LosGatosObserver.com

Softening regulations on what kinds of businesses can occupy downtown buildings took little consideration by city leaders. From 2007 to 2009, vacant office space downtown tripled from about 60,000 square feet to more than 180,000 square feet. Vacant space equals dwindling sales and property taxes for city coffers, and at 2030 North Pacific, Santa Cruz city leaders have an especially high stake in seeing business begin to boom.

Santa Cruz residents, The Santa Cruz City Council and Santa Cruz Police discuss preventative efforts in place and explore new options for cracking down on crime.

THEY DON’T drink blood. They don’t wear fake fangs or black trench coats. They don’t read Anne Rice novels and they wouldn’t be caught dead watching Twilight. What they do is ride souped-up motorcycles at ridiculous speeds, party like rock stars and occasionally forget to wear clothes while doing either. They’re the Vampires. And they’re Santa Cruz’s most recognizable motorcycle club.

Pressed deep into the front seat cushion of an unmarked Chevy Silverado, Bill Leach grips the steering wheel with pudgy, calloused hands and checks the rearview mirror. In it, behind his doe-eyed wife smiling in the back, sways a wood and steel flatbed trailer loaded with a pair of motorcycles. Neither one belongs to him. Neither one belongs to the men who had them parked in their garages a couple of hours before, either. Both, in fact, belong to the bank, and the only one happy about that at this point is the man at the wheel. Leach is a repo man, and business is booming.

As the midmorning sun burns off the hazy remnants of fog over Elkhorn Slough, the estuary comes to life in the same way it has for thousands of years. Herons glide low over the top of the chilly water, otters scoop up clams from the floor and each step along the reed-edged hiking path sends an unseen critter scuttling loudly into the brush. A visitor might find it hard to believe that, according to a recent report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this is the most damaged ecosystem in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.

On the south end of Pacific Avenue, inside the long, cream-colored hallways and clustered, video-screen-adorned studio rooms of Community Television of Santa Cruz County, you could cut the tension with a knife. Six months past the deadline, Craig Jutson, the studio’s happy-go-lucky interim director, hasn’t been given an annual budget yet. Instead he’s been given access to funds on a quarterly basis and is staring at a cut-off date of Nov. 30 unless city and county leaders approve another few months of financing for the shoestring studio.

Disabled students at UCSC will soon be benefiting from three new ADA complian paratransit vans to replace the existing vehicles.

Santa Cruz water restrictions should be lifted by late October, but that is no assurance that the city will be back to how things once were.

A strike across UC campuses marked the first day of classes. In most schools, things have gotten back to normal, but not in UCSC.

As of January 4, the environmental building laws will be extended to all new construction in the county’s unincorporated communities.

On Jan. 6, 1987 then-Supervisor Chairperson Gary Patton signed into law the “County Well Ordinance.” This law, one of many conceived and designed by Mr. Patton, was intended to protect our groundwater from contamination from a number of possible causes.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has declared Santa Cruz County, as well as 49 other counties, drought disaster areas. As such, local farmers are now eligible for loans to account for weather-inflicted losses.

On Tuesday night, Santa Cruz City Council voted unanimously to allow the construction of a new Fairfield Inn off of Highway 1, off the Mission Street Extension.

Homelessness is rampant in Santa Cruz County. With the current recession, about 2,260 people—1 percent of the total population—are currently homeless, says the 2009 Santa Cruz County Homeless Census and Survey.

Two men were arrested last week in connection with two armed robberies in Santa Cruz and Capitola.

The weather held up for the 1,200 athletes, who swam, biked, and ran their way through Santa Cruz’s annual triathlon this Sunday. The morning temperatures hovered in the mid-50s, and the sky was overcast, making it much easier to compete.

All around the world, volunteers gathered to clean up beaches and waterways during International Coastal Cleanup Day on Saturday. In Santa Cruz, 3,800 volunteers spread out among 50 sites across the county to pick up the garbage left by others.

Curtis Cartier photographs the children of Beach Flats.

I’’m a geek. Not the useful kind that can build a website or de-frag a hard drive, but the worthless kind that can quote passages from Lord of the Rings and kill a level 70 demon lord on World of Warcraft.  So when I showed up last Wednesday at the Santa Cruz New Tech MeetUp, a monthly gathering of tech-savvy entrepreneurs and IT specialists, it became quickly apparent that my geekdom was severely outgunned.

City leaders are looking to take another major swipe at tobacco smokers by banning smoking on Pacific Avenue downtown, around Main Beach and on the Municipal Wharf.

