Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti on Saturday signed a law hiking the city’s minimum wage from $9 an hour to $15 by 2020, an increase that will affect hundreds of thousands of workers.
Garcetti, speaking in English and Spanish, told a crowd of hundreds at the signing event that he wanted to lift the city’s lowest-paid workers out of poverty.
“Too many Angelenos have been left behind even as we’ve put the recession in the rearview mirror,” he told union representatives, immigration and activists at the ceremony.
The Los Angeles City Council approved the wage hike in May with a 14-1 vote. The law requires businesses with 25 or more employees to increase pay for minimum wage workers to $15 by 2020.
The pay hikes start in July 2016 with a jump to $10.50. Smaller businesses will have an extra year to meet the new minimums.
Opponents say the law will place an unfair burden on small businesses and will drive employers away from the city.
Addressing those concerns, Garcetti said: “We would not have done this if we believed this would hurt our economy.”
The city council included in the law a stipulation that the city’s minimum wage should continue to increase based on the Consumer Price Index starting in 2022.
The legislation also included a $500,000 budget to establish an Office of Labor Standards. It will investigate whether businesses in the city are paying workers fairly.
The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009. Other U.S. cities such as Seattle and San Francisco have increased minimum wages in recent years.
The new law will impact an estimated 600,000 workers in Los Angeles, the second-largest U.S. city.
“The winds of this country blow from West to East,” Los Angeles City Council President Herb Wesson said at the event. “Don’t believe people across the country are not watching this.”
The city council in September approved a pay increase for hotel workers to $15.37 an hour.
The Eleanor Abbott Big Bear Valley Historical Museum has been in operation since 1982. The idea for the museum first came about in the late ‘60s when longtime Big Bear resident Eleanor Abbott recognized a need for historical preservation.
Kim Sweet, who has been the museum’s curator for 12 years, says she’s glad Abbott came to that realization. Sweet says if we don’t preserve Big Bear Valley’s rich history now, it could be lost for future generations.
Sweet says the museum holds a lot of treasures from the area. Thousands of artifacts from Serrano Native Americans, early pioneers, gold miners and even 1940s movie stars fill the shelves in the museum’s nine buildings. Sweet says for her, there’s nothing more exciting than looking at things that belonged to the people who came before us.
In a classroom at Cal State San Bernardino, Ernest Siva shares a traditional Serrano story with students. He reads aloud in a language that was spoken by as many as 30,000 Native Americans in the San Bernardino mountain areas before settlers arrived in the 18th century.
78-year-old Siva remembers speaking Serrano at home with his mother and grandfather as a child. But in his generation, pressure to assimilate led English to become the tribe’s dominant language. Now, Siva is one of just two living speakers of Serrano. He’s hoping to pass on as much as he knows.
“I hope more and more people learn enough about it to keep the fire going. It’s our heritage. It does mean something to us and it really was important to the people,” Siva said.
The San Manuel Band of Mission Indians has been making a formal effort to preserve the Serrano language since 2004. Two years ago, the tribe teamed up with Cal State San Bernardino to offer college courses in the language.
The challenge was finding an instructor who could teach a language almost no one speaks.
Michael Navarrete, who describes himself as “Nicaraguan-Sicilian-German-Russian-Jewish,” is one of the people the tribe turned to. Navarrete said he didn’t even realize there were still Native Americans in California when he got the job. But, as a trained linguist, the idea intrigued him.
“It really is kind of a linguist’s dream job that I’m working on. For all intents and purposes it’s an extinct language but I’m trying to bring it back, so it’s very interesting even if I can’t talk to anyone,” Navarrete said.
Navarrete is teaching the introductory Serrano class at the university with Siva’s help. This semester they have just seven students.
None of the participants in Navarrete and Siva’s class have Serrano heritage. Most of them enrolled out of simple curiosity.
21-year-old psychology major, Vanessa Rodriguez already speaks Spanish and Romanian. She said Serrano just seemed interesting.
