Press release from the Humboldt County Drug Task Force:
Since
early February 2022 the Humboldt County Drug Task Force (HCDTF) had
been investigating Christopher
Battles, AKA: Christopher Newcomb
(32 years old from Eureka), and his girlfriend, Karli
Anagnost (30 years old from
Eureka) for transportation and sales of fentanyl. As a result of
their investigation agents received a search warrant for Battles,
Anagnost, and their vehicle.
On
Wednesday April 13th,
2022 HCDTF agents conducted surveillance on Battles and Anagnost as
they travelled from Humboldt County to the Tenderloin District in San
Francisco to purchase more fentanyl. On Thursday morning April 14th,
2022 HCDTF agents made a traffic stop on Battles and Anagnost as the
entered Humboldt County on Highway 101. Both subjects were detained
without incident.
HCDTF
Agents conducted a search of the vehicle and located approx. 3 ounces
of fentanyl, smaller quantities of methamphetamine and heroin, as
well as a digital scale and packaging materials. Both suspects
admitted to transporting fentanyl into Humboldt County for the
purpose of sales. Both suspects were transported to the jail and
booked for the following charges:
H&S 11351 Possession of fentanyl
for sale
H&S 11352(b) Transportation of
fentanyl across non-contiguous counties
H&S 11377 Possession of
methamphetamine
PC 182 Conspiracy
Anyone
with information related to this investigation or other narcotics
related crimes are encouraged to call the Humboldt County Drug Task
Force at 707-267-9976.
Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:
The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office is pleased to share with the community our 2021 Annual Report.
In this report you will find information about every division of the Sheriff’s Office. While this profession certainly comes with many daily challenges, the men and women of this office continue to take these obstacles and turn them into opportunities to show compassion and make a difference. In addition to the daily difficulties that come with this job, our organization has faced many other challenges this year, including short staffing, pandemic restrictions and fatigue, wildfires, and rising crime. Despite these adversities, our dedicated staff have continued to step up, allowing our office to maintain 24-hour communications, patrol coverage and jail services, all while consistently providing a high level of service in all of our many other functions. Through it all, the men and women of the Sheriff’s Office continue to exemplify our mission, to protect and serve our community and to earn the public’s trust compassion and accountability.
This publication is only a snapshot of what the Sheriff’s Office accomplishes daily throughout the county. There are things that deputies do every day to make a difference that go unnoticed, and we pride ourselves on that. The Sheriff’s Office is blessed to have the community’s trust and support.
As we welcome 2022 in anticipation of whatever this year may bring, we have confidence that one thing will remain the same: our commitment to you, our community. We look forward to continuing our pursuit to build trust and relationship with our community, to solve problems together and make Humboldt County a safe place to live, work and play. If you are interested in learning more about the Sheriff’s Office or volunteering to help with our mission, vision, and values, please visit our website at humboldtsheriff org, like us on Facebook @HumboldtSheriff, or follow us on lnstagram @HumboldtSheriff or Twitter @HumCoSO.
Scott Dam at Lake Pillsbury — a key component of the Potter Valley Project. Photo: PG&E.
###
PG&E’s license to operate the Potter Valley Project expires today. The license expiration marks the first step in the decommissioning process of the project, and the likely removal of the Scott and Cape Horn dams.
PG&E has been looking to rid itself of the Potter Valley Project — a hydroelectric system that diverts thousands of acre-feet of water each year from the Eel River into the headwaters of the Russian River — and the costs associated with it for years. PG&E submitted a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in January 2019 to provide notice that it would not submit an application to relicense the project once the license lapses on April 14, 2022.
Members of the Two-Basin Partnership – California Trout, the County of Humboldt, the Mendocino County Inland Water & Power Commission, the Round Valley Indian Tribes and Sonoma County Water Agency – filed a proposal to take over the license in May 2020 with the intent to remove Scott Dam and restore fish passage to more than 280 miles of prime spawning and nursery habitat for endangered summer steelhead.
It should be noted that the Potter Valley powerhouse has been offline since July 2021, when PG&E staff discovered a broken transformer during a routine inspection of the facility. Despite PG&E’s efforts to ditch the project, the company announced earlier this year that it would make the necessary repairs to bring the powerhouse back online.
“PG&E has completed its evaluation of whether to replace the transformer and concluded it is beneficial to PG&E’s electric generation customers to proceed with the work necessary to return the powerhouse to full operational status,” PG&E stated in a Feb. 1 letter to stakeholders. “… PG&E does not have a schedule for returning the powerhouse to service. Our experience with this kind of work indicates the repairs could be completed in the next couple of years, but we will not know until the detailed engineering is completed later this year.”
