PREVIOUSLY

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A groundbreaking ceremony was held today for the long-awaited EaRTH Center, a development that will bring dozens of new affordable housing units and a transit center to downtown Eureka.

Officials there dug around in a symbolic dirt box and rejoiced that construction is finally getting started.

“This is a labor of love,” said Eureka Mayor Kim Bergel. “It’s a collaboration. It’s been a beautiful project,” she said, but added there have also been some really difficult conversations.

The project will mean the conversion of two city-owned parking lots, something that enraged some residents during the lengthy planning phase.

Nevertheless, the EaRTH Center, a partnership between the City of Eureka and Humboldt Transit Authority (HTA), has marched forward.

“I think that the good news is that it’s happening now. It’s going to be a great thing for our city. We’re going to have a lot more people in Old Town, and opportunities for people to be able to get around,” said Bergel.

Located at 3rd Street and H Street, the Eureka Regional Transit & Housing (EaRTH) Center will bring a central transit hub to the city, plus 45 units of affordable housing and a handful of ground-level commercial spaces.

Construction on the center will start over the next few weeks, and is expected to take around 20 months, give or take, according to Chris Dart, Danco president of development.

During his remarks, he told the smattering of attendees the company has undertaken nothing quite like this before — the unique project involved some complicated planning, including paperwork involved in HTA owning the first level. He said it’s clear to him that a lot of very dedicated people have been working for years to make it happen.

“I think this is something that we can all be proud of,” he said.

Danco announced the project was fully funded in December 2025, following changes to early designs and approval by city government bodies.

HTA’s main transit hub for the entire region will be hosted on-site, once completed. This will include outdoor transit stops and parking for buses. Riders can look forward to bathrooms, locking bike storage and a transit center lobby on the first floor — which will serve as a warm, dry place to sit while waiting for transportation.

“Eureka has long needed a transit center, as well as, of course, more walkable, affordable homes, and this project delivers both,” said Colin Fiske, executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities, during his remarks.

Katie Collender, general manager of HTA, said the center will be unlike anything else offered locally. She said the project will bring in both people riding transit and the greater community to the commercial space on the ground floor.

Humboldt County 4th District Supervisor Natalie Arroyo, board member of HTA, said the hub will be a great place for bus riders to jump on longer routes.

“For those who don’t ride transit, it’s something that might not be as visible to them, that might not be a part of their everyday lives. But for many people, it’s a lifeline to work, to school, to get to and from their homes, and medical appointments and much more. So it really is a critical part of our community,” she said during her speech, noting the HTA serves about half a million riders each year.

Officials lauded the addition of housing in the city. The development can house up to 83 people in affordable units.

The city of Eureka has made a concerted effort to convert city property into affordable housing in recent years.

“This transit center and housing development is close to my heart because these will be my neighbors, and it will be my most frequented transit stop,” said Eureka Councilmember Leslie Castellano during her remarks.

“Local businesses will benefit from having more people living and working and spending time in the heart of Eureka. The homes here will allow Old Town clerks, baristas, librarians, waitstaff, social workers, artists and many others to live within an easy walk of their jobs,” she said.

Included in the development are 11 units reserved for people with disabilities.

Jonathan Padilla, executive director of the Redwood Coast Regional Center, said the center will mean access to the downtown area for people they serve, and access to transportation. He said it will go a long way toward helping people live meaningful lives — to be integrated, included and valued members of the community.

“Affordable housing for people that have developmental disabilities is one of the most frequently cited issues that the people we serve face,” he said.

Danco’s Chris Dart estimated at least a hundred people will be employed during the project’s construction.

He said the project is mostly local construction sourcing - and the company is excited about bringing a multi-million dollar project to the local economy.

“[Danco] construction guys, they travel a lot outside the area because there’s not enough work going around here. But they’re going to be able to be here locally and do the construction work and go home to their families every night, which is really exciting for us,” he said.

He said they’re confident parking will not be a problem. He pointed to the Sorrel Place, in Arcata, an affordable housing development with limited parking. He said despite this, the development received thousands of applications from prospective tenants.

Press release from PG&E:

As part of PG&E’s commitment to safety and emergency preparedness, the Humboldt Bay Generating Station (HBGS) is reinstating regularly scheduled emergency alarm testing on Fridays at 12:05 PM. The weekly testing began on Friday, August 21. Community members in the area may hear emergency alarm signals during scheduled testing periods and should be aware that these tests are planned activities. Because multiple warning systems will be tested, the tone of the alarm may change from week to week.

