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A standard-issue Santa Cruz park ranger uniform comes with a forest green shirt and slacks, hiking boots, a wide-brimmed hat and a tool belt containing a Leatherman multi-tool, a flashlight, a notepad, a two-way radio and a can of pepper spray. Nowhere in any pocket, holster or clip is a device designed to assist a ranger in a gunfight. So when Rangers Brian Watson and Gar Eidam stumbled onto an illegal campsite in the Pogonip last month and found $850 worth of heroin and a loaded .357 magnum handgun, they radioed in for help from the Santa Cruz Police Parks Unit. With slideshow.

Khalil Rahim didn’t know there was gang violence in Watsonville, because he lives in San Jose. At least that’s what he told the police, after they raided his discount cigarette store and confiscated brass knuckles and switchblades.

Over 23,000 pink slips are being sent to everyone who works in education across California this week. Almost no one is immune, regardless of whether they’re a principal or a janitor. Though final notices will only be sent out in the middle of May, just using last year as an indicator suggests that some 60 percent of the people receiving the pink slips will end up losing their jobs.

Those that listened closely Thursday evening around 6:45pm might have heard a dull thud that echoed around the county. That was the sound of several dozen jaws hitting the ground inside the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors Chambers when the California Coastal Commission voted unanimously against the city’s Arana Gulch Master Plan and its controversial paved bicycle path, a decade and a half in the planning.

Tuesday evening, the Santa Cruz City Council voted to limit the number of medical marijuana dispensaries in the city to two, effectively putting a moratorium on any new pot clubs.

Matthew Moore didn’t carry a sign at last week’s student protest at UCSC. With a walking stick in one hand and his dog’s leash in the other, he stood in a grassy field near the university entrance at High and Bay streets and watched while hundreds of his fellow students demanded the university lower its fees and restaff its departments.

There’s good news for businesses in downtown Santa Cruz. After two and a half years of recession— National Bureau of Economic Research claims that the downward trended started in December 2007—things are finally looking up. Downtown has suffered significantly in that time not only from the recession but also because of a negative image as a center for gang members and the homeless.

Ramona Cash is a cute, punky looking brunette you’d expect to see modeling skirts and bikinis in a skateboard fashion catalog. Over coffee in downtown Santa Cruz, she parts a section of her professionally highlighted hair to reveal an inch-wide heart-shaped bald spot from where her friends precisely ripped the hair from her scalp.

Fed up with rising fee costs and slashed department budgets, UCSC students staged a massive protest on campus Thursday as students across the nation demonstrated against what many see as higher education becoming unaffordable.  With slide show.

On a sunlit winter’s day following a long and rainy week, Jean Brocklebank and Michael Lewis trudge through the soggy soil and tall grasses of Arana Gulch in Santa Cruz, talking about their group’s upcoming case before the California Coastal Commission on March 11. Suddenly Brocklebank stops and lays down the situation as she, and doubtless other members of the Friends of Arana Gulch, sees it. “This not a case of environmentalists versus environmentalists,” she says. With slide show.

It’s no secret that Santa Cruz’s public library system is facing a deficit. Just about every public service in the county is. The real problem is that they don’t know what to do about it anymore.

The school’s board met last night to discuss strategies to deal with $3.2 million in state funding cuts, with disabled and disadvantaged students among the first to suffer. Programs at the new Stroke and Disability Center and the Extended Opportunity Programs and Services assisting students facing language, social, or economic challenges will be reduced considerably. According to state law, faculty and staff to be laid off because of the budget cuts must be notified by March 15.

Could racial tensions be seething beneath the surface of UCSC. Some school officials are worried that they are after an image of a noose was found scrawled on a bathroom door in the Earth and Marine Sciences Building. The image was accompanied by the words “lynch” and “San Diego,” the latter a reference to racial tensions at UCSD two weeks ago.

The 8.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Chile early Saturday prompted tsunami warnings along the entire Pacific coast of the United States. In Santa Cruz, beaches were closed as a precaution. That didn’t stop hundreds of onlookers from crowding the Municipal Wharf and West Cliff Drive in an attempt to see the oncoming waves, which began to hit shore around 1:45pm.

