Mary Jane Perkins passed away peacefully in her sleep after a long battle with dementia. She was born November 7, 1935 in North Platte, Nebraska to Earnest and Buelah Abbott.

Mary spent most of her younger years in Ohio and Sacramento until she moved to Humboldt County. Mary lived on McDonald’s Creek then moved to Big Lagoon company housing. Mary enjoyed the many potluck and events that were held in the cookhouse. Mary made a lot of good friends there.

Mary had a variety of hobbies — ironing clothes, teaching Sunday school, sewing, bingo, square dancing and raising five children.

Mary is survived by her four children Mary Ann (Beaver), Paula (Norman), Charlene (Bill), Edie (Rodney) and a daughter-in-law, Shirley; 13 grandchildren; 29 great-grandchildren; 7 great-great-great grandchildren; and a very, very special sister, Daisy.

Mary is preceded in death her parents, Earnest and Buelah; her brother Leonard; sister Alvina; son Joesph; and a great-great grandson, Quentin. Mary had two husbands — Paul, Wilbur — and life partner Bob. You could often hear her laughing and telling people she killed three husbands.

Edie would personally like to thank the staff at Pace, Sequoia Springs and Hospice, especially nurse Tim.

You are welcome to join the family for graveside service at Greenwood Cemetery — 1757 J St., Arcata — on Nov 8, 2025 at 3 p.m. Celebration of life to follow at Arcata Veterans Hall, 1425 J St.

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It’s been more than seven years since a humdrum gray utility box on the corner of Eureka’s Fifth and H streets was transformed through the power of art into a brightly hued donut cheeseburger.

Over the subsequent weeks, quite a few more utility boxes received creative makeovers thanks to Eureka’s Strategic Arts Plan, a multi-year endeavor which has also included a series of street art festivals, the Waterfront Trail artistic benches and the official certification of downtown Eureka as a California Cultural District. 

However, the bright hues from that inaugural utility box art season have dimmed in the intervening years, and Eureka is looking to make them pop once again. Will there be public controversy like last time? Who can say?!

We’ll let the city’s latest press release take it from here:

The City of Eureka is bringing new life to one of its most colorful community projects: The Utility Box Art Program. Supported by a Clean California grant and in partnership with Caltrans, the City is revitalizing artwork on utility boxes along the U.S. 101 corridor through Eureka. 

Originally painted in 2017 and 2018, many of the boxes have weathered years of exposure, making it time for a refresh. The City first reached out to the original artists, inviting them to touch up their existing work or propose new designs. After those artists had the opportunity to participate, a public call for artists was issued to fill the remaining boxes. 

The Eureka Art & Culture Commission reviewed and approved all new designs before forwarding the catalog to Caltrans for final selection. This round of updates also introduced a new option: artists could now have their work reproduced as a vinyl wrap instead of painting directly on the box. Vinyl wraps offer greater durability and can be easily replaced if a box is damaged or swapped out in the future. 

Over the next several weeks, our community will see artists and installers at work along the corridor, adding a renewed burst of creativity and color to Eureka’s streetscape. 

The City extends its appreciation to Caltrans for funding this effort through the Clean California program and for continuing to support local beautification initiatives. Following this phase, the City hopes to secure additional funding to refresh utility boxes in other areas throughout Eureka. 

Artists who are interested in future opportunities to create public art in Eureka are encouraged to follow the City’s social media channels, where all upcoming artist calls and public art opportunities will be promoted. 

For more information about the Utility Box Art Program, please contact the City of Eureka Economic Development Division at EconDev@eurekaca.gov.

As the government shutdown enters its third week, the Outpost thought it’d be a good idea to check in with Rep. Jared Huffman about the latest happenings on Capitol Hill. In short, Democrats and Republicans are still at odds over spending priorities and appear no closer to agreement. 

Earlier today, the Senate tried — and failed for the ninth time — to advance a House-passed measure to reopen the government. Senators voted 51-44 on the GOP-led funding bill, which would have funded the government through Nov. 21. The Senate is expected to vote again on Thursday.