“I can learn a language outside, but this is a language that not many people know, so it’s not easy to come across to go find a book or something where I can learn from there,” she said.
The university hopes offering these courses will encourage students to take an interest in the cultural history of Southern California and help connect students with other parts of the community.
Carmen Jany, chair of CSUSB’s Indigenous Languages program, said, “The local tribes are part of our university community so we obviously want to serve the tribes as well. What is their main concern? To keep their languages and cultures alive, so we want to help them in that endeavor.”
The university started the program in 2012. They now offer courses in three Southern California indigenous languages: Luiseño, Serrano and Cahuilla. This year, the school also introduced a certificate program in California indigenous languages and cultures. Jany says the courses are available to community members as well as university students. She said she hopes that CSUSB students might someday learn enough about indigenous languages to work on the tribes’ reservations as teachers.
So far, enrollment has been low. The individual tribes pay for language instruction and Jany said without the tribes’ backing, the university probably wouldn’t be able to offer these courses.
Still, it’s an investment the tribes are willing to make in their future.
“Based on my experience, most tribes in the U.S. are playing catch up,” Navarrete said. “Most linguists think more than half the world’s existing languages will disappear by the end of the century.”
Southern California’s native languages are among those threatened, Navarrete said.
Navarrete and other linguists have helped compile a dictionary of about 4,000 Serrano words, but a lot of the language has already been lost. It’s something that concerns Siva.
“The main thing is to pass that on as much as we can,” Siva said.
Siva never thought he’d see a university teaching his language his lifetime. This course makes him feel hopeful.
There’s a traditional Serrano teaching on the matter, Siva said. “If you lose your language, you won’t have the deep roots of the oak, you’ll have shallow roots like grass, which withers and is gone.”
It’s a sentiment he hopes future generations will share.
It was a welcome sight for fishing enthusiasts. Trucks bearing “live fish” signs backed into the Big Bear Lake Municipal Water District lot and shot hundreds of thousands of small trout out of pipes and into the water the morning of April 1.
About 750,000 fish have been released into the lake in the past two weeks. Another 500,000 will arrive later this month.
The fish, which MWD was able to secure at a discounted rate, are a nice boost for the Big Bear Lake fishing industry, especially following the recent cancellation of two local fishing tournaments. But they’re also an indication of a rough outlook for the fishing industry statewide.
“No one has fish right now,” said MWD General Manager Mike Stephenson.
Fish hatcheries across California have been struggling to cope with the state’s historic drought. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife evacuated fish from two of its hatcheries last summer as dry conditions persisted and water temperatures rose. Other hatcheries have attempted to save fish by installing massive water cooling systems. The Calaveras Trout Farm, a regular supplier for Big Bear Lake, is simply closing up shop for the season.
“The farm has been in operation since 1971, and we’ve never had an issue,” said Tim Goodson, the farm’s owner. “Last year we struggled, but this year the lake is going to go dry.”
Goodson’s Snelling, California farm depends on water from the Merced River, which is fed by Sierra snow pack. With snow levels in the Sierra Nevada at a mere 5 percent of average, some waterways near Goodson’s farm are expected to go dry this summer. Without cool mountain water flowing in, the water at Goodson’s farm will become stagnant and too hot to support baby fish.
Goodson called the situation “dire,” and said he has had to lay off his seven full-time employees. “We produce 600,000 pounds of fish a year, and this year we sold about 80,000 pounds and we’re shutting down,” Goodson said.
Stephenson said Big Bear Lake usually waits to buy fish that are bigger—the majority of the new fish are 2 to 8 inches long—but said he is happy to be able to secure any fish at all for this season. The MWD built new fish cages for the occasion. About 200,000 fish will be raised in the cages until they grow larger.
“It was now or never,” Stephenson said. “React now, or suffer a whole season without fish.”
Stephenson said the Calaveras farm offered him the trout for “pennies on the dollar.” The 1.25 million fish cost about $95,000 and might have cost more than $3 million in a good year, he said. He is optimistic the investment will make a lasting impact.
