Who are you to be calling me aggressive?

Yes, I’m the 5-year-old female otter from the waters off Santa Cruz, about whom you’ve been reading scary headlines.

Now, I do sometimes approach surfers or kayakers in ways that they interpret as threatening. It’s also true that, on occasion, I separate surfers from their boards, and exercise my right, as a Californian, to ride the waves myself.

But have I ever done anything aggressive, at least by Santa Cruz standards? It’s not like I ever swiped a street parking space near the Boardwalk, or bid $200,000 over asking on a three-bedroom in Seabright.

Which is why it’s downright slanderous to say, as the city of Santa Cruz has on signs posted near the coast, that I’m an “aggressive sea otter” so dangerous that people shouldn’t go in the water. It’s offensive that the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife speculates that my behavior “may be associated with hormonal surges”—hey, feds, you can’t say that about a female anymore!

And if I could find a lawyer, I might have a case against those biased human media who have called me “wayward,” “rogue,” and a “renegade”—without ever bothering to ask me for comment.

The real aggressors in this otter’s story are all too human. And I’m not just talking about the paparazzi who, now that I’ve made the international news, are paddling out into the Santa Cruz waves to try to take my photo.

As of this writing, there are no confirmed cases of me hurting anyone, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Still, I’m being relentlessly hunted, by state officials and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, as if I were a dangerous fugitive.

Yes, I’ve bitten a few holes in some boards. But c’mon! Human Californians can shoplift in Union Square, steal catalytic converters on Nob Hill, and smoke meth in the Tenderloin without any real fear of prosecution, much less imprisonment.

This otter spooked a few surfers, and my freedom is at stake. For now, the state’s plan is to capture me (they may have succeeded by the time you read this) and remove me from my home in the Santa Cruz waters. Eventually, they would relocate me to a zoo or aquarium, placing me in front of audiences with little compensation besides a few meals—like a character actor in a Netflix show.

But it could get worse for me. Experts have raised the possibility that, if I’m ever accused of doing harm to a human, I’ll be euthanized—without a trial before a human jury, much less a panel of my fellow marine mammals.

And you thought Governor Newsom had put a moratorium on executions.

Of course, deadly attacks on otters are a human tradition. There are only around 3,000 of us southern sea otters living off the California coast today because of mass slaughter by fur traders of the 18th and 19th centuries.

So, don’t I have every reason to bite back?

I am among the otters born in captivity and returned to the wild, with a number (841) and a transmitter for monitoring. My mother, according to reports, showed what the humans call aggression, perhaps because they fed her.

After I was first reported for “aggressiveness” a couple years ago, a team of state and aquarium officials yelled loudly at me and beat a paddle in my direction in an effort to make me afraid of people. This intervention didn’t work, which is no surprise.

I can’t really help it if I run a little hot. My metabolism requires that I eat one-quarter of my body weight each day in fish and crab and urchins. I have to eat even more when I’m pregnant. It’s also hard for me to keep warm; I don’t have blubber like those media darlings, the elephant seals.

If I weren’t a fugitive, I might find it funny, or at least ironic, that I’m in trouble for confronting surfers. Because surfers, who constantly paddle right into my ecosystem, are far more aggressive than me. Santa Cruz has a long history of surfers who defend their breaks violently, and even create gangs. But I’m the threat here?

To the contrary, I should be seen as an asset, even a model for Californians. I’m out here breeding—two pregnancies so far that anyone knows about—while the human birth rate is dropping so fast onshore that California is losing population. My presence, and that of other sea life, is vital to the tourism that powers the Central Coast economy. I’m also an environmental steward, because I eat the sea urchins that can devour kelp forests. The same state government now hunting me has considered introducing otters along the North Coast, to make those ecosystems healthier.

Despite all we do for society, my fellow otters and I are excluded from participation in decisions in California, even as the state seeks to control me. This is primitive, and hypocritical for a state that purports to be committed to democracy and environmental justice. Efforts are underway, here and elsewhere, to create multi-species constitutions and democratic governance for important commons spaces on this planet, like the Amazon or the oceans.

