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Love Your Local Band: Mark London & The SuperGreens
Mark London and the Supergreens are all about community involvement. When the masterminds behind Santa Cruz’s Hibernation Fest aren’t tracking down locals to join them onstage at the Crepe Place, they’re operating DIY record label Invertebrate Records, in addition to running a blog, “Two-Track Tuesdays,” where they feature music from local artists every week.
Their own musical influences range in scope from Explosions in the Sky to Al Green, which explains their eclectic style and sound. The band has been playing together since 2013, but they prefer to remain, for the most part, underground. They have next to no music available online, but that hasn’t kept them from gaining popularity, or from landing the weekly Monday night slot at the Crepe Place.
Mark London & the Supergreens secured the Mixtape Monday gig through a local band that they originally met at Hibernation Fest. Hibernation is a winter music festival usually hosted at private houses, and often features not only musicians, but also other Santa Cruz artists and local home-brewers. Out of respect for their hosts, Mark London & the Supergreens try to keep the festival “low profile,” opting to reveal the location to a handful of people a few days before the event. Invitations are largely by word of mouth.
“Hibernation has played a huge role in defining our sound, our goals, our mission,” explains bassist Tauvin Pursley. “There are so many pockets of different artists and musicians in Santa Cruz, and we’re trying to bring them all together. That’s what we’re doing with Hibernation, and what we’re trying to do with Mixtape Mondays.”
Sharing the spotlight is the weekly approach, with each Monday featuring a different genre. This furthers the Supergreen mission of building up the musical community while simultaneously expanding their network and ensuring that they play before a different crowd each week.
“We want to encourage other musicians and artists to contact us and try to be a part of Hibernation, of Mixtape Mondays,” says guitarist Matt Barnett. “We need other people to get in on this to actually create something for Santa Cruz. That’s the goal.”
INFO: 9 p.m. Mondays. Crepe Place, 1134 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $3. 429-6994.
Senior Moments
A charming memoir of a smelly, prickly old lady, The Lady in the Van is based on material that was first performed on stage, then as a radio play. Surprisingly, as a movie it hasn’t lost any keenness.
Its writer and subject is Alan Bennett (played by Alex Jennings), a playwright whose breakthrough was being part of the Beyond the Fringe quartet that paved the way for Monty Python. In 1973, when Bennett moved to Gloucester Crescent in London’s Camden Town, it was a changing district—awaiting the gentry who inhabit it today. Priding themselves on their liberality, the neighbors put up with one Miss Shepherd (played by Dame Maggie Smith in the film adaptation) a transient old lady living in her van on the street. When the parking police tried to run her off, Bennett allowed her to park in his driveway. She would be encamped there for 15 years.
Bennett once commented that he thought he’d go into the clergy just because he looked like a clergyman. Jennings’ Bennett does look like a vicar: tall, self-effacing, awkward, limp-haired. In his never-to-be-forgot Beyond the Fringe sketch, “Take a Pew,” Bennett played a minister trying to explain, with multiple inanities and chummy, hopeless faux-contemporary allusions, the importance of a scripture verse from II Kings 14. The quote was actually from Genesis: “But my brother Esau is a hairy man, but I am a smooth man.”
The funny thing is that Bennett ended up a bit of a non-denominational minister, after all. As opposed to the more overt (and boring) St. Francis imagery in The Soloist—the Jamie Foxx-starring movie on a similar subject to this—The Lady in the Van is a sweet, subdued piece of natural Christianity.
During the course of his friendly but never informal relationship with Miss Shepherd, Bennett often has a good talk to himself. The play depicts Bennett split in half on the grounds that a writer is actually two people in conversation with himself. And while watching this strange woman, and learning her own sad history, he has some guilt about using her for material.
Director Nicholas Hytner is primarily a theater director and an occasional filmmaker. He has made three movies this century. Bennett’s direct address to the camera doesn’t look stagey, and the movie is opened up to take in the hilliest, most endearing part of London as it was 40 years ago. The role is so right for Smith that it might be easy to underrate her very tough and touching work here. (Think of the twinkling a less rigorous actor would have brought to this. Smith’s derelict Miss Shepherd is no pixie.)
Smith has long been a deep-focus underplayer, from her helpless Desdemona in Olivier’s Othello, to 1987’s Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne—the soul is so strong in her that we never really think of this 80-year-old performer’s fragility until the end of the film, when her health fails. Before then, her Miss Shepherd has push. She is willing to be a pain; snarling at anyone who dares to play music around her, or talking grandly of her memoirs, to be titled either The Lady Behind the Curtain or A Woman of Britain.
The fragrance of Miss Shepherd is described as that of “a bad dish cloth”; out of folk wisdom, she eats raw onions to ward off colds. Bennett, not an enormous fan of the physical world, admires the way the ambulance people or the social workers can handle this exasperating woman without minding her moods or her smell. He himself downplays his own ability to stand her bad habits, including her regularly soiling his driveway. “Caring is shit,” Bennett decides. Indeed, cleaning up shit, and putting up with it, is essential to dealing with human beings, instead of being a wry outsider who avoids them.