Routine alarm testing helps verify that emergency notification systems are functioning as intended and ready for use when needed. The alarms being tested are intended for HBGS employees but may be audible to nearby residents during certain conditions, including those in King Salmon and lower Humboldt Hill.

The testing program is designed to enhance preparedness and awareness for station personnel and the surrounding community.

In advance of August 21, PG&E conducted outreach to ensure employees, partners, local agencies and community stakeholders are informed about the restart of routine testing. Regular testing supports operational readiness and reinforces the station’s focus on maintaining safe and reliable operations. We appreciate the community’s awareness and cooperation as the station resumes its scheduled alarm-testing program.

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Roy’s Club is back.

Nearly a decade after the legendary Italian restaurant and cocktail lounge shut its doors, Roy’s is slated to reopen next month as a music venue and event space.

The new business owner, Sidoma Bowen, a hairstylist at Studio One Salon in Eureka, has big plans for the Old Town institution, with hopes to reopen the restaurant and eventually buy the building. But first, she’s going to bring back the bar.

“My goal is to keep the bar as is,” Bowen told the Outpost during a tour of Roy’s Club this week. “I don’t want to change anything, just give it a good clean and let the people who enjoyed Roy’s come in and enjoy that same exact experience. Obviously, it’s going to be different with me running the business, but I want it to be welcoming for them — for everyone.”

There are relics from the past scattered throughout the cavernous, wood-paneled bar and dining room — an oil painting of Dionysus, a hulking metal cash register, dusty strands of artificial English ivy and copper light fixtures handcrafted by Roy’s longtime owner, Evo Fanucchi. 

The decor and furniture will eventually be updated, but Bowen emphasized that she wants to preserve the character of Roy’s as best she can. She envisions the north side of the building, where the deli used to be, as an event space and hub for local nightlife, but she wants to keep the bar more or less the same.

“I’m never gonna change the bones of this place,” she said. “I want to make sure that the people who enjoyed Roy’s Club feel comfortable and welcome because a lot of the feedback I’ve received did come from the people who used to [frequent the restaurant]. …  I got message after message from people saying, ‘My mom or my grandpa used to take me here!’ It was very heartwarming, and I want to make sure the space is being loved and taken care of.”

The two-story building at 218 D Street has hosted a handful of businesses over the past century, starting as a sausage factory in the early 1900s. Italian immigrants Angelo and Teresa Fanucchi purchased the building in 1919, just before the United States entered the Prohibition era, and set up a cigar shop on one side and a hidden speakeasy on the other. The couple moved into the upstairs apartment with their three children — Evo, Ida and Roy — who grew up watching bootleggers and gangsters scurry throughout Old Town. 

In 1945, Roy and Evo took over the family business, which had shuttered briefly when the brothers served in World War II, and rebranded it as “Roi’s Club,” an Italian restaurant and cocktail lounge. The restaurant was named after the eldest Fanucchi brother, whose name was misspelled on his birth certificate and again misspelled by the artist who designed the business logo, according to an article in the Humboldt Historian. An artist would finally get the spelling right years later, when Evo and his wife, Catherine, started selling “Roi’s” sauces and salad dressings. 

Roy’s Club has sat largely untouched since 2017, when Evo and Catherine shuttered the restaurant and bar after 70 years of business. Evo died eight years later at 105. Catherine no longer lives in the apartment upstairs, but she still owns the building.

Asked about next steps for Roy’s, Bowen said she still has a few bureaucratic hoops to jump through (approval from the health department, ABC license and city permitting, etc.), but she hopes to start hosting events as soon as she’s up and running. 

“I’ve been throwing events at the Eagle House, the Shanty and Siren’s Song in the past year, mostly burlesque performances,” she said. “I want to provide a place for whatever is different and whatever we don’t already have here, but I’m open to anything; comedy, music, drag shows, burlesque — all of it.”

Eventually, she plans to reopen the restaurant, but she’s not quite sure what’s on the menu.

“I actually have no idea,” she laughed. “I’ve been in talks with someone, and we’ve made many mock menus of what we want to do, but we haven’t landed on anything yet.”

Asked about financing, Bowen said she hasn’t sought out any investors as of yet, noting that she “prefers to do things on my own.”

