Another brutally long Board of Supervisors meeting today, with a wide variety of topics discussed and another couple punted down the road for later consideration. Supervisor Natalie Arroyo was out on assignment in Los Angeles with the U.S. Coast Guard’s Pacific Strike Team, which is helping our neighbors to the south with wildfire recovery.

The meeting is still going as of this writing, with several items left to go after a long closed session dealing with lawsuits and labor negotiations wraps up. But let’s get in the chips.

Bridgeville Cannabis Operation Gets Reprieve

The county’s Planning and Building Department came out swinging for Mana Farms, LLC – a 10,000-square-foot licensed cannabis operation in the Bridgeville area. The department had already suspended the operation’s cannabis license in October of last year; it came to the board with a long argument – seven pages, with tons of attachments — for why the board should revoke that license entirely.

In short: Staff argued that the operation had been found to be in violation of its cannabis cultivation permit on numerous occasions and in a number of different ways. It was using generators to power operations, rather than solar power. Required tests of the property’s well were not performed. Junk was piled around the premises, some of which led to a hazard to wildlife. Most importantly, it was discovered, through a search warrant obtained California Department of Fish and Wildlife and served on the site on Oct. 24, 2024, that it was the operation was illegally taking water from Little Larabee Creek.

“Taking water from an illegal source that has the potential to damage the environment is egregious enough to warrant suspension and revocation,” Planning Director John Ford told the board at the opening of proceedings.

But Kathy Hall, Mana Farms’ owner, and Vanessa Valare, her consultant, had a different story to tell. Valare went first. Hall had acquired the property and the operation relatively recently, she said. A lot of the junk found around the property, which included discarded monofilament netting, was actually from a neighbor, and it had been decided that the neighbor was supposed to clean it up. That hadn’t happened. As for the illegal water diversion: Her client had been confused about her legal rights to the water in the creek, as often happens, or whether she could use that water to supplement the well that was supposed to be the sole source of water for the farm, according to the terms of the permit.

In any case, Valare said, her client was working diligently to comply with the terms of the permit. After receiving her shutdown notice from county staff, she had stopped waiting for the neighbor to fulfill his obligations and cleaned up all the junk from the property herself. She had every intention of operating within the terms of her permit, given the chance.

“With farms going out of business left and right, I see this as an opportunity to offer a carrot, not only a stick, to our farmers that are left in this county,” Valare said.

“So yeah, I know this all looks bad,” Hall began, when it was her turn. “We have worked hard — we’ve worked really hard — to come into compliance with stuff, especially the last few months.”

Hall acknowledged that the biggest issue was over the illegal diversion from the creek. She noted that a previous landowner did have a state permit to use some of the Little Larabee Creek water for domestic purposes, and assumed – even though there is no home at the location now, and even though the county’s cannabis permit was conditioned on using the well for water – that she could continue to pump from the creek. She said she only pulled water out of the creek to balance out the pH levels from the well, which were testing high, which was not good for her cannabis plants.

When it came back to the board for discussion, it became immediately clear that Supervisor Steve Madrone was in a forgiving mood.

“One of the things that does impress me is the efforts that Ms. Hall has made since buying the property only a year, year and a half ago, to clean up,” Madrone said. “I mean, I’ve heard nothing here today about, no, I don’t want to do this. I’m not going to do that.”

“Is it your intention to continue to work as quickly as you can to meet all these other conditions that have now been made clear to you?” Madrone asked.

“Yes, and I mean, if I have the opportunity,” Hall responded. “And now moving forward, just understanding a little more like how each agency works — that was a huge misunderstanding on my part.”

With that, the sentiment of the room shifted, and it became clear that Planning’s push to revoke the cannabis cultivation license was going to fail. Supervisor Mike Wilson used to occasion to beef up the conditions placed on the operation. It should be reaffirmed that no water can be taken from the creek to fuel cannabis operations; there should be an increased inspection regime, including no-notice inspections, at Mana Farms’ expense; and that issues with solar power generation being used to power the farms should be resolved.

Hall said that this was all OK with her. Board Chair Michelle Bushnell, in whose district the farm is located, had a final thing to say before the vote.

“My message to the applicant would be that if you have another violation you’re going to be revocated by this board,” Bushnell said. “And amendments that are going to put be put forth on your permit — you need to adhere to them. And that you are going to get unannounced inspections, probably a lot of them. And so please comply with your permit.”

With that, the board voted unanimously to bring the issue back before the board on March 25, at which point it would presumably renew the operation under these new, more stringent conditions.

ACV is … Booming?

Forty-one percent of Humboldt County people who are going to fly somewhere fly out of our own airport, according to a new study performed for the county by Volare Volaire Aviation, Inc., a consulting firm.

Doesn’t sound very good, does it? Almost 60 percent of our people who plan to take an airplane drive three to five hours — to San Francisco or Oakland or Santa Rosa or Sacramento or Medford — to do so, perhaps driving straight past McKinleyville’s California Redwood Coast-Humboldt County Airport (ACV) on the way.

