California
White House announces first California marine sanctuary managed by Indigenous peoples
The Biden administration, members of Congress and native tribes will commemorate the designation of the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary on Monday — the first such preserve in California to be managed in cooperation with Indigenous peoples.
The 4,543-square-mile sanctuary, located off California’s rugged Central Coast, would prohibit oil drilling and offer other protections to an area that encompasses numerous cultural resources, including the suspected remains of ancient, submerged villages.
The preserve could one day serve as the final puzzle piece of an effort to protect virtually all of California’s coast from the Channel Islands to Point Arena, north of the Bay Area.
“I am overwhelmed with pride for our community and just how much, how far we’ve been able to come in such a short time,” said Kenneth Kahn, chairman of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians. “We’ve got a lot to celebrate.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is responsible for managing the preserve, but Indigenous tribes will directly advise the agency. The Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, which has territory overlapping with the sanctuary and is the only federally recognized Chumash tribe, has been designated as NOAA’s key Indigenous partner.
Some Indigenous leaders say NOAA’s tribal consultation process fell short, but most agree the sanctuary is a step forward for conservation of the ocean, which provides Californians food, a temperate climate and recreation. Humans, they say, have a responsibility to protect it.
“We’re accomplishing a lot of things here,” said Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Santa Barbara), who represents the swath of coast adjacent to the sanctuary and has championed the project since he was elected in 2017.
“It’s good for the environment, good for biodiversity, the ecosystem, the cultural resources, the marine life, but also protecting our region and coast from future offshore oil drilling.”
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NOAA announced the designation last week, starting a 45-day countdown on the congressional calendar until it takes effect, during which Gov. Gavin Newsom has the power to veto it. Officials have no expectation he will do so, however.
Newsom’s administration have been involved in the designation process, and the sanctuary aligns with both Biden’s America the Beautiful initiative and Newsom’s 30×30 goal — both of which aim to conserve 30% of land and waters by 2030.
“There are still a lot of questions about how its going to work … I don’t have all the answers but we’re going to figure this out together,” said Paul Michel, regional policy coordinator for the West Coast at NOAA. “We need to get together, roll up our sleeves and get busy learning from each other.”
The proposal was first submitted in 2015 by the Northern Chumash Tribal Council, a nonprofit organization focused on rekindling Chumash culture and heritage and raising public awareness. The proposal was submitted not long after the Obama administration started allowing the public to propose sanctuaries for the first time in decades.
In 2021 — after years of sitting on the shelf during the Trump administration — the Biden administration made the proposal a top priority.
But after NOAA publicly posted its initial detailed plan in 2023, progress hit a wall.
Many Indigenous and environmental leaders wanted the sanctuary to extend up to the Monterey Bay sanctuary, past the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.
But offshore wind companies had long planned developing near the power plant, which provides an easy connection to the electrical grid since Diablo Canyon already sends 6% of the state’s power from the coast inland.
Eventually NOAA proposed a reduced sanctuary with the promise of considering expansions every five years during its required management plan review process, potentially absorbing the offshore wind waters once construction finishes.
The compromise, which the White House helped broker, aims to establish the sanctuary before the presidential election — allowing officials to work out the complex details later without jeopardizing the whole sanctuary.
A coyote runs through the sandy dunes of Surf Beach in Lompoc, which overlooks the newly designated Chumash Heritage Marine Sanctuary.
(Al Seib / For The Times)
Yet some say the government’s efforts to work side-by-side with Indigenous tribes has fallen short.
Haylee Bautista, ocean advocate with the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribe of San Luis Obispo County and Region — whose tribal territory overlaps with the sanctuary — said her tribe wasn’t made aware of the proposal until after an initial plan was already submitted to NOAA.
“We’ve voiced our concerns multiple times and submitted letters and the reciprocation hasn’t been great,” Bautista said.
“The ocean is a very sacred and important place to us, so the fact that they’re so quick to dismiss what we have to say about it … is just really disheartening.”
While the government has come a long way in recognizing the importance of Indigenous voices, they are often still an afterthought, she said.