It’s bemusing to imagine the army of people in their vans, trucks and campers today, displaced by the obscene rents of the Bay Area, being looked after with the care and dignity demonstrated by the characters in this story. The Lady in the Van wells up with compassion; it never drills for it.
THE LADY IN THE VAN
Maggie Smith, Alex Jennings, and Jim Broadbent. Written by Alan Bennett. Directed by Nicholas Hytner. A BBC Films release. Rated PG-13. 104 Mins.
Dancing Creek Winery
In the early stages of their vino venture, winemaker and owner Jim Boyle, along with his wife Robin, were making so much wine that they had to give much of it away. Finally, Jim decided it was time to get serious, open a tasting room and actually start selling the fruits of their labors. Dancing Creek Winery was born, its name inspired by the Santa Cruz landscape: “We live in a crazy yellow house in a Happy Valley on a dancing creek,” the Boyles explain.
Wine lovers in the area now head to the Boyles’ tasting room to snap up their Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Syrah, and Merlot. Add to that list their new 2009 Zinfandel Port, made with grapes harvested from Zayante Vineyard. It’s $18 for a 12-ounce bottle and is only available in their tasting room. But this ruby beauty with its dark fruit and peppery spice is worth a trip to Dancing Creek.
Growing up in England, I well remember how much my mother loved a drop of port after dinner, and this sweet wine is still very much associated with Brits. The Boyles have captured rich and sensuous flavor and sealed it in a bottle with an elegant red wax seal. Pair it with cheese, especially a tart Roquefort or a nice bit of English Stilton—and we all know how well port goes with chocolate.
Dancing Creek Winery, 4363 Branciforte Drive, Santa Cruz. 408-497-7753. dancingcreekwinery.com. The Boyles’ tasting room is very close to the famous Mystery Spot, and open every third Saturday of the month from noon to 5 p.m., so the next time will be Feb. 20.
Fat Tuesday at Michael’s on Main
Fat Tuesday (aka Shrove Tuesday) on Feb. 9 at Michael’s on Main in Soquel promises to be a tasty time for all. Guest chef Madlyn Norman-Terrance will be cooking up her famous gumbo, Kip Allert will perform—and it’s all paired with local wines by Bargetto Winery. Wine-pairing dinner is from 6:30-8 p.m. and cost is $25 per person. Visit michaelsonmain.net for more info.
On the Run
For more than 14,000 years, humans have had a close relationship with wild salmon. Along the Pacific Coast, natives harvested thousands of adult salmon each fall from their spawning grounds in local rivers and streams, a catch that fed their families throughout the year.
While many cultures in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska are still deeply wedded to the salmon resource, California’s grasp has grown increasingly slippery, with only a small percentage of its historical natural breeding population remaining.
Salmon’s legacy for Californians goes far beyond its estimated $1.4 billion fishery, or its classification as one of the most nutritious foods in the world: the fish also provide a vital transfer of nutrients and energy from the ocean back to the freshwater ecosystems where they were born.
“People have done studies to show that you can identify ocean-derived nutrients from salmon in many dozens of different species, like kingfishers or water ouzels, fish-eating ducks, foxes, raccoons, coyotes—all the way up to the big predators that used to live here but are gone, like grizzly bears,” says Nate Mantua, a research scientist for NOAA’s Southwest Fishery Science Center in Santa Cruz.
Accumulating 95 percent of their biomass at sea, adult Pacific salmon die after they spawn, and their nutrient-rich carcasses, gametes (mature eggs and sperm) and metabolical waste return to the land. “It’s fascinating that, over the eons, a lot of fertilizer was provided by these dead salmon, so a lot of the wine grapes and a lot of the agriculture inland by the rivers was fertilized by salmon for a long time,” says Randy Repass of the Golden Gate Salmon Association (GGSA), a coalition of salmon advocates based in Petaluma.
Salmon’s yearly return props up an entire food web, replenishing bacteria and algae, bugs and small fish, and fueling plant growth with deposits of nitrogen and phosphorus.
“They fertilized forests as well, there are lots of studies that find salmon’s ocean-derived nutrients in trees that grow along productive salmon watersheds,” says Mantua. “And where we’ve depleted the natural runs of salmon, we’ve really degraded that connection.”
Damming a Species
The largest salmon known to man—with adults often exceeding 40 pounds, and capable of growing to 120 pounds—the chinook (aka king) salmon is the pride and joy of California’s salmon fishery. Not so long ago, the Central Valley watershed was one of the biggest producers of naturally breeding chinook salmon in the world, second only to the Columbia River, with the Klamath River another big California contributor. Driven by the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems, the Central Valley nursed a ballpark average of a few million salmon per year, emerging each spring out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, says Mantua.
“Today, natural production, maybe in a good year is in the hundred thousand or hundreds of thousands,” Mantua says. “So, yeah, it’s a few percent of the historical population.”
In addition to cold ocean water and an ample food supply at sea, salmon require cold river water that drains all the way to the sea, and, during their early life, a delta habitat. Salmon eggs do not survive in water warmer than 56 degrees, which is why adult fish ready to spawn instinctively head toward the cold, upper headwaters and tributaries coming out of the snow-packed mountains.
