A new state policy may require nearly 900,000 Californians to return their unemployment benefits because they may not have been working or looking for work. But some researchers worry the clawback campaign could force low-income individuals to pay back thousands of dollars they no longer have.

The state Economic Development Department began issuing notifications of the proof-of-work requirement last month to one-third of California’s 2.9 million Pandemic Unemployment Assistance recipients. The federal program, which ran from March 2020 and ended in September, was aimed at helping people who don’t usually qualify for unemployment benefits because they are freelancers or small-business owners.

The state is asking them to prove, retroactively, that they were working, or planning to work, prior to filing their unemployment claim. If they can’t provide documentation, they would be ineligible and asked to give the benefits back.

A full repayment could be over $32,000 if a recipient received full benefits throughout the program. In addition, if a claimant offered false information, the state could impose a 30% penalty. Some experts are now suggesting giving recipients a pass even if they can’t prove their eligibility.

​​Have you received a notification from EDD requiring proof of work history? We invite you to share your story here.

“We should be saying, ‘Look, if you got unemployment insurance benefits during that time, you’re fine,’” said Chris Hoene, executive director of the left-leaning California Budget & Policy Center based in Sacramento.

“If the concern is fraudulent claims,” he added, “then do the work to fix the administration of the system” instead of requiring recipients to prove they qualified for the benefits.

It’s not clear where lawmakers stand. Democratic Assemblymember Tom Daly of Anaheim, chair of the Assembly Insurance Committee, which has oversight of the EDD, did not return a request for comment. Assemblymember Chad Mayers of Yucca Valley, an independent serving as vice-chair of the committee, also didn’t respond.

The chair and vice-chair of the Senate Labor, Public Employment, and Retirement Committee — Democrat Dave Cortese of San Jose and Republican Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh of ​​Yucaipa — did not respond to requests for comment.

The EDD noted that the repayment policy is a federal requirement, passed by Congress in the Continued Assistance for Unemployment Workers Act in 2020. EDD acknowledges it can waive repayment if the overpayment was not the recipient’s fault, not fraudulent and if repayment would cause extraordinary hardship.

The new policy is an attempt to claw back an estimated $20 billion lost to fraudulent claims in California. But McGregor Scott, a former U.S. attorney who has been leading a state investigation into unemployment fraud, doesn’t believe EDD’s repayment policy will recover much.

The state’s immense loss came after EDD, inundated with unemployment claims early in the pandemic, began expediting the process by waiving a proof-of-work requirement. Investigators have said the rollback allowed organized crime and prison inmates to siphon money from the state through fraudulent claims.

Recipients who receive EDD notices must use pay stubs, tax returns, business licenses, or job offer letters to prove they were employed or planned to be employed in the lead up to filing their claim.

Those who filed on or after Jan. 31, have only 21 days to send documentation. Those who filed before that date, and received a payment after Dec. 27, 2020, have 90 days to comply.

“We probably need to implement this with compassion,” said Jesse Rothstein, a professor of public policy and economics at UC Berkeley. “We won’t be able to collect in every case.”

“If the concern is fraudulent claims, then do the work to fix the administration of the system.”
— Chris Hoene, executive director of the California Budget & Policy Center

Even before the pandemic, nearly one in three Californian households struggled to pay for basic necessities, according to the United Ways of California. During the pandemic, a report from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity found that 4.8 million Californians were seeking, but unable to find, full-time work that paid a living wage.

A recent report by Tipping Point Community, a nonprofit focused on alleviating poverty in the Bay Area, estimated that 200,000 of the region’s residents were kept out of poverty because of expanded support from government and charitable organizations.

“Without further bold action, we risk a ‘return to normal’ in terms of durable poverty and inequality,” said Tipping Point’s chief executive, Sam Cobbs.“We cannot afford to take that step backwards.”

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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.

It’s countdown to Christmas, Humboldt! Are your presents all wrapped? Are your stockings all hung? Is the stress getting to you? Ack! Your President of Positivity recommends a glass of wine to help take the holiday edge off and this week she’s sipping her way to jolliness with some friends down at Old Growth Cellars, that wine spot you’ve heard about just off Broadway in Eureka. 

Click the clip above to join in the boozy fun and have yourself a merry Humboldt Christmas. Ciao Bella!

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Perhaps You’d Like to Explore Previous Mondays With Michaele For Some Reason!

“Last time I saw you, you led a hike here four years ago,” I said to the deep-tanned gringo who was guiding a walk to a remote beach on Mexico’s Pacific shore.

“Yeah, I remember you! Time sure flies, doesn’t it?”

I paused, not wanting to argue, but…

“No, it seems an eon ago to me,” I finally said.

