Their local economies grew up around an industry built on an ever-expanding inmate population, most of it shipped in from California’s big cities. But roughly 15 years ago, state lawmakers rewrote sentencing laws, shrinking the prison population and setting off a wave of closures. Then-Gov. Jerry Brown oversaw sharp reductions in the 2010s, and Gov. Gavin Newsom has shuttered five state prisons since taking office in 2019. Now several of the towns that once depended on those institutions are grappling with hard choices about their future. One is still fighting the closure of its prison. Another is banking on new businesses to fill the gap. And a third — Susanville, tucked deep in Lassen National Forest — is isolated, remote and arguably in the toughest spot of all.

Sitting near one of the last major stops before Reno and the high desert, Susanville has long been the kind of place California sends things it would rather not think about.

“Prisons in communities are not popular, so they tend to be located in areas that have severe economic distress,” said Dan Newton, who spent 20 years working for the city of Susanville and recently served as its city manager. “That describes this area perfectly.”

In 2021, city officials learned the prison would close. They went to court to challenge the decision, arguing the state’s environmental review process had failed to account for how the closure would devastate the local economy. Newsom’s response was a budget bill that exempted prison closures from that environmental review altogether.

“At first there was a lot of panic,” said Susanville Mayor Mendy Schuster. “Houses went up for sale. People left town. State jobs are good jobs with good pay, and people were going to leave.”

Since the closure was announced, Susanville’s population has slid from about 16,000 in 2021 to roughly 14,000 in 2024, the most recent year for which American Community Survey data is available.

Not all 1,100 former prison employees left town. Some transferred to a nearby facility; others retired and stayed. Still, the local elementary school lost 10% of its enrollment between 2021 and the 2025-26 school year.

The town’s isolation is also part of its charm. The surrounding landscape offers some of the most striking scenery in far Northern California — sweeping desert views framed by the Cascade Range, where it meets the Sierra Nevada.

This region’s history follows a familiar pattern: the state or federal government tells residents they’re needed — to mine gold, log timber, guard the people sent to prison — and then eventually shows up to say their services are no longer required.

Susanville the landscape remains unchanged, a striking mix of geological features. But Susanville the incorporated city is running out of time.

“We’re heading toward insolvency,” Newton said before stepping down as city manager to take a position with Tehama County government.

The prison-building boom

Back when California’s three-strikes law handed mandatory life sentences to repeat violent offenders, the state needed places like Susanville to house its swelling inmate population.

According to Brown University’s Prison Proliferation Project, state and federal governments operated 511 prisons in 1970. By the time the nationwide prison construction boom ended around 2000, that number had climbed to 1,663.

Correctional officers who settled in Susanville coached Little League teams and bought bread from the local bakery. They held stable jobs with strong health and retirement benefits — today, experienced correctional officers earn a base salary of $9,650 a month.

The city benefited from sentencing policies that shipped inmates hundreds of miles from their families, and Lassen County even counted those incarcerated individuals as residents until 2022, building its identity around a prison boom that seemed like it would never end.

Until, of course, it did.

In 2006, overcrowding forced some of the state’s 170,000 inmates to sleep in hallways and multipurpose rooms. But by the early 2010s, sentencing reforms shifted more people into county jails rather than state prison, and those who were incarcerated served shorter terms. Today, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation houses about 90,000 inmates statewide — with roughly 8,000 more beds than people to fill them.

Over the past 15 years, researchers have increasingly studied what’s become known as the era of “mass prison closure,” when shutdowns have outpaced new construction. Criminal justice policy experts have found that the economic benefits prisons were long assumed to bring to small, rural communities were probably overstated from the start.

“A large share of prison jobs were filled by residents of neighboring towns,” researchers wrote in a 2024 paper published in Punishment & Society. “Even those who relocated to work at the prisons often settled in adjacent communities, providing little direct benefit to the local economy.”

A landmark 2010 study by researchers at Washington State University found that prisons may not have driven meaningful economic growth at all — and might have actually discouraged other industries from developing nearby.

John Eason, an associate professor of sociology at Brown University and author of “Big House on the Prairie,” which examines a rural Southern prison town, found that a prison town’s economic fate has more to do with when it built its prison than where.

“Towns that embraced prison construction early in the boom saw a short-term benefit compared to those that didn’t, but the effects weren’t lasting,” Eason wrote.