And yet the message Volaire’s Jack Penning had for the board today was a very upbeat one. Why? Because 41 percent is a great deal larger than a truly miserable 23 percent, which was the rate we were flying ACV just a few years ago, in the pre-pandemic year of 2019.

“My main point is this airport is doing the best that it has done in its history, in terms of passenger service and performance,” Penning said. “It’s serving this county the best it ever has. There is room to grow, and that’s very encouraging.”

So, the good news: A larger percentage of our people are using our airport. That is due in part, no doubt, to the fact that average one-way ticket prices out of ACV have gone way down – from $313 in 2014 to $231 in 2024. (Penning didn’t mention this, but a lot of that seems due to the entry of budget carrier Avelo, with its cheap flights to Burbank and – once upon a time – Las Vegas.)

The other good news, in Volaire’s view, is the same as the bad news: Only 41 percent of Humboldt County fliers use our airport. What if prices continue to fall? What if we can add some new routes? If we can capture more of the 60 percent who get in their cars before they fly, here’s a lot of room to grow. The study shows that if every local who buys plane tickets buys them to fly out of ACV, there’s enough demand to support 11 departures per day.

So what’s the plan? The county’s first priority, Penning said, is to get a regular route to Seattle. We currently fly south (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Burbank) and east (Denver). We lack a route north. But over the next 10 or 15 years, Volaire envisions new routes to a multitude of locations – Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Portland, Las Vegas.

There are a lot of challenges, and most of them are at the macroeconomic level. Aircraft production has slowed down a lot over recent years, with engineering problems at both Boeing and Airbus. There’s a shortage of pilots. And in the face of this scarcity, we’re competing with airports all across the nation, many of which are offering airlines big incentives to establish new services.

Penning had a concrete example of the pressure these industry-wide factors place on our local services. Avelo’s flights between ACV and Las Vegas – see here and here — were profitable, he said. This route was canceled, he said, only because the airline could make more money on a specific route on the East Coast.

On the other side of the coin, another macroeconomic trend: The rise of remote work. More and more people living where they want to live, unconstrained by their jobs, is a big opportunity for Humboldt air travel, Penning said.

“Guess where people want to live?” Penning said. “They want to live in great places. This is a great place to live. We are seeing a huge influx, especially from the L.A. area … Those people are mobile and they get on flights. So this is going to support more service for us as we move forward.”

Find a slideshow on the Volaire study here; those who would like to crunch numbers more deeply may check out this other link.

Odds and Ends

• Remember this big weed bust in the Table Bluff area last year? Well, apart from all his other problems, the person who owns the cannabis license for Humboldt Emerald Triangle, LLC – Uonan (John) Uonan – owes the county about $150,000 in back Measure S taxes, according to a staff report. Also, Planning Director John Ford told the board that Uonan has been, uh, hard to get hold of lately.

So the board revoked his weed license.

There was kind of an interesting wrinkle in the brief discussion around this item. A new person has bought the Table Bluff farm, and that person is going to pursue a new cannabis license for the property. Since the Measure S taxes follow the license and not the land, the county is likely out that $150,000 forever. It can’t place a lien on the land – at least in cases where the licenseholder and the landowner are different people.

Supervisor Madrone wondered: Given the cost of pursuing a new cannabis license, why doesn’t this new person just assume that $150,000 Measure S debt and take over Uonan’s license? But Ford said that the new person hasn’t had any more luck getting in contact with Uonan than the county has, and the county is “very, very strict” about requiring both parties to sign off on the transfer of a license, above and beyond the transfer of a deed to the property.

These complications, and others like them, are scheduled to come back before the board on March 25, as part of a more general discussion around holding cannabis license holders accountable for their Measure S obligations.

###

• A pair of items associated with some new Williamson Act agricultural preserves – one in the Ferndale bottoms and another near the intersection of Myrtle Avenue and Freshwater Road – were postponed. Director Ford said that there was some sort of problem with the staff report on one of the items was mistaken, and so he requested the delay. He didn’t say what the problem was, but we do note that the staff report associated with the Freshwater parcel was posted to the county’s system in conjunction with both items.

###

• Early in the meeting, many people spoke movingly in tribute to Dr. Ruby Bayan, a psychiatrist and co-founder of Waterfront Recovery, on the occasion of her retirement. Founded in 2017, Waterfront is Humboldt County’s only residential, medicine-based center for treating people with mental health and substance abuse issues. (Our Ryan Burns wrote about it when it opened.)

“Dr. Bayan, I’m not going to say a lot but what I want to say is thank you for all the lives that you saved here in Humboldt County,” said Supervisor Madrone. “Because truly that’s what you’ve done. You and your staff have been there at these crucial times for people, and you have really saved lives.”

The board passed a resolution commending Bayan for her work.

“I would like to thank the community of Humboldt for allowing me to fulfill my life’s mission as a doctor,” she said, in accepting that resolution. “Before I became a doctor, I had an agreement that should I become a doctor, I will take care of the most broken children. And it was shown to me that it was not pediatrics. No one can be more broken than those people who have substance abuse and mental health”

Waterfront Recovery has a whole page of tributes to “Dr. B” on their site. She will be succeeded as medical director by Dr. Landon Whittington, who you can meet here.