Good morning, it’s Monday, July 13, and there is a heat advisory in effect. Also more humidity than usual. Be warned, especially if you’re inland.
1. Have you gotten a street sweeping ticket? It might’ve been bogus.
Many streets in the City of Los Angeles have signs banning parking on weekly street-sweeping days. Most streets, though, are only swept every other week, so you won’t get tickets for parking on off weeks.
At least, that’s what the Department of Transportation recently promised the L.A. Times.
But an exclusive L.A. Material analysis of city parking ticket data found that, in more than 12,500 instances over the last five years, LADOT has issued street cleaning tickets when there wasn’t actually any sweeping. That amounts to nearly $1 million in erroneous fines.
Roughly a sixth of the bum tickets were levied along a single corridor in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods in South L.A., where residents say they have to forgo grocery shopping when hit with the dreaded $73 citations.
LADOT says it regularly voids and refunds erroneous tickets. But it refused to provide data to prove it.
Our story includes a map so you can check whether your neighborhood got bad tickets. We also built a tool so you can check if you’re owed a refund.
2. A top Bass advisor is helping Lineage manage its response to the Boyle Heights fire.
Yusef Robb, a longtime political strategist, held an unusual role with the Bass administration: He was neither formally employed nor paid, but remained indispensable as a senior communications advisor. He also took a job last month advising Lineage, the cold storage company whose Boyle Heights facility burned for more than a week, sending smoke and noxious fumes through many Eastside neighborhoods.
The mayor’s office insisted Saturday that Yusef had not been involved with her response to the environmental catastrophe and its clean-up, now that he is working for the company at the center of it.
Hours after my colleague Julia Wick broke the story about Robb’s role on Saturday, Robb said he’d no longer be serving as an informal advisor to Mayor Karen Bass.
“I'm not going to let unnecessary distractions get in the way of the important things that need to be done, so I'm not extending my volunteer advisory work for the Mayor,” Robb said.
3. Here’s what’s happening this week.
MONDAY: LACMA will host a free, first-come, first-served children’s art workshop.
TUESDAY: LA28 will open applications to volunteer for the Olympics. Also, the Consulate General of France will put on an open-air concert to celebrate Bastille Day downtown. (The mood may depend on the outcome of France’s World Cup semifinal match against Spain earlier that day.)
WEDNESDAY: England will play Argentina in the World Cup semifinal.
THURSDAY: Independent Shakespeare Co. will put on a free performance of “Coriolanus” in Griffith Park, part of its summer-long concert series that runs every Wednesday through Sunday.
FRIDAY: The County Arboretum and Botanic Garden in Arcadia will kick off its two-day Plumeria Festival. Also, the Academy Museum will host a drop-in stop-motion animation workshop for teens.
SATURDAY: The Hollywood Forever Cemetery will host an outdoor screening of Roman Polanski’s horror movie “Rosemary’s Baby.”
SUNDAY: Two teams will slug it out in the World Cup final. Also, Compton rap legend DJ Quik will headline a free concert in Pershing Square.
READING MATERIAL
GRAHAM TRIBUTES: California politicians had sober reactions to the sudden death of Sen. Lindsey Graham, the prominent Republican from South Carolina, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “Many of us considered him the Trump whisperer,” said Sen. Adam Schiff. “If we wanted to know what the president’s thinking was or how he might be moved on something, we would go to Lindsey to discuss.”
FLOCK FALLOUT: The LAPD suspended its relationship with a controversial surveillance tech company over concerns about its data use, the Los Angeles Times reported. In California cities, including San Francisco, local police have illegally shared data from Flock’s license plate readers with out-of-state cops working with ICE.
BIG PAYDAY: An ex-deputy police chief in Redlands was California’s highest-paid city employee in 2025, receiving $1.2 million in wages. The San Bernardino Sun noted that a large part of his compensation was a settlement with the city — and he didn’t work a single day that year.
LUXURY LANDMARKS: Santa Monica’s stunning La Mesa Drive is home to an unusual concentration of historic homes. The Wall Street Journal chronicled the tug-of-war between preservationists and deep-pocketed homeowners in a story with gorgeous architectural photos.
RAW MATERIAL
For today’s peek inside our subscriber-only Discord server, Greg Ruben has a food rec.
AND FINALLY… A poem to pair with your morning coffee: “Small Kindnesses” by Danusha Laméris.
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