The Humboldt County Board of Supervisors (from left): Natalie Arroyo, Mike Wilson, Rex Bohn and Steve Madrone. Supervisor Michelle Bushnell was absent.



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The big topic of conversation at today’s meeting of the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors was a controversial, industrial-scale biomass project being proposed by the Golden State Finance Authority (a joint powers authority) and Golden State Natural Resources (GSNR), a government-linked nonprofit that focuses on forest management and economic growth.

The board heard a presentation from two staff members of the Rural County Representatives of California (RCRC), a state policy group representing 40 counties, including Humboldt.

In short, GSNR is proposing to collaborate with a private bio-energy producer — possibly the U.K.-based company Drax, which has a spotty track record — on a project to convert forest biomass into industrial wood pellet stock for energy production. The Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) for this so-called “Forest Resiliency Demonstration Project” runs a whopping 1,300 pages, not counting the voluminous appendices.

The board agreed to send a letter to the Golden State Finance Authority asking it to extend the public comment period for the DEIR to 90 days so that the public can have additional opportunities to weigh in.

This proposed project would operate at facilities in Lassen County and Tuolumne County, taking biomass (slash and other organic material from forest thinning, orchards, sawmills, etc.) from within a 100-mile radius of each facility, then shipping it to be processed into wood pellets and exported from the Port of Stockton to markets around the world. Up to 1 million metric tons of wood pellets would be produced annually.

The stated goals of the project include improving forest health and mitigating wildfire risk while producing a valuable fuel source in wood pellets, considered by some to be an environmentally superior alternative to coal. (Not everyone agrees. See below.) But county supervisors and members of the public, including quite a few representatives from local environmental groups, voiced serious concerns about the environmental impacts of such a project.

Fourth District Supervisor Natalie Arroyo had some questions about the draft environmental document, noting the massive scale of the project, including its workforce component, and asking whether prescribed burning was considered as an alternative method of forest management. In response, RCRC staff said the organization supports prescribed fire but doesn’t consider it an either/or choice with the wood pellet project.

Fifth District Supervisor Steve Madrone spoke at length, saying he’s skeptical of the project “for a lot of reasons.” Specifically, he mentioned the fossil fuel costs and asked why a smaller project hadn’t been considered as an alternative. He also expressed concerns about the potential health impacts of manufacturing the wood pellets, including dust exposure, on the community in Stockton. And he questioned the project’s long-term fiscal sustainability, noting that the wood pellet industry is dependent on intermittent subsidies.

“I’m not anti-biomass, by any means,” Madrone said, but he advocated for a smaller-scale project. He also said that if Drax is chosen as the private-industry partner for this project, it would be “a public relations nightmare.”

First District Supervisor and board chair Rex Bohn, who previously served as chair of RCRC, expressed support for the project, citing the closure of countless sawmills, the need for wildfire management and the potential jobs for people in Lassen and Tuolumne counties.

He also voiced frustration with how long the project has taken to get to this point, saying it’s “because we keep having these public meetings and questions keep getting asked.”

“Hopefully we’ll be able to move forward on this … because this is an answer to the problems we have,” Bohn said.

Yana Valachovic, the county’s forest advisor and University of California Cooperative Extension director, urged the board to consider the need for both prescribed fire and management tools to deal with the woody vegetation that functions as surface fuels.

“How do you deal with all the material that’s been built up?” she said. “This is one alternative, and it’s one pathway.” She also addressed the impacts of wildfire smoke, saying, “I appreciate any project that’s going to be able to help make an impact at that scale and help reduce the potential smoke impacts that are going to come our direction.”

During the public comment period, former county supervisor candidate Gordon Clatworthy said wood burning actually produces more greenhouse gases than coal. (Some smokestack emissions tests support this statement.) “I don’t think this project is right for our community, and I also feel that it undermines our climate goals,” he said.

Tom Wheeler, executive director of the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), said a longer public comment period is fully justified for this “extraordinarily complex and controversial project.”

