`The people have spoken, now shut up'
Tuesday night's Santa Cruz City Council meeting was an interesting exercise in political theater. While the final outcome was never in doubt, an assortment of desperate tree huggers made a last-ditch appeal to the council to spare two or three “heritage trees” (a pair of mature liquidambars and maybe a lone magnolia) by incorporating them into the design of the mixeduse garage-library-housingchild care project redundantly approved and reapproved for construction on downtown's Lot 4. Measure O, decisively defeated in November, was the previous. On the other side were a roughly equal number of advocates for developing
Lot 4 as planned according to city staff recommendations, including testimony from the architects that to integrate those two or three trees would unacceptably compromise their design by reducing the square footage of the library and/or the 124 units of “affordable housing.” This grandscale development with its eight-story height and “density bonus,” along with other massive downtown buildings, will further establish a brave new skyline west of the San Lorenzo River. Despite objections from preservationists, the die is cast, the cake is baked, the train has left the station and the deal is done. The towers are rising whether they like it or not.
The master of ceremonies for this three-hour show, Mayor Fred Keeley, set a genial tone for the evening, treating every speaker with diplomatic respect while moving the discussion along, first in public comments alternating between people in the chambers and those on Zoom, and then, after the inevitable motion to accept staff recommendations as is, in deliberations among the councilmembers. The 21 street-tree saplings to be planted to replace the 12 slated for removal were increased to a total of 36 on and off site as a way of compensating for the lost environmental benefits of the 50or 60-year-old trees to be sacrificed. The council no doubt considered this a magnanimous nod to the unsuccessful tree defenders.
One argument heard repeatedly from the pro-development speakers was that the six-year process from library bond Measure S to the grassroots initiative Measure O had definitively settled the matter and that it was time for opponents to get out of the way of progress because “the people have spoken,” the complainers have lost and they should just admit defeat and disappear. Democracy, after all, works by majority rule; the election is over and need not be relitigated.
There is a certain logic to this argument, but only up to a point. Just because a politician wins an election or a ballot measure is defeated, the prevailing party is not exempt from criticism. In a democracy, people have the right, the duty in fact, to hold the winners and other officials accountable. So if, for example, the
Rail Trail has been approved by a majority and the funding, engineering and construction are in progress — at the expense of hundreds of trees and the destruction of wildlife habitat, among other questionable impacts — the environmental costs of such a monumental project are worth exposing in a public forum. The same goes for the Lot 4 library-housing development, whose ultimate cost and financing have yet to be determined.
Dissent is as American as olallieberry pie. People whose causes are officially lost, and nonpartisan observers who scrutinize both sides of a contentious issue, can keep the victors honest by critiquing their decisions, their spending of public funds, their cost-benefit tradeoffs and their presumption of their own infallibility. Everybody loves libraries, affordable housing, childcare and trees, but even if the city is above the law in freely violating its own heritage tree ordinance, its critics are also entitled to speak, no matter how annoying they may be.
Monday, March 20, at 6 p.m., the Santa Cruz City Council will hold a public hearing on the city Planning Commission's approval of cutting down some 380 trees and building concrete retaining walls through Seabright and Live Oak for Segments 8 and 9 of the proposed Rail Trail.