As the University of Leicester politics professor Rob Garner has written, “the interests of animals are affected—often devastatingly—by collective decisions and, therefore, they, or—more specifically—their representatives, have a democratic right to have some say in the making of those decisions.”

I shouldn’t be evading state officials. I should be helping to govern them. Because the real aggression I see in California is your anthropocentrism.

The post I’m the Santa Cruz Otter. Why Shouldn’t I Bite Back? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Is Santa Cruz the scariest place in California?

For sure, this state’s 21st-century reality is frightening: from the persecution of immigrants to the droughts and wildfires made worse by climate change. But there is simply no place in our state scarier than this coastal county of 275,000 tortured souls.

Santa Cruz is not our most dangerous or damaged place, but it comes very close to embodying the greatest fears of Californians, which are all about our powerlessness: that our coastal beauty is collapsing underneath us, that we’ve lost control over our future, and that our state’s wealth no longer guarantees anything, not even a roof over our heads.

Perhaps that’s what made Santa Cruz, a pretty place somehow beset by demons, such an effective setting for Jordan Peele’s Us, the year’s most popular horror film. “Being here feels like there’s this black cloud over me,” says the film’s protagonist, a wealthy Bay Area woman (played by Lupita Nyong’o) who summers in Santa Cruz.

She is not the first to feel that way about the place. While Santa Cruz’s shoreline geography makes its mountains tumble violently down to a sea, local history correspondingly sends shivers up your spine. Santa Cruz’s mission is remembered for the murder of Father Andres Quintana, who was strangled to death—and then castrated—shortly after he nearly beat to death two indigenous people whose coerced labor he depended upon.

All the tall trees on those hills cast a lot of shade. In the darkness, trouble thrived, including the cultists of early-20th century Holy City, whose leader practiced bigamy while preaching celibacy, repeatedly ran for governor, and was arrested for writing supportive letters to Hitler. Santa Cruz residents still talk about the two different serial killers who, between them, killed more than 20 people in the 1970s. (One was killing, he said, to appease God’s taste for blood as a way of preventing an earthquake, while the other, the Coed Killer, targeted students).

Even the road into Santa Cruz is fraught: California State Route 17 has so many dangerous sharp turns, blind spots, and narrow shoulders that it’s called “Blood Alley” or “Killer 17.” The mountains separating Santa Cruz from the Bay Area are a leading site of Bigfoot sightings, and they are full of the vacation homes of Silicon Valley technologists who are busy plotting God knows what.

But, as any horror filmmaker will tell you, the scariest threats come not from the rare serial killer or tech overlord but rather from the routines of daily living, which can seem so difficult as to produce feelings of powerlessness.

This may be where Santa Cruz is scariest. Traffic is terrible. Finding a parking space downtown is a fight (and if you find one, you might get ticketed anyway—the meters only take change). And there’s a good chance the other people driving are so high they’re effectively zombies.

Santa Cruz County is consumed with cannabis—more than 20 manufacturers, two distributors, seven cultivators, and even Melissa Etheridge’s new company, Etheridge Farms. It’s telling that, even as other Santa Cruz structures show their age, the shiniest building in town is the KindPeoples Recreational Cannabis Dispensary, on Ocean Street, near the creepy-looking county government building. If Santa Cruzans see weed as a spark for economic opportunity, they are making a Faustian bargain.

Other deals with the devil haunt Santa Cruz, which struggles just to keep what it has. While much of California is vulnerable to drought, Santa Cruz, highly dependent on its own rainfall and waterways, is even more susceptible; another major dry spell could produce damaging water shortages. Climate change and sea-level rise are eating away at its signature shoreline. In 2017, a woman was killed when a cliff collapsed beneath her. (The ocean isn’t much safer—the great white shark population has made a huge comeback).

