Humboldt County Planning Commission Chair Alan Bongio speaking at Thursday’s meeting. | Screenshot.

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Hoping to avoid getting overruled by the California Coastal Commission and further damaging relations with local tribes, the Humboldt County Planning Commission postponed a permitting decision last night on a controversial home construction project near the Fay Slough wildlife area north of Eureka.

The hearing was a continuation from the commission’s August 18 meeting, during which Chair Alan Bongio employed incendiary language, repeatedly referring to “the Indians” while accusing both the Wiyot Tribe and the Blue Lake Rancheria of dishonestly manipulating negotiations over the project. [DISCLOSURE: The Blue Lake Rancheria is a minority owner of the Outpost’s parent company, Lost Coast Communications, Inc.]

Local developer and business owner Travis Schneider is pursuing modifications to a coastal development permit and special permit in order to resume construction of his 8,000-square-foot home on Walker Point Road. The project has been halted for the past eight months as the result of a stop work order issued by the Humboldt County Planning and Building Department.

Schneider was found to have violated the terms of his previous permits by building an access road through environmentally sensitive habitat and disturbing a known Wiyot archaeological site when he used an excavator to clear native blackberries and other foliage. Schneider also built the home’s foundation about 10 feet away from the footprint specified in his site plans, and he initially failed to comply with the county’s stop work order.

Several members of the public spoke out against Bongio’s behavior at the last meeting. The commission chair offered a qualified apology, saying he was sorry “if [he] in any way offended” the tribes. Two of his commission colleagues expressed their own regrets, with Third District representative Noah Levy denouncing Bongio’s “appallingly disrespectful comments” and Fifth District representative Peggy O’Neill describing the previous meeting a “a very dark day in our history.”

During the first public comment period, a woman who introduced herself only as Vanessa spoke out against “the bigotry and the racism that occurred at the last Planning Commission meeting.” She called on Bongio to recuse himself from any decision on the Schneider project.

Local resident Ellen Taylor, chair-person for the Lost Coast League, said the tenor of the previous meeting “took us back to the 19th century” when the region’s colonizers “wanted to sweep the indigenous population off the landscape.” She argued that Schneider’s permit violations should disqualify his project from further permitting and said it would be “a disgrace for the county to approve this exemption after the planning commissioner’s behavior last week.”

Satellite image showing Schneider’s home-building project as it looked in June. | Screenshot.

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In a staff report, Senior Planner Cliff Johnson recounted the history of the project and said planning department staff reached out to the Wiyot Tribe and the Blue Lake Rancheria after the August 18 meeting in hopes of arranging a meeting but were unsuccessful.

In letters submitted to the commission a day before the last meeting, the Wiyot Tribe and Blue Lake Rancheria both asked for additional environmental review and more time to review the proposed restoration and mitigation measures, with the latter asking the county to revoke Schneider’s building permit.

They also said it was unclear how the recommended conditions would be implemented, monitored or enforced. The Coastal Commission backed the tribes, saying the proposed project didn’t adequately address violations of the Local Coastal Plan nor adequately protect onsite coastal resources.

Johnson also reported that the county’s environmental health division submitted comments after 5 p.m. Wednesday, pointing out that the project doesn’t have an approved septic permit and requesting some additional conditions of approval. The health division’s emailed comments, published yesterday by the North Coast Journal, express concern that Schneider’s temporary road may have impacted the onsite wastewater treatment system’s dispersal field areas.

Regardless, planning staff again recommended approval of the permit modifications, noting that the recommended conditions of approval had been developed in consultation with the tribes and the Coastal Commission, agreed to “in principle” during an August 2 meeting, and that the parties have not offered suggested alternative conditions. However, staff also prepared an alternative resolution to deny the project. 

Planning Commissioner Melanie McCavour recused herself, as she did at the previous meeting, so that she could participate as the tribal historic preservation officer of the Bear River Band of the Rohnerville Rancheria, another Wiyot-area tribe that has been involved in negotiations on the project.

On behalf of the Bear River tribe, McCavour offered suggestions for how to avoid such messy situations in the future. She proposed, for example, that a separate page be attached to conditions of approval for any project on which there are known tribal cultural resources, and that applicants be required to sign the page.

Unlike the other two Wiyot-area tribes, which have requested archeological excavation to more fully assess damage to the tribal cultural resource onsite, the Bear River Band wants the area to be capped or fenced because it considers excavation disrespectful. McCavour reiterated that position on Thursday.

Applicant Travis Schneider addresses the Planning Commission. | Screenshot.

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During another public comment period — this one dedicated specifically to Schneider’s project — the applicant himself addressed the commission.

“Several planning commissioners have indicated to me that they have personally and proactively reached out to the stakeholders and had not received any negative comment, which has also been my experience,” Schneider said, adding, “I’m glad we found common ground.”

Apparently taking the tribes’ recent lack of communication as consent, Schneider said, “I’m proud of the fact that when I put my my kids to bed this evening we will have shown them how, by working together patiently, we can navigate an adverse situation and come to a thoughtful resolution.”

Apologies

After the previous meeting, Wiyot Tribal Administrator Michelle Vassel told the Outpost that she had attended via Zoom and tried to raise her hand to participate after commissioners complained that nobody from the tribe had shown up to answer questions.

