Monterey County News, Traffic & Weather

As voters receive their ballots for the 2024 presidential election and important statewide and local races, we look at efforts to build democracy, and efforts to weaken it.

Volunteering and looking out for one another is central to community life.

A spectacular piece of land north of Santa Cruz shows what a determined group of people, with the help of a tenacious little media company, can do.

The Cotoni Coast Dairies National Monument, just north of Santa Cruz, brought a community together.

California's first big reservoir project in decades is underway, as the state finally gets rid of some old dams. Environmental responsibility meets aridification.

We check in on efforts to raise some dams in the state to store more water, and to raze some dams to to let water run free.

What happens if you have a democracy and nobody shows up?

We look at one of many local efforts to cultivate the local civic engagement talent pool.

As some municipalities struggle to find people to run for elected offices and advisory boards, we look at the civic engagement pipeline.

In which we salute the hard workers who make California the fifth largest economy on the planet.

Things bloom best when people get their hands dirty.

For one thing, "citizen," like "garden," can be used as a verb.

In the midst of charges that California, and its favorite daughter Kamala Harris, are soft on crime, lawmakers step up in the name of public safety.

Nobody is happy with the current situation. Especially California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Californians are fed up with flash mob shoplifting, smash and grab theft and an alarming uptick in Fentanyl deaths.

Joe Biden visited the Santa Cruz County beach towns of Aptos and Capitola following bad storms a couple winters ago. Last week, his administration delivered a big pile of money to help these communities and their neighbors build resilience.

The Santa Cruz-based California Marine Sanctuary Foundation receives a historic $71 million climate resilience grant from Biden Administration.

The writer and Internet dynamo shares his experience and reveals what happens in the board room.

What does it mean when firefighters call a fire "contained?" Here's a brief guide to commonly used fire prevention terminology.

As July goes down in the history books as the hottest ever recorded, the 2024 California fire season has already burned more than 30 times as much acreage as in 2023.