Quick Take
As District 5 voters prepare to cast their votes for a new county supervisor, no issue stands more prominently than Santa Cruz County's failure to shepherd through a more efficient rebuild after the 2020 CZU fire. Voters in the Santa Cruz Mountains say it's time to fundamentally change government.
The Santa Cruz Mountains, an area which tens of thousands of people call home, hosts some of the most beautiful vistas and natural spaces in the county, from Big Basin to Henry Cowell and the Garden of Eden. Remote and rugged are terms central not only to the proud way of life at these altitudes, but the challenges as well.
The possibility of natural disaster hangs over every season, from river flooding to landslides and wildfires. And every three years since 2017, the mountain communities have endured a haymaker from Mother Nature. Global warming’s introduction of more extreme storms and weather conditions has, in some ways, redefined mountain living.
Aside from Scotts Valley, the Santa Cruz County side of the mountains is shaped by a collection of unincorporated communities that rely on the county as their most local form of government. The sheriff’s office is their police force, and the board of supervisors is their city council. For the first time in 12 years, thanks to the retirement of longtime Supervisor Bruce McPherson, a highly competitive race is underway to represent District 5 on the board of supervisors. Monica Martinez, CEO of social services nonprofit Encompass, small business owner and community organizer Christopher Bradford, Theresa Bond, a trustee for the Los Gatos-Saratoga Union High School District, and home builder Tom Decker have each promised a new direction for District 5.
For many in the mountains, two ideas hold true, and have risen to top the agenda in the race. People tend to want the government to stay out of their way; but if they must deal with the government, they want bureaucracy to be more efficient, and feel as though it’s working for them instead of lopping on layer after layer of stifling regulations. In a region where more than 900 homes burned down in the 2020 CZU fire and fewer than 40 have been rebuilt 3½ years later, the people point to the county government as the problem a new supervisor needs to fix.
A long way to go
Toward the northern corners of Santa Cruz County, past downtown Boulder Creek and after Highway 236 peels off from Highway 9, the narrow, winding Redwood Drive becomes Boulder Brook Drive. Beneath a dense canopy of redwood, Douglas fir and oak, Catherine Wilson steps out from her creekside trailer.
Four years ago, meeting Wilson at this location might have meant a tour of her house, or of the adjacent unit she rented to tenants seeking a mountain lifestyle. However, the CZU fire incinerated both structures, and now the youthful 79-year-old lives alone in a tight, blue mobile home that hosts her kitchen, dining room, living room, bathroom and bedroom, all within a few square feet. She says neighbors call her “the poster child” of the post-CZU struggle.
“All that could go wrong has gone wrong,” she said. “I’ve been in the trenches for so long.”
Wilson is among the vast majority of homeowners who are as close to rebuilding today as they were immediately following the fire. Although each home not yet built sings its own song of obstacles, county bureaucracy has become a familiar chorus, and residents like Wilson say they will be humming it on their way to the ballot box this winter to cast a vote in the District 5 supervisor race.
“What we have to do first of all is change the county culture to the point where we’re focused on getting everyone housed,” Wilson said. Property owners are facing updated septic regulations, new standards in geological evaluations, engineering requirements for first responder access and exponential increases in fire insurance premiums. Wilson said her insurance agreed to pay $350,000 toward rebuilding her home. However, after she received the permit to rebuild, a county report estimated she could be in the path of a future landslide. She said the cost to rebuild, with new landslide reinforcements, went up by another $300,000 – not covered by insurance.
Many residents in Wilson’s situation say they feel the county has purposely done little to help them navigate a path toward rebuilding and reoccupying their homes.
“They view us as one big liability out here,” Wilson said. “A lot of people have just given up.”
A few miles up Bear Creek Road, past Boulder Creek Golf Club, contractor Luke Rizzuto Jr. stands surrounded by what looks like a staging area of steel rebar, a pickup truck and a giant pile of earth. He looks out over a down-sloping vacant lot where pieces of cement foundation indicate the remnants of a house. Rizzuto says he began trying to rebuild his friend’s home in September 2020, but a mix of county bureaucracy and blunder (including losing his paperwork several times, a not-uncommon complaint from people dealing with the planning department) meant nearly two years before he was able to get the rebuild permits.
By that point, his friend, a local schoolteacher, had to move on and buy a home somewhere else. The property now sits in limbo, waiting for a buyer.
“I gotta say, I would have had this home built by [August 2021] if the county had just gotten out of my way,” Rizzuto said. “But it didn’t happen that way. The county has gotta lighten up their bureaucracy. It’s too complicated and it just wears people out to the point where they end up leaving the area.”
Several miles south down Highway 9, Thomas Fredericks, like the rest of his neighbors in Felton Grove, spent last January shoveling mud from his garage, his yard and his driveway. The unrelenting series of atmospheric rivers sent the San Lorenzo River surging through his street, turning Felton Grove into a swampy mess.
Fredericks said the county responded well to the flooding, and made sure fresh dumpsters were consistently available to residents. However, this kind of natural disaster is no longer an existential threat to Felton Grove. In the early 2000s, instead of paying out insurance premiums any time the San Lorenzo River flooded, the Federal Emergency Management Agency provided grants to homeowners who wanted to raise their houses out of the flood plain. Fredericks said the program was in part managed by the county. He wonders why this kind of government-sponsored reinforcement appears largely unavailable to the victims of CZU or other natural disasters that have plagued the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Fredericks said he feels the county does an acceptable job on road maintenance, and the emergency response has been well executed. However, he levied the same complaints about the county’s planning department and bureaucracy overkill that seem to echo throughout the mountain communities. The next supervisor, he said, needs to be someone willing to do something now.
“The current supervisors have become too complacent with government as it exists,” said Fredericks, who said the planning department is “the most universally acknowledged problem” in county government for homeowners. “I don’t want a candidate who knows how to navigate government as it exists. I want someone who won’t settle until change occurs. The planning department needs serious work to change their culture.”
Ballots in the election will be mailed out next week. Election day is March 5.
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