Curated news, notes and observations most weekdays from LA Observed.
Fixing the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is necessary, say officials, but it won’t be cheap. The costs to build and operate the Gov. Brown’s twin-tunnels plan are estimated to cost $24.54 billion over the 50 year term of the project. Where will the money come from? Capitol Weekly
Opponents of the Millennium Hollywood project released emails this morning they claim show the developer and the city's Department of Building and Safety discussed a controversial earthquake fault as early as 2012.
Brian D'Arcy, head of the union representing Department of Water and Power workers, said Tuesday he wants to see the city act early — possibly by Friday — to approve a proposal extending his workers’ contracts but freeze wages for three years, resolve a pension lawsuit and begin to address salary parity issues. DN
The ACLU here and other local groups are launching a campaign today against the "predatory towing of immigrant drivers and their vehicles."
The computer systems that connect 911 callers to Los Angeles Fire Department rescuers broke down repeatedly last month, complicating and delaying emergency responses and prompting renewed calls to fix the agency's faulty technology. LAT
Harold Meyerson's 7200-word profile of the L.A. Alliance for the New Economy says "Over the past 20 years, it has become the nation’s most innovative and effective force for raising the incomes of low-wage private-sector workers. No other think tank has come up with more ways to leverage the powers of municipal government to create higher pay for America’s working class." The American Prospect
Mayor Eric Garcetti and Amy Wakeland are pondering whether to move into Getty House, the foundation-run mayoral residence in Windsor Square. LAT
Los Angeles Unified and seven other California school districts won an unprecedented federal waiver Tuesday from the No Child Left Behind law, freeing up $150 million to educate low-income students and creating new benchmarks for gauging their success. DN
Senior writer Geoff Boucher has left Entertainment Weekly less than a year after joining the magazine following a messy resignation from the LA Times. "I've decided to take the leap into leap into starting a live events company and trying to shape my own media empire....[EW's] business code practices would have made it impossible to talk to studios and other media outlets as partners/sponsors for the live events." The Wrap
Snarky tweets by journalists at the seemingly endless Television Critics Assn. press tour in Beverly Hills are "rattling the relationship between publicity-hungry networks and journalists under mounting pressure to deliver immediate, constant 140-character commentary to attract readers." LAT
'Downton Abbey's' TCA press tour: 12 things to know about Season 4. LAT
The LA Times weighs in on the unending newspaper war in Beverly Hills with a story on the Courier's Clif Smith, a divisive figure in the city. Smith did advance damage control in print last month. LAT
Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff were named co-anchors of "PBS NewsHour." TV Newser
Hiltzik: Jeff Bezos of Amazon is "looking forward to turning the Post into a laboratory. That's a real departure from what drove newspaper ownership in the old days." LAT
AOL is looking to close, sell or find partners for about 300 Patch sites that aren’t on a course to break even anytime soon. Forbes
That startling alert on your phone this week "was the first time the state has used a new national Amber Alert system administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Rather than being sent as text messages, the alerts were transmitted on an exclusive frequency that can reach tens of thousands of people at the same time -- even if those people are crowded into one place, such as a stadium, and even, as some users discovered this week, if a cellphone is set to silent." LAT
Different perspectives on the need for a gang injunction in Echo Park. WWLA
Amanda Bronstad, reporter in LA for the National Law Journal, is on Twitter @abronstadnlj.
A Los Angeles police detective shot and killed a pitbull outside a home in Reseda. DN
New SoCal bestsellers atop the fiction list: "The Cuckoo's Calling" by Robert Galbraith followed by "The English Girl" by Daniel Silva. "Zealot" by Reza Aslan has taken over the top of the nonfiction hardcover list. IndieBound
"Stryker" is a children's adventure book co-written by UCLA's Mark Wheeler and Marc Zabludoff, former colleagues at Discover. M.M. Wheezee
What good are Joshua trees? KCET
Venice Biennale highlight: LACMA's Michael Govan talks about "Prima Materia" and global art with Michael Kurcfeld. Huffington Post
Charlie Scheips reminisces on the Los Angeles art scene of old. New York Social Diary
Claremont McKenna College on Tuesday announced that it has raised more than $635 million in a fundraising campaign believed to be among the largest for an American liberal arts college. LAT
San Francisco's Chinatown in the 1950s in pictures. SF Gate
A Bay Area tribute "to the now-romantic phone booth." SF Chronicle
FYI: This year’s quadrennial national AFL-CIO convention takes place in Los Angeles September 8-11.
Grant Adamson, a scion of Malibu's founding family, died early Tuesday when the hot-air balloon carrying him and his family crashed near the western Swiss town of Montbovon. LAT
The Dodgers lost in St. Louis, ending their streak of 15 road wins in a row. Hanley Ramirez is day-to-day with his shoulder injury. Manager Don Mattingly told the media that the Dodgers turnaround saved his job. MLB.com
@LAObserved We the tortured Westside commuters thank him.
— Karen Diehl (@KDofLA) August 7, 2013