That’s the thing about time. One man’s moment is another’s age. What does it mean to say, “That seems like a lifetime ago,” when to the other, it feels like yesterday? We know what objective time is, that which we read from a clock, or on the calendar. I was born 28,955 days ago, Siri tells me, so it must be true. Another couple of years I’ll be thirty thousand days old. Jeezus. Feels like a lifetime.

Objective time is what you read from a clock. This is the world’s oldest working clock, Prague’s Orloj, originally installed in 1410. Photo: Barry Evans.

So, subjective time, which is all over the place. Everyone has had, if not their whole life passing before their eyes in a moment of stress or fear, at least the sense that time passed really, really slowly. Jumping out of a plane, my first parachute jump. Rolling a car after too many beers. Stuck on a crumbling rock face, scared to go up or down. You must have had something like that happen when time—at least in retrospect—went really slowly. Or maybe just some mundane event, like having a tooth filled? C’mon, get it over, feels I’ve been in this dentist’s chair for hours! (Whatever happened to nitrous?!)

Scientists, wouldn’t you know, have been studying this for years. “Time dilation” is a well known effect. “Fear prompts a state of arousal in the amygdala which increases the rate of a hypothesized internal clock,” says Wikipedia. Makes sense. When you’re in a threatening situation, you want to have “time” to consider your options, not just react blindly. Put yourself in the shoes of your distant ancestor. Instead of running from the sabertooth (which, let’s face it, you aren’t going to out-run in a million years), you might be better off facing the threat down. Or climbing a tree. Or throwing a rock. Or asking Scotty to beam you up. Probably anything’s better than the instinct to turn and run.

Which (finally) gets to my particular interest, age-related perception of time: the sense that time goes by faster now when we were young. Why? Because (according to neurologists) dopamine levels drop with age. And the less dopamine in your brain, the more likely you are to underestimate a given interval of time—what used to feel like a year now feels like six months. That’s biochemistry, and there’s not much we can do about that: “That which we are, we are.”

What we can do is to keep the novelty alive by filling our lives with new experiences, spinning out our days with events to make time seem to pass more slowly and deliberately. Problem is, the older we get, the harder it is to find novelty when the cynical “been there, done that” syndrome has taken over from kids’ “every experience is new.” At some point in our lives, we already know what a mojito tastes like, the velvet smoothness of our lover’s skin, what it’s like to walk on snow, how we’ll feel on seeing the glow of the Milky Way in the southern sky. “Neural adaption” they call it: we barely notice stuff that once would have thrilled us. We’ve adapted to wonder.

Me, I won’t give up wonder without a fight. (Screw those dopamine levels.) Hang out with young folks (vicariously experiencing their novelty), travel to new shores, get lost, brave the breakers, write every day, rise early, keep questioning, emulate Ulysses and his crew: “…hearts made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/ To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Have you ever seen the “Grand Canyon of the Eel River”?

Few have, but that might change soon thanks to a major new conservation deal engineered by the Wildlands Conservancy. The former “Lone Pine Ranch,” owned by San Francisco financial mogul Dean Witter, is now the Eel River Canyon Reserve, one of three reserves managed by the Wildlands Conservancy along the Eel River.

Listen to this week’s show to learn about when you can go camp along the Eel River and how the new lands will be incorporated into the Great Redwood Trail (and the risk that a coal train poses to this special spot).

AUDIO:

“The EcoNews Report,” Dec. 19, 2021.

REQUIRED READING:

• SOLD! Conservation Groups Close Escrow on Mogul’s Massive Ranch in the Eel River Canyon

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Cannabis has long been the economic backbone of Humboldt County. While efforts to quantify exactly how large a contribution cannabis makes to the local economy are challenging, a recent estimate from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office states that approximately 4,000 illegal pot farms still operate in the county. Including licensed grows, the total is around 5,000 farms. Assuming just 500 pounds of production each and a price of $500 per pound, these farms would generate approximately $1.25 billion a year. In addition, Humboldt has a large number of commercial-sized indoor grows not included in these numbers. Regardless of the exact figures, cannabis plays a huge role in the local economy and has since the demise of the timber and fishing industries.

For those who don’t know, the price of outdoor or sun-grown cannabis collapsed this year, down over 50 percent from a year ago. Humboldt County, like the state of California, produces a lot of outdoor weed, and because 70 percent of localities throughout the state have banned commercial cannabis activity, there are relatively few dispensaries to sell products. With excess supply and limited opportunities for distribution, prices are falling fast. Add to that the fact that Oregon and Oklahoma are now moving enormous amounts of cannabis on the black market, Humboldt pot farmers in both legal and underground markets are getting squeezed.

