Mount Madonna School sent 14 seniors on to college during last week's graduation ceremony.

Shashi Sarnaik was the class Valedictorian, and Aaron Colton and Alexa Rosendale were the 2008 Co-Salutatorians.

Sarnaik, who lives in Gilroy, will attend the University of California, Los Angeles. The university is home to the renowned UCLA Medical Center; Sarnaik plans a pre-med course of study.

Colton, a Soquel resident, will head east to attend Vassar College, located in the heart of New York's Hudson Valley. Founded in 1861 to provide women with an education equal to that once available only to men, the college began enrolling male students in 1969.

Rosendale, who lives in Watsonville, will head to the Pacific Northwest to attend Portland State University. She plans to major in civil engineering. A talented volleyball player who helped take the MMS Hawks to the Division 5 state championship last fall, Rosendale has signed to play as an outside hitter for the Vikings, an NCAA Division I program.

In addition to Sarnaik, Rosendale and Colton, Mount Madonna School's Class of 2008 includes 11 other college-bound students.

Garbage rates on the rise

The average resident will soon pay nearly $2 more a month for curbside garbage service.

Implementing the city's streamlined recycling program and paying for increasingly expensive diesel means South Valley Disposal and Recycling has no choice but to raise rates, the city council agreed.

"In my tow truck business, we operate on diesel fuel, and there's just no way around it," said Councilman Dion Bracco. "I really want the citizens to understand that the garbage company's got to be able to buy fuel to do their job."

Excluding this year, rate increases have averaged 3.4 percent since 2001.

Let's talk library

With a 5-2 vote, the council hired a consultant to lead an 11th-hour voter outreach campaign to help the city pass a $37 million library bond.

The council still must vote before Aug. 8 to place the measure on the November ballot. That is a formality, though, since the city has already agreed to spend $160,000 for voters to decide this winter.

The city will spend $20,000 to survey voters in light of the sour economic climate to see if they would pass a bond measure by the required two-thirds majority. The city already spent $20,000 on a would-you-support-a-library-bond survey six months ago. It will cost another $54,000 to $64,000 for the county to place that measure and a separate charter on the ballot. And Lew Edwards will charge the city another $53,500 to, among other things, send out mailers, help poll voters, train library staff on talking points and assist the city attorney in drafting the ballot measure itself, according to city figures.

Councilmen Perry Woodward and Craig Gartman declined to support the "noble" project because using city money for advocacy, subtle or not, is inappropriate, they said. Mayor Al Pinheiro and the rest of the council argued, however, that the community needs a new library - period. Plus, the money comes from a city fund dedicated to the construction of the new library, they noted.