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Press release from Humboldt Green Events:

Humboldt Green Events is proud to officially announce that Cannifest 2026 will take place at the historic Arcata Ball Park on September 12th and 13th, 2026. This year’s theme, “Build the Village,” marks a return to the grassroots, community-focused roots of the Emerald Triangle, transforming the “Crown Jewel” of Arcata into a vibrant space for families, farmers, and music lovers.

In a major shift toward inclusivity, Cannifest 2026 is a free concert for all children. The entire festival has been reimagined as a multi-generational experience where families are encouraged to enjoy the weekend together in a safe, celebratory environment.

“We are bringing Cannifest home to the heart of the community,” says Stephen Gieder, Executive Director. “By moving to the Ball Park, we are creating a village where our kids can play, our farmers can share their stories, and we can all dance to the same rhythm. This isn’t just a festival; it’s a family reunion for the culture.”

2026 Festival Features:

• The F.I.Z. (Family Interactive Zone) & Unity Stage: A cornerstone of the “Village,” the F.I.Z. is a dedicated space for youth and families to engage with hands-on art, workshops, and community building. The Unity Stage will feature a full lineup of music and programming designed to inspire the next generation—completely free for all children under 12!
• The Main Stage: Produced by Cannifest Presents, featuring a world-class lineup of music that will provide the soundtrack for the weekend.
• Into the CannAbyss Talk Stage: A premier educational hub featuring deep-dive panel discussions, heritage storytelling, and the Dan Mar Sustainability Symposium.
• The Grow Games: Humboldt’s legendary agricultural athletes take the field for a high-energy display of cultivation skill and community spirit.
• Shakedown Street & The Makers Market: A curated marketplace featuring local artisans, heritage farmers, and small businesses showcasing the best of Humboldt’s creative and agricultural output.
• The Headstash Hub: An interactive activation where the public can meet the region’s master judges and sign up for the 2026 Headstash competition.

Community & Compliance

To ensure a safe environment for all ages, Cannifest will not host a regulated sales and consumption area this year. To support our local industry partners, the Dispensary Flight Club will provide dedicated shuttle transportation from the Ball Park to premier retail locations in Arcata, Eureka, and McKinleyville, allowing patrons to support the local dispensaries directly at their licensed storefronts.

Sponsorship packages and vendor applications for Shakedown Street and the Makers Market are now open. Community members and non-profits are invited to step up to the plate and help “Build the Village” this September.

For more information, visit www.cannifest.com.

About Humboldt Green Events:

Humboldt Green Events produces high-impact gatherings that celebrate the intersection of agriculture, music, and community. Led by Stephen Gieder, the organization remains a steadfast advocate for the legacy culture of the Emerald Triangle.

Press release from the city of Fortuna:

When the City of Fortuna began updating its General Plan and Strategic Plan, officials chose to start by listening first. Last fall, the City launched a communitywide Listening Campaign, conducting in depth conversations with community members, City staff representing every department, all five City Council members, and focus groups with teenagers and immigrant families. The newly published report summarizing these conversations shows a remarkable degree of unity across groups that often have different perspectives.

The City is now inviting the broader community to build on that shared foundation through two hands-on public workshops at River Lodge. Everyone who lives, works, raises a family, or simply cares about Fortuna is encouraged to attend.

Workshop 1 — IMAGINE FUTURE FORTUNA - Wednesday, March 25, 2026

• Doors open: 4:00 p.m. (preview)
• Workshop: 5:30–8:00 p.m.
• Location: River Lodge, 1800 Riverwalk Drive, Fortuna

Focus: Developing guiding principles—vision, purpose, community values, and decision-making criteria that will help shape Fortuna’s future.

Workshop 2 — CHART A COURSE TO FUTURE FORTUNA - Saturday, April 11, 2026

• Doors open: 10:00 a.m. (preview)
• Workshop: 11:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.
• Location: River Lodge, 1800 Riverwalk Drive, Fortuna

Focus: Turning shared principles into clear priorities across key community topics, including:

• Youth & belonging
• Economic development
• Land use & community character
• Infrastructure & safety
• City services & programs
• Leadership & communications

Both workshops will include snacks and drinks, childcare for ages 5 and up, teen and youth spaces, and Spanish interpretation (traducción al español). No registration is required — drop in, bring family and friends, and help shape Fortuna’s future.

For more information and the full listening campaign report check out Future Fortuna:Community Workshops & Listening Campaign.

The calls rang out over and over, in the dispassionate water system codes that meant unmistakably: “Something’s wrong. I need you. Help.”

