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Eureka City Manager Miles Slattery recently gave the Outpost’s John Kennedy O’Connor a status update on various city projects — among them, downtown and waterfront development, the teardown of the Lloyd Building and, of course, the city’s efforts to park a floating dorm in Humboldt Bay.

Video above, transcript below.

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JOHN KENNEDY O’CONNOR:

Well, welcome to another Humboldt Conversation. I’m here today with Miles Slattery, who is of course the city manager for the city of Eureka. Miles, welcome to Humboldt Today.

MILES SLATTERY:

Thank you for having me.

O’CONNOR:

Well, it’s a real pleasure. Now, tell us the history of this painting.

SLATTERY:

You’re going to heckle me, huh?

O’CONNOR:

Yeah, absolutely.

SLATTERY:

Yeah, I don’t have any clue. I told you if Pam was here, we’d let you know.

O’CONNOR:

I love the fact that there’s a guardrail.

SLATTERY:

I know that it has some historical significance, and I’m told that it’s very valuable.

O’CONNOR:

The area was built on the back of the redwood industry, but actually downtown right now, the Lloyd Building is coming down. It’s coming down very, very slowly. Why is the demolition taking quite so long?

SLATTERY:

So the initial part of it was just to deal with asbestos and some issues that needed to be abated prior to taking it down. So we had to hire, we had Mercer Fraser as a general contractor, they had to hire an asbestos, certified asbestos contractor to come in and remove the asbestos. And then now just because of concerns about safety and stuff like that, you know, the demolition ball probably didn’t, wasn’t the best mode.

O’CONNOR:

No wrecking ball.

SLATTERY:

No wrecking ball. Well, see they’re taking the bricks out. Well, I don’t know if the costs keep going up, we may just do the wrecking ball. 

O’CONNOR:

Okay. And has the city taken possession of the land?

SLATTERY:

No, no, no, no, no. It’s still owned by the private property owner. We need to abate the safety issue.

O’CONNOR:

So what’s going to happen there? What’s the plan for that area? I mean, there are a number of empty lots now in the city, either the buildings that came down through fire or whatever. Is this just going to be another empty lot?

SLATTERY:

So it, you know, as of right now, you know, we don’t own it. And so depending on what happens with that, there’s going to be obviously a big abatement lien on it because of this. And so what happens after that is, you know, I can’t really say — it’s private property right now. There’s not going to be any more need to abate the property, obviously, because it’s going to be gone. But as far as what happens to it will be up to the property owner for now.

O’CONNOR:

Now the waterfront is another area that’s been undeveloped for such a long time. There’s just those sort of gravel pits that stand there. But there has been some movement recently. And there are some plans, I believe, to really bring that area back to life.

SLATTERY:

Yeah, so that’s a part of we added those properties to our housing element. We included that as well as the property adjacent to the Lloyd Building, 5th and D parking lot. They’re incorporated into our housing element and they are slated for development for housing. At that particular location it’s in a zoning designation where you have to have a mixed use. So the first floor of that development will have to have some visitor serving aspect whether it’s retail, a convention center, whatever it may be. And then housing on the upper stories, it could even be a hotel with housing combined with it. That’ll be up to the people that respond to the RFP. And so those two properties are gonna be going to council on Tuesday for requests for proposals for developers to come and develop them. We’ve included in that RFP some of the designs that were came up by the community in 2017, I believe it was. We did a bunch of design charrettes. And so we’ve incorporated those designs into the RFP as a kind of suggested type of development that we’d like to see there.

O’CONNOR:

So it’s moving forward, but any sort of timeline when you think we might, you might see some development on that side.

SLATTERY:

So, you know, it’s been through many iterations. There’s been two different RFPs that went out previously. They both, unfortunately, ended up in lawsuits. And so because of the urgency of the state and some of the regulations that have passed recently and some of the stuff that we’ve adopted, we think that housing being there will make it a much more likely candidate for development, especially with the mixed use that’s available there. So we’re hoping that this will do that. There will be some interim. There’s been a lot of concern from the business community about the condition of that lot. Because of the heavy rains that we’ve had, we haven’t been able to address that. But come the dry moments, which hopefully happen soon, we’re hoping by May that that’ll be all regraded and we’re going to do more substantial regrading of it so that those potholes and stuff like that aren’t there. We also have some kind of interim potential uses, but that’ll be determined on who responds to the RFP and who gets awarded the RFP as to how much time we’ll have to do something different there.

