If you live and vote in Shelter Cove or the Trinidad area, your June 2026 ballot will come with the question of raising local property taxes.

Shelter Cove’s Resort Improvement District is seeking capital for big water infrastructure replacement projects, while the Trinidad Union School District is looking for voters to sign off on bonds to fund a spread of upgrades and repairs.

Measure A: Shelter Cove Wants to Replace 60-Year-Old Infrastructure

Shelter Cove’s Resort Improvement District No. 1 — the entity tasked with providing utilities and emergency services to the far-flung community on the Lost Coast — is asking for property owners to agree to a $60 per-year increase on the special utilities, improvement and operations tax. The tax, at $80 since 1981, would total $140 annually if approved.

Funds are needed, District General Manager Christopher Christianson tells the Outpost, because of two huge projects they want to take on.

District engineers previously estimated replacing the cove’s water treatment plant will cost $6.4 million, and the replacement of four water storage tanks will cost $3.3 million. Three of these tanks broke during the Dec. 2024 earthquake as they lack seismic features, but were repaired.

Christianson said the District is maintaining the infrastructure, but wants to be proactive with replacement.

“They started with the District in 1965, so it’s time. This kind of infrastructure lasts 40 to 50 years. We’re over 60 now,” he said.

Christianson said, when applying for loans or grants for replacement, they’ve found the District often needs to match up to 25% of funds to qualify, hence the need for funding.

He said the only methods to boost revenue are property taxes and utility rate increases. But the district just came off a five year rate increase. And while Shelter Cove has just around 650 utility customers, there’s about 3,850 property owners.

“If we can spread out the costs over that bigger pool, it’s less of an impact on the ratepayers,” he said.

The District estimates, if Measure A is approved, the tax will generate an additional $231,000 on top of the existing $308,000 revenue — totaling $539,000 annually.

The last two attempts to increase this particular tax, in 1993 and 1994, failed to meet the required two-thirds majority. This time around, the district is asking for a more modest increase. But Christianson says the election could still be a nail biter, like a 2017 fire tax measure that passed by a single vote.

Two-thirds of the funds would legally be required to pay for capital improvements to the utility systems, while the remaining one-third could be used for operating the systems. There is no sunset to the tax.

There’s some other projects the district wants to tackle — like upgrades to the generator plant, repairs to water and sewer mains, backhoe replacement, and upgrades to the wastewater treatment infrastructure, for example.

“We’ve been in the red for a few years now, budget-wise, so [we’re] trying to help our budgets and not impact the ratepayers as much as a rate increase would,” said Christianson.

People registered to vote in Shelter Cove will weigh in on Measure A in the June 2 election.

For the full ordinance, click here.

To read an argument in support, click here.

Measure B: School Repair Bonds an ‘Investment in the Future of Trinidad’

The Trinidad Union School District, which operates a TK-8 with 166 registered students, has been discussing the idea to issue school bonds for the past few months to pay for a spread of repairs and upgrades.

The district is asking for voter approval to issue up to $4 million in general obligation bonds. This will spell out an average annual tax rate of about $30 per $100,000 of assessed property value within the district, a tax that would end in 2059-2060.

The infrastructure repairs, said Superintendent and Principal Alyse Nichols, come down to fixing infrastructure and making the building more secure, modern and dry.

“We’ve got classrooms that leak whenever it rains. Our windows are beginning to fail, our fence around our kindergarten classroom needs to be replaced,” she told the Outpost. Bathrooms also need to be updated for accessibility, technology needs to be updated and furnaces need to be replaced, she said.

Some buildings are about 50 years old. The last time the District issued a bond was 15 years ago, an effort that updated classrooms and brought the school a multipurpose room and an aftercare facility.

Nichols said the district has a facilities fund, but it’s mostly used for smaller repairs.

“We go after bonds because the repairs are just so expensive that we don’t have millions of dollars in our reserves that we can put towards the infrastructure projects that we need,” she said. The tax is estimated to generate an average revenue of $265,000 a year, according to the measure.