Like a little kid pleading for someone – anyone — to respond, the alarm calls on that rainy January morning went to three different phone numbers at 3:02 a.m., 3:04 a.m. and 3:06 a.m. Then minutes later calls went again to all three phones, and yet again, before roping in a fourth phone by 3:35 a.m.

No one answered.

While 70,000 gallons an hour rushed from a broken pipe, two key Trinidad city workers slept, each thinking the other was supposed to be on call that night.

The ensuing water crisis shuttered restaurants for days, dented Trinidad’s water reserve funds and prompted fresh conversations about a long-smoldering pipeline debate.

More than that, though, Trinidad’s waterfall of water loss underscores a national reality that policy analysts have acknowledged for decades: Many of America’s water systems are broken, too fragmented to be relied on, especially in rural areas.

Humboldt County alone has 51 different water systems, including at least four that are “failing” and four that are “at risk,” according to a list that’s updated daily by the state Water Resources Control Board.

Among the failing, the state water board says, is the Scotia Community Services District, which just last week, on March 5, told residents to boil their water before drinking it. The others are the Redway Community Services District, the Weott Community Services District and the tiny Palomino Estates Water Company near Garberville.

The biggest “at risk” system in Humboldt County, the state says, is the city of Trinidad, which provides water to around 1,000 people, restaurants and businesses within and beyond city limits. (The other three at-risk systems are much smaller: Alderpoint County Water, Moonstone Heights MWA and Trinidad Extended Stay RV.)

“Running a modern, safe, reliable, resilient, sustainable water system is hard,” says water distribution expert Manny Teodoro, a professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And while catastrophic failures like the one in Trinidad can happen anywhere, he says, “your probability of catastrophic failure is much higher when you’re small.”

Teodoro, who has edited a new book looking at 50 years of water policy, can summarize decades of studies finding that small districts have more trouble meeting safe drinking water standards. As a group, he says, they charge more for lower quality systems.

One of the benefits of these rural water enclaves, though, is a sense of place, rooted in local history and local control, says Kristin Dobbin, a UC Berkeley professor who focuses on water policy research and community outreach.

To preserve that, she says, tiny water systems scramble to maintain equipment and pay workers, struggle to save for emergencies, and often have a lone water source that makes them especially vulnerable to fire, landslide or drought.

The state of California has been a leader in encouraging small districts to meld into larger ones, and has fostered well over 200 consolidations since 2015, she says. But that push isn’t always welcome.

“There are places that are really concerned about consolidation because they’re concerned about growth,” Dobbin says. “Or what I hear more often, people really don’t want to give up control of their local decisions.”

In Trinidad, local control has come at a high cost. The city burned through its entire water system capital improvement budget, more than $1 million between 2021 and 2024, just to cover operating expenses, including outside contractors who had the required licenses to run a water plant. It raised rates in 2024 and was just clawing back toward a solid reserve fund when trouble hit.

A dark and stormy night

The failure began when a 6-inch PVC pipe, which lay buried near a slowly sliding section of Scenic Drive, began to crack. Water plant records show first a trickle of loss around 1 a.m., and then a flood, likely when the crack forced open a wide horizontal wedge along the top of the pipe.

The city’s SCADA (“supervisory control and data acquisition”) system began sending out more and more alarms. But the city worker who had volunteered his work cell number for the primary alarm phone had handed off the on-call job that night to another worker – or thought he had.

“There was a misunderstanding there. There was a mishap,” said Kyle Shipman, Trinidad’s public works supervisor.

Such misunderstandings are not trivial. For a water plant operator, neglecting an alarm call is like a fire department picking and choosing which fire alarms it responds to, says Michael Sims of the California Rural Water Association.

“If they are a state water operator, certified by the state, they have to pick up the call. That’s their job,” says Sims, the water association’s lead specialist in leak detection training. “They are supposed to pick up. They are supposed to shut it down.”

People familiar with small water systems say the logical thing to do after such an alarm that would be to go to the water plant, consider isolating one or more tanks to preserve some water supply, then drive first to areas with known weaknesses to look for leaks. Good places to start looking would be areas with past leaks or with known slides or earth movement.

In this case, though, Shipman said that an immediate response wouldn’t have helped much. Someone would still have had to get dressed, drive to the plant to check its systems, then drive to the water tanks to verify levels were really dropping so drastically, and finally drive to potential leak sites, find the leak and turn the right valves to seal it off. That all would have taken three hours at best, he and his staff have estimated.

None of that was even attempted at 3 a.m. though.

Instead, the water flowed on, eventually forming a slurry that oozed through a slope below Scenic Drive, where it was spotted by a Trinidad Rancheria worker in the morning’s light. That worker called Interim City Manager Gabe Adams at 7 a.m.

