Both lanes of Highway-9 in Ben Lomond were shut down for over 11 hours yesterday after a Boulder Creek resident crashed into a power pole. 27-year old Micah Szoke was arrested for driving under the influence after driving a Cadillac sedan into a pole just before 8 a.m near Middle Drive, an area located between Boulder Creek and Brookdale. Power was shut down to roughly 745 area-customers throughout the day. One lane reopened around noon while P-G-and-E crews worked to replace the pole. The highway was completely re-opened at around 7:30 p.m. Szoke was booked into Santa Cruz County Jail.
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Santa Cruz City Council members voted today to waive overnight camping citations issued to homeless people if they are on a shelter wait list. Current rules allow the city to waive such tickets when the winter shelter at the former National Guard Armory site is full. However, it doesn’t cover times when other year-round shelters are full, but the long-standing practice has been to dismiss citations written when the shelters are full. The city attorney is expected to work out the details about wait list verification with shelter providers.
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A Long Beach man was arrested on drug charges in King City Monday after he was found urinating behind a gas station. Marlon K. Wells was stopped at 7:20 p.m. at the Valero Gas Station in the 50,000 block of Mesa Verde Road while he and passenger, Patricia Litel were traveling from Long Beach to the Santa Cruz area. Officers searched the vehicle and discovered a backpack filled with $20,000 worth of Morhine, Hydromorphone, Oxycontin, and Hydrocodone. The 2 were taken into custody on suspicion of possessing and transporting narcotics for sale.
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Plans to design a desalination plant and launch a study to ban single-use plastic bags were approved in Santa Cruz today. The council voted unanimously to sign a design contract with a Walnut Creek firm to draft partial plans for the proposed desalination project. If approved, the plant would transform 2.5 million gallons of seawater per day, and the city would draw on the supply only during drought years. The council also approved studying a ban on plastic bags dispensed by grocery stores, eateries and merchants. The ban would charge customers 10-cents for each paper bags. The county is currently looking at a similar ordinance, as are other communities statewide after the Legislature failed to pass a statewide ban recently.
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