County

The details of a group of Silicon Valley titans’ secretive land grab in Solano County, California are starting to come into focus, even as residents say a lot is still up in the air.VC giant Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Laurene Powell Jobs are among the tech giants who banded together to purchase over 60,000 acres of land about 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. California Forever, as the group calls itself, revealed last year that it hopes to create a whole new city in the middle of the…

Until Katie Porter won her congressional seat in 2018, being a Democrat in Orange County was like rooting for the Angels: Someone has to do it, amirite?Republicans had held a majority of my home county’s legislative, congressional and supervisorial seats for decades. They maintained a robust ecosystem of candidates, funneling activists onto school boards and party committees to learn how politics works before moving on to higher offices. The GOP way took Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to the White House, the latter…

Elon Musk's pick to be district attorney of Texas' Travis County lost on Tuesday, hours after the Tesla CEO sent a companywide email urging employees to follow his lead.Jeremy Sylestine, a Democratic challenger to the incumbent José Garza, was defeated early on Super Tuesday, with Garza winning by over 30 points. Musk appears to have deleted his post on social media site X endorsing Sylestine.Sylestine ran on a platform to prosecute more cases, invest in public safety initiatives and rely on more jury trials. Musk, who…

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón is expected to advance to a November runoff, but it’s too early to tell who his challenger will be. Although polls show Gascón has grown deeply unpopular with a significant portion of L.A. County residents, polls and local political observers have suggested that his strong progressive base will carry him out of a crowded primary field replete with challengers who spent more time attacking him than they did defining their own candidacies. Four years after taking office on a…

Californians want their trial judges to be both independent and accountable. The tension between those two competing goals can never be fully resolved but is partially addressed by a judicial election system in which they are automatically reelected every six years without their names even appearing on the ballot.Unless, that is, they are challenged. When one or more candidates run against an incumbent judge who is up for reelection, voters decide whether to retain the judge or elect a challenger.Judicial independence is…

Virtually every challenger has said they will reverse the sweeping policy changes Gascón enacted on his first day in office, but the planned implementation varies on such a walk back. Hochman, Hatami, Milton and McKinney have said they would either erase all of the district attorney’s policies or begin their terms as the “exact opposite of George Gascón.” Hochman has accused Gascón of ushering in “the golden age of criminals,” and Milton claimed the district attorney is part of a broader national attempt to “destroy our…

Most Superior Court judges are appointed by the governor when incumbents retire or otherwise leave their judicial offices. But voters are asked to step in every two years for various reasons, such as when judgeships open up in the few months before an election or when a challenger tries to unseat a sitting judge.This year there are 10 Los Angeles County Superior Court offices on the ballot, of which eight are open seats. The Times previously offered its recommendations in the two challenges to incumbent judges. For the…

After several days of sun, L.A. County is expected to see mostly cloudy skies and light rain this week, according to forecasters.There’s a chance of rain late Monday into early Tuesday, but the shower should only bring a quarter of an inch or less, said Mike Wofford, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. “It should be quite a bit weaker than most of the storms we’ve had recently. No significant impacts are expected with it,” Wofford said.Temperatures are expected to range from the high 50s to the high 60s…

With a storm lingering again over Los Angeles County, experts warn that even its modest rainfall could elevate the risk for mudslides, debris flows and flooding because the ground is already waterlogged from the monster storms earlier this month.“In normal winters where we haven’t had as much rain, this type of rainfall doesn’t cause that much issue because the ground can still absorb water,” said National Weather Service forecaster Ryan Kittell. But once the ground becomes completely saturated, he said, flooding can…

Rain rolled into Los Angeles County on Monday and was expected to continue through Wednesday, with the latest storm system bringing heavier precipitation and a more likely threat of flooding to Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. A flash flood warning was in effect for swaths of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties Monday morning. By 8 a.m., there were reports of flash flooding and landslides in those areas, with between 3 to 7 inches of rain dropping. Santa Barbara Airport was closed Monday morning due to flooding. There…