And if Santa Cruz is going to change course and build a better future, it must do better by its children. By some measures, its rate of child poverty is the second highest—at more than 27 percent—among California’s 58 counties. Santa Cruz is in a particularly perilous position. It has the high cost of living of Bay Area counties with relatively lower incomes, given how many people work in low-wage agriculture and hospitality. Those incomes are often a bit too high for families to be eligible for food stamps and other health programs for the poor. It’s a nightmarish squeeze.

The worst piece of the poverty puzzle involves high housing costs. Santa Cruz has a UC campus that can’t house all its students, who then compete for space in a community that has failed to build enough housing for its year-round residents. The shortage got so bad last year that the university begged faculty members to house students. The middle-class workers that Santa Cruz depends upon often can’t find housing in the county at all; one ranking determined that Santa Cruz was the least affordable housing market in the country for teachers.

And the horror show of homelessness in Santa Cruz is simply too long a story for this short column.

If all that wasn’t enough to curdle your blood, Santa Cruz now faces scary new threats from the Trump administration, which has stated its intention to do everything from opening up oil drilling off its coast, to cutting Medicaid for its relatively high percentage of poor people. Already, the workers in Santa Cruz’s agricultural and tourism industries have been aggressively targeted by immigration enforcement. That has forced many of them underground; news broke recently of a secret food bank for undocumented residents and others who fear going to grocery stores or public food banks.

In picking Santa Cruz to tell his horror allegory of a United States that buries its unwanted people deep, the film director Jordan Peele made a wise choice. Us uses the Main Beach, the UC Santa Cruz campus, Big Basin Redwoods State Park, and especially the Beach Boardwalk—and the constant screams from its roller coaster riders—to create fear that at any moment your demons might emerge from the ground beneath you. And there’s nothing much you can do about it.

California taxpayers may also find the film scary. It received $5.2 million in tax breaks from California’s Film & Television Tax Credit Program, which provides subsidies for films made in California. Studies suggest that such subsidies can’t be financially justified. And Us, which made $254 million worldwide, didn’t need it. Such tax giveaways, which steal from the poor and give to the rich, illustrate why California’s budget feels like an out-of-control carnival ride.

Peele is not the first filmmaker to identify the scariness in the soul of Santa Cruz, which was also the setting of the 1987 vampire movie, The Lost Boys.

On my own recent visit, I didn’t encounter any vampires—or any of the red-clad doppelgangers who emerge from tunnels beneath the boardwalk in Peele’s movie. But I was scared nonetheless. Santa Cruz is California’s hall of mirrors. If you stare at it, beware: you’ll soon find our state’s most terrifying problems looking right back at you.

The post The True Horror of Sunny Santa Cruz appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Further north, welcome as well to Modesto, Sacramento, Placerville, and Yuba City. And, to the south, you’re invited, too, Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Benito, and Salinas. And while you’re almost in another state, don’t worry, Tahoe City, because the Bay waters are warm.

This expanded notion of the Bay Area’s reach isn’t a joke. It reflects the biggest thinking about California’s future. If you’re in a smaller Northern California region struggling to compete with the advanced grandeur of the Bay Area, why not join forces with the Bay Area instead?

The Bay Area would benefit, too. It is one of four connected Northern California regions—along with the greater Sacramento area heading up into the mountains, the northern San Joaquin Valley, and the north Central Coast triumvirate of Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Benito counties—that face severe challenges in housing, land use, jobs, transportation, education, and the environment. Since such problems cross regional boundaries, shouldn’t the regions address them together as one giant region?

The Northern California Megaregion—a concept developed by a think tank, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute—includes 12 million people, 21 counties, and 164 incorporated cities. It extends from the Wine Country to the Lettuce Lands of the Salinas Valley, and from the Pacific to the Nevada border.

