Orange County softball standings: Saturday, May 3

• May 3, 2025

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Orange County high school softball standings through Friday, May 2.

​ Orange County Register 

Orange County families are working hard, but it shouldn’t be this hard to get by

• May 3, 2025

This week, United Ways of California released the latest Real Cost Measure in California report, offering a clear look at what it actually costs to live in our communities. Unlike the federal poverty measure, which has often been criticized for being outdated, the Real Cost Measure looks at the true costs of housing, childcare, food, transportation, healthcare, and taxes. The findings are eye-opening and confirm what many people have been feeling for a long time.

In Orange County, the Real Cost Measure shows that a family of four with two working adults, a preschooler, and a school-aged child needs $127,888 a year just to meet basic needs. Meanwhile, the median household income in the county is $115,206. The gap between what families earn and what they actually need may not seem huge on paper, but it is real. Every month, thousands of families come up short and are forced to find ways to make it work. The report finds that to meet the cost of living, families need the equivalent of three full-time minimum wage incomes — just to get by.

When your income does not fully cover your needs, you make tough choices. You rely on family members for free childcare because the cost of daycare is simply too high. You skip the expensive, healthier food options and settle for cheaper, less healthy meals. You delay going to the doctor or the dentist, hoping that small problems do not turn into bigger ones. You stop adding to your savings account or your retirement fund because every dollar is crucial to getting through today. You put off expenses that feel like they can wait, even though they are often important for long-term health and stability.

This way of living might allow families to survive in Orange County for another month, or even another year. But it also means that many households are just one unexpected event away from financial tragedy. What happens when the family member who watches your children gets sick? What happens when a small cavity turns into a thousand dollar root canal? What happens when the car you depend on to get to work breaks down and the repair costs more than your emergency savings?

The daily pressure of living paycheck to paycheck takes a serious toll. Stress caused by financial insecurity is tied to long-term health problems, including high blood pressure, heart disease, and mental health struggles. Over time, the cost of living this way adds up not just in dollars but in years of a person’s life.

It is important to understand that this struggle is not because people are not working hard enough. In fact, the Real Cost Measure shows that 98 percent of households falling below the standard have at least one working adult. Many families are working multiple jobs, sacrificing their own health, and doing everything they can to stay afloat. Orange County is not a passive community. It is filled with hard-working families who are making major efforts to build a better life. But it is hard, much harder than it should be.

Living in Orange County should not require constant sacrifice. It should not mean living with the daily fear that one unexpected bill could tear everything apart. It should not force families to choose between a healthy meal or paying rent, between seeing a doctor or keeping the lights on.

The release of the Real Cost Measure is a major wake-up call for all of us. It gives us clear proof that far too many families are living on the edge. It challenges us to do better for our neighbors, by supporting policies and programs that make childcare more affordable, healthcare easier to access, housing more within reach, and good paying jobs more available.

Getting by should not be the accepted standard for Orange County families. Thriving must be the goal.

Andrew Fahmy is the Executive Director of the United for Financial Security Initiative at Orange County United Way and is an appointed member of the Orange County Workforce Development Board. 

​ Orange County Register 

How to save the LA28 Olympics from the incompetence of Los Angeles leaders

• May 3, 2025

I went to the Olympics in 1984 – not as an athlete nor a reporter but as a volunteer at the Olympic Village on the campus of UCLA. Just 16 years old, I swelled with pride at the chance to participate in this global celebration of unity and excellence through competitive sports. As a messenger, simply delivering envelopes and packages, I still felt part of the grand event. Meticulously planned and flawlessly executed, the 1984 Olympics remains the gold standard, notably achieving a small profit.

But for those who love this tremendous quadrennial event, the 2028 Los Angeles Games should spark alarm, not excitement. Today, Los Angeles is a shadow of that city, riddled with incompetence that threaten the Olympic legacy

Think about what it means to host the Olympics. Thousands of athletes, millions of visitors, and a hoard of media from all around the world – and a need to seamlessly coordinate venues, transportation, and security – with an infrastructure that can support it all. LA’s 1984 success leveraged existing facilities and fiscal prudence. 

