Good morning. It’s Wednesday, July 24. I’m Gustavo Arellano, a metro columnist, which means I’m allowed to have opinions like:

Newspapers are cool.

But before I begin my rant, here’s what you need to know to start your day.

Whither the news industry in California?

Since I was a teen, I’ve lapped up newspapers.

I used to steal the sports section from the rolled-up newspapers on the driveways of homes on the way to Sycamore Junior High in Anaheim. When I realized there was more to life than just the Angels and Dodgers, I’d jump a fence every Sunday morning to buy copies of the Orange County Register and L.A. Times from news boxes in my neighboring apartment complex. Once I got a job my senior year of high school, I subscribed to those two papers along with the New York Times.

I went into journalism straight out of college despite earning a film studies degree — I’ve never regretted it. But as the years went on, I ended my print subscriptions because I could read for free on the internet most of what I used to pay for.

It’s people like me who launched the proverbial Little Boy that destroyed too many journalism outlets to count.

But the Fat Man remains companies like Craigslist, Google and Facebook, which eradicated the traditional business model of news organizations — advertising. This one-two punch has led to mass layoffs, shutdowns and a society where misinformation reigns.

Two bills currently in the California Legislature, Assembly Bill 886 and Senate Bill 1327, seek to confront this digital dystopia.

The former would require social media giants such as Facebook and search engines like Google to pay news outlets for using their content; the latter would use the revenue gathered from a proposed tax on user data gathered by Big Tech to gift news groups a tax credit for every full-time journalist they employ. The California News Publisher Assn., of which The Times is a member, supports AB 886, arguing it could give the state’s dying news industry — and local news — a lifeline.

(Tech companies vehemently oppose the bills, arguing it’s unfair to target them when the news industry hasn’t kept up with modernity and readers have more options to get their news than ever before.)

These bills aren’t merely a desperate money grab by the lamestream press, folks.

A limping media ecosystem affects society in many ways — few of them good.

Times reporters investigated the decline of local news and what it actually means. Here’s what we found:

• More big businesses control the narrative. The largest news source in Richmond, Calif., is owned by the Bay Area town’s largest business: Chevron. That means in a city where pollution concerns are real from the company’s refinery, its digital rag doesn’t say a damn thing, Jessica Garrison reported.
• News that serves disenfranchised communities is ignored. Santa Ana is one of the most-Latino big cities in the United States. Twenty years ago, dozens of local semanarios (weekly papers) and all sorts of sports, entertainment and lifestyle magazines covered the goings-on of the city. Today, just two publications focused on entertainment fluff remain. I looked at how important issues affecting residents now get ignored.
• Tech companies are intent on winning. Australia and Canada passed bills similar to what California legislators have proposed. Some money went to publishers, but tech bros created chaos by blocking news from their platforms, national correspondent Jenny Jarvie reported.
• AI is only making things worse. AI chatbots might openly lift local journalists’ work and either pass it off as their own or mischaracterize it. “The average consumer that just wants to go check [out a restaurant], they’re probably not going to read [our article] anymore,” L.A. Taco editor Javier Cabral told Wendy Lee on AI’s effects on his scrappy indie site.
• Even news nonprofits — long seen as a foolproof solution — are having a rough time of it: The Long Beach Post had eclipsed the 127-year-old Press-Telegram in readership and gravitas but now finds itself in tatters after nearly three-quarters of its reporters resigned over editorial and business disputes with management. Those defectors now have their own publication, the Long Beach Watchdog, James Rainey reported.
• There are fewer reporters to hold power accountable. The people paid to objectively find out what people in power are trying to hide from you … we’re losing jobs like the Halos are losing fans, Ashley Ahn showed.

I thank you, gentle reader, for reading this newsletter, offer you a virtual high-five if you subscribe to Essential California, and gift you a digital gold star if you are a Times subscriber. And if you read this without paying us? We pardon you — and ask you to subscribe. Hey, $1 for four months is a deal anyone can afford, amirite?

Today’s top stories

Vice President Kamala Harris campaigns at West Allis Central High School in West Allis, Wis.