Adams dispatched a city staffer to the site, who isolated the leaking pipe by turning two valves, in two separate but nearby locations. Shutting both valves only took about 20 minutes, Shipman said. By then it was too late.

Both of Trindad’s water tanks, with a combined capacity of 400,000 gallons, had drained away.

That level of detail was missing from the presentation given to the Trinidad City Council on Jan. 13, during its first meeting after the water leak.

To prepare for their upcoming March 10 meeting, council members were just sent a much more detailed account, which stresses that the fastest possible leak fix would have taken three hours. The report called Trinidad’s water team “heroes” and said in part: “Considering the unprecedented set of circumstances surrounding the incident, including the fact that our team of young operators have never experienced a leak of this size and scope, the response was outstanding.”

Even after reading past council minutes and talking with city council members, Trinidad Eatery owner Betsy Musick has been among those frustrated by the city’s response.

“I don’t think it’s clear what happened between the team getting those first alarms between 3 or 3:30 and being boots on the ground between 7 and 7:30,” Musick said. “There’s clearly a breakdown here. If it’s human that’s OK but that needs to be admitted.”

Musick has surveyed business owners and believes that over the five days that a boil water order was in effect, forcing restaurants and the grocery deli to close or partially close, $150,000 was lost. That includes lost revenues, spoiled food and lost wages and tips for employees.

As a business owner, her concerns are threefold. “I want to hear what actually happened, where the fault lies so it doesn’t happen again; how is the city learning from the situation: and is there anything they can do for us financially.”

From creek to table

Trinidad’s water comes from a mossy bend of Luffenholtz Creek, a little inland from where the creek runs under the freeway and tumbles toward Luffenholtz Beach. Water is pumped up from a gravelly bed about 10 feet below the creek, and shunted through a series of tanks and treatments, filters and a flocculator to remove sediment and screen out anything you wouldn’t want to drink.

“It’s archaic — this is like 1970s technology,” says Carl Anderson, who is working toward getting a “T3” license that will allow him to serve as chief plant operator, eliminating a need for outside contractors.

Well, perhaps not archaic, public works chief Shipman qualifies during a recent water plant tour. But, he says, “It’s very finicky. It likes what it likes.”

The finickiness, a storm that sent churning muck down through the riverbed to where the pumps lay, and a failed motherboard in a key sensor all slowed efforts to get clean water back to Trinidad’s taps.

For days, a convoy of water trucks fed the water system’s tanks, at a cost of close to $20,000. City staffers shared shifts around the clock, racking up substantial overtime. “No matter what we did, it wasn’t looking right,” Shipman said.

When Trinidad first imposed a boil water order that Saturday morning, the city said it hoped to restore service in 48 hours. Instead, the order wasn’t lifted until that Wednesday evening.

At council meetings since, council member and public comments have ranged between praise for herculean work from 7 a.m. that Saturday morning onward to questions about what, if anything, could have helped – including a much-debated pipeline.

Pandora’s pipeline

Trinidad Rancheria has long yearned to build a hotel beside its The Heights casino, just outside Trinidad town limits. One roadblock has been water supply, although a lawsuit from opponents has put fire protection criteria in play, too.

Back in 2020, the rancheria asked the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District to consider sending some of its supply north, via a new pipeline.

People who hate the idea of a five-story hotel rising up above coastal cliffs, and even some who might tolerate it, hate the pipeline idea even more. They’ve flooded local and regional meetings in protest, and filed a lawsuit that forced more consideration of fire risks.

For almost as long, the city of Trinidad has gone back and forth over whether to even study the implications of connecting to that pipeline if it is built.

Opponents predict that if water comes, sprawl would infest the green ridges from northern McKinleyville to Trinidad, peppering vacation rentals throughout Moonstone Heights, Westhaven and beyond. The Pandora’s pipeline would gush with multiple misfortunes -– higher water rates, swarming crowds at the local market, a casino gas station that could rob the city of revenue.

To opponents of the pipeline, even asking -– as one Trinidad council member did in January -– whether a pipeline could make Trinidad’s water more secure is like asking if you could save your kid’s school by firing every teacher.

Nonetheless, the question is there.

The answer, interim manager Adams told the council, is that a big pipeline from the south could have supplied far more water, and that Humboldt Bay’s much larger staff of operators, working overnight, would have made it far easier to respond to the leak quickly.

The pipeline itself is no slam dunk, and years of deliberation by multiple regulatory bodies lie ahead, whether Trinidad chooses to join in or not.

Still, Trinidad’s five-day boil water episode has put a fresh focus on what kind of water system it wants, and what tradeoffs it might make to get there.

