Dear CalMatters reader,

Anticipating a wet winter and the possibility of more debris flows, San Bernardino Supervisor Dawn Rowe is hoping the federal government gets back to work as the shutdown enters its 29th day. 

“We had hoped our federal partners could manage public lands in anticipation of debris flows. But the work has stopped,” said Rowe.

Last month, rain from Tropical Storm Mario triggered a flow of dead trees from the burn scar of the 2020 El Dorado fire in the San Gorgonio Wilderness. The debris flow washed out Highway 38 and affected 17 structures. Four homes were over 50% destroyed, but no injuries were reported, according to Shawn Millerick, San Bernardino County Fire Protection District public information officer.

The county’s flood control channels were designed to handle water, not the accumulation of mud, trees and rocks sent down the mountain, Rowe said. 

With additional burn scars in federal forests from the Line, Bridge and Lytle Creek Fire, and an expectation of heavy rain this winter, Rowe says the county has its hands tied. If the county had the ability to manage the forests, they would dig a catch basin to capture debris in future flows, she said.

The government shutdown is also leaving homeowners without assistance to renovate the damaged structures from the mudslide. In Oak Glen and Forest Falls, homeowners with damage are waiting for the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a federal agency paused due to the shutdown, to assess their properties and remove damage, so that they can get their insurance money and start rebuilding. 

The county can’t step in due to a lack of appropriate resources and statutory authority.

“It’s a very frustrating thing because they didn’t start the fire. It’s not the homeowners’ mud. Not the county’s mud. It’s not their rocks, or their trees. And we don’t have resources from the federal government,” Rowe said.

The county itself is working on its emergency disaster response after the February 2023 blizzard that trapped San Bernardino Mountain residents. A 2024 civil grand jury report recommended county leaders regularly meet to discuss emergency preparedness, improve the sending of emergency information and increase training for county employees. The San Bernardino Civil Grand Jury meets to audit the county government.

The county has continued to match the recommendations of the report. This month, the county’s Office of Emergency Services published a phone application that consolidates its education and emergency notification services. Ready SB County directs users to sign up for emergency alerts, volunteer, and be informed of how to prepare for fires, earthquakes and floods. Residents can also sign up for the county’s emergency notification text at this link.

Sen. Sabrina Cervantes has completed her first year in the 40-person state senate after eight years in the assembly. As the chair of the Elections and Constitutional Amendments Committee, the senator from Riverside has mostly focused on election integrity. 

“We need to protect our fundamental rights to vote, and ensure that our democracy remains strong and resilient in California. A lot of the work was going around, building public trust in our elections, which I never believe has been more urgent, especially in this administration, which continues to spread dangerous misinformation about our election integrity in this state,” Cervantes said.

Her most well-known bill is Proposition 50. But she has authored Senate Bill 851, which has established that immigration officials and other federal agents and officers cannot be at voting locations.

“We need to guard against federal interference,” Cervantes said.

“They cannot access our county registrar’s office without an actual warrant, they cannot be at our voting places, because this is about intimidation. We cannot allow our elections to be—we need to safeguard our election against any kind of government inference,” Cervantes said.

The federal Justice Department announced on Friday it will deploy officers to monitor polling sites in Riverside on Election Day.

Cervantes posted a message on X (formerly Twitter) in response: “President Trump has long targeted California & may deploy federal agents to engage in voter suppression under the guise of 'election monitoring.' The Trump Administration must not interfere with California's elections by intimidating voters or impeding the canvass of the vote. I will address this threat to the integrity of California's elections—and work to follow up on Senate Bill 851 and further bolster our state's defenses against federal interference-by introducing language in Senate Bill 73 in January.”

The bill also made it a crime to provide envelopes for the purpose of diverting ballots from the clerk’s office (doing so with fake ballot boxes is already illegal), requires the Secretary of State to alert prosecutors if a county elections official fails to certify the election results, and specified that a county clerk’s duties to certify elections are non-discretionary.

Senate Bill 851 was written in discussions with clerks across the state, Cervantes said.

Another of Cervantes’ bills, Senate Bill 3, issues a standard form for voters to verify their ballot signature if it does not match the signature on record.

Cervantes’ other bills worked to prevent harm to people affected by immigration enforcement.

Senate Bill 313 removes parental birthplaces from public birth certificates, in an attempt to prevent families from being targeted for enforcement.

“We know that this federal administration has been using sensitive information to track down people and deport them,” Cervantes said. “We want to make sure that people are not being just tracked down, and that their rights, privacy rights, are not infringed upon,” she continued.

Another of Cervantes’ bills would assist California State University students who are forced to drop out after missing classes due to immigration enforcement. Senate Bill 307 requires the California State University Board of Trustees adopt a policy allowing such students to enroll back in school. It also establishes that such mistakes would not force these students to pay out-of-state tuition upon their return to campus.

The law requires the CSU to adopt such policies, and requests the University of California to follow suit.

The bill is “giving them a pathway for (undocumented students) to complete their coursework, even if they are subjected to federal immigration action, which is what we are seeing across the UCs and Cal State this year. Just because of shifting federal immigration enforcement, we want to make sure that we are providing students with the opportunity to complete their higher education,” Cervantes said.

California voters will decide whether to vote in new congressional districts in six days. CalMatters’ Nadia Lathan reports on how Proposition 50 would cut up the districts around Southern California. 

The Yes campaign has raised $97 million to the No campaign’s $42 million, but polling has the race close, CalMatters reported. The Desert Sun reported yesterday that 4.8 million voters have already voted by mail.

CalMatters reporter Maya C. Miller has reported on how the Department of Justice will be sending monitors to polling centers in Riverside County—and how it might affect in-person voting.

A spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement wrote in a statement to Miller that the agency “is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” but that if agents are tracking “a dangerous criminal alien” who goes near a voting site they could be arrested there.

 If you’re still looking to see how the new maps will affect your voting district, the Riverside Record, the Press-Enterprise and Community Forward Redlands have published explainers on local districts under the measure.

KVCR has written on what the ballot measure means to Norco residents, and the Desert Sun has published letters to the editor on the measure.

While you are here, please sign up for the Inland Empire newsletter and let me know what kinds of stories you’d love to read, and please add my email to your contacts:  inlandempire@calmatters.org.

Thanks for reading,