SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom announced July 18 that through SUN Bucks, a new federal food program, more than 3,240,000 low-income children and their families have received food assistance during summer break. More than $162 million in food purchases have already been made by families across the state, and over five million total cards are expected to be distributed across California in the coming months, keeping kids fed. This comes as 13 Republican-led states continue to refuse to fund these programs that will help their local children.
Most families did not and will not need to take action to receive SUN Bucks. Children who qualify for free or reduced-price school meals through a school meal application or an alternative income form, or who receive CalFresh, CalWORKs, or Medi-Cal, were automatically enrolled. Eligible families are receiving SUN Bucks electronic benefits transfer or EBT cards, which can be used just like CalFresh benefits to purchase groceries. SUN Bucks is providing $120 per child, which is equivalent to $40 per month for the three months schools are typically closed during the summer.
This new program was implemented by the California Department of Social Services or CDSS and the California Department of Education CDE. In addition to SUN Bucks, Summer Meal Programs provide opportunities for children in need to access meals during the summer. Families can locate summer meal sites in their communities using the CA Meals for Kids App or by visiting the Summer Meal Service Sites webpage.
Additional details
Children not automatically enrolled must apply for free or reduced-price school meals by completing and submitting a school meal application or alternative income form by Aug. 31, 2024, or they will not receive SUN Bucks benefits for summer 2024. Families may obtain the free or reduced-price school meal application from their school or school administrator’s office.
The SUN Bucks helpline is available at 877-328-9677 to support cardholders who have questions about their specific SUN Bucks card. The helpline provides automated support 24 hours a day, seven days per week. Live agents are available Monday through Friday, 6 a.m. – 8 p.m. People with general SUN Bucks questions are encouraged to visit the CDSS website for information. Receiving SUN Bucks will have no bearing on eligibility for CalFresh or any other state public benefit program. Additionally, it is not part of federal public charge determinations. More information about public charge is available on the CDSS website.
Regardless of when a card is mailed or received, every SUN Bucks card will be loaded with the full $120 per child. Per federal rules, funds must be used within 122 days of the funds being loaded to the card. Any unused funds on the card will expire after 122 days. Expired benefits cannot be replaced.
Rancho Palos Verdes — The first phase of the Wayfarers Chapel disassembly, as of July 17, is complete and the team has successfully salvaged the most vulnerable elements of the landmark chapel: redwood, steel, glass and roof tiles.
Wayfarers Chapel and the surrounding grounds are now closed due to the momentum of local land movement, non-historic buildings on site have been removed, and the last remaining historic elements to be salvaged are the Palos Verdes stone walls of the chapel, other historic site elements such as the stone fountain, and the bell tower.
As the Portuguese Bend landslide accelerates at an unprecedented rate it is important to safely remove the bell tower as soon as possible. At roughly 80 feet high, and with the dangerous site conditions, it is not possible to carefully salvage the materials of the bell tower in the same way as the other chapel materials.
Scaffolding and large cranes cannot safely be used on site. Easily removable objects on the bell tower such as the cross, roof tiles, bells, interior spiral stair, and Palos Verdes stone that is reachable from grade will be salvaged and stored for reuse, and the tower itself will be removed.
According to Katie Horak, principal at Architectural Resources Group, “All possible options for salvaging the bell tower have been explored by the design team. Safety continues to be our number one priority, and given the circumstances of the land movement we continue to see on site, it is imperative that the bell tower is removed as soon as possible.”
The movement on the site to date has caused damage to every structure on the property and is increasingly seen in buckling concrete and separations in the earth. While it continues to be possible, the design team will document and salvage original Palos Verdes stone from the chapel’s foundation, low walls and other historic features such as the fountain and colonnade for future reuse. This work is ongoing now, and the construction team is expected to begin removing the bell tower July 19.