PG&E spokesperson Deanna Contreras noted that the license surrender process “is likely to take more than five years” so replacing the transformer “makes economic sense for our electric generation customers.”
“Based on our analysis, the ‘payback’ period for investment in the new transformer is about five years,” she wrote in an email to the Outpost. “In this case, payback simply means the point at which the benefit of operating the powerhouse outweighs the cost of purchasing replacement power for our customers. …The transformer will need to be engineered, custom-built, transported and installed, which could take a couple of years.”
Although the Two-Basin Partnership’s initial bid to take over the license wasn’t successful, Redgie Collins, legal and policy director for CalTrout, remains optimistic that dam removal will eventually move forward.
“The future of Potter Valley is a return of native spawning grounds and salmon and steelhead running through pristine habitat and a return of abundance to the Eel River,” he wrote in an email to the Outpost. “…PG&E can’t afford to operate the project, let alone pay the $3 to 5 million per year just to keep the project in place. That’s not even including the litigation costs should they attempt to delay surrender.”
But the timeline is still unclear. Alicia Hamann, executive director of Friends of the Eel River, said decommissioning could begin in the next few years if PG&E is motivated to act swiftly.
“Following [today’s license expiration], we expect to see FERC order PG&E to begin a license surrender proceeding,” Hamann told the Outpost. “Within 90 days of that order, we should see PG&E issue a schedule for the license surrender process and that will give us some more information about the timeline of events.”
The license surrender process usually takes about two years, but Hamann anticipates that it could take more time as we are entering “an era of lots and lots of dam removals.”
“We actually haven’t seen a lot of dam removals and so there’s not a ton of precedent for exactly how this process is going to go,” she said.
Collins added that CalTrout is prepared to negotiate a settlement agreement with Northern California tribes and PG&E to initiate the decommissioning process.
“We’ve got all the data and engineering studies to get a deal done quickly,” he said. “…PG&E will enter the decommissioning process with $2 million worth of studies that show in extreme detail how to remove both dams.”
FERC will soon issue an annual license to PG&E which will continue to operate the Potter Valley Project under the existing license conditions until FERC issues a final license surrender and decommissioning order.
Homeowners in wealthy, white neighborhoods in Oakland received thousands of dollars more in property tax breaks than their counterparts in neighborhoods with large Black, Asian and Latino populations, according to a new report based on a study by the Tax Fairness Project and the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association.
The report takes aim at Proposition 13, a 1978 California law which limits how much governments can tax property to 1% of its assessed value. The law also constrains property values for tax purposes, so properties are taxed at the value at which they were sold – not a property’s up-to-date market price. In most cases, properties are only reassessed when they sell.
The law has been criticized by policy experts for effectively offering long-time homeowners hefty tax discounts relative to new buyers.
The new analysis, called Burdens and Benefits, concludes that the law disproportionately benefits white and wealthier homeowners, who tend to live in higher-income communities where property values have risen faster relative to other neighborhoods.
Phil Levin, who founded the Tax Fairness Project to measure the effects of Prop. 13 in the Bay Area, argues that the law has offered businesses and largely white, wealthy homeowners huge tax breaks at the expense of government revenue and school funding.
But “the people who are hurt by it just don’t even know about it,” said Levin, “Then, of course, all the people who benefit from it intensely care about it.”
Prop. 13 does allow a property’s selling value to increase by 2% annually to account for inflation, but median home prices throughout California have soared far beyond that adjustment.
In the last year alone, Bay Area median home prices have risen nearly 14% to $1 million, according to CoreLogic sales data.
The law has been criticized by policy experts for effectively offering long-time homeowners hefty tax discounts relative to new buyers.
The law creates situations where mansions are paying similar taxes as fixer-uppers, “because homes in higher-income communities have increased in value at a faster pace than other homes, making the effects of Prop. 13 much larger for those homeowners,” Levin wrote in the report.
While the study focused on Oakland, Levin said the findings shed light on how Proposition 13 impacts communities across the state.
The owner of a 6,740-square-foot mansion in San Francisco estimated to be worth $9 million paid $5,625 in property taxes in 2020, according to the Tax Fairness Project, which analyzed county tax records and market values in home buying websites such as Zillow. Across the bay in Richmond, the owner of a 991-square-foot home worth $331,000 and in need of repairs paid almost as much tax at $5,240.
