PREVIOUSLY:

• POTTER VALLEY DAM UPDATE: The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Says That a Municipal Water District in Riverside County is Interested in Taking Over the Project

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Statement from PG&E:

PG&E met with the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District early this year.  While PG&E has not received a proposal from Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District, we would review any proposal we received.  The window to take over the project and continue to operate it as a hydroelectric project closed years ago, after which FERC directed PG&E to develop a license surrender application and decommissioning plan.  PG&E no longer has the ability to transfer the operating license at this late stage of the regulatory process.  However, qualified parties can seek to take over certain features of the project such as those for water conveyance. 

PG&E continues to work with Sonoma County Water Agency, Inland Water & Power Commission of Mendocino County, Round Valley Tribes, Humboldt County, Cal Trout, Trout Unlimited and California Department of Fish & Wildlife on the proposal received from them.  PG&E included in our Surrender Application and Decommissioning Plan a request for FERC to authorize PG&E to permit the “Non-Project Use of Project Lands” which will allow the Eel-Russian Project Authority to construct the New Eel-Russian Facility (NERF), while utilizing some of the existing Potter Valley Project facilities.  The NERF will provide diversion flows from the Eel River to the Russian River watershed after PG&E’s removal of Cape Horn Dam and Scott Dam.   We have had some previous communication with the Secretary’s staff.

Statement from Friends of the Eel:

US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins issued a message today alleging that a water district near LA is interested in purchasing the Eel River dams and the rest of the Potter Valley Project from Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E).

“Why anyone would be interested in paying money for a failed, money-losing, and risky project is beyond me, let alone a water district nearly 600 miles away from the dams,” said Alicia Hamann, Executive Director of Friends of the Eel River (FOER). “The project simply isn’t worth investing in. The existing dams are failing, face very serious seismic threats, and cannot be relicensed as a hydroelectric project under the current Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) license.”

Even if a purchaser were to try to keep Scott and Cape Horn dams running just as an irrigation project, they’d still have to pass muster with the State of California’s Division of Safety of Dams, the agency that has told PG&E they have to operate Scott Dam at reduced capacity to mitigate seismic risks. Those seismic risks are only going to come into sharper focus as FERC-mandated studies continue.

Scott Dam was plagued by construction difficulties a century ago. Its Lake Pillsbury Reservoir is filling with sediment that will inevitably block the only remaining low-level outlet. When that fails, the dam won’t be able to release water during the summer, cutting off current irrigation uses entirely. The project also hasn’t generated electricity since 2021 due to a failed transformer that would cost many millions of dollars to replace. Neither water diversions or electricity from the project are “reliable” as Secretary Rollins claims.

And then there are the impacts on Eel River salmon and steelhead protected by the Endangered Species Act. Scott Dam blocks all fish passage to the rest of the watershed for steelhead and Chinook salmon that still occupy the upper mainstem Eel River. Steelhead are especially impacted by the dams because they must spend at least a year in freshwater before migrating to the ocean.

Key stakeholders have agreed to a deal which supports both dam removal and future diversions in the wet season. Regional interests are best served by supporting this deal, removing the dams and installing a modern diversion system as soon as possible. Not by selling out the safety of downstream residents and ecosystem recovery to carpet baggers who likely have no clue about the liability in which they are “interested.”

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Relevant links:

• How Many Ways Can the Potter Valley Project Fail?
• An Agreement for Post-Dam Removal Diversions From the Eel

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UPDATE:

• Statements From PG&E and Friends of the Eel on SoCal Agency’s Potter Valley Dam Bid 

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This morning, Brooke Rollins, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, tweeted that a potential buyer has expressed interest in taking over the two dams near the headwaters of the Eel River, in Mendocino and Lake Counties.

That buyer is the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District, which serves around 160,000 residential and commercial users in western Riverside County.

It’s not yet clear how serious the district is, or why it wants to assume water and power operations far from the customers it serves, but in her tweet Rollins celebrated the fact that a buyer could potentially disrupt PG&E’s efforts to abandon the dam system, which hasn’t produced power in many years and has been massively inefficient for many more.

⚖️🚨 Last year, PG&E filed to surrender its license and begin decommissioning the Potter Valley Project, removing the Scott and Cape Horn Dams because of @GavinNewsom‘s policy of putting fish over people.

