After the final tally came in on Friday, Republican Assemblymember Sam Blakeslee didn’t manage to cross the 50 percent threshold needed to give him the District 15 Senate seat outright. There was a brief window last week, as workers sorted through the last 17,000 mail-in and provisional ballots, when it was statistically possible for him to clinch it, but by Friday, the final count gave him 49.49 percent to Former-District 27 Assemblymember John Laird’s 41.73 percent. Blakeslee will face Laird, and long-shot candidates Jim Fitzgerald and Mark Hinkle, in an Aug. 17 runoff.
Articles by Jessica Lussenhop
John Laird’s Sprint Toward Sacramento
On Friday, June 11, former Assemblymember John Laird left his house in Aptos at 6:45am and drove three hours south to San Luis Obispo, did an editorial board meeting, stopped by his campaign office there, raced two and a half hours north to Monterey for two more editorial board meetings, stopped at the Monterey campaign office, and then spoke for an hour and a half at a live radio town hall before driving home.
June 22 Vote to Stand
Despite the best efforts of three Monterey County residents and their lawyers, it appears that the special election to fill Lt. Governor Abel Maldonado’s recently vacated District 15 Senate seat will take place in June.
Elder Justice Included in Health Care Reform
A lesser-known piece of the federal health care reform bill will almost certainly breathe new life into the Santa Cruz Adult Protective Services program, which has been beset with personnel and funding cuts even as the number of reported elder abuse cases in the county has ticked upward. “It’s enough to make one weep,” says APS program manager Sandy Skezas. “This has been so many years coming. There are those of us who have worked on this for a very long time.”
Santa Cruz Clinics Line Up for Funds
Erika Hearon spent Sunday night glued to the television in the small, handsome living room of her mobile home in Live Oak, watching as the House of Representatives slowly collected itself to pass historical health care reform legislation. “For about two, three hours I watched pretty intently,” she says.
Synergy Clothing Comes Home to Santa Cruz
A lot has changed since Kate Fisher locked eyes with Henry Schwab at a Phish concert in 1997. She was a Deadhead peddling Indian textiles; he was a Greenpeace activist touring with Phish’s nonprofit arm the Waterwheel Foundation. And yeah, yeah—they grew up, got married and had kids, but Fisher’s clothing line Synergy grew up with them, culminating with her new downtown Santa Cruz storefront, Synergy Clothing, which opened in January.
Cove Britton, Architect, to Challenge District 3 Supervisor Neal Coonerty
Britton, a long-time critic of county politics and planning, says he decided to throw his hat in the ring to prevent Coonerty from running unopposed.
Lowell Darling to Run for Governor, 32 Years After First Attempt
Darling House owner’s brother returns to California from overseas to tackle the two-thirds majority problem and his old opponent, Jerry Brown. With video.
The Creature From the Backyard Lagoon
In the lawn in front of the mother-in-law unit where I live, the tumultuous winter rains of January had filled up a depression where a tree stump had been removed. I’d really enjoyed the way things sprang to life all around after the rains, the way overnight a long dormant bush had suddenly come alive with a hundred thin woody fingers reaching out over my sidewalk, or the abrupt appearance of sturdy mushrooms caps popping up through the wood chips. I’d particularly enjoyed lying in bed listening to the happy guttural expositions of toads, imagining them gleefully loping beneath my windows in the dark.
America’s Invisible Immigrants
Author Gabriel Thompson may have spent two months cutting lettuce (no one says “picking lettuce,” as he discovered) in the blisteringly hot fields of Yuma, Ariz., for his new book, but he had his first glimpses of the backbreaking work of immigrant laborers just outside Watsonville. “I grew up surfing Manresa and Sunset Beach,” says the Cupertino-raised Thompson, a contributor to the New York Times and the Nation. “I’d often drive through the strawberry fields just off of Highway 1, and I would just pull over and watch people work. I would be very curious about what it was like to do the work and who the people were. It seemed like a completely foreign place.”