Communities that built prisons early in the boom saw median home values and incomes rise, along with dips in poverty and unemployment — but those gains faded within about a decade, something Eason called “a decay effect.”

Residents and city leaders in Blythe, however, where the now-shuttered Chuckawalla Valley State Prison opened in 1987, are convinced their economic troubles began — and ended — the day the prison closed in 2022.

A desert town’s failed fight

“To be honest, I don’t think they care,” said Blythe Mayor Joseph DeConinck. “We still haven’t gotten anything from the state. It pains me to say it, but Blythe is in the middle of nowhere. We’re the farthest from Sacramento, and again, we’re just a handful of votes.”

The mayor of this small Riverside County desert town near the Arizona border watched Susanville’s lawsuit over its prison closure fail, and chose not to pursue similar legal action after Newsom ordered Blythe’s prison shuttered just before Christmas 2022.

Instead, Blythe took a different approach — leaning into diplomacy rather than confrontation, launching a lobbying push to convince state lawmakers and the governor that the city needed some form of economic assistance.

So far, that effort has produced nothing.

“We took on these prisons when nobody else wanted them,” DeConinck said. “And we adapted around them because they became a major economic driver for our area.”

Blythe’s population, which stood at 18,000 in 2022, dropped to about 17,400 by 2024, the most recent year with census data available. A 3% population decline might not sound dramatic, but Blythe was already struggling well before the prison closed.

The city’s population has been shrinking since it peaked at roughly 20,000 in 2010. A Riverside County civil grand jury investigation in June 2022 found that Blythe couldn’t keep up with its bills, that residents were leaving for Phoenix or the Coachella Valley, and that neither the city nor its people had especially promising prospects ahead.

Six months after that investigation, Newsom announced the prison closure.

DeConinck said city leaders traveled to Sacramento seeking help, without success. He recalled a meeting between Blythe’s city manager and the governor’s representatives in which, he said, the city was promised direct financial assistance.

The era of trying to charm the state into helping is over, DeConinck said.

“They wouldn’t even talk to us,” said Vice Mayor Johnny Rodriguez. “They’re not doing anything to help us because they’ve got this political mantra that all prisons are bad.”

Rodriguez said the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the Department of General Services sent representatives to a meeting about the shuttered prison’s future. It didn’t go well.

“We only had one meeting with a potential developer who showed some interest, and all the state told us was what can’t be done and what they won’t do,” Rodriguez said. “They won’t even give us a timeline to start talking about it, so what good is that?”

Newsom’s office referred questions to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Will Matthews, a spokesperson for the department, said after this story initially published that the state sent $995,000 to the Riverside County Workforce Development Division in August 2024.

“In July 2024, state representatives met with local leaders to discuss these resources and other available assistance,” Matthews said. “There was no commitment to provide direct financial assistance to the city of Blythe.”

Matthews said that until the Blythe prison’s infrastructure is separated from the neighboring Ironwood State Prison and outstanding bond obligations are resolved, the property cannot move through the state’s surplus property disposal process.

At a March hearing before a state Senate budget subcommittee, corrections secretary Jeff Macomber said he’s eager to relinquish his agency’s oversight of closed facilities.

“I don’t want to maintain closed facilities,” Macomber said. “Believe it or not, I have to provide some staffing. It’s unpopular, there are security risks. People break in — because who wouldn’t want to break into a closed prison?”

Newsom began shutting down prisons with the closure of the Deuel Vocational Institution near Tracy, followed by the Susanville facility and then the prison near Blythe. The state also ended its contract with a private prison in Kern County, a site that now operates as an immigration detention facility. A prison in Norco, also in Riverside County, is scheduled to close in October.

More closures are likely. This year, the Legislature approved a budget anticipating the shutdown of at least one more facility, reflecting Democratic lawmakers’ push to save roughly $150 million annually per prison by eliminating underused facilities.

Some state prisons also carry massive deferred maintenance bills. Last week, the state auditor released a report estimating that five facilities need $2.4 billion in repairs.

Rodriguez continues pushing for a new prison to be built on the closed site. He hopes to pitch the federal government on opening a women’s facility there, as a form of compensation for the closure of FCI Dublin, which shut down after 10 correctional officers were charged with sexually abusing female inmates.

“Closing Chuckawalla was a mistake,” said Assemblymember Jeff Gonzalez, a Coachella Republican. “For our rural communities, these facilities are critical sources of employment that sustain families and local economies.”

