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See heavy machinery up close at Santa Cruz Touch-A-Truck event
The City of Santa Cruz will host “Touch-A-Truck” on May 20 from noon to 2 p.m. in the parking lot of Day’s Market in Seabright.
Attendees can climb aboard the heavy machinery, ask questions and learn how all the work gets done.
Touch-A-Truck is part of National Public Works Week, a nationwide recognition of the professionals who support roads, water systems, storm drains, parks and other infrastructure.
Attendees can also see operators in action during the fourth annual Equipment Road-e-o, a live skills competition that demonstrates the expertise and coordination required to operate heavy equipment safely and efficiently.
Both events, at 526 Seabright Ave. near the corner of Murray Street, are free and open to the public. Registration is not required, and walk-ups are welcome.
See more information here.
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MORE LOCAL COVERAGEThe post See heavy machinery up close at Santa Cruz Touch-A-Truck event appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.
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California election officials face false choice: Count votes quickly or count them right
This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for its newsletters.
Political persecution, threats of violence and the seizure of sensitive documents might sound like a plot line for a heist or thriller movie.
For California election officials tasked with enabling participatory democracy, these are now everyday realities — from Riverside County, where Sheriff Chad Bianco seized more than 650,000 ballots from his own county’s registrar of voters, to Shasta County, where threats of violence forced the longtime registrar to retire early.
ELECTION 2026: Read more local, state and national coverage here from Lookout and our content partners
The integrity of the state’s voting systems will be under intense scrutiny this year with control of the U.S. House on the line, as Californians could play a decisive role in which party wins the majority. Yet while timely and decisive results are more crucial than ever, California is famous for its ploddingly slow vote count.
That lengthy wait has increasingly sown distrust in the accuracy of California’s results, especially among Republicans, and particularly in races where a candidate leading on election day falls behind as more ballots are processed in subsequent days.
“Every day matters,” said Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation. “Election security is about security in reality and also security in perception, and they’re both equally important.”
During a panel Thursday on election integrity, presented by CalMatters and the University of California Student and Policy Center, Alexander argued that election administrators are boxing themselves into a “false choice” if they sacrifice timeliness in the name of accuracy. When winners aren’t decided for days, sometimes weeks, the ensuing uncertainty leaves room for doubt to take root, speculation to grow and misinformation to spread.
It took eight days in 2024 for The Associated Press to be able to declare Republicans had won control of the U.S. House, partly because of outstanding votes in California races, Alexander said. Two years earlier, it took nine days. In 2020, it took the AP seven days to determine that Democrats would retain the House, she said. Each time, outcomes in California swing districts played a decisive role.
“We’re creating a window of opportunity for people to make these claims,” Alexander said, referring to largely unfounded claims of systemic voter fraud and election rigging. “We have to acknowledge that.”
Fellow panelists defended California’s meticulousness as crucial to its election integrity. Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, Democratic chair of the Assembly elections committee and former Santa Cruz County registrar of voters, argued that county officials need time to verify voters’ signatures on vote-by-mail envelopes “so people don’t get disenfranchised for penmanship or for failure to sign.”
Assemblymember Gail Pellerin speaks with supporters in August 2023. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz“There’s nothing in law that says, ‘I need to meet your deadline,'” Pellerin said of media outlets and journalists who are eager to call races on election night. “What the law says is that I need to count the votes accurately, securely. I need to check them, and double-check them, and audit them, and then I certify them.”
Matt Barreto, director of the UCLA Voting Rights Center, noted that counties have 30 days post-election to certify their results and submit them to the secretary of state. That process, he said, should be completed as quickly as possible but “not at the expense of the county registrars doing their job effectively to make sure every vote is counted.”
Catharine Baker, head of the UC Center, emphasized — pointedly to Pellerin — that counties need more money to make sure they’re sufficiently staffed and have the equipment they need to count efficiently.
They all agreed that voters can do one thing to speed up the count: turn in their mail ballots early so counties can process them before election day.
Large partisan divide over election integrityCalifornia voters are highly polarized in their views on the status of democracy in their state and country, largely along party lines.
A new survey from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found a third of Democrats said they are “extremely satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the way democracy works in California, while only 4% of Republicans said they felt that way. Conversely, more than two-thirds of Republicans are not satisfied at all, compared to 10% of Democrats.
Those results are practically unchanged from voters’ responses in 2024, despite several major political events, including a presidential election that President Donald Trump won, a new presidential administration and a special election in California in which voters adopted more partisan gerrymandered congressional districts.
“It speaks to the fact that in a lot of ways our democracy is stuck,” said Eric Schickler, a UC Berkeley political science professor and co-director of the institute. “Republicans have one perspective on what’s wrong — they make claims of voter fraud and slow ballot counts,” he said, “and Democrats have another, which is concerns about voter suppression.”
The poll also highlighted the partisan divide over a proposed ballot initiative from Republican Assemblymember Carl DeMaio of San Diego that would require Californians to show photo identification to vote. When asked whether they would support the measure, but without any context about who was for and against it, 56% of survey respondents said they strongly or moderately supported it, while 39% were strongly or moderately opposed.
But those shifted the more information voters were given. When told that DeMaio was the main proponent of preventing fraud and that Democrats argue the measure is part of Trump’s agenda to keep people of color from voting, the support flipped, with only 39% supporting the measure and 52% opposed.
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The post California election officials face false choice: Count votes quickly or count them right appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.
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Armed man arrested after standoff
A man was taken into custody after a shooting Saturday night near Riverside Drive and Marchant Street.
