New Leaf Community Markets brand manager Lindsay Gizdich said the store is moving from Pacific Avenue in order to have…
Community Voices
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Stephen Homan has a perfect record fighting for CZU survivors. But why did he have to fight at all?
Stephen Homan came out of retirement as an environmental health specialist to help a Santa Cruz County neighbor struggling to rebuild from 2020’s CZU fire. He ended up helping 50 CZU fire survivors whose rebuilds were held up by poorly understood septic regulations and improperly applied environmental health ordinances. His efforts would ultimately help lead to a near sea change in the process, making it better for everyone. And he did it all for free. Daniel DeLong marvels at Homan’s humanity — and, nearly three years after the fires started, takes a few jabs at bureaucracy and incompetence.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Keep the Cabrillo name: Voting for a project underfunded by $500,000 is ‘irresponsible at best’
Rosemary Anderson has “lost all trust” with the current Cabrillo College board of trustees over the handling of the school’s proposed name change. I “would not donate one of my hard-earned dollars to an institution that no longer reflects the community at large,” writes the Watsonville resident who credits Cabrillo with helping her go back to school after she had kids and who continues to take extension classes today. She wants to see polls and other “proof” of the alleged strong community support for the change.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
I teach poetry in the Santa Cruz jail, but it’s ‘my guys’ who are teaching me
Renee Winter started teaching poetry in the Santa Cruz Main Jail seven years ago, after retiring from her law practice. Now, once a week, she sits in a locked room with about 15 incarcerated men. She often marvels at how her “big-knuckled, burly male students can grip such tiny tools and write. But they do.” Not once in all her years, she says, has she had to press the panic button. Instead, she has found inspiration and shed her “one-dimensional” view of incarceration.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
I went to Washington to talk about the looming crisis of water; here’s what I told Congress
We might be on the cusp of a breakthrough to help maintain water services for all, writes Rosemary Menard, director of the City of Santa Cruz’s water department, which provides water to all residents of the city of Santa Cruz. Or we might be unable to keep water affordable for everyone in our community and reinvest in our water delivery system. Menard went to Washington on May 31 to explain her plea for federal funding for Santa Cruz County and other California communities. Here, she explains what she said and why.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
AI is our friend, even in Santa Cruz County. Why are we so afraid of it?
Local tech guru and Santa Cruz Works co-founder Doug Erickson ponders the fear surrounding artificial intelligence and the push to regulate it. It’s not a demon monster, he says, but something we all already use in Santa Cruz County. And he applauds our leaders for being open to it. He suggests we approach it with cautious optimism. “AI has the potential to carry us into an epoch of remarkable transformation — one where human effort is minimized, decisions are optimized and public services reach heights of quality previously unimagined,” he writes.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Adventures of a beginner glassblower: At age 60, I’m putting hot irons in the fire — literally
Bridget Tapia is finding her post-retirement mojo with a new hobby right out of the Middle Ages: glassblowing. It’s dangerous, fiery and full of unexpected weirdness. “It’s as if someone turned up the heat on my retirement plans and threw me headfirst into a furnace,” she writes.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Letter to the editor: Sentinel has an unhealthy obsession with the name ‘Cabrillo’
New Leaf Community Markets brand manager Lindsay Gizdich said the store is moving from Pacific Avenue in order to have…
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
What Santa Cruz can teach about the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision
In its decision on affirmative action, Lookout politics columnist Mike Rotkin writes, the Supreme Court left open the possibility of other ways to achieve racial diversity in student admissions, and we need to take that as a serious opportunity. We can learn from how the City of Santa Cruz approached affirmative action when progressives took power in the 1980s.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
I helped on Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 campaign: RFK Junior is not getting my vote
It’s been 55 years since Bobby Kennedy’s exuberant presidential primary win in California, followed shortly by his tragic murder. Now, his son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer who has taken a hard stance against vaccines, has announced his own candidacy for the 2024 election. Lookout columnist Claudia Sternbach worked on RFK’s 1968 campaign and went to San Francisco to greet him when he came to California. She says it’s “tempting” to imagine another Kennedy in the White House. But not this one. “Unfortunately when it comes to vaccines, Kennedy is not on the side of science.”