Santa Cruz Good Times

Saturday
May 18th
Text size
  • Increase font size
  • Default font size
  • Decrease font size

Open-Source Democracy

Tuesday, 06 March 2012 12:32 Dan Woo News - Local News
 E-mail

olive susanHackers try to help the city communicate

Rob Mylls was waiting for planning department signatures on a building permit when City Councilmember Hilary Bryant attended the grand opening of his gym, Bike Dojo, in February 2011.

The dual high and low water fountains required by the second agency to review his remodel were already installed.  The planning department had told him a single low-standing fountain was adequate to meet handicap accessibility requirements. The city, however, outsourced those overseeing duties to a group in San Jose that had different standards, according to Mylls. He was ready to open shop, but still waiting for final signatures on the permits. A planning department official noticed the grand opening and delivered the signed permit within days.

The frazzled feeling of not having necessary paperwork in hand that Mylls experienced is not unique. Bike Dojo was his first venture into the Santa Cruz business ecosystem, but experienced local entrepreneurs are equally confounded while navigating the city's bureaucratic process.

Susan Pappas, co-owner of The True Olive Connection downtown, owns two other businesses with partners. Despite this, she says figuring out which department to go to and in which order was difficult as she set about opening True Olive Connection.

“There wasn't one person that said 'now that you've checked this off, you need to do this, this and this,'” says Pappas. “Every day that I didn't start construction, I was paying rent.”

Three computer programmers from the San Francisco-based nonprofit Code For America (CfA) are working with the City of Santa Cruz to improve this experience for business owners. As one of CfA’s finalist cities, Santa Cruz is partnering with CfA to create a web-based program akin to Turbotax that would streamline the permitting process and other requirements for opening a business.

Santa Cruz is the smallest community CfA has worked with and CfA fellow Jim Craner says this offers them opportunities they don't find in larger cities.

“It's great to be able to just go ask the city manager questions without setting up an appointment six months in advance,” says Craner. “I guarantee that my counterparts are not getting that type access with Rahm Emanuel [in Chicago].”

The programmers held a “hack-athon” brainstorming session at NextSpace Coworking on Saturday, Feb. 25 to explore what Santa Cruzans would like to come out of the partnership. It was one of about 20 events they will hold over the first two months of the project. CfA fellow Ruthie Bendor showed how the software program Wiki Scraper can turn a search of “open taqueria in Santa Cruz” into a list of the permits required to open one as well as how many competitors there are in the area.

Bendor is also focusing on revamping the city's business license database, which includes 3,767 registered businesses in the city limits. Attendees of the Feb. 25 workshop agreed that identifying your competition in a spreadsheet is not easy, to which Bendor said that Google Refine can turn the tens of thousands of text boxes into latitude and longitude numbers in minutes. That information can be transferred into Google Maps to be more user-friendly.

The effort to bring in these ”white-hat” hackers—people who change software with positive intentions—was led by City Councilmember David Terrazas and Peter Koht, the economic development coordinator for Santa Cruz. Capitola, Scotts Valley, Watsonville and Santa Cruz County helped cover the $150,000 cost of collaborating with CfA for one year. Santa Cruz also won a share of a $1.5 million Google grant the tech giant awards to cities they think can benefit most from the CfA fellows' work.

The other local governments plan to use the lessons learned to create websites for similar uses in their communities. The new sites in Santa Cruz will not replace or alter how people find information on city websites.

“We want to make city data usable so someone can drag information of a certain type on their own web page,” says Chris Stathis, Santa Cruz's chief technology officer.

Concrete estimates of how the work will impact the city are impossible to predict, but Koht says that the benefits will be more noticeable here than in the 22 other cities CfA is currently working with.

“In Santa Cruz we're smaller and nimbler,” says Koht. “The cultural impact can be so much deeper in a small community where you can know most of the city officials by sight or name within a month.”

Visit codeforamerica.org/category/santa-cruz to learn more.

Comments (1)Add Comment
...
written by Susan Hayes Pappas, March 06, 2012
Mostly, I would like to see a Business Dept. Road Map or Process Flow Chart to determine which license or permit to start my process, then what comes next. Do I drive to the City or County building, and on what floor, what are the business hours for the departments? I found once I went to the County to get a permit, I was then going to the City for the next item, then back to the County. I am not complaining, I had a very positive experience with all the County and City Staff, I just would have spent less time in lines or in my car parking if I had a Road Map to get through it. The True Olive Connection is very grateful for the support the Staff at both agencies gave us during this stressful time. We have had a few required permits since then and the experience was the same, delightful people just had to go to different departments for everything.

