from New York for Mangione’s extradition.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office said it’s seeking a warrant from the governor to try to force the extradition.
Mangione’s attorney said his client planned to plead not guilty to the Pennsylvania charges and not guilty to the murder charge in New York.
The slaying might have been motivated by Mangione’s anger with what he called “parasitic” health insurance companies and his disdain for corporate greed, law enforcement said in a bulletin obtained by the Associated Press.
Mangione wrote that the U.S. has the most expensive healthcare system in the world but is 42nd in life expectancy, according to the bulletin based on a review of Mangione’s handwritten notes and social media posts. Mangione wrote that UnitedHealthcare had “simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit.”
R.J. Martin, the owner of Surfbreak, a co-living community near Honolulu’s Ala Moana Beach Park in Hawaii, told the Honolulu Civil Beat that Mangione suffered from a misaligned vertebra that would pinch his spinal cord. Mangione underwent surgery and even texted Martin pictures of it.
Mangione lived at Surfbreak from January to June of 2022.
Martin said that, as a joke, he suggested the group’s book club read the manifesto of Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, according to the publication. Mangione’s review of the book on his since-privated Goodreads account has been widely circulated on social media and reflects Mangione’s sympathy for Kaczynski.
“It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies,” Mangione wrote. “But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.”
Mangione stayed in touch with members of Surfbreak after he left, but he stopped responding over the summer, according to Martin.
“He went radio silent in June or July,” he said.
Those who knew Mangione also sounded the alarm over his apparent silence in the weeks leading up to the shooting.
“Hey, are you ok? Nobody has heard from you in months, and apparently your family is looking for you,” one user wrote on X on Oct. 30, tagging Mangione’s account. The user’s account was private as of Tuesday.
Mangione’s mother filed a missing person report for her son in November in San Francisco, the Associated Press confirmed using two law enforcement sources. The San Francisco Police Department didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Posts from a since-deleted Reddit account, with details matching Mangione’s university, health condition, age and college major, indicate that the Reddit user suffered from spondylolisthesis — a condition in which a vertebra in the spine, usually in the lower back, slips out of place. The Reddit user wrote that his condition got worse after a surfing accident.
“My back and hips locked up after the accident,” the Reddit user wrote in July 2023. “I’m terrified of the implications.”
The Reddit user said he underwent spinal surgery weeks later, which appeared to have improved his symptoms. Mangione also posted an image of spinal fusion surgery as the banner for his X account.
Mangione’s Goodreads list included at least five books on grappling with chronic back pain, including “Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery.”
Mangione was the class valedictorian in 2016 at Gilman School, a private all-boys school in Baltimore, according to the Baltimore Sun. He is the grandson of Nicholas Mangione, a real estate developer who owned nursing homes, country clubs and a radio station in the area. Mangione graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania. And he is the cousin of Republican delegate Nino Mangione in Maryland.
Mangione’s family said they couldn’t comment on the news and “only know what we have read in the media.”
“Our family is shocked and devastated by Luigi’s arrest,” the statement said. “We offer our prayers to the family of Brian Thompson and we ask people to pray for all involved.”
According to public records, Mangione spent time at Stanford University in 2019 and once worked for the Santa Monica company TrueCar, a digital marketplace for automobiles.
A spokesperson for Stanford confirmed that a person named Luigi Mangione was employed as a head counselor under the Stanford Pre-Collegiate Studies program between May and September 2019, and a TrueCar spokesperson confirmed Mangione worked for the company and left sometime in 2023.
A former co-worker at Stanford Pre-Collegiate Studies said Mangione seemed like a “really nice, goofy guy” during their time there. They asked to not be identified, as they had not spoken with him for several years.
The slaying of Thompson, who led the United States’ largest medical insurance company, has sparked a larger conversation about the shortcomings of the health insurance industry, as outcry and vitriol following his killing were aimed at UnitedHealthcare for having denied people treatment in their time of need.
Officials found bullet casings at the scene of the slaying that had the words “depose,” “deny” and “defend” engraved on them — similar to the phrase commonly used by critics of the insurance industry to describe how payments are delayed, claims are denied and insurers defend their actions.
UnitedHealthcare has faced backlash for using artificial intelligence to review claims and issue denials. The company faced a lawsuit last year brought by two families who said their now-deceased relatives were denied care by the insurer that was deemed necessary by their doctors.