(Kayla Wolf / Associated Press)

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Kamala Harris hits the trail

Coronavirus in California

How clean is your weed?

Fentanyl

• The family of 3-year-old twins who died of a suspected fentanyl overdose is in shock. Relatives said they had no idea the boys’ mother used the opioid.
• Their mother has been charged with murder.
• Just last week, another toddler died of a fentanyl overdose. DCFS had trusted his mom’s friend to keep him safe

More big stories

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Today’s great reads

A plate of tacos is displayed at the Industrial Downtown Night Market.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

How L.A. reached peak taco. To understand how Los Angeles became the world’s most taco-diverse city, let’s start with the taco truck.

Other great reads

How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to essentialcalifornia@latimes.com.

For your downtime

Tacos at Bandito Taqueria.

(Andrea D’Agosto / For The Times)

Going out

Staying in

And finally … from our archives

On this day in history, the Supreme Court voted 8 to 0 that President Nixon had to turn over transcripts of the Watergate tapes to Special Counsel Leon Jaworski.

Have a great day, from the Essential California team.

Ryan Fonseca, reporter
Defne Karabatur, fellow
Andrew Campa, Sunday reporter
Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editor and Saturday reporter
Christian Orozco, assistant editor
Stephanie Chavez, deputy metro editor
Karim Doumar, head of newsletters

Check our top stories, topics and the latest articles on latimes.com.

Last October, California passed the nation’s strongest law to address the glut of oil and gas wells that are unplugged and ownerless, many leaking pollutants into the environment.

The legislation required that, as part of any sale or transfer of wells, the purchasing company set aside enough money in financial instruments known as bonds to cover the entire cleanup cost of low-producing wells if the companies go out of business without plugging them. It was a striking departure from the piecemeal steps taken by other state legislatures and federal agencies to reduce the number of orphan wells. California lawmakers repeatedly cited ProPublica’s work on the subject as a reason to act.

But in its first major test, California regulators sidestepped the law.

The California Geologic Energy Management Division, the state’s oil regulatory body, announced in late June that the law does not apply to the merger of California Resources Corp. and Aera Energy, two of the three companies that account for the vast majority of the state’s oil and gas production. If the law had been enforced, the deal would have provided billions of dollars in new bonds to ensure taxpayers weren’t eventually left with the cleanup bill.

Department of Conservation Director David Shabazian explained the agency’s decision in a letter to Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo, the Los Angeles Democrat who sponsored the new law. The bonding requirements “do not apply to stock transfers, nor does the law make any mention of such transactions,” Shabazian wrote. In other words, because Aera is still listed as the operator of the wells, the state can’t act.

That explanation did not appease Carrillo.

“This deal is exactly why we passed AB 1167, the Orphaned Well Prevention Act,” she said in an email to ProPublica and Capital & Main. “If a company is drilling for oil in California, they should be responsible for cleaning and closing that oil well. Not enforcing the law as intended sets-up our state for a potential financial catastrophe.”

The merger created the largest oil company in the state, with about 16,000 idle wells, which neither produce oil and gas nor are plugged and are at a higher risk of becoming orphans. That’s 40% of the total number of idle wells in the state.

“It’s an absurd interpretation of the law,” said Kyle Ferrar, who helped write AB 1167 as Western program coordinator with environmental group FracTracker Alliance. “They’re essentially creating a model to get around this bill.”

Richard Venn, a California Resources spokesperson, said in an emailed statement that the companies have plugged more than 5,000 wells and “have active and well-established programs for managing the full life cycle of wells and we have the size and financial resources to address all of our plugging obligations. The merger strengthens those resources.”

“Enormous Dereliction of Duty”

In December, the California Geologic Energy Management Division wrote to the state’s oil companies notifying them that they should submit paperwork before completing “any acquisition” — agency staff bolded those words — to assist the state in determining necessary bonding levels under AB 1167. “This notice is to ensure that operators are aware of new bonding requirements that must be complied with in advance of acquiring certain wells and production facilities,” regulators wrote.

But the state concluded the California Resources and Aera merger didn’t trigger the bonding requirements because of the way it was structured.

