Talk of the Bay, with Chris Krohn, Tuesday, January 10th, 5-6 PM, on KSQD
Fred Keeley then
Fred Keeley now
Fred Keeley has worn many political hats in his 24 years serving in public office: county supervisor, state assemblymember, Speaker Pro-Tem in the California Assembly, and finally, Santa Cruz County Treasurer. And now, in the twilight of his lengthy political career he wants to run for Mayor of Santa Cruz. Keeley’s always had environmental concerns too. He currently serves on the board of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Foundation and also passed legislation that added additional park land around California.
Right now, Santa Cruz faces a tremendous building growth spurt and desperately seeks to manage the gauntlet of realtors, developers, and UC Regent-types who seek to capitalize off our community’s rich resources. It is not so much a new story, but one ratcheted up ten-fold. Is Keeley the right person to steer this community through the the impending clash over 20-story buildings while still providing protection for our greenbelt lands? Does he have an answer for growth’s inevitable increasing water use with no new supplies in sight? Can he manage the ongoing tensions between real police protection and devising a competent plan for addressing the city’s homeless and affordable housing crisis?
Fred Keeley will be Chris Krohn’s guest for the entire hour on this week’s Talk of the Bay, rerun from Tuesday, July 5th at 5pm. Come join us and see if Santa Cruz politics is going back to the future with a veteran political insider like Keeley, or if he can lead the way for this town to live up to its progressive ideals as it confronts a daunting future of high rise buildings, 28,000 UCSC students, and Boardwalk traffic that no city council has yet solved.
Ronnie D. Lipschutz is Emeritus Professor of Politics at University of California, Santa Cruz, where he taught from 1990 to 2020, and Co-director of the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation in Santa Cruz (https://sustainablesystemsfoundation.org/). He received his Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from UC-Berkeley in 1987 and an SM in Physics from MIT in 1978. He teaches and writes about energy, resources and social sustainability, foreign policy, global politics and sociology, politics and popular culture, and surveillance society. He is the author/co-author and editor/co-editor of numerous books and articles. His most recent book, with Dr. Doreen Stabinsky, is Environmental Politics for Changing World—Power, Perspectives and Practices (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).