Times staff writer Nathan Solis and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Federal wildlife officials on Tuesday moved to add the monarch butterfly to its endangered species roster, citing decades of steep population decline of the striking black-and-orange insect.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the once-common monarch as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, and designating coastal California sites where the butterflies spend winters as critical habitat.
“Despite its fragility, it is remarkably resilient, like many things in nature when we just give them a chance,” Fish and Wildlife Service Director Martha Williams said in a statement. “Science shows that the monarch needs that chance.”
The action came a decade after advocacy groups petitioned the federal agency to protect the dazzling pollinators and kicks off a 90-day public comment period starting Dec. 12. The deadline for a determination is a year from that date.
Given the wide distribution of the species, it would affect all 48 contiguous states, officials said — making it one of the broadest species listing ever considered.
In North America, there are two long-distance migratory monarch populations: Western monarchs that primarily overwinter between the Bay Area and San Diego along California’s coastline, and the much larger Eastern population that spends the chilly season in the Transvolcanic Mountains. of central Mexico.
Since the 1980’s, Western monarchs have plummeted by more than 95%, putting them above a 99% chance of extinction by 2080, according to the agency’s most recent species status assessment. Eastern monarchs have declined by roughly 80%, with a probability of extinction from 56% to 74% by 2080.
To put the crash into perspective, more than 4.5 million Western monarchs flocked to overwintering grounds in the Golden State less than five decades ago. Last year, roughly 233,000 were logged at winter respites.
Threats to the monarchs include the loss and degradation of habitat used for breeding, migration and overwintering, including milkweed plants they rely on as a place to lay their eggs.
Other perils include exposure to insecticides and the effects of climate change, including increasing temperatures and drought, which affect resources they need to make their marathon migration.
“The synergistic effects of all that are what’s leading to the decline,” said Cat Darst, a Ventura-based wildlife biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service.
If the butterflies are listed, they’ll earn protection across their expansive range from what’s known as take, which includes harm, harassment, possession, transport and collection. Entities seeking to undertake activity that could affect the monarchs would be required to work with federal wildlife officials to ensure they’re not harmed.
Federal wildlife officials also have proposed what’s known as a 4(d) rule, which would allow exceptions from prohibitions, including allowing activities that boost or protect monarch habitat — such as planting milkweed — and the rearing and release of small numbers of butterflies.
“What’s really cool … is that given the monarch butterflies’ general habitat use and wide distribution — I mean, they’re everywhere, right? — this means that everybody has an opportunity to participate in the broad range of conservation efforts that are needed throughout the range,” Darst said.
Officials are also floating the designation of 4,395 acres of land as critical habitat across Alameda, Marin, Monterey, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz and Ventura counties in California. Overwintering sites in those areas are considered essential to the conservation of the species.
“It’s good news because [the species] will get ongoing funding and a recovery plan,” Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said of the proposed listing.
“In California, in particular, monarchs’ overwintering trees are still felled,” Curry said, adding that just last month the Bureau of Land Management chopped down some trees that were known to host the butterflies in the winter.
“Now their overwintering trees are slated to be protected,” she said.
Federal agencies are prohibited from destroying or negatively changing critical habitat. And they must consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service about actions that they carry out, fund or authorize to ensure that they will not cause such harm.
Activities by private and state landowners aren’t impacted by the designation unless they require federal funding or permits.
In 2014, the Center for Biological Diversity, along with the Center for Food Safety, Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation and a noted monarch biologist petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the beloved invertebrates and their vulnerable habitat.
Six years later, the monarchs landed on the waiting list for federal protections under the Endangered Species Act.
This week marked a court-ordered deadline to make a determination as to whether the butterflies warranted listing.
A new lawsuit alleges that courts across California routinely deny people due process by failing to maintain transcripts of many types of proceedings.
The suit, filed last week by two San Francisco Bay Area legal advocacy groups against the superior courts of Contra Costa, Los Angeles, San Diego and Santa Clara counties, alleges that more than a million litigants are affected statewide each year by a shortage of certified court reporters.
Court reporters are trusted to keep verbatim accounts of sworn testimony and other goings-on inside courtrooms. Certified transcripts are crucial for appeals, and the absence of such records can be a factor in judicial decisions on child custody, domestic violence and other high-stakes legal matters, according to the lawsuit.
The litigation, filed directly in the California Supreme Court in an usual move, comes as advocates have grown increasingly frustrated by the documented inability of many courts to find and hire enough court reporters.
“This is a problem that’s existed for more than a decade and just gotten increasingly worse,” said Jennafer Dorfman Wagner, director of programs at the Family Violence Appellate Project, one of the two petitioners, along with Bay Area Legal Aid.