Luke Quirk, 42, purchased a four-bedroom home in Concord with his wife and two children for about $697,000 in 2015. While he pays more than $9,000 annually in property taxes, he said, his long-time homeowner neighbor told him he pays about $3,700 in taxes, though their houses are similar sizes.
Still, Quirk, who works in pharmaceuticals, is saving, too. Since 2015, his house has risen in value to about $1.1 million.
But Quirk said he thinks the next couple with children who want to buy a family home in the blue-collar suburb of Concord won’t have it as good.
“Not only are they going to be absolutely devastated by their mortgage payment, they are going to be paying four times what their neighbor pays if their neighbor has been around since 1999. It just doesn’t seem fair for the same services,” he said.
People often assume that Prop. 13 yields large benefits for all homeowners, but “that’s just not the case,” said Jacob Denney, co-author of the report and economic policy director at the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association.
“Where you live within your city matters,” he said. And race and ethnicity matter, too.
For example, Oakland homeowners in white neighborhoods pay taxes on homes that, on average, are assessed at $693,924 below their market value, the study says, resulting in $9,631 per home in property tax breaks.
Homeowners in Latino neighborhoods also pay taxes on homes that are under-assessed, but by an average of $216,430, resulting in about $3,000 in tax breaks per home — a third of the savings in white neighborhoods, according to the analysis.
While the study identifies neighborhoods as white, Black, Latino or Asian, in most cases those races or ethnicities did not make up the majority of the population but represented large proportions of those parts of the city.
More white residents in Oakland benefitted in general from Prop. 13 because more own their homes than other racial groups. White residents make up 28% of the city’s population but represent 43% of its homeowners, the report found.
“The wealthiest neighborhoods receive the most (breaks), which helps them build more wealth for communities that were already benefiting from lots of wealth.” — Jacob Denney, co-author of the report and economic policy director at the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association
Latino, Black and Asian residents are more likely to rent, a likely legacy of redlining, Denney said, referring to a banking practice which kept residents of poor and largely minority neighborhoods from obtaining bank loans to purchase or refinance their homes.
“The wealthiest neighborhoods receive the most (tax breaks), which helps them build more wealth for their communities that were already benefiting from lots of wealth,” Denney said.
Added Levin in the report, “Even when people of color do own their homes, their tax savings from Prop. 13 are smaller than those of majority white communities.”
Low property taxes from Prop. 13 also mean fewer tax dollars for Oakland. Critics say removing the proposition would be a gamechanger for the city.
The report found that if Oakland homes were taxed at their current market value, the city would gain an estimated $400 million in annual revenue. That’s more than the city’s current budgets for its transportation, fire, housing and community development, and human services departments combined.
But such solutions are complicated.
Low-income households may be getting a far smaller subsidy, but it’s a subsidy nonetheless.
Doing away with Prop. 13 altogether would have far-reaching implications, including the potential to make property taxes unaffordable for low-income families and retired seniors who rely on a fixed income and low-property taxes to keep their homes, said Susan Shelley, a spokesperson for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, an organization working to protect Prop. 13.
“You can look at the data any way you want,” she said, raising property taxes would “knock the middle class of California out of homeownership.”
Levin said he hopes for “a system that makes California look like the other 49 states … Every other state does it another way and they do fine.”
Other states have higher caps on property taxes and assessed values, and many have higher rates for commercial properties. Massachusetts, for example, allows cities to tax commercial property at nearly double the rate of residential property, while New York allows for an annual reassessment increase of 6% instead of California’s 2%.
But in California, Prop. 13 remains popular.
A 2018 poll from the Public Policy Center of California found 57% of adults thought the measure was “mostly a good thing,” while 23% believed it was “mostly a bad thing.”
In 2020 a ballot initiative that would have changed part of it by requiring that commercial properties be taxed at their market value lost 52-48%, a difference of more than 600,000 votes.
Denney said, “The conversation we have to have with the people of California is: Is the personal money saved worth it?”
###
This article is part of the California Divide, a collaboration among newsrooms examining income inequality and economic survival in California. CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.
David Fuqua was born on June 15, 1956 to Clara Jimmy and Clyde Fuqua in Amarillo. He passed away unexpectedly February 18, 2022, at the age of 65.
Dave grew up on a ranch in Woodland Park, Colorado with one sister and four brothers. He moved to Humboldt County his senior year, graduating from McKinleyville High School in 1974.
Dave started riding bulls and broncos in the local rodeos in 1974. He won the bull riding event in the First Annual Annie and Mary Rodeo in Blue Lake. He worked in several local lumber mills throughout his life.
