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Jun 19th
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Santa Cruz News

Environment

Saving Our Outside Lands

Saving Our Outside Lands

Land Trust of Santa Cruz County goes forward with 20-year conservation plan

Stephen Slade can remember a time just three decades ago when Campbell was a tiny rural community, reachable only by rough dirt roads. Terry Corwin grew up in Southern California, surrounded by orange groves that have almost entirely vanished.

“Most people that are growing up in California,” Slade says, “will have a memory of a landscape that is going to be completely altered. I grew up in Modesto and when I go back there now it’s like, ‘Where am I?’ The Central Valley is rapidly changing.”

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Town Hall

Town Hall

Town Hall

There were 700 bills awaiting Gov. Schwarzenegger’s signature or veto by Sunday, Oct, 11.  Were there any vetoed bills that you believe should have been upheld, or bills passed that you believe should not have been?  Why?

I was disappointed to learn that the Governor vetoed:  Senate Bill (SB) 14, which would have made programmatic changes to implement an increase in California’s Renewable Portfolio Standard’s goal to 33 percent by 2020; SB 14, along with Assembly Bill (AB) 21 and AB 64, would have combined to provide a clear and enforceable timeframe for investing in new renewable energy resources in order to meet the greenhouse gas emission reductions mandated under AB 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.

AB 1401 would have enacted the California Transition to Organics Act of 2009 and would have established the Transition to Organics Fund (TTOF) with federal, industry and private citizen funding.  TTOF monies would have provided financial assistance to individuals who transition their uncertified farms to certified organic farms.

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Local News

Local Foods at Your Fingertips

Local Foods at Your Fingertips

Online market lends power and convenience to Cruzans who want to buy and sell local

“It’s no secret that the Internet has become something of a disconnecting factor in our society—a simulated world of convenience and entertainment that is all too easy to be sucked into. And, in the midst of the over-stimulation, two enterprising young Santa Cruzans have found a way to use the Internet’s omnipotence and convenience to get people to eat healthy, be involved in the local community, and support the local economy.

Santa Cruz Local Foods (SCLF), created by Noah Pinck and Eleanor Taylor just over three months ago, is a year-round online local foods market dedicated to bringing people fresh foods (picked that day in most cases) from within a 100-mile radius of Santa Cruz. “Our intent is to really paint a picture that you can eat local, and it’s not hard, and there’s a great abundance here,” says Taylor.

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Local News

Unshakeable

UnshakeableLocal volunteer coalition provides vital relief, then and now

In the aftermath of the Loma Prieta Earthquake, a coalition of community and church volunteers known as Valley Churches United Missions (VCUM) led the relief effort among San Lorenzo Valley and Scotts Valley residents.

VCUM volunteers quickly activated their disaster center and began distributing water, food, and other relief items before the Red Cross or the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had even arrived. Their office became a hub of information and support for community members still reeling from the sudden trauma. It also served as a conduit for the outpouring of mutual aid that flourished after the disaster.    
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Local News

Related Loma Prieta 20th Anniversary Events

Related Loma Prieta 20th Anniversary Events

 

Thursday, Oct. 15 The Great California Shake Out—A statewide simulation at 10:15 a.m. to help Californians prepare.  It will be the largest earthquake preparedness activity in U.S. history.  Anyone and any organization can register to participate.

Saturday, Oct. 17  Dangers in Paradise: Preparedness Fair and CERT Muster—Aptos Village Park, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Free.  This promises to be a veritable smorgasbord of exhibits and demonstration for residents about earthquake and other disaster preparedness.  There will be a visit by the Shake Cottage with its simulation of a large earthquake, and a full-fledged CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) competition.

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Local News

The Track of the Quake: Loma Prieta Turns 20

The Track of the Quake: Loma Prieta Turns 20

An Evening of Commemoration and Reflection

Where were YOU at 5:04?

