The ever-controversial Mercer-Fraser gravel operation on the banks of the Mad.

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This morning the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors looked all set to rezone vast swaths of land all around the county. It was supposed to be the board’s first big bite at translating the land use designations in the new Humboldt County General Plan — passed in 2017 after over a decade of toil and strife — into actual, on-the-ground zoning code.

Instead, the whole meeting was derailed by yet another fight over a single property — the Mercer-Fraser gravel-mining operation on the banks of the Mad River in Glendale, just downstream from Blue Lake.

It was a fruitless exercise. After an hour and a half of cantankerous testimony and sometimes bitter debate, the board punted off any decision on the future zoning status of the property to a later date. The unexpected interruption also postponed the broader zoning decisions that the board had expected to hear today.

Coming into the meeting, county planning staff had expected the board to consider a whole package of amendments to the county’s zoning code, along with alterations to the county’s zoning map. The centerpiece of the report was the classification of some 530,000 acres of Humboldt County land that were previously set down in the books as “unclassified.” For the first time, these lands would be regulated in a sensible (or at least systematic) fashion — “unclassified” lands that were suited to agriculture, “unclassified” timber lands would be lands would be zoned for timber, and so on. In addition to dealing with the unclassified lands, though, planning staff had prepared a large package that would introduce new zoning types for mixed-use developments, tribal land, the railroad corridor and much else.

But as the board sat down to consider the item at 10 a.m., it took a left turn and decided to consider individually two individual properties out from the mass of the rest. One was the Bigfoot Golf Course in Willow Creek, and the other was the Mercer-Fraser property, which was controversial earlier this year, when the company was proposing to build a hash oil extraction lab there. (A different potential Mercer-Fraser hash lab outside of Willow Creek was dropped at last week’s board meeting.)

The Bigfoot Golf Course came first, and was more easily dispensed with. It’s long been rumored as the site of a future marijuana business, and several supervisors spoke in favor of leaving the zoning regulation for the property as-is to prevent such an outcome. Supervisor Rex Bohn said that a neighbor of his had called him with concerns about future marijuana cultivation on the site.

“I just want to make sure no one’s going to grow dope on it,” Bohn said. “Or cannabis, or whatever we’re going to call it.”

Several speakers from the public backed him up, and still others said that they were concerned about the possibility of landowners evicting a low-income trailer park at one corner of the property, and developing it for more upscale residents instead.

In response, Planning Director John Ford described the current zoning restrictions on the property, without the changes recommended by the planning commission. The board quickly inclined in that direction.

“They can’t grow marijuana on it,” Bohn put to Ford.

“Correct.”

“Takes care of my neighbor.”

(Later, Supervisor-elect Steve Madrone — in the first of several tense interactions with the incumbent board — told Bohn that the intent of the golf course’s owner was to turn the golf course into a Frisbee golf course, and use that as the centerpiece of a cannabis ecotourism project. “Just to be clear, Rex, it’s not about growing there,” Madrone said.)

It was a relatively quick and painless vote, but even it was not without controversy. The vote was 3-1-1. Supervisor Virginia Bass abstained, as her family owns property bordering the property, and Supervisor Mike Wilson objected to the board going down the road of looking at properties in a piecemeal fashion. “I’m just hoping we don’t do this for every parcel everyone has an issue with in the county,” Wilson said. “My no vote is only because of that.”

But the meeting lost the plot completely when it moved on to the next property that was pulled aside to be considered separately — the Mercer-Fraser property in Glendale. The company no longer proposes to build a hash lab at the site, but it would still like to see the land in question rezoned from agriculture to heavy industry, and apparently to resume processing the rock and gravel it quarries from the banks of the Mad right there on site.

But zoning that property for heavy industry is just as controversial as building a hash lab there, and several people were at the meeting to object to it in the strongest possible terms. Most notable among them were several representatives of the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District, including the district’s attorney, and they all came bearing the same message: Putting heavy industry on the banks of the Mad imperils the water supply of nearly 90,000 people.

Sheri Woo, the president of the water district’s board, said that her district had recently completed studies of what might happen were the district’s wells — located on the same stretch of river as the Mercer-Fraser property — contaminated with industrial pollutants. 

“The punch line is that our drinking water capacity could decrease by 75 percent until the contamination is cleaned up, which could take years,” Woo said. She said that the district’s seven municipal customers — including the cities of Eureka and Arcata and the Humboldt and McKinleyville community districts — supported the water district in opposing the rezoning, as did the National Marine Fisheries Service and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

During the next hour or so, several supervisors mounted something a defense of the proposed zone change, which would bless any future attempts Mercer-Fraser to resume asphalt and concrete batch plant operations on the banks of the Mad. Such activities, said Bohn and Supervisor Estelle Fennell, were part of Mercer-Fraser’s historical use of the site, and the intention of the zoning change was to make the code compliant with such use. 

Wilson, meanwhile, pushed for language that would subject the resumption of such operations to require a special permit from the county. He held that if an applicant were coming to the board anew with such a project, there is no way that the board would take the application seriously, and that it shouldn’t be the function of the zoning code to legalize formerly noncompliant activities.

But the board bogged down for quite a while, seeming to talk past one another as regards what constituted “existing” uses of the site, which the proposed zoning change wished to sanction. Supporters of the change seemed to consider asphalt operations and the like, as opposed to simple gravel mining, an “existing” use, even though the company hasn’t done such manufacturing there for some time. Opponents did not.

At the same time, several people, including Supervisor Virginia Bass, were beginning to wonder out loud why this particular project was being pulled out of the general discussion that the board was supposed to be having, and there was some fear — brought up by the water board’s lawyer, among others — that what the doing was improper and possibly illegal: It was having a large discussion about a particular property, and seemed about to take action on that property, without having given public notice about that subject.

“I move we stop talking about this,” Wilson said at 1 p.m. On this point, there was consensus. Supervisor Ryan Sundberg, who is currently serving as chair of the board, recessed the board for a 15-minute break that stretched out to half an hour.

When the board reconvened at 1:30, it had apparently decided in the interim that it was not going to be able to reach a decision on how to proceed with the Mercer-Fraser property, and it wouldn’t be able to finish up with the larger issues that the staff had brought to it, either. Some of the people in the audience had been waiting since 10 a.m. to address the board on these larger issues, and the board spent the rest of its session taking their testimony. At the end of the meeting they punted everything to the Jan. 15 board meeting. (By which point, incidentally, Sundberg will have left office and Madrone will have assumed his seat.)

During the meeting, Ford said that the board has two years to bring its zoning code up to date with the new general plan. That plan was officially approved by the board on Oct. 23, 2017.

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PREVIOUS MERCER-FRASER GLENDALE FLARE-UP: