Seeking answers at the county jail
It has been four years since the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office temporarily stopped its program that provided children a chance to visit their incarcerated parents in a designated room allowing for physical contact.
In 2020, the pandemic’s reality of mass deadly contagion and social distancing made halting the program an obvious call. In 2024, the sheriff’s budget and recruitment hurdles to reinstating contact visits have been increasingly difficult to swallow for families and community groups who will be seeking some answers this week.
The county board of supervisors will discuss the sheriff’s 2024-25 budget plan during a pair of hearings this week, during which District 3 Supervisor Justin Cummings said he plans to raise the question directly to Sheriff Jim Hart. Representatives from the criminal justice nonprofit MILPA Collective, the local chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice, as well as the county’s Commission on Justice and Gender also expect to make an appearance.
In a story published earlier Monday, I spoke with these groups and a couple of supervisors about this issue. Studies show that contact visits, which the sheriff allowed at the jail’s lower-security facilities at Rountree and Blaine Street, are critical in easing the trauma that follows from a child separated from an incarcerated parent. Many inmates in the county jail system are pre-trial, which means they are legally still considered innocent, and more than 70% are locked up on misdemeanor charges. But bringing contact visits back, according to the groups I spoke with, is largely about easing the harm on the children.
“Jail isn’t supposed to be a fun place, but it wasn’t meant to dehumanize people,” Bernie Gomez, a member of the MILPA Collective, told me. “At what point does the board of supervisors start to care about this?”
Get full access to Lookout Santa Cruz
Become a member to read all of Lookout’s local coverage, from politics and policy to education, dining and more. Annual and monthly membership options are available — start reading for as little as $17 today!
Of Note
An argument about everything but: The Santa Cruz City Council decided last week that The Hook Outlet, a locally owned cannabis retailer, can open a dispensary on Mission Street where Emily’s Bakery stood for more than four decades. The dispensary will operate as a partnership with WAMM Phytotherapies, a medical cannabis nonprofit central in the city’s counterculture and pot-friendly history.
The decision followed months of boiling debate that even pulled state legislators into the fray. The dispensary sat comfortably outside of the city’s own 600-foot buffer zone around schools, but the location still invited the furor of the Santa Cruz City Schools District and a group of Westside parents who said the business would increase access to and normalization of cannabis for students of Santa Cruz High School and Mission Hill Middle School.
The hourslong discussion last week at times devolved into a relitigation of the legalization of cannabis, touching on the merits of medical cannabis, the impact of cannabis on developing brains, the growing mental health crisis among youth and comparisons between alcohol and cannabis regulations.
Read more about the 6-1 city council decision and the debate surrounding it.
An $87 annual subscription for climate resilience? Well, it’s really a tax, but the lead voice supporting a countywide ballot measure that could go in front of voters in November pitches the cost as cheaper than even the cheapest Netflix subscription. (The cheapest Netflix subscription, $6.99 per month, actually runs about $84 annually.)
On Friday, a roster of local dignitaries and environmental nonprofit executives helped launch the campaign for the Water and Wildfire Protection Act, which would create a new revenue source dedicated toward climate resilience projects across the county. In April, the group submitted a petition with more than 16,000 signatures supporting its placement on the November ballot (only 10,000 signatures are required to qualify). As of this writing, County Clerk Tricia Webber said she had not yet validated the signatures, but the group of supporters, including state Sen. John Laird, Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley and Watsonville City Councilmember Eduardo Montesino, sounded confident Friday that the petition would qualify. Webber told me she is in the final stages of validating the signatures, and will present a report to the board of supervisors on the petition this week.
The measure proposes charging parcel owners throughout the county $87 per year, regardless of assessed property value, location, or income level, to fund the climate project budget. Sarah Newkirk, executive director of the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County and president of the measure’s campaign, said Santa Cruz is one of the only counties in the greater San Francisco Bay Area without a dedicated revenue stream for countywide climate initiatives.
Looking Ahead
Hear ye, hear ye … about the county’s plan for your taxes: As mentioned above, the county board of supervisors will host two public hearings on the 2024-25 budget this week, on Tuesday and Wednesday. As I’ve reported earlier this year, the word of this budget cycle has been “dire,” as the county figures out how to sustain its services while climbing out of the deep debt caused by the 2023 winter storms. Both hearings begin at 9 a.m.
Capitola advances on improvements to park at Rispin Mansion: The park surrounding the allegedly haunted Rispin Mansion is being eyed by city officials for an upgrade with a new amphitheater, picnic areas and children’s playground. The city plans to use state funds for the project, but in order to receive the funds, the city has to implement a deed restriction that commits it to operating and maintaining the property, and using it only as a public park. The Capitola City Council will vote on whether to pass the deed restriction on Thursday.
Pulitzer party continues: After floating for a few days, my and my colleagues’ feet are firmly back on the ground, finding and reporting the stories that matter most to Santa Cruz County residents. But for Lookout members, there is still an opportunity to celebrate Lookout’s 2024 Pulitzer Prize win. Please join us for a Lookout Pulitzer Prize celebration at our downtown office on Wednesday from 5 to 7 p.m. Have a drink, light snacks and help us celebrate this win. This event is free, but space is limited, so please RSVP. Not yet a member? Sign up today to support our work in the community and join the celebration.
The Santa Cruz, Watsonville and Scotts Valley city councils will be back next week!
Weekly News Diet
Local: The City of Santa Cruz unveiled updated renderings of the long-anticipated (and debated) downtown library mixed-use project, which will lay down a new library and 124 affordable housing units on the parking lot that currently houses the Wednesday farmers market. Construction is expected to begin in the first quarter of 2025.
Golden State: My colleague Hillary Ojeda reported earlier Monday that UC Santa Cruz graduate student workers walked off the job as part of larger strike plans protesting the University of California’s decision to use police to arrest pro-Palestinian protesters and clear encampments. Over at CalMatters, Mikhail Zinshteyn has a story on the broader statewide implications of the strike.
National: A prosecutor at the International Criminal Court has requested arrest warrants for Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and leaders of Hamas for war crimes committed in the ongoing conflict in Gaza The move is, at this time, largely symbolic, reports The New York Times. Israel does not recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction in the country, which means, if the warrants are approved by the ICC’s judges, Netanyahu and the leaders of Hamas would be arrested only if they travel to one of the ICC’s 124 member nations.
One Great Read
The battle for attention, by Nathan Heller for The New Yorker
In this moment of social media, invasive targeted advertising and virtual reality goggles built to envelop our experience into our devices, sustaining one’s attention seems to be a radical, if not impossible, act. In English, we refer to the act as “paying” attention. The Spanish version translates it to “lending” attention. No matter which economic term we prefer, how we transact our attention ends up being how we live our lives.
New Yorker writer Nathan Heller, my first pick on the list of distinguished contemporary magazine writers, wanted to track down where our attention has gone, and how the average attention span has dropped well below a minute. What he ended up finding was an underground, global society of mostly artists and academics whose mission is to radically attend. The result is epiphanic for both the author and reader.
I’d recommend pairing this article, as I accidentally did, with Susan Sontag’s 1964 iconoclastic essay “Against Interpretation,” which touches on many of the side themes of Heller’s story.
And, of course, a reminder that I always love reading your thoughts on the articles/essays/documentaries shared in this section (and any section, really). So, I encourage you to reach out! Thanks!
