Statistics confirm what people know in their gut. Violent crime is on the rise in Santa Cruz. The city usually averages 2.4 murders per year, but 2010 has already seen 5 homicides, or double the average—and there are still five and a half months to go.
Santa Cruz Celebrates “Day on the Beach”
At Cowell’s Beach this past Sunday it was the annual “Day on the Beach” for the disabled, their families, and their caregivers, and hundreds of people showed up to take advantage of a beautiful summer day.
Saturday Among the Sandcastles
At Seacliff Beach, a battleship rusts away at the end of the pier and a sandcastle training camp has sprouted on the shoreline. Instead of seagulls there are parents milling and clucking admiration. Children are the day laborers. They cluster in groups, fluttering around the beach with buckets and trowels: future contractors of America developing the most expensive real estate in the area, building for the posterity of the evening.
Ten Questions for Thomas Hickenbottom
Santa Cruz native Thomas Hickenbottom, author of the new novel Local Tribes, tells us about the old Driv ‘N’ Eat, the importance of positive thinking and his life’s passion.
Big Bowls of Bad
There was a point during Tuesday’s “Pension Reform Study Session” at City Hall when even Santa Cruz Mayor Mike Rotkin—a self-described socialist and champion of entitlements—had to admit that “scaling back pensions may be inevitable.”
Phone Books May Soon Be Cleaned Up
Let’s face it. The phone book is a relic of bygone times, when people actually used landlines for more than just modems. Once every home and every phone booth had its White Pages and Yellow Pages. These days just finding a phone booth is hard enough.
But the phone books keep coming. Every so often homeowners wake up to hundreds and hundreds of pages of information that they could easily pull up on their laptops and cell phones. The phone books end up rotting on the curb, until some good phone book Samaritan hauls them off for recycling.
The Rodeo Is Coming!
Finally had enough of that foreign sport, soccer, which is about as American as tapas or boerenkoolstamppot with rookworst? Want a sport as American as tater tots and processed cheese in a can? Good news, Santa Cruz! The rodeo is coming to town!
Big Ag Wins Kudos for Being Green
Researchers at Stanford University are trumpeting new findings that they say show agriculture’s so-called green revolution has greatly reduced forest clear-cutting and resulting climate-warming emissions—an unforeseen benefit to industrial agriculture. Because agricultural “advancements” like fertilizers, genetically engineered crops and pesticides have boosted yields, there has been less need to slash and burn for additional fields, and this has meant fewer carbon emissions, the report says.
Car Chases and Shootouts All Part of New Film
A new action film, “In Grit Fashion,” being shot in Santa Cruz. It’s a gritty tale of a conman just released from prison, a hitman, and a cop gone bad, racing for $5 million in diamonds. It’s a low budget production too, coming in at $15,000, less than it cost to film about a quarter of a second on James Cameron’s Pandora.
Santa Cruz Passes a Budget … Sort of …
Santa Cruz City Council approved the city’s budget at their Tuesday meeting. The total cost of the budget is $78 million. The problem, though, is that the budget still has a $2.2 million deficit, meaning that the city may yet have to dip into its emergency reserves.
