On an overcast morning on Friday, Aug. 25, as jets of water from sprinklers rain down on the surrounding fields of lettuce, a gaggle of journalists, politicians and public officials are gathered at a press event along the Pajaro River levee, just more than a stone’s throw from where it breached last March. The breach occurred after weeks of sustained rainfall on the Central Coast, and it wasn’t a surprise – for over 50 years, federal, state and local officials have known the levee was deficient, but there was never enough buy-in, or urgency, to do something about it. Seemingly, that is starting to change, but time will tell if it’s real, or just a public relations band-aid to save face after the flooding in the community of Pajaro, which displaced thousands of residents from their homes and left some of those homes unlivable.