At 5:04 p.m. on Oct. 17, 1989 the Loma Prieta Earthquake ripped through the forested canyon of Aptos Creek, snapping trees, throwing boulders and opening fissures across the landscape.  This wasn’t the first time the Aptos canyon had been torn loose by an earthquake.  On April 18, 1906, the north side of the canyon wall collapsed, hurling trees down the mountainside and blocking the creek for weeks. 1906 and then 1989.  Have we learned anything?  Did the 1989 earthquake modify our behavior in any significant way?   Do you do anything differently because of that earthquake?  Are we any closer to being able to predict earthquakes here in California?  And what about the scars scratched into our psyches?  Have they healed?  From this lofty perspective 20 years later, knowing what you know now, would you have done anything differently before Oct. 17, 1989?  And after?  See all Loma Prieta earthquake articles in the Santa Cruz History section >

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Local News

Planning Ahead

Planning Ahead

How prepared are we for the next natural disaster?

The past month has been one of quakes: an 8.0 hit Samoa on Sept. 29, the same day that a 7.9 rocked Sumatra, and just last week there were three earthquakes of magnitudes greater than 7.1 in the South Pacific, resulting in tsunami warnings for 11 countries. And as further points on the globe rumble their way through the month, Santa Cruz is commemorating a more proximal disaster—the Loma Prieta Earthquake, which shook the Bay Area at 5:04 p.m. on Oct. 17, 1989. With international earthquakes all over the news and the 20th anniversary of a local quake at hand, Santa Cruz finds itself facing a tough question: Are we ready for the next one?

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Environment

Oil Used Up

Oil Used Up

Workshop teaches skills for a low-energy future

“Generally we don’t go up to people and say, ‘Do you know that the world as you know it is coming to an end?’” Michael Levy is a reasonable man. He’s not going to try to convince you that the Apocalypse is nigh or of some other doomsday scenario. He just believes that our current standard of living in the United States and other industrialized nations is unsustainable.

That’s why a year and a half ago he founded Transition Santa Cruz (TSC), part of the growing worldwide transition movement. Originating in England in 2005, and now with hundreds of chapters worldwide, transition initiatives are grassroots local movements. They seek to educate their communities about the possibility that energy resources like oil will soon grow so scarce and expensive that they will be unavailable to the vast majority of people, a development that will radically alter our current lifestyle, which for the past century or more has relied heavily on the availability of low-cost oil, coal, and natural gas.

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Town Hall

Town Hall

Town Hall

With the year-end deadline for health care legislation looming, what is the likelihood of the public option making it into the final bill? What will happen if it isn’t?  First, let me explain what the public option would do. I’ve found that too often over the past few months, debate has raged without a clear understanding of the subject.

The public option would be just that, one insurance option of many. More importantly, it would only be available as part of the health insurance exchange, the marketplace of insurance options for those without employment-based insurance.

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Local News

UCSC Budget Brainstorm

UCSC Budget Brainstorm

UCSC humanities division forum keeps the budget wheels turning
Distress over UC Santa Cruz budget cuts has already spurred an opening-day walkout, the occupation of a campus building and a flurry of coalition-building among students, workers, and faculty. While every division on campus is coping with permanent budget reductions, the transparency of the decision-making has varied.

On Sept. 29, UCSC Humanities Dean Georges Van Den Abbeele hosted a “Humanities Division Town Hall Meeting” to disclose the division’s latest budget woes and elicit creative solutions from the campus community. The evening of the event, more than 60 faculty members and graduate students (plus a handful of undergraduates) are gathered at the Humanities Lecture Hall.

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CYNDI

On the eve of Cyndi Lauper’s Mountain Winery gig, we dissect the woman, the icon, the creative beast. Plus: Her thoughts on the music industry, equal rights and those sparkling ‘Kinky Boots’ Few performers possess the kind of fierce, she-bopping tenacity Cyndi Lauper has become famous for. Equal parts free spirit, civil rights activist and Grammy-winner, Lauper is one of the few creative artists able to successfully marry her cutting-edge verve with a heart-of-gold panache. It certainly has helped fuel the remarkable career resurgence she has been experiencing lately.