“This will make a difference for three years, easily,” Stephenson said. “Even though they’re smaller fish, it’s 20 times the number of fish we got last year.”
For now, the effects of the drought have brought some good news for fishing in Big Bear Lake, even if it’s bad news overall for California’s $1.3 billion fishing industry.
Goodson just hopes things turn around for trout farms like his. “Next year we’re hoping we get rain, but if this continues I’m not sure what we’ll do,” Goodson said.
Photo courtesy of Big Bear Lake Municipal Water District
More than 90 percent of long-distance hikers who attempt to tackle the 2,650 mile Pacific Crest Trail start at the Mexican border, making their way north to the Canadian border. Almost everyone who attempts the daunting journey over the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges does so in spring and summer months.
Forry, 33 and Lichter, 34, are hiking the PCT from north to south, and they’re doing it during the coldest months of the year. They started at the Canadian border in late October and expect to make it to the Mexican border around March 1. No other hikers are known to have accomplished this before.
“There’s been a bunch of people calling us ‘the crazy ones,’” Lichter said in an interview. He and Forry took a break to speak to The Grizzly when they passed through Big Bear on Feb. 20.
Shawn Forry looks out over Mount Jefferson in Oregon. In Oregon, Forry and his hiking partner Justin Lichter faced stormy conditions and frostbite. (Courtesy of Shawn Forry)
When they started walking in Washington last autumn, they never expected to make it all the way to Southern California. Forry said they estimated they had less than a 20 percent chance of finishing.
“So much has to line up along the way,” Forry said. Hiking through snow and over mountains, Forry and Lichter knew the slightest twist of an ankle could derail their itinerary.
So why risk unpredictable weather and difficult conditions to head south during the winter? “Because that’s what the birds do, right?” Lichter joked.
In truth, the pair was ready for a formidable challenge. Lichter and Forry have hiked a combined 50,000 miles or so on trails around the world. They have both completed the Pacific Crest Trail (in warmer weather) in years past, not to mention the Appalachian Trail, the Continental Divide Trail, and several other monumental outdoor feats. They also have adventurous careers—Forry is an instructor for the outdoor education nonprofit, Outward Bound, and Lichter is a ski patroller. Both men grew up on the East Coast, but moved to California for more outdoor opportunities.
“I just like being outside and seeing new places,” Lichter said. “I couldn’t even picture myself at a desk or in a cubicle.”
But even with an incredible amount of experience, the two have had a number of difficult days since they set out four months ago. Near Mount Hood in Oregon Lichter and Forry were caught in a serious storm where they both ended up with frostbitten feet. “Ironically, that’s one of the easiest sections of the trail and it turned into one of the hardest for us,” Lichter said.
Forry added, “We had a ‘go go go’ mentality at the beginning, and I think that was what caused our oversight that the storm was a little more serious than we were anticipating.”
Forry and Lichter, who have been traveling 20 to 30 miles per day, faced constant rain and snow for the first two months of their journey. They alternated between hiking, snowshoeing and skiing. Snow was sometimes heavy enough they had to wake up in the night to dig out their own tents and sometimes thin enough they had to ski over rocks. Then came the desert. The past week, as they’ve traveled through 65 degree sunshine in Southern California, the hikers said they’ve felt overheated, having adjusted to below-freezing temperatures.
Shawn Forry carries skis through the California desert after months of hiking through snowy conditions. (Courtesy of Shawn Forry)
“It’s been almost a tale of two trips,” Lichter said, of the roller-coaster weather conditions they’ve faced.
With the most treacherous challenges behind them and the end of the trail within reach, Lichter and Forry said they have relaxed a bit. They have rewarded themselves with a few more breaks from the trail. They stayed two nights in Big Bear. When they arrived, they indulged right away in substantial quantities of Mexican food. They were also eager to check out the movie schedule at Village Theaters.