O’CONNOR:

Now one big change to the city that might be coming, might not, it’s been a big story recently, is the possibility of a floating student accommodation with a very large ship being berthed to accommodate the capital of the city.

SLATTERY:

Would you not want to be my roomie? I mean, come on, that would be insane, wouldn’t it?

O’CONNOR:

It could be fun actually, it did draw very mixed reactions, students were very unhappy, what’s the possibility?

SLATTERY:

No, some of them actually received an email from an incoming student who said they would be stoked. Well yeah, it’s still being considered. We’ve hit some hiccups with the State Lands Commission about public trust property and being able to put housing there. So we’re trying to work around that. It’s definitely been delayed. It was intended to go as soon as August and that’s definitely not going to meet that time frame. But we definitely intend on continuing to pursue that because of the housing crisis that we’re in right now. I think there needs to be a temporary suspension of the prohibition of housing on state lands. It’s very odd to me and talking to state lands, you know, they allow for liveaboards at marinas and those type of things and it’s justified by the sense of something to do with security measures. And so I would say that a lot of the waterfronts up and down the coast of California have those same security issues and that allowing this temporary removal of prohibition I think is totally justifiable. And so we’re trying to get to that point and hopefully we can. We’re also looking at other alternatives for that now but it’s not dead in the water yet.

O’CONNOR:

Literally. Now if it does go ahead though, it’s going to be a massive structure. I mean one of the largest structures actually that will be in Eureka.

SLATTERY:

really over inflating this thing. I’ve seen the pictures. It’s 300 feet by 900. It’s smaller than a block. And so it’s 300 feet by 90 feet. The one that was being pursued originally, it’s a little bit different. It’s now five stories. It’d be four. What we were looking at was potentially 150 rooms that could house three students per room. So it wasn’t quite the same size it was before. But we’ll still continue to pursue that. I see it as a huge opportunity not only for interim housing for students to deal with the shortage that we have now up until we can get more permanent housing, but I also see it as a huge benefit for the big projects that we see on the horizon here. You have wind energy coming in here. You’re going to have a lot of people from out of the area that are going to need to do that work. And it’s going to impact our housing stock here. Having something like this and the availability for that would be a huge benefit for Eureka and future development when you’re having these huge projects come in here that are going to have hundreds of workers that have the place to go.

O’CONNOR:

The ship that was being proposed, that is actually one of the things it was used for originally, was docking in Singapore, I believe.

SLATTERY:

Uh… Alaska, Singapore, all over the world

O’CONNOR:

Now you’ve touched on housing as being one of the biggest issues that faces the city and it’s something that a lot of people talk about. What are the plans to develop more affordable housing for Eureka?

SLATTERY:

So I talked about that the RFP is going out and that’s going to be Going to council on Tuesday and then that gets approved It’ll go out for a solicitation probably a four to six week period and then once those responses come in staff will review them and make Recommendations it’s very similar to what we’ve done with the link projects we put out an initial RFP for three of the properties — on Eighth and G, Sunny and Myrtle, and Sixth and M — and those are going through the funding phase right now, and once those get funded they’ll put in I think 97 units That’ll be built We’re hoping that this a six grant that they just went for which is affordable housing sustainable communities grant for 35 million dollars would be a big step in the direction of getting all the funding for that and then they’ll get that for their tax credits and then that should be up and running. That’ll be 97, but then we have close to 210. Ten more that are being put out in this RFP and then we’re also looking at some agreements for the sunset properties on Fairhaven between Harrison and Henderson as well as the Earth Center project that’s going to be going in behind the Lost Coast Brewery Cafe. So all told there’ll be 309 total units. We have a lot of private development that’s doing housing right now. We have the property on Second and E that’s going to have 12 units going in there of market rate housing. We also have another development by the same developer going on in at Third and G, kind of by the Earth Center. That’s going to have another 11 units. And then we have the Lundbar Hills Subdivision that just got approved by council — that would be 66 single-family residential units, so we’re definitely have a big emphasis on on getting our housing crisis at least alleviated for the time being. Well, that’s all I have to say

O’CONNOR:

There is definitely momentum happening and there are as many projects happening as you just said. Miles, thank you so much for joining us for a Humboldt Conversation. A real pleasure to meet you. Good to see you. You too. Thank you.