These places, while different, are already linked, by infrastructure and flows of capital and commodities that date back to the Gold Rush. Today, the Megaregion has grown more integrated as people search a wider geography for jobs and schools, while businesses expand by serving more of Northern California.

The trouble is that this growth is imbalanced. The Megaregion is home to the mega-rich San Francisco and Marin and three of California’s poorest cities: Stockton, Vallejo, and Salinas.

The 21-county, 12 million person Northern California Megaregion, a concept developed by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. Courtesy of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

The imbalance of high-paying jobs created in the Bay Area, coupled with scant and expensive housing, results in a sky-high cost of living that blunts the benefits of high salaries. It also has produced an out-migration of younger people and companies. Some of these Bay Area refugees head to East Bay exurbs, the Sacramento area, and even to the Northern San Joaquin Valley, where housing prices are one-third of those in the Bay Area proper and still haven’t recovered to their pre-recession highs. But once there, they often find themselves too far away from their jobs and preferred educational institutions. The result is brutal traffic that slows the movement of goods, produces more greenhouse gases, and creates long, unhealthy commutes for workers.

Figuring out how to rebalance the Megaregion and solve such problems is a high-stakes challenge, and not just for Northern Californians. The entire state relies heavily—perhaps too heavily—on the growth and tax revenues generated by the Bay Area, which accounts for one-third of the California economy.

Nationally, too, the future of megaregions matters. Defined as sets of neighboring metropolitan centers that share infrastructure, environmental concerns, and economic connections, Megaregions are projected to be home to 70 percent of the national population growth between now and 2050. During that period, just 11 American megaregions will be home to 80 percent of the country’s job growth.

For all these reasons, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute’s 2016 report, “The Northern California Megaregion,” deserves more consideration because it offers a vision for how the Golden State might spread out prosperity beyond its richest centers, creating a more distributed version of the California dream.

This is not about letting the Bay Area colonize its neighbors. Rather, it’s a mega-rethinking so that planning and development enable the Megaregion’s pieces—Bay Area tech, Sacramento government, Northern San Joaquin Valley trade and logistics, and the Monterey Bay Area’s farming dominance—to magnify each other.

To pick one example, if new state research-and-development tax credits were to target inland companies, an infusion of technology and investment could allow the Northern San Joaquin to make its logistics industry much less polluting in terms of greenhouse gases as it moves the vegetables of the Salinas Valley to market, perhaps through expanded ports in Stockton, West Sacramento, or Oakland.

The think tank report and its co-author, Jeff Bellisario, a man whose colleagues call him “Mr. Megaregion,” offer dozens of similarly transformative ideas. The Northern California Megaregion could create a “more distributed high tech sector,” with more companies, and more jobs inland, by better connecting universities, laboratories, and research institutions with local entrepreneurs.

Imagine, if the center of gravity in Northern California shifted southeast, landing in the fast-growing Tri-Valley, which includes the cities of Livermore, Pleasanton, Dublin, and San Ramon. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, better linked with entrepreneurs and investment, could be a jobs hub that turns into something of a megaregional capital.

Such planning should be performed by new economic development entities that extend across the entire Megaregion; companies that now leave the Bay Area for Austin in search of cost savings might be redirected to Sacramento or Santa Cruz. Such an effort would be strengthened if Bay Area entities jointly lobbied Sacramento to improve education outside the Bay Area. Only half of the people in the Monterey and Northern San Joaquin areas have had some type of post-high school education, as opposed to 70 percent in the Bay Area proper.

The report shows such investments could spin off literally hundreds of new ideas. My favorite: The Megaregion could have its own…well, I’ll call it a Nerd Army of overeducated consultants, or, in the report’s words, “a megaregional corps of consulting post-docs and advanced graduate students” that could be dispatched to solve regional problems and prepare local talent for higher-skill jobs.

Of course, making such a shift would require a well-integrated set of transportation connections from one end of the Megaregion to the other. The goal would be to get trucks and commuters off the hellish 80, 580, and 101 corridors, making it easier for the state to hit its targets for reducing greenhouse gases.