On a rainy January morning more than 13 months ago, teams of local government workers and volunteers tromped through the soggy corners of the county and counted homeless people as part of the 2009 Santa Cruz County Homeless Census and Survey.
On a similarly rainy afternoon just last week, the fruits of that effort were finally presented to the Santa Cruz City Council.  The reason for the delay? “Time and availability.”

The Olympic sport of curling involves two teams of players carefully sliding large stones down an icy lane while “sweepers” use brooms to polish the rocks’ gradual paths toward a target.
There will be no curling shown at the Banff Mountain Film Festival.

In a city where constant change is the only guarantee, Santa Cruzans have been able to count on one thing for the last 28 years: that City Manager Dick Wilson would show up to work every day, a steady hand at the tiller keeping the city on course. During his tenure, the tall, soft-spoken Wilson answered to more than a dozen city councils, steering city staff through an earthquake, an expanding university and more budget crises than just the most recent one. When Wilson retires in July, he’ll be leaving the Santa Cruz City Council with what Mayor Mike Rotkin calls “the most important decision the council will make in its tenure.

“Orange is the happiest color,” Frank Sinatra famously said. He obviously didn’t see Soquel Creek last week, when it started to emit a warm orange glow. State Fish and Game officials are still trying to discover the source of discolored water.

Cyclists talking or texting on their cell phones could soon face the same penalties as drivers if State Representative Joe Simitian has his way. The author of California’s hands-free law believes that cyclists “should have the same rights, laws and responsibilities” as drivers when it comes to following the rules of the road.

A 15-year-old boy was arrested in a stabbing that took place on Encinal Street yesterday. Police are still investigating what happened, though they say that the boy and his victim, a 31-year-old man, were involved in a physical argument before the boy stabbed him.

The New York Times Magazine traced the origins of the words “cellar door,” which, it turns out, is considered an exceedingly beautiful pair of words. Local poet Stephen Kessler, however, isn’t convinced.

Santa Cruz is a pretty happy place. In fact, it’s happier than most major cities and towns in the U.S., ranking 14th overall. That was the finding of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which was released yesterday.

It turns out that Obama and Bush are cousins—umpteenth removed, but cousins nonetheless. And their extended family includes everyone from Bill Clinton to the Roosevelts to Lincoln to Jefferson to Washington, etc.

A pipe bomb found on the beach yesterday was taken to Central Fire Station No. 1, where it was finally detonated. It took two hours for the local bomb squad to complete the task.

South African Chris Bertish won first place in the Mavericks Surf Contest after conquering huge 40-foot waves that many surfers said were the biggest ever for the contest. With slideshow.

The wait is over. The California Energy Commission announced Thursday that a $16.5 million grant would be awarded to the 14-county alternative energy financing program CaliforniaFIRST.

WHEN IT COMES to the business of cheating, Noel Biderman is boss. His website AshleyMadison.com—named, he says, after the two most popular monikers for baby girls—functions like any other dating site, with profiles, searches, messages and photos. But at Biderman’s site, the dating pool comes with baggage: namely girlfriends, boyfriends, wives and husbands.

This year, stage three of the AMGEN Tour of California is set for Tuesday, May 18, and ends a few blocks south of our previously prime location - on Beach Street, in front of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

In an email to Santa Cruz Weekly, group founder Rebecca Dmytryk says she responded to a private Aptos residence around 1pm on Monday where the skunk had been trapped for about five hours. With video.

Bonnie Moor, a bus driver, best known as the face of the United Transportation Union Local 23 and Mark Halfmoon, a local TV personality, who hosted the Community TV show “Voices” are both running for election to the Santa Cruz City Council.

Forget about Cash for Clunkers. Cabrillo College in Aptos is launching a new Cash for Carpool program. As part of the school’s efforts to get students to find more sustainable ways to get to school each day, the college is promoting biking, walking, and, yes, carpooling.

Anna Deavere Smith, a celebrated actress, author and playwright known for using documentary approaches to art, will deliver the keynote address at Santa Cruz’s 26th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Convocation on Feb. 11.