“Those who want the pipeline are absolutely going to try to take this to the bank,” says Steve Madrone, the Humboldt County Supervisor whose district includes Trinidad. (Full disclosure: I volunteered for Madrone’s supervisorial campaign in 2018.)

Madrone is chair of the Local Agency Formation Commission, one of several government boards that would ultimately consider the pipeline, and as such he says he cannot take a position on the issue.

But in general, Madrone says, merging small water districts into larger ones tends to be a remedy for repeated water safety violations, and Trinidad has not had repeated water safety issues. What Trinidad has had instead, he says, are serious management issues.

“If I were a city resident or a ratepayer, I’d be lividly pissed about their mismanagement,” Madrone says, particularly under prior city managers whose tenures saw big contracting bills and the departures of some water staffers.

Council member Kati Breckenridge bristles at that criticism as unfair and poorly informed. “Our staff works so hard, and the councilors do too,” she says. The water leak was rough on staffers, rough on local businesses, expensive, and potentially scary, she says.

“It increased the feeling, at least for me, that we really need a feasibility study about our water processing and whether it’s wise to continue the path we’re on or to make a change,” Breckenridge says.

Community soul-searching is a sound starting point, says UC Berkeley expert Dobbin.

“If a community wants to grow that’s great,” Dobbin says, “and if a community doesn’t want to grow that’s great. But there has to be a plan for investing in the system.”

What people in any small water district, from Scotia to Trinidad, should ask themselves is whether the water district they have is able to do the job they want.

The questions Dobbin recommends include: Does my district have enough money for regular maintenance? Does it have enough funds to cover emergencies? And does it have enough sources of water to handle an uncertain future?

If those answers lean toward no, she recommends a crucial next step: How can the community find ways to keep its local voice, while exploring some kind of connection, physical or managerial, to a larger agency?

Like Luffenholtz Creek in winter, that conversation will keep churning on.

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This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

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The apartment building planned on East Morris Avenue in Modesto is exactly the kind of thing that California’s political leaders want to see a whole lot more of: The project promises 44 units of affordable housing — half reserved for people without homes. It’s received zoning approval, weathered public feedback, earned the support of local elected officials and sits beside a busy bus line. Once built, the project promises on-site mental health services, job training and Zumba classes.

What the project lacks is money.

Having quilted together a financial patchwork of local government and corporate grants, private debt, and a plot of land donated by a foundation, it remains just shy of the total needed to break ground.

Six years and 13 funding applications after it was first proposed, the Morris Village project sits ready, but waiting.

An estimated 39,880 affordable units across California are stuck in financial purgatory, according to a new report by Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit that funds, consults and advocates for affordable housing. That’s 461 “shovel-ready developments” that, like the one on East Morris, are fully designed, legally green-lit and backed with a significant — but still insufficient — amount of money.

Many have “been sitting for a year or two waiting for funding,” said Justine Marcus, policy director for Enterprise’s Northern California office and one of the report’s co-authors. “There’s no exit route right now. It’s a bottleneck.”

For many developers and affordable housing advocates, that bottleneck represents an especially frustrating inconsistency of California public policy. Lawmakers are desperate to see the state build more homes — of all kinds, but especially for people with the least ability to pay the state’s exorbitant rents. State housing regulators have ordered local governments to plan for the construction of an additional 2.5 million units by the end of the decade. One million of those are supposed to be for people making less than 80% of each region’s median income.

As a general rule, that’s a population of hard-up renters that the private market has been unable to profitably serve at scale. To fill that gap, non-profit low-income housing developers typically turn to taxpayer-funded support. At the moment, according to the report, there isn’t enough of that to go around.

Enterprise took publicly available but hard-to-parse applicant lists from seven subsidy programs administered by various wings of California’s state government going back three years. With a combination of number crunching and a little inference, the report estimates that clearing the current backlog would require an extra $4.1 billion, split between state administered grants, low-cost loans and tax write-offs.

Once awarded, this final layer of state subsidy has to be spent in relatively short order. That means this list of 39,880 units comprise a group of affordable housing projects that are all but ready to go, said Marcus. “They kinda have to have their (stuff) together.”

Case in point: Two-thirds of the projects on the list have already received support from at least one other state program. Those dollars aren’t awarded to just any developer, said Betsy McGovern-Garcia, vice president of Self-Help Enterprises, one of two non-profits behind Morris Village.

“These are all projects that are close to amenities,” she said. “These are all projects providing resident services. These are all projects that are financially feasible…They are all meeting the bar for what we want to see as a state out of our affordable housing community.”

In February, McGovern-Garcia and her colleagues applied for a final round of financial support from the state “to close the gap” and finally start construction.