“It has been approximately one year since accelerated movement on chapel grounds caused greater visible damage to structures and hardscapes than ever before. Who could have imagined that within one year’s time the chapel would be deconstructed and all structures on the property would only be a memory? As difficult as this year has been, we have felt the support of our community and City and are strengthened in our resolve to rebuild,” says Dan Burchett, executive director, Wayfarers Chapel.
SACRAMENTO – Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the release of up to $3.3 billion in competitive grant funding from Proposition 1 to expand the behavioral health continuum and provide appropriate care to individuals experiencing mental health conditions and substance use disorders — with a particular focus on people who are most seriously ill, vulnerable, or homeless. Proposition 1 includes two parts: a $6.4 billion behavioral health bond for treatment settings and housing with services, and historic reform of the Behavioral Health Services Act or BHSA to focus on people with the most serious illnesses, substance disorders, and housing needs.
The state is also releasing the Proposition 1 Behavioral Health Services Act: Housing Supports Primer (July 2024) for counties, which explains how to spend the ongoing BHSA revenue on housing interventions. Per Proposition 1, 30% of county BHSA funds each year must be directed to housing supports for people with serious behavioral health needs, including allowable ongoing capital to build more housing options. Based on projections for fiscal year 2026-2027, the total statewide housing funding will be approximately $950 million annually to help ensure the longevity of these projects. The Proposition 1 Behavioral Health Services Act: Housing Supports Primer (July 2024) can be found HERE and a high-level fact sheet be found HERE.
Applications are due from cities, counties, non-profits, for-profits, and tribal entities on Dec. 13, 2024, and are anticipated to be awarded by early 2025. A second round of funding from Proposition 1 bonds will support even more behavioral health facilities in 2025. BHCIP funding made possible by the bond is estimated to create 6,800 residential treatment beds and 26,700 outpatient treatment slots for behavioral health and will build on other major behavioral health initiatives in California.
Find a fact sheet on the first round of Proposition 1 bond construction funding: HERE.
Learn more and apply
Interested applicants can view the RFA for more details about eligibility requirements. To be considered “launch ready,” eligible entities must meet the criteria specified in the RFA. For more information about Bond BHCIP Round 1: Launch Ready, please visit the BHCIP website. Information about housing supports related to the BHSA is available here More information about California’s transformation of our entire mental health and substance use disorder system can be found at mentalhealth.ca.gov.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, announced on July 16 that it would be awarding grants totalling less than $160 million to organizations so that they can measure the carbon emissions of businesses that manufacture or use construction materials. This money is part of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which is intended to reduce climate change and invest in clean energy.
The funding will be used to create environmental product declarations, or EPDs. These will allow businesses, universities and nonprofit organizations all over the country to track how the emissions that businesses release when they use concrete, asphalt, glass, steel and wood. The EPA’s statement says that these trackers will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They won’t do so directly, though, they’ll just report on how much pollution is being created. Or they’ll report on how emissions have been lowered by switching to more sustainable methods.
The organizations will tentatively receive the money in late summer.
U.S. Census Bureau to Announce Locations for 2026 Test
The United States Census Bureau announced on July 17 that it will be announcing the sites for its 2026 test in an online webinar on July 24. The 2026 test will be the first of two major tests the bureau will use to prepare for the 2030 census.
This webinar will be the fourth webinar the Census Bureau has used to inform the public of its plans for the 2030 census. The bureau intends to focus on increasing the participation of underrepresented and difficult-to-count groups from previous censuses.
In order to improve results from the previous census, which was in 2020, the bureau is focusing on several key areas of innovation, the effectiveness of which will be tested in 2026.
One of those areas is self-response, which involves convincing people to respond to the online questionnaire by sending them mailed materials, and making it easier to respond and finish the questionnaire. This will especially target those who do not typically respond. In addition, the bureau will also provide an online version of the questionnaire if requested, in multiple languages.
Trump Names Vance as Running Mate, Rewards Gaslighting Responsibility For Violence
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
On Saturday, June 13, a 20-year-old conservative attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump. “He definitely was conservative,” Max Smith, a former classmate of the shooter, Thomas Crooks subsequently told the Philadelphia Inquirer.