Both the federal government and tribal leaders acknowledge that many lessons were learned during the first-of-its-kind process.
“We will continue to learn,” said Michel. “We’re in that process of developing relationships, hopefully some trust along the way. But we’re really at a starting point here with what we’ve heard so far and big hopes for where we could go.”
The Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary is lined with sandy beaches and rocky shores and is home to a multitude of seabirds and sea lions. Kelp forests — one of the most biodiverse ocean ecosystems on the planet and great at absorbing carbon — sit off the coast.
On the deep seafloor, rough volcanic terrain harbors corals, sponges and fish. The open ocean is home to whales, turtles and jellyfish.
Yet these vibrant ecosystems are facing threats from all sides.
Seawater along California’s Central Coast is becoming increasingly unlivable. The Santa Maria and Santa Ynez rivers — neither of which meet state water quality standards — discharge a mix of toxic chemicals, fertilizer, grease and dangerous bacteria.
Large cruise ships and industrial cargo vessels dump pollutants — including human sewage — directly into the waters. Passengers and crew on a single cruise ship can generate millions of gallons of waste per day.
Seven offshore drilling rigs stand in the vicinity, with three permanently shuttered, and four temporarily out of operation. They are each connected to shore by miles of oil-carrying pipeline, and spills have fouled the sea multiple times since the area was first developed in the 1970s.
In 1997, a Freeport-McMoRan pipeline ruptured, releasing thousands of gallons of oil, killing hundreds of seabirds. In 2015, an ExxonMobil pipeline spilled over a hundred thousands gallons of crude oil into the ocean.
As greenhouse gas emissions warm the sea, ocean oxygen levels decrease, suffocating wildlife. The sea also absorbs carbon dioxide, acidifying the water, which breaks down essential minerals that organisms need to grow their shells and skeletons.
“It is our responsibility to protect the ocean and to give back to it and to keep it healthy and keep it clean,” said Bautista, to provide “the people of the water — so all of the animals and plants that live under the water … a space where they can thrive.”
Cal Poly and UC Santa Barbara will help study the ecosystem, checking in on its vital signs and getting to know it better. Chumash groups will also monitor the area and provide NOAA with advice on how to best care for it.
The agency can then use its might, vested by the National Marine Sanctuaries Act, to put regulations into action.
They’ll all work to create educational programs to engage the public. The Santa Inez Band of Chumash Indians is even opening their own museum as early as the end of the year, in which they hope to eventually incorporate lessons from the sanctuary.
“It is a bit of an experiment,” Michel said. “It will adapt and grow and evolve over time through collaborative co-stewardship.”
By Dan Walters, CalMatters
This commentary was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
Two decades ago, when California got serious about reducing or even eliminating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, its political leaders weighed two potential tactics about industrial emissions.
The state could impose direct facility-by-facility limits, generally favored by climate change advocates. Or it could set overall emission reduction goals that would gradually decrease and auction off emission allowances, assuming their costs would encourage reductions.
The latter, known as cap-and-trade, was favored by corporate interests as being less onerous and was adopted, finally taking effect in 2012.
Since then, the California Air Resources Board has conducted quarterly auctions of emission allowances, collecting a total of $35 billion dollars so far, which, in theory, is being spent on projects that would reduce emissions.
The revenues have varied from year to year, but they have generally increased as the emission caps have declined. Since reaching a peak of $8.1 billion in the 2023-24 fiscal year, however, auction proceeds have been declining.
Roughly half of the money has been given to utilities to minimize cap-and-trade’s impact on consumer costs. However, the program has been widely criticized as a de facto tax on gasoline and other fuels, which were already among the most expensive of any state.
The remaining revenues have been deposited into a Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that governors and legislators have tapped for various purposes, not all of them connected to emission reductions. In a sense, it’s been a slush fund.
Last year Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature overhauled the program in two bills, Senate Bill 840 and Assembly Bill 1207. The program was extended, it was renamed as cap-and-invest and new priorities for spending auction proceeds were set.
Notably, the state’s cash-strapped and long-stalled bullet train project would get a flat $1 billion a year, rather than the 25% share it had been getting. Project managers hope that lenders will advance enough money to complete its first leg in the San Joacim Valley; the plan is to repay the loans from the $1 billion annual cap-and-invest allocation.