In the state’s letter explaining regulators’ reasoning, Shabazian wrote that “if the operator of the well remains constant, changes in ownership of the operator’s holding company do not require new bonds.”

If regulators had applied the law to the merger, California Resources would have been required to put up an estimated $2.4 billion bond to guarantee Aera’s wells will be plugged, according to an analysis of state data. In comparison, that’s about eight times the total value of all outstanding cleanup bonds for all oil companies in the state.

Instead, Aera will continue operating with only a $3 million bond.

“This particular transaction is itself tremendously consequential, potentially the most consequential transaction that the state will see,” said Kassie Siegel, a senior counsel with the environmental group the Center for Biological Diversity.

Siegel worries that the state’s “enormous dereliction of duty” opens a loophole for the industry. Regulators are “creating a roadmap for other companies to similarly evade the law,” she said.

The agency’s decision also came after Aera spent about $250,000 lobbying in California in the first quarter of the year, including on “1167 implementation,” according to the company’s lobbying disclosure form.

Neither Aera nor state regulators answered questions about the company’s lobbying.

Despite California Resources’ assertions that the company resulting from the merger is financially stable, it faces serious challenges.

California Resources was formed when Oxy Petroleum spun off its West Coast assets, and the company has already gone through Chapter 11 bankruptcy. California Resources acknowledged in filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that the merger left it and Aera with more than $1 billion in impending cleanup costs between them. In the records, the company also suggested that some of its key assets will reach the end of their economic lives in the coming years.

Aera, meanwhile, was sold by Shell and ExxonMobil in 2022 and ended up in the hands of German asset management group IKAV, investment fund Oaktree Capital Management and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

IKAV did not respond to requests for comment, while the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Oaktree declined to answer questions.

The office of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who signed AB 1167 into law with a warning that it might need to be amended, also did not answer questions about whether he agreed with his agency’s interpretation of the legislation.

A swank town in California’s central coast where celebrities from Oprah Winfrey to Prince Harry have bought properties, has become a hot spot for another reason: an active infestation of red imported fire ants.

The Santa Barbara county agricultural commissioner’s office is addressing an active infestation of these ants in Montecito, California, according to a statement issued last week.

This infestation likely originated from ant-infested nursery stock shipped from Riverside county in September 2023, according to officials.

“This is the only known infestation in the county,” according to the statement.

Staff from the commissioner’s office, along with the California department of food and agriculture, the University of California Cooperative Extension, and Riverside county agricultural commissioner’s office, are conducting regular property surveys.

Red imported fire ants, native to South America, have established themselves in parts of southern California, particularly in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside counties, according to researchers at the University of California, Riverside.

The first recorded sighting in California was in 1984. Since then, there have been periodic outbreaks in several counties.

Stings from these ants are painful and can cause pustules that may scar if infected, and a small percentage of the human population is allergic to these stings. Newborn livestock and poultry are also vulnerable to attacks.

These ants can clog irrigation lines, short-circuit electrical systems and displace native wildlife, including young birds and lizards. Their stinging behavior is also hazardous to fieldworkers and poses a significant risk to agriculture by feeding on various hosts, particularly turf.

The ants, mainly originating from Argentina and Brazil, pose a significant threat to California’s agricultural economy because they require quarantine of nursery products to prevent spreading through potting soil. In Texas, for example, over $1.1bn is spent each year on pesticides for fire ant control and $872m of those funds is used to control the ants from infesting lawns in urban areas.

No fire ants-related quarantines were in place in Santa Barbara amid the infestation.

Nursery products ranked second in value in the county’s agricultural economy, below strawberries, in the 2023 Santa Barbara County Crop and Livestock Report at $122,301,000.

Residents were encouraged to contact the Santa Barbara county agricultural commissioner’s office if they detected these ants or bring a sample to their offices.

“There are native fire ants and Argentine ants that are not hazardous and the quickest way to distinguish RIFA from other ants are their aggressive behavior, not color or size,” the county of Santa Barbara said in a Facebook post.

Montecito, located about 80 miles west of Los Angeles, is known for its celebrity and affluent community. Current and former residents include Ariana Grande, Adam Levine, Rob Lowe and others.