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A 73-acre property adjacent to Headwaters Forest Reserve is set to be transferred to the Bureau of Land Management this summer.

Save the Redwoods League is hoping the sale of Westfall Ranch will be wrapped up in July, if everything goes to plan.

“We’ve owned the property since 2016, so 10 years later, it’s all coming to fruition — fingers crossed,” Adrianna Andreucci, a land protection manager with the Save the Redwoods League, told the Outpost.

Located along Elk River Road just down the way from the trailhead of the 7,472 acre Headwaters Forest Reserve, the property hosts former rangeland and a smattering of second growth trees.

The ranch was purchased by the League in 2016 for $1.1 million with aims to prevent development and hand it off to public ownership after restoration. 

Since then, the organization has focused on vegetation in the former rangeland, with on-and-off planting of conifers, removal of invasive species and restoration of meadow habitat (future restoration work on the property with the Wiyot Tribe is also planned).

Andreucci said, since the property hosts about a mile of the South Fork Elk River, “the exciting next focus is seeing that river restored.”

Collin Ewing, manager of BLM’s Arcata field office, said once the land is owned by the agency and becomes public, people will be able to walk freely around on it.

But of particular interest to BLM is the habitat.

“The main reason why BLM was interested in managing it is to help restore salmon and steelhead spawning and rearing habitat,” he said.

Environmental organization CalTrout has completed a conceptual design for a restoration project on the property. This would include removal of sediment, vegetation work and adding some wood in the riparian area for fish to live in.

The ranch is below industrial timberlands and sees a fair amount of sediment, said Darren Mierau, North Coast director of CalTrout. 

Too much sediment can clog fish gills and hinder spawning grounds.

“I think our restoration will help that, but we’re still dependent on the upper forested watershed areas to also heal and contribute less sediment,” said Mierau.

He said the organization is prioritizing other parts of the Elk River before pushing ahead on this section of the South Fork.

The sale price is $750,000, sourced from the BLM’s Land and Water Conservation Fund program funding. This fund is mostly sourced from royalties levied on offshore oil and gas drilling.

There’s still some county planning hurdles to go through before the transfer is finalized. A bundle of zoning changes to facilitate the transfer were approved, without discussion as part of the consent calendar, during the Humboldt County Planning Commission meeting Thursday night. Land use and zoning requirements required before the sale could happen caused some delay of the transfer, according to Andreucci.

A 4.3-acre piece of the ranch with a 1,200 square foot home and barn was parceled out, which the League intends to sell after transferring the property.

No concrete plans are yet in place for trails. The land won’t technically be a part of the Headwaters Reserve proper, explained Ewing, but would be managed in accordance with it by the Arcata BLM field office.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Amazon Confirms Plans for a Distribution Warehouse in McKinleyville
• Supervisor Madrone: The Jobs That an Amazon Warehouse Would Provide are Not What Humboldt County is Looking For

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Press release from the County of Humboldt:

On Oct. 21, 2025, the Humboldt County Planning & Building Department received an application for a coastal development permit to construct a 40,290 square-foot commercial warehouse and several parking lots. The proposed project would operate as an Amazon Distribution Facility that spans across six parcels located within the Airport Business Park in McKinleyville.

An informational community meeting to discuss the permit application and the county’s permit review process will be held at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, April 29. This in person meeting will take place at Azalea Hall, located next to Pierson Park at 1620 Pickett Rd. in McKinleyville.

All interested community members are encouraged to attend to ask questions and share concerns about this proposed project. No final decisions regarding this project will be made at this meeting. Additional opportunities for public comment will be provided before a final decision is reached.

For more information about the public meeting, please call 707-268-3741.

Fortuna’s staring down a budget crisis, a $1.8 million deficit caused by tanking sales tax and hotel revenue and increased insurance rates. Its city council was supposed to hear an update last night on how city officials were planning on compensating for its fiscal woes, but that item was pulled and rescheduled for a future meeting in May. (The entire meeting was less than 20 minutes long.) The councilmembers did, however, adopt an $846,000 contract with Arcata-based consulting firm Planwest Partners to complete its 2060 General Plan update after a short discussion. 

A General Plan is something like an ambitious list of goals and plans that outline how a city aims to develop and change over the next x amount of time; everything from transportation to the economy to land use to housing to safety and noise and climate change has to be addressed. Every city in California must have one — the penalties for not adopting a long-range General Plan within a specified amount of time can be painful, and delinquent jurisdictions lose their land use authority — and creating one is a massive ordeal. It’s common for smaller jurisdictions to hire a firm to complete its General Plan. Directing a limited amount of city staff to work on such a time-consuming document could force every other routine city operation to grind to a halt. 

