Daily Business Report: Wednesday, April 9, 2025
Judge Rejects California’s Attempt to Block City’s Voter ID Law
By Jill McLaughlin| The Epoch Times
A California judge rejected the state’s attempts to shut down a conservative coastal city’s voter ID law April 7, ruling the city did not violate state elections law when voters passed the provision last year.
In his ruling early Monday, Orange County Superior Court Judge Nico Dourbetas denied a request by California Attorney General Rob Bonta to invalidate Huntington Beach’s charter amendment, passed in March 2024.
“There is no showing that a voter identification requirement compromises the integrity of a municipal election,” Dourbetas wrote in his decision Monday. “Municipal election results do not lack integrity because only residents of a municipality who are eligible to vote participated in the election.”
‘World-class nightlife’: Lawmakers try again to extend last call to 4 a.m.
By Yue Stella Yu| CalMatters
Enjoy closing down a California bar at 2 a.m.?
Hold my beer, say a pair of San Francisco Democrats.
Assemblymember Matt Haney and Sen. Scott Wiener are bringing back a measure to allow some restaurants and bars in California to serve alcohol until 4 a.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and state holidays, extending the current cutoff time by two hours.
“World-class cities have world-class nightlife,” said Haney, a San Francisco Democrat, at a Monday press conference. “The opportunities that this can provide for our small businesses, for our hotels, for our restaurants, are tremendous.”
Under his AB342, city leaders would decide which areas and which businesses could extend their hours, and by how long.
Gov. Newsom Appeals USDA Slashing $47 Million-A-Year Food Assistance Program
By Evan Symon | California Globe
Governor Gavin Newsom and the California Department of Social Services appealed a United States Department of Agriculture decision to abruptly end the $47 million a year Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) Program over the weekend.
According to the USDA, the LFPA was first authorized under former President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan in 2022. A COVID recovery program, the LFPA sent out around $400 million a year to “make food more affordable for more Americans and help stabilize agricultural supply chains”. The California Department of Social Services, getting over $40 million a year, used the LFPA funding to purchase and distribute locally grown, produced, and processed food from producers within the state to food banks and schools.
In the next few years, the state used more than $88.5 million of LFPA funding for a local farm to food insecure area system. Essentially, it paid local farmers to grow food for foodbanks and schools. In 2025, the Department of Social Services was expecting to receive $47 million in LFPA funding. As the economy stabilized following the pandemic, the need for such programs began to shrink. At the same time, the incoming Trump Administration began looking at cuts within the USDA, with the LFPA being flagged as not critical. This led to early March when the USDA announced that it would be slashing $1 billion in funding for the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement and LFPA programs for 2025.