A group of residents called People Against Chemical Trespass is hoping to pass an ordinance that would make it illegal for non-local governments to use any pesticides whatsoever on Santa Cruz soil without the blessing of her people.

On Feb. 5, Patty Sapone turns in her gun and badge for retirement. She leaves as the first woman to be promoted all the way through the ranks and the longest-serving female officer in SCPD history.

In the video, a mottled Laysan albatross chick waddles slowly in a circle, clacking its beak angrily in the camera’s direction. Its scruffy brown wings hang limply at each side, occasionally fluttering and dragging in the soil as the young bird struggles to defend itself from the perceived threat. Around its grey webbed feet, tiny white flecks dot the ground.
“Paint chips,” says UC-Santa Cruz assistant researcher Myra Finkelstein, the woman behind the camera, who’s now watching the video on her home PC. “Lead-based paint chips cover the ground in a lot of places. It’s real easy for the young birds to ingest them.” With video.

Officially, 150 jobs were added to Santa Cruz over 2009, with 86 of them in the final quarter.  County officials are more optimistic, saying that as many as 362 jobs were either created or saved last year through the county’s departments alone—and that this doesn’t count small businesses that benefited.

A Santa Cruz prosecutor discovered that the weight-loss supplement DEX L-10, touted for its Hoodia Gorodoni, had about as much Hoodia in it as a Coke bottle. Prosecutor Kelly Walker took the manufacturers to court to prevent Breakthrough Engineered Nutrition Inc. from selling their pill in California.

“Pro-Israel, pro-peace” may not sound like a controversial mantra for a political action committee, but in the world of Israeli-American foreign policy advocates, it’s loaded with meaning.

Santa Cruz police arrested three suspected drug dealers in the Pogonip Thursday after a sting operation was conducted, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reports. The men, 23-year-old Alfonso Marquez, 23-year-old Rey Antonio and 31-year-old John Pitts, were charged with crimes related to heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana.

With local unemployment at 13.5 percent, it doesn’t take a scientific poll to tell most people that raising city taxes might be a tough sell. But Santa Cruz city leaders are not most people.

Santa Cruz County Public Health officials will be offering two free evening walk-in clinics for H1N1 influenza vaccination in Watsonville on February 2 and 4.

Yesterday the County’s Board of Supervisors rejected a request by Paul Goldstone, owner of the Alimur Mobile Home Park, that he be allowed to sell of individual plots that are currently rent-controlled.

It’s been raining for eight straight days, and many of the dried up riverbeds across the county have suddenly come to life again.

At the Santa Cruz City Council meeting on Wednesday, city leaders vowed to crack down on problem bars and extend a limit on pot clubs.

Rob Mylls is a stocky, wisecracking 42-year-old who is most often found behind a set of carbon fiber handlebars. Last July, after his boss at Hewlett-Packard said goodbye with a handshake and a pink slip, Mylls decided to skip the job hunt to chase a dream. The result is the Bike Dojo, “A Cycling Community.” And for anyone who joins, Mylls and his partner Delfina Gimeno promise a year-round ticket to gorgeous scenery, better fitness and maybe even some new friends. With slide show.

The weeklong storm that brought 4.5 inches of rain to Santa Cruz last week, brought 46 inches of snow to Heavenly Mountain Resort in South Lake Tahoe. With slide show.

Professor Dana Frank, who heads UCSC’s Center for Labor Studies, says that there is a major misconception about what the teachers unions do.

Rents are down in Santa Cruz since last year, by 6.7 percent on average. Despite the drop, rental rates in the county are still the highest in the state.

The Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission is supporting Caltrans against a lawsuit aimed at stopping the construction of new lanes on Highway 1.

After spending the summer battling wildfires in the Santa Cruz Mountains, firefighters are now getting ready to do battle against downed power lines and mudslides.

As Santa Cruz’s much-trumpeted Renewable Energy Assessment District inches closer to implementation, its fate increasingly seems tied to the 9 percent interest rate participants would pay to join. The program, dubbed CaliforniaFIRST and administered by the quasi–public organization California Communities, would let homeowners purchase alternative energy systems like solar panels with loans financed by the sale of “special district”-issued bonds. The plan targets homeowners that lack enough home equity or good credit to qualify for a bank-issued loan.

