LOVE FOR ANI
Thanks for the article on Ani DiFranco highlighting her concert at the Civic. The update on her achievements is much appreciated. She also collaborated in the late ’90s with the musician and storyteller Utah Phillips, resulting in my two favorite CDs put out by her: “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere” and “Fellow Workers.” The latter has a track containing an anecdote that takes place in Santa Cruz, about the saw player and Wobbly Tom Scribner (the fellow still playing outside Bookshop Santa Cruz as the statue by Marghe McMahon). Ani did us all a great favor by producing these collections of Utah’s work. Talk about speaking truth to power! Highly recommended.
Mathew E. Simpson | Santa Cruz
NO PARKING
I loved the article on parking at UCSC! Having had my own spirited engagement with no less than three separate parking administrators over where I should park momentarily while I paid for my one-time, one-afternoon $10 permit, it’s clear where the term “petty bureaucrat” originates locally.
Surely a campus with the IT/AI resources UCSC must have should be able to devise a parking permit administration that doesn’t appear to seek primarily to become its own profit center?
Nadene Thorne | Santa Cruz
PRAISE FOR OUR COVER STORY
I want to appreciate how Richard Stockton took a complex and seemingly fantastical reality facing our coast and ocean and made it make sense for the reader. Very helpful, and well done!
Dan Haifley | Santa Cruz
TAKE ACTION, SAVE THE BAY
It breaks my heart what our current governmental people want to do to our Bay and elsewhere along our California Coast… They want to add additional Oil Rigs. Especially to our Monterey Bay. We already have a “Sanctuary Bay” and that was put into place several years ago. Now our current administration wants to violate that condition.
WHY? The only thing I can think of is because of Money….
Here we really care about our waters in our Bay… we have all kinds of wildlife in our Bay—dolphins, whales, seals, all kinds of sea fish. If there is drilling here and one of the oil rigs spills into our bay, that will threaten the cleanliness of our animals here. It will threaten our children who love coming to our shores and playing in the waves. It will threaten our surfers who come from all over the world to surf here. It will threaten the lifeguards who are present all the time along our beaches and shores.
Marie Lindsay | Felton
DON’T PAVE PARADISE
We just returned from the Sunday Live Oak Farmers Market where the proposed 7th & Brommer project had a booth as well as a few representatives associated with the contractor. The proposed sketch of the plan was on display, and as the affected community, we were merely allowed to write our dire concerns about this undesirable, dense proposed building plan on sticky notes and adhere them to the board.
This, to me, already demonstrated the lack of concern as well as respect for all the Yacht Harbor and Twin Lakes homeowners who will be the folks most impacted by this construction.
What truly concerned me was the often complacent attitudes of many in attendance today. We have lived in the same single-family home, just off 7th for 54 years and have never witnessed such indifference to our Live Oak community and neighborhood. And now with this shameful display of indifference, can any of us place our faith in how this remaining catastrophe of excessive density will proceed? Rather than turning a blind or complacent eye to what the county, hand in hand with the contractors, is attempting to shove down our throats, this is the time to stand up and loudly protest their outlandish scheme to ruin what has always been the best of the Santa Cruz we all love dearly.
Defend the integrity of our Harbor/Twin Lakes Beach neighborhoods. The contractor reps are trying to get us to believe that it is all written in stone already, that none of us have a say. This, I am quite sure, is merely their tactic to make it easier to plow forward with minimal community protest.
Sure, we all knew some sort of building would eventually be fashioned in the 7th and Brommer lots. But, for the love of Santa Cruz, and to preserve the integrity of our community and neighborhood, scale it back to blend with the single-family units surrounding the proposed construction. Don’t pave paradise and put up a parking lot.
Dave Misunas | Santa Cruz