Suggested changes include more service on Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor between San Jose and Placer County, an extension of rail service to Salinas, and support of planned expansions of the ACE (Altamont Corridor Express) train down to Modesto and Merced and up to Sacramento. (Political note: The gas tax increase, on the November ballot for repeal, produces $900 million for these ACE expansions.) And all these changes, in turn, would make the actual completion of high-speed rail more urgent, since the first segment, extended from Bakersfield to San Jose, would connect with this expanded Megaregional transit system.

It is easy to mock such mega-visions. For years, real estate interests have broadcast silly promotions, like touting a major housing development in San Joaquin County as being in the “Far East Bay.” (Local joke: Is that nearer Singapore or Hong Kong?)

But if the Megaregion could harness its joint economic and lobbying power, much of this seems possible. It could even inspire imitators. Could Los Angeles, San Diego, and Las Vegas further integrate into their own Megaregional triangle? And might they throw Tijuana and Mexicali into their planning mix as well?

If it built a record of success, the Northern California Megaregion could expand, connecting to planning efforts in the troubled Northstate, and even extending down the San Joaquin Valley to California’s fifth-largest city.

Welcome to the Bay Area, Fresno.

The post If You Can’t Beat the Bay Area, Join It appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Counting the seconds in a movie scene sounds weird, I know. But as a film minor at Occidental College in Los Angeles, I’ve spent more time than I care to admit crafting punchy loglines, wrapping my head around the 180-degree-rule, and convincing people that watching three-quarters of Citizen Kane doesn’t a movie buff make. I’ve dabbled in script writing, and proudly marathoned entire film series with the commentary on.

My love for cinema didn’t sprout from film theory or Adobe Premiere tutorial clips, however. It came from a cluster of movie theaters bunched together in downtown Santa Cruz.

I grew up in Watsonville, a small town just outside the northern California city. Santa Cruz is a place you can find local substitutes for well-known chains (Betty’s Burgers instead of In-N-Out, Bookshop Santa Cruz instead of Barnes and Noble) and cars plastered with “Keep Santa Cruz Weird” bumper stickers. People loiter on the sidewalks downtown—sitting on benches, strumming guitars under trees, gazing into shop windows as they stroll by.

While the city is mostly associated with surfers, potheads, and hippies, I never fell into any of those categories. As a kid, I was quietly creative and eager to make art—so, yeah, pretty nerdy. Whenever I could wrangle a ride downtown with friends, we’d rush into the independent bookstores, buy ice cream cones from Penny Ice Creamery, and gawk at the fudge in Marini’s. But first and foremost, we would watch movies.

The downtown area has four theaters within one square mile. If you began at the Riverfront 2, hit the Regal 9 and the Del Mar, and finished at the Nick, your path would form a small zigzag through downtown and take less than 10 minutes to walk.

After a few years of going to the movies in Santa Cruz, I started to figure out the vibe and purpose of each theater. The Regal Cinemas Riverfront 2 on River Street only shows a few (usually older) films at a time. It’s where I go to see the comedy that got a 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, has already been out for six and a half weeks, and is no longer playing anywhere else. A short walk down Front and Cooper streets brings you to the Regal on Pacific, which is your standard modern theater—with an escalator and plush recliner seats that make the movie-going experience feel a little like naptime. This is where you go to see Hollywood hits and blockbusters—your Harry Potters and your Hunger Games.

The Del Mar and the Nick are both Nickelodeon theaters, a small chain that’s locally owned and operated. The Del Mar, two minutes south of the Regal on Pacific Street, has a small but ornate lobby with ceilings decked in red, gold, and green. Their big screen has a fancy red curtain that adds a bit of whimsy to a run-of-the-mill movie outing, and the overhanging mezzanine contains comfy, vaguely Art Deco furniture. The Nick is just 0.1 miles away, and can be called cramped or charmingly intimate, depending on your mood. I used to think it was a snack shack before I realized it was a theater. The Nick serves organic popcorn and shows films that aren’t playing anywhere else in Santa Cruz County. It’s where I saw my first Wes Anderson film (Moonrise Kingdom) and watched Oscar-nominated movies with my father.