Last week, I heard from the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District. A… https://t.co/pfuNAkeq44 pic.twitter.com/ZkIXFhXblK

— Secretary Brooke Rollins (@SecRollins) April 21, 2026

In concert with PG&E’s abandonment efforts, environmentalists, local governments and water districts in the Russian River Basin, which receives diverted water from the dams, have hammered out a future agreement whereby water would continue to flow south after the dams are removed, in exchange for funding to restore habitat along the river.

In the past, the government of Lake County and agricultural interests in Potter Valley have appealed to the Trump administration to kill the deal. PG&E’s plan to decommission the dams is currently before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Minutes from the March 26 meeting of the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District Board of Directors show that two of its members — both members of its “Water Supply Ad Hoc Subcommittee” — had recently traveled to a meeting of the Potter Valley Irrigation District, though the minutes do not reflect what was discussed there. 

The Outpost has a call in to Elsinore, and we’ll update when we hear back. Also, we are promised statements from Friends of the Eel and PG&E soon.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Lake County May Try to Derail Eel River Dam Deal With Direct Appeal to President Trump
• Farm Bureaus in Russian River Counties Issue Plea to President Trump to Keep the Potter Valley Dams in Place
• Humboldt Supervisors OK Potter Valley Water Diversion Plan, Paving the Way for Eel River Dam Removal
• PG&E Files Its Application to Surrender its Hydropower License, Paving the Way for the Removal of the Potter Valley Dams on the Eel River
• Trump Administration Slams Eel River Dam Removal Plan, But Huffman is Confident the Project Can’t Be Stopped
• Trump Administration Intervenes in Potter Valley Dam Removal, as Department of Agriculture Asks FERC to Halt Decommissioning Process

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California scored a legal victory Monday that, for now, undermines the Trump administration’s efforts to drastically cut funding for homeless housing.

Changes that would have diverted huge chunks of federal funds away from permanent housing and funneled them instead into temporary shelters and sober living programs will remain suspended after the Trump administration dropped its appeal of an earlier court loss. While the broader case is still being litigated, the new development could provide some reassurance to California counties waiting for the federal funds.

“We continue to fight for Californians and the rule of law, and we continue to win,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a news release. “People experiencing housing insecurity or homelessness need the federal government’s continued support — not a rollback of assistance.”

In November, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development attempted to change the way it doles out money for homeless services via its Continuum of Care program. It decreed that jurisdictions applying for a piece of about $4 billion in federal homelessness funds can’t spend more than 30% of that money on permanent housing — a move that would result in a significant cut to the type of long-term housing that can resolve someone’s homelessness.

Last year, California communities spent about 90% of their federal Continuum of Care funds on permanent housing.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration quickly joined 19 other states and the District of Columbia in suing to stop the Trump administration’s changes. In December, a federal judge in Rhode Island temporarily blocked the changes and ordered HUD to process funding applications under the original rules. The Trump administration appealed that ruling, leaving local governments and homeless service providers unsure of what they would be awarded funding for, and when.

The federal government on Monday dropped its appeal. While the rest of the lawsuit will move forward, and could take months to resolve, counties should be able to access permanent housing funds in the meantime.

Instead of prioritizing permanent housing, as has been the rule in the past, the Trump administration wants to focus more on shelters that get people off the streets quickly and temporarily, and on programs that require residents to be sober. HUD also attempted to ban the use of federal homelessness funds for diversity and inclusion efforts, support of transgender clients, and use of “harm reduction” strategies that seek to reduce overdose deaths by helping people in active addiction use drugs more safely.

HUD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a December statement, a spokesperson said HUD stood by its funding reforms.

Former President Joe “Biden’s policies harmed the vulnerable people that HUD intends to serve through the grant program,” the agency said in an email. “This new framework is the first step toward righting those failures with increased funding for high performing programs that have demonstrated real success and accountability.”

HUD experienced another legal setback last month when a federal judge in Rhode Island shot down the agency’s attempt to upend another, smaller, source of federal homelessness funding. At issue in that case was a program called the Continuum of Care Builds grant, which funds the construction of new homeless housing. HUD last year made grantees reapply under a very different set of criteria, which seemed to disqualify organizations that support trans clients, use “harm reduction” to prevent drug overdose deaths or operate in a “sanctuary city.”