Ready for change on the edge of the Bay Area

If any town was prepared for a prison closure, it was Tracy.

Optimism runs high there — even the city’s website touts it as “one of the fastest-growing suburbs in the San Francisco Bay Area.” For decades, Tracy has served as a bedroom community for commuters heading into the East Bay and San Jose.

According to San Joaquin County Supervisor Robert Rickman, who served as Tracy’s mayor from 2016 to 2020, interest in redeveloping the closed prison site has been steady.

“We’ve been in contact with people in agriculture, in education, and even some interested in opening a casino,” Rickman said. “I’d say the prison closure was neutral. The property isn’t sitting abandoned. The southern part of the county is a thriving area.”

Rickman said correctional officers and support staff were largely transferred to the California Health Care Facility in Stockton.

“I guess you’re never really ready for a closure,” Rickman said, “but the good news is nobody lost their job.”

Tracy has advantages Susanville lacks — proximity to Interstate 5, a busy commercial corridor, and a growing, populous region of the state. It also avoids the extreme heat and water uncertainty that plague desert communities like Blythe.

Rather than fighting the state the way Blythe has, Rickman has focused on courting business prospects.

Back in Susanville, getting any company to return a phone call has proven to be a struggle.

Hard choices in Susanville

“Over the last two years, we’ve adopted deficit budgets,” said Newton, the former city manager. “We’re spending more than we can cover to fill public safety vacancies, and rising expenses are outpacing our revenue growth.”

“This is going to start eating into our cash reserves.”

The city is hoping some industry — any industry — will come in and turn things around. City leaders hold out little hope for state assistance. But Susanville also faces its own built-in obstacles.

For one, Newton said it’s difficult to persuade companies along the California-Nevada border to choose the California side, given higher taxes and stricter regulations — a dynamic economists call regulatory arbitrage.

Second, industry needs power, and Susanville doesn’t have much capacity on its electrical grid or the infrastructure to support heavy use. A strong thunderstorm can knock out power to half the town. The city’s transmission lines simply can’t handle the demands of heavy industry.

Third, the area’s small population works against it. Prisons bring in workers and the state supplies the labor force — but there’s no broad pool of workers to draw from for other industries. When prisons close, guards are transferred elsewhere or retire and leave a remote, geographically isolated area behind.

The pandemic didn’t help either. Downtown businesses were already struggling as more shopping moved online, a trend that never reversed once lockdowns ended, Schuster said.

These days, some of the city’s biggest tax revenue sources come from online sales tax and fuel taxes — drivers stop in Susanville to fill up because it’s home to the only gas stations within 20 miles in any direction.

Last year, a baseball grandstand burned down. In March, a lumber mill that employed about 30 people caught fire. No one was hurt, but the mill was destroyed.

Now, the roughly 8,000 people who call this remote corner of California home are left asking what else the land can offer, what else can be built, what else might sustain them. One idea under consideration: a new truck stop.

Whatever rescue eventually comes for the town, Newton said, likely won’t come from the same state government that built the prison and then walked away from it.

“Nobody’s coming to save us.”

Original source: CalMatters

The post California Prison Towns Scramble for New Jobs After Closures: ‘No One’s Coming to Save Us’ appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Roughly 15 years ago, both towns were relatively stable, propped up in large part by steady state jobs at nearby correctional facilities. Prison employment brought reliable paychecks and benefits that helped sustain local businesses in these remote pockets of California. But as sentencing reforms reduced the state’s prison population, Gov. Gavin Newsom moved to shutter facilities across the state — five so far, with a sixth in Norco set to close this October. Lawmakers also approved budget language this year calling for at least one more closure, a move that could save the state roughly $150 million annually, though that provision has not yet become law.

The fallout in these smaller communities has been significant.

In Blythe, a desert city near the Arizona border, Newsom ordered the closure of Chuckwalla Valley State Prison in 2022. The announcement came as the city was already struggling — its population was shrinking as residents moved toward Phoenix or the Coachella Valley, and a county audit that same year found Blythe couldn’t keep up with its own bills.

City officials have pressed state lawmakers and the governor’s office for economic assistance, but so far nothing has come through.

“Be honest with you, I don’t think they give a shit,” Blythe Mayor Joseph DeConinck said. “We still haven’t got nothing from the state. I hate to say it, but Blythe’s in the middle of nowhere, we’re the furthest from Sacramento … we’re only a few votes out here.”