In 1984, Dave married Robin Stolpe, and January 15, 1985, they had their daughter, Jessica Fuqua.
In 1994 he met his soulmate Linda Smith and together they helped raise their girls Jessica, Danielle, Katie and Amanda.
He loved rodeos and fishing, and could always make you laugh with a good joke or cowboy story.
Dave is survived by sister Clydette, and brothers Regan, Danny, Butch, and Andrew. Daughters Jessica, Danielle, Katie, and Amanda. His grandchildren Colton, Parker, Tannor, Erika, T.J., Josiah, Asher, and Everyn. Also several nieces, nephews, and cousins.
There will be a celebration of life held May 14, 2022, at Perigot Park, at 351 S Railroad Ave in Blue Lake, from 1-6 p.m. Please bring any photos, and/or good stories you have of David. We also ask to bring any favorite side dishes or refreshments you would like to share.
###
The obituary above was submitted by David Fuqua’s loved ones. The Lost Coast Outpost runs obituaries of Humboldt County residents at no charge. See guidelines here. Email news@lostcoastoutpost.com.
This year, like every election year, the Lost Coast Outpost has received the electronic equivalent of reams and reams of “letters to the editor” in support of this candidate or that.
Here’s the thing with them: They are boring.
More often than not, they’re cut ‘n’ paste form letters that say whatever the candidate has told them to say in a preplanned campaign to take advantage of newspapers’ desperate need for content of any sort. They suck. They suck bad! They’re spam!
At the same time, we love and respect our readers and their political opinions. So this year we’re going to do something new.
We will print your “letter to the editor” in support of your favored candidate if and only if it is written in the form of a limerick.
And when I say “limerick” I definitely mean limerick. Clumsy scansion? A half-rhyme stretched too thin? You’re outta here. Also we reserve the right to reject your limerick if it’s really gross or something.
Most importantly: No haiku.
So get crackin’, supporters! Write up a limerick or two in praise and celebration of your favorite candidate(s) for office — multiple verses are OK! — then email it/them to news@lostcoastoutpost.com. Be sure to put the words “Election Limerick” in the subject line. Include your real name and phone number.
If enough people actually care about local candidates for office, and aren’t instead too lazy to bother putting in some actual creative work on their behalf, we’ll run periodic politi-limerick roundups right here in this space. Stay tuned!
###
The Ballad of the Uncontestable Sheriff
No one dares challenge dear Sheriff Billy. At the height of his powers? Don’t be silly.
You’d be in for a snub
at the Rotary Club.
The reception you’d get would be chilly.
Admired by humans for more than 130 years, Eureka’s Queen Anne Victorian “The Pink Lady” is now a subject of inspiration for intelligent machines.
The image-generating software DALL-E 2, developed by the company OpenAI LP, was recently used to visualize Humboldt’s prized Victorian as a work of modern architecture.
“DALL-E 2 has learned the relationship between images and the text used to describe them,” the company stated on its website. “It uses a process called ‘diffusion,’ which starts with a pattern of random dots and gradually alters that pattern towards an image when it recognizes specific aspects of that image.”
DALL-E 2 co-creator Aditya Ramesh shared an animation of The Pink Lady’s AI-generated remodel on social media yesterday, drawing astonishment and revulsion from many viewers, including New York Magazine’s Pulitzer-Prize winning Senior Art Critic Jerry Saltz.
“Please no Victorian Architecture nostalgia. We all love it,” Saltz wrote on social media in response to The Pink Lady’s transformation. “This isn’t about that.”
The company has stated that the purpose of this software is “to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity, primarily by attempting to build safe AGI and share the benefits with the world.”
However, the ability to generate completely original false images that can be indistinguishable from real life photographs, poses major ethical questions for how this technology may affect the future of our society.
“We recognize that work involving generative models has the potential for significant, broad societal impacts,” the company stated. “In the future, we plan to analyze how models like DALL·E relate to societal issues like economic impact on certain work processes and professions, the potential for bias in the model outputs, and the longer term ethical challenges implied by this technology.”
The software is not yet accessible to the general public. Select professionals like artists, journalists and researchers can currently join a waitlist to one day preview the program. OpenAI reportedly hopes to one day make DALL-E 2 available for use in third-party apps.
While The Pink Lady may be vulnerable to infinite alterations in the “metaverse,” in the real world, the newly remodeled Victorian is set to re-open this summer as a new location for dining, shopping, weddings, public tours and more.