But almost immediately, conservative freshman US Senator JD Vance falsely, ludicrously blamed President Biden for the attack. “Today is not just some isolated incident,”Vance wrote on Twitter. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Two days later, Trump endorsed Vance’s gaslighting by naming Vance his running mate amidst a wave of calls to tone down the rhetoric, as Biden temporarily suspended his campaign.
The “logic” of these bizarrely disjointed facts was routinely normalized by the media, which even floated the ludicrous notion that Trump could somehow emerge as a unifying healer—a thought bubble that Trump himself quickly burst.
Later that night, Trumpranted on his social media site, calling for “the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts” starting with “The January 6th Hoax in Washington, D.C.” as the pathway to unify the country “and Make America Great Again!”
“Trump isn’t backing off his vow to pardon 1/6ers and says 1/6 was just fine,” the New Republic’sGreg Sargent noted on Bluesky. “This is incompatible with being a ‘uniter.’ It embodies the idea that MAGA is not subject to the law the rest of us are and that invalidating the votes of millions is good.”
CNN initially characterized the shooter “as quiet, with classmates remembering him as a good student and something of a misfit in high school,” with potentially “divergent political leanings,” citing his registration as a Republican and a $15 contribution to a progressive organization—which later turned out to come from a different, 69-year-old Thomas Crooks. One unnamed classmate told CNN “that he had a group of friends who were fairly conservative, some of whom would wear Trump hats.”
But the Inquirer’s account added more specificity:
Smith recalled a mock debate in which their history professor posed government policy questions and asked students to stand on one side of the classroom or the other to signal their support or opposition to a given proposal.
“The majority of the class were on the liberal side, but Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side,” Smith said. “That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”
While that hardly marks him as an extremist in the usual sense, it’s notable that shooters labeled as rightwing far outnumber leftwing ones. The most recent figures from the Anti-Defamation League show that 76% of political murders from 2014-2023 were by right-wing extremists vs. 4% by left-wing ones — a ratio of 19 to 1. His precise motives may never be known, but whatever they are it’s impossible to blame Biden or Democrats more broadly, as he showed no signs of sympathy towards them.
For perspective on the shooting, Random Lengths sought emailed comments from
“Lily Mason and I have fielded dozens of surveys since 2017 asking public views on political violence with roughly 80 questions and counting,” Kalmoe said. “One surprising finding is that we generally see little if any differences in support for violence between Republicans and Democrats, apart from questions where party or ideology are clearly baked in (like January 6th support).”
On the other hand, he said, “We also know from research by others that the prevalence of violent threats and actions is far higher on the Republican and right-wing side,” which means that “something, or more likely several things, are increasing the link between violent attitudes and violent behaviors among Republicans.” Gun ownership levels are one possibility, “but political gun violence has been fairly rare ― though intimidation from armed groups is an important exception,” he noted. “Violent threats, which don’t require possession of any weapons, are also far more prevalent among Republicans — toward elected officials (including Republicans), election administrators, school boards, librarians, and a host of other targets.”
This in turn “could reflect something about Republican politics in particular, or something about the kinds of people who are Republicans — the groups that comprise their base, or personality traits more associated with conservatism,” and he went on to cite two salient factors — gender and race:
One clue is that physical violence is more common among men, and people who make violent threats are more likely to be men. To the extent men are slightly more likely to be Republican, that could be a factor, but it can’t explain why left-wing men are less likely to act.
Another factor is that Democratic men are more likely to be people of color and religious minorities, who tend to face disproportionate retaliation for violent acts, past and present, as individuals and communities. That could be an inhibiting factor on the left to the extent that individuals are sensitive to those dynamics.
In contrast, he noted, “Historically, people from dominant groups have been far more politically violent than people from marginalized groups. That violence was and is often accomplished with the stamp of state authority. Still, non-state violence by militias, mobs, and individuals was more prevalent among dominant racial and religious groups – and certainly by men against women — compared to violence aimed in the other direction.”
