It was a somber, and at times tearful, gathering Monday as legislators and advocates promoted a bill to hold behavioral treatment centers for teens more accountable.
Most of the attention was focused on one (some might say, unexpected) speaker: The hotel heiress, socialite and media personality Paris Hilton.
Hilton is the latest celebrity to utilize their fame (or as she said “shine my spotlight”) to persuade the Legislature to change state policy. In Hilton’s case, the physical and emotional abuse she says she experienced at youth treatment centers in California, Utah and Montana has led her on a personal crusade against institutional abuse in the “troubled teen industry.”
- Hilton: “I was subjected to abuse disguised as therapy, isolated from the outside world, and denied even the most basic rights… .The sounds of my peers screaming as they were restrained and injected sedatives will never leave me…. If these facilities are scared of a simple transparency measure, then I think we should ask them: ‘What do they have to hide?’”
Senate Bill 1043 won unanimous approval from the Senate human services committee later Monday. It would require the California Department of Social Services to detail a center’s use of “seclusion rooms” and restraints through a publicly accessible online dashboard by Jan. 1, 2026. The information would include descriptions of the incident, the duration of the incident and what staff members were involved in the incident, among other things. Facilities would also be mandated to provide a report to the person who was confined or restrained, as well as the individual’s parent or guardian if they are a minor.
Hilton’s nonprofit, 11:11 Media Impact, is co-sponsoring the bipartisan bill, led by Sen. Shannon Grove, a Bakersfield Republican, and co-authored by Democratic Sens. Angelique Ashby of Sacramento and Aisha Wahab of Fremont. Disability Rights California and Children’s Law Center of California also support the proposal.
- Grove: “It doesn’t matter if you’re worth a billion dollars or you’re worth $20. The word trauma is still there.”
In 2021, after reports of rampant abuse, California passed a law that prohibited the practice of sending troubled youth, including foster children, to out-of-state, for-profit treatment centers. As an alternative, youths can be sent to “short term residential therapeutic programs,” which are licensed by the state’s social services department. Two years ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a measure to fund crisis residential treatment facilities for children on Medi-Cal.
During Hilton’s time at these youth facilities, including the 11 months she spent at the Provo Canyon School in Utah when she was 17, Hilton said she lived in constant fear.
Hilton also made a not-so-veiled threat near the end of her remarks: “If you are abusing children, I will find you and I will come with my huge spotlight and shine it on wherever you are.”
In other news: Newsom shifts pension cost
More generous-than-expected raises for California state workers are nudging up the cost of public employee pensions, according to the California Public Employees’ Retirement System.
But, for one year, Gov. Newsom has a plan to save some money that otherwise would have to be spent on those retirement plans. He wants to take money set aside 10 months ago to pay down CalPERS’ debt and instead use it for part of next year’s state worker pension costs.
That’ll save the state general fund $1.7 billion, making it a small but important part of Newsom’s plan to manage California’s yawning budget deficit.
There’s one catch: The independent Legislative Analyst’s Office wrote that Newsom’s pension plan “appears unconstitutional” because of the way it relies on a previously scheduled debt payment.
Newsom’s accounting shift is possible because California has been paying down debt to comply with Proposition 2, the 2014 ballot measure meant to put the state’s fiscal house in order. It requires the state to make supplemental debt payments until 2030, even in years when it runs a deficit. Recently, Newsom has been using the Prop. 2 payments to chip away at the state’s substantial pension liabilities, including the $1.7 billion chunk earmarked for CalPERS’ debts in the current budget.
The analyst’s office contends the governor’s new proposal runs afoul of Prop. 2 by using a planned debt payment to “supplant, not supplement, what the state would otherwise have to provide CalPERS in 2024-25.”
The Newsom administration has a different view. “Put simply: it’s the Administration’s position that this proposal complies with Proposition 2,” said Finance Department spokesman H.D. Palmer.
The details on how much California will spend on state government pensions next year — regardless of whether lawmakers go along with Newsom’s proposal — are laid out for the CalPERS Board of Administration this week.
Capturing carbon
As California sets its sights to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045, a controversial plan to collect carbon emissions and trap it underground has divided residents of a Kern County community, writes CalMatters climate reporter Alejandro Lazo.
The state’s largest oil and gas producer, California Resources Corp., is seeking federal and county approval to proceed with the state’s first carbon capture project. It calls for injecting 1.46 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year for 26 years into a mile-deep underground reservoir — the equivalent of the annual emissions from several hundred thousand gas-powered cars.
The process keeps greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere; and Newsom’s administration supports carbon capture and storage as a way to lower the state’s carbon footprint. Dave Noerr, the mayor of Taft, which is located near the project site, says the technology enables the 14,000 Kern County residents employed by the oil and gas industry to hang onto their jobs.
- Noerr: “If we can learn how to do it, and do it right, on a commercial scale, right here, then we can help those people.”
But residents and environmental justice groups argue that such projects prop up fossil fuel companies that are struggling in a decarbonizing world and enable oilfields and power plants to emit toxic substances into local communities. Analysts are also skeptical about how much the process notably reduces greenhouse gases.
Sonia Sanchez, a Buttonwillow resident, located near the project site: “We cannot afford to compromise the air we breathe, the water we drink and the soil we rely on for the sake of experimental solutions..”