55% of voters need to support the measure to pass. With a recent District survey finding high approval, Nichols is hopeful it will go through.

“I like to think of it as a central point in the community. And any investment we do there is going to impact the whole town, and it’s also going to impact our kids. So it’s an investment in the future of Trinidad,” she said.

The school has students hailing from McKinleyville north to Orick.

According to the measure, the total debt service including the principal and interest that would be required to be repaid if all the bonds are issued and sold is estimated at $12,650,000. The tax, used to pay off the bonds and the interest, would begin in 2028-29, if approved.

The school board would establish an Independent Citizens’ Oversight Committee to oversee the measure. The funds can’t be used for teacher or administrator salaries.

Those in the Trinidad Union School District — which includes a stretch of land including Westhaven and Trinidad — will weigh in on the measure come June.

For the ordinance, click here.

To read an argument in support, click here.

Apparently, Arcata is responsible for its own tourism website, and, well, it ain’t really up to snuff. 

The city’s tourist-attracting vehicle, VisitArcata.com, currently presents a pretty surface-level overview of what’s worth doing and where’s worth staying. You can probably already guess the included imperatives: Watch a Crabs game! Stay at the Hotel Arcata! Go to the community forest and Moonstone Beach and the Farmers Market! So on and so forth. But it’s a tad out-of-date, and there’s an item on tomorrow’s city council agenda allowing city staff to consider putting out a notice letting design consultants know they can bid on a chance to fix it up. 

The site is “outdated in terms of design, functionality, accessibility, and user experience,” reads a staff report. “Additionally, evolving expectations, integration with social media, and accessibility compliance standards (including ADA requirements) necessitate a comprehensive review and potential modernization of the platform.”

A brief perusal confirms the soundness of that idea. Much of the info on the site is cloistered, difficult to access, and not particularly fetching. Some of it stopped being correct several years ago. (The long-shuttered event venue The Jam earned a few mentions.)

There’s no budget allotted for the site’s maintenance and no time to do it anyway, claims the report; everyone from community members to the city council to city staff to the chamber of commerce wants it revamped. 

An article on the annual lantern floating ceremony, held to remember the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and honor the hundreds of thousands of victims, also exhorts visitors to “spend some time in town and Shop!” before the ceremony, with a link to the site’s page on shopping, which is just a map of members of the Arcata Chamber of Commerce.

The chamber’s executive director, Meredith Maier, told the Outpost that she’d like to go even further and let the chamber run the website. They get calls a few times a day from people interested in visiting , and it’d be easier to have a pretty, well-functioning website to direct them to, one that presents Arcata as an excellent “base camp” to explore the county at large. They already have the staff, the knowledge, and the connections to do it, Maier said. 

“We’d keep it fresh and up-to-date,” Maier said. “…The site, as it is now, is not dynamic, it is not something tourists are obviously going to because we’re the ones that are fielding the calls from people that are coming to town.”

The item is on the consent calendar and will almost certainly pass. If approved, the city is recommending a budget of $25,000 for the project. 

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It’s supposed to rain a lot in March, especially here in Humboldt County — but that has not been the case this year.

Eureka averages about five and a half inches of precipitation in March, but the 2026 version has delivered less than half an inch, according to data from the National Weather Service. And with none in the forecast today, we can go ahead and mark this down in the record books as the city’s driest March since 1926 and the second-driest since modern record-keeping began in 1886.

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While the National Weather Service has just the one measuring station in the county, this super-dry spell has been “pretty similar across the board in Humboldt,” meteorologist Jacob Boomsma told the Outpost in a phone interview earlier today. 

To zoom out a little bit, Eureka’s rainfall remains at about 88% of normal for the current water year, meaning the 12-month period that starts each October 1. That’s largely due to some very wet weather in the second half of December and the first week or so of January. 

“So we’re doing pretty good this year for precipitation, but March really fell off,” Boomsma said.