Fortuna last adopted a General Plan in 2010 that detailed the city’s future until 2030, and it’s time to develop another. City Manager Amy Nilsen said the new one would be finished by the end of 2027 and will be valid until 2060. 

Fortuna will pay $200,000 to Planwest out of its fiscal year 2025-2026 budget, and the rest will be budgeted for the next fiscal year. Though the money is coming from Fortuna’s general fund, there’s a chance that not all of it will come from city coffers: Fortuna also applied for $261,000 from California’s Community Development Block Grant program to offset some of the cost. 

The item was on the consent calendar, but considering the fiscal impact, councilmember Abe Stevens pulled it for discussion. Nilsen explained that they chose Planwest because they’re local; they won’t have to pay for any consultant’s travel fees or deal with endless Microsoft Teams meetings. Fortuna and Planwest have also worked with one another on previous planning projects. 

It’ll be a huge task. 

“Lots of moving parts here,” Mayor Mike Johnson said. “There are a lot more moving parts than there were 20 years ago.” 

A motion to adopt the contract passed unanimously.

PREVIOUSLY:

• POTTER VALLEY DAM UPDATE: The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Says That a Municipal Water District in Riverside County is Interested in Taking Over the Project

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Statement from PG&E:

PG&E met with the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District early this year.  While PG&E has not received a proposal from Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District, we would review any proposal we received.  The window to take over the project and continue to operate it as a hydroelectric project closed years ago, after which FERC directed PG&E to develop a license surrender application and decommissioning plan.  PG&E no longer has the ability to transfer the operating license at this late stage of the regulatory process.  However, qualified parties can seek to take over certain features of the project such as those for water conveyance. 

PG&E continues to work with Sonoma County Water Agency, Inland Water & Power Commission of Mendocino County, Round Valley Tribes, Humboldt County, Cal Trout, Trout Unlimited and California Department of Fish & Wildlife on the proposal received from them.  PG&E included in our Surrender Application and Decommissioning Plan a request for FERC to authorize PG&E to permit the “Non-Project Use of Project Lands” which will allow the Eel-Russian Project Authority to construct the New Eel-Russian Facility (NERF), while utilizing some of the existing Potter Valley Project facilities.  The NERF will provide diversion flows from the Eel River to the Russian River watershed after PG&E’s removal of Cape Horn Dam and Scott Dam.   We have had some previous communication with the Secretary’s staff.

Statement from Friends of the Eel:

US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins issued a message today alleging that a water district near LA is interested in purchasing the Eel River dams and the rest of the Potter Valley Project from Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E).

“Why anyone would be interested in paying money for a failed, money-losing, and risky project is beyond me, let alone a water district nearly 600 miles away from the dams,” said Alicia Hamann, Executive Director of Friends of the Eel River (FOER). “The project simply isn’t worth investing in. The existing dams are failing, face very serious seismic threats, and cannot be relicensed as a hydroelectric project under the current Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) license.”

Even if a purchaser were to try to keep Scott and Cape Horn dams running just as an irrigation project, they’d still have to pass muster with the State of California’s Division of Safety of Dams, the agency that has told PG&E they have to operate Scott Dam at reduced capacity to mitigate seismic risks. Those seismic risks are only going to come into sharper focus as FERC-mandated studies continue.

Scott Dam was plagued by construction difficulties a century ago. Its Lake Pillsbury Reservoir is filling with sediment that will inevitably block the only remaining low-level outlet. When that fails, the dam won’t be able to release water during the summer, cutting off current irrigation uses entirely. The project also hasn’t generated electricity since 2021 due to a failed transformer that would cost many millions of dollars to replace. Neither water diversions or electricity from the project are “reliable” as Secretary Rollins claims.

And then there are the impacts on Eel River salmon and steelhead protected by the Endangered Species Act. Scott Dam blocks all fish passage to the rest of the watershed for steelhead and Chinook salmon that still occupy the upper mainstem Eel River. Steelhead are especially impacted by the dams because they must spend at least a year in freshwater before migrating to the ocean.

Key stakeholders have agreed to a deal which supports both dam removal and future diversions in the wet season. Regional interests are best served by supporting this deal, removing the dams and installing a modern diversion system as soon as possible. Not by selling out the safety of downstream residents and ecosystem recovery to carpet baggers who likely have no clue about the liability in which they are “interested.”

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Relevant links:

• How Many Ways Can the Potter Valley Project Fail?
• An Agreement for Post-Dam Removal Diversions From the Eel

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UPDATE:

• Statements From PG&E and Friends of the Eel on SoCal Agency’s Potter Valley Dam Bid 

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This morning, Brooke Rollins, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, tweeted that a potential buyer has expressed interest in taking over the two dams near the headwaters of the Eel River, in Mendocino and Lake Counties.

