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Enter for a chance to win a $50 gift certificate for Rosie McCann's Irish Pub & Restaurant in Santa Cruz. Drawing Date is November 19, 2026.

Gillian Greensite, a longtime local activist and mayoral candidate in the primary election, officially endorsed Ryan Coonerty for Santa Cruz Mayor on Thursday. She said that she believes Coonerty is the best choice for the city leadership role, that she and Coonerty hold common ground on overbuilding, and likes his idea of posting a public dashboard with data on city progress across multiple areas.

Enter for a chance to win a $50 gift certificate to The Crow's Nest Restaurant in Santa Cruz. Drawing Date is December 3, 2026.

Santa Cruz County will reinstate its seasonal mask requirement in all skilled nursing facilities and infusion centers beginning Nov. 1, requiring employees, visitors and other non-patients to wear face masks indoors.

The requirement was issued by Public Health Officer Dr. Lisa Hernandez in response to an uptick in respiratory viruses common between fall and spring. Hernandez said the county has already seen an increase in respiratory viruses in the community, as seen by wastewater testing. This is the fourth year a seasonal mask mandate has gone into effect.

“This Order is intended to protect people who are most vulnerable to serious illness, including hospitalization and death,” Hernandez said in a media release.

The California Department of Public Health also encourages community members to get vaccinated against the flu, COVID-19 and RSV. All of the respiratory vaccine recommendations can be found here.

The post Santa Cruz County reinstates mask requirement in skilled nursing facilities, infusion centers appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Candidates for Watsonville’s District 5 and 7 city council seats discussed a variety of issues impacting the city, including Flock Safety cameras, infrastructure and economic development during a Lookout election forum.

As our one-week August vacation was nearing an end in Zacatecas, Mexico, my wife Sarah and I had been to around 20 dance performances around the colonial city during the weeklong International Dance Festival.

In between the heavy dose of world culture, from Poland to the Canary Islands, France, Chile and all over Mexico, we felt fortunate to have such a rich blast of culture at our fingertips. And it was all free. 

STREETWISE Each year the International Folclor Festival wraps up with a grand parade that files through downtown Zacatecas.

The festival winds down with a colossal parade through town where townspeople flood the main drag of downtown for a view of the action.

Zacatecas is an easy city to visit on foot. The curvy, winding streets offer a colorful, rich blend of both shops and street vendors with benches sprinkled all over the city for rest stops. We found one street vendor who sold all kinds of copperware, from tiny, miniature toys and bowls, to large kettles and huge cook pots. I bought a cooking apron from a street vendor who was doing a brisk business. It cost around $12. I saw the identical apron, with the colorful letters ZACATECAS embroidered on the front a week later in a supermarket in Watsonville for twice the price. 

BIG COLOR The streets of Zacatecas, Mexico, radiate bright colors.

Several times was passed by a friendly street vendor with his burro named Frank in tow. He offered some form of alcoholic beverage in large wooden jugs strapped to the burro’s back. Almost every evening we stumbled on loud, wandering parties known as callejoneada. They are typically  a wedding or birthday celebration that incorporate live musicians, dancing and a burro who carries the drinks. Anyone can stop and join in and be part of the mobile celebration.

SHARING CULTURES Folk dancers from Croatia treat the crowd to traditional steps and attire.

Open air markets in Mexico are one of the biggest draws for us. From Oaxaca to Mexico City, Chiapas, Ensenada or Veracruz, the markets are often the town hub, the heart of Mexico that all else seems to revolve around. Blend that in with the weeklong open air dance festival in Zacatecas, street musicians, tasty gorditas, and dramatic early day architecture and it’s quite the mix.

In the final chapter of my story, I’ll share photos of the dance festival finale. 

The 2026 Billionaire Tax Act is dominating airwaves this election season as Californians get ready to vote on the nation’s first wealth tax.

Also known as the Billionaire Tax, Proposition 40 creates a one-time 5% wealth tax on taxpayers with over $1 billion in assets. 90% of the revenue will be spent on public healthcare and the other 10% on education, food assistance and administrating the tax. 

This tax affects the roughly 250 billionaires who hold a collective $2.4 trillion in wealth. As of Sept. 28, it is expected to generate around $109 billion for California, according to California Billionaire Wealth Tracker.

The Legislative Analyst Office found the state tax would “probably” collect tens of billions of dollars from the wealth tax spread across several years, but that potential wealth flight could reduce state revenues by less than $1 billion per year. 

The tax is retroactive, meaning it affects billionaires residing in California as of Jan. 1, 2026. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, retroactive taxes are standard practice and the Supreme Court has approved this approach in previous matters. This element is threatened if Proposition 42 passes.

