August 9, 2021

TOUGH TO KEEP UP.
If you are like me, you read a lot, listen to even more, and still are overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of development coming down in Surf City. Take a look at the city of Santa Cruz Planning Department’s web site and you will see the climate disruption issue on full parade. It is not somewhere out there in China or India or even Los Angeles, but right here ready to rip out the soul of our community if we stand by and throw our hands up. The United Nations climate report was released today, as I write this, and the prognostication is not a pretty one if we keep building the way our Planning Department, with direction of the current city council, is calling for. All the green buildings in the world will not put our humpty-dumpty planet together again. Santa Cruz developers will be pouring cement, lots of it, and they will be cutting down trees, heritage trees. And for what? To build some $800k condos for those who already have a home? Or for those who want to relocate to Santa Cruz so they can work from their near-the-beach villa? We need to stop. Stop the “Cruz Hotel” bait and switch ruse on Front Street where a hotel will replace the credit union building; stop the 233 “single room residencies” and 209 parking spaces (!!!) on Center Street; stop the Soquel-Front 172 condo project (why is 172 parking spaces called for?). All we have to do is look at what is taking place at Laurel and Pacific…a 205-unit condo complex and NOT one affordable unit will be integrated into what appears to be an upscale project, to comprehend what is taking place. There’s more, unfortunately, but it’s tough to keep up. Are these forces larger than the sum of our collective community angst, activism, and stamina? I guess we will find out soon.

What We Know
The UN Report looks to be only 41 pages, so I hope you will take a look at it. Here is where it begins: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.” It’s all here, have a read.

Replacement Development
Okay, if we do not proceed with the luxury condo, second-homer, let’s fix up dingy Santa Cruz plan that Swenson, Lay, Lawlor, Carr, Meyers, and out-going Bernal have wrought, then what? We come together for a community-wide discussion, an on-going series of workshops and charrettes with the over-arching purpose of addressing climate change. We begin with the recently-released UN report and move to a community solution to our community housing and homeless/houseless crisis. Not easy stuff, I know, but it is time to develop and nourish the leadership needed now, integrating old and new ideas, and face up to what is in front of us: rising sea levels, less predictable temperatures, and challenging weather patterns, drought and fire in our case. This report is sobering, and yes, we have both a responsibility and the agency here in Santa Cruz to address climate change. Pouring more cement and building more parking spaces are the antithesis to what’s actually needed. The emperor has no clothes, not even a toothbrush, but the community has agency and education. Now, we need to find our way beyond allowing the greed machine, aka read this list of moneyed interests, to walk over us. Ready?

Watch Out Status-quo: Brown and Filippini Loom Large
I like to highlight the work of others, in this case, Sandy Brown and Lira Filippini recently posted outstanding work. Our local city council hero, Councilmember Brown wrote eloquently about why she could not vote for a sales tax increase if it did not place city workers first when it comes to budgeting the new money. Ms. Filippini’s work is quite important too. She questions the legitimacy of SB 35, which looks to supersede the democratic rights of locals. Have a read.

Sandy Brown Stands with SC Workers…(Her statement)
Recently, I cast the lone “no” vote to declare a fiscal emergency in the city of Santa Cruz. A unanimous vote was needed to place a half-cent sales tax on the ballot outside of the usual process of a consolidated general election.

In Spring 2018 I reluctantly supported a similar proposal, in spite of my concerns about the regressive nature of a sales tax, which disproportionately burdens those with the least ability to pay (though it does apply this same tax on visitors who place pressure on city services when they visit).

City leaders insisted that critical issues could only be addressed after passage, and that a sales tax was the only option. The tax passed in 2018, bringing the city much needed revenue for a variety of critical needs. Since then, city leaders have continued to underinvest in critical services and the essential workers who perform them and to prioritize consultants, studies, and expanded staffing at the top of the pay scale, those farthest away from on the ground realities that our community faces.

There are consequences to these choices. Public services, including maintaining our parks, open spaces, civic center, and other public spaces, are undermined; worker morale declines; recruitment and retention challenges increase. I consistently hear from city workers about the struggles they face due to low pay, from housing insecurity, to taking pay day loans, to becoming seriously ill due to COVID-19 exposure, and other hazards on the job. They are understaffed, overburdened, and paid far less than their counterparts at comparable public agencies. Many classifications continue to earn less than the city’s prescribed “living wage” (currently $18.10-$19.74/ hour, depending on health insurance provision). When the city adopted a living wage policy in 2000, it excluded its own workforce, committing instead to address the issue through labor negotiations. Since then, city leaders have refused to fulfill that promise. Twenty years on, it’s time for the city to finish what it started and raise the floor for its own workforce. This year, I asked my colleagues to make a meaningful commitment to address low pay and understaffing prior to a vote on the fiscal emergency. I also wanted to see more than a theoretical commitment to tackle affordable housing and homelessness response, the issues that voters told us were of the highest priority in a recent poll conducted by the city. What we’ve been doing is clearly not working. While the pandemic did reduce city revenues, workers stepped up by agreeing to furloughs and other measures to maintain core city functions. Money can be found in the city’s opaque budget, if one looks hard enough, including salary savings from unfilled positions, placeholder line items, and funds set aside for labor negotiations.