Write comment
smaller | bigger

busy
< Prev   Next >
 

Share this on your social networks

Bookmark and Share

Share this

Bookmark and Share

 

Bring Your Own Bag

Single-use plastic bag bans are underway Shoppers in Capitola, Watsonville, the City of Santa Cruz, and the unincorporated parts of the county are, by now, becoming accustomed to the absence of plastic bags. On Sept. 20, 2011, Santa Cruz County became the first local jurisdiction to pass an ordinance that banned single-use plastic bags and implemented a fee for paper bags, which took effect last spring. Watsonville, Capitola, and Santa Cruz followed suit with similar actions: Watsonville’s ordinance went into effect last September, and, as of last month, the bans in Capitola and the City of Santa Cruz are now in place.

 

The Maya-Ixil Move Forward

Local nonprofit works to educate and create opportunity for indigenous communities in Guatemala In an isolated region of the Guatemala mountains called Ixil, the indigenous Maya population was devastated by a civil war between the government and leftist guerrilla factions that spanned 1960 to 1996. During that 36-year war, the Guatemalan military eradicated entire Mayan communities. In what amounted to genocide, soldiers burned Mayan farmlands and homes, raped and tortured the people, and scattered families. By the end of the war, 200,000 Mayans had been killed, 7,000 of whom were Maya-Ixil.

 

Public Thinking

Watsonville teens host TEDx event Santa Cruz County is no stranger to the TED brand. TED—which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design—talks have come to the area through independently organized events 10 times since 2011. This month, the gathering returns to the county with a new twist, thanks to the Watsonville Youth City Council. TEDxYouth@Watsonville, which will take place Sunday, May 19 at the Henry J. Mello Center for the Performing Arts in Watsonville, will feature only speakers younger than 19 years old and will traverse topics from racial stereotypes and renewable energy to traditional Mexican dance.

 

The Tilt

Although Jesse Malley, lead singer of the outlaw country, blues and rock ’n’ roll band The Tilt, no longer lives in Santa Cruz, she was born and raised here and this is where her love of music and performance began. “My dad worked at The Catalyst for 27 years, so I got to see a lot of music acts come through town,” she says. “Music always seemed to me to be such an incredible way to express yourself that I just stumbled upon my voice and jumped into it.” That jump eventually led to Malley heading down to San Diego to pursue a music career, and her band The Tilt has just released their full-length debut, Howlin’.

 

Whole Lotta Blues

The 11-piece, husband-and-wife-led Tedeschi Trucks Band headlines the Santa Cruz Blues Festival Guitarist Derek Trucks and vocalist/guitarist Susan Tedeschi, the husband-and-wife team at the helm of The Tedeschi Trucks Band, have learned that in a band as well as in a marriage, the best way to keep things running smoothly is sometimes to take a step back. That’s especially true when you’re dealing with an 11-piece group that, in addition to its namesakes, features two drummers, a keyboardist/flautist, a three-piece horn section and two harmony vocalists.

 

Beck to the Future

In celebration of Beck’s solo acoustic show at The Rio, GT explores Song Reader, the alternative rock icon’s most ambitious interactive art piece yet. Here’s an odd little paradox of the digital revolution: The more sophisticated our technology gets, the more our musical milieu begins to resemble that of a bygone era, when song ideas were passed around from musician to musician, perpetually taking on new twists. Dozens of different YouTube users might try their hand at setting somebody’s rant about cats or double rainbows to music, or you might hear the Belgian musician Gotye turning the many and varied covers of his song “Somebody That I Used to Know” into a virtual orchestra (see below).

 

Land of Lions

New research provides foundation to look at protecting mountain lions, particularly when it comes to Highway 17 An adult male mountain lion called simply “Number 16” by the Santa Cruz Puma Project led a scientifically interesting life for the more than two-year period he was tracked by the UC Santa Cruz-based research project. According to Chris Wilmers, associate professor of environmental studies at UCSC and head of the Puma Project, the group initially caught and collared Number 16 in Loch Lomond. He then proceeded to cross Highway 17 several times, where he was eventually was hit, but survived. In an unusual move for an adult male, Number 16 then shifted his home range to the Forest of Nisene Marks State Park. Recently, the lion’s tracking collar went on “mortality mode.” The day before Wilmers spoke to Good Times, the researchers found his skeleton.