None of this says anything about Crooks, but it reflects underlying political realities.
“In short, Republican constituencies may simply feel more entitled to commit violence and make threats than Democratic constituencies,” Kalmoe said.
Further evidence of that came from an unexpected source: the Facebook account of the Trump supporter Corey Comperatore, shot dead by Crooks protecting his family from the gunfire. Comperatore was universally praised for his heroism and personal sacrifice—understandably so. But one can be heroically virtuous in one sense, and not so nice in another, asa June 2022 Facebook post showed: a steamroller atop the motto “TREAD ON THEM.”
Tellingly, Donald Trump never bothered to reach out to Comperatore’s family, but President Biden did. His widow told the New York Post that tried to call, but she declined to speak to him. “My husband was a devout Republican, and he would not have wanted me to talk to him.” Still, she didn’t blame Biden.CNN reported:
“I don’t have any ill-will towards Joe Biden,” she said. “I’m not one of those people that gets involved in politics. I support Trump, that’s who I’m voting for, but I don’t have ill-will towards Biden.”
“He didn’t do anything to my husband. A 20-year-old despicable kid did,” she continued.
So why did a conservative kid try to assassinate Donald Trump? With no obvious clues after the first several days, we may never know.
“Sometimes we never learn the motives of killers and assassins, as in the 2017 Las Vegas mass killing, or the Kennedy assassination. People’s motives for violence can be complicated and sometimes inscrutable,” Kalmoe said. “People naturally assume a political target must mean a political motive, but desire for notoriety, personal grievances, or various kinds of personal crises are alternatives.”
In short, using this assassination attempt to try to prove a larger point, seems to get everything backwards. So far, it can only be understood as part of a much larger picture of violent acts and threats, which in turn has a very long history.
“By far, the biggest threat we face isn’t assassins killing people in politics. It’s the fear and intimidation from violent threats and armed intimidation that’s really hurting us right now.” Kalmoe said. “Those non-physical harms are several orders of magnitude more prevalent than physically violent acts. But, of course, the few violent acts and obscene levels of gun ownership add credibility to those threats.”
Finally, “The present situation is consistent with what we’ve seen historically with political violence,” he said. “For example, many thousands of Black Southerners and their few white allies were murdered – including many assassinations – by white supremacists during Reconstruction and Jim Crow. But vastly more people were frightened away from the polls, even before disenfranchisement became state policy.”
And we’re seeing the same kinds of activities today. Thousands of poll workers and election officials have resigned since the 2020 election. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of voters have been expelled from voting roles. Trump and his allies are already refusing in advance to accept the results of the 2024 election unless Trump is elected — setting up the preconditions for potential widespread violence.
And the false narrative that Biden was somehow responsible for a conservative 20-year-old trying to shoot Donald Trump is now playing a key role in helping Trump to amp up his supporters and make such violence all the more likely in just a few months.
“The discourse is so bad right now, and especially disappointing from Democrats who seem unnaturally gifted at both-side-ing themselves,” Kalmoe said.
“The unity we should be seeking must be grounded in democracy and equality for all Americans, and until Republicans can meet us there, we shouldn’t be united with them,” he warned. “Of course, Democrats are far from perfect on democracy and equality, but a large portion of the Republican Party has embraced what can fairly be described as fascism centered on white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and male dominance. They have to be defeated, not invited to a picnic,” he summed up.
“I was shocked that Biden said political violence is ‘unheard of’ in the United States – that’s just wildly ignorant about our past and our present. I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose, but I was,” he added as a parting thought.
As long as we live in denial, there is no way we can address the fundamental underlying problem.