Lichter and Forry admit they’ve grown a little tired of camp food and are excited to finish their journey. But they already look back on their one-of-a-kind trek with nostalgia.
“Even to go through the some of the same places I know and see them in a different season was amazing,” Forry said.
Both hikers said getting to see isolated parts of the trail after fresh snow had fallen made for unforgettable views. Being among the first hikers to experience that scenery in the way they did made it even more exciting.
As Forry put it, “The balance of the beauty and the challenges has been really rewarding.”
Her coy smile is hard to miss. The new mural on the west wall of the Broadway Cafe in Big Bear City shows a rosy-cheeked girl with long eyelashes about to bite into a steaming hamburger.
“Let’s have a burger, baby,” she says.
The mural will be instantly recognizable to some. It’s the work of an LA-based street artist known as Sand One. She has painted a series of cheeky young women on walls around the world, and her work has gained her a sizable cult following. In early January, Sand took her first trip to Big Bear and left one of her signature paintings behind.
Chuck Norton, whose wife Brenda is one of the cafe’s owners, was cooking burgers in the kitchen last month when Sand approached him with the idea. “She just walked in here one afternoon and asked if she could do a painting on the side of the building,” Norton said. “She said everywhere she goes she likes to leave her mark.”
It’s true. The 23-year-old artist started painting murals as a teenager. In the years since, she has embellished walls from Chicago to Puerto Rico to Guatemala to Miami with spray-painted compositions.
“This is when I feel alive—painting,” the gregarious artist said in a phone interview from her LA studio.
In the male-dominated world of street art, Sand makes herself stand out with ultra-feminine images. Don’t let the frills fool you.
“You see these big walls with eyelashes and cupcakes, but I paint like a man,” Sand said. “I can paint big walls. Don’t help me, don’t touch me, don’t lift my ladder, I bring my own equipment.”
All of Sand’s paintings feature one of the many, stylized characters known as “dolls” she created. The girl with the fang-toothed smile on the side of the Broadway Cafe is a character Sand calls Wolfy.
“Each doll has a story. Each one relates to a girl that’s somewhere out there,” Sand said. She added she likes using the dolls as her subject because, “Women can morph into anything, we’re easy to adapt.”
Wolfy, for example, is cute, but she can also be ferocious, Sand said. She joked that Wolfy will be tough enough to handle Big Bear’s cold climate.
Recently, the dolls have gained even more popularity and Sand’s business has grown. The artist, who has nearly 40,000 followers admiring her work on Instagram, started taking more custom orders for small paintings and also launched a clothing line. The attention from fans has kept her busy.
“I been painting nonstop for like three months and I haven’t left my studio,” Sand said. “I wanted to get away from LA. I live downtown and it’s always super crazy, so I was like, ‘you know what? I’m going to Big Bear.’”
She recruited her mom, her siblings and a cousin to join her on the impromptu mountain getaway. She said she assured her family the trip would be strictly for relaxation.
“They were like, ‘You’re not painting right?’ But I needed to tell people I was there,” Sand said. She had taken note of the temptingly blank, cream-colored wall on the side of the Broadway Cafe. On her last day in town she hopped out of the car and told her family, “Just give me 30 minutes!” She had secretly packed her supply of spray paint.
Sand said it’s not just any business that lets her start painting—she estimates for every 20 businesses she approaches, only three will agree to let her adorn the walls.
When she came to Norton with the idea, he said he called around and checked with everyone he could think of, including the cafe’s neighboring businesses, to ask if a mural would bother them. He said everyone seemed to be in favor.
“So far, the reaction has all been positive,” Norton said. He added that he has even had a few customers come in for a burger just because Wolfy’s sly grin caught their attention.
Norton said there is some maintenance planned for the cafe later this year. There’s a chance the owners may need to repaint the cafe’s exterior walls and cover up the mural.
“I told (Sand) she could come back if we do maintenance,” Norton said.