About $75 million in federal funds had been frozen as that case moved forward.

In March, the court found HUD violated the law through its “slapdash imposition of political whims.”

“This ruling is a victory for people across this nation who have overcome homelessness and stabilized in HUD’s permanent housing programs,” Ann Oliva, chief executive of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, which filed the lawsuit, wrote in a statement. “Today’s news reinforces a fundamental truth: that the work to end homelessness is not partisan, and never should be interfered with for political means.”

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In 2022, faced with mounting criticism from California parents and students who couldn’t get into the state’s three premier public universities, legislators and UC officials struck a deal.

UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC San Diego would admit a combined 900 more in-state students a year, and the state would up their budgets to cover the loss of revenue from non-resident students, who pay three times what in-state students pay.

That deal has since cost tax-payers $276 million and allowed around 3,000 more students to enroll at the three universities.

While the costs were expected, the number is far higher than the annual $31 million figure Gov. Gavin Newsom and state legislators routinely cite for funding the in-state student expansion, a CalMatters analysis shows. Now, with one year to go in the five year plan, some are wondering whether the program’s high costs should continue as-is, particularly as California faces several years of multi-billion-dollar deficits.

Questioning the non-resident swap

At least one lawmaker and the Legislative Analyst’s Office are questioning the ongoing wisdom of the non-resident funding swap. “We are now living with those decisions, and we need to decide whether those are decisions we want to stand by still, or perhaps there is another approach,” said Assemblymember David Alvarez, a Democrat from Chula Vista, at a March meeting of the budget subcommittee on education, which he chairs.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office supported enrolling more California students in 2022, but its analysts now are proposing that the state no longer add new resident students in lieu of out-of-state students. The analyst’s office says it’s an unnecessary expense for multiple reasons and going forward can be made cheaper, especially given “the state’s projected budget deficits.”

Instead, it proposes that the Legislature direct the UC to enroll more resident students without limiting the enrollment of non-resident students. That would cost the state $25 million annually, rather than the $61 million predicted for the fiscal year starting July.

One reason for the office’s skepticism about keeping the current formula is that the three campuses were able to add thousands more undergraduates from California since the funding program began, aside from those who replaced non-residents.

UC data shows 6,000 more Californians were enrolled at the three campuses, on top of the students added through the funding program, since the swap began. That growth was fueled by hundreds of millions of dollars in annual funding increases to the UC between 2022 and 2024 that lawmakers and the governor also approved in addition to the non-resident funding swap.

The analyst’s office also indicated that the three popular UC campuses have space to continue adding students. “Over the past five years, all three campuses have initiated and/or completed housing projects adding several thousand beds” and still have available classroom and lab space, a February report from the office said.

Time will tell if the Legislature will agree with the analyst’s office. Lawmakers and the governor face an annual late June deadline to finalize the state budget.

The governor’s office so far supports maintaining the non-resident swap program and doesn’t intend to alter the plan in its forthcoming May revision to the governor’s budget proposal, said H.D. Palmer, a spokesperson for the Department of Finance, which in effect serves as the governor’s fiscal policy team.

In a statement, UC spokesperson Omar Rodriguez underscored that the Legislature’s push to drive down out-of-state enrollment has to come with costs.

“Replacing a non-resident student with a resident student is not an even exchange absent sufficient state buyout,” Rodriguez wrote to CalMatters in an April email. With the higher tuition they are charged, every out-of-state student pays for the equivalent of 2.7 California students, he wrote. The three UCs added about 300 more in-state students through the swap program than they were funded for, Rodriguez added.CalMatters requested interviews with UC officials, but key personnel were not available, Rodriguez said.

UC officials were ambivalent about the non-resident funding swap five years ago. While they welcomed the money, they worried that future lawmakers would back away from the promise to pay the UC for not enrolling out-of-state students.

Emphasis on Californians

Why do any of this? Lawmakers in 2022 wanted to curb the percentage of out-of-state undergraduates at the UC and the three campuses specifically. At the time, more than 20% of the three school’s undergraduate students came from out of state. The funding swap was intended to bring the percentage down to 18% by the fifth year, which is next year. The non-resident enrollment rate currently is around 19% at the three campuses.But the decision by lawmakers to require the campuses to limit the number of out-of-state students came at a considerable cost. Had the Legislature instructed those same campuses to enroll more Californians and not cut out-of-state enrollment, the combined price tag since 2022 wouldn’t be $276 million, but closer to $105 million, according to CalMatters’ calculations that were validated by officials at the governor’s Department of Finance as well as the UC.