Today, the city’s fiscal health is declining rapidly. There are concerns that the $6.9 billion Olympic budget is already insufficient, with inflation and post-disaster rebuilding likely inflating costs by large amounts. Facing at least a $1 billion city budget deficit, Mayor Karen Bass has been walking the halls of the State Capitol, with hands out for a bailout. It’s not hard to find public critics voicing growing skepticism, openly questioning how a city drowning in debt can manage a global spectacle.

The recent tragic wildfires in the Pacific Palisades, Pasadena, and Altadena, which ravaged over 18,000 structures, claimed 28 lives, and caused over $40 billion in damages, have laid bare LA’s fragility. The effort to rebuild is paralyzed with only four permits issued for 6,000 homes in Palisades months later. While Olympic venues remain untouched, the city’s stretched resources, evidenced by Mayor Bass’s released budget including the termination of over 1600 city workers, paint a concerning picture. 

How is Mayor Bass, or anyone, supposed to manage that act of miraculous multi-tasking – focusing on a city reeling from backbreaking debt, disaster recovery of epic proportions, and preparing for the Olympic Games? There is a growing sense that the Olympics may falter.

How are Olympic preparations coming along? Despite spending the city into debt, the homelessness crisis affecting over 75,000 people remains unresolved, festering. Advocates for the city’s homeless have launched “NOlympics LA,” raising all manner of concerns about the potential negative effects on that population. The city’s goal of a “car-free” Olympics is in chaos. Only 23 of the 3,000 promised bus shelters are installed. Planned Metro expansions face delays, and federal funding requests have been rejected, casting doubt on moving vast numbers of Olympic spectators efficiently. Sensing catastrophe, Olympics sponsors are withdrawing, and LA28’s leadership is unraveling, with key executives resigning. And who is excited to have Gov. Gavin Newsom declare the Olympics the “Recovery Games” where somehow the funds raised for this event are going to cure the ills of the state’s largest city?

Public trust is eroding. LA’s contract with the International Olympic Committee leaves the city liable for $270 million in initial cost overruns, with California on the hook for up to $270 million more. This isn’t the 1984 triumph in which I participated as a volunteer. It’s a city buckling under fiscal, social, and political pressures. 

This isn’t the first time a U.S. Olympic Games has faced turmoil. The 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games were mired in scandal and financial distress and public confidence was plummeting.

What the Olympics committee did then may provide a blueprint for getting LA28 back on track. They brought in Mitt Romney, then a former Massachusetts governor and turnaround expert. Appointed CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee. Romney slashed costs, secured close to a billion dollars in sponsorships, and restored transparency. His leadership transformed the faltering Winter Games into a success. 

Romney’s model—decisive, competent, and apolitical—proved that strong leadership can salvage an Olympic crisis. LA 2028 needs a similar rescue. With political leaders mired in deficits of their own making and distracted by crises, the IOC and LA28 must recruit a proven manager to oversee final preparations and execution. For those who love the Olympics, now is the time to demand this model to protect the Games’ legacy and restore the pride we all felt in 1984.

Jon Fleischman, a longtime political strategist in California, resides in Yorba Linda with his wife and two children.

​ Orange County Register 

Chihuahua mix Pearl’s friendly, joyful outlook is infectious

• May 3, 2025

Breed: Chihuahua mix

Age: 1 year

Sex: Spayed female

Size: 8 pounds

Pearl’s story: She may be tiny, but Pearl is a big bundle of pure joy. This girl is sweet as can be, with a heart full of love and a shining personality. She’s happy, lively and always ready to brighten your day with her cheerful spirit. Pearl is the perfect companion, full of affection and charm, and is just waiting for the perfect home where she can share all of her love. She’s fully vaccinated and microchipped.

Adoption cost: $300

Adoption procedure: Fill out Friends of Orange County’s Homeless Pets’ online application or email fochp@yahoo.com. The website has other pets in need of homes, too.

​ Orange County Register 

Trump officials must report efforts, if any, to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, judge rules

• April 30, 2025

By BEN FINLEY

A federal judge on Wednesday again directed the Trump administration to provide information about its efforts so far, if any, to comply with her order to retrieve Kilmar Abrego Garcia from an El Salvador prison.