Development in the ’40s through ’60s, and especially the constructions of dams like the Shasta Dam, built in 1943 on the Sacramento River, played a key role in the near-annihilation of the long-standing fish stock. “When they built the big dams in California, they basically blocked off access to 80 or 90 percent of the habitat salmon historically used to reproduce in California,” says John McManus, executive director of the GGSA.
Fish ladders, which are like a staircase of pools that salmon can jump through to get over the dam and continue their journey upstream, were built on river dams in Oregon and Washington.
“Well, in California when they built dams, they didn’t put a ladder on a single one of them,” says McManus. The problem with building them now is that most of the dams in California are too massive. “A fish ladder will work with a dam that’s up to about 140 feet high,” says McManus. “The dams that we have in California, a lot of them are in the 200-feet-plus range. Now, everybody is forced basically to get along in the valley floor, in whatever habitat’s left over,” says McManus. “It’s kind of a wonder they’re still alive. They’re clinging to existence.”
One solution being discussed on the Yuba and Sacramento rivers is a “trap and haul” plan, which would trap adult salmon who beat their heads against the base of the dams, and give them a ride up over the dam in an elevator, then trap and truck the baby salmon who come back down the river after they’re hatched. But it’s an expensive proposal, says McManus. One such program that may begin at the Shasta Dam in two years is estimated to cost $16 million for the first three years, according to the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which manages Shasta Dam.
California’s four salmon runs—Fall, Late-Fall, Winter and Spring—are named for the time of year they return from the open ocean as adults, after about two to five years spent feasting on smaller fish and krill at sea, and back under the Golden Gate Bridge to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. As of 1989, the winter run had joined the ranks of 130 other endangered and threatened marine species when it was listed as an endangered species under the Federal Endangered Species Act. Ten years later, the spring run was listed as threatened.
It’s the state’s numerous hatcheries, managed by the California Department of Fish and Game, that now propel the strongest fall run, which makes up the bulk of California’s fishery. Not to be confused with farmed salmon—a practice banned for salmon in California—and a far cry from the on-land GMO-raised salmon recently approved by the FDA and projected to hit supermarkets in two years, hatcheries produce about 90 percent of chinook salmon caught in the ocean. But hatcheries are not invulnerable to drought conditions or massive habitat losses in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
“When we have a really good fishing year out in the ocean, it’s because of two things,” says McManus. “We have a good contribution from natural spawning salmon coming out of the Central Valley, and we have a good contribution from the hatcheries.”
Feast or Famine
When I ring Frank Ribeiro’s boat, Gayle R, in the Santa Cruz Yacht Harbor, his answering machine squawks out that there is “no new news!” With an email list of more than 1,000 customers for salmon and Dungeness crab, which he’s been fishing locally since ’71, everyone is clamoring to know if crab season will be called back on. I found Ribeiro—whose reputation as both a damn good fisherman and a notorious flirt echoes up and down the docks—on his boat, cooking a pot of beans. Sitting on the deck, he jokes to a passerby that he’s going to bottle and sell the rain water he’s been collecting in plastic bins when water is scarce this summer. “Like when they canned San Francisco fog and made a killing selling it as souvenirs,” he says. “I’ve got to make a living somehow.”
Last year, Ribeiro took the salmon season off. “There were some fish up north, but not much down here. They said it was going to be a bumper year, but it wasn’t,” he says. “We haven’t had any water in the rivers. They claim that there is a lot of fish trying to go up the rivers, but we don’t know what’s going on. We won’t know until we go fishing.”
If you can catch 200-300 pounds of fish, you can make a living, he says, and if you can get more than 1,000 pounds you’re pretty much set. “I’ve done OK,” he says, pausing to greet E dock’s resident seagull, P.P. “I’ll always fish, as long as I’m alive.”
With a house in the Azores and one in Santa Cruz, Ribeiro, now 70, represents a generation of old timers who weathered both good and bad years, but for whom the good years outnumbered the bad.
“When I first started, the piers were loaded,” says Wilson Quick, who began fishing out of Santa Cruz in 1966 with his dad, and continues to fish for salmon up and down the coast on his boat Sun Ra. “All of that stock was nothing but a solid commercial fleet. I would say there were at least 60 salmon boats in the Santa Cruz harbor in the beginning.”
Today, there are 25 boats with commercial salmon permits, according to Hans Haveman of H&H Fresh Fish Co., who has also been the official fish buyer at the Santa Cruz Harbor for the past three years.
Following a period of abundance in the late ’80s and then again in the late ’90s and early 2000s, California’s salmon season was closed in 2008 and 2009, due to a population crash that scientists at NOAA in Santa Cruz found was due to a lack of upwelling and the subsequent low production of krill, one of salmon’s dietary staples.
“The population has undergone a modest rebound since then, but it still has not reached the abundance that we observed in the late ’90s and early 2000s,” says Michael O’Farrell, a research fish biologist at NOAA.
“To be honest, I haven’t had a good year since I have taken over. Even from last year, being a decent year, there was barely enough for my farmers markets,” says Haveman, whose top-selling fish at H&H is salmon. “It’s sad because it used to be what everybody put on their barbecue, and in the last couple years it’s turned into a ‘birthday fish,’ as I call it, because people can only buy a little piece of it at $25 per pound.”