It took 15 months, 19 court hearings and an estimated 500 hours of legal work to convict Jack Rusk and Wes Modes of a combined three misdemeanor citations—resisting arrest and obstruction of justice, plus, in Modes’ case, battery of a police officer—stemming from the September 2008 “drum circle protest” near the downtown Farmers Market.

Around noon on Wednesday 10-to-12-foot waves brought about 15 brave surfers to Steamer Lane. Waves were expected to reach up to 20-feet as a giant swell headed south from Alaska down the California coast, bringing around an inch of rain to Santa Cruz along with it.

In the misty winter dusk outside the 7-Eleven at Ocean and Broadway streets, Ashley Russell lights a candle in remembrance of Nichole “Nikki” Schrock. It was inside the store, just a few hours into the new decade, when Schrock, an auburn-haired, 24-year-old mother, was gunned down during her morning shift as store clerk in what police are calling a murder-suicide. (Slide show included)

The incident is the latest of a series of attacks on construction sites in the area, which began late last summer.

Has the Santa Cruz Water Department fully studied the implications of a proposed expansion of the UCSC campus? Some members of the county’s Board of Supervisors are not convinced it has.

The land consists of two parcels: one 107-acre area adjacent to the Skyline-to-the-Sea hiking trail, and another 160-acre area plot in San Mateo.

Tired of virtual vitriol, local officials are requesting better monitoring of Sentinel online forums.

Ibrahim Nyampong is a 32-year-old entrepreneur who lives in Accra, the capital city of Ghana on Africa’s west coast, where the average annual per capita income is $600. About two years ago, nationally renowned bicycle designer and Santa Cruz County native Craig Calfee taught him how to build bicycle frames from locally grown bamboo. Today, Nyampong earns about $150 for every frame he builds, shipping the completed frames—some a milky caramel color, others a deep mocha—to Calfee’s La Selva Beach manufacturing shop. (includes slide show)

Santa Cruz downtown buisness owners say that holiday sales are off to a good start.

Still suffering from a growing deficit, the city of Santa Cruz will be cutting back on services and modifying its schedules in an effort to save money.

Cold, sweaty and nauseous, Stefan R. burst into the pale green bathroom stall of the Aptos Cinema men’s room to spend his first experience with OxyContin face down in a public toilet.

Live Oak-Soquel Supervisor John Leopold was appointed to the Santa Cruz Metropolitan Transit District Board, raising complaints among some local officials

The event was nearly canceled after the city’s Event Permit Coordinator Kathy Agnone insisted that a guard be posted to keep 15-foot tall menorah from being stolen.

U.S. News and World Report ranked the 100 best high schools in the country. Among the top ten was Pacific Collegiate Charter School.

It’s been reported by the Santa Cruz Sentinel that the seven members of the Santa Cruz City Council are paid roughly double the salaries of their counterparts in Scotts Valley, Capitola and Watsonville. But what about cities with bigger budgets or fewer services? Turns out, Santa Cruz’s council salaries are still pretty high—but they’re not the highest.

The Cayuga Vault, midtown’s funky, internationally inclined concert hall is throwing its last bash Dec. 20 and shutting its doors for good at the end of the month. Chalk up another victim to the recession.

“Heroin Hill,” as it’s called by addicts and law enforcement, is a roughly 50-acre trash-strewn plot in the southeast section of the city-owned Greenbelt that’s known to addicts and cops as a substance abuse superstore with rock-bottom prices on heroin, methamphetamine, crack, marijuana, cocaine and pharmaceuticals.

When United States Attorney General Eric Holder announced in February that he would stop ordering federal law enforcement raids on medical marijuana providers as long as they complied with state law, entrepreneurs around the country scrambled to open their own pot shops. Santa Cruz, being ahead of the curve on all things cannabis, already had two dispensaries in town, but city officials say they still received more than 60 calls from interested growers between then and June, when a temporary moratorium was put on all dispensary applications. Now, after last Thursday’s meeting of the Santa Cruz Planning Commission, city leaders are one step closer to making the temporary freeze of two pot clubs in town permanent.

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.