Susanville, tucked into the Lassen National Forest in far Northern California, is facing similar strain. After its prison closure was announced in 2021, Mayor Mendy Schuster said residents began listing their homes and leaving town almost immediately. The city’s population dropped from about 16,000 in 2021 to 14,000 by 2024.

“We’re heading toward insolvency,” said Dan Newton, Susanville’s former city manager.

Neither town has received a clear plan from the state for economic recovery, raising questions about what long-term support — if any — will be offered to communities left behind by California’s shrinking prison system.

In other statewide news, the race for California insurance commissioner is drawing attention for its ideological divide. Former San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim, who has proposed a state-backed natural disaster insurance program and expanded access to low-cost auto insurance, topped the June primary field — a sign her progressive platform is connecting with voters frustrated by rising insurance costs. Her opponent, state Sen. Ben Allen of El Segundo, finished second and has earned the state Democratic Party’s endorsement, positioning himself as the more institutional choice. UC Irvine law professor Shauhin Talesh said the contest reflects a broader split within the party nationally over how aggressively government should intervene in the insurance market.

Meanwhile, a high-stakes trial got underway this week in an Oakland federal courtroom, where Meta faces accusations from California and dozens of other states that it deliberately engineered Facebook and Instagram to hook young users, despite internal awareness of the potential harm to their mental health. States also allege Meta unlawfully collected data from children under 13. If the tech giant loses, damages could reach as high as $1.4 trillion, along with mandated changes to how its platforms operate. California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement that “exploiting our most vulnerable residents to boost corporate profits is not only morally wrong, it’s also illegal.” Meta maintains the lawsuit misrepresents its efforts, saying it has made “real changes to protect teens online.”

Closer to home for Inland Empire families, a state-funded database that gave California’s K-12 schools free access to research materials, encyclopedia entries, PBS videos and academic journals has lost its funding after lawmakers made cuts this year. CalMatters and PBS SoCal have produced a video segment examining the impact on classrooms that relied heavily on the resource, which aired as part of the SoCalMatters series on PBS SoCal.

Original source: CalMatters

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Blythe, a Riverside County city near the Arizona border, and Susanville, in the far northeastern corner of the state, both lost their prisons in recent years. A third community, Tracy in San Joaquin County, appears to be weathering its own prison closure with far less pain. The contrast between the three offers a stark lesson in how geography, timing and existing economic conditions determine whether a town survives losing its largest employer.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has shut down five state prisons since taking office in 2019, continuing a decline in the incarcerated population that began under former Gov. Jerry Brown. California’s prison system once held more than 170,000 inmates and forced overcrowded facilities to bunk people in hallways. Today, the population has fallen to roughly 90,000, leaving the state with about 8,000 more beds than prisoners. Lawmakers this year approved a budget calling for at least one more closure, citing the roughly $150 million in annual savings each shuttered prison represents.

For Blythe, the closure of Chuckwalla Valley State Prison in late 2022 compounded problems that were already building. The city’s population had been sliding since 2010, and a Riverside County investigation completed just six months before the closure announcement found Blythe struggling to pay its bills as residents left for Phoenix or the Coachella Valley.

Blythe leaders chose not to sue the state, unlike officials in Susanville, and instead pursued a lobbying campaign asking Sacramento for economic assistance. City officials say that effort has largely gone nowhere.

“We took these prisons when nobody else wanted them,” said Mayor Joseph DeConinck. “And we adapted to them because they became a strong economic generator for our area.”

Vice Mayor Johnny Rodriguez said state officials have offered little beyond restrictions on what can’t be done with the vacant site. “They’re not doing anything to assist us because they have this political mantra that all prisons are bad,” he said.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement that nearly $1 million was directed to the Riverside County Workforce Development Division in 2024 and that state representatives met with local leaders that July, though no direct financial assistance to the city was promised. Officials said the property can’t be released for redevelopment until infrastructure tied to the closed prison is separated from the neighboring Ironwood State Prison and related bond obligations are settled.

Rodriguez said he’s now pursuing a long-shot idea: pitching the site to the federal government as a potential women’s prison, following the shutdown of the scandal-plagued Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin. Assemblymember Jeff Gonzalez, a Coachella Republican, has called the Chuckwalla closure “a mistake” that stripped a rural community of a critical employer.

Corrections Secretary Jeff Macomber told lawmakers in March that the agency wants to relinquish control of shuttered prison properties as quickly as possible, citing security risks and the cost of maintaining empty facilities.

