When Jayne Dudfield noticed the hillside directly behind her home beginning to erode, she informed the city of Santa Cruz to no avail. That was almost 40 years ago, according to records supplied by residents currently living above the hillside, and still the bluff over Chestnut Street—created in 1961 as part of a city engineering project that cut away a steep hill to create a sheer cliff in its place—continues to crumble away. And still the Santa Cruz Public Works Department has failed to stanch the erosion.
Articles by Alastair Bland
A Salmon Season Without Salmon?
On April 15, the Pacific Fishery Management Council decided at its Portland meeting to extend the recreational salmon season, which opened April 3, until Sept. 6. The decision comes as an unpleasant surprise to many California fishermen, some of whom would prefer to see salmon fishing prohibited for at least the rest of the year following the poor return of spawning adults to the Sacramento River last fall.
Santa Cruz’s Strange Brew
Alec Stefansky learned to make beer in his UC-Santa Cruz dorm room, where he hid five-gallon batches from campus authorities and shared home-brewed pints among his roommates. It was a common enough way to begin. But today the 31-year-old is a professional brewer quickly ascending into the ranks of West Coast weird-beer stardom.
Reform Needed in the Court System Regarding Child Custody
When an Alabama superior court judge issued an order that Amanda Hodge’s two adopted children be returned immediately to her custody out of concern for their safety following a February, 2008 state-ordained forensic interview, the family court of Monterey County, where Hodge’s children were living with their adoptive father, declined to cooperate. Instead, the custody battle seemed only to swing further out of Hodge’s favor. She lost custody entirely, was granted supervised telephone calls only and has now not see her children in two years.
Reports: Revenue from State Parks Exceeds Cost
The governor’s proposal to close 220 of the state’s 279 state parks as a cost-cutting measure could shoot California’s economy in the foot. Results of two university studies have concluded that California’s state parks generate more money than they cost to operate, and local park advocates assure that tourism in Santa Cruz County will suffer if the parks go off-limits. (With slide show)
Big Creek Lumber Seeks Special Consideration in Salmon Rules
There was surely a time when the last thing an aspiring forester ever thought he or she would be concerned with was protecting fish. Now, it seems, tiptoeing around salmon and steelhead is as natural a part of life for loggers in northern California as poison oak, and the laws that guard the state’s threatened salmonids might be about to get tougher.
Santa Cruz Group Gears Up for Life After Cheap Oil
In late May, a small grassroots organization called Transition Santa Cruz convened for an evening meeting at the police station on Center Street. The subject of the hour was how the community could bolster Santa Cruz’s public transportation system and steer residents away from sprawl and dependency on cars for every outing and errand. Led in part by Micah Posner, director of the cycling advocacy group People Power, the discussion quickly veered into a debate over whether or not high-density housing would facilitate a public rail system or do the opposite and lead to more cars on the streets.
E. coli Count Soars in Local Waterways
The results from the Coastal Watershed Council’s Snapshot Day are in, and it’s not a pretty picture.
Scientists Debate Strategy at Elkhorn
The wetland system of Elkhorn Slough has undergone dramatic change for decades, but now a group of local scientists and conservationists is revving up a restoration project aimed at reversing many of these alterations and letting one of California’s largest marshlands revert back to the ecosystem it once was. However, no one quite knows what Elkhorn Slough’s truly “natural” state ever really was, and activists are at odds over precisely what treatments the slough really needs, if any at all.