 

Field to Vase

Open house provides opportunity for residents to meet their local flower growers Valentine’s Day is a high point of the year for those in the cut flower business. So when, one year in the late ’90s, the bouquet-riddled holiday failed to deliver for Kitayama Brothers Farms, the family behind the decades-old rose-growing business knew something was wrong.  “It was the writing on the wall,” recalls Stuart Kitayama, operations manager for the Watsonville-based company. “Those of us who had been hoping things would just get better finally said ‘it’s time to change.’”

 

The Price of Safety

The city's proposed budget addresses public safety needs The City of Santa Cruz’s pocketbook has come a long way since 2009, when an $8 million shortfall loomed. According to City Manager Martin Bernal, the proposed general fund budget for 2013-2014 is healthier than it has been since the beginning of The Great Recession in 2008. Armed with this returning stability, the proposal puts one of the community's top concerns—public safety—front and center.

 

Community Studies 2.0

After a controversial suspension, a new incarnation of the unique UC Santa Cruz major is reinstated The UC Santa Cruz community studies lounge is a great place to have a conversation.  Housed on the second floor of a faculty building in Oakes College, just down the hall from a whiteboard that reads “COMMUNITY STUDIES LIVES,” the room has a big round table, couches and chairs, and shelves stacked with past senior “capstone projects.”

 

North Pacific String Band

Jeff Wilson, who plays banjo for North Pacific String Band, loves being part of original music experiences. “What I like about the music we play is that it’s fairly unique and kind of hard to put your finger on,” Wilson says. “We’re not just trying to do bluegrass or country or folk. It’s a mixture of those things and we try to add in a lot of musicality to all of that.” Originality and musicality aren’t ideas which are limited to the band’s exploits either.

 

Peace in the Middle East

New dance-concert explores Palestinian-Israeli conflict Inspired by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, local choreographer Karl Schaffer’s “Mosaic” is a dance-concert featuring Jewish Diaspora and Arab music from the women’s choral group Zambra, singer Fattah Abbou and a troupe of local dancers. In between rehearsals for the show, which runs June 21-22 at Motion Pacific, Schaffer shared the story behind its creation.

 

Muscle-Bound

Valiant cast battles loud, ugly action for the soul of 'Man of Steel' Early in Man of Steel, fourth-grader Clark, the boy who will be Superman, is cowering in a broom closet at school, eyes screwed shut, hands clapped over his ears. He can't control his super powers: his X-ray vision shows him the skulls and skeletons under everyone's flesh; unfiltered noise—dogs, traffic, heartbeats—assault him from all sides. Rushing to school, his mom kneels outside the door and asks what's wrong.

 

The Plug Bug & Corbin Dunn

Mechanic, programmer, acrobat, builder, tinkerer. Corbin Dunn's 1969 Volkswagen Beetle is a fully electric vehicle. It has an electric motor powered by 48 stacked squares of Lithium-ion battery cells under the hood in place of the 50 horsepower gas engine that it was built with. He calls it, affectionately, “the Plug Bug.” Dunn, who was born in Hawaii, raised in Corralitos, and now lives in a large, old A-frame house near the summit in the Santa Cruz Mountains, is a 35-year-old programmer for Apple in Cupertino, where he helped develop the iPhone and works on the framework for the Macintosh operating system. But his aptitude for intricate technical work is not limited to computers. Dunn is a tinkerer.

 

Making the Grade

The quest to identify sources of high levels of bacteria at Cowell Beach continues With straight As on Heal the Bay’s annual “beach report card” for 10 out of 13 Santa Cruz County beaches—Main Beach, Seabright, and even Cowell Beach at the Stairs, to name a few—it would seem that Santa Cruz boasts a high coastal GPA. But in recent years, one Santa Cruz beach just can’t seem to pass: Cowell Beach west of the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf.

 

Flag Day, Father’s Day and Chiron

Another week of complex planetary energies falling to Earth. Mars interacts with Pluto (inconjunct), Uranus (sextile) and Chiron (square, challenge, ouch!). We won’t know how to comprise, we’ll want to be friends but our hurts will challenge that desire.
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Good Morning Maui

Goodness, righteousness, virtuousness and fairness are some of the four-score English words that attempt to describe the Hawaiian essence of pono, whose use in the state motto translates to “The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.”

