Downtown plan ‘will ruin Santa Cruz culture’

Your affordable housing editorials (May 20 and May 23) are important. Let’s hope you’ll dig deeper like other local newspapers (SJ Mercury and Santa Cruz Local) and not run a fluff interview piece with Cannabis Keeley like Lookout did.

The downtown expansion plan will ruin Santa Cruz culture and its neighborhoods.

Having lived in SF for over 40 years and watching how isolated high-rise apartments and dense development in Mission Bay with a Warriors stadium has separated San Francisco neighborhoods, it’s clear that working-class families will be kicked-out of Santa Cruz because large commercial companies will raise rents and commercial spaces at market rates to a younger faction willing to pay higher rent and enrich their self-importance over our beach culture. All the while the $6 billion Warriors franchise with the help of our mayor pushed the new Warriors arena costs onto homeowners.

As our local newspaper and fourth branch of government, you must follow the money and investigate why this so-called “expansion” is necessary and why Keeley pushed to increase homeowner’s property assessments while naming it “affordable housing.”

— Jeff Staben, Soquel

Even battery leaf blowers are harmful to health

The county ordinance banning gas-powered leaf blowers as of July 2025 should not end the conversation. Even battery-powered leaf blowers blow dust and dirt into people’s lungs. I’ve experienced it riding my bike to downtown Santa Cruz, and I’ve experienced it in Capitola Village.

Blowers are time-efficient and prevent injury. But at what cost to people’s health? I wish someone would invent a blower with a catchment system. In the meantime, what can we do as a county to move past an unsustainable alternative to a broom?

— Tory Wilson, Santa Cruz

Rail proponents ignore real issues: cost, complexity

Jim Weller’s finger-pointing at Greenway supporters (Letter to the Editor, May 16) ignores the real issue: the Coastal Rail Trail is delayed because it’s expensive and complex to build.

Segment 7 Phase 2 trail in Santa Cruz cost $24 million for less than one mile. Why? Narrow corridor, utility relocations, excavation of steep terrain — no public debate. These are engineering and financial obstacles, not political ones.

The corridor was acquired in 2012. Thirteen years later, only 2.3 miles of trail are complete. That’s not due to Measure D or its supporters. It’s due to the RTC’s decision to pursue an unusually difficult and costly design alongside an out-of-service rail line.

Voters rejected Measure D, but that doesn’t mean Greenway advocates are wrong to question ballooning costs and glacial progress. We want trails now — built efficiently, affordably and for actual use — not as placeholders prioritizing a speculative rail system.

Stop blaming citizens who ask tough, necessary questions. The delays are not political — they’re structural, financial and real.

— J. Ben Vernazza, Aptos

Cuts to SNAP, Medicaid betray social solidarity

Humans have gotten this far by our evolved preference for social solidarity. Sharing the hunt with the clan morphed into progressive taxation, SNAP benefits and medical insurance for the needy. Without social solidarity filtered through a mutual compact controlled by a king – now by representative government — we still fear, as Hume described in 1651, a world of domination where the losers live a life that is “nasty, brutish and short.”

The Congressional Republican House betrayed this solidarity by passing a reduction of $300 billion for SNAP and $800 billion for Medicaid (Medi-Cal) and the Affordable Care Act, while granting $1.1 trillion in tax cuts for those with incomes above $500,000.

Despite this vote, the instinct to care for our neighbors remains.

Social solidarity is not a mere leftist piety. To the contrary, as Pope John Paul II said “Solidarity is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all.”

— Doug Urbanus, Ben Lomond

Reader submissions

The Sentinel welcomes submissions on local topics. Guest commentaries should be approximately 650 words. Letters to the Editor should be no more than 175 words and accompanied by the writer’s address and phone number.