Stephen Kessler | Politics as usual and a free press

By Stephen Kessler | Santa Cruz Sentinel August 20, 2022 at 7:00 a.m.

In the good old days when local newspapers could afford investigative reporters, the press served as a reality check on politicians’ power. In recent decades it’s all a local paper can do to report on meetings and official pronouncements, giving public officials the comforting impression that nobody’s keeping an eye on how they operate. Which leaves it up to mere commentators to look more closely at what they’re doing, and to make them uncomfortable.

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Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.

Stephen Kessler | Questions for Cynthia Mathews and city leaders

By Stephen Kessler | Santa Cruz Sentinel August 13, 2022 at 7:00 a.m.

"On the council’s agenda, set by the mayor, for Aug. 9, in closed session, was an item concerning the possible purchase by the city of a piece of property owned in part by Mathews. It’s a beautifully restored Victorian with a big magnolia in front, currently a six-unit (residential-commercial) apartment building adjacent to City Hall. I can’t help wondering whether these apartments are “affordable housing” — an important selling point for Mathews’ favorite development project, the mixed-use housing-library-parking complex intended for Lot 4 — or market rate.

The appearance of this item on the City Council agenda raises a number of questions that I hope one of the above-named officials, or Mathews herself, will answer with a response on this page."

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.

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Mark Primack | Measure O: Demand to be included in library plan

By Mark Primack | Santa Cruz Sentinel October 2, 2022 at 7:30 a.m.

Do we need parenting? The anti-Measure O propaganda says we do. Their embrace of negativity and their willingness to deepen community polarization belie the flimsy logic of the library/garage project and the process that spawned it. When those who have relentlessly and unapologetically hobbled housing for decades start shedding crocodile tears for the project’s residential afterthought, it begs the question of what this whole plan was ever really about...

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Mark Primack | Columnist Mark Primack is a former city councilman

and author of “Divisible Cities:

Acting Local in a Transient World.”