FRESNO, Calif. (FOX26) — A new effort to crack down on dangerous drivers in California is gaining attention as lawmakers push forward legislation aimed at repeat speeders.

Assembly member Esmeralda Soria has introduced a bill that would require certain drivers with multiple speeding offenses to install a device in their vehicles that automatically limits how fast they can go. The measure, known as the “Stop Super Speeders Act” (AB 2276), is designed to improve road safety and prevent deadly crashes.

The program could first roll out as a pilot in several counties, including Fresno, Kern, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, San Diego, Santa Clara, and Shasta. While the proposal was initially intended to be implemented statewide, consultants recommended starting with a smaller pilot program.

The legislation is driven in part by tragic cases like that of Paul Martinez, who was killed at just 21 years old after being struck by a speeding driver in Fresno. His father, Joe Martinez, says the loss is something he lives with every day.

“Being 21 years old and suddenly your entire life, dreams, goals—everything—is just wiped out by the distraction of one person who was speeding,” he said. According to reports, the driver who hit Paul was traveling 54 miles per hour in a 40 mph zone.

Traffic safety remains a serious concern in Fresno. Data from Smart Growth America ranks the city as the seventh worst in the nation for pedestrian deaths.

“I do not want to see another father who grieves every single day because he lost his child to someone driving recklessly,” Soria said.

Under AB 2276, judges would have the authority to require repeat offenders to install Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) devices in their vehicles. The technology functions similarly to cruise control but automatically adjusts a car’s speed based on posted limits using GPS data.

“Once the technology is installed, it knows the speed limit of the neighborhood or freeway and makes adjustments accordingly,” Soria explained. “This is for those folks who haven’t learned their lesson from simply getting a ticket.”

However, the proposal has drawn criticism from some groups. Opponents argue that the bill’s language is too broad and could create unintended safety risks. Critics say there are situations where drivers may need to accelerate quickly to avoid danger, and limiting speed could make those situations more hazardous.

Supporters counter that the bill is about accountability and protecting lives on the road.

“You would think this is a no-brainer bill,” said Martinez, “It holds repeat offenders accountable.”

The bill is still in the early stages of the legislative process. Its next step is review by the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

The California Republican Party will make endorsements of the candidates running for office — including for the state’s next governor — on Sunday during the final day of the California Republican Convention in San Diego.

Candidates made their plea for endorsement to the party’s delegates at the convention, held at the Sheraton San Diego Resort on Harbor Island, on Saturday — with promises to root out alleged misuse of spending, push forward voter identification initiatives and boost affordability in the state.

The party faces what could be an uphill battle to win in the majority Democratic state, and is also coming off the loss of Proposition 50 last year, in which voters overwhelmingly voted to redistrict the state to benefit Democrats.

Despite the challenges, Republican candidates and convention attendees showed up hopeful for their odds — with especially strong enthusiasm behind the two candidates for governor, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and former Fox News commentator Steven Hilton.

“This election has always been ours for the taking,” said Bianco. “It is up to us — conservative, common-sense Republicans — to show proven leadership, compassion and integrity matters.”

Hilton has been endorsed by President Donald Trump — a development some expect could hurt his chances of winning in the largely blue state.

But many of the candidates expressed support and alignment with the Trump administration and its policies, including efforts to ban transgender athletes in women’s and girls’ sports and abolish sanctuary cities, which limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

“It’s going to be a whole new story in California,” Hilton said. “We are going to play our part in (Trump’s) golden age for America.”

That support for Trump was on full display at the convention, with loud cheers from the audience when the candidates mentioned the president’s policies and signs saying “Make California Golden Again,” co-opting his signature slogan.

Associate delegate from Ventura County Jennifer McCarthy says she wants a candidate with Trump’s ideals, which is why she’s supporting Hilton.

“I think he has the political and the business experience, plus the media experience, that he will be able to make the difference in California,” she added.

The party’s delegates will announce its endorsements during the final day of the convention on Sunday.

Along with the candidate forum, the convention on Saturday offered a series of events, including a book signing with former Trump administration press secretary Sean Spicer and a panel on voter identification and the future of elections.

Booths with volunteers promoting candidates and vendors selling merchandise lined the main hall of the convention, and bedazzled clothing for sale — along with rows of “Make America Great Again” hats and other Trump-related merchandise — further decorated the space.

San Diego resident Blake Marnell says he’s been often seen at Trump rallies wearing a signature suit with a brick pattern on it — to symbolize his support for the Trump administration’s border fence — but he left the outfit at home on Saturday, since the convention was more focused on California issues.