They’ve come from around the country and the world to gather on the bare concrete floor of an empty office building and talk shop. A sea of laptop-clutching writers, photographers, graphic designers, IT specialists, engineers, public relations officials and advertisement representatives with one thing in common: they never want to work for another boss again.

Curtis Cartier shares photos from the three-day music bonanza in Golden Gate Park.

Behind the spectacle of town hall brawls, death panel paranoia and pundit jabber, there is a real effort by powerful people to change the way Americans receive and pay for their health care. Nearly everyone agrees that the industry needs reform, but questions over what role the government will play and how any of it will be paid for has the nation bitterly divided.

It’s a sweltering day in Tracy. July behind bars at Deuel Vocational Institution smells like sweat, bleach and old orange peels. Clifford Bair, a white-haired, goateed first-degree murderer—a lifer—perches under a barred window’s light and talks about the day 25 years ago in Bodega Bay when he tied up Theresa Aiken and Rose Fomasi with electrical wire and left them to die. With slide show.

It works like this: some shady sleazebag copies an expired Craigslist housing ad and reposts it, with a slightly lower price, back on the site. Next, a curious apartment hunter spots the ad .

The skies over Davenport were thick with acrid brown smoke Thursday morning as a wildfire raged in the Santa Cruz Mountains around Bonny Doon.  Dubbed the Lockheed fire, the blaze had torched more than 2,300 acres by midmorning after dry conditions caused what had been a relatively small fire on Wednesday to explode in size overnight. About 600 people living on Swanton Road, Warrella Truck Trail, Last Chance Road and Rancho del Oso were evacuated while more than 300 firefighters battled the flames. A mandatory evactuation order for Bonny Doon went into effect at 11am Thursday. With slide show and video.

What do ball games, bathrobes, squirt guns, skateboards, dirty clothes, smoking, hanging laundry, bare feet, pajamas, barbecues and video cameras all have in common? They’re all soon to be prohibited in some way from common areas at the Mission Gardens Apartments in Santa Cruz.

The stone-enclosed, glass-crowned former home of the Santa Cruz Sentinel has some new folks moving in. Local Internet providers Cruzio, along with green non-profit Ecology Action, partnered with developer Joe Appenrodt to win an auction for the old building, with a bid of at least $3.5 million.

In the harmonica world, musicians are represented by two separate but equally important groups: the blues players who dominate the limelight and the jazz players who settle for what they can get. This is the jazz players’ story.

At Deer Tick’s sold-out indie rock show at the Crepe Place not long ago, one hipster was heard saying to another, “Man, I’m just glad someone still has shows in the summertime.” The observation, it seems, is rooted in what’s looking like another bone-dry schedule of summer sounds from a few of Santa Cruz’s most famous venues. During the spring and fall, places like the Catalyst, Rio Theatre and Cayuga Vault are well known for bringing huge names in rock, reggae, indie, folk and hip-hop to the local stage. Yet each summer, in a pattern stretching back as far as most care to remember, the hot months mark a cold front in the live music output of all three concert halls.

Anyone who’s ever spent a long night dancing and cheering under the bright stage lights of the Catalyst owes a little debt to Randall Philip Kane.

They say truth is often stranger than fiction. But in a tale told by master raconteur Louis de Rougemont, both fact and fantasy have their place. Explorer, seaman, survivalist and con artist, de Rougemont, as played by seasoned television and stage actor Dierk Torsek, spins his greatest yarn ever in Shakespeare Santa Cruz’s production of Shipwrecked! An Entertainment: The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougement (As Told By Himself).

In my day, “summer camp” meant bunk beds, nature walks, BB guns and calamine lotion. Obviously I didn’t grow up in Santa Cruz.

When the Santa Cruz City Council passes its 2009-2010 fiscal year budget next Tuesday, it will usher in an agenda radically different from any since the Loma Prieta earthquake struck in 1989. Then, an unexpected natural disaster leveled buildings, crumbled roads and forced residents to sacrifice services for years to come in efforts to rebuild the community. Now, a far-from-natural financial disaster has ripped through Santa Cruz, like so many other American towns, and though buildings still stand, the devastation is undeniable.

For as long as he’s been an adult, Paul Beisser has had a beard. Be it a full and bushy face mane, a chiseled Fu-Manchu or a long and proud Van Dyke, the 58-year-old Santa Cruz postal worker’s chin skin has rarely seen the light of day. It wasn’t until May 23, at the World Beard and Moustache Championships in Anchorage, however, that the world finally recognized the whisker whiz for all his worth and awarded him the coveted trophy for World’s Best Natural Goatee. 

