Concern sparks over Santa Cruz County taking over CZU permitting pipeline
More than four years after the CZU wildfire scorched the Santa Cruz Mountains, hundreds of people looking to rebuild remain somewhere in the reconstruction pipeline. About 700 lots with actual dwellings burned, according to the county assessor’s office. To this point, 127 single-family homes have been rebuilt and are occupied.
Since 2021, the county, not known for expediency when it comes to housing permits, brought in San Francisco-based 4Leaf Inc., to run its Recovery Permit Center. The idea was for the construction management firm to run a one-stop shop that promised to prioritize fire victims looking to rebuild in the CZU burn scar.
Now, as work has slowed as fewer permitting requests are funneling through the Recovery Permit Center, Santa Cruz County is preparing to end its partnership with 4Leaf and wrap CZU victim permitting into its general, countywide workflow. Given the county’s reputation for agonizing turnaround times, mountain residents in the recovery pipeline are now worried.
“4Leaf has been very knowledgeable about the disaster recovery process, and is very well-versed in trauma-informed care and how to address people who are still grieving over what they lost,” said Tonje Switzer, an operations manager with the nonprofit Mountain Community Resources who has been helping fire victims through the rebuild process said. “That can’t be easily replaced.”
The Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors will vote on Tuesday to transition away from the 4Leaf partnership, with a formal handoff due Jan. 1. For more, be sure to read our coverage tomorrow about the switch.
OF NOTE
Interim Sheriff Chris Clark sworn in: On Friday, Sheriff Chris Clark took his oath of office to become Santa Cruz County’s next top cop. Although he will lead the county’s law enforcement office for the next four years, he will technically do it as an interim, taking over for the retiring sheriff, Jim Hart. During his inauguration address, Clark said he wants “nothing more than safety, security and peace of mind for all of you. I will work tirelessly to address your concerns, to continue to build strong connections between law enforcement and the people we serve.”
Albert, the adopted prince of Boulder Creek, dies: Sometimes, someone’s impact on a community is so great that their death requires a proper obituary in the media. Such was the case for Albert, Boulder Creek’s adopted mascot and symbol of resilience amid the terror of the CZU wildfire. The rare white peacock of unknown origin who hung around Boulder Creek for more than two decades, died last month after losing a battle with a mountain lion. A statue has already been built in his honor, and a big mural could be on the way. Read my dispatch from a community in mourning.
Pedals vs. paddles as pickleball proposal gets the BMX community to organize: The topic of Santa Cruz’s rapid transformation from sleepy, gritty beach town into one of the country’s more exclusive communities found a new proxy last week when the city’s parks and recreation department introduced a proposal to replace BMX ramps at Depot Park with four new pickleball courts.
POINTS FOR PARTICIPATION
Swap two for 25 homes in Live Oak: At the end of Live Oak’s Mattison Lane, just off Chanticleer Avenue, property owner Claudio Locatelli is proposing to demolish two single-family homes and replace them with 25 townhomes across 5.3 acres. The transformation of this end lot, which will include four affordable units, will go before the Santa Cruz County Planning Commission on Wednesday.
Workbench’s Clocktower Center reintroduces itself: Next week, the 16-turned-eight-story tower proposed behind downtown Santa Cruz’s town clock will go in front of the public for a virtual community feedback meeting with residents, city planning staff and local developer Workbench. The meeting is scheduled for Dec. 16 at 6 p.m. You can learn more about the meeting, and the project, here.
Coastal Commission takes up City of Santa Cruz’s outdoor dining rules: The City of Santa Cruz recently adopted land-use standards for permanent outdoor dining areas as it phases out the pandemic parklet fad. On Wednesday, the California Coastal Commission, the powerful land-use agency overseeing all development standards along the state’s 1,100 miles of coastline, will determine whether the city’s rules can stand. Coastal Commission staff have recommended allowing the new standards.
County hopes to punt cannabis lounge proposal to next year: A proposal to allow cannabis retailers to open up on-site smoking lounges might not get a final vote until March if County Administrator Carlos Palacios’ office has its way. The county chief executive has proposed delaying a vote on the consumption lounges, originally slated for this month, to March 2025, saying his staff needs more time to develop the proposal. If the supervisors approve the delay, it means outgoing supervisors Zach Friend and Bruce McPherson won’t get a say. Both have voiced skepticism over recent proposals to overhaul the county’s cannabis rules.
Developer kills controversial West Cliff condo project: In 2019, the city council approved a four-story, 89-unit mixed-use condo project at 190 West Cliff Dr. After the California Coastal Commission denied a neighborhood appeal, a group of neighbors filed a lawsuit challenging the commission’s decision. Although the lawsuit is still pending, it appears those neighbors have won. On Tuesday, the Santa Cruz City Council will vote to retract the project’s permits after the developer said the project was now infeasible due to construction costs and changes in the market.
ONE GREAT READ
The Dream of the Raised Arm, by Zadie Smith for The New York Review of Books
Propaganda’s greatest achievement, and perhaps the critical feature that makes it propaganda, is its subtle but unrelenting nature. To understand its power, think not about the obvious political advertisements trying to sway you to one side of the aisle; no, instead, consider the ways your brain has been shaped by the unending stream of videos and images and posts that move through our social media feeds. Propaganda is not a blunt-force tool, but instead plays the long game, persuasion by 10,000 brushes.
In the 1930s, Polish journalist Charlotte Beradt began having nightmares about the Third Reich, and soon found this was a widespread phenomenon. In 1966, she published “The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation,” a collection of interviews about these dreams and the people who had them. A new translation of that book will be out next year, and, in classic fashion, the New York Review of Books asked one of our generation’s finest writers to pen an essay about it.
Zadie Smith delivers, tying the wartime propaganda of the Third Reich to today’s attention economy, in which the world’s best minds spend their time creating algorithms to get you to stay on apps. That may sound like a gloomy read, but she ends it with some hope:
“With every other extractive and exploitative industry of the past four hundred years, the process of unraveling and resistance was far more complicated. To end the racialized system of capital called “slavery,” for example, you had to violently revolt, riot, petition, boycott, change minds, change laws, all in order to end one of the most lucrative gravy trains the Western world has ever known. To rein in the unprecedented wealth of the robber baron industrialists at the turn of the twentieth century, you had to regulate their businesses, the banks, and the labor laws themselves, and create the electoral majorities needed to do so. But to seriously damage the billionaire empires that have been built on your attention and are now manipulating your democracies? To achieve that right now? All you guys would need to do is look away.”