Monday, April 27, 2026

Altadena Forum Puts Three County Agencies in One Room Before This Year’s Fire Season Opens

A free Zoom meeting Tuesday gives residents a direct line to county officials on brush clearance, crime, and rebuilding — with inspections starting in three days

Fire season’s paperwork deadline is 72 hours away, and Tuesday night, the county agencies that hold the answers are all scheduled to show up at once.

The Altadena Coalition of Neighborhood Associations (ACONA) has organized a 90-minute public Zoom forum for Tuesday, April 28, from 7 to 8:30 p.m., bringing representatives from LA County Fire, the LA County Sheriff’s Department, and LA County Regional Planning and Public Works before an open community audience. The meeting arrives three days before the county’s annual defensible space inspection season opens for inland communities on May 1, and just weeks before the May 31 deadline to apply for the Measure E parcel tax’s low-income senior exemption.

According to ACONA’s agenda, LA County Fire’s presentation will cover three subjects that have generated steady questions in Altadena since January 2025: the specifics of brush clearance compliance,

Monday, April 27, 2026

The Last Harpers Ferry Raider Is Buried in Altadena. A Film Is Telling His Story.

The man who outlived every other participant of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry is buried in the Altadena hills, at the north end of El Prieto Road. He has been there for 137 years. Most Pasadena and Altadena students have never heard his name, according to the group that made a documentary film to change that.

Owen Brown — third son of abolitionist John Brown, one of the five raiders who escaped the October 1859 attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and the last of those survivors to die — spent his final years in the foothills above Altadena, where he died in 1889 and was buried on a hilltop the community named Little Round Top. A 20-minute documentary, “Owen Brown’s Body,” was commissioned by the Owen Brown Gravesite Committee specifically to bring that story into classrooms. On Tuesday evening, filmmaker Pablo D. Miralles and historian Michele Zack will discuss how the film came to be at the Pasadena Civil War Round Table’s monthly meeting at the historic Blinn House in Pasadena.

Sunday, April 26, 2026

Altadena’s Poets Laureate Invite a Community to Tell Its Story Onstage

The library series born from the Eaton Fire closes with an afternoon where the audience writes the script

Sixteen months after fire tore through Altadena, the stories still outnumber the people willing to tell them. On Sunday, an event at the Bob Lucas Memorial Library will try to change that — not with a microphone and a podium, but with actors who listen.

“After the Fire: Honoring Stories From the Community” pairs poetry with People’s Playback Theater, an interactive performance company whose actors take audience members’ spoken memories and transform them, on the spot, into movement, music and improvised scenes. The event runs from 10 a.m. to noon at the Bob Lucas Memorial Library and Literacy Center, 2659 Lincoln Ave. Registration is required.

The program is part of “After the Fires: Healing from Histories,” a yearlong poetry initiative led by Altadena Poets Laureate Sehba Sarwar and Lester Graves Lennon. The Academy of American Poets awarded the pair $50,000 fellowships in 2025 to launch the project,

Saturday, April 25, 2026

Free Workshop Offers Eaton Fire Survivors a Single-Team Path to Rebuilding

The nonprofit behind a turnkey summit in March returns with a second session — this time in Pasadena

Eaton Fire survivors weighing how to rebuild their destroyed home can hear Saturday about an approach that puts one team in charge of the entire process — design, permits, and construction — delivering a move-in-ready house.

The Altadena Recovery and Rebuild Corporation is hosting the free, two-hour workshop at Pasadena Senior Center, its second event focused on what the building industry calls “turnkey” or “production” rebuilding. The concept, according to ARRC, consolidates steps that homeowners would otherwise coordinate among separate architects, engineers, permit consultants, and general contractors.

More than 15 months have passed since the January 7, 2025, Eaton Fire. destroyed. Many survivors remain in temporary housing, navigating insurance disputes and a complex rebuilding process.

ARRC held its first turnkey event, the Altadena Turnkey Rebuild Summit, on March 15 at Loma Alta Park in Altadena. That summit gave attendees the chance to meet builders and housing professionals and attend speaker presentations,

Saturday, April 25, 2026

Pasadena Assemblymember Condemns Trump for Omitting ‘Genocide’ From Armenian Remembrance Statement

The rebuke came on the 111th anniversary, as Pasadena held observances at its permanent memorial in Memorial Park

Assemblymember John Harabedian (D-Pasadena) condemned President Trump on Thursday for refusing to use the word “genocide” in his annual April 24 statement marking the anniversary of the systematic killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire.

Trump’s White House statement, titled “Presidential Message on Armenian Remembrance Day,” used the Armenian phrase “Meds Yeghern” — meaning “Great Crime” or “Great Catastrophe” — but did not include the word “genocide,” according to the text published on whitehouse.gov.

The Armenian National Committee of America, an advocacy organization, said it was the sixth time across two presidential terms that Trump has declined to use the term.