Directly held real estate, pensions and traditional retirement accounts are excluded. Roth accounts are excluded up to $10 million, as well as up to $5 million of art, cars and personal property.

Prop. 40 has been spearheaded by the healthcare union SEIU-UHW and is supported by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, CA 17th District Rep. Ro Khanna, California Labor Federation, California Democratic Party and Teamsters CA.

According to Dave Regan, president of SEIU-UHW West, Prop. 40 is a direct response to H.R. 1, also known as President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.

The LAO projects that California could see an annual shortfall of $20 billion to $35 billion by the fiscal year 2027-2028 as a result of H.R. 1. Regan said Prop. 40 is the solution “to this problem that’s a freight train coming at us.”

“This is an incredibly modest and relatively speaking small tax against the gargantuan wealth held by these people, and it’s all to avert a public health catastrophe,” Regan said. 

According to economists Emmanuel Saez of University of California, Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman of the Paris School of Economics, California billionaires saw wealth increases of an average of over 15% per year and paid on average 0.26 of their wealth annually in state income taxes—accounting for 2.4% of California’s income tax revenue. 

“The income tax is irrelevant to [billionaires],” Regan said. “The billionaire’s wealth does not come in the form of wages and salaries, and what we’ve seen in the last 10 to 20 years is this incredible accumulation of wealth, not income, but wealth concentrated at the very, very upper level of our state.”

Regan said this tax is intended to be a one-time “temporary bridge” while legislators figure out a long-term solution. 

Support for the proposition is split among party lines. The San Francisco Democratic Party voted to oppose Prop. 40 against its state party. Gov. Gavin Newsom and gubernatorial candidates Xavier Becerra and Steve Hilton are also against the tax, along with CA 3rd District Rep. Kevin Kiley, California Professional Firefighters and the California Teachers Association.

Opponents say the one-time tax would not produce the long-term funding needed to counteract the effects of H.R. 1. 

In a press release, CTA said it “determined that this policy will not provide the sustainable and long-lasting funding that our schools and communities deserve.”

Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California opposes Prop. 40, citing a lack of accountability and specificity on how funds would support patients and healthcare providers. 

Its staffers launched their own campaign in favor of Prop. 40, signing a public letter to PPAC CEO Jodi Hicks, saying her “position stands in direct conflict with the mission and values this organization was created to uphold.”

According to a Truthdig investigation, 22 California billionaires, most notably Google co-founder Sergey Brin, have spent a combined $150 million to oppose the initiative and endorse Propositions 41 and 42, which could nullify Prop. 40 if all three pass. SEIU-UHW and other supporters have spent $36 million on the campaign.

Ryan Coonerty in an interview with Santa Cruz Local on Sept. 19. (Amaya Edwards — Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local)

SANTA CRUZ >> Ryan Coonerty has secured the endorsement of Gillian Greensite, a former opponent in the June primary, in the race for Santa Cruz Mayor. Greensite said she chose to endorse him over his opponent Ami Chen Mills because he shifted his attitude towards large new developments, a core frustration of Greensite and her supporters. 

As a staunch environmentalist, Greensite has at times opposed large new housing developments. Conversations between her and Coonerty, and recent proposals for large housing, have led him to take a more aggressive attitude towards what he sees as oversized developments, the two said in a press conference Thursday.

Her support is “because of the issues I ran on,” she said. “I think he’s the best person, as well as being very experienced, to bring them to fruition.”

Coonerty said his overall position on housing has remained the same, and that he evaluates housing proposals “project by project.” 

“The change of the rhetoric,” he said, is because “some of these projects are so incredibly bad that they deserve to be called out.”

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Greensite won 11.1% of the vote in the June primary. Coonerty had 47.8%, and Chen Mills had 20.5%. 

Greensite’s endorsement

A core plank of Greensite’s campaign was her concern that the city was allowing too much housing. While Coonerty didn’t share that rhetoric during the primary, “everything that I brought forward that had helped him change his mind about that issue, and in talking about it with him, I feel that we have common ground,” she said. 

Greensite has been called a progressive activist, a label she shares with opposing mayoral candidate Chen Mills, and the three other candidates of the June primary.

But, “right from the beginning of the campaign,” she said, “I made it very clear to everybody that I was running an independent campaign on specific issues, and that I was not wanting to be part of any slate, or group.”

Greensite has supported Coonerty’s push for more data-gathering about the city’s housing — she remains skeptical that below-market-rate housing is being occupied by people who already lived in Santa Cruz — and his history of negotiating with UC Santa Cruz to protect the city’s interests.

Coonerty also has close ties with some local developers. He helped scout a site for affordable housing developer The Danco Group — eventually landing on the Downtown location of Dell Williams owned by Coonerty’s wife and mother in law. 