That buyer is the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District, which serves around 160,000 residential and commercial users in western Riverside County.

It’s not yet clear how serious the district is, or why it wants to assume water and power operations far from the customers it serves, but in her tweet Rollins celebrated the fact that a buyer could potentially disrupt PG&E’s efforts to abandon the dam system, which hasn’t produced power in many years and has been massively inefficient for many more.

⚖️🚨 Last year, PG&E filed to surrender its license and begin decommissioning the Potter Valley Project, removing the Scott and Cape Horn Dams because of @GavinNewsom‘s policy of putting fish over people.

Last week, I heard from the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District. A… https://t.co/pfuNAkeq44 pic.twitter.com/ZkIXFhXblK

— Secretary Brooke Rollins (@SecRollins) April 21, 2026

In concert with PG&E’s abandonment efforts, environmentalists, local governments and water districts in the Russian River Basin, which receives diverted water from the dams, have hammered out a future agreement whereby water would continue to flow south after the dams are removed, in exchange for funding to restore habitat along the river.

In the past, the government of Lake County and agricultural interests in Potter Valley have appealed to the Trump administration to kill the deal. PG&E’s plan to decommission the dams is currently before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Minutes from the March 26 meeting of the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District Board of Directors show that two of its members — both members of its “Water Supply Ad Hoc Subcommittee” — had recently traveled to a meeting of the Potter Valley Irrigation District, though the minutes do not reflect what was discussed there. 

The Outpost has a call in to Elsinore, and we’ll update when we hear back. Also, we are promised statements from Friends of the Eel and PG&E soon.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Lake County May Try to Derail Eel River Dam Deal With Direct Appeal to President Trump
• Farm Bureaus in Russian River Counties Issue Plea to President Trump to Keep the Potter Valley Dams in Place
• Humboldt Supervisors OK Potter Valley Water Diversion Plan, Paving the Way for Eel River Dam Removal
• PG&E Files Its Application to Surrender its Hydropower License, Paving the Way for the Removal of the Potter Valley Dams on the Eel River
• Trump Administration Slams Eel River Dam Removal Plan, But Huffman is Confident the Project Can’t Be Stopped
• Trump Administration Intervenes in Potter Valley Dam Removal, as Department of Agriculture Asks FERC to Halt Decommissioning Process

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

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California scored a legal victory Monday that, for now, undermines the Trump administration’s efforts to drastically cut funding for homeless housing.

Changes that would have diverted huge chunks of federal funds away from permanent housing and funneled them instead into temporary shelters and sober living programs will remain suspended after the Trump administration dropped its appeal of an earlier court loss. While the broader case is still being litigated, the new development could provide some reassurance to California counties waiting for the federal funds.

“We continue to fight for Californians and the rule of law, and we continue to win,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a news release. “People experiencing housing insecurity or homelessness need the federal government’s continued support — not a rollback of assistance.”

In November, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development attempted to change the way it doles out money for homeless services via its Continuum of Care program. It decreed that jurisdictions applying for a piece of about $4 billion in federal homelessness funds can’t spend more than 30% of that money on permanent housing — a move that would result in a significant cut to the type of long-term housing that can resolve someone’s homelessness.

Last year, California communities spent about 90% of their federal Continuum of Care funds on permanent housing.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration quickly joined 19 other states and the District of Columbia in suing to stop the Trump administration’s changes. In December, a federal judge in Rhode Island temporarily blocked the changes and ordered HUD to process funding applications under the original rules. The Trump administration appealed that ruling, leaving local governments and homeless service providers unsure of what they would be awarded funding for, and when.

The federal government on Monday dropped its appeal. While the rest of the lawsuit will move forward, and could take months to resolve, counties should be able to access permanent housing funds in the meantime.

Instead of prioritizing permanent housing, as has been the rule in the past, the Trump administration wants to focus more on shelters that get people off the streets quickly and temporarily, and on programs that require residents to be sober. HUD also attempted to ban the use of federal homelessness funds for diversity and inclusion efforts, support of transgender clients, and use of “harm reduction” strategies that seek to reduce overdose deaths by helping people in active addiction use drugs more safely.

HUD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a December statement, a spokesperson said HUD stood by its funding reforms.

Former President Joe “Biden’s policies harmed the vulnerable people that HUD intends to serve through the grant program,” the agency said in an email. “This new framework is the first step toward righting those failures with increased funding for high performing programs that have demonstrated real success and accountability.”