 

The Power of Conversation

Local author Cecile Andrews emphasizes importance of community engagement in newest book Cecile Andrews, author of the new book “Living Room Revolution: A Handbook for Conversation, Community and the Common Good,” probably wouldn’t get along too well with Larry David’s character from HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, known for hiding his face and avoiding communication with anyone he runs into on the street. Andrews is a longstanding part-time Santa Cruz (part-time Seattle) resident who says something that’s struck her about this town over the years is people's willingness to participate in a practice she’s dubbed the “Stop and Chat”—which is exactly what it sounds like.

 

Is Edward Snowden a patriot or a traitor?

He's a patriot. Anyone who stands up for the rights that we stand for as a country, that is real democracy. That would be in my book—somebody who is a patriot. Leah WeissSanta Cruz | Therapist

 

Best of Santa Cruz County

The 2013 Santa Cruz County Readers' Poll and Critics’ Picks It’s our biggest issue of the year, and in it, your votes—more than 6,500 of them—determined the winners of The Best of Santa Cruz County Readers’ Poll. New to the long list of local restaurants, shops and other notables that captured your interest: Best Beer Selection, Best Locally Owned Business, Best Customer Service and Best Marijuana Dispensary. In the meantime, many readers were ever so chatty online about potential new categories. Some of the suggestions that stood out: Best Teen Program and Best Web Design/Designer. But what about: Dog Park, Church, Hotel, Local Farm, Therapist (I second that!) or Sports Bar—not to be confused with Bra. Our favorite suggestion: Best Act of Kindness—one reader noted Café Gratitude and the free meals it offered to the Santa Cruz Police Department in the aftermath of recent crimes. Perhaps some of these can be woven into next year’s ballot, so stay tuned. In the meantime, enjoy the following pages and take note of our Critics’ Picks, too, beginning on page 91. A big thanks for voting—and for reading—and an even bigger congratulations to all of the winners. Enjoy.  -Greg Archer, EditorBest of Santa Cruz County Readers’ Poll INDEX | Shops | Food & Drink | Arts & Entertainment | Health & Fitness | Professionals | The Rest |

 

Dancing Creek Winery

At the Pinot Paradise event back in March, I tasted some very good Pinots from the Santa Cruz Mountains, and Dancing Creek Winery’s 2009 Pinot ($27) was one of them. This plummy dark brew, made from grapes grown in Corralitos, has delicious flavors of pomegranate, prosciutto, dried cherries, and mint julep.

 

Paying it Forward

Pianist Benny Green wants jazz’s past to continue to inform its future I can honestly say I’m still learning.” Hearing such an admirable, humble statement from someone like Benny Green—a jazz pianist, arranger, composer and band leader whose 30-plus year career includes performances and recordings with jazz luminaries like Oscar Peterson, Art Blakey and Betty Carter—might be surprising at first. But Green’s insatiable desire to keep learning has served him well. That desire—and his deep love of jazz—is something he wants today’s younger musicians to feel, too.

 

A Very Fine House

Adjacent to the front door, the long, clean wooden bar is surrounded by pumpkin-colored stools. At the entrance to the dining rooms, there is a new low-slung cafe door hung in the wood-covered arch. Where there once was a stage, stocky wooden tables are neatly arranged perpendicularly on a new tile floor, each set with square white plates and burnt orange cloth napkins.

 

Exposed

David Cay Johnston’s new book explains how big companies rob us blind In his late teens David Cay Johnston started to ask questions. “Why do we have these guys in uniforms with guns driving around in cars all day?” “Why is the Santa Cruz County Courthouse being built in such an unusual shape?” He wrote an article, while still living in his hometown of Santa Cruz, proving that the off-kilter courthouse building, which officials had promised would save money, actually cost more than a conventional building.

 

What’s your secret to avoiding the summer swarms?