The county’s generational shift deepens
As we sat across from one another in an empty board of supervisors chambers Monday morning, Santa Cruz County’s top bureaucrat, Carlos Palacios, told me he still has plenty left in the tank, and that’s part of the reason he has chosen to retire.
“We’ve seen that at the federal level, with people maybe staying too long in office, and I’ve always been cognizant of not wanting to stay longer than my energy, or enthusiasm or ambition for the job,” Palacios told me.
Palacios, 63, announced his retirement on Thursday, but has committed to staying on the job until December, giving the county’s board of supervisors roughly six months to execute its most important hiring decision. The board seems poised to launch a national candidate search for the county’s top government role.
Palacios’ departure comes at a time of great uncertainty, typical of sea changes. Yet, sea changes facing Santa Cruz County governance are manifold. The obvious one, and perhaps most immediately consequential, is the change happening at the federal government, where high-wire budget negotiations have the potential to diminish the local social safety net for years to come.
The other sea change is less pressure from an outside force and more evolution from within.
Just three years ago, the board of supervisors was an all-white, all-male panel with decades of government experience under their belt. Today, the board is a mix of races and genders, where four out of five members are in their first term. The board’s most tenured member — Supervisor Manu Koenig — is only six months into his second term. As of last summer, the county has a new sheriff, and will soon have a new Health Services Agency director, putting new faces at the top of two of the most consequential local government operations.
Palacios sees his departure as not only part of that change, but spurred by it as well. “It is the most important hire they make, and it’s one of the most important decisions, and I wanted to make sure they had time to gel as a unit before they made that decision,” Palacios said. “So it’s important that they be able to pick that person who they gel with and they most feel comfortable with. Because they’re the ones who are going to be here for the next decade.”
Stay tuned for when we publish more on this Tuesday.
OF NOTE
‘All my dreams shattered’: It will take time to fully grasp the impact and consequences of President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities on Saturday. However, as my colleague Hillary Ojeda reports, the escalation has already impacted the lives of Iranians in Santa Cruz County.
Remembering a Santa Cruz political giant: Mike Rotkin, the former mayor of Santa Cruz who stood on the bleeding edge of the city’s progressive identity of the 1970s and 1980s, died last Wednesday at 79. In this memoriam compiled by Lookout’s opinion editor, Jody K. Biehl, people from across the county offered their thoughts on what many view as a substantial loss in the city and county’s public square.
*Cue “Jaws” theme music* Closure of Santa Cruz’s Murray Street Bridge begins: The Murray Street Bridge, a main thoroughfare connecting Santa Cruz’s Seabright area to Live Oak, officially shut down Monday for an astounding seven-months-long, full closure as the city works on a retrofitting project that it isn’t due to complete until 2028. My colleague and transportation aficionado Max Chun has that update.
Heightened focus on county permitting: The Santa Cruz County Civil Grand Jury published its fourth report Monday, detailing the challenges homeowners and contractors encounter through the county’s “permitting maze.” The watchdog group recommended the county change some smaller projects that currently require permitting to become permit-free, hiring a full-time staff to act as a liaison between the public and staff, and open a “walk-up front desk” to assist the public, among other recommendations. – Hillary Ojeda
POINTS FOR PARTICIPATION
Santa Cruz City Council meets for the last time until August: The city will hear an appeal of the 530 Ocean St. project, known as the Art Haus, which proposes 225 units in a six-story building along one of the city’s most trafficked corridors.
Tuesday’s agenda also includes an amendment to the BCycle contract to increase the price per single, 30-minute ride with the local e-bike-share program from $7 to $7.99, and the monthly pass from $30 to $34.99. The annual subscription price of $225 will stay the same. According to city documents, the price hike has been approved by other parts of the county and will impact the entire regional network, from Watsonville to Mid-County and into UC Santa Cruz’s campus.
The city council will also vote on a pair of resolutions that condemn the military response to protests in Los Angeles, and recommit the city to supporting trans and queer rights.
Board of supervisors to receive an assessment on its planning department shortcomings: The county has leaned on national consultant firm Baker Tilly to search the pipes of its planning department and point out the clogs. In a March report, the consultant criticized the county’s planning department as harboring a “culture of no.” In its last scheduled meeting until August, the board of supervisors on Tuesday will receive a more comprehensive assessment of its planning structure, with recommendations on how the local government can change.
Capitola City Council will choose a direction for its wharf: Residents surveyed by the city want the new Capitola Wharf to include a restaurant and a fishing concession. On Thursday, the Capitola City Council will make a final decision on which vision of its wharf it prefers, after months of planning and community input. It is the last meeting until July 24.
Watsonville to vote on its budget: The Watsonville City Council will vote on the city’s biennial budget plan. City staff are proposing to remove 14 vacant positions and a 1% reduction in operational expenses across all departments to help avoid a budget deficit or dipping into its reserves this year. That meeting will begin at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday. – Tania Ortiz
ONE GREAT READ
‘I feel like I’ve been lied to’: When a measles outbreak hits home, by Eli Saslow for The New York Times
When they publish a new story, few journalists command quite the same drop-everything response as New York Times reporter Eli Saslow. For more than a decade, at the Washington Post and now at the Times, Saslow’s beat has amounted to spelunking into America’s more confounding issues and finding the definitive human story.
Here, Saslow does it again, using the country’s increasingly severe measles outbreak as a vehicle to tell a story about well-meaning people led astray by controversial leaders and a growing obsession with the internet’s science skeptics. But ultimately, this is the story of a doctor, his family and community in West Texas who were plunged into the physical and emotional terrors of a measles outbreak that, just 10 years ago, would have been impossible to imagine.