Post-Covid Summer: Camps, Outdoor Events, Swim Lessons, By Jondi

COMMUNITY NEWS Post-Covid Summer: Camps, Outdoor Events, Swim Lessons

By Jondi Gumz

With 15,483 recovered COVID-19 cases and 229,000 vaccinations, the pandemic outlook in Santa Cruz County keeps improving.

The county, one of 38 in the Orange Tier, reports 204 deaths, only 144 active cases, and 130,000 negative test results.

The adjusted case rate is 1.4 per day per 100,000 people and test positivity dropped to .6 percent.

Sam Rolens, spokesman for Santa Cruz City Schools (which includes Soquel High) and a Gault parent, reported in his first weekly video news update on Facebook “the steadily improving picture of the pandemic locally,” with a positive test rate below 1 percent.

Half of the county’s eligible population has received one shot, and more than a third are fully vaccinated, he said.

Even with elementary students back on campus five days a week, there have been zero cases of on-campus spread in Santa Cruz City Schools, he said, noting exposures and cases are tracked on the district website.

New air filtration systems have been installed at schools in preparation for the fall semester, he added.

“We haven’t all had the same year,” he said, noting some are carrying heavier loads of trauma and offering his willingness to serve as a resource via email.

Dignity Health and the Santa Cruz County Office of Education helped set up mass clinics for high school students at three locations after everyone 16 and up became eligible on April 15, aiming to provide Pfizer vaccine to 1,800 teens. The sites were at Soquel High, Scotts Valley High and in Pajaro Valley Unified.

The Soquel High Knights finished their shortened spring football season.

Track and field is under way, so are basketball, soccer and golf. The Soquel High girls edged Aptos 3-2 in their first game against Aptos.

Cabrillo College will have a virtual graduation ceremony at 4 p.m. May 21.

Although COVID cases are down, the local economy hasn’t recovered due to regulatory restrictions — unemployment in March was 8.1 percent and more than 5,000 jobs in the hospitality sector had yet to return.

To help restaurants, hard hit by the rules, the Capitola City Council agreed to extend permission for temporary outdoor dining through Sept. 7. Most restaurants in Capitola Village had invested in outdoor dining as a survival tactic when indoor seating was prohibited.

Warning

On April 23, federal regulators ended the 10-day pause on the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine, begun after 6.8 million doses to investigate after six women under age 50 had blood clots in the brain and one died. A warning is to be added to the label to warn about this uncommon, but potentially deadly, effect.

Vaccinations could resume Saturday, the Food and Drug Administration said.

Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine has two advantages over the others – one shot is needed instead of two and it can be refrigerated, not requiring extremely cold storage.

Johnson & Johnson supplied only 4 percent of the California’s vaccines, and Santa Cruz County responded to the pause by substituting the two-shot vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.

On April 27, when new COVID-19 data are posted, Santa Cruz County may qualify to move into the least restrictive Yellow Tier, which allows gyms, saunas, dance and yoga studios, wineries, breweries and bowling alleys to operate at 50 percent capacity. Current capacity for those businesses is capped at 25 percent; liveaudience events can be staged outdoors at 33 percent capacity.

On April 6, Gov. Newsom said the state has administered 4 million of doses of vaccine, a key milestone, and that if current trends continue, the state will fully reopen June 15, allowing conventions to resume, with maximum attendance of 5,000.

Events to Return

Cabrillo Stage in Aptos plans to stage five musical productions outdoors in June and July, including “Circus: Knives, Blood & Water,” new show created by Capitola playwright Joe Ortiz.

The Scotts Valley Chamber of Commerce plans to restart the Art & Wine Festival Aug. 21-22 with Cops ‘N Rodders Saturday and Bring Your Dog Day Sunday, and Watsonville Municipal Airport plans to host “Fire in the Sky,” an open house with remote control aircraft demos and fireworks on Sept. 4.

Jim Booth’s Swim School is opening first in Watsonville, then at Harvey West Park in Santa Cruz.

Summer camps are restarting, and the state will allow overnight camps starting June 1.

CineLux Capitola has been open for five weeks and the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk opened rides on April 1.

How to Sign Up

For those looking to get their shot, the place to look is the state system at www. MyTurn.ca.gov.

Most health providers are on this platform, making it easier to track California’s vaccination progress.

But federally qualified health care centers such as Salud Para La Gente and Santa Cruz Community Health are not using MyTurn, so to get an appointment there, go to santacruzhealth.org, click on vaccines and follow the directions.

Another source, supported by the federal Centers for Disease Control, is www.vaccinefinder.org.

Santa Cruz County health officials have prioritized equity, allocating 60 percent of its doses for the greater Watsonville area and its Latinx community, which has seen the most cases.

The Santa Cruz County Office of Education has created a campaign in Spanish to encourage educators, childcare workers and farmworkers get the vaccine. The information phone line is 831-466-5906.

Economic Aid

Santa Cruz County government expects to receive $53 million in federal COVID relief, which will end furloughs for county employees enacted to close the budget gap.

Cabrillo College in Aptos is getting $16 million in federal COVID relief, part of the $1.9 trillion package signed by President Biden.

U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo (D- Palo Alto) who represents parts of Santa Cruz County, hosted a webinar April 15 to explain how restaurants, food trucks, food carts, caterers, tasting rooms, brewpubs and bars can get federal aid. Julie Clowes, director of the Small Business Administration for Northern California, joined her to answer questions.

The aid package includes $25 billion for restaurants with grants to be awarded by the federal Small Business Administration, $7.25 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program forgivable loans for small business and nonprofits applying through a bank, $15 billion in targeted Economic Injury Disaster Loan advance grants through the SBA, and $16 billion in grants to shuttered entertainment venues, also through SBA.