HUD experienced another legal setback last month when a federal judge in Rhode Island shot down the agency’s attempt to upend another, smaller, source of federal homelessness funding. At issue in that case was a program called the Continuum of Care Builds grant, which funds the construction of new homeless housing. HUD last year made grantees reapply under a very different set of criteria, which seemed to disqualify organizations that support trans clients, use “harm reduction” to prevent drug overdose deaths or operate in a “sanctuary city.”

About $75 million in federal funds had been frozen as that case moved forward.

In March, the court found HUD violated the law through its “slapdash imposition of political whims.”

“This ruling is a victory for people across this nation who have overcome homelessness and stabilized in HUD’s permanent housing programs,” Ann Oliva, chief executive of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, which filed the lawsuit, wrote in a statement. “Today’s news reinforces a fundamental truth: that the work to end homelessness is not partisan, and never should be interfered with for political means.”

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

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In 2022, faced with mounting criticism from California parents and students who couldn’t get into the state’s three premier public universities, legislators and UC officials struck a deal.

UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC San Diego would admit a combined 900 more in-state students a year, and the state would up their budgets to cover the loss of revenue from non-resident students, who pay three times what in-state students pay.

That deal has since cost tax-payers $276 million and allowed around 3,000 more students to enroll at the three universities.

While the costs were expected, the number is far higher than the annual $31 million figure Gov. Gavin Newsom and state legislators routinely cite for funding the in-state student expansion, a CalMatters analysis shows. Now, with one year to go in the five year plan, some are wondering whether the program’s high costs should continue as-is, particularly as California faces several years of multi-billion-dollar deficits.

Questioning the non-resident swap

At least one lawmaker and the Legislative Analyst’s Office are questioning the ongoing wisdom of the non-resident funding swap. “We are now living with those decisions, and we need to decide whether those are decisions we want to stand by still, or perhaps there is another approach,” said Assemblymember David Alvarez, a Democrat from Chula Vista, at a March meeting of the budget subcommittee on education, which he chairs.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office supported enrolling more California students in 2022, but its analysts now are proposing that the state no longer add new resident students in lieu of out-of-state students. The analyst’s office says it’s an unnecessary expense for multiple reasons and going forward can be made cheaper, especially given “the state’s projected budget deficits.”

Instead, it proposes that the Legislature direct the UC to enroll more resident students without limiting the enrollment of non-resident students. That would cost the state $25 million annually, rather than the $61 million predicted for the fiscal year starting July.

One reason for the office’s skepticism about keeping the current formula is that the three campuses were able to add thousands more undergraduates from California since the funding program began, aside from those who replaced non-residents.

UC data shows 6,000 more Californians were enrolled at the three campuses, on top of the students added through the funding program, since the swap began. That growth was fueled by hundreds of millions of dollars in annual funding increases to the UC between 2022 and 2024 that lawmakers and the governor also approved in addition to the non-resident funding swap.

The analyst’s office also indicated that the three popular UC campuses have space to continue adding students. “Over the past five years, all three campuses have initiated and/or completed housing projects adding several thousand beds” and still have available classroom and lab space, a February report from the office said.

Time will tell if the Legislature will agree with the analyst’s office. Lawmakers and the governor face an annual late June deadline to finalize the state budget.

The governor’s office so far supports maintaining the non-resident swap program and doesn’t intend to alter the plan in its forthcoming May revision to the governor’s budget proposal, said H.D. Palmer, a spokesperson for the Department of Finance, which in effect serves as the governor’s fiscal policy team.

In a statement, UC spokesperson Omar Rodriguez underscored that the Legislature’s push to drive down out-of-state enrollment has to come with costs.

“Replacing a non-resident student with a resident student is not an even exchange absent sufficient state buyout,” Rodriguez wrote to CalMatters in an April email. With the higher tuition they are charged, every out-of-state student pays for the equivalent of 2.7 California students, he wrote. The three UCs added about 300 more in-state students through the swap program than they were funded for, Rodriguez added.CalMatters requested interviews with UC officials, but key personnel were not available, Rodriguez said.

UC officials were ambivalent about the non-resident funding swap five years ago. While they welcomed the money, they worried that future lawmakers would back away from the promise to pay the UC for not enrolling out-of-state students.

Emphasis on Californians

Why do any of this? Lawmakers in 2022 wanted to curb the percentage of out-of-state undergraduates at the UC and the three campuses specifically. At the time, more than 20% of the three school’s undergraduate students came from out of state. The funding swap was intended to bring the percentage down to 18% by the fifth year, which is next year. The non-resident enrollment rate currently is around 19% at the three campuses.But the decision by lawmakers to require the campuses to limit the number of out-of-state students came at a considerable cost. Had the Legislature instructed those same campuses to enroll more Californians and not cut out-of-state enrollment, the combined price tag since 2022 wouldn’t be $276 million, but closer to $105 million, according to CalMatters’ calculations that were validated by officials at the governor’s Department of Finance as well as the UC.

