Opinion

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To say the last three weeks have been tough is an understatement. Overwhelming, heartbreaking, enraging and exhausting is more accurate. The Pajaro levee breach on March 11 came at the same time our community marked the three-year anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic. As with...

Stay hopeful in midst of tragedies It used to be that I would write to my state and federal representatives whenever there was a school shooting. Full of shock and outrage, I asked that they support legislation to outlaw assault rifles and require universal background...

Thousands of Monterey and Santa Cruz County families were forced to evacuate March 11 after the Pajaro and Soledad rivers flooded this rural agricultural area. The storms arrived at the beginning of the growing season, just as farmworkers were going back to work and...

As we entered the second week of March, we once again prepared for storms and another atmospheric river event that was expected to bring heavy rains and flooding. The City is working tirelessly with many partners to prepare and be ready to assist our...

The start of the New Year greeted all of us with more water than any of us, including meteorologists, had anticipated. And again, this past week our neighbors in Pajaro were devastatingly flooded. Although Pajaro isn’t technically a part of Watsonville or Santa Cruz...

It is to my dismay upon reading that yet another breach in the Pajaro River Levee has occurred. This has happened numerous times through the years resulting in floods that have inundated the area. The repairs amounted to nothing more than a band-aid.   Following the...

I'm not a regular reader of the Pajaronian, but I am so glad to have caught the article “The Porter Family Legacy” (Pajaronian, March 10-16) and learn of the family’s link to the Chinese community in Watsonville. My father Henry G. Wong leased the...

The myth about how Watsonville’s original Chinatown (1870-1888) moved from the corner of Maple and Union to a new site across the river in Monterey County began even before the move was completed in September 1888.  The story of the delicate negotiations and the Chinese...

The tragic deaths of seven farmworkers in Half Moon Bay in January revealed an ugly, persistent truth: there are parts of our state where our essential, agricultural workers still live in deplorable conditions. There are no permits, no inspections and conditions are substandard. But...