The final price tag to reach the out-of-state enrollment goal will be about $460 million. After that, the program will cost about $153 million a year to sustain — or less, if policymakers side with the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

California spent more for a reason

In many ways, the Legislature’s actions were a return to form. The state’s interest in enrolling more California students in its prominent public universities is decades-old. Until the mid-2000s, UC campuses enrolled few students from outside of California. After the Great Recession prompted lawmakers to slash state spending, UC’s public funding cratered. To make up the difference, UC tripled its enrollment of undergraduates from out of state.

But then the state, under the guidance of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s five-year higher education compact, promised to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars annually in 2022 so the UC could enroll more California students at all its campuses. That’s in addition to the $30 million annually to limit the out-of-state student body at Berkeley, UCLA and UCSD, the three most popular campuses.“They’re making good on the reason that you have a state university, which is not supposed to be a purely revenue-making machine,” said Julie R. Posselt, a professor specializing in higher education issues at the University of Southern California, where she’s an associate dean. “It’s supposed to be an engine for your state’s population, economy and workforce.”The UC is arguably one of the best deals for state taxpayers: a world-class education that for more than half of California undergraduate students is tuition-free because of financial aid.

Demand for the three UCs, by the numbers

More than 100,000 students apply to each of three most popular UC campuses annually, the majority Californians. Lately the freshman admissions rate at UCLA has been less than 10% — not quite as exclusive as Harvard’s 4% but well below the admissions rate to UCLA two decades ago, when more than a quarter were admitted.

UCLA is top of mind for the thousands of low-income students in Southern California that Alison De Lucca’s collective serves. She’s executive editor of the Southern California College Attainment Network, which is made up of dozens of nonprofits working to help students apply for college and financial aid.Additional slots at UCLA matter to the region’s high schoolers seeking to attend a highly selective institution. “Many of them, particularly post-pandemic, would like to stay a little closer to home,” she said.She didn’t speculate on whether parents think more slots for Californians is worth the extra state spending, “but I will say that parents are quite emphatic about ensuring that their students also have the chance” to gain entry at a school such as UCLA.

National studies of flagship public universities also indicate that as schools rely more on increased revenue from non-resident students, overall campus diversity can decline. That’s because out-of-state students “tend to be richer and are less likely” to be Black or Latino, one study co-written by Posselt found.

Non-resident value

The UC student association representing all undergraduates opposed the out-of-state funding swap when it first became policy. The association didn’t want to see fewer non-residents, which it considered an attack on the diversity of the student body. Students argued that out-of-state students add to the cultural dynamism of a campus and also contribute to the regional economy.

“We’re living here, we’re voting here, we’re working here, we’re tenants in our campus cities. We’re still treated as second-tier students,” said Riya Master in 2021, when she was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley from Virginia.Master is now in her fourth year of attending UC San Francisco’s highly ranked medical school. She gained residency as a Californian by working at a UCSF laboratory on drug discovery after graduating from UC Berkeley. As a result, she’s paying the in-state tuition rate. Her goal is to specialize in pediatrics, a field of medicine undergoing a massive shortage nationally.

California enrollment grew

The UC system added 19,000 slots for new California undergraduates across its nine undergraduate campuses since 2022 — equal to a mid-sized UC campus without having built one. That includes about 9,000 more at the three sought-after campuses.The number of non-resident undergraduates at the UC fell by 3,500 students in that time.

The growth in enrollment availability coincided with higher admissions rates for Californians, as the share of applicants gaining admission jumped from around 65% to 77% in that time.

But it’s a different story at the three most popular campuses: admission rates there haven’t increased, meaning it’s as difficult to get into UC Berkeley, UCLA or UC San Diego now as it was five years ago — and harder compared to nearly a decade ago.Even with loads of new state spending, UC reports less money per student. Though state support has jumped by more than a billion dollars since 2000, inflation has eroded those gains while enrollment soared. As a result, UC academic spending for every student decreased from $46,000 at the start of the millennium to $28,000 today.