The inception of farmed salmon during the abundant ’90s had a huge impact on local fishermen, whose price was brought down to 97 cents per pound, says Haveman. “Now it’s come full circle. People learn more about farmed fish, and they’re breaking down the door for wild fish,” says Haveman, who says prices are now around $5 to $8 per pound off the docks.
According to McManus, California’s salmon fishery, currently estimated at around $1.4 billion and employing 23,000, would be more like $6 billion if abundance was restored to 1988 levels. “And that money gets spread all over; it’s the guy at the fuel docks who’s getting money for fuel, it’s the guy at the boatyard who had to fix your boat, it’s the guy who sells the trailers, runs the harbor, fishing equipment,” says McManus.
About 60 percent of salmon caught in Washington and Oregon are Central Valley fish, he adds, so it’s not just our economy that gets hurt during bad fishing years.
While Quick says he’s seen an increase in small sardines, a potential good sign for salmon, Greg Ambiel, who has been fishing salmon locally for 30 years, is not hedging any bets for this coming season.
“The fish are being killed in the Central Valley before they get a chance to get to the ocean,” says Ambiel. “If you follow the money, that’s who gets the water. It’s simple, just go look at the almond trees in the Central Valley.”
Indeed, over the last few years, a fairly drastic shift has occurred, with high-profit almond crops replacing raisin grapes and other less profitable crops in the Central Valley. The problem for salmon is that it takes a gallon of water to produce one almond—which is three times more water than it takes to produce a grape—according to a study published in 2011 at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Water demands for agriculture are a known contributor to an estimated 95 percent loss of salmon’s critical rearing ground in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
The success of the 2016 season also relies on the survival rate of the juveniles who went to sea in the spring of 2014. “That was a transition year from what looked like really good ocean conditions in 2012, 2013, the spring of 2014. But by the fall of that year, it started to look really bad,” says Mantua, who says ocean temperatures remained warmer than normal for all of 2015, which is not favorable.
Two weeks ago, O’Farrell began the process of calculating 2016 abundance forecasts for both the Sacramento and Klamath rivers and tributaries—based on data that includes the return of fish the previous fall. Each March, he reports the number to the Pacific Fishery Management Council, who then sets the season in April.
“Where we’re at right now, we’ve come out of the very low abundance periods of 2008 and 2009, but we don’t know exactly what the returns are for this past year,” says O’Farrell. “There are some issues that we are monitoring with regard to the effects of drought and ocean conditions. It’s hard to say which way the population’s going to go at this point, but we’ll have more information on that in a couple of months.”
Hatch-22
Under ideal conditions, a hatchery will produce a lot more juvenile salmon smolts that are ready to go to the ocean from a single pair of parents than could be produced in the wild. “Wild fish are spawning in gravels—some of those eggs may not get fertilized, some are going to get preyed upon by other fish or birds, some might not successfully hatch, and then once they hatch, the fry are going to be subject to lots of predation risk. So a lot of those fish end up getting eaten before they are big enough to go to sea,” says Mantua. “For a pair of natural spawning salmon, maybe in a really good year they’ll produce 50 or a hundred smolts, but for a pair of spawning adults in a hatchery, they might produce 5,000.”
But drought can tip those odds considerably: for the past two years, 95 percent of winter-run salmon were killed off by low water levels and high temperatures in the Sacramento River, and 98 percent of salmon eggs perished in the Red Bluff area this year. The drought also left Lake Shasta at low levels. Such conditions that hurt the winter run are not good for the other runs either, says McManus.
Heavy rains not only raise river levels to help salmon down the river, they also raise water turbidity, which acts as a cloaking device against predators. The last year that happened was in the winter of 2010-2011, says McManus. “It started raining in October, and it didn’t really stop until June. So, in a situation like that, in spite of the dam, there’s so much water everywhere that it mimics the way it used to be in the good old days before the dams,” he says. “In fact, you get a bunch of runoff coming down even below the dams. So in situations like that, survival of the juvenile salmon is quite high.”
In 2014, to avoid high loss of baby salmon due to low, clear water conditions during drought, the GGSA began encouraging all of the state’s hatcheries to truck their productions down to the bay to release them safely. Of five major hatcheries, which collectively produce around 32 million juvenile salmon, says McManus, two were already trucking 100 percent of their production, and by 2015, GGSA had gotten the other three to also give their smolts a ride—which is expensive.
“The biggest hatchery we have in the Central Valley is called the Coleman Hatchery, up by Redding,” McManus says. “It produces 12.5 million juvenile salmon every year, and it’s around 280 miles from the Bay. You can fit about 120,000 in a tanker truck, so if you think about it, that’s over 300 truckloads.”
This means there could be a fairly good chunk of hatchery-produced salmon out in the ocean this year—and old enough to be fished—as a result of the 2014 trucking, says McManus.
But while scientists and fishermen agree that trucking prompted an increase in survival, Steve Lindley, leader of the Fisheries Ecology Division at NOAA, says that the practice is the only GGSA-backed idea that his lab does not agree with.