Bigger is better at the Grizzly Manor Cafe, where pancakes are the size of stop signs and butter comes in heaping scoops. Jayme Nordine has owned the cafe for 23 years. His work philosophy is simple: keep portions large and attitudes sassy. Nordine says he loves his customers but doesn’t hesitate to give them a hard time when they don’t finish their grizzly-sized meals. Nordine credits the cafe’s success to the menu’s homey breakfast fare and ample portions, but says atmosphere has a lot to do with it too—in the tiny restaurant, guests have to cram in and are forced to get cozy with the wait staff and fellow diners. Everyone’s family at the Grizzly Manor, Nordine says. That business model seems to be working, there’s a line of people out the door waiting for the Grizzly experience almost every day.
By Day, Joe Vonesh is an airplane mechanic. Most people think he’s soft-spoken and a little shy. By night, he takes on a completely different persona. He takes up the microphone and leads the Big Bear Country Dance Club as a high-energy country music DJ. Vonesh says he has become a master of gauging the crowd to pick songs that will keep people on the dance floor. Vonesh says his 14-year career as a line dancing DJ has made him more socially confident. He also says it has given him a sense of family among the hundreds of loyal dancers who come every week to kick up their heels to his music.
The way Watts locals remember it, the Watts Happening Coffee House was the place to be in the late ‘60s.
“It was hip,” said Harold Hambrick, a longtime Watts resident and witness to the 1965 Watts Riots. “Anyone who had any kind of creative ideas could come there.” Musicians, poets, and artists gathered at the space in the years following the Watts Riots, as did political activists, Hollywood actors and members of L.A.’s Black Panther Party.
In the nearly 50 years since the Watts Riots — or Watts Rebellion, as residents prefer to remember it — the coffee house sat dormant for decades, then reopened. It has hosted some performances in recent years, but not to the scale it once did.
Now, some community members hope to bring the arts scene back to the iconic cafe. With a grant from the California Arts Council, the Watts Village Theater Company has set out to refurbish the space, now called just the Watts Coffee House. For the first time ever, the company will stage a full length play called Follow in the cafe, starting tonight.
The Watts Happening Coffee House rose, literally, out of the ashes of the 1965 violence in Watts which left 34 dead and more than 3,000 arrested. 103rd Street became known as “Charcoal Alley.” Nearly everything on the street had burned.
“It was brought out of chaos,” said Rita Cofield, project manager of the Watts Village Theater Company’s beautification project. “It was an incubator for all of these creative things in the community.”
The Watts Rebellion was a six-day struggle in response to the arrest of a 21-year-old black man by a white CHP officer, the largest civil unrest in L.A. history at its time. In the years afterwards, artists and activists transformed the Watts Happening Coffee House into base camp for civil rights efforts. Donations flowed into Watts from government agencies like the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Hollywood names like Budd Schulberg and Roger Mosley, giving rise to organizations like the Watts Writers Workshop, Studio Watts and the Mafundi Institute — all promising creative expression for survivors of the Rebellion.
But within a decade, donations slowed, public memory of the Watts Rebellion waned, and the coffee house and many of the organizations formed there closed.
Over the course of a few years, Julie lost several of her family members, then a close friend also passed away. Overwhelmed by grief, Julie developed severe depression. She cried daily. Worst of all, she had no one to talk to.
“I was definitely in a tough place with a lot to say and nowhere to say it,” said Julie, a Big Bear Lake resident who preferred not to give her last name for this story.
What she really wanted was a professional counselor, someone to speak to one-on-one in a private setting.
Just over a year ago, Julie’s doctor recommended she try a new program through the Bear Valley Community Healthcare District. Julie was among the first patients of Mindy Mueller, a psychologist offering private therapy at the district’s health clinic.
The thing is, Mueller doesn’t live in Big Bear, or even nearby. Julie would be participating in therapy sessions via video chat.