“We are optimistic this might be our round,” she said in an interview, her fingers crossed.

A moving bottleneck

California has seen gridlock in affordable housing production before, but the precise location of the traffic jam has changed over time.

When Nevada Merriman was leading a team of affordable developers in Silicon Valley a decade ago, she said local approval was the major hold-up. Getting the legal okay to build low-income housing on a particular site in a particular town required developers to run a gauntlet of planning department and city council meetings, win over hostile neighbors with costly concessions, community meetings and design revisions and to fend off the ever-present possibility of litigation. Because relatively few projects survived that ordeal, the competition for funding on the other side wasn’t especially stiff, said Merriman, who is now policy advocate for MidPen Housing, an affordable developer in San Mateo County.

That began to change earlier this decade. California lawmakers began passing laws overriding these local impediments — especially for affordable projects. All of a sudden more projects were clearing those early regulatory hurdles and competing for Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, the federal government’s signature affordable housing construction subsidy. The bottleneck moved further up the road.

But then that too began to change late last year. Buried in President Donald Trump’s signature tax bill from 2025 was a significant boost to the tax credit program. (Specifically, the law increased the total supply of one type of credit while allowing another kind to be spread out over twice as many projects).

Which brings us to the latest bottleneck.

Now projects can get through local approval. They can more easily acquire the final and most important layer of federal financing. But project sponsors typically can’t apply for that until all other financial holes are plugged.

“We’re looking for state sources to fill that gap,” said Merriman. “We want to make sure we don’t leave those federal sources on the table.”

MidPen currently has 1,198 units spread across seven developments waiting for that last bit of funding, she said. “Should there be a source…there’s a pipeline that is ready to go.”

“There’s no exit route right now. It’s a bottleneck.”
—Justine Marcus, Northern California policy director, Enterprise Community Partners

California’s last major infusion of public affordable housing dollars came in the form of a voter-approved bond in 2018. That well has run dry. A hodgepodge of funding streams remain.

Adding together funding that has already been approved by legislators but not yet spent and a variety of other state and federal sources, California’s Housing and Community Development department says at least $1.8 billion should be available for affordable developer applicants this year. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget proposal for the coming fiscal year doesn’t include any new discretionary spending beyond that.

Boosters of more funding have reasons to be optimistic. Newsom has taken such an austere posture in early budget negotiations before only to have the Legislature successfully pour hundreds of millions of dollars of affordable housing subsidies back into the final budget agreement.

California lawmakers are also considering a record-breaking $10 billion affordable housing bond for the 2026 ballot. If a majority of voters go for that, “we’d be off to the races,” said Merriman.

Cutting costs

One way to get more affordable housing built is by spending more money. The other is trying to make the existing money go further by cutting costs.

The cost of affordable housing construction is notoriously high in California: A 2025 study estimated that tax credit-financed projects here cost two- to four-times the amount of comparable projects in Colorado and Texas. There is no single reason for this disparity. Land costs in California are significantly higher. So too, often, is the cost of labor. Regulatory barriers like restrictive zoning, slow permitting and stiff impact fees are frequently named as culprits. Sometimes old-fashioned construction methods and materials get blamed.

But there’s also the cost of just waiting around.

A typical affordable development in California will have two or three public funding sources, with some drawing on six or more. Many of these sources are awarded on their own timelines. Each has its own program-specific requirements that can take time to meet. Some are conditional on the receipt of another. As time goes by, developers still have to make payroll, pay interest on pre-construction loans and watch as inflation drives construction costs up further. As delays compound, funding sources that have already been secured might expire, setting things back further.

Each additional funding source delays the start of construction on a project by an average of four months, adding an extra $20,460 per unit, according to an analysis by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley.

The Newsom administration is currently tinkering under the hood of California’s affordable housing finance system in an effort to speed things up.

Last year, the governor proposed the creation of the state’s first ever cabinet-level housing agency. The California Housing and Homelessness Agency is scheduled to take over the state’s disparate housing loan and grant programs. The governor’s office also proposed legislative language that would force the new agency and the Treasurer’s Office to operate in tandem, giving affordable housing developers a single place to apply for the state’s various funding programs — and to cut out some of the time they spend stuck in line.

As a wealth advisor, my job is to talk to clients about their money. And to do so in all seasons of their life: marriage and divorce, career promotion and job loss, and birth and death. Financial advisors regularly deal with crisis in the lives of their clients and how that influences investment decisions.

I have mixed feelings when writing about investing in times of war like this because human beings have far more dignity and value and influence for good or evil than money. Flipping such things into a conversation about investing can feel trite and insensitive, and we should resist that impulse.

