Quick Take
The Santa Cruz City Council has deferred its response to two recent grand jury investigations criticizing the city's handling of rape cases and affordable housing. Though Mayor Fred Keeley initially disagreed with many of the findings, the council decided to form a subcommittee to provide a more comprehensive response.
Tasked with writing on behalf of the entire Santa Cruz City Council, Mayor Fred Keeley was ready to reject all of the findings from two recent civil grand jury investigations into the city’s handling of rape cases and affordable housing.
Instead of approving Keeley’s responses, the city council on Tuesday unanimously requested more time so it could form a subcommittee and respond with more input and analysis from the rest of city council. Keeley supported the council’s decision.
“Having read the reports, I don’t feel comfortable that we’ve adequately responded,” Councilmember Sandy Brown said. “The grand jury would be happy to accept a late response over a highly inadequate, and in some cases obfuscating, response.”
The two reports, “Preventing Rape and Domestic Violence: Where’s the Priority?” and “Housing for Whom?” were published in June. Each criticizes city government for what it perceived were failures in transparency and reporting on rape and domestic violence cases, and in tracking the city’s affordable housing stock.
The civil grand jury is a volunteer, 19-member government watchdog body that convenes each year under state mandate to investigate local government operations in Santa Cruz County. This year, the civil grand jury published nine investigations, on topics ranging from county jail conditions and sexual assault prevention, to road conditions and the county’s CZU wildfire recovery.
The grand jury questioned how well the city has prioritized the prevention of rape and sexual violence, saying “inaction leaves the community vulnerable and ill-informed with respect to rape and domestic violence.” The grand jury found, among other things, that the police department’s annual reports lacked key rape statistics including the prevalence of stranger rape, that the reported rape numbers are unreliable, and that the police department stopped providing the city’s Commission on the Prevention of Violence Against Women with redacted rape reports so it could oversee how police were interacting with victims.
In Keeley’s accounting, the city disagreed with 10 of the grand jury’s findings in the report, and “partially” disagreed with an 11th that claimed the lack of stranger rape data misleads the public into a false sense of security.
In the housing investigation, the grand jury found the city does not maintain data on whether affordable housing units are abiding by the city’s local preference ordinance, which prioritizes Santa Cruz residents for income-restricted housing units. It also claimed the city doesn’t keep track of how many affordable units are occupied by UC Santa Cruz students, and that the city’s land-use rules are unclear around which kinds of affordable housing — moderate, low, or very low income — are required in certain zoning designations. Keeley disagreed with all three points, but only partially with the finding about the effects of not tracking UCSC student occupancy in the city’s affordable housing projects.
During Tuesday’s meeting, Keeley said he’s read 43 civil grand jury reports since entering local politics in the 1980s, and has found the investigations to be “uneven.”
“I think some of the work they do is actually quite good, and some of it is, frankly, not worth the paper it’s written on,” Keeley said. “I think this is a case where it is worth the paper it’s written on and I think it’s a good idea to take a look at this and provide feedback.”
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