Public universities, such as the three UC campuses, have to manage a tough balancing act, said Posselt, the USC professor. They need to preserve their academic rigor, but “they absolutely have a mandate to not become exclusionary institutions, and they must do all of that while maintaining financial solvency.”She said the UCs are “probably the best in the country in terms of a state system that is actively trying to maximize” student access.

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In the spring of 2022, a woman named Shelby Bunch began appearing at government hearings in Riverside County, demanding that officials there address what she believed was an epidemic of fraud in local elections.

Bunch often introduced herself as a representative of New California, a secessionist movement that seeks to break away from what it describes as the tyranny of a Democratic-controlled state.

She accused Riverside officials of colluding in criminal activity and warned that they would soon “be answering to law enforcement.” She once closed her comments by telling the Riverside County Board of Supervisors to “have a crappy day.”

The supervisors didn’t seem to take Bunch seriously, but she found a powerful ally in Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco.

Based on her various claims, including that the county’s electronic voting machines had been remotely manipulated, the sheriff put one of his senior investigators in charge of a criminal probe into the registrar of voters.

The investigator, Christopher Poznanski, quickly came to the conclusion that there was no evidence of a crime. On July 20, 2022, he sent Bunch an email letting her know he was closing the case.

“I understand this may not be the desired outcome,” he wrote. “But know that I did not take this case lightly and considered all of the information.”

Bunch was furious. She demanded that Poznanski investigate the “corrupt machines.”

But Poznanski was unmoved. “I respect your passion for this cause, but I will conduct no further investigation into the matter,” he wrote.

Bunch continued to write Bianco directly, urging him to reopen the case. Then, in early September, she got some help.

Shelby Bunch comments on election oversight at the Riverside County Board of Supervisors hearing on Oct. 4, 2022. Screenshot via the Riverside County Board of Supervisors

A figure in the “constitutional sheriff” movement, which asserts that elected sheriffs are more powerful than anyone — including the president and the courts — sent Bianco an email.

“I just heard this past week that a group of your constituents requested that you investigate election fraud in Riverside County and that your investigator was unable to find anything and you closed your investigation,” Steve Tuminello wrote to Bianco. “I know that as a Constitutional Sheriff you realize how extremely important Election Integrity is, and that you would welcome any assistance in these investigations.”

Bianco, whose career has been guided by the movement, wrote back to say he had launched another, more ambitious investigation.

Emails obtained by CalMatters trace the development of a years-long case that ultimately led to Bianco’s unprecedented seizure of 650,000 ballots in March. They reveal that his sprawling investigation was based on the thinnest of evidence and raise alarms over how the November elections could be disrupted by the unproven claims of fringe groups and ideologically aligned officials.

That scenario is particularly troubling in Riverside County, which is home to one of a few dozen congressional districts in the country that could determine control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the midterm elections.

Bianco’s emails with Bunch also show that he doubted some of her group’s allegations.

In one exchange in 2023, Bunch suggested the county supervisors were complicit in election fraud and might have ties to drug cartels.

“This is absolutely ridiculous,” Bianco responded. “Just because ‘someone’ convinced themselves of something doesn’t mean its reality.”

Bianco told Bunch her group was “acting stupid.”

“I actually cant believe I took the time to respond,” he wrote.

Still, he pushed the investigation forward.

In a 2024 podcast interview, Bunch said the sheriff had been hamstrung by the courts. She told her host that Bianco had “tried to get a search warrant on the machines … but the judge, he just laughed. He said, ‘I’m not giving you anything.’”

Her coalition, she said, needed a judge who was ideologically aligned with Bianco.

“If we can get just one judge,” she said, “the whole dam will break.”

“Who’s gonna be the one judge that steps up?”

In 2026, she would get her answer.

‘Don’t have to ask permission from anybody’

The “constitutional sheriff” movement is rooted in the beliefs of a Southern California-based white supremacist who was active in the 1970s and 1980s and argued that sheriffs were the country’s only legitimate law enforcement officials. Its members cite the 10th Amendment, which says that powers not specifically delegated to the federal government fall to the states. The amendment, however, makes no mention of sheriffs.

The main organization behind the movement, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, is led by a former sheriff named Richard Mack.

