News

PAJARO—In a factory centered in a rural stretch of Pajaro, a small team of workers and engineers was busy one Tuesday afternoon hand-building a new line of cross-country racing bicycles they hope one day will be used by Olympic athletes. The work was happening in...

WATSONVILLE—Starting an event centered around comics, art, fantasy and the collectibles that those realms inspire was something Francisco “Paco” Estrada had first dreamed up when he was elected into the Watsonville City Council in 2018. The idea was, Estrada says, to give kids—and adults—a safe...

WATSONVILLE—Thanks to an alert citizen, a suspect is now in custody less than 24 hours after he reportedly snatched a woman’s purse.  The Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office said deputies were dispatched to a reported robbery on the 100 block of Seacliff Drive around 4:15pm...

WATSONVILLE—Gerry Kall on Friday celebrated her 101st birthday in Watsonville, the town she was born in. Thanks to a gathering of relatives, friends, Katie Nuñez, Watsonville Senior Center’s older adult services supervisor, and a handful of folks who cheered out the window of the cars...

SANTA CRUZ COUNTY—Bernie Sanders captured a majority of California’s votes – and the state’s 416 delegates – making a decent Super Tuesday win for the Vermont Democrat in a night where the majority of votes in 13 other states went to Joe Biden. Santa Cruz...

On Saturday morning, 48-year-old Gerardo Gutierrez was one of about a dozen men sitting in the day room at Salvation Army’s Watsonville location, quietly watching an old Vicente Fernández film playing silently on a television mounted to the ceiling. The men—most of them homeless—had stayed...

A six-month project to improve pavement quality on five miles of Highway 1 through Watsonville, both north and southbound, is moving toward completion. “We have about three weeks of work remaining on this project,” said Caltrans spokesman Kevin Drabinski. “That timeline is weather dependent. During...

A new 200-foot mural has gone up across the front of Hotel Paradox on Ocean Street in Santa Cruz.  Artist Jeremiah Kille, who has completed scores of large-scale murals around town, Sacramento and elsewhere, finished the work in November. The mural spans the front of the...

WATSONVILLE—The Land Trust of Santa Cruz County, together with the Martinelli and Silliman families, have protected the Silliman Ranch on Highway 129 from development.  Under the agreement signed the week before Thanksgiving, the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County purchased the development rights to the...