But it’s my job and therefore my responsibility to speak to the potential impacts of geopolitical conflict on our financial journeys, specifically in how we invest.

It might surprise you to find out that typically the impact of military invasions and conflicts when it comes to market volatility, as JPMorgan puts it, is “short-lived”.(1)

Furthermore, the below chart compiles major geopolitical calamities and shows that the US stock market has averaged a one-year return of 14%.

Ryan Detrick, a Chief Market Strategist at Carson Group, digs even deeper on the details of general (not only military) geopolitical shocks.(2)

On average, the S&P 500’s investment return is positive over a 3-, 6-, and 12-month period.

What about the impact of an oil shock?

We know this affects gas prices, is inflationary, and can crunch the pocketbooks of the consumer. But how does it affect the stock market?

Matt Cerminaro, a data research associate at a wealth management firm, has this encouraging chart(3):

Translation: since 1990, the S&P 500 has been down in only 17% of years that followed a dramatic oil price spike, and the average and median performance is above a 20% return.

Those odds are worth considering.

What’s the takeaway from all this data?

The stock market does not always perform how you think it will.

Therefore, don’t become a bigger problem to your portfolio than the event itself. Investment decisions you make may have a longer impact than the events themselves.

None of the above guarantees anything.

But it does give perspective.

In times of flooded news feeds and division, hard data cuts through the noise.

Overall, make sure you have an investment portfolio that #1 you can handle and #2 enables you to reach your goals.

Thus far, the investment return of the US stock market has withstood incredible pressure from crisis and benefited long-term investors significantly. (4)

Investing is hard. Life can be hard.

Don’t give up.

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1. Madison Faller & Erik Wytenus, “The US and Israel strike Iran: what it could mean for markets” (March 2, 2026). Accessed online.

2. Posted on X by Ryan Detrick (February 28, 2026 at 12:48pm). Accessed online.

3. “What Happens to Stocks After Oil Rips?” (March 3, 2026). Accessed online.

4. “Markets in Perspective Client Resource Kit” (Fourth Quarter 2025). Accessed online.

# # #

Brandon Stockman has been a Wealth Advisor licensed with the Series 7 and 66 since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. He has the privilege of helping manage accounts throughout the United States and works in the Fortuna office of Johnson Wealth Management. You can sign up for his weekly newsletter on investing and financial education or subscribe to his YouTube channel. Securities and advisory services offered through Prospera Financial Services, Inc. | Member FINRA, SIPC. This should not be considered tax, legal, or investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

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For offshore wind to fight climate change, that power needs to reach the larger statewide grid where it can replace fossil fuel electricity generation. The catch? Humboldt’s current transmission lines are too small to transmit that power out of Humboldt. New transmission infrastructure has been proposed to solve this problem, with the California Independent System Operator selecting Viridon to build new 500kV transmission lines. While this is a big project, new analysis from the Schatz Energy Research Center found that the cost to California ratepayers is low, about $1.68 per year. Tanner Etherton, Awbrey Yost and Jim Zoellick from Schatz join the show to nerd out over transmission infrastructure planning.

Have other questions about offshore wind? Check out northcoastoffshorewind.org

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The following piece has been adapted by the author from his book, Natural Resources at Humboldt State College — the First 30 Years. —HH.

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In 1935-36, two events occurred which set the stage for the formation of a Natural Resources Department at Humboldt State. First, there was the 1935 authorization to expand the educational opportunities of Humboldt State College. From the time of its founding in 1913 as Humboldt State Normal School, the two- year Arcata college was primarily a teacher-training institution. Then in 1921, it became the four-year Humboldt State Teacher’s College. But in 1935, the school was renamed Humboldt State College and was authorized to expand its offerings in the liberal arts accordingly.

The second key event was the arrival of Hortense Lanphere in 1936. Hortense Marie Lanphere had just completed her master’s degree with a major in Zoology at the University of Washington. She and her husband, Professor William Lanphere, came to Humboldt State for the year in 1936, then returned permanently in the fall of 1938.

Hortense was brightly intelligent, had a strong will and a free spirit, and was intensely interested in the natural world. Probably from her awareness of the fish hatchery at the University of Washington, she was interested in researching fish culture.

However, the Prairie Creek State Fish Hatchery, which began operation in 1936, was not within commuting distance in those days. The enterprising young Hortense came up with a solution to her problem, and, without checking first with Vice President Homer Balabanis as was the usual protocol, she went directly to President Arthur Gist with her proposal. She proposed to build a small hatchery on the campus where she could do her research; it would be built without any financial support from the college; and she would volunteer to teach a class in Hatchery Biology.