Marnell is supportive of Hilton for governor and says he thinks he will be able to reach independent voters as well as Republicans.

“I don’t see Steve Hilton as being a party politician,” he said. “He’s got a lot of crossover.”

But Louisa Millington, from Riverside, says Trump’s endorsement of Hilton is detrimental in a state like California.

“I would vote for (Trump) again today, but in California, we need a governor for California, not for Washington, D.C.,” she said. “We can’t have our president picking and crowning who’s going to be our governor in California.”

After three years of unprecedented closures that devastated California’s fishing industry, commercial salmon fishing is poised to reopen this spring.

The return comes with a catch: Regulators at the interstate Pacific Fishery Management Council will strictly constrain fishing dates and impose harvest limits for both commercial and recreational fishing to protect the threatened California Coastal Chinook. The council is set to finalize the details this weekend.

It’s not the season the fleet had hoped for after years of closures. But those who survived the shutdowns fear a graver threat: state and federal decisions could reshape California’s water systems and rivers.

“Water policy in California is about to change drastically and irreversibly, and nobody has the energy to pay attention to that,” said Sarah Bates, who fishes commercially from San Francisco. “I am concerned that salmon is going to be (commercially) extinct in our lifetimes.”

For the first time since 2022, Bates was preparing her century-old boat, the Bounty, docked at Fisherman’s Wharf. She ticked off the boat’s needs: an oil change, a hydraulics check, a run-through of the steering system, the anchor. Her fading fishing permit, now four years out of date, still clings to the outside of the cabin.

“Pay no attention to my paint job,” Bates said. “Try not to make my boat look bad.”

Looking at its cracking paint and tangled ropes, Bates — who wrestles waves and weather for a living and uses a fishing float dented by a massive shark bite — seemed a little daunted by the tasks ahead.

Without income from salmon, Bates allowed critical upkeep to lag. “There’s been a lot of deferred maintenance,” she said. “I’m actually a little worried about everybody charging out into the ocean in May to go fishing.”

‘A tremendous, avoidable hit’

Salmon is king in California. It’s what keeps the markets and restaurants buying, the industrial-scale ice machines running, the tourists booking charter boats and visiting the coast.

“It’s iconic,” said retired charter boat captain John Atkinson. “We have people who will fish every week for salmon. And for the other species, they come out once.”

But dams, water diversions, low flows and poor ocean conditions have driven decades of decline.

California experienced its driest three year stretch in history from 2020 through 2022 — worsening that burden and causing populations to plummet. Interstate fisheries managers cancelled commercial salmon fishing for an unprecedented three years in a row, and barred recreational fishing for all but a handful of days last year.

The financial damage was severe. California estimated the closures cost nearly $100 million in lost coastal community and state personal income during the first two years alone.

The fishing industry says these numbers vastly underestimate the economic and human costs: Boats went to the crusher, tourists took their money to other states, suppliers went out of business and fishers fled California or the industry altogether.

“This was a tremendous, avoidable hit. We have survived droughts throughout recent history, but none had impacts this drastic,” Vance Staplin, executive director of the Golden State Salmon Association, said in an email.

First: Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco on March 20, 2026. Last: Sunlight pours through a window of the Bounty, a commercial fishing vessel, on March 20, 2026. Photos by Jungho Kim for CalMatters Sarah Bates, a commercial salmon fisher, stands at the wheel of her boat, Bounty, at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco on March 20, 2026. Photo by Jungho Kim for CalMatters California has requested disaster assistance from the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. But federal aid has come slowly, and fallen short. The U.S. government has released only $20.6 million, and only for the 2023 closure.

“The entire framework for fishery disasters has to be totally redone,” said U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat and ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee. “We need something that is much faster, that is less political, that doesn’t depend on all the vagaries of multiple federal agencies and congressional appropriations.”

Rain, but little respite

The rains returned in 2023 — bringing the flows and cool water young salmon need to survive and complete their ocean migration.

Now, the Pacific Fishery Management Council projects that roughly 392,000 Sacramento River fall-run Chinook salmon are swimming off the coast. These are the mainstay of California’s salmon fishery — and the forecasts are better than last year’s, though still a fraction of the millions that returned historically. But the limited fishing season is not the respite that the industry had counted on.

“We’re happy to get some fishing this year,” Staplin, of the Golden State Salmon Association, said, “but if we want to preserve the businesses and families that define California’s coastal and inland salmon economies, we need a little compromise and balance in prioritizing water during droughts.”

A plan or a patch?

Two years ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom released a plan aimed at protecting salmon from climate change.