You can see that reflected in the graph below, which shows the observed rain accumulation hitting a stark plateau late last month.

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This mini-drought is also reflected in the depleted snowpack across the northern Sierra Nevada and Trinity Alps. Snow accumulation has been well below average since the beginning of the water year and has now almost entirely disappeared, as shown in the below graph from the California Department of Water Resources.

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The snowpack in Trinity County is less than 5% of normal, according to Boomsma, though he said that has less to do with a lack of precipitation than with warm temperatures, which caused that precipitation to fall as rain.

We’re not alone in this trend, either. This has been among the driest and warmest Marches on record across much of California. On March 19, Ukiah tied its record high March temperature of 91 degrees, set in 1914. San Francisco recorded its first-ever 90 degree March temperature on the 20th, and its total rainfall this month, 0.06 inches, is barely above the record low for March of 0.03 inches, set in 1923.

Across much of the American West, temperatures have been 3 to 9 degrees above normal, according to the Climate Prediction Center. Scientists overwhelmingly agree that human-caused climate change is exacerbating volatility in the weather, which can be especially catastrophic here in California given our susceptibility to drought, wildfires, landslides and other extremes.

But good news is on the horizon — for the short term, anyway. 

“A cold spring storm will bring rain and high mountain snow to Del Norte, Humboldt, Trinity and portions of Mendocino and Lake Counties Wednesday into Thursday,” the NWS Eureka forecast says.

“That should help a bit,” Boomsma said. With fire season around the corner, he and his colleagues are keeping their eyes on fuel moisture, meaning the amount of water in vegetation and dead organic matter.

“We did have some record dry fuels a week or two ago, but this next storm looks like it will correct things back to where they should be,” Boomsma said. “So it’s not the end of the world yet.”

Heyo! Excellent news for all runners, cyclists, and perambulators: further progress has been made on Arcata’s Annie & Mary trail. It’s now paved all the way from Sunset Avenue to where it meets up with West End, a little over two miles total. All that’s left to pave is the mile and a half or so from there to its terminus at the pump station. 

As recently as last week, the trail was unpaved beyond its first quarter mile from Sunset to the Hinarr Hu Moulik dorms. The portion beyond the intersection with West End has been cleared of brush, levelled, and gravelled, but is still unpaved. The new miles of pavement are flat and smooth. 

Because of today’s holiday we were unable to query City Hall about the timeline to completion, but the last time we wrote an update, Director of Environmental Services Emily Sinkhorn predicted that the trail may be totally finished as soon as the end of this summer. 

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

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In an effort to put a dent in the state’s housing shortage, California is considering something unprecedented: getting into the construction insurance business.

Last week, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat, and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers raised the curtain on a long-awaited package of bills meant to push developers toward cost-cutting innovations in construction, with a particular focus on factory-based building.

Building homes in factories and then trucking them to where they’re needed offers a wide array of potential benefits: Faster construction, safer working conditions and lower overall cost that ought to ultimately make housing more affordable.

But despite decades of hope and hype, that promise has never materialized at scale. Boosters of the industry point to regulatory and financial hurdles that stand in the way of cost-effective mass production.

The half-dozen new bills are meant to help the nascent industry clear those hurdles. Most would do so by standardizing or trimming regulation. But one, Assembly Bill 2166, authored by Wicks and Assemblymember Juan Carrillo, a Democrat from Palmdale, is different. Though still light on detail, the bill aims to guarantee insurance payouts for developers and lenders who are interested in factory-based building, but still need a little extra assurance.

Taking on the role of re-insurer — committing to come to the financial rescue at a specific chokepoint in the residential construction process — is a departure from virtually anything the state has done before in its years-long effort to cut the cost of housing in California.

“This is the first time I have seen something like this be suggested, drafted and potentially implemented by a state for housing,” said Tyler Pullen, a researcher at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, who has been providing technical assistance to Wicks and other legislators on the bill package.