While I still regularly went to the theater in Watsonville to catch its basic selection of Hollywood flicks, the 30- to 50-minute drive to downtown Santa Cruz was always worth the trip because of all the movie options. My friends and I could drive down to see a blockbuster at the Del Mar, and change our minds at the last second and head over to the Nick instead.

With these theaters at my disposal, I became interested in film as a creative outlet—a way to bring people together and spread ideas. I found my life filled with movie references, ticket stubs, and memorized matinee prices. I kept movie release dates in my calendar. I filmed my friends, and spliced the clips together to turn the footage into short music videos and theme-song montages.

I thought my frequent visits to the theaters were the habits of a casual moviegoer with nothing better to do, because I assumed everyone had easy access to a theater smorgasbord. But when I got to college, I kept ending up in film classes, and I found myself missing the tight-knit group of theaters back home.

My studies have taught me entirely new ways to look at films. I wouldn’t be as tempted to count the seconds of film shots if it wasn’t for a mini-lecture I heard in my freshman year. But even so, I’m convinced the Santa Cruz theaters had a hand in laying that groundwork. Understanding a lecture on story arcs is much easier when I can think back to perfect examples that I saw at the Del Mar. Growing up watching all different kinds of movies has helped me to predict how films will end, recognize the influence one filmmaker had on another, and understand how scripts can uphold certain film conventions while breaking others.

Even more importantly, the downtown theaters have taught me what art can make me feel. Last summer, Boyhood came out during my family’s annual Tahoe camping trip. No movie theater within a 100-mile radius ran the film. But the Nick did. The very evening my family and I returned home, I threw my belongings in my house, ignored my very real need for a nap and a meal, and drove with a friend to Santa Cruz. The theater was as small and unimpressive as always, but most of the seats were filled, and many of the audience members were teenagers and college kids. We all chuckled together whenever we heard a familiar song from the main character’s childhood that we associated with our own. The movie felt so real, even though it contradicted story structures I had been taught for years in school.

Art elicits an emotional response that’s not unlike a gravitational pull. When it’s good, it grabs you and stays with you—similar to how I still dwell on my trips to the Santa Cruz theaters, even when I am miles and years away. As my friend and I stumbled out of the Nick and into the night, I asked him what he thought of Boyhood. He said, “I feel like I just watched my life.” I told him, “I want to make art like this.”

I haven’t made it yet. But if I reach that level, even if what I come up with isn’t a film, even if it’s barely acknowledged by anyone, I want to create the sort of art that I most enjoyed viewing in Santa Cruz’s theaters—the sort of art that, regardless of form, makes people feel as if they have just connected with something real. Real, like 16-year-olds loitering on Pacific Avenue, scrounging up quarters to feed the parking meter, laughing together as the theater lights dim.

The post Santa Cruz Made Me Love Movies appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Here in Santa Cruz, tracking our water consumption has become a serious matter. Compulsory water rationing began in May.

More than 80 percent of California is in extreme drought, and scorching temperatures in the first half of 2014—the hottest on record—have only complicated the calamity. Hundreds of California communities are urging conservation, and the state recently approved a $500 fine for water wasters. For now, however, most water restrictions in California are fairly light and loosely enforced. Los Angeles, for example, is beefing up its water patrols and education efforts, but residents can still water their lawns three times a week and wash cars with a nozzle.

But in Santa Cruz, and a handful of other cities, the rules are strict and mandatory. If plentiful rains do not arrive next winter–and forecasters recently downgraded the chances of a strong El Niño that could bring drought-busting storms–Santa Cruz’s tough water restrictions may foreshadow the fate of L.A. and many other cities.