To the dismay of many in our local industry, we are finding there simply isn’t much demand in the marketplace for the outdoor cannabis we produce. Indoor and mixed-light flower, which tend to have a tighter bud structure and tend to be more visually appealing, are predominantly filling dispensary shelves and commanding better prices. Admittedly, stating this is near-heretical here in the county, given our historic reputation of producing “premium” organic sun-grown product. Regardless of our beliefs or our historic dominance in the market, transaction data shows the same – that Humboldt ganja is no longer what it once was.

Cannabis Benchmarks aggregates reported sales data from states with medical and adult-use markets and produces pricing and transaction data on a weekly basis. The most recent report, dated Dec. 10, shows that outdoor flower accounts for just 8 percent of legal transactions, versus 65 percent for indoor-grown product. In terms of volume of overall product sold, outdoor accounts for 13 percent and indoor, 53 percent. Mixed-light or greenhouse flower makes up the balance. In other words, the numbers (not our opinions) show that outdoor-grown cannabis is seeming to lose its luster, with prices and market action reflecting this new reality. While many believe that sun-grown cannabis is better for the environment and for your body as it houses a greater percentage of medicinal compounds like terpenes, the market simply isn’t on board at the current juncture, and resultingly, our local economy is at risk.

I know many growers throughout Humboldt and neighboring counties who can’t move their product in either the legal or underground market right now. Desperation is growing among the farming community, and sadly it’s been noted that suicides are on the rise among growers. Some of us have already lost friends and it’s terribly sad to see.

Given the significant price collapse we saw in wholesale or bulk prices for outdoor flower this year, the Humboldt economy is facing significant risk. According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, countywide GDP or economic output slacked off in 2020 (presumably due to COVID). One might expect this year to show another decline in formal economic activity given the dynamics we are discussing. While much of the revenue derived from cannabis production goes unreported, as a majority of farms still operate in the unregulated market, consumption of goods and services will undoubtedly take a hit as growers struggle to move product or sell at very low prices and have less to spend.

As cannabis prices fall and sales stagnate, economic activity in the county will be negatively impacted. Inefficient farms and those with moderate product quality are already going out of business, trimmers are being offered far less or being stiffed on their pay altogether, laborers are losing work, and cannabis brokers are getting squeezed and fading away. Retailers and others providing services to these groups will likely be hit hard in the coming months. Unfortunately, we’re probably in the early innings of what promises to be a tremendously uncomfortable and disruptive adjustment to the local economy.

Remember that economic activity is primarily a function of two things – how much people have to spend and, importantly, how they feel about their future economic prospects. With greater economic uncertainty, folks generally spend less. Without another pony show, our county may be in very deep trouble. Luxury goods and service providers will likely be the first to feel the pain, with other industries groups following as overall economic activity declines and people tighten their belts, spending less on things like clothing, autos and recreation.

You may recall that pot prices collapsed similarly in 2017. During that time, some local businesses like retailers reported 25-30 percent declines in sales and there was real fear in some circles that Humboldt faced an economic collapse. It never materialized as corporate interests, out-of-towners and successful local growers built out cannabis infrastructure and sunk large sums into engineering, compliance, construction and legal services as part of the regulatory permitting process. Humboldt and other areas began to aggressively abate illegal operations and, statewide, demand for legal cannabis increased rapidly with the onset of adult-use or recreational sales in 2018. New dispensaries opened and many manufacturers came online who needed cannabis to create value-added products like extracts, edibles, tinctures and topicals such as lotions and salves. Pot prices, after cratering just a year or so prior, then increased significantly in 2019 and 2020. Upward price momentum, coupled with the infrastructure buildout and permit-related spending just mentioned, spurred Humboldt’s economic growth once again and helped us avoid economic disaster.

I’m not sure we get such a quick rebound this time around. While things like cannabis tourism and the potential for national and international cannabis markets bode well for the county’s economic future, neither will happen overnight. Instead, industry insiders believe it could be years. Mark Lovelace, our former supervisor who now works as a cannabis consultant to municipalities and counties recently noted on The Humboldt Chronicles that it could be five years or so for a fully functioning national marketplace to take hold. Others think even longer. By then, many Humboldt County farmers will be out of business. In fact, within the cannabis industry, folks are now estimating that 50 percent or more of small operators will fail in California this year and the current environment has been labeled an extinction event.

The ramifications of widespread farm failure will be serious for Humboldt. Right now, we boast of moderate unemployment rates and record home values. With the collapse of the cannabis industry, we may all feel some economic pain given the interconnectedness. Mountain properties are currently experiencing huge declines in value and residential home values could eventually follow suit, as they too collapsed during the last recession in 2007-2008. A local recession (or depression) will hamper consumption and spending and force many to reevaluate their lifestyle. Depending on the duration of the downturn and developments regarding national and international cannabis marketplaces, the county may have to redefine its economic paradigm once again. Only time will tell.