Following up on a comment from Supervisor Madrone about how the biofuel industry can act as the “tail that wags the dog” of forest management, Wheeler remarked, “We’ve seen that in the American Southeast, where we’ve seen logging of whole trees to supply the biomass plants.”

Fellow environmental activist and author Greg King said, “It is worth noting that wood-fired biomass is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and it’s quickly growing.” King said the GSNR website is filled with “the grim language of greenwashing … [but] what is being proposed by GSNR and Drax and the state of California … is anything but green. Rather, it’s a recipe for disastrous and perhaps final pillaging of our already suffering Western forests.”

Numerous other environmental advocates expressed similar opinions, with some saying the county should refuse to support the project altogether.

Third District Supervisor Mike Wilson made the motion to send the letter requesting a longer public comment period, and he said, “I think there’s probably a larger conversation as we move forward about biomass fuels and their large-scale development and export.”

Bohn seconded the motion, and it passed unanimously. 

Afterward, Madrone asked whether GSNR already has a memorandum of understanding with Drax. (There is one, he was told, though it’s non-exclusive and non-binding.) After some more discussion, Madrone wound up making a motion for the board to oppose the project altogether. 

After some push-back from his fellow board members, however, Madrone agreed that taking such a stance before the EIR is complete would be premature.

Sheriff’s Office oversight

Earlier in the meeting, the board revisited the open question of whether or not to create a civilian oversight committee for the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, as recommended by this year’s Civil Grand Jury.

The county’s supervisors proved to have substantively divergent views of this notion when the recommendation was first discussed, back in July. At that meeting, Bohn defended the county’s “great law enforcement” agency, and he and Bushnell argued that Sheriff William Honsal can always be held accountable at the ballot box. 

But Arroyo, Wilson and Madrone voiced support for establishing either a civilian oversight board or an inspector general with subpoena power, arguing that such a body would improve public trust, transparency and accountability.

At a subsequent meeting, in August, Honsal himself urged the board to reject the Grand Jury’s recommendation, saying his office is already transparent with the public and suggesting that if there are serious allegations of misconduct they would be investigated by existing agencies, including the California Commission on Peace Officers Standards and Training (POST), the Department of Justice, the District Attorney, the Board of Supervisors, the Human Rights Commission and the Grand Jury.

The board punted on a decision at that meeting, instead appointing a working group consisting of Arroyo, Bushnell, Honsal and County Administrative Officer Elishia Hayes.

At today’s meeting, Hayes reported that the group met just once since then, but its members quickly agreed that a Sheriff’s Advisory Council could be created. They’re working to develop a proposal on the specifics to bring back to the board at a later date, and according to Hayes the idea came from Honsal himself. 

The advisory council “would be comprised of up to seven members,” Hayes said, with the existing four-person working group bringing forward recommendations for other appointees.

Arroyo said this advisory council would be similar to the one established by the City of Eureka. It would offer perspectives from “outside the law enforcement space,” she said, but it wouldn’t be quite what the Grand Jury recommended — a civilian oversight committee. 

“So we’re going to continue to explore that and go forward with additional information gathering,” Arroyo said. 

Bohn was still skeptical. 

“We had one of these 12 years ago, and we met downstairs by the elevators. And it kind of went by the wayside because of lack of anything to do,” he said.

Madrone advocated for a committee with more teeth, saying the kind of oversight needed is beyond the skills of a volunteer citizens group.

“So I think this is a great first step, but it won’t satisfy myself and I believe a lot of the public in regards to wanting to have deeper oversight into critical incidents so that we can learn from them and improve … ,” he said. “I said this before, but I’m not sure that we can afford not to have this kind of group, even if it costs us money to hire a consultant who is expert in this realm … because we have a lot of lawsuits, and they cost a tremendous amount of money.”

The board unanimously agreed to let the working group continue its efforts toward developing the advisory council. 

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