Early this year, the Air Resources Board released new regulations to implement the legislative changes but faced criticism that they would increase consumer costs. That led to a revision in April that softens the rules’ impact — most obviously on refiners who have been threatening to leave California — but environmental groups are very critical.
The April version would also sharply reduce net revenues from emission auctions, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, providing barely enough for the $1 billion allocation to the bullet train and another $1 billion for the governor and Legislature to spend. Other programs that have been receiving cap-and-invest support, such as wildfire protection and housing, would probably get nothing.
The program has been tapped in recent years to backfill programs that a deficit-ridden state budget could not cover, so the projected revenue drop would exacerbate efforts by Newsom and legislators to close the state budget’s yawning gap.
“The (Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund) is a relatively small portion of the overall state budget, but it has been a noteworthy source of funding for environmental and other programs in recent years,” the state Assembly’s budget advisor, Jason Sisney, says in an email. “Collapse of its revenues would change the state budget process noticeably. The state’s cost-pressured general fund seemingly would be unable to make up much, if any, of a significant (Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund) revenue decline at this time.”
When Newsom presents his revised budget this week, he may reveal how he intends to cover the cap-and-invest program’s shortfall, particularly whether he will maintain the $1 billion bullet train commitment that project leaders say is vital to continuing construction of its Merced-to-Bakersfield segment.
It could boil down to bullet train vs. wildfire protection.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
Vance says Trump cares about Americans finances amid Iran debate
Vance pushes back on claims about Trump and says Americans finances matter as the administration weighs Iran and nuclear diplomacy.
Vice President JD Vance announced on Wednesday, May 13 that the Trump administration will be deferring $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements from the state of California, as part of a new initiative to root out fraud in federal health programs.
The topic of California’s hospice care fraud has been a major focus of scrutiny by state leadership, members of President Donald Trump’s administration, and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s critics. In his announcement, Vance claimed that the administration was set on deferring these funds “because the state of California has not taken fraud very seriously.”
“There are California taxpayers and American taxpayers who are being defrauded because California isn’t taking its program seriously,” Vance said during a press conference.
Notably, this decision was part of Vance’s Anti-Fraud Task Force’s plan to implement a six-month nationwide, data-driven moratorium on new Medicare enrollment for hospices and home health agencies.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is led by Dr. Mehmet Oz, is set to use this six-month moratorium to conduct investigations and review data on Medicare programs, with the hopes of removing hospice and home health agencies that are suspected of committing fraud.
“Today we’re shutting the door on fraud — preventing new bad actors from entering Medicare while we aggressively identify, investigate, and remove those already exploiting them,” Oz said. “This is about protecting patients, restoring integrity, and safeguarding taxpayer dollars.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta called the administration’s action “unlawful” and noted that his office would be “carefully reviewing all available information” and may challenge the administration’s decision to threaten “Californians’ rights or access to critical services.”
“Once again, California appears to be targeted solely for political reasons,” Bonta said on X.
“The Trump Administration is planning to defer over $1 billion in Medicaid funding for vital programs that help seniors and people with disabilities remain safely in their homes.”
Bonta and his office have attempted to counteract criticism that the state does not take action against hospice fraud.
In April, Bonta announced that the California Department of Justice had arrested five people in connection with a major health care scheme in Southern California that defrauded taxpayers of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars.
“For years, California has led the charge to protect public programs from fraud and abuse,” Newsom said in the press release on April 10. “We hold accountable to the fullest extent of the law anyone who tries to rip off taxpayers and take advantage of public programs, particularly those as sensitive as hospice care.”
Newsom has yet to publicly respond to the administration’s decision to defer California’s Medicaid reimbursement.
However, shortly after Vance made the announcement, Newsom’s press office blasted the decision on X.
“We hate fraud. But that’s NOT what this is,” Newsom’s press office posted on X. “Vance and Oz are attacking programs that keep seniors and people with disabilities OUT of nursing homes. Pretty sick.”