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Jesse Duncan is a lifelong Humboldt County resident, a father of six, a retired financial advisor, and a full-time commercial cannabis grower. He is also the creator of NorCal Financial and Cannabis Consulting, a no-cost platform that helps small farmers improve their cultivation, business, and financial skills. Please check out his blog at, his Instagram at jesse_duncann, and connect with him on Linkedin.

On Thursday, November 11, 2021, Janice Madge Rogers peacefully left her home in Eureka to spend the rest of eternity partying on “the other side.”

Her children — Rochelle “Shell” Lockridge, Tangie Markle (Tony Markle, aka “Girlfriend”) and Scott Rogers (Tammy Rogers) – were just one week away from celebrating the day of her birth, November 19, 1944, with a mischievous mother proclaiming she was turning 39 this year (again?) Sadly, her grandchildren – Amber Lockridge (Misha Perron), Jenny Schrer (Kyle Schrer), Tyler Markle and Angie Rogers – will not have that same opportunity to enlighten bewildered family and friends how they were miraculously older than their grandmother. Great-Grandma Janice would’ve been proud of her three great-grandchildren — DJ, Everett and Axel — when they too were face-to-face with the same annual dilemma and responded with one of her life mottos, read by so many sitting around her kitchen table, “Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.”

Family was important to Mom. She was born to parents Georgia Fern and Arnold in Newberg, Oregon, as the little sister to Jim, Artie, Richard (“Dick”) and Cecil. She is survived by “Brother Jim” and Dick Shaw, and many nieces and nephews. She was known as “Aunt Jan” or “Mom” to all the kids that grew up at our house. She always had her three kids and three to five more with her. She would want to give a special thank you to Terry and Tom Davis and Jim and Lynette Worthington for always looking out for their Aunt Jan.

With her PACE family, Jan was a self-identified rabblerouser who made it a point to provide those in charge with ideas on “how to improve things around here.” They saw her as a leader and a genuine Golden Girl who was loved and cared for by all. After a “jailbreak” from the local rehab center, we want to thank PACE for providing the services she needed to maintain her independence, dignity and quality of life at home.

Family also included feathered and furry critters. Her pet goose, Hannibal, watched over her while she tended to her gladiola bed, clear back when she was 29 for a decade. His presence comforted her, knowing a goose would eat any terrifying snakes that dared invade her flower beds. And Mom never really got over the loss of her favorite dog, Doobie, who rode shotgun during their many trips to town, once caught “sharing” her Steve’s Coney Island chili dog with stolen bites each time the steering wheel turned his direction.

The story goes (and boy, did Mom have her stories), she once grabbed a hamburger out of the hand of one of her “extra” kids, ran into the bathroom, locked the door and ate it. Mom loved food. Pizza for breakfast? Why not? Her favorite diet? The Seafood Diet. “I see food and I eat it.” At only 5’2” she insisted she wasn’t fat, she was just too short for her weight. She was, like her hero Mae West, full-figured. Mom swore she had no idea what happened to that candid photo of her looking like a lemon in her yellow bathing suit. But we all know — she burned it.

Mom traveled a rough road of health issues throughout her life, and was fond of telling us not to worry; “It’ll all work out.” A few near-death experiences let her know she would not be joining the other side until she had “saved a multitude.” With her passing, though the official cause of death is listed as “cerebrovascular disease,” we know that her generous contributions to family, friends and community have fulfilled her purpose. It was her time to go. When we too have fulfilled our unique purpose here on Earth, Mom will be there to welcome us all, take our hand, and invite us to join the party.

While we wait, and due to COVID concerns, family, friends and acquaintances are invited to hold the date June 21, 2022, for Jan’s final going-away party, when we’ll share stories and give a party she’d be proud of at her favorite swimming hole, Swimmer’s Delight on the Van Duzen River, during the summer solstice.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Hospice of Humboldt and PACE.

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Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

On Dec. 17, 2021, at about 5:57 a.m., Humboldt County Sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to a gas station on the 200 block of Blue Lake Boulevard in Blue Lake for the report of an armed robbery that had just occurred.

According to an employee, a male suspect entered the business and brandished a firearm, demanding money from the register. The suspect fled the business with an undisclosed amount of cash. The employee was not physically injured during this incident.

The suspect is described as a white male adult, over six feet tall, wearing a gray sweatshirt, blue jeans, a black and tan hat and a mask.

This case is still under investigation.

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