“I never saw any of those hands come up,” Bongio said last night. “I truly apologize if anybody on either side of the item [was] not allowed to get up and speak.”

Levy said that in the past week he sent letters to both the Wiyot Tribe and the Blue Lake Rancheria apologizing for making an issue of their non-attendance “and, secondly, for the disrespectful way that I feel Chair Bongio spoke about and treated them throughout that meeting.”

He said he was upset not only by Bongio’s language and treatment of the tribes but also by “the overall biased handling of the matter that I felt infected that item from the start. It betrayed, I felt, our role that we need to strive for to be a neutral and fair and unbiased body when these items and these stakeholders come before us.”

Levy said he didn’t feel Bongio’s mea culpa went far enough to repair the damage done to tribe-county relations and suggested drafting “a simple and formal apology on behalf of the whole commission to submit to those tribes, and I would offer to work with the chair and with the [planning] director to help draft such a letter.”

Bongio said he’d be willing to be part of that.

O’Neill said she worked for the Wiyot Tribe about 30 years ago. “Of all the tribes in Northern California … there’s no tribe that has been treated worse than the Wiyot people,” she said, recounting their wholesale displacement and the Wiyot Massacre of 1860. Given this history, O’Neill said she was particularly offended by Bongio’s suggestion that future applicants may have to go before “the Indians” for approval on all projects.

“I don’t think that we can make the comment that ‘the Indians’ are going to tell us what to do,” she said. “And it was very offensive because they are tribes and they’re all separate tribes. They have separate languages, cultures [and] history. … So I wanted to say that and, you know, give my apologies as a part of this commission, too, [for] what I felt was a very dark day in our history.”

From there the commission worked to find a path forward. Levy said he really wanted to find a way to approve the permit, but Planning and Building Director John Ford warned that the California Coastal Commission remains unsatisfied with the county’s proposed conditions of approval. 

The commissioners tossed out a few ideas for possible ways to appease the Coastal Commission. Commissioner Brian Mitchell, for example, wondered aloud about requiring Schneider to demolish the portion of his home that was constructed within the 100-foot wetland setback area. 

Bongio got into a back-and-forth exchange with Ford over the appropriateness of Schneider’s 8,000-square-foot home, with Ford eventually cutting him off and saying he was merely trying to articulate potential objections from the Coastal Commission.

“They’re concerned with the size and the mass of the house in a very scenic location and whether or not that fits within the setting of the property,” Ford said.

Bongio defended the merits of the project and again voiced frustration with the length and complexity of the permit review process.

“I mean, everything to this point that has been asked for, the applicant has readily offered to give and do … ,” he said. “So with all the mitigations that have been proposed and everything, I think that we should move forward on this.”

He suggested that the details should be left for the Coastal Commission, tribes and applicant to work out among themselves.

“I think that we’re more of the 30,000-foot view on this and not in the trenches, you know, mucking out the details,” Bongio said. Later he added, “I think it’s our job to move this along.”

Mitchell disagreed.

“The Coastal Commission sent a letter, and it was very clear to me that they are reminding us that they have every authority to deny this permit,” he said. “And if we keep heading down the path that we’re on, that’s where we’re going to end up. And so my goal is to try to avoid that dead end.”

Levy said he takes issue with the fact that Schneider was able to take advantage of the county’s Alternative Owner Builder (AOB) program, a less restrictive permitting system originally intended to give flexibility to back-to-the-land residents looking to build low-cost, low-amenity dwellings in the hills.

“That was a legal pathway for the developer to take, but I think what has happened has shown that had there been more oversight, more inspections, we probably wouldn’t have gotten to the point where we’re at with this,” Levy said. “I don’t really think this is an appropriate type of project to be using the AOB permit.”

Eventually it became clear that the choice at hand was whether to approve the project and risk it being appealed to the Coastal Commission or delay a decision once again in hopes of ironing out a more thorough resolution. The commission appeared to be headed toward another contentious vote until Schneider was asked his opinion. 

“I would be reluctant to rush something in spite of our desire to get this structure weatherproofed as we watch natural materials diminish rapidly and we see a great deal of waste,” Schneider said. “I do recognize there are probably some matters that are unresolved.”

He wound up asking the Planning Commission to direct staff to reach back out to the Coastal Commission so they could identify the agency’s specific outstanding concerns about the project’s conformance with the Local Coastal Plan. He said he wants one definitive list of mitigation measures “that would ensure that we can approve this at the local level and satisfy all parties that are involved.”

Commissioner Mike Newman said he appreciates Schneider’s request “because I think in the long run it will speed things along and not jeopardize the project that is at hand here.”

“I always defer to the applicant — or try to,” Bongio said. He argued for establishing a limited timeframe, possibly bringing the item back for a decision at the next meeting. 

Newman said he was hesitant about that suggestion, and Schneider came back up to say he agreed that there should not be a time limit placed on talks with the Coastal Commission.

Mitchell made a motion to table the matter to an unknown future date and direct staff to bring back “regular reports” while continuing talks with the Coastal Commission and other trust agencies, referring to the tribes, presumably. Newman seconded the motion, and it passed unanimously.