In our interview with Rep. Huffman, we discussed the consequences of the ongoing shutdown, including recent funding cuts and anticipated impacts to North Coast communities. We also briefly touched on Prop. 50, which, if it passes, would reshape Huffman’s 2nd Congressional District, swapping out portions of Sonoma and Mendocino counties for redder regions to our east.

Our interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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LoCO: I want to ask you about funding cuts hitting Democrat-led congressional districts, but first, I’d like to talk about the government shutdown. What’s the scene like in D.C. right now?

Huffman: Surreal. My Democratic colleagues and I were just on the Capitol steps, doing another of these events that we’ve done each week during the three-week shutdown, where we bring real people to tell the stories of how this health care disaster is impacting them and their families. That’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to demonstrate that we’re here to reopen the government, end the cuts and save health care, and our Republican colleagues are off sipping umbrella drinks on vacation.

Since the shutdown began on Oct. 1, the Trump Administration and Congressional Republicans have continually cast blame on Democrats. Can you respond to that?

Good luck with that! I mean, they control all three branches of government. They have set these disastrous health care cuts in motion with their massive tax giveaway to billionaires, and Democrats are simply saying, “If you want our votes to move forward, end the cuts and save healthcare.” 

This is something that’s getting very real for a lot of people. Notices of ACA [Affordable Care Act] premium increases started going out on the first of this month, and I’ve got 37,000 households in my district that are going to get these notices, and in some cases, their premiums will go up 600 percent. 

These are people who are farmers, small business owners, self-employed entrepreneurs — people who were finally able to afford health care because of these ACA subsidies — and in order to give tax giveaways to billionaires who don’t need them, Trump and the Republicans have decided to strip away their care. And that’s before all of the devastating Medicaid and Medicare cuts that are coming our way in the months ahead. This is an important fight, it’s an important line to draw, and I am proud that we’re doing it.

In the first days, Trump called the government shutdown an “unprecedented opportunity” given to him by Democrats to reshape the government and cut programs that don’t align with the administration’s goals. How is that playing out?

Well, you know, Trump is the dictator who cried wolf. He was doing all of these extreme and unconstitutional things long before the government shutdown, firing people, trying to eliminate entire departments and ignoring congressional directives on funding. He’s going to do it anyway — and he’s already done so much of it — so you just can’t take it seriously. It’s just blatant bullying. 

But look at the cruelty of it, look at where he’s targeting a lot of these actions. I mean, getting rid of people at the Department of Education who oversee special education funding? The USDA sent out a notice last month that SNAP benefits will discontinue in November. He is hitting some of the most vulnerable families and communities in this country, and it’s going to hurt a lot of people in rural Republican areas, too. That’s on him. That is not on Democrats.

[NOTE: After our conversation this morning, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump Administration from firing federal workers during the government shutdown. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco said she believed the evidence would ultimately show the cuts were illegal and in excess of authority, according to the Associated Press.]

Circling back to those local funding cuts I mentioned before, the New York Times is reporting that the Trump Administration is freezing or cancelling nearly $28 billion in federal funding reserved for more than 200 infrastructure projects, including $129.1 million earmarked for California’s 2nd District. Can you break down where that money was allocated?

A lot of it is for tribes and communities that are trying to be more resilient in the face of the climate crisis and the risk of catastrophic wildfires, and also to bring down electricity costs. We had some great projects that would have produced all kinds of community benefits, but these days, if you’re in a blue state or if you have anything to do with equity or environmental quality, you are a target for these extremists in the Trump Administration.

Which tribes are losing that funding?

Well, there’s a microgrid project that I believe involves the Blue Lake Rancheria. There was also a project that the Yurok, Hoopa Valley and Karuk tribes all stood to benefit from, along with the County of Humboldt, but I believe that was announced last week.

Can you talk about the greater consequences of these funding cuts for North Coast residents?