Since 2020, Mack has held a series of events alongside prominent election conspiracy theorists, encouraging sheriffs to investigate voter fraud in their own counties. Sheriffs, he said, “don’t have to ask permission from anybody.” As a result, many conspiracy-minded local groups have flocked to their county sheriffs for support when other officials have rejected their theories of election fraud.

Even though claims of widespread voter fraud have been debunked, these sheriffs have used their discretionary power to open investigations, many of them based on allegations that echo President Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election.

Bianco, who could not be reached for comment for this story, describes himself as a constitutional sheriff and agrees with the movement’s core tenets.

He has maintained power in Riverside even as the county’s shifting demographics have altered its historically conservative political landscape. Today there are more registered Democrats in Riverside than there are Republicans. But that shift to the left has coincided with a religiously fueled radicalization on the right.

One of the key figures of that movement is Tim Thompson, the pastor of a powerful Riverside church and Bianco’s political ally. Thompson has led an effort to stack local school boards with members who have rolled back transgender student rights and rejected textbooks that mention Harvey Milk, one of the nation’s first openly gay elected officials. He recently celebrated a parishioner who was pardoned by Trump after being convicted for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Thompson has also taken an interest in the local judiciary. In 2022, he supported a former prosecutor named Jay Kiel, who was running to fill a seat on Riverside’s Superior Court.

When Kiel joined Thompson on his popular podcast, he promised to “bring a little balance back to the bench” to counteract the state’s liberal Legislature. Kiel also praised Bianco and said Riverside needed “judges that are willing to stand up and say, this is the law, and I’m going to follow it.”

He won the election.

A new group emerges

By late 2024, a new group had taken control of the effort to prove voter fraud in Riverside County. The Riverside Election Integrity Team included many of the same people who had been working closely with Bunch, but they had very different tactics.

The group’s leader, Greg Langworthy, had testified alongside Bunch for years. While he was part of the same Christian conservative circles, he rejected her antagonistic approach. Langworthy is soft-spoken and polite. At board hearings, he wears button-down shirts and the occasional pocket protector. If Bunch was the movement’s firebrand, Langworthy is its genial middle school math teacher. He focused his group’s efforts on ballot counting, conducting audits of past elections to prove to local officials that the county’s voting system is rife with error.

Greg Langworthy gives public testimony on election oversight during a Riverside County Board of Supervisors meeting on April 2, 2024. Screenshot via the Riverside County Board of Supervisors

Langworthy’s group asked the county registrar for records from the November 2025 election for California’s redistricting measure, Proposition 50, which passed with overwhelming support across the state and by a wide margin in Riverside. The measure redrew California’s congressional maps and gave Democrats a chance to pick up several House seats in the midterms.

Langworthy said he reviewed the data and found that the registrar’s office had counted 45,896 more ballots than it had received. His group demanded meetings with individual supervisors and asked the district attorney and the sheriff to look into the matter.

The alleged discrepancy wasn’t enough to change the election results in Riverside, and Langworthy said he was not interested in overturning the measure. “Prop. 50 just happened to be the next election,” he said.

On Feb. 10, the Riverside supervisors held a special hearing on the issue. Langworthy’s group had met with several officials but wanted to present its findings to the full board.

Hoping to lay the matter to rest, the board asked the Riverside registrar, Art Tinoco, to show the group that it had misread the data his office had provided. Tinoco said Langworthy and others had relied on raw data that did not include provisional and other ballots. The actual discrepancy between ballots cast and ballots counted, he said, was 103 — a figure independently confirmed by the Riverside Record.

Tinoco spoke for more than an hour, but members of the Riverside Election Integrity Team were not convinced. One by one they approached the podium with prepared statements, laying out their audit.

The supervisors struggled to hide their frustration. But Langworthy didn’t need the board; he had Bianco. Just one day before that hearing, an investigator from the sheriff’s office had appeared in court asking for a warrant to take hundreds of thousands of ballots from Tinoco’s office.

The judge handling the matter was Jay Kiel.

The investigator’s sworn statement, intended to justify the warrant, focused almost entirely on Langworthy’s audit and Bunch’s claims. In three years of investigating the matter, the sheriff’s office had failed to produce any of its own evidence to support a case.