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland temporarily halted her directive for information at the administration’s request last week. But with the seven-day pause expiring at 5 p.m., she set May deadlines for officials to provide sworn testimony on anything they have done to return him to the U.S.

Abrego Garcia, 29, has been imprisoned in his native El Salvador for nearly seven weeks, while his mistaken deportation has become a flash point for President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and his increasing friction with the U.S. courts.

The president acknowledged to ABC News on Tuesday that he could call El Salvador’s president and have Abrego Garcia sent back. But Trump doubled down on his claims that Abrego Garcia is a member of the MS-13 gang.

“And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that,” Trump told ABC’s Terry Moran in the Oval Office.

Police in Maryland had identified Abrego Garcia as an MS-13 gang member in 2019 based off his tattoos, Chicago Bulls hoodie and the word of a criminal informant. But Abrego Garcia was never charged. His attorneys say the informant claimed Abrego Garcia was in an MS-13 chapter in New York, where he’s never lived.

The gang identification by local police prompted the Trump administration to expel Abrego Garcia in March to an infamous El Salvador prison. But the deportation violated a U.S. immigration judge’s order in 2019 that protected him from being sent to El Salvador.

Abrego Garcia had demonstrated to the immigration court that he likely faced persecution by local Salvadoran gangs that terrorized him and his family, court records state. He fled to the U.S. at 16 and lived in Maryland for about 14 years, working construction, getting married and raising three kids.

Xinis ordered the Trump administration to return him nearly a month ago, on April 4. The Supreme Court ruled April 10 that the administration must work to bring him back.

But the case only became more heated. Xinis lambasted a government lawyer who couldn’t explain what, if anything, the Trump administration has done. She then ordered officials to provide sworn testimony and other information to document their efforts.

The Trump administration appealed. But a federal appeals court backed Xinis’ order for information in a blistering ruling, saying, “we shall not micromanage the efforts of a fine district judge attempting to implement the Supreme Court’s recent decision.”

The Trump administration resisted, saying the information Xinis sought involved protected state secrets and government deliberations. She in turn scolded government lawyers for ignoring her orders and acting in “bad faith.”

The judge has directed U.S. attorneys to provide specific justifications for their claims of privileged information. But her order could face continued resistance.

When a reporter asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday whether he has had any conversations with El Salvador about returning Abrego Garcia, Rubio said foreign policy should not be discussed with judges.

“Well, I’ll never tell you that. And you know who else I’ll never tell? A judge,” Rubio said during a Cabinet meeting. “Because the conduct of all foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States and the executive branch, not some judge.”

Associated Press reporter Seung Min Kim in Washington contributed to this report.

​ Orange County Register 

RFK Jr. exaggerates share of autistic population with severe limitations

• April 30, 2025

By Louis Jacobson, PolitiFact, KFF Health News

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attracted notice — and in some quarters, outrage — for remarks about autism, a topic he’s clashed with scientists about for years.

Kennedy held an April 16 press conference pegged to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that found the prevalence of autism rising to 1 in 31 among 8-year-olds, the latest in a series of increases in recent decades.

Kennedy said “autism destroys families” and is an “individual tragedy as well.”

Kennedy said many autistic children were “fully functional” and had “regressed” into autism “when they were 2 years old. And these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

He also said: “Most cases now are severe. Twenty-five percent of the kids who are diagnosed with autism are nonverbal, non-toilet-trained, and have other stereotypical features.”

Medical experts, along with people on the autism spectrum, told PolitiFact that Kennedy’s portrayal was skewed. A 2023 study written by CDC officials and university researchers found that one-quarter of people on the autism spectrum have severe limitations. But this is on the high end of studies, and many people in that one-quarter of the autism population do not have the limitations Kennedy mentioned.

The vast majority of people on the spectrum do not have those severe challenges.

“I wish he would spend some time with parents of other autistic children, and well-regarded scientists who have studied this condition for decades,” said David Mandell, a University of Pennsylvania psychiatry professor and director of the Penn Center for Mental Health. “He has a fixed, myopic view.”

The Department of Health and Human Services did not provide data on what share of people with autism diagnoses are unable to do the things Kennedy described.

