Hello readers, just getting back to the office, sore legs and all, after a three-day backpacking trek through Big Sur and the Ventana Wilderness. If you’re even remotely considering a trip to those dramatic vistas to our south, I urge you to do so quickly, lest you miss the abundant wildflowers, glassy rivers and verdant mountainsides known to lure Big Sur’s springtime visitors into becoming lifelong enthusiasts.
What are our legislators up to?
For the average person, the California Legislature can sometimes feel like a mystery, as can the work of the citizens we elect to represent us in Sacramento.
Since the legislature reconvened on Jan. 3 for the 2025-26 session, those citizens chosen by Santa Cruzans — Sen. John Laird, Speaker Robert Rivas and Assemblymembers Gail Pellerin and Dawn Addis — have been busy. With the exception of Rivas, who, as speaker and leader of the California Assembly, hasn’t authored any bills, Santa Cruz County’s political representatives have put forth 52 proposed laws.
Laird is the primary author on 19 bills, ranging from enhancing the fire safety standards at battery storage facilities and increasing the requirements of cities and counties to build full-service homeless shelters, to streamlining certain affordable housing and infill developments in the state’s coastal zone.
Addis, whose district stretches from Mid-County to down past Pismo Beach, has proposed 18 bills under her name. Addis has tended to focus on the environment, with bills that would place stricter requirements on fast fashion companies to report their greenhouse gas emissions, hold fossil fuel companies financially liable for climate change damage in California, and strengthen emergency preparedness for mobile home parks. Addis’ most dramatic idea, a ban on large battery storage facilities following the Moss Landing fire, remains in the Assembly’s Utilities and Energy Committee.
Pellerin, who, like Addis, is in the first year of her second term, has been the primary author on 14 bills. Pellerin, Santa Cruz County’s former elections clerk, often focuses on voting rights and electoral processes, and although she has a couple of election-centered bills, she’s put forward a diverse portfolio this year, with proposals ranging from offering financial help to cities and counties developing their coastal land-use plans and sea-level rise strategies, and prohibiting income-based housing discrimination.
Pellerin also proposed a bill that would place a statewide ban on city and county officials transporting homeless people to other communities without coordination between the local governments. The bill, which comes on the heels of a 2024 incident between Santa Cruz and the city of Hanford, sits in the Assembly’s Housing and Community Development Committee.
In the next few weeks, we will begin to see which bills have a real chance at passage this year, which will die on the vine, and which will have to wait until the second half of the two-year legislative session. And later this week, I will have a deeper report on the bills proposed by our local legislators and how they reflect, or fail to reflect, Santa Cruzan priorities.
OF NOTE
Santa Cruz’s soda tax kicks in: Thursday marked the start of the 2-cents-per-fluid-ounce tax on the distribution of sugar-sweetened beverages in the city of Santa Cruz, a fee enacted by voters last fall. The American Beverage Association, which spent nearly $2 million in its unsuccessful campaign to defeat the ballot measure, has long threatened a lawsuit against the city over the tax. Throughout the year, the organization’s attorneys have told Lookout to expect some kind of action, but it’s unclear when a lawsuit may come, if at all. City officials have nonetheless been preparing for a fight. My colleague Wallace Baine also spoke to a grocery expert who said that the soda tax may inhibit the city’s ability to attract a downtown grocery store.
Max Chun on Santa Cruz’s increasingly stalled developments: During a regional economic forum last week, Santa Cruz City Manager Matt Huffaker said a growing number of approved developments are not moving forward to the construction phase, and the stream of new project applications has slowed to a trickle.
POINTS FOR PARTICIPATION
Supervisors meet for second consecutive week: The Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors will decide on whether to take up an appeal from North Carolina-based CTI Towers over the county planning commission’s denial of the company’s proposal to replace a 71-foot cell tower with a 152-foot tower on Summit Drive, north of Bonny Doon. The tower company claims its proposal, designed to look like a pine tree, would close a gap in AT&T’s cell coverage. The planning commission didn’t buy it, and now the supervisors will decide whether to accept the appeal and later decide on the tower proposal. The supervisors will meet at 9 a.m. on Tuesday.
Capitola City Council to take up two high-profile decisions: Whether Capitola follows Santa Cruz County’s lead in banning the sale of filtered tobacco products could come down to a vote this week, when the city council will decide if it wants city staff to draft an ordinance proposal, to be voted on later by the council. The city’s elected officials will also receive a report on e-bike safety initiatives and vote on whether to urge state legislators to take up the issue in Sacramento. The city council will meet Thursday at 5:30 p.m.
ONE GREAT READ
“How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy“ (2019) by Jenny Odell
The topic of attention — on scales both individual and global — has gripped me for the better part of two years. The topic has taken me to articles by Nathan Heller, interviews with Chris Hayes, essays by Susan Sontag, pieces by Kyle Chayka and books by Simone Weil. Each has offered their own, urgent version of “snap out of it!” and articulated well the existential necessity of winning the war for our attention, as well as the invasive commercialization of our minds and wills. Yet, I’m not sure any have jolted me like Jenny Odell’s 2019 book, “How To Do Nothing.”
I leave you with one of my favorite paragraphs, in which Odell ties the loss of attention to the loss of a rich culture, and ourselves.
“Just as practices like logging and large-scale farming decimate the land, and overemphasis on performance turns what was once a dense and thriving landscape of individual and communal thought into a Monsanto farm whose ‘production’ slowly destroys the soils until nothing more can grow. As it extinguishes one species of thought after another, it hastens the erosion of attention.”