“By refusing to call the Armenian Genocide what it is, he is perpetuating a dangerous false narrative,” Harabedian said in a statement released by his office. “As an Armenian American, this is a betrayal of history and a deliberate act of denial.”

Saturday, April 25, 2026

Housing Affordability Edges Up Across SoCal; Disparities Remain

CITY NEWS SERVICE

Housing affordability in California improved slightly in 2025, but Southern California remained among the least affordable regions, while significant gaps persisted for Black households, according to a report released Friday by the California Association of Realtors.

According to CAR, 19% of California households earned enough income to purchase a median-priced home in 2025, up from 18% the previous year.

In Los Angeles County, affordability remained among the lowest in the state, particularly for minority households. Only 8% of Black households and 9% of Hispanic/Latino households could afford a median-priced home, according to the report.

Orange County also ranked among the least affordable markets. According to CAR, 15% of white non-Hispanic households, and 18% of Asian households could afford a median-priced home, while just 10% of Hispanic/Latino households had the same ability.

The statewide median price for a detached home was $875,550 in 2025. A minimum annual income of $221,200 was required to afford monthly payments of about $5,530,

Saturday, April 25, 2026

Statewide Voter ID Measure to Appear on November Ballot

CITY NEWS SERVICE

California voters, including those in the Southland, will decide in November whether to impose new voter identification and citizenship verification requirements under a proposed constitutional amendment that qualified for the November ballot, state officials announced Friday.

Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber said Friday the initiative cleared the signature threshold needed to appear on the Nov. 3 ballot.

The measure would require voters to present government-issued identification at the polls or provide identifying information when voting by mail. It would also require the state to issue voter identification cards upon request and mandate annual reports on voter citizenship verification rates.

To qualify, the initiative needed 874,641 valid signatures, equal to 8% of votes cast in the 2022 gubernatorial election. Officials said the measure exceeded that threshold through random sampling.

The proposal is scheduled to be formally certified for the ballot June 25 unless it is withdrawn by its proponents.

A fiscal analysis estimated one-time implementation costs in the tens of millions of dollars,

Friday, April 24, 2026

Pasadena Teacher of the Year Among Roughly 160 Educators Facing Layoff, School Board Told

Martin Dorado said his name is on the proposed layoffs list

The Pasadena Unified School District’s current Teacher of the Year told the Board of Education on Thursday that he is among approximately 160 educators issued Reduction in Force notices this budget cycle, a disclosure that crystallized a night of escalating community emotions over proposed school consolidations, teacher layoffs and a zero Cost of Living Adjustment offer in ongoing contract negotiations with United Teachers of Pasadena.

Martin Dorado, a fifth-grade teacher at Madison Elementary School and a member of United Teachers of Pasadena, said he has taught in Pasadena Unified School District since 2016. Addressing trustees during public comment, Dorado said the district’s repeated invocation of “sustainability” rings hollow inside classrooms facing 36 students and biennial layoff cycles.

“Whenever the budget is referenced, the conversation is always centered around sustainability, but what does sustainability look like inside a classroom? 36 students in a room, teachers doing the jobs of three or more people,

Friday, April 24, 2026

Pasadena’s Harabedian Leads Assembly in Recognizing 111th Anniversary of Armenian Genocide

The only Armenian American in the Legislature, the District 41 assemblymember presented a resolution and honored an advocacy group days before the April 24 commemoration

Assemblymember John Harabedian of Pasadena stood before the California State Assembly on April 20 and presented House Resolution 97, formally designating April 24, 2026, as the state’s Day of Commemoration of the 111th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.

He is the only Armenian American serving in the California Legislature. The resolution passed the Assembly that day.

HR 97, introduced by Assemblymember Nick Schultz with Harabedian as a co-author, recognizes the systematic killing of more than 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923, affirms the historical record, and condemns ongoing efforts to deny the genocide, according to the legislative text. The resolution also pledges continued support for educators who teach about human rights and genocide. Assemblymember Juan Alanis, a Republican from Modesto, joined the measure as a coauthor — one of 13 legislators from both parties listed as sponsors,

Friday, April 24, 2026

Senator Pérez Reacts to Court Ruling Blocking Enforcement of No Vigilantes Act

Federal appeals panel halts the No Vigilantes Act, ruling California cannot require federal officers to show identification; senator says the fight isn’t over

On Wednesday, April 22, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit blocked enforcement of the identification requirement at the center of that law — SB 805, the No Vigilantes Act — ruling that California cannot require federal law enforcement officers to display visible identification during enforcement operations. The court held that doing so likely violates the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

“Today’s injunction ruling is disappointing, but it is not the final word on SB 805 as the court’s full analysis is still pending,” Senator Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena) said Thursday in a statement issued by her office.

SB 805 requires any non-uniformed law enforcement officer operating in California — including federal agents — to visibly display identification showing their agency and either a name or badge number during arrests,