“Right now I’m just doing hair, so every balayage, every haircut, everything I do goes into some license or some permit,” she said. “I believe in myself, and with the support that I have and the way that I manage things, I feel like I’m going to be very successful.”

If everything goes according to plan, Bowen will reopen Roy’s Club sometime in September. 

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Fresh off the launch of a celebrated new traffic signal at the south end of Eureka, Caltrans is set to fire up some more lights on the northern end.

The long-planned half-signal at Airport Rd./Jacobs Ave. is scheduled to go live tonight. It’s designed to stop northbound traffic to allow drivers coming from Airport Road smooth ingress to the Hwy. 101. Southbound drivers won’t be affected.

“This safety improvement is aimed at addressing collision rates well above the statewide average for similar facilities,” Caltrans District 1 spokesman Myles Cochrane told the Outpost early last month. 

The agency made its announcement on Facebook:

Final electrical and striping work at the half-signal on U.S. 101 at Airport Road/Jacobs Ave. is scheduled to be completed the evening of Wednesday, Aug. 26. The signal is planned to be activated before the morning commute on Thursday, Aug. 27.

Expect lane closures and minor slowdowns in both directions Wednesday night as this work is completed.

Once operational, the signal will stop northbound U.S. 101 traffic to allow:

 Southbound left turns

Southbound-to-northbound U-turns

Turns from Jacobs Ave./Airport Road onto the southbound U.S. 101 auxiliary lane

Please slow down, stay alert and give crews room to work.

A new Arcata housing development got the go-ahead at last night’s planning commission meeting, though the commission did force the developers to make a small change to their plans. 

Located at the intersection of K Street and Samoa Boulevard, the lot is currently occupied by what was once an H&R Block. The developers, designer Donald Cleek and Crescent City residents Steven and Trina Park, the parcel’s owners, filed paperwork late last year with the city, seeking permission to turn it into multi-family housing. They’d add a second story to the low, squat building, then split it up into four one-bedroom apartments, all 568 square feet apiece. They’ll be “cozy” apartments, Cleek said at last night’s meeting, and “economical” and “efficient,” Trina told the Outpost on Monday. 

It took quite a long time to get the plans approved, something Cleek chalked up to “sloppy” city code, he told the Outpost earlier this week. A June letter filed by Cleek tersely references the city’s request that they include a list of the site’s every code deviance, with an explanation for why they can’t be fixed. It was a frustrating process, Cleek said, and it took far longer than the 45-60 days he thinks it should have taken. They had originally aimed to begin construction in April of this year, but got bogged down attempting to clear the designs with the city, forcing a planned April 2027 start date. “It was a huge waste of time,” he said.

Overlapping nets of regulations trapped the project for months while the developers worked out how to navigate them. They have to pay heed to the city’s General Plan, its Land Use Code, and the Gateway Code, but that last one doesn’t matter, staff wrote, because the parcel is in the coastal zone, which is regulated by California’s Coastal Commission. It hasn’t yet ratified the Gateway Code, so, ‘til then, it’s inapplicable. It’s also subject to the rules of the Arcata’s Local Coastal Program, as well as a design review process because it’s in a historic conservation area. The lot is also zoned for industrial-commercial uses, not residential ones, and the pre-existing building is rife with code deviances caused by the size of the lot, only 4,600 square feet. The zoning, Loya said, is “pretty interesting.” “We put ourselves in a situation where it’s very complex,” he said, though the city’s working on simplifying the regulations. 

The number of apartments they could cram into the parcel was limited. It wasn’t quite what Loya and other local officials had envisioned for the Gateway area, Loya said, but it’s a constrained site. He, and several of the commissioners, said they were pleased to see any kind of housing built in the area. 

“I think you’re going to keep seeing this,” Loya said. “We develop a plan that’s nice and shiny and golden, and then when we get our boots on the ground and we’re actually dealing with a real property, a real parcel, that doesn’t conform to our ideals, we’re going to have to make compromises.”

What several of them didn’t like was a dearth of covered bicycle parking spaces. Most of the meeting was spent debating if the developers should be forced to add a storage shed with enough space for four bicycles, which would take up one out of the five parking spaces in the building’s lot. California code requires enough parking space for vehicles for handicapped people be saved in every lot, so if a shed takes up one space, and a disabled person’s van takes up two, one of the residents would have to park on the street. Four out of the six commissioners present — Peter Lehman, Matthew Simmons, Abigail Strickland, and Ashton Hamm — thought the tradeoff was worth it to incentivize cycling, though Cleek said he thought the space for a car was probably more valuable. 