Susanville’s experience has followed a similarly rocky path, though its remote location in the Lassen National Forest, hundreds of miles from major population centers, presents different obstacles than Blythe faces. When the state announced in 2021 that it would close the prison there, city officials went to court, arguing that California hadn’t properly studied the closure’s impact under state environmental law. Newsom’s administration responded by pushing through budget legislation that exempted prison closures from that review process altogether.

“There was initially a lot of panic,” said Susanville Mayor Mendy Schuster. “Houses went on the market. People left town. State jobs are good jobs with a good income, and they were going to leave.”

The city’s population dropped from about 16,000 in 2021 to 14,000 by 2024, according to Census data, and elementary school enrollment fell 10% over roughly the same period. Former City Manager Dan Newton, who left the position recently for a job in Tehama County, said Susanville has been running deficit budgets for two years just to keep public safety positions filled.

“We’re heading toward insolvency,” Newton said.

Attracting new industry has proven difficult. Susanville sits near the Nevada border, making it easy for businesses to choose lower-tax, lighter-regulation Nevada instead. The local power grid can’t support heavy industrial use, and the area lacks the workforce base that large employers typically need. A recent lumber mill fire and the earlier loss of a baseball grandstand have only added to the sense of decline. One idea now under discussion: a new truck stop.

“No one is coming to save us,” Newton said.

Tracy, by contrast, has barely stumbled. The Deuel Vocational Institution near Tracy closed in 2021, but the city’s position along Interstate 5 in a fast-growing corridor of the Bay Area’s outer suburbs has drawn interest from agricultural, education and even casino developers eyeing the vacant property. San Joaquin County Supervisor Robert Rickman, who served as Tracy’s mayor from 2016 to 2020, said most displaced prison staff transferred to the California Health Care Facility in Stockton without losing their jobs.

“I guess you’re never really prepared for a closure,” Rickman said, “but the good thing is that nobody lost their jobs.”

Researchers who study rural prison economies say the pattern playing out across these towns tracks with what they’ve found elsewhere: the economic benefits of hosting a prison were often overstated from the start, since many jobs went to workers commuting from neighboring communities rather than local residents. Studies also suggest that towns which built prisons early in the state’s decades-long prison boom saw only short-lived gains in income and housing values before those effects faded — what one researcher called a “decay effect.”

More closures may be coming. Beyond Blythe, Susanville and Tracy, the state also ended its contract with a private prison in Kern County — now operating as an immigration detention facility — and a prison in Norco is scheduled to close this October. A state audit released last week found that five aging prisons statewide would require a combined $2.4 billion in deferred repairs, adding financial pressure that could accelerate the state’s exit from more communities that once depended on the industry to survive.

Original source: CalMatters

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“Narcan saves lives by reversing actual or suspected overdose to opioids,” Riverside University Health System CEO Jennifer Cruikshank, who is also serving as the hospital’s interim manager, said Thursday. “PVH plays a role in the critical infrastructure for our community. We are proud to be able to offer this free resource and access point from the hospital.”

Narcan, formally known as Naloxone, is an opioid antagonist nose spray that can arrest the effects of an overdose from fentanyl and other illicit drugs. It’s carried by fire crews and sheriff’s deputies countywide.

Palo Verde Hospital received more than 200 Narcan kits via the California Naloxone Distribution Project.

“A single dose of Narcan is administered as one spray into one nostril,” according to a hospital statement. “Each kit contains two nasal sprayers. Narcan should be stored in a cool, dry place. Given Blythe’s extreme summer heat, residents are strongly advised not to store Narcan in a vehicle, where high temperatures can degrade the medication and reduce its effectiveness.”

Residents can procure a free kit from staff in the hospital’s emergency room, which is the only functioning component of the medical facility, at 250 N. First St.

The hospital is under bankruptcy protection and a six-month management services agreement with the county, which is working to rectify the facility’s ongoing financial and operational challenges.

Without emergency services at the hospital, the area’s roughly 20,000 residents would lose access to “timely treatment for life-threatening conditions where minutes matter,” according to a county statement in January. Outside of the hospital, the nearest option for emergency healthcare is more than 70 miles away.

Preliminary county health department statistics indicated there were 229 suspected fentanyl-related fatalities countywide in 2025, compared to 351 confirmed poisonings in 2024, a roughly 40 percent decline.