He was hired by RedTree Partners to help them close out lease negotiations between them, the City of Santa Cruz and UCSC for a 161-unit housing project for UCSC students and staff on Delaware Avenue. He’s also helped in negotiations about the proposed Downtown hotel, and a proposed Warriors stadium redevelopment. 

He doesn’t see a conflict of interest with his potential role as a mayor, “I see it as really relevant experience,” he said in September.

Ryan Coonerty was hired by RedTree Partners to help with negotiations between the developer, the city and the university for Delaware Addition. The project finished construction in May. (Nik Altenberg — Santa Cruz Local file)

As a consultant, “my role was to work with the city, when relevant with UCSC, and with the building owner to get to a solution,” that would allow the project to move forward, he said. “In some ways, that’ll be the same thing that I’ll be doing, but on behalf of the residents.”

He added, “there are projects and developers that I have turned down over the years working with because I don’t believe they’re doing the right thing.”

Coonerty’s views on housing

Ahead of the June primary, Coonerty said that city leaders must be realistic about their ability to block or change new housing developments. 

“When the city has authority, we need to use it to protect neighborhoods from out-of-scale development,” Coonerty told Santa Cruz Local in May. At the same time, “pretending like we can go back and just stop every project is lying to people, and it’s not how you should be running a government.” 

In a September interview, he said that recent housing proposals, including a six-story project in Seabright, has led him to reconsider his attitude.

“The city has to be more aggressive in pursuing legal options” to stop or curtail projects with large amounts of community pushback, he said.

A full description of Coonerty’s platform is forthcoming in Santa Cruz Local’s Election Guide on Oct. 5.

At the Thursday press conference, Coonerty said that his overall political view of housing policy remains constant, and that he’s opposed some projects in the past.

Greensite’s influence, he said, is more about the strategies the city could use to push back on state mandates. “What are the levers we have? What is the data we need to provide? Where are the opportunities to fight?” he said. 

The two aren’t aligned on all issues — Greensite opposed the Downtown library and affordable housing project, which Coonerty supported — but Greensite said she believes Coonerty is best positioned to shape the future of housing in Santa Cruz. 

“I feel Ryan is the stronger, the better candidate,” she said.

The post Greensite endorses Coonerty as he shifts his tone on ‘oversized’ housing appeared first on Santa Cruz Local.

With the weekend nearly here, check out things to do around Santa Cruz County, with a recommendation from Lily Belli and a specially curated list from Lookout's BOLO events calendar.

There are four open seats on the Pajaro Valley Unified School District board up for election on the Nov. 3 ballot. (Amaya Edwards — Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local)

WATSONVILLE >> All three candidates vying for the Pajaro Valley Unified School District’s Trustee Area 5 seat will remain on the November ballot, despite one candidate being arrested for allegedly lying about living in the district and the other withdrawing.

Candidate Curt Wilcox was arrested Sept. 18, Lookout Santa Cruz first reported Tuesday. He now faces multiple felony charges related to his candidacy filing paperwork, according to court records. 

Candidate Jennifer Schacher withdrew from the race last month and endorsed Alicia Jimenez, citing family obligations in an emailed statement. Schacher served on the board from 2018 to 2022, but lost her reelection bid to Olivia Flores, who is not seeking reelection. 

Wilcox, Schacher and Jimenez will all still appear on voters’ Nov. 3 ballots because the deadline to change anything was Aug. 12.

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Court records show that Wilcox is currently facing felony charges including false affidavit as perjury, voter registration violation and false declaration of candidacy. On Sept. 21, Wilcox was ordered to undergo an evaluation by a psychiatrist or psychologist as the court declared doubt about his mental competency. He’s been assigned a public defender. 

Tricia Webber, Santa Cruz County Clerk, said that Wilcox can only be removed from the ballot by a court order. She said the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office and the District Attorney’s Office were aware of her scheduled ballot printing deadline of Aug. 26, but did not receive a court order to remove him. 

“We will tabulate any votes that are cast for any of the three candidates,” Webber said. “The person with the most votes is declared the winner of the contest.” 

In Santa Cruz County, every candidate running for office signs a declaration of candidacy and takes an oath to officially become a candidate, which promises that if they are nominated and elected, they serve their role in office. 

Jimenez, who actively remains in the race, said, “I’m not going to take for granted that Jennifer withdrew or that there are controversies around Curtis’s candidacy.”

Jimenez, who worked for the district for 25 years, hopes that the community will get out and vote. 

“It’s the only privilege we have as citizens and the one opportunity we have to make a change,” she said.

Jimenez also shared that Schacher endorsed her in August. “In that essence, I felt very comfortable afterwards,” she said. “ But until then, I knew that she was a very strong opponent.” 

