Greetings from San Benito County

The city of Hollister, in San Benito County, is 45 miles from San Jose—and a world away. This county is overwhelmingly rural, with the vast majority of its 1,390 square miles devoted to agriculture—mostly ranching. Because of its proximity to Silicon Valley, and to a lesser extent Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, Hollister is under tremendous development pressure. 

Bounded by the Diablo and Gavilan mountain ranges, and home to Pinnacles National Park, it is an extraordinarily beautiful and bucolic piece of California.

Hollister, the county seat, is located just 10 miles from Highway 101, but is served by such long-neglected highways that it is isolated from the traffic and commerce of the South Bay Area and Central Coast. While that isolation gives the place a refreshingly peaceful vibe, it hurts local businesses—and leaves the county government’s coffers depleted.

For the past six months, related to my duties as editorial director of California Local and co-steward of our Media Alliance, I have been consulting and serving as acting editor at BenitoLink, a nonprofit newsroom with its headquarters in Hollister’s historic downtown. It’s been one of the most challenging and rewarding chapters of my long career in journalism.

Last week, in an annual tradition practiced by many newsrooms, BenitoLink published its Top Stories of 2024. Reporter Noe Magaña pointed out that because it was an election year, there was no shortage of news. The first article Magaña mentions in his roundup is the first installment of a series of Fact Checks, instituted in response to a barrage of direct-mail campaign flyers that went on to flood the county all year.

BenitoLink’s editorial team published Fact Checks that analyzed just four of dozens of flyers that targeted elected officials, and found that most of the charges against the incumbents were misleading or just plain false. This misinformation campaign was accompanied by a torrent of inaccurate and uncivil posts on social media. 

When votes were tallied in November, all three incumbent members of the Hollister city council were swept out of office.

The city government purge was one of several electoral upsets relating to crucial issues that could change the shape of this small city and county. 

• The hospital that serves San Benito County, Hazel Hawkins Memorial, is involved in an ongoing bankruptcy case. The board that runs the hospital wants to sell it to a Michigan based company, while the majority of members of the county Board of Supervisors wanted to maintain local control. The hospital board placed a measure on the November ballot asking voters to approve the sale, and won approval. A few weeks later, a respected national magazine, American Prospect, published a blistering investigative piece about the company slotted to buy the hospital, Insight Health, revealing that it has no experience running rural hospitals, and accusing its executives of fraud. (Insight denied the charges.) While the political battle is over, the war goes on.

• Voters approved Measure A, a ballot initiative requiring that any move to develop a piece of land zoned rural, agricultural or rangeland must first be put to a countywide public vote. While proponents of the measure pitched it as a way to stop sprawl in Hollister and protect the Diablo range, it can do neither. In fact, its most profound immediate result may be to halt development at four intersections on Highway 101—miles from both Hollister and the Diablos—that had been in public process for years. Meanwhile, in a story that broke in the Hollister Freelance and was later reported on BenitoLink, it was revealed that Measure A’s opponents misfiled $189,000 in campaign contributions in what the county called “an honest mistake.”
  
  
• Two bonds to fund a second campus for the celebrated yet overcrowded Hollister High School failed. This will affect the high school district’s ability to tap into money being made available by a statewide measure to fund local schools.

Hollster and San Benito County face even more challenges. In November, having negotiated secret deals with city officials several years ago to build two ginormous warehouses, with the promise of sales tax revenues exceeding $1 million, Amazon ditched a plan to make one of the buildings a revenue-generating fulfillment center. Projected tax revenues now are exactly zero. 

While there were a slew of articles following these big developments over the past 12 months, they made up a fraction of the news covered by BenitoLink’s small devoted team, all documented in Noe’s end-of-year roundup. 

Following an escape at the county jail, the sheriff closed a newly built extension citing lack of funds, while problems at the sewer-treatment plant regularly engulfed some neighborhoods in stench (see depleted county coffers, above). Longtime businesses in charming San Juan Bautista, a destination thanks to California’s most magnificent mission, went under, as tourist traffic dwindled (see decrepit highways, above). Highway improvements crept forward at a painfully slow pace, while the Civil Grand Jury found systemic dysfunction in local government. 

For most residents of San Benito County, BenitoLink was their primary source of information about these issues. This news organization, which was founded 14 years ago by the Community Foundation for San Benito County, survives on donations from local residents and national organizations committed to local journalism. Just a few weeks ago, executive director Leslie David reported that we’d completed a successful fundraising drive, fueled by local donors and matched by the Institute for Nonprofit News. A few months ago, Leslie secured other significant funding from the Press Forward initiative.

I invite you to contribute to their efforts by following this link.