“We have serious concerns about the longterm consequences of those practices for the genetic integrity of the stock,” says Lindley. When salmon make their way down the river on their own, they use their sense of smell to memorize their way back. “When they’re trucked, the fish can’t find their way back to where they were born very accurately, and they end up going all over the place, and they interbreed with each other.”
Inbreeding is especially detrimental to endangered fish, whose low numbers increase the probability. “It causes fish to die before they can reproduce,” says John Carlos Garza, a research geneticist at NOAA. Garza, who was recently dubbed “The Fish Matchmaker” in the New York Times, is currently working to provide DNA-based elucidation of kin relationships to conservation hatcheries. In the wild, salmon are more likely to recognize close kin to avoid breeding with them. “In the hatcheries, typically, it’s a haphazard process,” says Garza. “They’re sticking this big bucket into the tank, and taking whoever comes up first in line, first male, first female.” The genetic markers involve a noninvasive fin clipping, and is especially important for small hatcheries. “It essentially adds back in the element of inbreeding avoidance that occurs in natural populations to the hatchery environment,” he says.
Restoring Hope
While the Central Valley Improvement Act, passed in 1992, ambitiously hoped to double the number of salmon and steelhead trout in the Sacramento River basin over the past 22 years, they’ve fallen short. While their goal was to see 86,000 spring-run chinook salmon spawning in the Central Valley by 2012, the number was just 30,522. Federal officials cited obstacles such as drought, competing demands for water and lack of funding.
But Lindley points to success stories in Central Valley wetland restoration in places like Clear Creek and Butte Creek. “These shallow areas that are nurseries for salmon, those populations have done very well, even during the poor ocean and drought periods,” he says. “So it’s not a lost cause. But we do really need to address some of these habitat issues, and find a way to operate salmon hatcheries in a way that supports our fisheries without imperiling their long-term liability. We’re really keen on working with GGSA and the fishing community and the broader fish and water communities to try to find those kind of solutions.”
The GGSA is also working with researchers at NOAA to identify areas of high predation along the river and delta, to try to restore some of the historic rearing areas where the fish can pick up weight and size and find refuge from predators.
“The public awareness is basically the water issues in the Central Valley,” says Haveman. “This is the most vital resource and everybody can access here in California, and it starts in that river system and ends on the dinner plate.”
Lindley thinks that the California WaterFix plan is a step in the right direction as far as making the state a little more resistant to drought and helping revive fish populations. The $20 billion program would utilize pumps and tunnels under the delta that would allow water to be taken out more efficiently. In the current system, a large amount of freshwater is pumped into the delta during the summer months to keep saltwater out, which is not only a waste of water but creates a big lake-like environment for freshwater fish to eat juvenile salmon, says Lindley.
There has been success on the Columbia River since 2005, when water managers were required to begin opening the reservoirs every springtime, says McManus.
“It’s worked wonders. The salmon runs in the Columbia River have rebounded big time. And it’s because of this runoff, it’s artificial runoff but it mimics natural runoff, and it functions exactly the same way. It carries the baby salmon in that camouflaged turbidity rapidly down the river, which is all you need,” McManus says. “So, in California, if we had something like that we would see a real beneficial result, rapidly.”
Prepare to Engage
The Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department is slated to be the first agency in California to implement all 79 of President Obama’s 21st Century Policing recommendations. Working with a community task force, the sheriff plans to identify the best way to provide an effective partnership between the community and law enforcement. It boils down to wanting to increase trust.
“In my 27 years in law enforcement I have never seen this level of public concern about police integrity,” said Sheriff Jim Hart during a community meeting the sheriff’s department hosted on Jan. 21.
Hart says these concerns have caused people to question police tactics, judgment and motives. “I believe that by reviewing our policy model and making some modifications, shifting our thinking, and being open to positive change, we will be a model as an exemplary law enforcement agency,” he said.
In response to ongoing nationwide concerns about policing, Obama signed an executive order forming a task force to pinpoint areas of improvement for law enforcement agencies in December 2014. The ensuing report, released in May, has spurred some law enforcement agencies, like the local sheriff’s department, to begin thinking about a shift.
Hart assigned a task force of 20 deputies and 20 community members to examine and discuss the recommendations.
At the event, which Congressmember Anna Eshoo attended, deputies announced plans to purchase body cameras, another move Obama has pushed for, although some activists have mixed feelings, based on privacy concerns.
Rico Baker, a member of the Veterans for Peace Santa Cruz Chapter, tells GT he’s inspired that Hart is on board with the new task force, calling it groundbreaking.
The community team, which includes Baker, is focusing on topics ranging from the best way to reintegrate convicted juveniles to the most effective way to involve the community in developing and evaluating procedures.
The sheriff’s department is poised to finish this project in July. County Supervisor John Leopold said the board of supervisors will be reviewing what the sheriff’s department develops.
Not Digging It
Colorful streamers weave in and out of the metal fence to the Beach Flats Community Garden, framing a large sign proclaiming “Save the Garden” and creating a vivid display for cars whizzing by on Third Street in Santa Cruz.
Garden supporters created the artwork to bring continued attention to the community garden after a recent decision by the Santa Cruz City Council asking gardeners to vacate the garden in order to reconfigure it.