“Secretary Kennedy remains committed to working toward a society where people with autism have access to meaningful opportunities, appropriate supports, and the full respect and recognition they deserve,” department press secretary Vianca N. Rodriguez Feliciano told PolitiFact. “His statements emphasized the need for increased research into environmental factors contributing to the rise in autism diagnoses, not to stigmatize individuals with autism or their families.”

The Washington Post reported that an HHS spokesperson said Kennedy “was referring to those that are severely affected by this chronic condition” and that “this was in no way a general characterization.”

We took a closer look at the available data and research.

What Is Autism Spectrum Disorder?

At root, “autism is a difference in how your child’s brain works that shapes how they interact with the world around them,” according to the Cleveland Clinic. People with autism diagnoses, the clinic says, “may excel more in certain areas and need more support in other areas compared to their neurotypical peers.”

Over the years, autism’s definition and diagnosis has changed.

In the 1950s and 1960s, “it is very likely that many people with profound autism were misdiagnosed with ‘mental retardation,’ a term in use at the time, or schizophrenia, while other autistic people probably got no diagnosis at all,” said John J. Pitney Jr., a Claremont McKenna College politics professor, author of the book “The Politics of Autism: Navigating the Contested Spectrum,” and a father of an autistic son who’s about to graduate from college.

In more recent decades, the diagnostic criteria for autism have broadened, producing a spectrum ranging from severe impacts to more modest ones. Today’s definition encompasses “individuals with milder symptoms, stronger language skills, and higher IQs,” said Christopher Banks, president and CEO of the Autism Society of America.

How Common are the More Limiting Forms of Autism?

Autism’s expanded definition means a minority of people on the spectrum have the kinds of severe limitations Kennedy cited, though it’s hard to say how many.

The highest total we found comes from a 2023 federal report, written by CDC officials and university researchers. It found that 26.7% of 8-year-olds with autism had “profound” autism, a newly framed (and not universally accepted) definition that included children who were nonverbal, were minimally verbal, or had an IQ below 50. (“Average” IQ is considered 90 to 109.)

People with profound autism “will require lifetime, round-the-clock care,” said Judith Ursitti, co-founder and president of the Profound Autism Alliance, a nonprofit. Ursitti said her 21-year-old son “is not headed towards employment or a career in poetry or baseball. Acknowledging this fact is important, as this population is often excluded from media portrayals and research.”

Other estimates are lower.

A study published in 2024, by researchers at the University of Utah and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, looked at 1,368 U.S. children with autism. When parents were asked whether they would characterize their child’s autism as “severe,” 10.1% said yes. Among this group of children with “severe” autism, a minority — 38% — were classified as having a “severe” intellectual disability.

“Even among those with an intellectual disability, there’s huge variability,” Mandell said. “People with Down syndrome have an intellectual disability but often are quite capable and can do all the things RFK points to.”

The CDC published data in 2020 showing that 42% of people with autism had an IQ in the average or higher range, and another study has found that this figure could be as high as 60%.

Zoe Gross, the director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, said limited available data suggests that Kennedy’s characterization is exaggerated.

Gross, who is on the spectrum herself, said a 2017 study found that 61% of people on the spectrum who were studied were employed. As for baseball, the Special Olympics, which was founded by Kennedy’s family and includes competitors who are on the spectrum, includes softball. At least two people who played major league baseball, Tarik El-Abour and Jim Eisenreich, were public about their autism diagnoses.

Gross said there is no official data on autistic poets, but she was aware of the poet DJ Savarese, a nonspeaking but highly literate advocate. Gross was also unable to find data on dating, but she said she’s married, and she pointed to the Netflix reality show “ Love on the Spectrum,” which follows autistic people’s dating lives. It is now in its third season.

As for not using a toilet unassisted, the 2024 study that analyzed 1,368 U.S. children with autism and found that 10.1% were considered “severe” found that 67% of those in the “severe” category had trouble bathing or dressing, which, if generalizable to the entire autistic population, would be less than 7%. Another study found urinary incontinence reported by 12.5% of the autistic people studied and fecal incontinence by 7.9%.