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The parasite, Heterobilharzia americana, is a flatworm commonly referred to as liver fluke. Previously found almost exclusively in Texas and other Gulf Coast states, it has never been reported this far west. The worm can cause canine schistosomiasis, an illness that impacts the liver and intestines of dogs. 

“Dogs can die from this infection, so we are hoping to raise public awareness that it’s there,” said UCR nematology professor Adler Dillman. “If you’re swimming in the Colorado River with them, your pets are in peril.”

After learning about cases of the infection in local dogs, Dillman assembled a research team and headed to Blythe, a border town east of Joshua Tree National Park in Riverside County, where the sick dogs had all spent time swimming in the river. 

The infection is driven by the presence of a snail that transmits the worm. The research team collected more than 2,000 snails from the banks of the river. A paper published today in the journal Pathogens describes how the team used DNA to confirm the identity of both the snails and the flatworm. 

“We actually found two species of snails that can support H. americana in the river in Blythe, and we found both snails actively shedding this worm,” Dillman said. “Not only was it a surprise to find H. americana, we also did not know that the snails were present here.”

After transforming itself inside one of the snails, the worm ventures out with the goal of finding a mammal to infect. In this stage it can only survive on its own for about 24 hours. If a dog or a raccoon is in the water, or drinking, then it gets infected. 

“It gets into the veins of the intestinal lining, and that’s where it develops into an adult and mates,” Dillman said. “The presence of the adults in the veins isn’t the problem. It’s the eggs that get into the lungs, spleen, liver, and heart. The immune system tries to deal with it, and hard clusters of immune cells called granulomas form. Eventually the organ tissues stop functioning.”

Once infected, it can be several months before the worst symptoms of the illness appear. Since 2019 in California, 11 dogs in three counties have been confirmed with this disease, and one has died. Health officials hope that with awareness they can prevent further infections and deaths. 

“Symptoms start gradually with a loss of appetite, and eventually include vomiting, diarrhea, profound weight loss, and signs of liver disease. If your dog has these symptoms after swimming in the Colorado River, it’s a good precaution to ask your veterinarian for a simple fecal test,” said Emily Beeler, a veterinarian with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. 

“Treatment typically involves use of multiple medications and close monitoring of the dog by a veterinarian,” Beeler said. 

It is important to note that H. americana is not known to be capable of causing disease in humans. “It can cause swimmer’s itch, a red rash where it penetrates human skin. But it’s not able to cause infection,” Dillman said.

Additionally, Dillman hopes to allay concerns that the parasite could be contaminating urban drinking water. “Compared to other pathogens these worms are fairly large. They can easily be filtered out with common water purification strategies,” he said. Though there is no cause for concern about contamination of water sources, drinking the water directly is still inadvisable. 

“You have viruses, bacteria, and other parasites such as Giardia in rivers,” Dillman said. “Nobody should be drinking straight out of the river, and that has nothing to do with this particular parasite.”

The post Dog-killing flatworm discovered in Southern California appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Coronavirus testing is available again in Blythe for residents of the eastern Riverside County community who want to know whether they have contracted the virus.

Testing started June 10 at the site — 445 N. Broadway Avenue – and will continue for two weeks. Riverside County health officials had previously operated a testing location in Blythe and are returning because there is a need to know the extent of spread in the community and a recent outbreak at a local state prison.

The opening of the Blythe site was one of several changes to the sites made to provide testing services to a wider portion of community. Additional moves include:

-The walk-up sites in Mecca, San Jacinto and Valle Vista outside Hemet have closed.

-A walk-up site at 31215 Wild Meadow Drive in French Valley near Temecula has opened. The location operates Tuesday through Saturday between 7 a.m. until 7 p.m.

-A walk-up site at the Edgemont Women’s Club in Moreno Valley, 21640 Cottonwood Ave., will be operate June 17 through June 19 between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m.

Testing at the county-run sites is open to anyone, whether they have symptoms or not, and there are no out-of-pocket costs to individuals. Participants will be asked to provide information about their health insurance, but they will not be charged any share of costs or copay, and will be allowed to get tested even if they do not provide the insurance information. You must have an appointment to get tested.

More than 146,000 coronavirus tests have been conducted in Riverside County, with more than 10,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus. Testing continues to be an integral focus as more residents visit more businesses.

Visit www.rivcoph.org/coronavirus/testing for more information on testing locations and how to make an appointment.

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