The notice to vacate was an unexpected addendum to a resolution passed on Oct. 27, when the City Council voted unanimously to “negotiate with the goal of acquisition of the current Beach Flats Garden property to allow it to continue permanently as a community garden operated by the city.”
This sounded like a win for gardeners and community supporters, who have been in limbo since March of last year, when the city issued a notice that the Seaside Company, which owns the land, would be reclaiming most of the parcel for its own landscaping purposes. “After the resolution, the gardeners put lots of trust in the city,” garden supporter Senka Pavisic says.
Then in January, the council issued new terms to the gardeners. City officials said that they would only negotiate with the Seaside Company to buy the land if the gardeners were to vacate the premises on Jan. 20, something the gardeners have yet to do. They are also calling on gardeners to sign a letter wherein they agree to surrender 40 percent of the land to the Seaside Company, which owns the land and the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. The city plans to reconfigure the remaining parcel.
“I have garlic that is this high,” he says, using his fingers to indicate about 6 inches. “What am I supposed to do? Tear it up? It is just a little baby.”
“We’ve been trying to work with the gardeners because that is what we have a lease for,” city manager Martín Bernal says, stressing that the original date to leave was November and that originally the remaining garden would be much smaller.
City officials point out that there are two projects in play. The first is reconfiguring a smaller, interim garden on the 60 percent of the land the Seaside Company has agreed to lease to the city for the next three years. The second is making a plan for a long-term community garden in the city.
Bernal says that before they can move forward in negotiations with the Seaside Company, they first need to return the 40 percent of the land that the city does not have a lease for. “It is hard to negotiate with someone when you haven’t even complied with the first thing you said you would do,” he says.
The notice to leave part of the land was still disheartening to the gardeners and their supporters. “I thought they were going to help us, but now it seems like they are not,” says Don Emilio Martinez Castañeda, a founder of the garden and 25-year resident. His plot is on the 40 percent slated for removal. For him, moving his plot would mean losing his decades-old nopales cactus and over two decades of investment in the soil. “I have garlic that is this high,” he says, using his fingers to indicate about 6 inches. “What am I supposed to do? Tear it up? It is just a little baby.”
Castañeda helped write and submit a letter to city council on Jan. 25, which was signed by 17 gardeners. The letter states that the gardeners “are confident that the city will do everything it can to purchase the land” and calls for “a more favorable solution for all.” The letter ends by stating that the undersigned gardeners intend to continue gardening the entire plot.
Only one signed the letter that the city sent them. The group launched a fundraising campaign on Monday, Feb. 1, to try and help the city purchase the space.
“Many of the gardeners are focused on the entire garden,” says Director of Parks and Recreation Dannettee Shoemaker. She has been trying to work with gardeners to redesign the smaller interim garden, but has had trouble finding willing participants.
Their cause has gotten some high-profile attention. United Farmworkers co-founder Dolores Huerta toured the garden on Nov. 13, offering words of encouragement. “There’s people out there that are manipulating the food supply, so we have to counter that with things like a community garden,” Huerta said. A few days later, rock icon Patti Smith, who was in town with her new book, endorsed the fight on stage, saying “Let’s save our gardens! We don’t need any more fucking buildings!”
The gardeners and supporters hope that the community response, as well as the vitality of the garden to the community, can turn their situation around. “This garden is essential for the community. It is food security,” says Pavisic. “There are plenty of places that the Seaside Company can put their landscaping business. If we lose the garden, who gets hurt in that situation? Seaside doesn’t, the city doesn’t, the community does.”
Amidst the back and forth, the future of the garden remains uncertain, even to city officials. “How it will turn out?” says Shoemaker. “Honestly, I’m not sure.”
Opinion
EDITOR’S NOTE
Back at my first newspaper job at the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian, I wrote a story about how the long-term projections for the California salmon population were alarming. Two decades later, those numbers didn’t turn out to be accurate. In fact, the reality is far worse than what scientists and fishermen were able to imagine then.
Maria Grusauskas’ cover story this week explains why. From rising ocean temperatures to how an unforeseen crop trend in the Central Valley is killing off salmon before they even reach the Monterey Bay, her story puts together the pieces to create a clear picture of how we got here.
Just as importantly, it explains why it matters. Salmon play a remarkable role in shaping our ecosystem that very few of us understand—but after reading this story, you will.
Lastly, a quick update, also on the topic of conservation and our link to the natural world: last year, I wrote about Santa Cruz’s internationally renowned nature photographer Frans Lanting, and mentioned he would be doing a show locally in 2016 featuring his photos from the Monterey Bay. That event, “Fran’s Lanting’s Bay of Life,” is coming to the Rio this Saturday, Feb. 6. Lanting will share images and stories at two shows, at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. For ticket information, go to lanting.com.
STEVE PALOPOLI | EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Read the latest letters to the editor here.
Bottled Up
Re: “Bubbling Up” (GT, 1/27): I applaud Mr. Ow’s forward thinking (as always) and the realization of his dreams with the Westside project. He has created less expensive space for inventors and artists, which is sorely needed in Santa Cruz’s ever-more-costly rental market.
One thing only, regarding LifeAID/FitAID, athletes have more than their share of healthy beverages shelf space. The cost to the already plastic-polluted environment and of additional water usage are a definite downside, and I think leasing/rental agents should reconsider signing with bottled-drink entrepreneurs.