Eric M. Garcia, who is on the spectrum and who has written the book “We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation,” was covering Kennedy’s remarks as Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Hearing his words “felt so demoralizing,” Garcia told PolitiFact. “A lot of people will respond by saying, ‘He didn’t mean autistic people like you.’ But that doesn’t make it any better.”

PolitiFact staff writer Madison Czopek contributed to this article.

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

​ Orange County Register 

New California neighborhood billed as first fire-resistant community in U.S.

• April 30, 2025

The homes in the half-built subdivision look a lot like all the others nestled up against the parched, shrubby hills of Escondido in north San Diego County.

But look a little closer. The gutters and vents are enclosed in a thin, wire mesh. Each window is double-paned, the glass tempered to withstand the heat of a wildfire, the stucco around the shutters resistant to flame. The privacy fences, a suburban staple, look like wood, but are actually brown-tinted steel. Every foundation sits behind a moat of gravel.

Also see: What is ‘home hardening’? Fire-resistant walls, roofs, windows and landscaping 

National mega-developer KB Home is marketing Dixon Trail as the first purpose-built “wildfire resilient neighborhood” in the United States. The next time fire rips through the chaparral in surrounding hills (a question of when, not if) this cluster of homes is being built to keep the flames at the subdivision’s edge.

Though only half of the 64 homes have been constructed, the development had its grand opening earlier this month. No one from KB would say as much, but in purely marketing terms, the timing couldn’t have been better. For years, wildfire-resilient home and neighborhood design has been a niche consideration for many California homeowners. January’s Los Angeles firestorms have made it feel more like an urgent necessity.

“Buyers want to feel safe in their homes and this is a really big plus for them,” said Steve Ruffner, who oversees KB projects across the region.

The design of each house and the layout of the entire subdivision — with healthy buffers between each building and scant flammable vegetation — meet standards set by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, a research nonprofit funded by the insurance industry. The institute began issuing its “wildfire prepared” designations to homes in 2022. Think organic certification on produce, except for homes built to withstand wildfire.

This is the first time the institute plans to give its stamp of approval to an entire neighborhood.

Building a fire resilient home from scratch is one thing. Bringing older homes up to that heightened standard is a more daunting and costly challenge — and one that California lawmakers at the state and local level are only beginning to grapple with.

Millions of Californians already live in tinderbox canyons and at the edges of shrub fields and overgrown forests. An unknown number live in homes built before 2008, when the state introduced its wildfire-minded building code for new construction in high hazard areas. Some home-hardening retrofits are cheap and DIY-able. Others less so. A report from 2024 by the independent research group Headwater Economics put the cost to harden a two-story, 2,000 square-foot single family home at anywhere from $2,000 to “more than $100,000.”

Also see: Southern California fire danger zones increase 76% in new maps

Karen Collins, vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, calls these retrofits “pre-disaster mitigation” measures. As wildfires grow more severe and costly, these measures can offer “a huge return on investment from what is otherwise spent at the loss,” she said. Translated from insurance speak: Replacing a roof before a fire is cheaper than replacing an entire house afterward.

“But yes, to retrofit and put on new roofs and new siding, that gets into the multiple tens of thousands of dollars, so there’s a public policy trade off,” she said. “Like, how do we do this?”

Some local governments — albeit not many — offer grants and incentives to fire-wary homeowners hoping to make these upgrades.

The insurance industry is beginning to offer discounts to some homeowners who make firewise changes, though the promised savings are often smaller than many homeowners expect or demand.

There aren’t any statewide plans to help harden California’s housing stock en masse, though a pilot project is underway and the Legislature is considering a few other ideas.

RELATED: Why are Californians allowed to keep putting homes where fires burn?

Beyond changes in policy, California homeowners, planners, real estate agents and developers may need to change the way they think about wildfire risk, said Yana Valachovic, a forest health and fire expert with the University of California. Rather than viewing home hardening as a luxury expense, or even a necessary cost that must be begrudgingly assumed, such protections might just need to become standard features of homeownership across the increasingly fire-prone American West.

“It needs to be spoken about in the advertisement of the house, because these are all keys to insurability and the protection of your investment,” said Valachovic. “Fuels management and home hardening are just as important as a remodeled kitchen at this point.”

A fireproof home?

Home-hardening experts try to think like embers in a windstorm.

