Speaking Up for Safety

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to keep better track of how our tax money is being spent. I hope to make this a group effort among our readers.

As a family magazine, we must take a good look at how families are being served, or more accurately, neglected.

Do your kids have safe ways to get to and from school on their own? Mine don’t. If we don’t drive them, they have no sidewalks or bike paths to get there.

How did that happen?

The only answer I can come up with is greedy developers put in homes and ignorant or lazy politicians let them build and earn their profits without holding them responsible for community safety. Am I wrong? If a community cared about kids, I believe the government would require builders to pay for sidewalks and bike paths to build their developments.

I’d like to know how your neighborhoods stack up? Are your kids safe on the streets?

I already know that Santa Cruz has one of the highest per capita rates of pedestrian and bike deaths in the state and I don’t see enough being done to protect people.

And why isn’t our money being spent on fixing the roads ? I’m posting some pictures of Sumner Avenue and Rio Del Mar Boulevard, streets that lead to the beach and should be able to be used safely by kids and tourists on bicycles or walking.

Forget it. They are mottled with potholes and have been for years. Does no one from the county see this?

I’ll ask you to send us photos of the most dangerous roads in your neighborhoods for cars, bikes and kids. Let’s hold the people spending our tax money accountable. They aren’t now. I see examples of it all around.

I had an inspiring conversation with the new District 2 County Supervisor, Kim De Serpa. Here’s what she said when I asked her what she thought of spending half a billion dollars on a train.

“I think of how many roads that could fix,” she answered. That got my vote.

There’s been a ton of spending on the pipe dream of a train in the county, which proponents claim goes by schools and will get cars off the road. I’d love to hear if that will work for your kids. It goes nowhere near schools around me.

The money being spent just on studies for it is now up to tens of millions of dollars. I met an engineer with the Regional Transportation Commission, who told me she’s spent 20 years working full time on the train proposal. Multiply that by everyone else working on a project they privately acknowledge the county will never afford, and imagine the cost. Consider how many roads that could have been repaired or how many electric buses—especially given our serious school bus driver shortage—that money could have funded.

Send me your suggestions, complaints and love letters and let’s get the word out.

Thanks for reading and happy 2025. Let’s get things back on track for families and safety, not pipe dreams.

Brad Kava,
Editor and Publisher