Opinion

Santa Cruz County steps up environmental and community support This month, Santa Cruz County is enhancing safety, cleanliness, and access to essential services. The County has also secured state funding to sustain homelessness prevention efforts, and initiatives are underway to ensure all youth have access...

By Kathleen Kilpatrick Twenty years ago my family and I supported Measure U. Measure U was a compromise measure that came from Action Pajaro Valley, a robust stakeholder process that created the Watsonville Urban Limit line to allow for some growth and protection of farmland...

How quickly we forget. Recent activity centers around the levee system on the Pajaro River. Yet, the first flooding in 2023 was in Watsonville, when the Salsipuedes and Corralitos Creeks overflowed. There are lessons from that flooding that need to be applied to those...

Editor's note: This column was submitted in December and should have run earlier in January. As we enter the new year, I’m reflecting on our achievements in 2024—progress made possible through collaboration with community members, colleagues, county staff, and you. Together, we’ve worked to ensure Santa...

Letters to the Editor, Nov. 16, 2018

These are the letters to the editor we received over the week. We value all opinions and viewpoints. If you want to make your voice heard, send to [email protected]. Please keep them around 200 words. Rep. Lofgren responds Editor’s note: This is a response to a...

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...

Watsonville mayor's update, August 2017

Support public education  Cabrillo College didn’t exist in 1953. Santa Cruz County taxpayers paid Monterey County for my 1955 Associate Arts degree from Monterey Peninsula College, for which I am eternally grateful. The older generations, many of them World War II and Korean War veterans,...