Additional revenue would surely help the city recover from pandemic-related revenue losses. It would provide resources for critical services performed by essential workers, support affordable housing investment, assist in city buildout of homelessness response, enabling parks maintenance and other workers to productively and safely do their jobs.

For the past month, I have done all I could to do right by the city residents who rely on these services and the people who do that work under challenging conditions. I worked with two council members to try to find ways to take some of the small steps that would give our community confidence that city leaders do value the workforce. Sadly, city leaders opted to foreclose the possibility of raising up to $7 million in sales tax revenue in the coming year because they refuse to address the underinvestment in city workers and services our residents need.

Sandy Brown can be reached at: sbrown@cityofsantacruz.com

Lira Filippini Calls for Local Democratic Decision-making

Whether you want Santa Cruz to be an eccentric beach town or a buzzing high-rise city, don’t you think we – as a community – should retain an ability to influence how it changes?

Right now, our city is assessing its first ever Senate Bill 35 application for a large development at 831 Water Street. There is one great thing about Novin Development’s massive development application: 50% of the units will be set at “affordable” rates.

Unfortunately, there are also a number of major issues with this application that bring up substantiated concerns over public health, public safety, inequitable segregation, and the probable destruction of very important underground historical adobe foundations and artifacts from our intriguing Villa de Branciforte heritage. But more on all that another time; right now, what is most concerning is that our community is facing unprecedented loss of any meaningful input on developments that achieve SB 35 approval. And no one seems to know about it. SB 35 is a law passed in 2017 that had commendable “intent” in that it promotes affordable housing in areas that have not produced enough.

The state keeps track of our housing production and annually reports which cities and counties will be subject to SB 35. Santa Cruz has worked hard on this front and fulfilled all market rate and affordable housing development categories, except one: the “very-low income” category.

This single deficiency, makes our city subject to SB 35 and what is called “ministerial streamlining” for developments that set 50% of their units as affordable housing. Ministerial streamlining means that the city will fast-track the approval and permitting process without public hearings, taking away your voice. You might think we could benefit from removing barriers to building affordable housing, and build it fast. But let’s look at the implications in more detail. For instance, a developer can get SB 35 streamlining by only providing housing in the form of tiny studio apartments … and lots of them. A land of little boxes made of modular building sections in the “brutalism” architectural design. Sound appealing? Where’s the responsibility to provide for low-income families in that? And imagine sheltering in place in a tiny concrete box.

Quality of living, not requiring housing for families, and pandemic implications aside, SB 35 means no CEQA. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is an important law that dictates our need to be stewards for the health and safety of our built environment and our natural environment; it has been painstakingly set up for decades — by professionals in many industries — to ensure we don’t do irreparable harm when we create substantial changes to our infrastructure, including housing developments. But who needs environmental responsibility? 

Also, who needs assurance that the due diligence has been put in to make sure health and public safety are considered in the development’s permitting process? Does it make sense to throw all that CEQA work out the door because we need affordable housing? How about that the entire project — including the expensive, market-rate units, at about the same size and packed density — will be geared almost entirely toward singles? What effect on the overall expense of living here per square-footage will that have? We can talk about AMI (Average Median Income) and how what’s technically deemed “affordable” is disastrously affected by all this another time, but I’ll just say for now — it’s not looking good.

That brings us to the final straw, the nail in the coffin for an engaged and equitable process for developing our community. If you identify ways in which an SB 35 development will harm you, your family, the environment, or community — too bad. SB 35 and city staff tell us we will have no say. But stay tuned, because our elected representatives, our City Council, have more power than they think in this process — and we’ll have to demand they use it.

Lira Filippini can be contacted at: lirafilippini@gmail.com

 Addendum: And please don’t forget what my colleague, Gillian Greensite wrote last week:
Senator John Laird is waffling on SB 10 and Assembly member Mark Stone, who has not taken a position on SB 10, voted for its evil twin SB 35 last time around. Both need to hear from you. Go to Lairds and Stones websites and email them your views. Request a zoom meeting. The bills still have to pass the Assembly.  August 16 is the deadline.  The future of Santa Cruz cannot be further ripped from local control and dictated to by a clueless Sacramento.

“I’ve heard a lot from the punditry as to why Nina Turner lost her race in Ohio. Well, maybe it had something to do with drug companies, Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry spending millions trying to defeat her. Is that the kind of Democratic Party we want? I don’t think so.” (Aug. 7)

I am running this picture again because these 15 progressive members of the US House of Representatives have the power to implement real change. Changes like Medicare-of-All and free state college tuition, if they decide to stick together and vote together as a bloc. It’s time.