Noe Padilla is a Northern California Reporter for USA Today. Contact him at npadilla@usatodayco.com, follow him on X @1NoePadilla or on Bluesky @noepadilla.bsky.social. Sign up for the TODAY Californian newsletter or follow us on Facebook at TODAY Californian.
California
California girls’ track and field stars speak out as Gavin Newsom’s Title IX crisis grows
Reese Hogan would have a very different set of medals if the rules were different in California.
It’s her third straight year competing against a trans athlete in the California girls’ track and field state tournament. She would have taken first place in the high jump all to herself in the sectional preliminaries last Saturday, if only biological females were allowed to compete.
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Now she’ll compete against a trans athlete in the sectional finals this weekend, representing her Christian high school, Crean Lutheran. It will mark one year since she went viral on social media for stepping up from the second-place spot on a medal podium up to first place, after a trans athlete who took first place stepped off.
“This is my third year competing against a transgender athlete, and last year I was stripped away of a CIF Title, and I basically worked my whole career to get to that point,” Hogan said on “Fox News at Night” on Tuesday. “It’s just really dissapointing to go into a competition knowing you already lost.”
CALIFORNIA TRACK ATHLETE BRIEFLY POSES ON 1ST-PLACE PODIUM AFTER LOSING TO TRANS ATHLETE, RECEIVES PRAISE
Her Crean Lutheran teammate, Olivia Viola, has been right there with Hogan throughout the three years of competition against trans athletes.
“I haven’t heard nearly enough adults come out and say anything. A lot of them like to say that they agree with you, that they’re proud of you for speaking up now, but they won’t do it themselves,” Viola said. “Just because it doesn’t affect every adult out there doesn’t mean it’s not worth standing up for.”
California has legally allowed biological males to compete in girls’ sports since a state law was enacted in 2013. The state’s education agencies are engaged in a federal Title IX lawsuit with President Donald Trump’s administration for commitment to upholding that state law.
A source at Governor Gavin Newsom’s office previously provided a statement to Fox News Digital in response to news that a “Save Girls Sports” rally, which the two girls attended, would be held at last Saturday’s meet.
“The Governor has said discussions on this issue should be guided by fairness, dignity, and respect. He rejects the right wing’s cynical attempt to weaponize this debate as an excuse to vilify individual kids. The Governor’s position is simple: stand with all kids and stand up to bullies,” the statement read.
“California is one of 22 states that have laws requiring students be permitted to participate in sex-segregated school sports consistent with their gender identity. California passed this law in 2013 (AB 1266) and it was signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown.”
At the rally, Hogan spoke and fired back at Newsom’s office for the statement.
“The recent statements coming from Governor Gavin Newsom’s office have made it clear that there is no intention of creating a safe, fair, and equitable environment for female high school athletes. Him and his office have gone as far as calling young girls bullies for speaking up for what we believe in,” Hogan said.
“The governor himself has admitted that males competing in women’s sports is unfair, yet nothing is being done to protect girls who train every day to compete on a level playing field.”
CALIFORNIA ATHLETE SAYS SHE CHANGES CLOTHES IN HER CAR TO AVOID SHARING A LOCKER ROOM WITH TRANS ATHLETE
California high school girls wear “Protect Girls Sports” shirts at a postseason track meet at Yorba Linda High School on May 10, 2025. (Reese Hogan/Courtesy of Reese Hogan)
Viola also rejected the “bully” assertion in Tuesday’s interview.
“I think his statement is manipulative, and it’s just completely untrue,” Viola said. “He’s saying stand up for all kids, yet he’s essentially trying to silence us… these girls are not bullies. They make a point, we all make an point to say we are not against any individual athlete, we are against California’s policies,” Viola said.
“We believe athletes deserve dignity and respect, and that’s why we believe women deserve the dignity of having their own category.”
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Crean Lutheran High School senior track and field star Reese Hogan speaks at a ‘Save Girls Sports’ rally. (Courtesy of Alyssa Cruz)
Both Viola and Hogan will compete at the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) Southern Section Final on Saturday in Moorpark, California.
And just like last year, there will be a podium ceremony after the competitions.
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