Kathy Cheer
Santa Cruz
Bad Strategy
Re: “Fury Road” (GT, 12/23): Freeway protests are bad strategy. They frighten and endanger and alienate people who are not responsible for the problem being protested against. They lose support. Social change only happens when there is widespread support for the change. Blocking freeways and airports attracts attention, but gains no support, no solidarity.
History shows us many truly effective ways to change a societal problem, ways that do not just end up looking like a tantrum. Blockading corporate offices, arms factories, polluting businesses, etc. also get attention but make sense and deal directly with those responsible. Organized actions that do not cause problems for passers-by show consideration for the public, so the public is more inclined to pay attention to the idea and to support it. Lining overpasses and sides of freeways with signs and banners for miles, without harassment of bystanders, without blocking traffic, would make drivers feel communicated with, not hassled and endangered and unfairly blamed. Successful protests are those that gain more and more support for the cause. Successful protests involve real strategy.
Kathleen Miller
Aptos
Online Comments
Re: ‘Catching Fiber’
This partnership is one of the best things the City of Santa Cruz has ever undertaken. As an IT professional, I can’t find anything bad about this project. The benefits are numerous and widespread. The risks are extremely minimal. Everyone wins, except maybe Comcast and AT&T. Personally, it can’t get here fast enough for me.
— John Rickard
Re: ‘Bubbling Up’
Hi Kara Guzman. So well-written. Thank you for putting such good and thorough energy into this story. I know the story well and am very impressed by your research and understanding of the building and businesses.
— George Ow, Jr.
There are other great businesses in the building, too. Tao San Fitness & Martial Arts was one of the first few business to rent space in the building. When we first moved in, there was only drywall and concrete floors. Now we have a beautiful, 3,000-plus square-foot studio space with 18 hanging heavy bags for our Fit-Boxing classes, as well as a separate room for Personal Training, Self-Defense and Martial Arts classes.
— Salvetoria Larter
Re: Rail of a Trail
We do not need a train at astronomical prices running through our town. Pull up the tracks and put in a trail, it will get way more use and is more ecological. I could go on and on, but just ask who profits by a rail to be subsidized at $12 million a year.
— Tom Haid
Thanks for the article. I do not understand why anyone would be against this. A bargain at twice the price. Once people start to see what this can be, they are going to be so thankful that so many worked hard to make this happen for our county. Although [it’s true that] the Capitola/Santa Cruz leg is needed the most, it seems to me that the first legs that are being completed are easier to accomplish. It’s important for people to see how great this is going to be so that they will support the entire thing.
— Linda Rosewood
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GOOD IDEA
RIDE ON
The Box Bike Collective, a new Santa Cruz-based business, has started building innovative, easy-to-ride cargo bicycles and launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund them. The bikes have a box behind the front wheel, making it easier to carry kids, groceries and surfboards, and a battery to help with the pedaling, says founder Alex Yasbek. He says he always loved bike commuting and decided he didn’t want to give it up when he had a kid.
GOOD WORK
CURTAIN CALL
We’d like to take a second to honor the service of Dennis Popper, also known as TuPop Sha-Corn, the hardest-working—or at least funniest-named—popcorn maker in the business. The popcorn maker is now gone, and its former home, Aptos Cinemas, has been gutted. The 45-year-old institution closed Jan. 26, after Landmark Theatres announced its lease at the Rancho Del Mar Shopping Center had not been renewed. Thanks for the memories, Mr. Popper. You always left us feeling buttered up.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Someone may offer you a freshly caught whole large fish, like a salmon or striped bass. Don’t panic. Take it!â€
-Julia Child
Joint Committee
As he points out items in his 41st Avenue shop, Jarrad Pecoraro, the director of Herbal Cruz, sounds more like Willy Wonka than a marijuana expert.
“Over here we have everything from ice cream and frozen popsicles to blueberries covered in chocolate, espresso beans covered in chocolate and candy bars of every flavor,” he says.
Along with more than 100 strains of cannabis flowers—the buds and blossoms that most people think of when they imagine cannabis—Herbal Cruz’s shelves boast iced teas, bubble gum, medicinal balms and ointments, saltwater taffy, cupcakes and cookies. Unlike what’s available on the black market, everything at Herbal Cruz has been properly weighed and lab tested to ensure patients know what they are getting.
Scores of cities and a half a dozen counties have approved bans [on cannabis]. “The term in the industry is ‘Banapalooza.’’’
But not everything is sweet for the medical marijuana industry, with growers and patients trying to navigate an ever-changing landscape of marijuana laws and enforcement policies. Cultivation laws have been the blazing question at the center of the cannabis issue both in Santa Cruz County and across the nation.
Locally, a 13-member advisory panel called the Cannabis Cultivation Choices Committee—or C4, for short—was chosen last year by the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors to tackle that question. Five of the C4’s members were chosen to represent county supervisors and their constituents; five more were picked to represent the cannabis industry; and three members were added for their “knowledge of land use, neighborhood issues, environmental protection or the medicinal value of cannabis.”