 

So Sleep (Pralaya) Does Not Overtake Us

Sunday is Pentecost, a festival of the Holy Spirit (Ray 3 of Divine Intelligence). Pentecost is the name given to the descent of the Holy Spirit as tongues of fire appearing above the heads of Christ’s (Piscean World Teacher) Disciples (students) in an upper room (plane of the Mind). Pentecost is not a simple bible story. It’s an actual experience for each individual as the Light of the Soul begins to direct the personality with spiritual gifts and virtues – wisdom, understanding (all ideas, all hearts), knowledge and Right Judgment (directing the intellect), wonder, fortitude/courage and respect/reverence (directing our willingness to serve).

 

Legal Battles Drag On

More than a year after the 75 River St. occupation, four defendants remain embroiled in ongoing case  More than a year and a half since a group occupied the former Wells Fargo building on River Street in an act of protest, felony charges linger on for four of the original defendants and a trial may be imminent. Gabriella Ripley-Phipps, Brent Adams, Cameron Laurendeau and Franklin Alcantara were scheduled to begin trial May 13 in connection with the late 2011 protest. That trial now has been pushed back to September due to scheduling conflicts. The four face a felony charge of vandalism and a misdemeanor for trespassing.

 

Bringing the Message Home

Former mayor and UCSC student recap their experiences at the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women While traveling to New York for the 57th United Nations (UN) Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), seasoned local activist Jane Weed-Pomerantz had a notion of what to expect. But, with the vast scope of worldwide women’s rights violations presented at the commission, she knew she would still be taken aback at times. “I was worried because I had a feeling I would be finding out what I did find out about women and girls in the world,” says Weed-Pomerantz. “I was trying to brace myself for the knowledge of the reality, because we are really very protected in this country.”
GTemail_tileTomorow's GTW Today.
Sign up for Tomorrow's Good Times Today
Upcoming arts & events

Latest Comments

 

May Day in the Alps

When my daughter returns to Santa Cruz from her new home in Los Angeles, she comments on how quiet it is here. It was even more so during a trip to Ben Lomond, when we set out for a sample of her second favorite macaroni and cheese. Sitting at the front of the Tyrolean Inn restaurant, the green tarp with plastic windows kept out the chill as well as the noise of an occasional passing car. A new draft beer celebrating the German spring, Maibok ($6) was refreshing, served in a hefty glass stein, but specialty cocktails are unique as well.

 

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.

 

What are you a total sucker for?

A cold beer after a long bike ride, gossip, and fighting over politics. Kyle McKinley Santa Cruz | Lecturer

 

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 |

 

Vine & Dine: Pine Ridge Vineyards

Chenin Blanc + Viognier 2012 On a recent trip to Palm Springs, I came across Pine Ridge Vineyards’ Chenin Blanc + Viognier at a new downtown restaurant called Lulu. Superbly decorated in Hollywood-esque style and with a very hip vibe, this California bistro is one of the hottest new dining spots—and the Chenin Blanc was just the right wine to pair with some of Lulu’s Happy Hour tapas-style food. And eating outdoors in the desert’s warm night air makes a chilled white wine taste even better.

 

Making Sense of Soul

Allen Stone wants to give R&B back some of its depth Whether fairly or unfairly, R&B and soul music often get typecast. Much of the music is groove-inducing and has an overtly romantic, sensual or sexual side to it, and the suggestive lyrics only reinforce this mood. That is fine and well, but for R&B and soul singer Allen Stone, it is not enough. “I love music that’s about love, and I love R&B songs, but I also like songs that have influence on culture,” Stone says. "I believe that if you’re given a microphone you need to use it in a positive way, and I feel like pop culture, more often than not, doesn’t. I think that [pop stars] are very bad stewards of the microphone they’ve been given, and the voices they’ve been given, and they tend to talk about pretty futile and shallow things, rather than subjects which uplift the children in our culture, or the teenage culture, or the young adult generation. If you’re given a microphone, you should say something that’s deeper than, ‘I’m going to the club and I’m going to drink cognac.’”

 

Step on up to the Bar

Here in Santa Cruz County, we are privileged to have farm-fresh greens year-round. Making a nightly salad at home is a snap since the emergence of pre-washed greens, and vinaigrette dressing is made easily with your favorite vinegar and small spoon of Dijon mustard whisked with a bit of olive oil.

 

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.

 

Do you unplug often enough? Or do you need help?

Santa Cruz | Caregiver