There’s a lot at stake: jobs, environmental quality, resiliency, but also the integrity of the government. When you have grants that are awarded, that were competed for in good faith, when you have people taking action in good faith and reliance on a government awarding these grants through a deliberative, transparent process, and then you have this dictator come along and apply these hyper-partisan political filters and start jerking people around? It’s really unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

On another note, Californians are getting ready to vote on these new district maps. How are you feeling about the redesign of the 2nd District?

Well, I’m going to work hard to make it successful. Doesn’t mean it’ll be easy, but I think I’m someone who shows up, does the work, and I have the ability to talk to people of all different political and personal persuasions. It’s just a continuation of the things that I need to do right now in my current district, but it’ll keep me a little bit busier.

I’m sure you’ve been brushing up on your knowledge of those red counties out east. What do you know about Modoc County? 

I know it’s beautiful! I know it’s very rural.

It’s out there! The county’s population is less than 9,000, I think?

Yeah, yeah. It’s very Trinity- or Del Norte-like in that regard. That’s going to be a little different for me, but if you look at Trinity and Del Norte counties, there are a lot of similarities. 

If Proposition 50 does indeed pass, you’ll take on thousands of new constituents in red counties, including Shasta, Modoc, Lassen and Siskiyou. How are you going to appeal to those folks?

Same way I appeal to people in my current district: I listen to them, I show up, I try to understand their concerns and their needs, and I try to get shit done.

On a somewhat related note, the U.S. Supreme Court is discussing election districts and the Voting Rights Act today. I understand that ruling could have widespread impacts across the American South. Would it impact California’s redistricting effort?

No. Here’s the thing with California and these maps that are going before voters right now: We proactively chose to comply with the Voting Rights Act. If this ruling goes the wrong way and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act ceases to exist, it means California could have even more aggressively drawn maps, but we did not want to do that because that’s not who we are. We don’t disenfranchise minority communities. There may be some places in the south that want to get back to the old Jim Crow playbook and start doing that, and that’s going to be the real implication of this ruling.

Is there anything else you’d like our readers and your constituents to know about the government shutdown or redistricting?

No, that’s good stuff. Thank you very much.

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While Amazon mega-billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has certainly meddled with the paper’s opinion section, prohibiting views that oppose select libertarian priorities, reporters over on the news side of the paper are still producing some quality journalism.

As evidence, check out today’s stunning multimedia presentation of a story on the use of fire in indigenous forest management. Reporters Daniel Wolfe and Alice Li traveled to Orleans, here in Humboldt County, to watch cultural fire practitioners with the Karuk Tribe as they burned a patch of farmland, and to interview a variety of researchers and ecologists about the practice.

“This cultural burning is part traditional food and craft production, part environmental protection and part ceremony with the land,” the story notes.

The piece goes on to outline how Native communities employed fire for centuries of landscape management, but these practices have been suppressed following colonization by European settlers. In 1850, for example, California passed a law making it legal to fine or punish anyone burning land, and the 1911 federal Weeks Act ushered in a paradigm of “total fire suppression.”

“This made cultural fire illegal at a federal level,” the story says. “Native people were shot and imprisoned for starting fires.”

Of course, the total-fire-prevention approach hasn’t worked as well as expected. Decades of fire suppression have led to overgrowth and a loss of biodiversity, creating conditions rife for larger, hotter and more catastrophic wildfires.

Recently, California has allowed federally recognized tribes to conduct cultural burns with less federal oversight. However, the Trump administration has released a draft executive order that could reverse recent policies aimed at reintroducing fires to the landscape, the Post reports.

The whole presentation — best viewed on a laptop or, better yet, projected onto a big TV — includes stunning photos, video and graphic elements

You’ll apparently have to create an account to access the story via this gift article link, but it’ll be free to experience should you choose to take that step.

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Authors: Tom Wheeler, EPIC; Colin Fiske, CRTP; Melodie Meyer, RCCER; Jennifer Kalt, Humboldt Waterkeeper

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There is a dire need for more housing in Humboldt County. Talk to a local renter or someone looking to buy their first home, and you’ll hear the stories. But where that housing goes is important to the environment and the economy. Do we want to cover our forests, fields and farms with more sprawl? Or do we want to see more housing in our existing communities? Right now, the Humboldt County Association of Governments (HCAOG) is considering a relatively obscure but important decision: how it should divvy up regional housing needs amongst various jurisdictions. This little-discussed decision will have big ramifications for the future of Humboldt.