But while the C4 was poring over details last October, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the Medicinal Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act (MMRSA). The bill not only formed the Bureau of Medicinal Marijuana Regulation, but also set a controversial March 1 deadline for all cities and counties to present regulatory and licensing programs—a provision lawmakers say slipped in by accident. A bill is currently awaiting a vote in the assembly to undo the “mistake.”
In the meantime, many communities have responded by completely banning cannabis altogether. So far, scores of cities and a half a dozen counties have approved bans.
“The term in the industry is ‘Banapalooza,’’’ says Patrick Malo, co-founder of Santa Cruz’s Cannabis Advocates Alliance (CAA), and a C4 member.
In Weed We Trust
Instead of giving in, the C4 is working to sort out the complex issues that swirl around a booming industry.
There are currently 18 states that allow medicinal use, and in the last four years, five states have legalized recreational cannabis use. ArcView Market Research, based in Oakland, estimates the value of California’s legal cannabis industry was a whopping $1.3 billion in 2015.
Business is blossoming locally, as well. Between November 2014 and October 2015, Santa Cruz County marijuana tax revenues of $1.95 million exceeded officials’ estimates. Patients pay the standard 8.25 percent sales tax as they would for any product at any other store. On top of that, the 14 regional brick-and-mortar dispensaries also pay an additional 7 percent tax, exclusive to their industry.
“We don’t pass that on to our patients,” Pecoraro says.
Despite the rise in recreational and medicinal cannabis use throughout the country, the cultivation of commercial cannabis has a sticky history, thanks to rapidly changing laws—and it’s been no different in Santa Cruz County. In 2014, the Board of Supervisors ratified County Code 7.126, which legalized cultivation for commercial medicinal use, limiting farmers to 99 plants. Many advocates in the cannabis community believed this was problematic due to the difference in size between outdoor and indoor yields. It also raised concern because it called for all farmers in the county to be tied to a local dispensary, while most cultivators elsewhere service several dispensaries throughout the state.
A year later, everything went up in smoke.
In March of 2015, citing environmental concerns along with neighborhood complaints of light and noise pollution, the board repealed 7.126, ratifying a new ordinance that banned commercial cultivation and limited each grow to a 100-square-foot space for personal use only. The new language also removed much of the limited protection given to farmers.
Anxiety ignited soon after, with reform-minded grower groups like the CAA forming in direct response to that proposed ban. “Santa Cruz has a long history of progressive politics, and has always been a leader on the cannabis front,” explains Malo.
Two months later, advocates filed a ballot referendum to repeal the changes, gaining 11,210 signatures, well over the 7,248 signatures needed to qualify. Afraid of losing at the ballot, the board repealed its ban, reverted back to the previous rules and created the C4 committee to craft some innovative reforms.
Consensus Builders
The committee was designed to draw up specific recommendations for the legal, commercial cultivation of cannabis within the county while taking into consideration the concerns of patients and neighborhoods. It also aims to provide a framework for the county to cope with pot legalization, which many expect California voters to approve this year.
So far, the C4 has gone on field trips to dispensaries, farms and areas damaged by mismanaged farms. And with stakeholders that have wildly different views, the process has been anything but speedy. But it has helped create the framework for a new licensing program that County Counsel Dana McRae introduced in December.
The Medical Cannabis Cultivation Licensing Program appoints an officer to distribute one of two licenses for cultivation—a “Cottage Garden” license for 200 square feet of covered space or a large-scale cultivator license for 500 square feet. The program also calls for several suggestions discussed by the C4, including lifting the “county only” sale regulations to allow farmers to supply dispensaries throughout the state. (Pecoraro estimates 70 percent of Herbal Cruz’s items come from within Santa Cruz County.) The program set a March 1 deadline for the C4 to work out the details.
In its Jan. 21 meeting, the C4 took a vote on the details of how the state’s latest rules will now affect growers in the coming years. Most of the meeting was spent balancing the best way to protect the sanctity and safety of county neighborhoods with the livelihoods of farmers and the health of patients.
“The problems the neighborhoods faced that caused the county to put the reactive ban in the first place are real problems associated with an unregulated market,” Malo says. “We’re trying to form a regulated market to bring in the people who have been doing their very best to follow the law.”
Be Our Guest: BANFF MOUNTAIN FILM FESTIVAL
Win tickets to the BANFF MOUNTAIN FILM FESTIVAL at The Rio Theatre on SantaCruz.com Celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, the Banff Mountain Film Festival takes film lovers on incredible journeys from the tops of mountain peaks down to raging rivers and everything in between. The Banff Mountain Film Festival tour, which runs Feb. 19-21, brings...
Love Your Local Band: Mark London & The SuperGreens
Mark London and the Supergreens are all about community involvement. When the masterminds behind Santa Cruz’s Hibernation Fest aren’t tracking down locals to join them onstage at the Crepe Place, they’re operating DIY record label Invertebrate Records, in addition to running a blog, “Two-Track Tuesdays,” where they feature music from local artists every week.
Their own musical influences range in...
Wine and Chocolate
West Cliff Wines gets its game on, plus a brand new chocolate cafe on Center Street
Not Digging It
Plan to reconfigure Beach Flats Community Garden rankles activists, but the future is uncertain
