Quick Take
Lookout political columnist Mike Rotkin offers a sneak peek into the big issues he sees locally for 2024. There are bright spots, he says, like the exceptional work at Santa Cruz Metro, which, he thinks, will soon make riding a bus faster than driving a car to get across the county. He rejoices at the prospect of a more diverse county board of supervisors and worries what an El Niño year will mean for West Cliff Drive, Pajaro, Capitola Village and rural county communities. And he wonders how we will continue to tackle our two biggest issues: homelessness and affordable housing.
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My editor has asked me to write a prognosis for Santa Cruz County politics in the coming year.
It would’ve been easier to write something about expectations for the coming year at the national level. In that arena, the personalities and political forces loom so large that it is easier to see the disaster into which we are heading.
Even if Donald Trump is not elected president – only an even-odds possibility at this point, despite 91 felonious counts of indictment against him – the situation is not pretty. Thanks to redistricting under the control of Republican state legislatures and conservative federal judges, the best we might hope for is an ineffective Congress unable to resolve any of our pressing national and international crises, much as we have now.
Of course, things could go much worse than that with respect to democracy, civil rights and political violence.
At the local level, the picture is murkier, but brighter. If I have anything insightful to offer, it is only because I have a strong enough stomach and years of practice in carefully observing how the sausage is made.
The best news is on the transportation front. This year we see if we can wean ourselves off our cars a bit and take advantage of exceptional promises by the Santa Cruz Metropolitan Transit District. Local elections are March 5; we will see what personality and leadership changes that will bring on both the county board of supervisors and the Santa Cruz City Council. We will need to lean in to tackle our most intractable issues – affordable housing and homelessness. Voters will need to think about diversity, and the experience of candidates needed to take on difficult and complex problems.
On the transportation front, we will see the implementation of dramatic improvements. Building on an unprecedented year of success in securing grants, Santa Cruz Metro will be rolling out a new service that, in an amazingly short period of time, will provide 15-minute service on major routes.
Over half of our buses will produce zero greenhouse gasses. An expanded cadre of drivers will ensure that all the necessary bus routes will pull out each morning, avoiding pass-bys, where riders are left at stops by already full buses, an issue that plagued the service in 2023.
We will also see something unprecedented here: an experiment with free bus service for everyone, not just for youth, which is already in place. This will also include free paratransit service for the disabled community.
This will all unfold in 2024 and will be followed over the next few years with intersection signal preemption for buses on Soquel Avenue. That means more green-light time for buses, which can help prevent traffic delays and make sure buses run on schedule.
We will also see a bus-on-shoulder program on Highway 1 that will make public transit a faster way to get across the county than driving a car. Think about that for a January minute.
In turn, this will have a huge, positive impact on the feasibility of more affordable housing being built on transit routes, including the large affordable housing projects at both the Santa Cruz and Watsonville transit centers.
On the affordable housing front, 2024 will see the completion of a significant number of large projects that will allow both the county and the City of Santa Cruz to meet required state goals for low-income and workforce housing construction.
I certainly can’t predict the outcome of every supervisor or council race in Santa Cruz, but I’m more than a little confident that both the Santa Cruz City Council and the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors will come out of the March election with clear majorities in support of continuing the commitment to increasing our supply of affordable housing.
The most likely winners in races both at the county and city of Santa Cruz level will be those with previous governmental or public sector experience. As I said, I see this as pivotal to steering us through the tough choices we need to make. That will mean more women in public office and likely our first LBGTQ supervisor in Santa Cruz County.
If Measure M, the so-called Housing for People measure, passes March 5, it will certainly slow down local housing production; the impacts of that will not be felt in the coming year as current projects come to fruition, but only further into the future.
How effective our community will be in addressing the homeless issue is less clear.
During this past year, while the rest of California and the United States saw a dramatic increase in homelessness, our county and the city of Santa Cruz saw a 22% to 29% reduction in the number of unhoused individuals. After years of ineffective responses, including periodic scattering of large campsites, including the Benchlands, last year the city took the moral high ground and offered all of the unhoused displaced an alternative place to shelter or camp.
Unfortunately, only about a third of the people displaced accepted the alternatives provided, but this strategy did result in a significant improvement in the lives of some unhoused people.
This year might be more difficult.
We still lack sufficient mental health, drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs, and there might be less funding available to address the myriad aspects of the homeless problem. Because of a stupid decision in the formulas for funding county services after the state took away local property taxes with Proposition 13 in 1978, Santa Cruz was designated a “rural county.” This means we get less funding for the services we need than we should for a county that is urban in terms of its density.
If the sales tax measures K and L on the March 5 ballot pass, the county and the City of Santa Cruz might be able to weather this problem, but should they fail, we can expect to see a return of large, dangerous and disorganized campsites mixed with periodic attempts to scatter unhoused people without offering them alternative living options.
The possibility of either the county or city of Santa Cruz electing even close to a majority that will support just leaving homeless people alone to camp where they will is nonexistent. I believe that candidates taking that position will not fare well on March 5.
And speaking of weather, here we are just coming off the first storm of what is predicted to be an El Niño year. What will El Niño do to the construction on West Cliff Drive, the rail corridor, Capitola Village, Pajaro and rural county roads? We don’t know. These are just some of the issues that will test our future elected officials.
At least we don’t face drought in the short term, but we might spend a significant part of the new year cleaning up natural disasters. Given how long it now takes the federal government to reimburse communities with disaster relief, that could well take a toll on other priorities in our community.
It’s been nine days since we toasted to “Auld Lang Syne,” but already it’s time to hold onto your hats. Here we go, 2024.