Housing costs are fundamentally a question of supply and demand. Rents and home prices keep going up, and it’s often hard to find a home at all, especially in a neighborhood with jobs, schools, shops and recreational facilities. Just like in the rest of California — and much of the rest of the country — housing production has not kept pace with needs for decades. Renters end up squeezing into overcrowded homes with more roommates than they want, potential homebuyers keep renting because they can’t find a place to buy, and many people pay more than they can really afford for housing. In extreme cases, folks leave the community entirely or become homeless because there isn’t enough housing.

A lot of the decisions about where to build housing start with an obscure state-mandated process called the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA). Every eight years, the state assigns each region a specific number of new housing units in every income category, and requires local governments to make plans to ensure those homes are actually built. However, the region makes its own choices about how to divide the responsibility for those new homes among local jurisdictions. In Humboldt, a lot about the future of housing and transportation hinges on whether most of the homes will be built in existing job and service centers like Eureka and Arcata, or will be assigned instead to the mostly lower-density unincorporated areas of the county.

Thankfully, over the last few years, we’ve started to see significant progress in both Eureka and Arcata toward building some of this much-needed housing. From the Linc Housing and Wiyot Tribe projects in Eureka to Sorrel Place and the Yurok Tribe’s 30th Street Commons in Arcata, we are seeing more affordable housing planned and built than we have in recent memory. Crucially, these projects are all within walking and biking distance to many jobs and services, and served by multiple transit systems. This is what’s called “infill,” and it’s the kind of housing we need in order to make living in our region more affordable, improve health and safety and reduce climate pollution. (If you live in a place where a car is required to get anywhere, you almost double your effective rent when you add the costs of car ownership.)

But it’s not inevitable that future homes will be built in infill locations. The state issues Humboldt County as a whole, including incorporated cities, a set number of housing units it must plan for. HCAOG then allocates those targets to each jurisdiction in the county. HCAOG is currently asking for public feedback on its proposed formula for distributing housing responsibility among the cities and the county. Unfortunately, the proposed formula does not adequately address the economic or environmental needs of the region. In doing so, the formula would promote sprawl by over-allocating housing to be built in unincorporated areas rather than in incorporated cities.

The formula considers only two variables — existing population and existing jobs — and gives them equal weight. Locating housing near existing jobs is a good idea, and is correlated with several other important considerations, including greenhouse gas emissions, vehicle miles traveled, cost of living and equitable access to destinations. Locating housing near existing homes, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily accomplish any particular goals. The existing population only tells you where people currently live; it provides no information about their living conditions, and certainly not about where they want to live.

We believe that the formula needs to be changed. Instead of population, the region should incorporate cost burden, vacancy rates and overcrowding directly into its formula. Other state-mandated considerations, including municipal sewer and water availability and the housing needs generated by Cal Poly Humboldt, should also be incorporated. And jobs should receive more weight, since that is such an important factor in meeting both environmental and equity goals.

Changing the formula as we suggest would likely result in more housing responsibility being assigned to Eureka and Arcata and less to the county. That’s a good thing. Eureka and Arcata are great places to build housing, unlike most county lands. The demand is already high, especially in Arcata, where prices make housing out of reach for many who work or go to school there. And building more housing in town will allow people to reduce their cost of living and their environmental impacts by increasing walkability, bikeability and access to high-quality bus service.

Over the last century, most local homes were built on former agricultural and wild lands, sprawling further and further from downtowns to places that are hard to access without driving. There is a lot of pressure to continue that kind of development. It took years of effort by tribes, public officials, planners and advocates to make projects like the ones we mentioned above possible, and they regularly face fierce backlash.

Don’t get us wrong: there are good places to build more housing in the unincorporated county, including places like McKinleyville and Myrtletown. But where most of the county’s land does not make for affordable, environmentally responsible development, almost anywhere in Eureka or Arcata does.

