Quick Take
Since Feb. 29, Mountain Charlie Road, which stretches toward the northern boundary of Santa Cruz County, has been cut off by a major landslide. Despite desperation from residents, county, state and federal officials have until now offered few solutions – and a fix could take three to five years.
What was once an easy 20-minute drive in his Lexus, Don Ferris’ work commute to downtown Santa Cruz now begins with a treacherous hike.
As he navigates the sharp incline wearing boat shoes, tan chinos and a tucked-in black polo shirt, the 75-year-old Chicago native stops to catch his breath. Ferris lives in one of the five homes atop this sloping ridge cut off by a February landslide that washed out their private driveway and a chunk of Mountain Charlie Road near the Santa Clara County line.
“In the wintertime, this is like incredibly slippery clay, you can’t carry anything,” he said, tapping the dirt trail with his foot. His 69-year-old wife cannot traverse the path without walking poles due to her osteoarthritis. One of his neighbors who relies on a walker now relies on being lifted and carried.
Quotidian tasks such as taking out the garbage, unloading groceries or commuting to doctors appointments have turned into feats of strength and resilience. Other less common but critical needs, such as getting a fire truck or ambulance up to the house, delivering heavy cans of propane for heat, hot water and cooking, or even loading a moving truck to find a new home, have become improbable, if not impossible.
“Right now, this is doable, but come fire season or winter storms, it gets complicated,” Ferris said, pushing back his gray hair. “We can’t survive like this for three years, but that’s what the county is asking us to do.”
In the Santa Cruz Mountains, decades of questionable infrastructure policy and climate change are mixing a crisis cocktail that has left 65 families along Mountain Charlie Road desperate for help.
Countywide, hundreds of millions of dollars of deferred county road and culvert maintenance and aging infrastructure have collided with increasingly extreme weather, driving the Santa Cruz County government into a financial hole that has left it unable to fix even its most urgent issues.
The county’s board of supervisors, responsible for maintenance of the road and public infrastructure, agreed in the most recent budget cycle to take out nearly $100 million in debt to finance repairs from a flurry of natural disasters stretching back to 2017. Yet even that will not cover everything: Mountain Charlie Road represents only one emergency road repair out of 80 that the county has no money and, until now, no plan to repair.
Over the past three months, this crisis has brought a carousel of politicians into the mountain community, from Rep. Jimmy Panetta to state Sen. John Laird, Assemblymember Gail Pellerin and County Supervisor Bruce McPherson; yet residents have heard few solutions. Without an infusion of cash — the repair has been estimated around $3 million — the head of county public works, Matt Machado, has estimated a three-to-five-year timeline for a fix. Machado’s team has scheduled a virtual town hall Thursday to update residents on the repair plan.
“I understand everyone’s angst and frustration,” Laird told Lookout. “But I think there is finally going to be some movement on this thing.”
Trapped in the mountains
Branching off of Glenwood Drive north of Bean Creek Road, Mountain Charlie Road winds for about 5 miles along the west of Highway 17 before approaching Summit Road.
Since it doesn’t have an outlet for much of its stretch, Mountain Charlie represents a critical but long-crumbling highway access route for work and school commutes. The road collapsed on Feb. 29, about 1 mile south of the Summit Road exit, turning often 15-minute trips to and fro into sometimes hour-and-a-half treks. Children are dropping out of extracurricular activities, residents are skipping doctors appointments, and access to everyday necessities has become strained.
As recently as November, Cal Fire determined that this rural community lies in a high fire severity zone, and wildfires are a central fear for residents on Mountain Charlie. If wildfire sparked south of the road failure, families would find themselves trapped between a blaze and 100 yards of collapsed asphalt.
Kathy Goudarzi has lived on Mountain Charlie with her husband and son for 10 years. Like many families in the area, their work, school and many of their services are north in Los Gatos. Each morning, she makes the choice between walking 15 minutes to the road failure and climbing down and through the 100 yards of crumbling asphalt to reach a car north of the closure, or navigating the pothole-laden southern leg of Mountain Charlie to reach Highway 17 near the Glenwood Drive cutoff — a route that extends her trips by an hour or longer. This detour has been particularly difficult on her son, an incoming senior at Los Gatos High School who Goudarzi said will likely need to drop either marching band or martial arts next school year.
“I still come up here to my house and look out over the Santa Cruz Mountains in awe. I’m not willing to give that up,” Goudarzi said one June afternoon in her spacious dining room. However, each day brings more exhaustion and increasing anxiety over the county’s timeline. “I don’t know if I can stick it out for three years, but would someone even buy my house before the road gets fixed?”
Ferris, Goudarzi and their neighbors say they thought they understood the stakes of life in the Santa Cruz Mountains: downed trees, added fire risks and, yes, road failures; however, they believed their tax dollars would fund response and repairs from the county government.
“Before the road failure happened, we put our trust in the process, and that the county would be on top of solving it,” Goudarzi said. “That trust has gone away now. I don’t think anyone up here expected that these were the stakes of living up here.”
Federal, state and local response
The perceived lack of response from the government has galvanized the neighbors into an organized political force. Since April 9, a growing number of Mountain Charlie residents have trekked south to downtown Santa Cruz for each board of supervisors meeting, making increasingly desperate appeals to the local lawmakers for help.
“You are going to have 80-plus people with a serious problem when a fire comes through and this is going to make national news and not in a good way,” resident Leanna Swartwood told supervisors on June 4, her voice cracking beneath tears. “This is a life-and-death situation and I am terrified by the fire season right now. It is more than just a little extra time to drive, this is serious.”
The county has been working for months to complete a geotechnical analysis of the damage and the landslide that caused it. Panetta and Laird said the great hope right now is that the analysis will tie the road failure to a landslide that began during the 2023 winter storms. Machado said the county is actually looking to connect the landslide to the 2024 winter storms. Both storms received disaster declarations, and if the county can prove causation, which Laird said the “odds are that it will,” the state and federal government will be able to release emergency money to at least front the repair cost.
Panetta, who visited the site with McPherson earlier this year, said he was hopeful about the geotechnical analysis, and vowed to “keep the pressure on [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] … and keep this process on track.” However, he said the local government will need to do its part as well.
“As we have seen firsthand, it takes all levels of government to play their part and work together to complete and cover these types of major repairs,” Panetta told Lookout in a written statement.
Laird, who spent the past six months working to reopen Highway 1 in Big Sur following an extended road slipout, visited Mountain Charlie three weeks ago. He expected to meet with three people, but as he approached the damage, he saw that “about 30 people showed up. The intensity was palpable.”
“The residents feel like the county needs to do more and that this is a major health and safety problem for certain families, and they are right,” Laird told Lookout.
In a move that exemplified the desperation for money, the county’s board of supervisors on Tuesday approved a partnership with the Community Foundation Santa Cruz County to open up a charitable fund to begin raising money for the road repair. If the road failure cannot be tied to the 2023 storms, well, Laird said, “I’m not ready to even start crossing that bridge.”
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