May 18

WHO WILL TELL THE PEOPLE?

Disorienting
Disorienting is what comes to mind when I try and follow the local political process in the age of Covid-19. If you are interested in engaging in local issues, finding ways to work on community solutions while the national pandemic politics play out, then these are the times that try men’s, women’s, and non-binary souls. Not only is it scary and chaotic in TrumpWorld, but as we are well-aware his shit is flushed across the country. Locally, who can follow in real-time what is transpiring on the issues we care about? Homelessness?  Affordable  housing? The environment? UCSC growth? Normally, the progressives are pretty good at thinking globally and acting locally, and there exist tremendous electronic resources for keeping up with the latest coronavirus news: economic statistics bombard us; how to avoid Tweet-monster Trump’s hourly pronouncements; Governor’s Cuomo and Newsom‘s usually informative press briefings; and likely the best in humanizing the Covid-19 story, Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. But trying to put all of this information into a localized context without the necessary benefit of real face-to-face public meetings has most of us occupying a kind of wait-and-see social space. This will end soon, right, we tell ourselves. But when? I don’t know about you, but my internal clock has been off. I often wake up at different times, forget this or that virtual meeting I had scheduled, I’m even often unsure about what day it is. And then there’s the anxieties…

Anxiety 101
They are deep, gut-gnawing feelings, sometimes burning a hole in my stomach. One is about our daughter living in a the Covid-19 hotspot, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The other daughter toils away with us in virtual land, sometimes taxing our home internet as three Zoom meetings happen in the same hour.We collectively are linked in weird ways with the outside world, all of us bowing before the hottest internet stock, Zoom.But the Zoom meeting and classroom of today is troubling at best. All three of us–mom, dad, daughter–have concluded that working on Zoom from home requires more focus and more preparation, and the desire to space out and want to clean that cob web in front of your computer or pick up all the clothes and dishes piling up around your room, is constant. Attending these Zoom meetings, I notice it is more difficult to be funny, body language cues coming from the Hollywood Squares screen are all off when trying to assess how a group of six, or 60 colleagues or students are actually thinking as someone’s audio and video drop away. Some have less connectivity than others. Our souls are being severely tested right now along with our compassion and empathy too. Many of my students feel alienated, miss the physical UCSC campus, and can’t find any space away from housemates or family members and sometimes just want to scream, or cry. For me, there hovers over each day a longing, (a knowing?), that this all will end soon. I will be able to once again meet a friend and share a Mike’s Mess at Zachary’s, a citrus IPA at Lupelo, or run into someone at the community table at the Coffee Roasting Company. I even look forward to that cacophony of high school student voices as they flood into the Bagelry mid-morning. How I long to hear those sounds again. 

Sad Daze for Democracy
This people-to-people contact becomes ever more vital when I remember how the public is unable to sit in close proximity and respond in a give-and-take dialogue with city staff members, commissioners, and councilmembers. These are truly sad days for democracy. Of course, I’ve been on Zoom meetings with enviros discussing Michael Moore’s new controversial film, Planet of the Humans; been part of discussions on the city council bi-weekly agendas; attended an Our Revolution post-mortem for Bernie (what’s next?); been at family gatherings too, and endless UCSC staff, faculty, and student meetings…all without great fulfillment. I tend to think most of us are not all that satisfied with our limited contact with each other. Sometimes the virtual meeting exacerbates the fury within for a need to be around friends. And, when it gets to the level of spending and cutting great sums of money as the city is currently doing, we have to find a better way for community input and collective decision-making.

URGENT: Public’s Extreme Vigilance Now Needed More Than Ever
There it was, in black and white, a Santa Cruz Sentinel headline screaming triumphantly above the fold:Development proposals roll in, and in the on-line version, Coronavirus no damper for Santa Cruz development projects. It should now be crystal clear just what the March 3rd recall was all about: $MONEY$. That is, the developers and real estate interests wanted a city council to enable a city staff to facilitate the building of profitable MARKET-RATE housing. Yep, no mystery there. For the price of half a luxury condo, these same developer and real estate interests were able to oust two councilmembers and move toward getting their buildings approved. Of course, we all knew that is what the election was about, but the speed and shear chutzpah on the part of city staff and developers in getting through the permit process is proving alarming. Since the March 3rd election there has been this unleashing of projects (see Sentinel article, Coronavirus no damper for Santa Cruz development proposals) looking for rubber stamp approvals by the city council. Developer interests are working the pandemic for everything it’s worth, and it is worth a lot of greenbacks to them. What is not clear to me is if any of these projects will actually be built any time in the next five years given the state of the economy. So why the rush? Part of the answer is that the “approvals” of these projects are usually transferable and can be sold for major dollars. Developers are rushing now to get approvals in the absence of any real public meetings and before this November’s election when the political climate just might change again. The current virtual approval process for obtaining permits and the lack of public input and scrutiny is unacceptable.

Building Permit Moratorium Now
Why not call for a moratorium on issuing any new commercial building permits until the pandemic has subsided and the council returns to public meetings? So much is on the table in terms of market rate housing projects. The projects being presented are not affordable undertakings, but ones driven by the maximization of profits. Santa Cruz is once again for sale. It may be likely too that the current council will allow the developers to pay “in-lieu” fees so as not to have any of those pesky affordable units in their building envelope. Can we put in place a building moratorium aimed at reigning in over-zealous developers? The emergency powers now enacted and commanded by the city manager can indeed put in place a moratorium on issuing any new building permits until a sense of municipal normalcy returns, as measured by Governor Newsom’s six goals that must be met in order to get the economy back up and running. The fifth bullet point below should be adhered to locally with respect to profit-driven developers. Building permits ought not to be issued until the city has “the ability for businesses, schools, and childcare facilities to support physical distancing.” Punto final! Here are the Governor’s six goals:

• The ability to monitor and protect our communities through testing, contact tracing, isolating, and supporting those who are positive or exposed;

• The ability to prevent infection in people who are at risk for more severe COVID-19;
• The ability of the hospital and health systems to handle surges;
• The ability to develop therapeutics to meet the demand;
• The ability for businesses, schools, and child care facilities to support physical distancing; and
• The ability to determine when to reinstitute certain measures, such as the stay-at-home orders, if necessary. (https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/04/14/governor-newsom-outlines-six-critical-indicators-the-state-will-consider-before-modifying-the-stay-at-home-order-and-other-covid-19-interventions/)

The developer class is fooling no one in its headlong rush to obtain their luxury condo gold and forge ahead quickly in using the pandemic as a way to extract profit from Surf City.

Democracy in Peril
This pandemic, besides losing jobs, childcare, and education time in the classroom for our children, is also bad for democracy. Much is happening in local government without public scrutiny—the Parks Master Plan, Wharf Master Plan, Library in a garage project, a towering curtain of buildings along Front street which will hover over the river, a Jeep dealership (yes JEEP cars), and we already know the Circle Church property has been approved for townhouse development. This is a dizzying array of projects, and it’s taking place while all of us are in lockdown and “sheltering in place.”These are the times when those who see public comment as burdensome, bothersome, and unnecessary will thrive in this atmosphere and push their highly profitable projects forward if we cannot create (invent?) additional avenues for input.

“Before this crisis, half of our people lived paycheck to paycheck. Tens of millions had no health insurance. Some 40 million people lived in poverty. 500,000 slept on the streets. We cannot just go ‘back to normal.’ We must go forward and build an economy that works for all.” (May 18)