In an unremarkable office trailer tucked in a corner of the sprawling California Grey Bears thrift complex on Chanticleer Avenue in Santa Cruz is one man’s ode to the stereo. No more than a modest collection of dusted off old speakers, televisions, radios and record players stacked on flimsy shelves amongst a scattering of musical and political posters, the room is the pride of Grey Bears employee and local activist Franklin Williams. But one person’s “sound museum” is another’s “inappropriate use of space,” and come July 16, these old relics will need to find a new home.

The first six months of Barack Obama’s tenure as president has seen the most drastic changes to U.S. policy toward Cuba in more than 50 years. But for a group of local and international volunteers, the president’s move to relax restrictions on family travel to the communist country is “commendable, but it is not enough.”

You could play dozens of public golf courses in America and be hard pressed to find one better maintained than Santa Cruz’s city-owned De Laveaga Golf Course. With 6,010 yards of expertly manicured fairways and greens you could eat eggs off of, the course is the handiwork of a top-notch, well-paid group of unionized golf course professionals.

It’s late dusk, about an hour after sundown. That’s when the first hissing screeches begin to sound in the treetops.

“There they are!” exclaims a binocular-wielding Rebecca Dmytryk, founder of the emergency wildlife care organization WildRescue. “You can hear the juveniles. The whole family will be hunting overhead soon.”

Dealing with 70 dogs and cats every day can be a challenge. Dealing with 70 dog and cat owners every day can be downright maddening.

A “bicycle boulevard” on King Street took one step closer to becoming reality at Monday’s Santa Cruz City Council budget hearing. But before anyone hops on a Huffy and coasts down the center lane, they should know that it could still be up to four years before bikes rule the Westside road.

It’s a beautiful view of the Pacific Ocean from Don Webber’s balcony. A clear shot between the bell tower and Court of the Mariners of the La Bahia Apartments over the warm and busy sands of Main Beach, it’s a postcard-worthy scene by anyone’s standards.

Scientists at UCSC have discovered high levels of an ultra-toxic form of mercury in the groundwater of two coastal sites in California. The groundwater flows, they say, show a previously unknown source for what have been mysteriously high levels of mercury recently found in marine environments and in seafood.

There’s an old saying: don’t shit where you eat. It’s a wise bit of logic—typically not meant literally—reminding people to keep their misdeeds away from where they live and work.

Santa Cruz City Councilmember Mike Rotkin spent $63,000 to outfit his house with solar panels. Using the equity in his home and good credit, he easily qualified for a loan from Santa Cruz Community Credit Union and expects to have it paid off in seven years. Considering his savings in energy costs, Rotkin calls investing in solar energy “a no-brainer.” But not everyone has the kind of home equity and credit that qualified the politician and UCSC lecturer for a solar loan.

It’s the most beautiful day I could have picked to jump out of an airplane. Eighty-five degrees at early evening, light breeze out of the west and 13,000 feet between me and the ground.

Walk in any direction in Santa Cruz and chances are you’ll come across a box of rat poison before long. The small, plastic cartons look like overgrown Roach Motels and are usually found near trashcans and alleyways, pressed flush against a wall. Inside are any of a number of toxic concoctions. The worst contain anti-coagulant chemicals that, once ingested by a rodent, cause internal bleeding and eventual death. What’s less known about these deadly rodenticides is that they are potentially lethal to other animals, especially birds of prey, for which rats and mice are a steady meal.

The Santa Cruz City Council is not a fan of hookah parlors. Last Tuesday, city leaders took all of three minutes to discuss and approve a set of tough new restrictions that outlaws hookah parlors from setting up shop near schools and parks, and also caps the number of parlors allowed in city limits at two. The new laws come in addition to previous regulations that keep hookah parlors from serving food or beverages—including water—and from having live music.

With several lecturers and professors already holding pink slips, it seems all but certain that UCSC will follow through with its rumored plans to phase out its Community Studies program. Retired professor and Santa Cruz resident Paul Lee knows what it’s like to be deemed expendable.

The goal was to turn $500 into $15,000 in local commerce in 30 days. The method was for five local banks to donate $100 apiece to five lucky raffle ticket winners, then for the recipient of each check to spend it at one of TLF’s 150 member businesses, each of which would, in turn, repeat the process. In theory, by keeping the money within the community, each $100 check would be spent dozens of times, thus producing thousands of dollars in revenue for goods and services along the way.