Opinion

By Luis A. Alejo, Kevin de León and Eduardo Garcia  On July 17, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that counties on the state’s Covid-19 “monitoring list” must begin the new school year with distance learning. More than half of our state’s counties are on the list,...

I grew up in Watsonville and have lived and worked in the Pajaro Valley all my life. I have been an agronomist, scientifically analyzing agricultural soils in California and throughout the United States. I have studied thousands of different soils, and I can say...

By Jimmy Dutra, Watsonville Mayor This week my grandmother, Epi Tavarez, turned 100. Just seeing that number is surreal. She was born one year after the 19th Amendment was ratified and women got the right to vote. My grandma has been a lifelong voter who...

Memo from Rev. Mathews-Johnson While I was growing up, whenever we moved—which was often in those days because my dad was a Navy officer—my mother would find a job at the local United Methodist Church in our new town playing the organ and piano.  As...

Building a real bridge over Pajaro River on Murphy Crossing Road “needs to be an immediate priority," according to an editorial in the Santa Cruz Sentinel.  I have advocated for building a real bridge over Pajaro River on Murphy Crossing Road by replacing the current...

Letter to the Editor, April 12, 2018

Thirty-three years ago, while my family was preparing for a birthday party, I decided to arrive early. My mother was shopping for a cake for my sister’s second birthday in our small hometown of Cuerámaro, Guanajuato, Mexico—a rural town of at the time just...

By JIMMY DUTRA We have seen politics hit an all-time low in our community. Behavior that has been more common at the national and state level has arrived in our local politics. It has moved from “what I can do for the people” into “how...

As your County Clerk, one of my most important responsibilities is to ensure that the votes cast in Santa Cruz County are secure and accurate. Despite claims that voter fraud is rampant nationally, court challenges have failed to produce evidence that voter fraud is anything more than an occasional clerical error or bad data matching.