(Want to get California Today by email? Sign up.)  Let’s turn it over to The Times’s Fernanda Santos for today’s introduction.  Wildfires in California will continue to burn, as they have year after year, and the conditions are there to make each year more devastating than the last. The official forecast for the months ahead call for above-normal temperatures and below-normal precipitation in the southern part of the state, a dangerous combination on land already castigated by drought.  What isn’t yet known is how, exactly, we’re going to pay to fight these fires in the fiscal year that has just begun.  Budgeting for wildfire suppression is a bit of an exercise in prediction, based on the average cost of fighting fires over the previous 10 years. In other words, the federal government sets aside a specific amount of money to fight fires before the start of the fiscal year — and, consequently, before a single fire has burned.  The news and stories that matter to Californians (and anyone else interested in the state). Sign up to get it by email.  Climate change and development have made fires more challenging and costly to suppress. Since 1995, the 10-year average has increased by more than $700 million, Shaun Donovan, director of the federal Office and Management and Budget, told reporters during a conference call on Tuesday.  To pay the tab, the United States Forest Service has had to take money away from other programs in place that are intended to prevent big fires from burning, such as forest thinning and controlled burns. In the fiscal years 2014 and 2015, these programs lost $200 million, Mr. Donovan said.  The problem with that, he said, is that “you can’t go back and undo the lack of preparation that wasn’t done in prior years.”  California, with its expensive and long fire season, has borne the brunt of these cuts. Of the 20 million acres of forestland in the state, six million to nine million acres are at risk of catastrophic fires because the vegetation is too dense or because there are too many dead or dying trees – 66 million of them in the Sierra Nevada alone, Jeanne Wade Evans, deputy regional forester, said during the call.  For the fiscal year that ended last week, the Forest Service received a one-time infusion of $500 million — a “Band-Aid solution,” said Mr. Donovan, and one that is unlikely to happen again this year.  The Obama administration has tried to change the way fire suppression is funded. Meanwhile, in Congress, several bills are vying to fix the problem, though there has been no agreement over how to get it done.  See reporting in The New York Times on the Nov. 8 ballot initiatives: Proposition 51 (a new school bond) | Proposition 56 (cigarette tax) | Proposition 60 (condoms in the adult film industry) | Propositions 62 and 66 (death penalty questions) | Propositions 65 and 67 (on banning plastic bags).  And dig into analyses of all 17 statewide measures by the Legislative Analyst’s Office, CALmatters, KQED and Ballotpedia.  • After protests over the fatal police shooting of a black man in Los Angeles, officials released footage that showed him at one point with what appeared to be a gun. [The New York Times]  • High school football players across the country are emulating the protest started by the 49ers backup quarterback Colin Kaepernick. [The New York Times]  • Judges are wrestling with bias at an immigration court in San Francisco: “Would I treat a black person the same way I’m treating this white person?” [The New York Times]  • With Apple’s iPhone in its sights, Google introduced Pixel, its own smartphone. [The New York Times]  • A stadium proposed by the Chargers would pump more than $2 billion into San Diego and create 15,000 jobs, a study said. [San Diego Union-Tribune]  • Believe it or not, U.C. Berkeley students used to pay $84 a year in tuition. [KQED]  • David Byrne’s new art exhibition in Menlo Park recreates science experiments “in more entertaining” ways. [The New York Times]  • Gordon Davidson, who helped establish Los Angeles as a West Coast capital of regional theater, died at 83. [The New York Times]  • George Barris, who captured the last professional photos of Marilyn Monroe, just weeks before her death in 1962, died in Thousand Oaks. [The New York Times]  In 1972, Sue Laris and her husband at the time started the weekly Los Angeles Downtown News with $1,400.  Back then, she wrote recently, the city’s downtown was mostly dormant.  Forty-four years later, downtown Los Angeles has come alive with development, the publication has become a habit for thousands of readers, and Ms. Laris, 73, has run out of steam.  “I’m getting cross-eyed,” she said in an interview.  So she announced in a column late last week that the Downtown News is for sale.  Ms. Laris said she hoped to find an owner who could steer the free weekly, with a print run of about 40,000, through a time of rapid change in Los Angeles.  A recent Downtown News article with the headline “Here Comes the Boom!” gave status updates on more than 100 downtown projects.  “I drive down the street and I literally can’t even name all the places I see that are under construction,” Ms. Laris said.  The influx of high-rise condominiums and other developments has been driven in part by an intense need for housing, she said, but also by a shift in policy makers’ thinking about the role of density in urban areas.  “You can’t have a suburban feel to an urban area,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense for the future of cities.”  That shift has met with fierce opposition from neighborhood groups and preservationists. The New York Times’ Los Angeles bureau chief, Adam Nagourney, wrote last month about their concerns that the frenzy of building is ruining the city’s distinctively low-lying character.  The Downtown News hasn’t named a selling price, but Ms. Laris said at least nine parties have made inquiries.  As for Ms. Laris, she said she has no plans for herself yet. She once thought she would be at the newspaper forever.  “It’s like one of my children,” she said. “It’s very tough.”  California Today goes live at 6 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com.  The California Today columnist, Mike McPhate, is a third-generation Californian — born outside Sacramento and raised in San Juan Capistrano. He lives in Davis. Follow him on Twitter.  California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and attended U.C. Berkeley.
Wednesday: Budgeting to suppress California’s fires, Google unveils its own smartphone, and parting thoughts from the longtime Los Angeles Downtown News publisher.