The plan received mixed reactions.

Some scientists and members of the fishing community credited state agencies and the Newsom administration with concrete efforts like hatchery upgrades and cutting-edge genetic fish tagging. One$58 million state and federal effort — the Big Notch Project — connected salmon and other fish to prime floodplain habitat in the Yolo Bypass through seasonal gates.

“Anything that can be done is a help right now,” Atkinson said.

But others say that the strategy papers over policies that rob salmon of the cold water they need. California is built around nature-defying engineering that funnels vast amounts of water away from rivers to supply cities and the state’s $60 billion agricultural economy.

“As soon as it stops raining or snowing, we’re going to be back in the same situation with the salmon season closing,” said Jon Rosenfield, science director at The San Francisco Baykeeper. “If we don’t protect river flows and cold water storage, then we’re not protecting salmon.”

Some of the fiercest fights are over the contentious Delta tunnel and Newsom’s controversial deal with major water users, backed by $1.5 billion in state funding, to overhaul how farms and cities take water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the rivers that feed it.

Carson Jeffres, a senior researcher at the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, takes a more moderate view — the effect on salmon will depend on how California agencies manage these projects, but the status quo isn’t an option.

“I just don’t see a world where the salmon are prioritized over human water needs — and I think we should plan for it,” he said. “Then that might be a more sustainable place.”

On top of state policies is a Trump administration that called for “Putting People over Fish” and adopted a plan in December to send more Northern California water to Central Valley farms.

State wildlife officials said at the time that President Donald Trump’s actions “run counter” to California’s efforts to improve salmon populations, “harming the California communities that rely on salmon for their livelihood.”

California Secretary of Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot acknowledged the state’s finite water supply can’t satisfy everyone’s priorities.

“There’s no shortage of finger pointing by some groups who argue that not enough water is remaining in our rivers for salmon and aquatic habitat, and other groups that suggest that not enough water is being diverted for California communities and agriculture,” Crowfoot said.

“Water management in California,” he said, “involves balancing water across these needs.”

Last year, the Newsom administration announced that nearly 70% of the salmon strategy’s action items were underway, and more than a quarter were already complete.

That’s “crazy math … What is your outcome measure?” said Bates. “For us, our outcome measure is enough fish to go fishing.”

Adapting to survive

In the absence of enough fish, the industry has been piloting new strategies to survive.

Back at Fisherman’s Wharf, a few rows over from Bates, Captain Virginia Salvador was getting ready to take a group out to troll for halibut and striped bass. Her French bulldog, Anchovy, wandered the deck between the ropes.

Salvador started her charter boat business, Unforgettable Fishing Adventures, during the salmon shutdown — and had to quickly expand her offerings.

Now, she runs barbecue and barhopping cruises around San Francisco Bay and takes passengers to McCovey Cove during Giants games. She teams up with food influencer Rosalie Bradford Pareja to offer a chef experience. And she still holds down a second job working in a hospital pathology laboratory.

“When you rely on a natural entity for your income, you have to learn how to deviate, pivot, expand,” Salvador said.

Captain Virginia Salvador on her boat, Unforgettable, at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco on March 20, 2026. Photo by Jungho Kim for CalMatters Where the front row of charter boats line the street like storefronts, Bates’ row at Fisherman’s Wharf has the feeling of a neighborhood. One fisherman clambered down the ladder to Bates’ boat, where they swapped great white shark stories. Bates hollered to another neighbor every time a tourist wandered down the dock, bucket in hand, looking to buy fresh crab.

This neighbor, a tattooed and lanky and exhausted fisherman named Shawn Chen Flading, had been out all night. His 12 hour mission to retrieve crab pots turned into a 26 hour ordeal when his throttle cable broke.

At the time Flading bought his boat, before the shutdowns, it looked like a pretty good living.

“A lot of people — the older generation — put their kids through college, bought their homes. And it just disappeared,” Flading said. “I lost basically half my revenue for the past three years straight.”

He tries to fill the gap by advertising on social media and selling Dungeness crab directly off his boat. But the crab season, too, he said, has been disappointing.

Now, salmon fishing is once again on the horizon.

“Whatever limited opportunity we have for salmon, at least we’re getting the ball rolling,” Flading said to Bates across the water between their boats, over the San Francisco mix of cars, construction and seagulls. “Without that, we’re just stuck.”

Bates, leaning on the railing of her own boat, agreed. “I really understand why people are upset,” she said. “But also, I’m so excited to catch some fish. Even though it’s not enough. It’s not even close to enough.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.