President Gist, whose primary interest at that time was the training of teachers and not applied science, was reluctant but said he would consider her proposal. He soon notified her that she could proceed the prospect of getting some students to enroll in her class at a time when the college was struggling to keep afloat likely appealed to him. He offered materials from a recently torn down dormitory for the construction of the hatchery and, if there were insufficient student interest, he offered that some of the janitorial staff could help clean the fish troughs. As Lanphere began preparing for what would be the first class in Natural Resources at Humboldt State, nobody guessed what would grow from this initial “proposal.”

Lanphere prepared plans for a building of nearly 300 square feet to contain four standard fish troughs and a small office. The hatchery would be located beside the stream just east of Redwood Bowl at the base of the existing dam creating Fern Lake. She established an account with $250 of her own funds to pay for student help and miscellaneous materials. Lumber and other supplies came from a variety of sources. Reclaimed lumber and probably plumbing supplies came from the demolished dormitory. The California Barrel Company in Arcata, managed by J. J. Krohn, a strong College supporter and avid sportsman, provided redwood bolts to make shingles for the sides and roof of the facility. Four troughs were obtained from Allan Pollitt, Foreman of the Prairie Creek State Fish Hatchery. Professor William Lanphere supervised the construction with volunteer assistance provided by William Johnson, Pete Petrovich, and Jake Relac of the College Plant Operations staff, and students including Gene German, Herb Christie, and Bob Bryan. Primarily for their work building the diversion dam, Nick Barbieri and Merlyn Allen were paid a total of $41.50 (at $0.50 per hour) from Hortense Lanphere’s fund. Lanphere’s records further indicate a total expenditure from May 1939 through June 1940 of $80.61 from her $250 for construction of the diversion dam, the hatchery itself, and miscellaneous supplies.

Her class in Hatchery Biology was first offered in the Spring Semester of 1940 with a planned enrollment of 8 students. Twelve signed up. The students in that first class, each of whom paid $2.00 to help offset operational costs such as fish food, included: Merlyn Allen, Walt Farley, Herb Gomez, Axel Lindgren, Herman Jones, Harry Manning, Walt Munroe, Marshall Rousseau, Frank Sanderson, Al Simay, Richard Tinkey, and Alvin Wright.

Allan Pollitt delivered 10,040 eyed silver salmon eggs in late February. The fish started hatching within a week of their delivery and began swimming about in their troughs. When they were three weeks old, the students began to regularly feed them and clean the troughs. The effort culminated in late May when, with the assistance of Pollitt, the class planted approximately 9,000 fingerlings into Little River. This first academic effort in Natural Resources at Humboldt State was a resounding success and set the stage for the next development.

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A second class in Natural Resources was launched when August Bade, then superintendent of the State Game Farm at Yountville, spoke to local sportsman groups in early January 1940 about the need for conservation of wildlife and showed pictures of the propagating and rearing of game birds. Later that same month, the Bureau of Game Farms of the California Division of Fish and Game was reported to be considering the development of a game farm with the involvement of Humboldt State College.

Professor Fred Telonicher.

As with the Fish Hatchery, a course of study was proposed along with the rearing project and students would be involved in the care of the game birds. Professor Fred Telonicher expressed interest and willingness to teach the class. President Gist supported developing a program of “practical instruction for students interested particularly in Fish and Game Conservation, forestry, or other related fields of study.” Dr. Homer Balabanis, Vice President of the college, and J. J. Krohn and Dr. Vernon Hunt, College Improvement Association members and avid sportsmen, undoubtedly influenced the President’s support.

Again, the avoidance of direct outlay of college finances was an essential condition for the approval to move ahead. However, due to the interest and support of local sportsmen, the development of pens to raise game birds received much greater publicity and outside assistance than had the effort of Hortense Lanphere. Building materials from the demolished dormitory were still available.

Authorization was obtained for workers from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), already on campus for other projects, to do the construction. And the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors agreed to provide funds: $640 for construction materials and $150 per year, funds available, for operations. These funds would be generated by fines levied on violators of state hunting and fishing regulations.

Work started on the new game pens in March of 1941. The pens were built immediately north of Nelson Hall (where Redwood and Sunset Halls now are located) and were ready to receive the first consignment of 250 day-old pheasant chicks from the Yountville State Game Farm in April The new Game Bird Management class had been started at the beginning of the 1941 spring semester with thirteen students: Herb Christie, Eugene R. German, Warren Haughey, Herbert Hudson, Fred Iten, Angelo Manfreda, Harry Manning, Marshall Rousseau, Elrid Spinas, Marshall M. Taylor, Ben C. Vonah, Arnold Waters, and Daniel R. Williams.