In June of 2013, the healthcare district began offering counseling with Mueller through a program called TeleConnect Therapies, a computerized video system. Sessions have been in high demand. The program has been so successful for offering quality medical services to Big Bear patients remotely, that the district has plans to expand the program this month.
Think of TeleConnect therapy like Skype or FaceTime, but more advanced. The patient and therapist look at each other on a screen. The therapist can control the cameras on the patient’s end to zoom in or change the angle of the lens. For the patient’s privacy, the Internet connection is extra secure and data is encrypted.
“It’s the coming wave of medicine—especially in rural areas,” said Ray Hino, Bear Valley Community Health District CEO.
When Julie was first seeking help, she had received some counseling at Big Bear’s Lutheran Social Services office. She also spoke to her medical doctor. But before TeleConnect therapy, she had found her mental health options on the mountain to be somewhat limited—a common issue in rural communities.
“There was a great need in Big Bear for more mental health services,” Hino said, adding, “If mental health issues go untreated, it can lead to domestic violence, problems at work or school, all kinds of negative effects.”
Without mental health services, Hino said, more pressure ends up placed on a community’s law enforcement or emergency rooms. Hino recalled one patient, whom he said used to be a regular in Big Bear’s emergency room, who has now been able reduce hospital visits just through sessions with Mueller.
Joanne Merrill stands with the healthcare district’s special computer system for TeleConnect Therapies. Merrill received special training to work with telemedicine technologies. She makes all of the appointments for the therapist who sees patients with the system and says demand for appointments has been extremely high in the first year of the program.
The district secured a $30,000 grant from the California Endowment to pay for the first year of the program. In that first year, 547 Big Bear area patients saw Mueller. Joanne Merrill books their appointments for the clinic. Merrill keeps a notebook on her desk with pages of names written inside—that’s just the waiting list.
“(Mueller) usually books up four or five weeks in advance,” Merrill said, “I’ve even seen people book two months in advance because being seen by her is so important to them.”
Mueller “beams in” to Big Bear from the San Diego area twice a week. Merrill said appointments are often booked back-to-back for 12 straight hours.
But while demand for treatment is high, TeleConnect therapy doesn’t work for every patient. “If a person has a more severe disorder with hallucinations or delusions, it’s hard because they look at the screen and are really distrustful,” Mueller said, “It can be hard for them to know if you’re really there.”
She added that some forms of therapy that she practices with in-person clients, like creating artwork or playing games, don’t work over the screen.
And for some people, the screen just feels weird. “We get the occasional person who says, ‘I don’t want to talk to a TV,’” Merrill said.
But for patients like Julie, the screen is no problem. Julie said sometimes she forgets she’s even talking to a video. “I look her in the eye and she looks at me in my eyes,” she said.
Mueller said some patients are actually more willing to talk to her at a distance since it feels less confrontational and, since Mueller lives out of town, the patients know she’s someone they won’t run into at the grocery store later.
Numerous studies have been conducted on the success of therapy conducted through phone, email or video chat. Most studies find video-based systems like the one at the Brenda Boss facility to be almost as effective as in-person therapy.
If all goes according to schedule, the healthcare district will expand the program to include video sessions with a psychiatrist this month. Mueller, as a psychologist and therapist, does not write prescriptions. A psychiatrist, on the other hand, is a medical doctor.
Mueller thinks the expansion will be an important complement to her services. “The combination of medication and therapy for some disorders is the most effective way to help, so I’m really excited people will have the option,” she said.
Hino also hopes to see the video technology program expand to bring other kinds of medical specialists beyond just mental health to Big Bear in the future. He sees the technology as an effective way to offer quality healthcare on the mountain without having to recruit doctors to move to the area.
So far, many patients seem to agree. Julie calls the day she first heard about TeleConnect therapy an act of God. A lifesaver.
“When I (have a session with Mueller) it’s like everything’s going to be OK, I’ve got someone who’s listening to me and willing to work through this with me,” Julie said. “If you can see that person—even on a computer—it makes a huge difference.”