He added that though the bill is certainly the “most open-ended and technically complicated” in the legislative package, some version of the idea popped up in nearly every interview he and his colleagues conducted with industry stakeholders as part of a recent Terner report on industrialized construction.

“This could be one of the highest impact things, but it has a lot of open questions,” he said.

Avoiding a construction doom loop

Construction is a risky endeavor. Developers run out of cash. Costs overrun. Lawsuits abound. Projects fail. A complex array of financial levers exist to help everyone involved, from lenders and investors down to the lowliest subcontractor, to minimize their exposure should things fall apart.

One of the most important of those levers is the surety bond, a financial arrangement in which an insurer, in exchange for an upfront fee, agrees to pay out if, say, an electrical subcontractor fails to deliver.

A bonded project is one that “puts the developers and the lenders at ease,” said Michael Merle, business development director at Autovol, an Idaho-based housing factory. “If any portion of the project fails, they are not going to be holding the bag.”

Depending on the nature of the project and the contract, a bond might cost a factory anywhere from three-quarters of a percentage point to 3% of a contract’s entire cost, he said. For a factory working a large apartment project, those fewer percentage points might add up to a quarter million dollars or more.

But that’s if the factory can even get bonded. Often they cannot. Why not? The text of the bill refers to a “self-reinforcing cycle” that the industrialized construction industry appears to be stuck in.

That doom loop looks something like this:

A developer or project lender is wary of starting a project with a housing factory, a new-ish player in a new-ish industry that has seen some high-profile failures, and so requires a factory to bond the project. The factory would be able to convince a surety company to provide that coverage if it had a track record of financial success. But it doesn’t, because developers and project lenders are wary. No bond for the factory means it can’t attract any business. No business means the factory eventually fails.

Carrillo and Wicks’ bill would have the state insure the insurers. If a project fails and a bond is called upon, the state would cover a portion of the payout in certain extreme circumstances (the size of that portion and what qualifies as “extreme” are still undetermined).

The ultimate hope underlying the legislation is that by making insurance companies more comfortable offering insurance, developers will become more comfortable signing on with factories, factories will have more steady business and, ultimately, they’ll be able to ramp up production, push down costs and start delivering on the long-offered promise of mass-produced housing. Doom loop terminated.

Though the state of California has never taken on a role quite like this before, the idea rhymes with other policies at both the state and federal level.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two federally-sponsored companies, guarantee privately-issued mortgages as a way to boost more plentiful and cheaper lending for American homebuyers. The Small Business Administration guarantees surety bonds for (you guessed it) small businesses. The state of California operates one loan guarantee program for health care facility construction, but none for the housing industry. A bill last year that would have replicated the model for affordable housing projects died without a full vote in the Assembly.

The housing factory surety guarantee idea is “super innovative,” said Jan Lindenthal-Cox, chief investment officer at the San Francisco Housing Accelerator Fund, a nonprofit that directs philanthropic money toward cost-cutting affordable housing projects. “This is what’s needed if you really want to scale the industry.”

Would cash be more helpful than bonding?

But even some off-site construction proponents are skeptical.

The Carrillo-Wicks bill is meant to push developers who are interested in off-site construction but skittish about its financial viability. That does not describe Mutual Housing California, a Sacramento-based nonprofit affordable development that has committed to use factory-built housing for the bulk of its future projects.

“Who are we incentivizing?” Ryan Cassidy, Mutual’s vice president of real estate, asked of the bill. “We’re incentivizing developers whose only go/no-go is whether the factory stays in business. To me, that’s a developer who is probably not very savvy.”

Likewise, the approach will help new factories with limited experience garner more business, he said. Mutual Housing contracted with Guerdon Modular Buildings, another Idaho-based manufacturer with among the longest track-records in the industry. “I don’t think the risk of factory-built housing is whether Guerdon is going to go out of business.”

Cassidy said he would prefer a “more direct” approach of simply giving factory-built projects more money.