Representatives of the superior courts of Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties declined to comment on pending litigation. San Diego County’s court spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
Rob Oftring, a spokesman for the L.A. County Superior Court, emailed a statement that said the court’s leadership “is committed to fair and equal access to justice. That includes ensuring all litigants maintain their full appellate rights by having access to a verbatim record of their proceedings when a court-employed court reporter is unavailable and fundamental rights or liberty interests are at stake.”
Higher pay offered by private-sector work has compounded struggles to maintain adequate court reporter staffing. Although the public workforce is still able to handle transcripts for criminal proceedings, some civil matters — including family court cases — can be left without anyone keeping an official word-for-word record.
State law permits electronic recording of some proceedings, but not in a wide range of cases involving issues such as domestic violence restraining orders, evictions, small claims and child custody disputes.
Well-heeled litigants can hire court reporters, which can cost more than $3,000 per day. Those without means are left with no way of obtaining an official record, as electronic recording of court cases is not permitted in most instances.
The petitioners are seeking “an order from the California Supreme Court mandating that, when a litigant cannot afford a private court reporter, they are entitled to have the proceeding recorded at no charge, including by electronic recording if a court reporter is not available,” according to an emailed statement.
In the superior courts of L.A. and Santa Clara counties, general orders issued this year have cleared the way for judges to allow electronic recording of certain proceedings involving low-income litigants who can’t afford to hire court reporters.
Sonya Winner, senior counsel at the law firm Covington & Burling, which is representing the Family Violence Appellate Project, argued that the state’s high court needs to intervene to address the situation.
“Without a verbatim record of what happened, it is basically impossible … to have an appeal,” she said. “If you get an erroneous ruling, you are out of luck.”
Firefighters worked overnight to gain control over a dangerous fire that burned homes in Malibu and forced thousands from their homes.
The Franklin fire continued to menace the coastal city overnight, burning close to some homes and forcing some water drops by helicopters. A red-flag fire danger warning remains in effect for the area until 6 p.m. But winds are expected to ease after that, and firefighters hope to make progress.
At least seven homes were destroyed and eight damaged, but officials said that number could rise as they do more complete assessments. It had burned more than 3,900 acres and was 7% contained as of Wednesday morning, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The blaze was reported a few minutes before 11 p.m. Monday along Malibu Canyon Road in the hills north of Pepperdine University and fanned by strong Santa Ana winds, Cal Fire said.
More than 1,500 firefighters battled the fire on the ground Tuesday, building containment lines as air tankers dropped water on the blaze.
By Tuesday evening, average wind speeds around the fire zone had slowed to 15 to 25 mph — a considerable drop from peak wind gusts of up to 65 mph that were recorded when the fire first ignited, said National Weather Service Meteorologist Rose Schoenfeld.
Past the security gates of Serra Retreat is a small enclave of luxury properties that’s home to celebrities such as Patrick Dempsey, Dick Van Dyke and at one time Mel Gibson. On the fire’s first night, it caught many in the area by surprise. Pets were killed and several cars and homes burned, including one on Mariposa De Oro Street, residents say.
Van Dyke wrote on Facebook that he and his wife, Arlene Silver, evacuated from their home.
“Arlene and I have safely evacuated with our animals except for Bobo escaped as we were leaving,” he wrote, referring to his cat. “We’re praying he’ll be ok and that our community in Serra Retreat will survive these terrible fires.”
Alec Gellis, 31, was riding through the neighborhood on his e-bike checking on homes Tuesday afternoon. He and a friend stayed behind overnight Monday into Tuesday to protect properties in the area. The fire, he said, broke out fast. Around 11 p.m. he was in his room when he heard people screaming outside and cars honking.
“The sky was red and the whole canyon was was lit up on the other side,” he said. “We were surrounded by flames. Literally everywhere you looked there was fire.”
He and his friend, 33-year-old Abel Rodgers, grabbed a hose connected to a machine that pumped water from the pool and began spraying down their home. Firefighters were busy trying to push back flames, so for five hours, the two men soaked everything they could, even venturing into neighbors’ yards to help put out spot fires.
Rich Leo was stranded at a gas station on Pacific Coast Highway as spot fires burned around Malibu on Tuesday.
He parked his SUV at a Chevron station, low on gas and flirted with the idea of leaving the area to refuel.
“But I don’t know if I would be able to come back home,” Leo, 79, said as he stood outside the gas station that had no power.