If you agree with us, now’s the time to speak up. You can learn more about this crucial issue, including how to submit a formal comment, on HCAOG’s website.

Don’t be deterred by all the numbers, models and acronyms. At its heart, this is a simple issue of where new homes should be built: on farmlands and forests, or in existing towns near jobs, schools and services. We think the choice is obvious, and we encourage you to join us in speaking up.

Last month I was sad. My stereo amplifier was not working and the audio repair guy in McKinleyville told me he was only working on tube amps. Lo, let despair rain from the heavens; let suffering reign; let the miserable wallow in their failures, rank with the stench of their disappointments.

Fortunately a well-timed remark from a friend reminded me that I could try going to the monthly Repair Cafe, so there I was on Sunday waiting for some help from one of the fellas who knew how to work on electronics without killing themselves. The room was filled with supplicants hauling in one item of junk apiece, waiting for it to be fixed; the scene reminded me of medieval serfs carting the dying to the latest miracle-man prophet hoping for a cure. Lamps and bicycles and sewing machines made up the bulk of the patients, though there was a couple with a DVD player the approximate size of a hope chest and a few people with computer monitors. 

My grandfather, most of his life a construction contractor with a generous streak, once told me that when selecting a repairman, people looking to get something fixed have three options to choose from but can only pick two: fast, cheap, and done well. Choosing always makes the third impossible. Going to the Cafe means opting for cost (free) and quality (though many of the volunteers told me not to expect much; fixing stuff is for most of them either a hobby or something done in a past life, and there also isn’t a ton of spare parts laying around). It is not a speedy process, though not at all by any fault of the volunteers. It took about an hour and a half of waiting until one of the electronic whizzes could give me a hand. 

Martin noticed me sitting around with my amp and — rejoice! — said he had worked in audio for some 30-odd years and could check it out, but not before some light interrogation. 

“Thrown any really loud parties recently?” he asked me. I denied the charge. 

“Are you sure?” I said I was. 

He hmmmmed. “Maybe you got spidered.” 

Disgusted but curious, we popped the top off and inspected the Sony’s innards. Every bit of the circuit board and the fuses and all of the wires were covered with dust — and Martin noticed something covering up a shiny node: a bit of spiderweb. He had been right. A speck of speaker wire making a small short probably hadn’t been helping either. He told me to hose “the SHIT” out of it with some canned air and take a Q-Tip and some denatured alcohol to my dirty flea market find. After some deep cleaning and fuse-testing, another volunteer found an old computer speaker and we hooked it up. It hissed; everyone was thrilled. 

Anywho, I didn’t have any cash on me to lend some more weight to my “thank you”s, and since several fixer-upper volunteers mentioned they wanted to get a few more people in there with stuff to mend, I hope this will do: the Arcata Repair Cafe is the second Sunday of every month at the Arcata Community Center, and if you have a broken household item light enough to carry in, you can try getting it fixed there. For free. I wish all of the kind people who spent a chunk of their weekends helping me out great riches and everlasting happiness.

Update, 10/22: A spokesperson for the Repair Cafe has asked us to clarify that the event doesn’t always happen on the second Sunday of the month at the Arcata Community Center; there will not be a Repair Cafe in December, and the event in January will be at the Eureka Municipal Auditorium. Make sure to check their Facebook page for up-to-date info.

Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

Poster. Click to enlarge.

This October will be the 4-year anniversary of the disappearance of Emmilee Renea Risling.  The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office is once again asking for the public’s help locating Risling.  She was last seen October 14th, 2021, on the Pecwan Bridge near Johnson (Wautec).

A $20,000 reward is being offered for information leading to the safe return or information leading to the location of missing person Emmilee Risling. Risling is described as a Native American female 32 years old (at the time of her disappearance), 5’- 2”, 140 pounds, brown eyes, and short dark brown hair. 

Anyone with information is asked to call Cold Case Detective Mike Fridley at 707-441-3024.

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