From mid-November to mid-March, the pandemic kept restaurants, gyms and movie theaters from opening indoors, eliminating thousands of jobs.

“COVID Update” page 22

“Outdoor Seating” from page 7

We have personally explored Parkletts in many other tourist driven cities like Pacific Grove, Carmel, Livermore, Murphys, and more, looking at types of construction and designs.

Nicest, Safest

One thing that stands out is the nicest looking, best functioning, and safest Parkletts constructed were anchored to the asphalt in some way. Our 2016 permit did not allow this. We believe this limits our ability to build a functioning and safe Parklett.

For outdoor dinning to be successful, the area needs to have the ability to serve the customers in most weather conditions safely, and comfortably. This can be best be achieved by being to be able to anchor the structure a few inches into the ground.

There has been some discussion of how events in the village would be changed because of outdoor dinning. We don’t think there is any doubt they would.

Each event of course has a different demographic that they bring to the village. Our Wine Bar takes on a loss on the car show weekend, but does well on the Art and Wine Festival. Having outdoor dinning during events overall would increase sales for us hence tax dollars for the city.

We believe a more pleasurable experience at events shared with outdoor dining would also increase return visits to the village. The visitors’ experience is overall nicer at events with outdoor dinning.

Really it’s simple when it comes to events, we can have both outdoor dining, and events; it’s not a choice of one or the other.

As we move into recovery, waiting for month-tomonth outdoor dining permission from our council is not ideal. Restaurants can not run effectively that way for numerous reasons. We need to move forward with a longrange plan now.

We encourage the council to make a motion to reinstate the Parklett policy, the only changes to the policy being the following. • Allowing the anchoring of the Parklett to the asphalt with Planning’s direction. • The reduction of the parking fee charged to $1,600. • The temporary aspect of the policy to be removed in favor of a renewable license of $250. • Start the process of exploring the impacts of removing cars from San Jose Avenue permanently.

Again, we thank you for acting so quickly to our restaurants needs during these challenging times. Please reinstate the Parklett program with the minor changes suggested, it will benefit our village. n

“Coastal Agency” from page 7

Please also be aware that continued operation of the program inconsistent with the underlying Coastal Development Permit (whether it is modified as is being recommended or it stays the same as in recent years) represents a knowing and intentional violation of the Coastal Development Permit, the Coastal Act, and the Local Coastal Plan, to which the Coastal Act includes a series of remedies (including administrative fines and other penalties to rectify both past violations as well as new and prospective violations).

Any changes to the program that you may make outside of the Coastal Development Permit process as you are being asked to do here (e.g., geographical expansion, operating time modifications, fee changes, app-based interface, etc.) are not recognized or authorized by the underlying Coastal Development Permit.

In short, the program has been in violation for many years, and many of those violations remain in effect today. Resolution of such violations should be the County’s priority (and should, at the least, precede any proposed new changes to the program).

Moreover, the County is currently liable under the enforcement provisions of the Coastal Act for unpermitted impacts to coastal resources, including impacts to public recreational access, both in the past and moving forward.

In that context, we note that although the program has been in operation for nearly 40 years, it has not met its original goals of better structuring on-street parking or relieving traffic congestion in coastal Live Oak as intended.

On this observation, we respectfully disagree with the representations by DPW staff to the contrary, including in the staff report for this item. Rather, the type and availability of on-street parking is virtually unchanged; the streets remain clogged with unpermitted private encroachments into the public right-of-way that serve to restrict and prohibit available public parking options; the same congestion from those looking for space to park is actually exacerbated by the program (as it requires trips to find and purchase permits on top of finding parking); and parking is not “organized and accessible,” as is being represented, on most Live Oak coastal streets. In short, the program does not come close to meeting its underlying objectives.

In addition, the program has not generated enough revenue to make meaningful on- street parking improvements. In fact, from the data that DPW has shared, at best it appears that the program has essentially generated enough revenue to solely run the program. And in most years, operational costs appear to exceed revenues, and thus the program appears to regularly lose money (and it operated at a nearly $100,000 deficit last year, which has not been uncommon).

It is also not clear that any acceptable version of the program would be able to generate enough revenue to both pay for itself and systematically improve public parking and public access going forward, which is described as a goal of a potentially modified program.

We therefore respectfully suggest that it is time for the County to consider whether continuing to operate the program makes financial sense, is in the public’s best interest, and can be found Coastal Act and Local Coastal Plan consistent. In our view, the answer to each of those questions is no, and we believe that the program should be discontinued.

This has been our consistent position regarding the program for decades, and we have shared this position repeatedly with County staff over the years, and any representations to the contrary should be disregarded. We do not support the Live Oak Permit Parking Program.

We understand that the County is looking for revenue sources, including to help fund maintenance and access enhancement projects at shoreline access areas, and we can appreciate that need. At the same time, it is clear to us that this program is not an appropriate vehicle for those purposes, and we believe there are other ways to accomplish such goals without unduly burdening coastal visitors via parking fees (including through the County’s recent Coastal Encroachment Policy, and potentially the County’s proposed armoring-related fee program to offset sand supply loss and public recreational access impacts due to shoreline armoring) under the County’s pending Local Coastal Plan hazards update).

We have and will continue to support these types of programs as a means to help reach common goals along the shoreline, including to improve public access opportunities, and we look forward to active collaboration as it effects coastal Live Oak moving forward.

It is clear to us that this program has reached a crossroads of sorts, and also that it has outlived any potential utility it may have once provided for meeting the County’s and the Commission’s goals for coastal Live Oak under the Coastal Act and the Local Coastal Plan. And for the above reasons, it is also clear to us that the most appropriate outcome is to discontinue the program entirely. We support you doing just that.

In any case, we hope that these comments prove useful in your deliberations, and please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or would like to discuss this matter further. n