Open eaves (the cavities beneath a roof’s overhang); vents that lead into an attic; wood decks; wood shingles; wood fences; and any plants, lawn furniture, cars, sheds and trash bins stowed right up against the house — all of these present an inviting array of nooks and crannies in which embers can settle and smolder. Hardening a home means covering them up, replacing material that burns with material that doesn’t, and clearing a five-foot non-combustible buffer around the house, an area state regulators call “zone zero”

Ember-proofing alone isn’t always enough. In urban conflagrations, like the ones in Los Angeles, flames go horizontal in the gale-force winds, turning a burning home into a blow-torch trained upon its neighbors. The sheer heat radiating off of a burning structure can warp and melt window frames 20 feet away.

In those conditions, cement siding and tempered-glass can give a home a fighting chance.

When the Insurance Institute conducted a formal forensic survey in Los Angeles, they found repeated examples of homes where a single double-paned tempered glass window, a stucco wall or a walkway free of decorative plants likely kept the flames at bay.

Experts turn to the surviving homes for lessons after every major fire. In Maui, after the Lahaina waterfront burned in 2023, images of a single red-roofed home, lonely and seemingly untouched, went viral. Reporting later revealed that just prior to the disaster, the homeowners replaced the roof with a thick metal one and removed its surrounding vegetation. They were trying to keep out termites, not flames, but fire doesn’t consider motive.

There may be no such thing as a fire-proof house, but if vulnerability to disaster is a numbers game, home hardening — like seat belts, bike helmets and vaccines — can up the odds of survival.

Pilots and programs

The closest thing California has to a statewide home hardening campaign at the moment is a $117 million pilot project.

The California Wildfire Mitigation Program, run jointly by the California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) and the governor’s Office of Emergency Services, is funding half a dozen neighborhood-wide retrofits in especially fire-prone and economically distressed corners of the state.

The program seeks to tackle the problem of fire resilience at a community scale. Managing wildfire risk is a bit like managing an infectious disease: There’s only so much a single homeowner can do if their neighbors are unprotected.

The pilot was launched by the legislature in 2019, but is only just beginning to get off the ground. So far, 21 homes have been retrofitted: 19 in Kelseyville, Lake County and two in Dulzura, east of San Diego. Neighborhoods in the Sierra foothills and California’s far north are still working through the start-up and permitting process.

Each house presents its own array of costly challenges. New roofs, new siding, new windows, replacing decks, cleaning brush. “We don’t want to just kinda harden the home,” said Deanna Fernweh, program manager for the Lake County project.

This is new terrain for the state and the pilot has run into plenty of unexpected complications along the way. Fire-resistant materials are a specialty product that can be hard to source, particularly if you need something to be just the right size. Local contractors don’t always know much about fire risk, nor do the local permitting officials. Some counties require construction workers to be paid union-level wages. With most of the money coming from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the work is also subject to rigorous environmental standards. Any work done in the spring and summer has to wait on nest surveys to ensure that construction doesn’t disturb migratory or endangered birds.

All of that adds to the price tag. The cheapest retrofit so far has come in at roughly $36,000, said J. Lopez, executive director of the statewide program. That was a tidy, well-maintained home in Kelseyville. The most expensive so far was $110,000. At current funding levels, the program is on track to harden roughly 2,000 homes.

That’s not likely to put a noticeable dent in the total number of vulnerable homes across the state. But Lopez said part of the goal of the pilot is to figure out just how expensive, delay-ridden and generally annoying it is to harden a neighborhood — and then figure out ways to make it all less so.

“When the VCR first came out, I think the first ones were about $1,500,” he said. “I leave it to American ingenuity to come up with solutions — and we are part of that, helping move that along.”

Also: State’s new fire maps won’t push up insurance rates, industry says

The pilot is currently set to expire in 2029, though the Legislature is considering a bill to make it permanent. Future funding remains an open question. So far FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Assistance Grant program, which provides much of the funding for the California program, has been spared the cuts that have felled other emergency response and preparedness initiatives under the Trump administration.