The students were assigned to teams who rotated responsibilities for the care of these birds and subsequent deliveries of chicks and eggs. By the end of the summer of 1941, 475 birds had been released at various locations throughout the Humboldt County. Local sportsmen, including Dedrick Oliver, Axel Anderson, J. R. Bicknell, Elmer Berg, Rease Wiley, C. J. Hill, Harvey Tighe, Waino Atilla, Roderick Frost, and Otto Klopp, gave a hand when it came time to release the birds in various North Coast areas from Ferndale to Orick. As in the hatchery, the hands-on instruction appealed to the students. However, sometimes extra hands were needed: Margaret Telonicher, wife of Professor Telonicher, would often have to help care for the pheasant eggs being incubated in her basement, especially when power outages necessitated that she use her oven to delicately continue the incubation.

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The College had shown its optimism for the future of the program in the fall of 1940 with the announcement of a two-year program in Wildlife Management. The program included four courses in Natural Resources: Conservation of Natural Resources, Hatchery Biology, Game Bird Management, and Diseases of Game Birds. A Natural Resources program was up and running! Students showed enthusiasm and interest. But the advent of World War II brought the program to a virtual halt. There were fewer than 500 students enrolled at Humboldt State College in 1939 and 1940 and by 1943 and 1944 the enrollment dropped to around 200 with no more than about 50 men. Needless to say, enrollments in the Natural Resources courses declined dramatically and the Hatchery Biology course was not even offered in those years. But Vice President Balabanis saw the potential of the program and anticipated a renewed student interest as the World War II veterans returned. He later recalled that, “By then the program, in our eyes, was justified … our environment was a natural. And, one would think, ‘Why didn’t we do it before?’” He also noted that Humboldt State was the first college in the nation to boast both an on-campus fish hatchery and game pens.

Professor John Lewis.

Even though no student had yet completed the two-year program, a four-year baccalaureate curriculum with a major in Wildlife Management was developed as the war came to an end. Knowing that the program could not continue to be taught as an overload by Professor Telonicher and by Hortense Lanphere as a volunteer, a new faculty member was recruited to lead the program. Professor John Lewis began teaching in the fall of 1946, and, in fulfillment of Vice President Balabanis’ optimism, 40 students enrolled in the new degree program that fall. Professor Lewis was energetic and immensely popular with the students and the community.

As the program grew, Professor John DeWitt was hired in the fall of 1949 to lead a new and separate baccalaureate degree program in Fisheries. A tragic setback occurred when Professor Lewis died in an automobile accident that same fall. Lewis’s replacement was Professor Fred Glover who arrived at the beginning of the 1950 spring semester.

Through this transition, student interest remained high and growing numbers of students were being attracted to the program from throughout the state. Three new faculty members were hired in 1953 Professor Charles Yocom replaced Professor Glover, who had moved on to a position with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Professor Ed Pierson was hired to lead a new two-year program in Forestry-Lumbering, and Professor Mark Rhea was hired to lead a new two-year program in Agriculture- Dairying.

The size, importance, and future potential of the program was recognized in the fall of 1956 when a Wildlife Building was completed. A separate Division of Natural Resources was created with Professor Yocom as the Chairman. Though the proposed Agriculture-Dairying program never really got off the ground, the Forestry-Lumbering program generated immediate interest with enrollments growing rapidly. In 1956, the two-year program became a baccalaureate degree program with a major in Forestry. That same year master degree programs were authorized with majors in Fisheries and Wildlife Programs, such as Range Management, Oceanography, and Natural Resources Planning and Interpretation and other master degree programs would develop from these beginnings.

Hortense Lanphere clearly did not anticipate what would evolve from her first course in Hatchery Biology. In fact, when asked why she sought to build the hatchery and teach a class, it turned out that she was actually seeking a way to research Saprolegnia (a fungus) affecting salmon eggs, without having to over-expose her fingers to cold water because of her mild Raynaud’s syndrome, a circulation problem of the fingers. “Scrubbing one fish trough would be fun but more troughs would be contraindicated. Why couldn’t students do that?”

Even so, as was reported in the Arcata Union in 1944, “Through her suggestion, the hatchery was built and in the spring of 1940 she taught the first course … The opening of this course was primarily the beginning of Humboldt’s Fish and Game department.”

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Richard Ridenhour was born and raised in Sonoma County. He attended Humboldt State College and received a BS degree in Fisheries in 1954. After attending graduate school at Iowa State College and then working for the Oregon Fish Commission, Ridenhour joined the faculty in the Department of Fisheries at Humboldt State in 1960, where he remained until retirement in 1992. His tenure included ten years as the Dean of the College of Natural Resources.