Leo is a longtime resident, over 40 years, and recalls when the Woolsey fire burned through Malibu and down to the coast.
“This one was bad,” he said about the Franklin fire. “It kept jumping and wherever I looked I saw fire last night.”
The fire had only been going for a couple of hours when firefighters banged on the door to his town home near Winter Canyon Road around 1 a.m. but he refused to leave. He worried about the staff at the nearby Our Lady of Malibu Catholic Church and school.
He wanted to stay behind to make sure everyone was OK.
At the nearby church, a lone parishioner rode into the school on a bicycle. The fire burned right up to the property line and scorched wooden fence posts and vegetation but firefighters were able to keep the fire from touching the property.
There were no staff as a man who identified himself as Mike walked through the school grounds where the gates were opened and all the water taps were running.
“I just wanted to make sure that everyone was OK and the school was standing,” Mike said. “My kids used to come here when they were little,” he said. “My house burned down in the Woolsey fire so I know what it means when this happens.”
He made his way around a kindergarten classroom as firefighting helicopters overhead rumbled the windows. Then a man appeared out of the brush with a blue bucket filled with water from a tap.
“I’m just trying to do what I can,” said the man, who doused a smoldering fire at the fence line. He declined to give his name and only said that he lived on the hillside around the school.
Tax revenues have exceeded estimates in California, but Gov. Gavin Newsom’s spending proposals and other state costs could quickly swallow up any extra funds.
An extra $420-million tax break for Hollywood film studios. Twenty-five million dollars to wage legal battles against President-elect Donald Trump. Unanticipated costs for providing healthcare to seniors and undocumented immigrants.
As analysts warn about the need for California to restrain spending, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s wish list and other new costs are threatening to unwind progress toward balancing the state budget.
To solve a $78.5-billion deficit over the last two years, the Democratic governor and lawmakers took savings from the state’s rainy day fund, delayed programs, cut spending and relied on the occasional accounting gimmick. Those moves, combined with higher than expected tax revenues in recent months, suggest the state could face a relatively mild $2-billion shortfall in the coming year.
But the deficit could grow with the proposals Newsom unveiled in recent months, cost overruns on existing programs and the potential loss of billions in federal funding as analysts predict more significant budget problems in the years ahead.
“There are many different reasons for us to be cautious and prudent going forward, and we should be very clear-eyed about the tough choices that lie ahead,” said Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel (D-Encino), who leads the budget committee.
Gabriel said the Assembly will “carefully consider and vet” the governor’s proposals, which lawmakers will get a better look at when Newsom unveils his budget plan in January.
Newsom’s new spending proposals
With Hollywood experiencing a massive production downturn, Newsom recently proposed a “historic expansion” of California’s program for providing tax breaks to studios that produce movies and TV shows here. The program currently offers $330 million in credits annually, and the governor wants to more than double that to $750 million next year.
The boost would make California the most film-friendly state in the country. The tax credits will also become refundable for the first time in the upcoming budget year, which begins on July 1, meaning the state will pay companies cash for any credits that exceed their tax liability.
The governor said the expansion will help keep more projects in the state and increase economic activity at a time when Hollywood studios are struggling to bounce back from pandemic losses and strikes.
The film tax credit is popular among lawmakers from Los Angeles, where a majority of the 125,000 film industry jobs are based. But it could face objections from advocates for education because the credits will result in reduced school funding.
Chris Hoene, the executive director of the California Budget & Policy Center, said the state loses more than $70 billion a year in tax credits and deductions. He said giving away more tax credits to compete against other states “just becomes a race to the bottom.”
“One state moves their credit up, and all the other states feel like they have to and pretty soon everybody’s basically giving away free cash to film companies,” Hoene said. “So that’s a losing battle in the long run.”
The governor’s litigation fund against the incoming Trump administration is another new expense that wasn’t calculated in the $2-billion deficit projection from the Legislative Analyst’s Office in late November.
Anticipating a need for more legal firepower during the Trump administration, the governor is asking lawmakers to approve an additional $25 million for litigation with the federal government.
The amount is relatively small, and the governor’s office says it has the potential for significant returns. The state spent $42 million to file 122 lawsuits against the Trump administration from 2017 to 2021, according to the governor’s office. In just one case where the federal government sought to link police grants to immigration enforcement, the state prevailed and was reimbursed $57 million.
California’s healthcare program for low-income residents is also costing more than expected as the state expands eligibility to all income-eligible adults, regardless of immigration status, and experiences an increase in the number of seniors seeking services.