The Area 5 race is one of four Pajaro Valley school board races that will be on the November 3 ballot. Santa Cruz Local’s Election Guide will be published Oct. 5, and will highlight candidates and elections throughout the county.

Questions or comments? Email info@santacruzlocal.org. Santa Cruz Local is supported by members, major donors, sponsors and grants for the general support of our newsroom. Our news judgments are made independently and not on the basis of donor support. Learn more about Santa Cruz Local and how we are funded.

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The post A candidate running for a PVUSD seat arrested for alleged fraud, but still on the ballot appeared first on Santa Cruz Local.

Santa Cruz County’s agricultural economy grew 2.8% in 2025, driven largely by a 27% jump in strawberry value to nearly $279 million, while other major crops saw more mixed results.

California created enhanced care management to help Medi-Cal patients with complex health and social needs before they reach the emergency room. Community Bridges spent three years building a community-based program that now serves more than 200 people. But, Community Bridges CEO Ray Cancino writes, a shift toward encounter-based reimbursement is making the relationship-building, outreach and coordination that prevention requires increasingly difficult to sustain and Community Bridges will now be forced to close the program. Cancino questions whether the new payment model will actually save money — or simply move the costs downstream.

Incumbent Misty Navarro and district parent Mads Realmuto are competing for the Trustee Area VII seat on the Pajaro Valley Unified School District governing board. Navarro was appointed to the seat in October 2024, after Jennifer Holm resigned from the board.

Santa Cruz County leaders held their first State of the County address Tuesday evening, providing residents an overview of recent successes but also serious financial challenges that lie ahead for the county.

In this week’s episode, Juan Reyes and John Devine will revisit Week 5 of high school and junior college football. 

Then they’ll chat with Scotts Valley football coach Louie Walters on how the Falcons are turning things around just before league play begins.

And finally, the guys will end the show with an update on cross country and the Games of the Week for Week 6 of the prep football season. 

We’ll have all this and more on… the Cover 3 Sports Podcast.

This post is updated throughout the day to reflect the latest incidents. It was last updated at 6:31 a.m..

Here’s what’s happening on the roads this morning…

▼︎ new incidents

Road incidents as of 6:30 a.m. on September 30

• A car hit a deer on northbound Highway 17 near Laurel Curve in Scotts Valley around 6:07 a.m. today. The deer was injured and just off the road. The car, a dark-colored BMW sedan with a broken radiator, was stopped about a mile north of where the deer was. The driver planned to handle vehicle assistance on their own.
   
• Highway 9 at Pool Drive in San Lorenzo Valley has alternating lane closures in both directions because of bridge work. This will continue until April 30.
   
• South Highway 1 at Park Avenue in Capitola / Soquel is facing closures for paving work. The closure is expected to end at 7:01 a.m. on Nov. 19.
   
• A lane is closed on eastbound and westbound SR-152 at Main St./Lake St. in Watsonville and Pajaro for curb, gutter, and sidewalk work. The closure will end today at 2:59 p.m.
   
• A lane on eastbound SR-152 at Clifford Drive/Ohlone Parkway in Watsonville/Pajaro is closed for core drilling. The closure will last until 2:01 p.m. on Oct. 5.
   
• One-way traffic control is in place on North SR-236 at Boulder Brook Drive in San Lorenzo Valley for pavement repair. The closure is expected to end at 1:59 p.m. on Oct. 5.
   
• A lane on South Highway 17 at W Vine Hill Road (North) in Scotts Valley is closed for core drilling work. The closure will end at 7:59 a.m. today.
   

Disclosure: Traffic incidents are partially generated by artificial intelligence. We are constantly working to improve the accuracy and quality of our AI-generated content. However, there may still be errors or inaccuracies. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us.

The post Wednesday morning traffic: Car hit deer on Hwy 17; multiple lane closures ongoing appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Starbucks locations in Soquel and Watsonville are among the 250 nationwide affected by another wave of closures at the coffee giant, Jessica M. Pasko reports in her weekly look at Santa Cruz County business.

What makes UC Santa Cruz different from the University of California’s nine other campuses? Journalist Miriam Pawel’s new book, “California Dreams,” traces the UC system’s tumultuous history — and explores how UCSC’s distinctive identity emerged from a vision that quickly collided with the upheavals of the 1960s.

After nearly three years, the fight over proposed no-take marine protected areas along the Santa Cruz County coast is headed for a final decision. County Supervisors Justin Cummings and Manu Koenig argue that the proposals are too broad, lack scientific justification and would unnecessarily restrict local fishing access. State wildlife and Ocean Protection Council staff have recommended denying both petitions, finding insufficient scientific justification for the proposed closures. Now the decision rests with the California Fish and Game Commission — and local residents have one final chance Wednesday to make their voices heard via comments.