Legislators may also take up legislation this year to shave off some of the tax revenue the state currently collects from property insurers and redirect it toward a grant program for fire-resistant roofs and vegetation management work. Another bill would create a “Community Hardening Commission” inside the state’s Department of Insurance to be tasked with recommending new home hardening rules and improving old ones. A third bill would create a state-run home hardening certification program, with the hope being that insurers will be more likely to cover a home with the state’s imprimatur.

“Almost everyone knows what the things are that we have to do with home hardening,” Assemblymember Steve Bennett, an Oxnard Democrat and the author of that certification bill, said at a budget committee hearing in February. “We’ve talked about it and talked about it, but we’re not really making much progress.”

‘Do this or you’re done’

Byers Enterprises has run a steady roofing business out of Grass Valley, just west of the Tahoe National Forest, since the late 1980s. In 2022, it started a specific division for home hardening.

“We’re seeing a real groundswell of interest,” said Jeff Fierstein, the company’s general manager. Some of that interest is due to the Los Angeles fires, which put fire risk top of mind for many.

But he said roughly half of his customers are turning to him out of duress. “The insurance companies are saying ‘Do this or you’re done,’” he said.

Not every fire-prone jurisdiction has Marin’s resources or Berkeley’s political appetite for new mandates. For the majority of Californians living in the so-called wildland urban interface, the most powerful nudge toward home hardening comes in the form of an insurance company’s premium hike or non-renewal notice.

A regulation from 2023 is forcing California insurers to offer discounts to homeowners who make certain home hardening investments or join Firewise communities, voluntary neighborhood disaster preparedness groups. But the approval process has been slow, the discounts vary from carrier to carrier, the requirements coming from insurers don’t always match the state’s own standards and the savings on offer are, according to some, miserly.

California property insurers are not in an especially discounting mood. After a decade of staggering wildfire-related losses, surging inflation and what the industry has long characterized as a sclerotic regulatory environment that doesn’t allow them to cover their costs, many carriers are looking for any excuse to drop California customers.

That dour climate might begin to change soon, said Janet Ruiz, a spokesperson for the industry association, the Insurance Information Institute. The state’s Department of Insurance is rolling out a series of policy changes aimed at enticing insurers back into the market. That overhaul “should bring more insurance companies into writing more policies,” putting them on a stronger financial footing and making them more willing to cut certain homeowners a break.

Even with the right regulations in place, insurers aren’t known for embracing change, said Dave Jones, California’s former Department of Insurance head who now runs the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley’s law school.

Earlier this month, Jones and the nonprofit Nature Conservancy released a new, first-of-its-kind insurance policy for Tahoe-Donner, one of the country’s largest homeowners associations. In exchange for years of tree thinning and brush clearing work, the Truckee-based HOA will receive nearly 40% off on its insurance policy.

Also see: California’s former insurance commissioner sees grim future, more wildfires

“It’s a very conservative industry,” he said. “You need to show them that an insurer is able to (make money doing this) before others will follow suit.”

The upside: The new policy shows that at least one insurer — in this case, Globe Underwriting, based in London — believes it can account for the reduced risk that comes with certain wildfire mitigation efforts and then pass some of those savings onto customers.

The downside: The policy only covers commonly held land, not individual homes and, at least for now, the Nature Conservancy is footing the $55,000 annual premium.

“The big success here is that the insurance policy was written at all because this is an area where insurers are pulling out and it was written because of the forest treatment work that the homeowners association is undertaking,” said Jones.

Whether it’s forest management programs, zone zero mandates or home hardening grants, the public is only going to support these taxpayer-funded initiatives if they start to open up the insurance market and bring down premiums, he said.

“Part of what we’re trying to do here is demonstrate that this can be done, convince insurers to do it, but also continue to build public support for these necessary investments,” said Jones. “Because this stuff is not inexpensive to do.”

​ Orange County Register 

Angels’ Taylor Ward to go ‘back to the drawing board’ amid slump

• April 30, 2025

SEATTLE — Taylor Ward had planned a busy afternoon for his “day off.”

The Angels’ left fielder was not in the lineup for the first time this season Wednesday. He said he planned to spend the bottom of every inning, while the Angels were in the field, in the indoor batting cage trying to figure out what’s gone wrong at the plate lately.

“Frustrated,” Ward said. “Really just missing pitches right now.”