Kiel signed off on the warrant and sealed it, preventing the public from seeing the justification for Bianco’s seizure of the ballots.

Over the next few weeks, Bianco’s office removed 1,500 boxes of election materials from the registrar’s office. If stacked, they would rise as high as the Empire State Building.

It was the first time in the nation’s history that a sheriff took possession of previously cast ballots.

‘You intend to ignore my directives’

The California attorney general, Rob Bonta, appears to have been caught off guard.

A day after Bianco seized the first batch of ballots, Bonta sent him a letter asking him to “pause” his investigation. Bonta wrote that he was “concerned” that Bianco had taken the boxes without probable cause that a crime had occurred.

Bianco ignored him.

A few days later Bonta sent another letter. “I learned that you intend to ignore my directives and plan to start counting the seized ballots tomorrow,” Bonta wrote. “Let me be clear: this is unacceptable.”

Bianco called a press conference to tell reporters he would continue counting ballots and that the attorney general did not have the authority to stop him. What had been a behind-the-scenes battle immediately became national news.

“I will carry out my constitutional duty to pursue justice,” Bianco said. He called the attorney general “an embarrassment to law enforcement.”

According to the California Constitution, the attorney general has “direct supervision over every district attorney and sheriff … in all matters pertaining to the duties of their respective offices.” There is no California case law directly addressing this provision.

Bianco believes he is the final authority on everything that happens in his county. In flouting Bonta’s orders, he has sparked a high-stakes legal showdown testing the constitutional separation of powers. The case is currently in front of the state Supreme Court.

Attorney General Rob Bonta speaks at a press conference at the California Department of Justice in Sacramento on Feb. 4, 2025. Photo by Fred Greaves, CalMatters

Bonta didn’t file a lawsuit to try to stop Bianco until almost a month after he first learned about the ballot seizure, and only after the story exploded in the national press. At that point, according to sworn statements by investigators, Bianco’s office had already begun counting the ballots, opening about 22 boxes.

During that same period, Bonta filed at least a dozen lawsuits on other issues, many of them against the Trump administration.

A spokesperson for Bonta said the attorney general was trying to “work cooperatively with the sheriff’s office in order to better understand the basis for its investigation,” and that Bonta believed Bianco was complying with his directives.

The state’s initially tepid response, and its inability, thus far, to get Bianco to return the ballots raise concerns about how officials here will be able to protect future elections.

Bianco has already said he wouldn’t hesitate to seize ballots again, even in the June primary for California governor, when his own name will be on the ballot.

And there’s another critical election that Bianco could throw into flux: In the November midterms, the Riverside registrar will be responsible for counting a significant percentage of the ballots in California’s 48th Congressional District. Last year’s redistricting effort made the district competitive for Democrats. Of the 435 House seats nationwide, it’s one of fewer than three dozen that analysts consider too close to call. These races will ultimately determine which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives.

If Bianco takes ballots cast in the race for the California 48th, the ensuing chaos could transcend Riverside County.

A broader network

In the months before Bianco’s ballot seizure, the FBI seized reams of paper ballots cast in Fulton County, Georgia, based on debunked claims from citizen election-deniers, and sought electronic voter data from Maricopa County, Arizona, despite multiple investigations that have turned up no evidence of fraud. The Justice Department has demanded voter information in dozens of states, leaving many attorneys general to fight those demands in court. In speeches and on social media, Trump has escalated his voter fraud claims. He has said Republicans should “nationalize the voting.”

Some of the administration officials pushing these efforts are associated with the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank that has consistently supported unverified election conspiracy theories. The founding director of the institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, John Eastman, was disbarred in California last week for being one of the legal masterminds behind the attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

Several years ago, the Claremont Institute set its sights on sheriffs and began hosting week-long education sessions to provide them with a roadmap for promoting Trump’s brand of conservatism in their counties. Bianco attended the training, and the institute later gave him its “Sheriff of the Year” award — a bust of John Wayne — at a fundraiser in Huntington Beach.

Other sheriffs who were trained at the institute have since dedicated the resources of their offices to investigate baseless allegations of election fraud, but all of those efforts have failed.

In 2022, when it seemed as though Bianco’s investigation into Bunch’s claims had also reached a dead end, Mack’s constitutional sheriff’s organization offered the services of “an expert in cyber crimes” who could “provide Sheriffs with immutable evidence of election fraud” to help them push their investigations forward.

