The lost summer: City scrambles to make it up to Seabright businesses
Just how dire is the burden forced onto lower Seabright businesses during the yearslong Murray Street Bridge closure that has choked off the area’s key access point?
Well, one can look at the magnitude of the downstream impacts. Seabright Social, one of the district’s anchor businesses, announced plans to shutter earlier this month, and, in doing so, placed direct blame on the bridge project. Causation, not correlation.
Or, one can look at the magnitude of the proposed solutions. Since getting excoriated at a Santa Cruz City Council meeting two weeks ago, local officials appear to have put almost everything on the table, including building out a temporary light rail route to increase the flow of traffic in the area. Although city staff doesn’t necessarily recommend it, it has proposed operating a tram between Capitola’s Jade Street Park and Depot Park in Santa Cruz. City says the idea would “potentially mimic” the 2021 Coast Futura passenger rail demonstration, when the California-based rail company TIG/m temporarily ran a tram service in the county to show the viability of passenger rail.
According to the staff report, the “operationally complex” project would take at least six months to a year to complete, require the construction of temporary station platforms and cost up to $120,000 per month. Construction on the Murray Street Bridge is expected to finish in 2028.
The rail idea is just one of several that officials will throw against the wall at Tuesday’s Santa Cruz City Council meeting. Some seem more likely to stick than others, such as a program for low-interest business loans of up to $50,000, extending the season for the port district’s water taxi service, significant discounts to parking, and even a revived Santa Cruz Metro bus route that would require the removal of on-street parking along parts of Seabright and Soquel avenues.
One proposal likely to take center stage is the temporary conversion of the harbor rail bridge — which runs parallel to the Murray Street Bridge — into a bike and pedestrian trail, allowing at least a little more access between Seabright and the harbor area. The proposal received large support from the public, and the Santa Cruz Regional Transportation Commission was ready to allow it.
However, the Minnesota-based operator of the rail line, Progressive Rail, said the idea, on its surface, presents too much of a legal risk and the company won’t consider it until the city returns with a series of lengthy environmental, engineering and safety reports. Staff also foresees the project costing $1.7 million, which could drain the overall bridge repair’s budget.
The final idea city staff is proposing Tuesday appears to be its starkest mea culpa. They want the city council’s OK to draft a formal policy “establishing requirements and best practices for business notification, outreach and support” during planned or emergency closures like the Murray Street Bridge. City officials have been clear that they never want this to happen again, but a policy that ensures a proactive approach in the future — rather than the extremely reactive one of the present — offers only cold comfort for the businesses of lower Seabright, which could end up referring to 2025 as their lost summer. Or, in the extreme case of Seabright Social, their last summer.
OF NOTE
Officials hail, cops jail at library groundbreaking: Dignitaries from across the region came together last Wednesday to celebrate the start of construction on Santa Cruz’s downtown library/affordable housing project, a centerpiece of the city’s future vision of itself. To kick things off in a most Santa Cruz way, cops arrested a bellicose Keith McHenry, the founder of Food Not Bombs, who interrupted the ceremony to protest the project and local corruption.
Demolition permission: Santa Cruz County has been working to shape a policy that keeps stationary, oversized vehicles from occupying public streets. Last week, officials from the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office said the policy was difficult to implement because tow companies refused to participate due to the expense of holding these vehicles in their lots. The county is now considering an amendment to the policy, as debated last week, to allow the companies to immediately demolish the vehicles they tow. The idea still has a few kinks, however.
Should high school sophomores be allowed to vote? As my colleague Hillary Ojeda reports, Pajaro Valley Unified School District is exploring a change to the voting age for school board elections to 16. Similar efforts have been taken up in other school districts throughout the country.
Santa Cruz makes room for luxury: The La Bahia Hotel & Spa, the new luxury accommodation on Beach Street, is set for a ribbon-cutting on Wednesday at 2 p.m. The coming of this hotel, which has two restaurants, two bars and room reservations that range from $550 to more than $730 per night, has been celebrated and grumbled over by Santa Cruz residents for years.
POINTS FOR PARTICIPATION
Parking problems prompt proaction by Santa Cruz City Council: Under state law, developers that include certain levels of affordable housing in their projects don’t have to include parking, leaving future car-owning residents with few options other than to find street parking or take up more space in public garages. As the city of Santa Cruz moves into this next, development-heavy chapter, city councilmembers, led by Vice Mayor Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson, are asking city staff to develop means for the city to mitigate potential parking problems, including transit incentives and residential parking permits. The Santa Cruz City Council meets at 1 p.m. on Tuesday.
Police use-of-force rates are on the rise in Santa Cruz: The City of Santa Cruz’s Public Safety Committee will receive a use-of-force report during its Wednesday meeting that shows between January and July of 2025, Santa Cruz Police Department officers reported 17.7 use-of-force incidents per month. That number has been consistently on the rise since 2022, when the department reported 12.3 such incidents per month. SCPD defines use of force as “the application of physical techniques or tactics, chemical agents, or weapons to another person.”
ONE GREAT LISTEN
AI is the next free speech battleground | “Your Undivided Attention” (podcast, 2025)
I’m not much of a podcast person aside from my inconsistent diet of shows from journalism outfits, which spans from The New York Times and The New Yorker, to the BBC and National Review. Lately, however, I’ve gotten hooked on “Your Undivided Attention,” a biweekly series that invites some of the brightest minds to debate the promise and perils of artificial intelligence.
Produced out of the Center for Humane Technology, “Your Undivided Attention” has taken on everything from the AI brain race between OpenAI and Facebook, to the disappointing rate of meaningful legislation aimed at the technology. There is so much more happening with AI that may fundamentally change our society than just chatbots. Amidst the bottomless morass of content we’re able to access through our phones, I’d argue “Your Undivided Attention” is crucial listening.
A good place to start might be this July 31 episode, in which hosts Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin invite Harvard Law professor Larry Lessig and Meetali Jain, the director of the Tech Justice Law Project, to discuss a seminal case moving through the court system. Character.AI, the developer of the chatbot that convinced a 14-year-old boy in Florida to commit suicide, is arguing in a lawsuit against it that the company’s chatbot has free speech rights protected by the First Amendment. It suffices to say this is a case we should all be paying attention to.