UCSC Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor David Kliger is worried. “We all know that student fees have risen while academic offerings and support services have been reduced,” he says, but despite all that, the school could face another $8 million in budget cuts this year.
News
The Sad Truth About Haiti
At 2am the rain started pouring in the Mission of Hope Camp, where most people sleep in shelters constructed from bedsheets and sticks. Six hundred people crowded into a shed already serving as a church and recovery room for injured people, trying to get out of the rain. With so many people crowded into such a small space, nobody could sleep. Everyone got wet and babies were crying; it was one of those nights when you just lose hope. Then, at 5am, the people started singing, using their voices to send up a strong prayer. In that moment I learned that the one thing the earthquake cannot take from the Haitian people is their spirit.
A Santa Cruz Band Makes Good
At one of Man/Miracle’s first shows, people were jumping around, breaking glass and generally going crazy. “Who knows what the genesis of that was,” lead singer and guitarist Dylan Travis says, “but we decided it was the most fun we could have within the context of a rock band.” As they continued to play, becoming regulars in the Santa Cruz indie music scene, they found their audiences getting bigger and wilder. “Suddenly, people were making us crowd surf at our shows,” says Travis. “It was then that I finally realized what punk was all about. The energy was amazing.”
MAH Explores The Santa Cruz Surf-Art Link
The overflow crowd at the opening of “Surf City Santa Cruz: A Wave of Inspiration” was a tsunami of positive energy. The Museum of Art and History’s three jam-packed floors of galleries held some 700 excited people greeting each other warmly in their outdoor voices as if after long separation: telling stories, promising to meet, exchanging opinions, issuing invitations, dropping names that even the uninitiated recognized—Jim Phillips, Boots McGhee, Eddie Aikau, Doug Haut—and swapping accounts of recent events at places like Steamer Lane, Maverick, Manresa and Four Mile. A sunny bonhomie was the order of the evening. With slide show.
Santa Cruz County Officials Mull Bag Ban
High in a cherry tree on Raymond Street, 300 yards from Main Beach in Santa Cruz, a tattered plastic shopping bag wrapped around a white-blossomed branch snaps in the breeze. It might have come from CVS, Safeway or the Apatzingan Taqueria up the block. Where it came from, however, isn’t as important to the environment as where it is now and where it will go once it finally blows down.
Enrollment Drops as Cabrillo College Cuts Classes, Semester
Enrollment for the spring semester at Cabrillo College is 14,653—900 less than in last year’s spring semester. That is because the school has cut classes and even the entire winter semester to stave off a $3.2 million deficit.
No Face Bandit Gets 12 Years
After a two-year robbery spree that spanned eleven banks (three of them in Santa Cruz County) in three counties, Peter Klein, the No Face Bandit, was spotted by an off-duty police officer leaving a bank in Gilroy. The former Vice President of the Monterey Pasta Company finally found himself in a noodle.
Santa Cruz Libraries Closing Shop
The Santa Cruz public library system is facing a crisis. With the steep decline in property and sales tax revenues, the system is facing a $500,000 deficit, a considerable chunk of its annual $11.3 million budget. Even more daunting is the threat that this deficit could grow to $5 million by 2013.
Do County Execs Need the Pay Raise?
There’s something wrong in Santa Cruz County. The county is desperately short on cash, with the general fund expected to slip below $369 million, departments across the board taking pay cuts and furloughs, workers being let off, public health clinics open fewer hours, and sheriff’s investigations on hold. Senior county executives, however, all received pay raises, some of them amounting to tens of thousands of dollars. The top-paid administrators in the county made, on average, 11 percent more in 2009 than they did in 2008.
Frogophiles Make Santa Cruz Their Home
There’s a lot that people can learn from frogs, like how they never drink up the pond in which they live. We’ll be learning a lot more about frogs soon now that Save the Frogs, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to saving the world’s best known amphibian, has decided to move its headquarters to Santa Cruz.