That expert was Gregg Phillips. Before Trump tapped him to lead emergency services at FEMA, he had a history of profiting from unfounded allegations of voter fraud, asking donors to fund his pursuit of concrete evidence and pocketing much of the money.

Recently, Phillips was back in the news with a different claim: He said he had been “teleported” against his will to a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.

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Jeanne Kuang contributed reporting for this story.

It’s official: the state of California says Arcata is in trouble. 

All right, that’s an incredibly literal interpretation of a proclamation of a state of emergency signed by governor Gavin Newsom on Friday, but no less true nonetheless. The Jan. 2 fire that torched half a city block some three months back qualifies the city to a nod that there are, indeed, “conditions of extreme peril” that are beyond the qualifications of the local authorities to fix. 

The 2.5 million gallons of water firefighters dumped on the blaze almost certainly carried innumerable pollutants and environmental hazards from the scorched buildings into creeks, waterways, and Humboldt Bay. Neither the city nor the county has the staff or the ability to monitor and clean up all the affected areas. The state’s declaration opens up emergency funding that will help defray the costs and expedite the environmental harms. 

Arcata and the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office signed their own state of emergency proclamations within a few days of the fire. 

Recovering from the fire has proved to be difficult and complex. The three different owners of the destroyed parcels all had to carry out their own insurance investigations, as did the Arcata Fire District, and the owners will have to secure a smattering of permits before any cleanup can begin. Any state funds the city or Humboldt County gets probably won’t go towards removing the debris; that’s the property owners’ expense. 

Arcata City Manager Merritt Perry told the Outpost today that city and county staff needed to research how to navigate the process of obtaining the funds. They’ll likely have to tally up all of their firefighting and environmental expenditures, as well as make a thorough assessment of all the damage the fire wrought. Beyond that, he’s unsure.

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• Woman Held To Answer on Murder Charges for Two-Year-Old Foster Kid’s Death

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A new charge has been levied against a woman accused of murdering a 2-year-old foster child in 2021.

Ashley Pearce-Pifferini was charged with felony child abuse by the Humboldt County District Attorney’s office last Tuesday, and pleaded not guilty today.

During the investigation into Phoenix Jayden Asti’s death, police testified they found Pearce-Pifferini texted an image of the boy with bruising on the side of his face to her partner on Oct. 24, 2021.

When examining the image in court, a child abuse expert testified the markings were consistent with bruising from an open hand slap.

According to police testifying on digital forensics, she texted her partner she couldn’t figure out what he would have done to cause the injuries.

The new charge alleges the woman willfully caused unjustifiable physical pain and mental suffering to Asti on Oct. 24, 2021, according to an updated complaint.

Previously, Pearce-Pifferini was held to answer to charges of murder and assault on a child causing death. Experts testified during a preliminary hearing the severity of injuries Asti died from could not have been caused by incidents she said caused his head trauma — including banging his own head on a crib because he was mad, or a possible short fall in the bathtub.

Earlier this month, prosecutors argued that medical evidence, including details from Asti’s autopsy, showed substantial internal head injuries with multiple impact sites. Prosecutors alleged Pearce-Pifferini repeatedly slammed the boy, causing the blunt impact head trauma that ultimately killed him.

She pleaded not guilty to the charges. Her attorney noted wrongful convictions are common in these types of cases, and pointed to issues in relying on medical records to explain the boy’s death. He also noted efforts the woman, who has a long history of fostering and no criminal record, took to get medical care for the boy after he was injured on two occasions.

Both sides are expected to bring experts to testify during the trial. The next hearing was set for June 12.

A judge previously found there was enough evidence to go to trial, while noting there was room for more information. He pointed to expert testimony agreeing there could be another explanation for his death, when asked to weigh in on hypotheticals during cross examination.

Asti, a two year old foster child, was described during court proceedings as being “very active and full of life” by District Attorney’s Office Investigator Ryan Hill, who was assigned the case in 2021 and interviewed social workers who knew the boy.

Asti had been in the care of Pearce-Pifferini and her partner from July 2021 until his death that November.

Pearce-Pifferini remains out of custody on a $1 million bail.