We’re all hypocrites. For the most part, it’s not our fault. We necessarily live in the systems we’re working to change. I’m writing this on a device made possible by conflict materials dug up by children in Congo. I’m sitting in an air-conditioned home that most likely requires dirty energy to operate. In a month, I will take a plane to see my mom overseas. Now, I don’t have a private jet, nor does my home run exclusively on fossil fuels, but let’s be honest, even renewables are not the utopian savior some make them out to be. If we’re all hypocrites, the questions are: Where do we land on this spectrum? and What can we do to change not only where we are but more so the breadth of the spectrum itself?
Some might say that the only purely non-hypocritical thing to do is to extract yourself from society, to evade both responsibility and engagement to favor a kind of stoic existence where you just sit and peacefully wait to die. And sure, I could choose to live like Tom Hanks in Cast Away but then I would be just that, cast away. I wouldn’t be able to involve myself in either the fight against our oppressive system or, perhaps more importantly, the collective building of alternatives. And that’s a trade-off I’m not willing to make. There really isn’t anything noble about extracting oneself from the fight. It’s a privilege that most don’t have, and like many moves in capitalism’s mindfulness phase, it’s way more about personal gratification than communal well-being, justice, or liberation. It pretends that we all have the personal ability to choose to “live better” along the system’s own prescribed lines of progressivism while ignoring everything from class systems to political geography to settler colonialism.
In central West Virginia, for example, there are really only two “choices” for a lot of folks: work at a Walmart or Dollar General type store or work in fracking. The former basically doesn’t pay and the latter pays quite well. Speaking of Walmart, for all the good intentions of boycotts aimed at the atrocious corporation, where are folks supposed to buy food when the only option in a thirty-mile radius is a Walmart? Same question for Amazon. If you’re struggling to make ends meet, which most Americans are, it’s easier and cheaper to get things from Amazon than to try to drive around to various stores in search of what you need. Those things likely won’t be on the shelves anyway. That is the system we now inhabit.
In the realm of systemic mass surveillance, smartphones are hugely useful and for many a necessary evil in today’s work environment. We use things like Google Docs and Gmail, knowing full well that Google is complicit in genocide, union busting, mass surveillance, and more. We use Instagram, a platform owned by Meta (Facebook), to connect with each other and gather news, knowing full well that Instagram is likewise scrolling through us, flipping the pages of our lives to see where it can make an extra buck while shadowbanning and outright censoring frontline journalists and dissidents of the almighty US empire. These insidious apps and devices have even become part of our language. After all, you don’t hear people saying, “Can you DuckDuckGo that?” It’s always, “Can you Google that?” People call any number of short-form digital messages “Tweets.” We’re essentially free advertising campaigns for pernicious companies who make billions off our monopolized mindsets. That’s a kind of dystopia even Orwell didn’t consider.
Some of this is avoidable, of course. If you don’t already have Signal, download it now and stop messaging on regular messaging platforms. Do not use WhatsApp, another Meta product that a lot of organizers still frustratingly use, putting themselves and their communities at great risk. You can use CryptPad instead of Google Docs. You can delete your Instagram account. You can download a VPN and extensions like Privacy Badger. You can use Jitsi meetings instead of Zoom. The Activist Handbook has more points and suggestions that aren’t only for activists, but really anyone who doesn’t want Uncle Sam peering over their shoulder and stalking them around the internet.
Whatever changes you do or don’t make will be based on several things, including accessibility to content and applications, and just not wanting to. I have Instagram, for instance. I use it both to follow and amplify journalists and outlets I respect and admire as well as to share my work, some whimsy, and joy with a digital community. I make sure to practice digital security on this and other social media platforms; for instance, never posting images of someone else without their consent, blurring faces at protests, etc. When it comes to surveillance, we can choose to be in the spotlight if we want to be, but we don’t have the right to drag other private individuals into it. An exception here is if a private individual steps into the spotlight themselves by, say, accosting someone on a subway, shouting racist abuse at a protest, and so on, then it is good to just light ‘em up like a can-can dancer at Radio City Music Hall.
