Guest Columnist

Throughout California there are discussions about how to address the significant affordable housing crisis. Recent academic and industry studies done on home affordability have shown that in some coastal communities less than a quarter of people earn enough income to be able to purchase a home in their community and many can’t afford rising rents. Seniors are struggling to stay in the homes they own with an overall rising cost of living. Santa Cruz County is no exception.

Every winter, the people who live and work in the flats of Rio Dell Mar experience flooding in the streets and in their yards. Every winter, news reporters descend on the area to cover the events. This year, one reporter asked me about the...

A wonderful new event has surfaced in our Aptos community thanks to Friends of the Library and Denise Ward, a local resident who also loves to read and to bring community together.

With Memorial Day and the unofficial start of summer the number of complaints for fireworks begins to increase.

The first owners of Aptos were the King and Queen of Spain. The Catholic Church and the Army administered their holdings.

One of the largest issues in the greater Aptos Village area is traffic flow and improving flow in that area has been a focus of your county’s traffic engineers. County traffic engineers made signalization (along with new turn lanes and bike, bus and pedestrian improvements) as the model for improving flow in that area. With the new lights (and most of the other main improvements) completed at Trout Gulch and Soquel, we have been working to make refinements based on community feedback.

Holidays can be a mixed bag full of love, laughter, joy, stress, anxiety, and full-blown tantrums. And I’m just talking about the adults. Expectations about gifts, traditions and spending time together can make the holidays challenging and overwhelming for many families, even when relationships are harmonious. When relationships between immediate, extended, separated, or blended family members are strained, it requires extra effort to communicate effectively so that children remember the holidays as a special time with family and loved ones. This monthly column provides tips for anyone who is helping raise children, based on the world-renowned Triple P – Positive Parenting Program, available to families in Santa Cruz County. If you have a question or idea for a future column, please email me at [email protected].

As I begin each new year as your County Supervisor, I like to report back in this column on some of the things we’ve accomplished because of your partnership and communication of priorities.

As you recall from last month’s story, Ralph Mattison owned a number of businesses in Aptos Village and he helped to organize the Aptos Volunteer Fire Department and build the first fire truck.

At the local level the county has taken significant steps toward modernizing and improving affordable housing regulations to help encourage the creation of affordable housing.