The final price tag to reach the out-of-state enrollment goal will be about $460 million. After that, the program will cost about $153 million a year to sustain — or less, if policymakers side with the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

California spent more for a reason

In many ways, the Legislature’s actions were a return to form. The state’s interest in enrolling more California students in its prominent public universities is decades-old. Until the mid-2000s, UC campuses enrolled few students from outside of California. After the Great Recession prompted lawmakers to slash state spending, UC’s public funding cratered. To make up the difference, UC tripled its enrollment of undergraduates from out of state.

But then the state, under the guidance of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s five-year higher education compact, promised to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars annually in 2022 so the UC could enroll more California students at all its campuses. That’s in addition to the $30 million annually to limit the out-of-state student body at Berkeley, UCLA and UCSD, the three most popular campuses.“They’re making good on the reason that you have a state university, which is not supposed to be a purely revenue-making machine,” said Julie R. Posselt, a professor specializing in higher education issues at the University of Southern California, where she’s an associate dean. “It’s supposed to be an engine for your state’s population, economy and workforce.”The UC is arguably one of the best deals for state taxpayers: a world-class education that for more than half of California undergraduate students is tuition-free because of financial aid.

Demand for the three UCs, by the numbers

More than 100,000 students apply to each of three most popular UC campuses annually, the majority Californians. Lately the freshman admissions rate at UCLA has been less than 10% — not quite as exclusive as Harvard’s 4% but well below the admissions rate to UCLA two decades ago, when more than a quarter were admitted.

UCLA is top of mind for the thousands of low-income students in Southern California that Alison De Lucca’s collective serves. She’s executive editor of the Southern California College Attainment Network, which is made up of dozens of nonprofits working to help students apply for college and financial aid.Additional slots at UCLA matter to the region’s high schoolers seeking to attend a highly selective institution. “Many of them, particularly post-pandemic, would like to stay a little closer to home,” she said.She didn’t speculate on whether parents think more slots for Californians is worth the extra state spending, “but I will say that parents are quite emphatic about ensuring that their students also have the chance” to gain entry at a school such as UCLA.

National studies of flagship public universities also indicate that as schools rely more on increased revenue from non-resident students, overall campus diversity can decline. That’s because out-of-state students “tend to be richer and are less likely” to be Black or Latino, one study co-written by Posselt found.

Non-resident value

The UC student association representing all undergraduates opposed the out-of-state funding swap when it first became policy. The association didn’t want to see fewer non-residents, which it considered an attack on the diversity of the student body. Students argued that out-of-state students add to the cultural dynamism of a campus and also contribute to the regional economy.

“We’re living here, we’re voting here, we’re working here, we’re tenants in our campus cities. We’re still treated as second-tier students,” said Riya Master in 2021, when she was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley from Virginia.Master is now in her fourth year of attending UC San Francisco’s highly ranked medical school. She gained residency as a Californian by working at a UCSF laboratory on drug discovery after graduating from UC Berkeley. As a result, she’s paying the in-state tuition rate. Her goal is to specialize in pediatrics, a field of medicine undergoing a massive shortage nationally.

California enrollment grew

The UC system added 19,000 slots for new California undergraduates across its nine undergraduate campuses since 2022 — equal to a mid-sized UC campus without having built one. That includes about 9,000 more at the three sought-after campuses.The number of non-resident undergraduates at the UC fell by 3,500 students in that time.

The growth in enrollment availability coincided with higher admissions rates for Californians, as the share of applicants gaining admission jumped from around 65% to 77% in that time.

But it’s a different story at the three most popular campuses: admission rates there haven’t increased, meaning it’s as difficult to get into UC Berkeley, UCLA or UC San Diego now as it was five years ago — and harder compared to nearly a decade ago.Even with loads of new state spending, UC reports less money per student. Though state support has jumped by more than a billion dollars since 2000, inflation has eroded those gains while enrollment soared. As a result, UC academic spending for every student decreased from $46,000 at the start of the millennium to $28,000 today.

Public universities, such as the three UC campuses, have to manage a tough balancing act, said Posselt, the USC professor. They need to preserve their academic rigor, but “they absolutely have a mandate to not become exclusionary institutions, and they must do all of that while maintaining financial solvency.”She said the UCs are “probably the best in the country in terms of a state system that is actively trying to maximize” student access.