Good afternoon, Santa Cruz County, and thank you for patiently waiting an extra day for this week’s reworked edition of In the Public Interest.
The county board of supervisors is back this week, as are the city councils in Santa Cruz and Capitola, each facing their own big decisions. But we’ll get into that later.
I first want to touch on three significant stories we’ve published since Friday.
A prominent local civil rights activist set himself on fire near Santa Cruz City Hall
This morning, the Lookout team broke a story about a prominent local civil rights activist who set himself on fire near Santa Cruz City Hall during the early evening Jan. 20, hours after President Donald Trump took his oath of office and a well-attended Martin Luther King Jr. Day march had cleared out from downtown. The man was standing atop the Black Lives Matter street mural on Center Street, engulfed in flames, as firefighters arrived on the scene.
The motive in this instance is unclear. However, self-immolation is often a form of protest, one that began appearing in the 1960s during the Vietnam War.
The Lookout team faced silence from police, fire and city officials, as well as threats and pressure to kill the story from community leaders and public officials. However, as the story lays out and as Lookout CEO Ken Doctor wrote in an accompanying column, the team chose to move forward because of the significance behind public self-immolation, the day, the location, and the person involved, who is a well-known local activist heavily involved in the police reform and Black civil rights movements that followed George Floyd’s murder. Lookout decided not to publish the person’s name to give the local family privacy at this time.
Four days after the incident, and only a few blocks away near Cedar and Cathcart streets, another man appeared to threaten public self-immolation after dousing himself with gasoline. He did not set himself on fire, and police detained him. Lookout has been unable to obtain any further clarifying information about the incident.
An increasingly worst-case scenario after Moss Landing battery fire
My colleague Tania Ortiz reports today that researchers have discovered high levels of highly toxic chemicals in the soil at Elkhorn Slough Reserve after the Jan. 16 battery fire at the Moss Landing Power Plant.
In a previous role, I was an environmental reporter and my beat often brought me to Elkhorn Slough, a delicate ecosystem for many precarious species. The site, a national research reserve, is meticulously managed and protected by world-class scientists. The slough has often had to battle fertilizer runoff, and now will need to figure out how heavy metal nanoparticles, typically found in lithium-ion batteries, will impact the sensitive habitat.
Amid national “sanctuary cities” concerns, Santa Cruz City Council ponders what to do — privately
Santa Cruz, a sanctuary city since the 1980s, has traditionally recommitted to the policy, which aims to protect undocumented residents by deprioritizing assisting federal immigration officials, when deportation rhetoric from the White House has ticked up. While one can argue the rhetoric has never reached such heights, the city has so far kept quiet under the new Trump administration – and in mid-January the city council held sanctuary city discussions behind closed doors.
During the meeting, which included a briefing about the city’s current sanctuary status and what kind of conflict it could raise under the new administration, some hesitation arose about moving forward with a public reaffirmation. No votes were taken in closed session, and some city councilmembers have since said they support recommitting to sanctuary status and expect to host a public conversation in the coming weeks.
Some city officials are unhappy that this closed-door discussion made it into the public sphere. I’d argue the public isn’t ecstatic about its leaders unnecessarily excluding them from a pertinent discussion that affects many vulnerable people across the community.
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POINTS FOR PARTICIPATION
Battery fires and cannabis lounges lead county supervisors meeting: A briefing is underway at the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors about the Moss Landing battery fire that erupted less than two weeks ago. Although the plant, owned by Texas-based Vistra Corp., sits across the border in Monterey County, understanding the risks in battery storage facilities will be crucial for the supervisors, who are set to vote on a similar, $200 million facility in South County later this year.
The supervisors will also vote on whether to move forward with an idea to allow cannabis retailers to open up on-site smoking and consumption lounges. The proposal, which supervisors have mulled for over a year, has stirred some objections in the county. Some believe the lounges could have a negative impact on youth despite the fact that they’d be for adult use only. Retailers and some supervisors believe the idea could help boost the local industry, as well as elevate Santa Cruz County as a destination in cannabis tourism.
Capitola City Council will appoint interim councilmembers after open application process: After Mayor Yvette Brooks resigned from the Capitola City Council to take the executive director job at United Way of Santa Cruz County, the four remaining city councilmembers were left with a combined four years of dais experience, as no sitting councilmember has served longer than two years. They showed the green behind their ears last week as they tried to figure out how to select someone to replace Brooks. Bowing to public pressure, the council scrapped a plan to choose between the two least popular candidates in the November election and instead agreed to hold an open application process. Now, councilmembers will have to figure out a way to sift through the applications, in public, and make a decision. That meeting is set for Thursday at 6 p.m.
A major deal on the wharf, and a compromise with a litigious landlord in Santa Cruz: Mark Gilbert, owner of the old Dolphin Restaurant, as well as Firefish Grill and Woodies Café, appears to have struck a deal for a new wharf eatery. The Miramar would take over the vacant slot that has been occupied by Humble Sea Brewing Co.’s seasonal beer garden pop-up.
The Santa Cruz City Council will also vote on creating a complicated program for landlords of certain government-assisted rental properties looking to increase rents. The move stems from a lawsuit filed by GVC St. George, the owner of the St. George apartment building downtown, challenging the city’s September ordinance to cap rent hikes for low-income apartment buildings that are phasing out of their affordability requirements. In a story published this morning, my colleague Max Chun, who has followed this issue for months, eloquently laid out the details of this rather byzantine compromise.
The Santa Cruz City Council meeting began at noon.
ONE GREAT READ
Democrats are losing the war for attention. Badly. By Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes for The New York Times
The issue of attention, and the confusing reality of what it means to live inside our brains at a time of such endless digital distraction, is something I’ve written about in this section and that will likely continue. I’ve been obsessed with this topic for a couple years now (irrationally focused on crumbling attention, you could say). I think it’s quietly one of the defining issues of our time: What we pay attention to, and how, is foundational in the direction of our society.
I found this conversation between New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and MSNBC host and author Chris Hayes to both elegantly zoom in and zoom out on this topic, diving into what it means for us as individuals, our politics and power structures. I will leave you with one prescient quote from Klein, and I urge you to check out the full conversation, which appears as an episode on “The Ezra Klein Show” podcast.
Here, Klein projects that a political leader will soon rise up who “radiates disgust” about what our phones, social media and digital advances are doing to us.
“But here’s one of my big theories, and we’ll know in four or eight years if I’m right. I think we are ready, or very near ready — and I see it in the states and counties banning phones in schools — for true backlash.
And I think that the next really successful Democrat, although it could be a Republican, is going to be oppositional to it. In the way that when Barack Obama ran … against cable news, against 24-hour news cycles, against political consultants. People didn’t like the structure and feeling of political attention then. And I don’t think there was anywhere near the level of disgust and concern and feeling that we were being corroded in our souls as there is now.
And I think that, at some point, you are going to see a candidate come up who is going to weaponize this feeling. They are going to run not against Facebook or Meta as a big company that needs to be broken up. They’re going to run against all of it — that society and modernity and politics shouldn’t feel like this.”