In the case of “green living,” alternatives are purposefully more difficult to access, again due to systemic pressures skewing towards planned obsolescence and the almighty petrodollar. Still, there are certain things we can all do, like thrifting, building and contributing to community tool libraries and car shares, and not buying a new iPhone every damn time one comes out.
Easy and common-sense changes like these are both important and not the silver bullet we want them to be. Deleting your Instagram account won’t topple the NSA or Meta. Deciding never to fly in another plane is not going to save the world when a recent report by The Carbon Majors showed that 80% of global CO2 emissions come from just fifty-seven companies. We can’t reusable tote our way to a green utopian future when the US military alone pollutes as much as 140 countries combined. As a Hard Times satire headline reads “How To Do Your Part To Fight Climate Change So Major Corporations Don’t Have To.”
Now, we can argue that simply pulling a Bartleby and saying “I would prefer not to” to the ills of society is a powerful act in and of itself, but again, we have to balance this with the understanding that neither strictly personal choices nor fully removing ourselves from society are the answer. The preference not to engage in certain ways must be coupled with a critical lens on why we choose not to engage, and then engaging in what must be done to change the system that pushes people to chronically act against our own well-being and best interests.
We have to contextualize our personal choices within a larger framework and recognize that as we do what we can on a personal and community level, it is the larger systems that have to change. After all, it’s their fault we’re hypocrites in the first place. How many people really want to work in fracking and be knee-deep in unknown chemicals that’ll see them die from cancer at the age of forty? I’m sure people would much rather have a job … oh, I don’t know, planting trees? How many people want to live in food deserts where their only choice is to drive forty-five minutes to buy mealy tasteless tomatoes from Walmart as opposed to a local food forest co-op?
As author and Professor Mohammed Bamyeh said recently on the Project Censored Show, “When reality becomes unacceptable, we have to go beyond.” From climate chaos to mass surveillance and from wanton censorship to genocide, our reality is violently unacceptable. From our places on the hypocrisy spectrum, we can wage battle against the architects of oppression. And in the meantime, we can give each other some grace for these necessary hypocrisies, and kindly point them out to those who might not be aware, while doing the best we can in the collective struggle for a better world.
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom July 16 announced the state has awarded almost $20 million in grants to 18 Native American tribes in California to support their efforts addressing the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People or MMIP crisis.
The California Board of State and Community Corrections or BSCC approved a second round of awards under the MMIP Grant Program, established in the 2022 budget to provide competitive grants to California tribal nations. Grants focus on work such as developing culturally-based prevention strategies, strengthening responses to human trafficking, providing culturally appropriate support services to affected families and their communities, and improving cooperation and communication on jurisdictional issues between state, local, federal, and tribal law enforcement agencies.
Some of the work funded by these grants includes:
The Pit River Tribe will develop MMIP projects to include culturally-based support and resources for family members whose loved one is missing, through their Tribal Victim Witness department,
The Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians will establish a small home village for the unhoused, providing a safe and culturally sensitive living environment for the tribe’s most vulnerable members.
The Pechanga Band of Indians plans to hire a trained law enforcement investigator, a human trafficking coordinator, and a master’s-level social worker with a comprehensive background in commercial sexual exploitation to effectively respond to runaway juveniles, missing persons incidents, and potential victims of human trafficking.
The MMIP crisis is a worldwide issue, recognized in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In the United States alone, 84% of Native women and 82% of Native men will experience violence in their lifetimes. MMIP cases are seven times less likely to be solved than any other group, and Native women are victims of murder at rates more than ten times the national average. California has worked closely with tribes across the state to develop strategies to support tribal work and investigations to solve and prevent these cases.
The Governor has signed several bills into law to address the MMIP crisis, including:
AB 3099 in 2020, by Assemblymember James Ramos (D-San Bernardino), directed the California Department of Justice to increase collaboration and training among law enforcement agencies related to MMIP-related cases and provide outreach to victims, their families, and advocates.
