Wednesday: Proposals for state stimulus and “hero pay” vie with unemployment fraud and freezes. Plus, name that condor chick.
Good morning.
Not long ago, my colleagues in The New York Times’s Food section reached out to essential workers, to see how they were getting through the pandemic. They heard from every link of the nation’s food supply.
One response came from Eric Hodge, a commercial fisherman in Ventura. On the third week of March, he said, he got back from a black-cod trip and learned that the wholesaler who bought 65 percent of his fish was no longer biting.
“Within 48 hours, I realized two-thirds of my market had just collapsed,” he told the reporter, Mahira Rivers. I won’t spoil the rest of his tale.
But he and his children are far from the only Californians struggling with hard financial choices, even with the $900 billion stimulus package Congress passed in December. Since February, before the pandemic hit, unemployment has more than doubled to 9.3 percent.
On Tuesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed his own $4.5 billion stimulus package as part of state budget negotiations. The biggest line item is $1.5 billion to accelerate the state’s shift to clean cars by funding more charging stations and rebates for clean-car buyers.
But Mr. Newsom also will ask the Legislature to fund a pandemic aid program to help struggling companies with grants of up to $25,000, including museums, galleries and other cultural enterprises, and tax credits to businesses that relocate to or expand in California. He also proposes fee waivers for bars, restaurants, barbershops, manicurists and other hard-hit businesses.
Hero Pay vs. Layoffs
In Los Angeles, the county Board of Supervisors moved Tuesday to consider a $5 hourly “hero pay” bump for supermarket and retail drugstore employees. The City of Los Angeles and Long Beach are considering similar measures. The head of the California Grocers’ Association called the measure “unprecedented” and “irresponsible.”
In a more familiar kind of workplace development, the Albertsons supermarket company, which includes Vons and Pavilions, confirmed it would lay off its in-house supermarket delivery drivers and outsource their work to the gig delivery company DoorDash. The national deal follows the November passage of a ballot measure that exempted gig employers from California’s far-reaching new labor law.
Fraud vs. Frozen Benefits
Californians have been flooding social media with complaints that unemployment checks have been suspended. The issue: technological and oversight failures that led to breathtaking pandemic unemployment insurance fraud.
Mr. Newsom last month appointed a new director of the state Employment Development Department, which handles unemployment. But “every month there’s a new E.D.D. fiasco,” State Senator Scott Wiener told The San Francisco Chronicle on Tuesday, adding that he had received at least 50 complaints in recent days from constituents whose accounts were frozen despite legitimate claims.
But The Los Angeles Times, also on Tuesday, was reporting a fresh outrage: Not only had bogus coronavirus relief claims allegedly been paid to death row inmates, year-old toddlers, a rapper and someone impersonating Senator Dianne Feinstein, among many others, but some $42 million in California claims had gone to fraudsters in out-of-state prisons and jails.
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Here’s what else to know today
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What was at stake for California in the Georgia senate election? Face time for Kamala Harris, confirmation for Xavier Becerra and more. [The San Francisco Chronicle]
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Arnold Schwarzenegger warned fellow Republicans in Congress that they “will live in infamy” if they don’t “step back from the partisan battlefield and accept the results of the election” today when Electoral College votes are counted. Mr. Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California, added that Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, is “a true hero.” [The Economist]
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The 2021 Grammy Awards were postponed Tuesday because of concerns about Covid-19 in Los Angeles, where a limited, audience-less show had been scheduled for Jan. 31. Organizers said they were aiming for a new date in March. [Rolling Stone]
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A $500,000 donation from “Prov 3:9, LLC ” to the effort to recall Governor Newsom came from an Orange County donor named John Kruger who objects to California’s pandemic restrictions on indoor, in-person worship, the group’s accountant revealed Tuesday. [Politico]
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The San Francisco Art Institute is weighing the sale of a 1931 Diego Rivera mural valued at $50 million to cover its debts and operating expenses after years of declining enrollment, pricey expansion and now, pandemic costs. Faculty members and students are aghast. [The New York Times]
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Renie Bardeau, the longtime Disneyland photographer whose work included some of the park’s most iconic images — and an estimated 100,000 Mickey Mouse photos — died Monday of complications from Covid-19. He was 86. [The Orange County Register]
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George Whitmore, who made the first ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, died on New Year’s Day in Fresno from Covid-19 complications. He was 89. [The Fresno Bee]
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Tanya Roberts, who starred in “That ’70s Show” and, before that, opposite Roger Moore as a Bond girl, died Monday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, after her publicist prematurely announced her death and then corrected the error. She was 65. [The New York Times]
And Finally …
Four months ago at the Los Angeles Zoo, a chick emerged from a shell into the hands of a California Condor Recovery Program worker. Wet, pink and bald, #LA1720 wasn’t supposed to have lived.
The chick had been upside-down in its egg and couldn’t have pecked its way out. Had it been in the wild, it would have been stillborn. But since 1982, when the species was so endangered that just 22 California condors remained on the planet, keeping condors alive has been part of the zoo’s mission.
Now #LA1720 is a three-foot, 15-pound toddler that feasts daily on regurgitated dead rats and rabbits. Mike Maxcy, the zoo’s curator of birds, says it is too young to completely fledge but old enough to “kind of bounce around and flap its wings and pretend to fly.”
In about a year, Mr. Maxcy said, after some months in a prerelease pen so that it can learn its pecking order, its keepers will release it to California’s Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge in Kern County, where it will become one of the more than 500 California condors in the wild now.
Before then, though, Mr. Maxcy and his staff think #LA1720 should have a name that’s catchier than the serial number of its egg. So the zoo has started a name-that-condor-chick campaign, with proceeds to benefit the condor recovery program. The nominees, chosen by the condor keepers, are “Cali,” “Wallace,” Timoloqin” or “Yurok.” Participants have until 11:59 p.m. Thursday to vote here.
California Today goes live at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com. Were you forwarded this email? Sign up for California Today here and read every edition online here.
California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.
January 06, 2021 at 08:47PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/california-essential-workers.html
California Delivers Hard Choices for Essential Workers - The New York Times
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