Merle at Autovol agreed that the surety bond proposal would likely benefit newer manufacturers. Autovol, another industry heavyweight, rarely has trouble getting coverage when it needs it, he said. And because of its relative financial stability and its list of long-term clients, it can go without bonding more often than not.

“If you’ve only got two or three projects and a couple years under your belt, those are the ones that are required to bond,” he said. But for the same reason, “those are the ones that very much struggle to bond.”

It’s unclear whether other lawmakers will be willing to tie the full faith and credit of the state to an industry that’s still proving itself. The bill is scheduled for its first legislative committee hearing in late April. The total amount that the bill could put state taxpayers on the hook remains an unanswered question. But for lawmakers who are unconvinced, one possible selling point is that the need for this program may be temporary.

The premise of the bill is that “the state can support the early adopters while the factory-built housing industry builds up its reputation,” said Pullen at Terner. “This is a problem that could eventually be solved in the private market.”

If all goes well in the industry, private insurers might be happy to offer factories their coverage without a state backstop and developers and lenders may no longer insist upon that extra layer of protection. For now, that remains a big “if.”

On Thursday, March 26, at 7:46 a.m., Tim Tanno, Sr., lost the battle to cancer after a six-year fight. Since his diagnosis, he never put down the gloves and always kept the ones he loved close.

Tim grew up in Santa Clara. In his twenties he started working for Lassen Volcanic National Park. After six seasons, he transferred to Redwood National Park, where he worked for the remainder of his 35-year career. When he moved to Orick he met the love of his life, Betsy. At the time, Betsy was working at the Orick Market, and Tim would walk to the store to see her every day. When Tim asked Betsy to go out on a date, she expected they would be walking somewhere. She was very surprised when he pulled up in a brand-new Chevy Step-Side.

Tim and Betsy shared 46 years and were married for 45 of them. They had three sons (Nicholas, Joseph and Timothy Jr.), three grandchildren (Joseph Jr., Olivia and Nicholas). Tim raised his sons to be outdoorsmen. He taught all three of them to hunt, fish and respect and enjoy the outdoors the way he did. He first started fishing when he was 10 years old. When he was 16, he learned how to hunt deer from his dad, Nicholas and godfather, Bill. He hunted every season from then on. There is no place he would rather be than up in the “piney woods” with his boys.

Tim is survived by his wife, children, grandchildren and daughters-in-law, Crissy Tanno and Amanda Fox. He is survived by extended family, including Bob and Shen Secor; Julie, Jay Adams and family; Bobby, Owens Secor and family; Anthony, Danessa Secor and family; Ben and Niki Secor; Andy Good; Ashlee, Justin Barragan and family; the Lane family; and the Dahn family.

He is preceded in death by his mother, Dorothy Tanno; his father, Nicholas Tanno; his mother-in-law, Constance Secor; his father-in-law, Bob Secor; his brother, Gary Tanno; son, Nicholas Tanno; and sister-in-law, Patti Dahn.

A special thank you to the Harpe, Ellis, Bray and the Murrell families for being there for us in our time of need.

From Tim himself: “Thank you all for being in my life. I love you all more than you will ever know. I am standing on a mountain. If you need me, I will be there. Thank you, Betsy for being in my life, and for all the love we shared. I love you.”

We will be holding a memorial ceremony Prairie Creek State Park in June 2026.

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A weary old fishing vessel docked at the Eureka Public Marina went ahead and gave up the ghost this morning, sinking a few feet before its hull settled into the tidal mudflats.

Eureka employees responded to the scene around 11:30 this morning and employed tools from an emergency response trailer that the city acquired through a grant from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response, according to reporting from local ABC affiliate KRCR. 

The photos above and below, submitted by LoCO reader Gabriel Douge, show the floating booms that were deployed to contain any oil spillage from spreading.

We’ve reached out to OSPR for more information and will update this post if we learn anything either substantive or interesting about this incident.

In the meantime, pour one out for the Terry S.