Ward was hitting .189 with a .623 OPS. He’s still hit six homers, which is slightly ahead of his normal pace, but little else has gone right offensively.

Ward has struck out in 23.5% of his plate appearances, which is around the major-league average and in line with his normal numbers. However, 10 of those 28 strikeouts have been called third strikes, which is a higher rate than usual.

On Tuesday night, Ward struck out looking at sweeper that was well within the strike zone. It came when the Angels had a potential rally in the eighth inning.

“The borderline pitches, I’m cool with taking those,” Ward said. “If they’re painted, I think over time, they’ll even out. But if the ball is fully in the zone, I need to take a hack at that for sure. Like my last at-bat last night, I need to foul that pitch off or take a swing at it. So there’s no excuse for that. I think it’s just the way things go sometimes. I think I’m seeing the ball well, except for maybe that last one last night.”

Ward has been slightly more passive than usual, swinging at 41.7% of the pitches he’s seen. He’s swung at 58.6% of the pitches he’s seen in the strike zone, which is the lower than his career average of 62%. The major-league average is 66.2%.

All of these are relatively small differences, and it’s still early enough that things could change quickly.

Ward said a fix to his mechanics can help him see the ball better.

“I’m stepping in the bucket,” Ward said. “My front shoulder has just kind of taken off. In the past, I’ve really stayed in there longer with my front shoulder. So that’s just another thing we work on in the cage, and hopefully that allows me to stay on pitches better and see them longer.”

Ward said he doesn’t think that’s still a residue of when he was hit in the face by a pitch, suffering multiple fractures, in July 2023. He admitted that getting hit again in 2024 caused him problems for about a month, but doesn’t believe that’s the current issue.

“There hasn’t creeped in much thought about getting hit,” Ward said. “I’m just mechanically not putting myself in a good position to see it for a long time. So I just need to get back to the drawing board and figure out how I’m going to stay in there longer and see it longer.”

ROTATION FLIP

The Angels shuffled their rotation for the upcoming series against the Detroit Tigers.

Kyle Hendricks would have been in line to start the opener, but he’s been pushed back to the third game, on Saturday.

Yusei Kikuchi will now start Thursday, followed by José Soriano, Hendricks and Jack Kochanowicz. Tyler Anderson would start the first game of the following series, next Tuesday.

Manager Ron Washington said Kikuchi’s relatively short outing Saturday – 66 pitches – allowed them to bring him back on four days’ rest and rearrange the order.

By aligning the pitchers this way, the Angels split up Hendricks and Tyler Anderson, who are both finesse pitchers without much velocity. They also split up Soriano and Kochanowicz, who are both pitch-to-contact sinker specialists.

STAY GOLDEN

Starting Thursday, the Angels will play 26 consecutive games in California, the longest such streak in franchise history. Their only road games in that Golden State span will be against the Padres, Dodgers and Athletics. It will be a welcome respite for a team that has played only nine home games, and only three of 20 road games on the West Coast.

“Hopefully this gives us a chance to get back and get things in order and start really grinding and playing the game the way we know we can play,” Washington said.

While the travel will be minimal, the Dodgers and Padres are two of the best teams in the National League. The Tigers and New York Yankees, two of the best teams in the American League, come to Angel Stadium in May.

NOTES

The Angels were out doing bunting drills on the field before Wednesday’s game. Normally they bunt against a pitching machine, but the Angels had 39-year-old pitching coach Barry Enright throwing to them in order to give the drill a more realistic feel. Washington said he’d like to see his players try to bunt for hits more often. They haven’t been in position lately to make use of the sacrifice bunt because they’ve mostly been trailing by multiple runs. …

Second-base prospect Christian Moore had his second straight three-hit game Tuesday at Double-A. Moore was hitting .156 with a .442 OPS through his first 13 games, but in the next seven games he hit .360 with a 1.220 OPS, including his first homer of the season. He has struck out just six times in 32 plate appearances in the recent stretch.

UP NEXT

Tigers (RHP Casey Mize, 4-1, 2.12) at Angels (LHP Yusei Kikuchi, 0-4, 4.31), 6:38 p.m. Thursday, FanDuel Sports Network West, 830 AM

​ Orange County Register