This summer, Santa Cruzans were required to slash overall water consumption by 25 percent. Due to a strong environmental focus here, we were already some of California’s thriftiest water consumers with per capita use at just half the statewide average.

Santa Cruz typically has cool, foggy summers and an average winter rainfall of about 30 inches. When I first moved here, I was intrigued to encounter banana slugs in the damp redwood forests. But the lush green landscape is deceptive. Santa Cruz depends almost entirely on seasonal rains to replenish our water supply, leaving us more vulnerable than many areas to drought.

The city’s water rationing plan provides every residential property with a monthly allotment of 7,480 gallons. That’s for a household of up to four people–the allocation increases if there are additional residents. This works out to an average of 249 gallons each day for everything.

The water shortage seeps into every part of our lives. Long hot showers are now just a memory, as we hurry through a two- or three-minute soap-and-rinse. Even though we previously installed water-saving toilets, this year we don’t flush unless it is necessary. We don’t wash our cars. Hosing down outdoor walkways is not allowed. If you own a hot tub or a pool, you cannot refill it. Hotels ask guests to forgo daily linen service. Unless it is requested, restaurants no longer provide customers with a glass of water.

Not watering our lawn provides the biggest water savings. Like so many suburban homes in California, our landscaping replicates an English garden with a verdant front lawn, even though our climate is vastly different. When rationing started, I measured what it took to keep the grass green. With the sprinklers running, the water meter’s dial whirled like a dervish. Roughly 10 minutes of lawn watering consumed our entire daily allotment. In an ordinary year, I calculated that our lawn accounts for more than half our summer water usage.

We always knew our lawn was wasteful, but due to the expense of installing new landscaping we had not gotten around to making a change. This winter we will take advantage of a city-sponsored incentive program that offers rebates of up to $500 for replacing lawns with drought-tolerant plants. Throughout the Golden State there are more than 2 million acres of thirsty lawns, an area more than twice the size of Rhode Island–and this is actually good news. Replacing lawns with alternative landscaping offers an obvious way to conserve.

So far this summer, my wife and I have consumed only about two-thirds of our monthly ration. Throughout the city, some 94 percent of residents are cooperating. Reports about the few who have exceeded the limit indicate that some have done so accidentally. The owners of an unoccupied beach bungalow were shocked to receive a $1,700 water bill caused by a leaky toilet. In lieu of paying a fine, first-time offenders can attend two hours of “water school,” where they learn about our local water woes, study conservation methods, and find out how to use a water meter to check for leaks. Repeat offenders, however, are subject to stiff fines. Penalties have ranged as high as $4,000.

One frustrating consequence: the better job we do saving water, the higher our bills may be. Under the rationing plan, the city brings in less revenue because it sells less water. But many operating costs of the water system remain fixed, so the City Council is considering a proposal to charge customers an additional $4 million to cover the shortfall. If the drought worsens and we use even less water, that figure could go much higher.

That’s not all. As in many California communities, our aging water system needs a serious upgrade. Citywide, we lose an astonishing 8.5 percent of our water supply to leaks. To cover the cost of these improvements, we in Santa Cruz are looking at the likelihood of a steep, 10 percent annual rate increase for the next five years.

Officials have been searching for ways to increase our water supply, from augmenting storage capacity to water exchanges with neighboring cities to recycling more water. The most controversial proposal is a $129 million seawater desalination plant. Because of widespread opposition, city officials scuttled plans to put “desal” to a vote this year. No matter what is done to increase supply, conservation will continue to be a permanent way of life.

For all the drought has cost us, what I miss most is our normal rainy season. It seems like it has been ages since we experienced a series of powerful, ground-soaking, river-filling storms. I miss how the air fills with expectation just before a weather system moves onshore, the sky darkening and the wind stirring. I long for the rattle of rain on the roof and to once again walk through fields of moist green earth.

Until that happens, I’ll continue to check my meter and to conserve every drop of water.

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