Just before 7pm, Watsonville Police responded to reports of shots fired at the heavily traveled intersection. They learned the suspect, 49-year-old Sandro Vega, had been seen outside a nearby home in the 100 block of Marchant Street holding a rifle.
Watsonville Police, accompanied by Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s deputies and the California Highway Patrol, surrounded a home on Marchant Street between Riverside Drive and East Front Street as a huge crowd of curious spectators gathered.
After cordoning off the area around the home with yellow crime scene tape, police shut down Riverside Drive, Marchant Street and East Front Street. Using a loudspeaker, police announced repeatedly for the suspect to come out of the home while a drone hovered overhead.
WPD spokeswoman Erika Vazquez said Vega stepped outside the home but stayed in the front yard and refused to follow commands, leading to a standoff with a swarm of armed police and a K9 at the ready. After about 30 minutes, Vega surrendered and was taken into custody.
Police found this cache of weapons after serving a search warrant on the home on the 100 block of Marchant Street. (contributed, WPD)After detectives secured a search warrant for the home they found multiple firearms. Vega was booked into the Santa Cruz County Jail on charges including assault with a firearm, brandishing a firearm, and negligent discharge of a firearm.
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A Senator Takes The Justice Department at Its Word. What Could Go Wrong?
On Sunday, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said he would confirm Donald Trump’s nominee for the new Federal Reserve chair after the Department of Justice made “assurances” to him that it would drop its investigation into the current chair, Jerome Powell.
“The U.S. Attorney’s Office criminal investigation into Chair Powell was a serious threat to the Fed’s independence,” Tillis wrote in a Sunday morning statement on X. “I take the Department of Justice at its word: the investigation is closed.”
The dispute started when the Justice Department opened a criminal probe into Chair Jerome Powell over costs in funding renovations to the Federal Reserve’s Washington headquarters. But on Friday, Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for the District of Columbia, posted on X that her office would close its investigation while the Inspector General for the Federal Reserve looks into central bank’s project costs.
“Note well, however, that I will not hesitate to restart a criminal investigation should the facts warrant doing so,” Pirro wrote at the end of her Friday statement.
While Tillis may take Pirro’s announcement as a win, when has fully trusting the Department of Justice been a good idea?
“It’s not dropped. They’re looking into the whole thing,” President Trump suggested on Saturday regarding Pirro’s statement. “How can a building that I could have done for $25 million cost $4 billion?”
Q: "Do you agree with the decision by Jeanine Pirro to drop the investigation into Jerome Powell?"Trump: "It's not dropped. They're looking into the whole thing."
— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) 2026-04-25T19:25:24.171ZPressure has ramped up on Trump to boost the economy and relieve the affordability crisis. He has repeatedly called for dropping interest rates—and his new nominee Kevin Warsh is falling in line. But Powell, who was nominated to become Fed chair in 2017 by Trump, has held interest rates steady and reiterated the central bank’s independence from the president.
As I wrote when news broke of the Justice Department’s investigation this past January, many lawmakers said that the move was part of the president’s public efforts to coerce lower interest rates.
The Trump administration was “actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve,” Tillis said. “It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question,” he continued, as he vowed to oppose the confirmation of any new Fed chair nominee until the matter was “fully resolved.”
During Kevin Warsh’s confirmation hearing last week, Tillis backed up his January statement, saying that while Warsh had “extraordinary credentials,” he would not support a confirmation unless the Justice Department dropped its investigation.
So much for that now.
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Trump and Friends Use Dinner Shooting to Boost Ballroom
President Donald Trump and many of his supporters are using the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night to promote construction plans for the new White House ballroom.
“This event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House,” Trump posted on Truth Social Sunday morning.
“This is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House,” Trump said at his Saturday night press conference following the incident. “It’s actually a larger room, and it’s a much more secure. It’s got—it’s drone proof, it’s bulletproof glass.”
And his supporters have chimed in shortly after news of the shooting broke:
“Unfortunately, the First Lady and I had to be evacuated from the White House correspondents’ dinner alongside the President and the entire cabinet,” Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry posted on X Saturday night, referring to his wife, Sharon Landry. “This event is yet another reason that President @realDonaldTrump’s ballroom should be built!”
“We’d better never again hear a peep from anyone complaining about a White House ballroom,” Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) wrote on X.
There were similar messages in right-wing media:
“I don’t want to hear one more fucking criticism of Trump’s new ballroom at the White House,” wrote Meghan McCain, a conservative television personality who has criticized the president in the past for disparaging her father, former Senator John McCain, but has since seemed to have offered “the olive branch.”
“THIS IS WHY WE NEED TRUMP’S BALLROOM,” Chaya Raichik, who runs the anti-LGBTQ+ and far-right social media account Libs of TikTok posted on X.
MAGA accounts tweet in unison about the need for a White House ballroom following WHCD incident pic.twitter.com/3acgko7qv3
— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) April 26, 2026The president’s ballroom has been stalled in legal disputes for months, with a federal ruling asserting last month that Trump doesn’t have the authority to continue his $400 million passion project without congressional approval. But earlier this month, a federal appeals court stayed the March ruling until this coming June, permitting construction to continue until then.
While Trump has repeatedly insisted that his new ballroom will not cost taxpayers any money, his administration reportedly may have revised tariffs to help out a foreign private firm who provided steel for the White House renovation and, according to a Saturday report from the New York Times, the company building the ballroom was secretly handed a no-bid contract for another Washington project at an inflated cost.