The commission approved the project unanimously, on the condition that the developers install a bike storage shed to the lot.

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PREVIOUSLY:

• Eureka City Schools Appoints Author, Public Speaker Jess Pettitt to Serve on the District’s Governing Board

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Press release from Good Enough Now:

Jess Pettitt, MEd, MBA, CSP, has been inducted into the CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame®, the National Speakers Association’s highest and most selective honor. She is one of five speakers (Allison Shapira, Peter Katz, Manley Feinberg, and Anton Gunn) in the class of 2026.

The Council of Peers Award for Excellence is neither applied for nor campaigned for. Speakers are evaluated by other speakers across five categories:

• message,
• presentation,
• experience,
• professionalism, and
• collateral material.

Fewer than 270 people have received the award since the National Speakers Association established it in 1977. It is the closest thing the speaking profession has to an Oscar, and it is held for life.

Pettitt was inducted on July 27, 2026, joining a roster that includes Ronald Reagan, Colin Powell, Zig Ziglar, Norman Vincent Peale, and Les Brown. As Mike Domitrz (CSP, CPAE) from The Center for Respect introduced Jess, he shared these words about her work:

Good Enough Now is about building an inclusive world that requires humility and curiosity. It is a challenge to us not to settle, but to declare, to commit to be real—and no one is more real from the stage.

As Jess says in her acceptance speech:

“Disruption shakes things up so the pieces can settle down together. I believe we are all pieces of a whole. I believe we can come together to do good better without minimizing pain, fears, and experiences, because disruption leads to unity. Disruption for disruption’s sake does nothing, but disruption intended to unify a deeply divided country and world means something.”

“I get called brave and courageous a lot. I don’t know if this is a true representation of me; I just got really good at crawling out of holes. There will be more, and you will crawl out of them too.”

“We are living in a very interesting time. I need you to remember that every sentence has a history and history is watching.”

We can come together by doing good better.

Jess Pettitt works with businesses, nonprofits, first responders, healthcare organizations, associations, and federal offices on problems leaders do not put on the agenda: the culture that no longer matches the values statement, the team afraid to tell the truth upward, the manager everyone works around rather than with. She has reached more than half a million people across North America under a banner she has carried for two decades: Tough Subjects. Better Connections.

She came to the work sideways. Before the keynotes, Pettitt was a stand-up comic in New York City. The drunken nights are long gone (sober for 20 years). The timing stayed. So did her willingness to say what the room is already thinking, which is what her clients actually hire her for. Visit jesspettitt.com/ to get started.

Pettitt is the author of Good Enough Now (2017) and Almost Doing Good (2025). Her third book, Doing Good Better, is coming September 2026, completing a trilogy whose through line she states plainly: doing the best you can with what you have some of the time, because it is better than nothing never.

The CPAE joins her Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) designation, held by a small fraction of professional speakers worldwide. Fewer than one percent of speakers hold both.

I would like to take this moment to thank my earliest colleagues, clients, exclusive managers, and bureaus for taking a risk on me and finding no risk at all. I couldn’t have built this business without you. If I am really going to thank those at the beginning of my career, then I need to thank everyone who ever fired me and all those hecklers in dark, seedy comedy clubs for building up both my tolerance and my humility to understand time and place. Thank you to those who have served as a bat signal for me over my twenty years on the road and for those who provide a place I call home.   

— Jess

Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

On August 25, 2026, at approximately 8:17 p.m., the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office Emergency Communications Center received a 9-1-1 call reporting a shooting in the area of Big Hill Road and Marshall Lane in Hoopa.

Deputies responded to the area and located a victim who had sustained a life-threatening gunshot wound. Emergency medical personnel arrived on scene and initiated saving measures. However, the victim was pronounced deceased at the scene.

No suspect has been identified at this time. Witnesses in the area reported seeing a possible 2010 black Toyota Tacoma near the location at the time of the shooting.

This case is currently under investigation by the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office Major Crimes Division.   The victim’s identity is being withheld pending notification of next of kin.

Anyone with any information about this case is encouraged to contact the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office at (707) 445-7251 or the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office Tip line at (707) 268-2539.