As of November, financial advisors to the Legislature reported that the program will cost the state $2.7 billion more than budgeted for in the current year and $1.2 billion more than forecast next year.
After a news conference at a rice farm in Colusa on Tuesday, Newsom said he will continue to fulfill the commitment he made to provide coverage for immigrants when he presents his spending plan for the year ahead in January.
“As it relates to future years, we’ll have conversations across the spectrum of issues,” Newsom said. “I can give you seven or eight categories in the budget that we have to consider soberly, and that’s one of them.”
Newsom said Trump’s threat to deport immigrants could also affect the cost of Medi-Cal services. The governor said he recently met a young immigrant woman who stopped chemotherapy treatment out of fear of being deported.
“That’s the new world reality, and Trump has not even been sworn in. That’s how scared she was to get treatment,” Newsom said. “So I think that’s going to have an impact as well on a lot of these programs.”
The governor declined to detail any cuts he will propose to pay for his new proposals or other unanticipated policy costs.
“We will put it up Jan. 10, and it will be balanced, and it will answer that question,” he said of his budget plan.
How voters and lawmakers add costs for the state
Newsom’s proposals aren’t the only squeeze on the state budget. Voters are calling for more spending too.
In November, voters adopted a permanent tax on managed healthcare organizations with the approval of Proposition 35. California uses the tax to draw down more federal money for Medi-Cal, the state’s healthcare program for low-income residents.
Proposition 35 effectively requires some of the money to be allocated to providers that serve Medi-Cal patients. The California Department of Finance estimates the measure will result in the loss of $4.9 billion in funding that the state planned to use in 2025-26.
Estimates suggest Proposition 36, another measure voters passed, could cost the state up to hundreds of millions of dollars each year. By requiring tougher punishment for some theft and drug crimes, it’s expected to increase spending on jails and prisons.
Voters also approved two bond measures on the November ballot that involve borrowing a combined $20 billion and repaying the loans with interest. Proposition 2 to improve school buildings and Proposition 4 to build environmental projects are expected to cost the state a combined $900 million a year.
Lawmakers’ priorities also create pressure on the budget. In its November report, the Legislative Analyst’s Office said “the timing and magnitude of the costs” associated with a pay hike approved last year for healthcare workers were still uncertain, with estimates ranging from the low hundreds of millions of dollars to the low billions of dollars.
A journalism fund that lawmakers and the governor agreed to support in August will cost the state $30 million in next year’s budget as part of a new public-private partnership with Google to research artificial intelligence and bolster local journalism. Google is expected to match the state investment next year, with each side spending an additional $10 million annually for the next four years.
Trump’s effect on state finances
On the campaign trail, Trump threatened to withhold federal wildfire funding if Newsom doesn’t go along with his plan to send water to southern farmlands from Northern California.
Although vague, the threat could have serious consequences for California, where major wildfires can cause billions of dollars in damage, much of which is typically covered by the federal government.
Newsom has said he’s considering setting aside state funding in a disaster account in the event that Trump declines to provide federal support. But it’s challenging for lawmakers and the governor to budget for a change in policy without knowing how much funding they could ultimately lose.
Trump also threatened to end federal consumer subsidies for clean cars.
Despite the state budget crunch, Newsom announced in November that California will offer its own rebates for those who purchase zero-emission vehicles if Trump follows through.
The governor has not quantified the amount of funding the state would make available for rebates and said the money would come from the cap-and-trade program, the state’s market for pollution credits to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Hoene pointed out that Trump’s promise to expand tax breaks for businesses that were approved in his first term will take significant revenue out of the federal budget. Threats to cut federal funding for social programs, such as healthcare and food assistance, he said, “could potentially blow a sizable hole in the state budget.”
Hoene said the state should consider raising taxes on the corporations and wealthy households that receive federal tax breaks to mitigate California’s losses if that happens.
“I’m not hearing state leaders talk about that yet, and I think that’s something they’re going to have to start taking seriously if they want to really protect the state’s budget situation, and the ability to provide services,” Hoene said.
H.D. Palmer, a spokesperson for the California Department of Finance, said the state is starting off 2025 in a better position than last year because of how Newsom and lawmakers reduced the current deficit and adopted solutions for next year’s budget problem.
That said, the transition to the Trump administration leaves “a known unknown” lingering over state budget discussions.
“We know there is a potential threat out there for upcoming policy decisions, but we don’t know the specific shape and form of those yet,” Palmer said. “And we don’t know what the price tag will be.”
