Who cares where their money goes?
The discussion and approval of the 2024-25 budget for the City of Santa Cruz went smoothly this year. Though perhaps a little too smoothly considering the city’s recent, and projected, financial turbulence.
This upcoming fiscal year, Santa Cruz residents are projected to send more taxes, fines and fees to the local government than they ever have. Sales taxes ($35.3 million) are also expected to overtake property taxes ($26.8 million) as the primary tax revenue source. However, the government continues to face deficits: The city had to break into its already underfunded piggy bank of reserves to cover deficits last year and this year. Unless the government finds new ways to raise money from the governed, or reduces its services, deficits will continue to be a reality in eight of the next 10 years.
Yet, as I report in a story published earlier Monday, when it came time to talk about any of this — how the government would spend its residents’ (and, partly, its visitors’) money, the idea that the city might look for new ways to charge residents fees and taxes even in the wake of a sales tax increase, or how this new, greater dependence on sales taxes to fund city services leaves Santa Cruz more vulnerable to economic downturns — almost no one showed up.
Mayor Fred Keeley called the budget approval the “single most important vote” the city council casts all year. Yet, community leaders say interest in the budget process has been waning for a long time. What will make residents care about how the government spends their money?
Of Note
Grand jury squabbles with sheriff over inmate access: In a report published last week, the Santa Cruz County Civil Grand Jury claimed the county sheriff’s office blocked jurors from interviewing inmates during its investigation into jail conditions, despite state law allowing for such inmate access. Sheriff Jim Hart told Lookout the report was the “most factually inaccurate” report he’s read from the civil grand jury, a state-mandated 19-member volunteer watchdog group that convenes each year.
Speaking of civil grand jury reports … The group published two more reports on Monday morning. I have not dug into the details yet, but one report analyzes whether the county met certain commitments it made in the wake of three 2020-21 grand jury investigations into the agricultural commissioner, wildfire risk and the CZU fire. The second report focuses on Child Protective Services, and examines claims made by some foster families that county’s branch of CPS was “reunifying children with their birth families at all costs.”
Looking Ahead
Public discussion over Santa Cruz’s downtown expansion: Earlier this month, the City of Santa Cruz’s planning department released a public review draft of its long-anticipated plan to expand downtown’s footprint into the South of Laurel neighborhood. The 81-page document puts a planning frame around the ideas thrown around by the community in recent years. The plan has brought steady community debate over the past couple years. Its vision for 12-story residential towers and a new, permanent Santa Cruz Warriors arena triggered Measure M, which voters defeated in March. Many questions remain for the expanded vision of downtown, and on Tuesday at 5:30 p.m., the city council and the planning commission will meet for a joint session to go over the proposal and take the public’s feedback. People can attend in person at city hall or virtually, on Zoom.
Scotts Valley reviews its pickleball pandemonium: In some communities, the pickleball phenomenon has created a not-insignificant amount of drama, particularly between those who wield a paddle and those who wield a [tennis] racket. In Scotts Valley, new interest in the city’s tennis courts meant the city had to manage crowds and friction by setting new hours and implementing an online reservation application. On Thursday at 6 p.m., the city’s parks and recreation commission will review whether those changes have made an impact. People can attend in person at city hall or virtually, on Zoom.
Weekly News Diet
Local: Wallace J. Nichols, the marine biologist who lived along the county’s North Coast and wrote the best-selling “Blue Mind,” which extolled the therapeutic benefits of living near large bodies of water, has died. Nichols’ family declined to offer a cause of death. He was 56. My colleague Wallace Baine has that story.
Golden State: Among the nearly dozen wildfires burning across California, the Point fire in Sonoma County is one of the largest. As of Monday morning, the fire had torched 1,100 acres and was at only 20% containment after sparking on Sunday. Mandatory evacuations are underway as fire crews attempt to contain the flames in California’s wine country. Rachel Swan and Anna Buchmann have the latest for the San Francisco Chronicle.
National: U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy has called on Congress to consider requiring warning labels on social media platforms. It would be similar to a Surgeon General’s Warning on a pack of cigarettes, except this would focus on social media’s harms to teenage mental health. Murthy’s suggestion has garnered some bipartisan support, but will likely face protests from tech companies, according to Ellen Barry and Cecilia Kang of The New York Times.
One Great (Vintage) Watch
David Remnick on his interview with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “The Charlie Rose Show,” June 1994
Much of my reading over the past week has been contained within the pages of “Lenin’s Tomb” (1994), the Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicling of the fall of the Soviet Union by now-New Yorker executive editor David Remnick. The reporting for the book came during Remnick’s time as a Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post. The video I share here has Remnick talking with Charlie Rose about the one interview he couldn’t get for the book: exiled Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Remnick makes the claim that no other 20th-century author had the same kind of impact on their society as Solzhenitsyn’s on Soviet Russia.