Opinion

25 years ago on May 23, 1996 Nobody knows Watsonville High School like Mas Hashimoto. Born at home just two blocks from the campus, he’s spent two-thirds of his life there; first as a student, then as a teacher of history and geography. He knows...

Since the beginning of the year, Community Bridges has been busy helping Santa Cruz County and North Monterey County residents who have been devastated financially, emotionally and mentally by the recent unprecedented spate of storms and floods.    We walked door-to-door in the immediate aftermath of...

The Pajaro River flood is a world problem. This flood has been written up in the New York Times and the UK Guardian.   The Pajaro River levee was built in 1949. The river begins at San Felipe Lake and travels 30 miles through Watsonville to...

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.

A portion of the Coastal Rail Trail project running through the middle part of the county will now move forward after the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved it. The supervisors also voted to withdraw an earlier vote that stalled the project, and...

MONTEREY COUNTY—Monterey County agriculture’s gross production value bounced back by 4.8% in 2021 to just over $4.1 billion, despite the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic that also resulted in supply chain shortages. This increase represents a $190 million rise from 2020, when the gross production value was...

Integrity Wines, located at the Watsonville Municipal Airport, has been in Watsonville for two years.

As a longtime elected official representing the people of Watsonville and the Pajaro Valley, I know how essential and important the agricultural industry is to the region and the rest of Santa Cruz County. In two elections, the voters of Watsonville have overwhelmingly affirmed...

Since the 1960s, the U.S. has become a more inclusive country. This necessarily meant that white men lost some part of their privileged positions in education, employment and entertainment. By the 2000s, in the wake of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, anti-racism books were on...