AB 1314 in 2022, by Assemblymember Ramos, established the Feather Alert, which functions like an Amber or Silver Alert, providing law enforcement with the resources they need to provide the public with timely information to help find a missing Indigenous person.
AB 44 in 2023, by Assemblymember Ramos, granted tribal governments and tribal law enforcement access to the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, which will allow them to enter, verify, and update missing persons’ information.
The 2024-2025 state budget provides an additional $13.25 million for the MMIP grants, and the BSCC anticipates releasing another Request for Proposals later this year.
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency July 11 issued updated recommendations under the Clean Water Act for contaminants that states, Tribes, and territories should consider monitoring in locally caught, freshwater fish. For the first time, EPA has added several per- and polyfluorinated substances or PFAS to the contaminant list alongside lead, three cyanotoxins, a flame retardant, and amphetamine. The recommendation to monitor for twelve PFAS fulfills a commitment in Administrator Regan’s PFAS Strategic Roadmap and helps protect communities from exposure to these “forever chemicals.”
States, Tribes and territories monitor and analyze contaminants in fish and shellfish caught in local, fresh water bodies. When they find contaminants at concentrations that can negatively impact people’s health, they issue consumption advisories. Some state and territorial programs that issue fish and shellfish advisories rely on EPA’s recommendations to determine which contaminants to monitor.
With this announcement, EPA is suggesting that states, Tribes, and territories monitor for twelve PFAS and other contaminants including lead, cyanotoxins, a flame retardant, and amphetamine. This update comes after reviewing scientific literature, analyzing data and seeking external peer review of the agency’s analysis, and it will help ensure that state and Tribal fish advisories consider the latest science.
EPA’s most recent National Aquatic Resource Survey, which monitors fish tissue from lakes and streams across the country, and numerous other studies have found PFAS in freshwater fish and shellfish at levels that may impact human health. These studies indicate the presence of PFAS in fish, but they do not give enough information at a local level to inform public health decisions, which is why the role of states, Tribes, and territories in gathering local data is essential.
EPA recommends that people who eat locally-caught, freshwater fish and shellfish caught in local rivers and lakes consult their state, Tribe, or territory to determine the safe amount of those fish and shellfish to eat.
LOS ANGELES— The Port of Los Angeles’ Port Optimizer™ technology data portal will receive a series of major enhancements, thanks to an $8 million grant from the California Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development GO-Biz. The award was the largest of five GO-Biz grants totaling $27 million to improve data and supply chain functionality across California’s port network.
First introduced in 2017 and the only port community data platform of its kind in operation in North America, the Port Optimizer is a cloud-based information portal that digitalizes maritime shipping data for cargo owners and supply chain stakeholders through a secure single access point. By integrating data from across the port ecosystem, the portal enables ports and the supply chain to operate more efficiently and helps cargo owners bring their goods to market in a more predictable and timely manner.
The $8 million GO-Biz grant will accelerate the development and deployment of three new enhancement tools for the Port Optimizer.
The grant will expand enhancements to the port’s truck appointment system, now under development. Specifically, the grant will enable interoperability with the Port of Long Beach allowing bay-wide coverage for a new universal truck appointment system that will improve the ease of identifying, moving and managing containers across the entire San Pedro Bay port complex.
It will also provide funding for the development of a new California Ports Mobile Application (CalPorts) providing mobile access to the Port Optimizer and other port dashboards when available. CalPorts will make it easier for California ports to send and receive data on items like cargo status, which will help reduce supply chain disruptions and allow stakeholders to better anticipate operational issues. CalPorts will also provide the capability for sharing environmental performance and port security data, among other information.
Another enhancement to the Port Optimizer will be the addition of a single, online gateway for collecting carbon impacts of port operations. The gateway, once developed, will provide users a near real-time Green Asset Score based on rail, trucking, vessel, and on-port equipment particulate and GHG emissions. Using this score, the gateway will help Port Optimizer stakeholders select more optimal routes that balance cargo speed and emissions impacts.
