Essential California Week in Review: Speed up your travel with L.A. Metro’s new downtown tracks

Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It is Saturday, June 17.

Here’s a look at the top stories of the last week

Metro’s new downtown tracks can speed up your travel. Here’s what to know. After three years, the 1.9-mile Regional Connector has finally opened with three new stations to downtown Los Angeles. The main significance of the new line isn’t the extra stations, however; it’s the two major holes in the Metro system that the Regional Connector’s tracks plug.

Californians were asked to cut water use 15% during the drought. How close did they get? Not close enough. Between July 2021 and March of this year, statewide savings were 7%, or about half of what was requested.

These are California’s dirtiest beaches. Is your favorite on the list? Of the worst beaches for water quality, five were in San Mateo County and two were in Los Angeles County. (Looking at you, Santa Monica pier!)

L.A. City Councilmember Curren Price was charged with embezzlement and perjury. Price, who was charged with 10 counts of embezzlement, perjury and conflict of interest, is the latest in a years-long parade of elected city officials to face public corruption allegations from state or federal prosecutors.

Texas sends busload of 42 migrants to Los Angeles. The group of people, including eight children, arrived after a 23-hour bus ride without food, according to Jorge-Mario Cabrera, director of communications for immigrant rights group CHIRLA.

Breasts are made for feeding. New dads play a key role in successful nursing, safe sleep. Dads play a crucial role in successful breastfeeding and safe sleep. But few follow all of the guidelines set out by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

• Are you putting your baby to sleep safely? Make sure you’re following these guidelines.

Column: Barbara Boxer warns progressives to back off on Dianne Feinstein or they may be sorry. “She sees no guarantee that Republicans would allow another Democrat to replace the 89-year-old Feinstein on the Senate Judiciary Committee. In fact, Boxer is convinced they would not,” Mark Z. Barabak writes.

Ocean temperatures are off the charts, and El Niño is only partly to blame. Researchers said there are several factors that may be contributing to the off-the-charts warming. Underlying everything is human-caused climate change, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA.

State Farm’s California freeze: Looming insurance apocalypse or political ploy? State Farm announced in May that the company would stop writing new homeowners insurance policies in California. But there’s a possibility that the company’s move may reflect other considerations, from applying political pressure to staying on the right side of financial regulations.

Rural towns lure California’s remote workers with cash, child care and other relocation perks. Goodbye California, hello Indiana? Across the Hoosier state, dozens of counties and cities are practically stepping over each other to attract people with remote jobs who no longer feel the need to live in more expensive urban centers like Los Angeles or New York.

How California schools are spending billions in record pandemic aid. California’s 1,018 school districts serving more than 5.8 million students will have to spend or commit about $1 billion per quarter by September 2024, but the vast majority appear able to do so, even if they got off to a slow start.

A record wet winter inflicted more than $210 million in damage to California parks. Among the storm-damaged parks, 15 had estimates of more than $1 million in damage each, with the highest numbers concentrated on the central coast.

The killing of a Crenshaw High athlete marks the latest trauma for L.A.’s Black youth. Teenagers in Los Angeles are far more likely to have been exposed to violence than those elsewhere in the U.S., according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That violence falls disproportionately on young Black Angelenos.

More than 100 vacant, government-owned parcels in L.A. could be used for housing, a study finds. But Mayor Bass has her own list of properties that could be used for housing. She said she wants to rethink the city’s approach to permanent housing on its lands to develop a “bigger and bolder” program.

Bounced paychecks and frozen 401(k)s — How this promising Fresno tech company ‘disappeared overnight.’ Much remains to be untangled in the story of how the company imploded, but this much is clear: Bitwise was not a mere casualty of a slowing economy, as has been the case with so much of the tech industry that has suffered waves of layoffs.

ICYMI, here are this week’s great reads

Workplace harassment, gunshots, arson: What happened at Fire Station 81? As firefighter Tory Carlon moaned in pain after being shot several times, his assailant and colleague Jonathan Tatone said, “Payback’s a bitch, motherf—!” Carlon had feared this day would come. For two years, he’d been the target of Tatone’s anger, and the Los Angeles County Fire Department knew but did little about the harassment.

‘We deserve to be taken care of’: This modern tea party experience is dedicated to Black women. Through Tea Party 4 Black Girls, Bianka Gravillis says her “goal is to get Black women taken care of in every sense of the word.”

What if LAX were literally anywhere else? It could have been. In the handful of years between the end of World War I and the 1929 stock market crash, Los Angeles became, lickety-split, the aviation capital of the nation. The Times, which led the campaign to make that happen, decreed that the city was “air-minded.”
“Air-minded? L.A. was air-mad, air-insatiable, thronging any rollout of a new airplane, any air rallies, any new air field,” Patt Morrison writes.

Today’s week-in-review newsletter was curated by Kevinisha Walker. Please let us know what we can do to make this newsletter more useful to you. Send comments, complaints and ideas to essentialcalifornia@latimes.com.