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UPDATE, TUESDAY MORNING:

“Yes on F” spokesperson Gail Rymer shared the following statement in response to the recent mailers:

All statements printed in a recent YES ON MEASURE F direct mail piece and press release were from recorded testimony given at public Eureka City Council hearings over the past few years. The testimony is the essence of public record. These quotes were selected to illustrate the long-term, ongoing pleas to the council over the need to address housing and parking together, particularly in the context of helping Old Town and Downtown Eureka businesses survive. 

The specific excerpts of testimony quoted – which are publicly available on the city’s website of council meeting recordings – showed members of the public and the business community appealing to the council over agenda items directly related to the city’s ill-advised plans to remove public parking lots and erect new housing structures. 

The Measure F campaign sought to stress the goals of Measure F: to provide housing and to preserve the parking our businesses need to survive.

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UPDATE, SUNDAY MORNING: The final phase of the Yes on F campaign continues to go full troll-mode, as Measure F supporters go into the archive to pull out-of-context quotes from non-supporters of the initiative to hint that they actually are supporters of the initiative … or should be!

This time Roy Gomez, whose candidacy for Third District Supervisor flamed out in spectacular fashion in the spring, wields Facebook to attempt a gotcha! on Eureka Mayor Kim Bergel:

Of course, not all people who live in a place live in that place with a family. Not to be a buzzkill. 

— Hank Sims

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A recent mailer from the “Yes on F” campaign.


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With just three days until Election Day, the “Yes on F - Housing for All” campaign is pulling out all the stops to secure a win at the ballot box. 

In its latest round of glossy mailers, the “Yes on F” campaign used half a dozen out-of-context quotes from disgruntled Old Town and Downtown business owners as apparent endorsements for the ballot measure. However, most of the quotes printed in the mailer are sourced from public comment at a Eureka City Council meeting that took place more than two years ago, long before any version of Measure F had been made public.

Humboldt Bay Coffee Company owner Luci Ramirez took to Instagram and Facebook on Friday to call out the “Yes on F” campaign for using something she said “about a very specific topic … that impacted [her] employees” at a February 2022 Eureka Council meeting for “political gain.”

The “specific topic” Ramirez was referring to did have to do with parking limitations in Old Town, but she said the issue was resolved when the city started offering parking permits for people. “[It’s] been a game changer,” she said. “Employees no longer have to play musical cars every 2 hours.”

Ramirez also said she was “never contacted about the measure” by the “Yes on F” campaign, adding that she would have “never endorsed it.”

The “Yes on F” campaign also used an out-of-context quote from Greg Gehr, executive director of the Northern California Indian Development Council and managing partner for the Carson Block Building Property, in a recent press release. His quote, from another February 2022 city council meeting, states: “[This] will have a devastating effect on the economy, the business services, retail businesses, residents and general public in using the old town and downtown area that we worked so hard to restore,” though it doesn’t specify what “this” is. 

Reached for comment via text message, Gehr told the Outpost that he was on the board of Eureka Main Street at the time and that the group was speaking out against the city’s plans to turn the two parking lots behind Lost Coast Brewery into the EaRTH Center, a mass transit hub and housing development.

Asked whether he supported Measure F, Gehr said, “I can only speak as myself, not as an official representative of the corporation, but I think the tagline that I’ve seen around town really says it all – ‘it’s confusing for a reason.’”

The Outpost emailed “Yes on F” spokesperson Gail Rymer for additional comment on the matter. We’ll update this post if we hear back.

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We’ve got links to our previous Measure F coverage in this post. To read the official arguments for and against the measure, as well as the Eureka city attorney’s impartial analysis, click here. Election Day is Nov. 5.

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