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PREVIOUSLY

• Flouting State Guidance, Blue Lake City Council Votes Not to Adopt Its Own Updated Housing Element
• SERVED: Three Blue Lake Council Members Were Handed Recall Notices at Tonight’s Meeting

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The Blue Lake City Council last night approved a plan to bring the city back into compliance with state housing law by the end of February 2026, and now they’re hoping state authorities will be okay with that timeline.

Blue Lake has been out of compliance with state housing law for nearly six years, as the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) politely reminded former City Manager Mandy Mager via a letter last month. 

Like all local government jurisdictions in the state, Blue Lake is required to regularly update its housing element to plan for its share of California’s projected population growth, known as its Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA). In Blue Lake’s case, it needs to submit plans for accommodating up to 34 new dwelling units in the coming years.

A housing element update has been completed and approved by the Blue Lake Planning Commission, and it was brought before the council for adoption last month. However, a new council majority, which narrowly won election in November, is possessed of a robust skepticism about the way the city has been run in recent years. Since being seated in January, this cohort has been closely scrutinizing past work and upending procedures in a DOGE-like shakeup of the municipal government.

This trio of council members — which includes Mayor John Sawatzky, Mayor Pro-Tem Elise Scafani and Kat Napier — are now facing a recall initiative mounted by residents in the wake of the unceremonious ouster of Mager earlier this month. (They were personally served notices of recall earlier in the meeting.)

Critics accused Mager of green-lighting various development projects — including a controversial mixed-use Danco project in the Powers Creek District — without sufficient public participation. (Mager’s supporters dispute such allegations while applauding her planning efforts.)

Last month’s HCD letter to the city warns that continued non-compliance with state housing law could have serious ramifications, including a lawsuit from the Attorney General, financial penalties of up to $100,000 per month, additional fines of up to $50,000 per month and even the loss of local control over when and where very low- to moderate-income housing and emergency shelters are built, via a mechanism called the “Builder’s Remedy.”

At last night’s meeting, City Planner Gary Reese walked the council through a draft response to HCD, which includes an outline of the tasks that still need to be completed. He said it’s up to the council to set target completion dates for the two big-ticket items on that to-do list:

• adopting the latest (6th cycle) housing element update and submitting it to HCD, and
• completing state-required rezoning

Napier voiced hesitation about the environmental review for this process. While an initial study conducted for compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) concluded that there will be no significant environmental impacts from adopting a housing element update, Napier suggested that there should be more analysis of the cumulative effects of various proposed projects in the city.

“It doesn’t seem like we’ve looked at the full picture,” she said, noting a number of projects in various stages of development, such as housing, a sports recreation center, an RV park, a battery storage facility, a new amphitheater and a bike park.

Reese said the level of environmental analysis Napier is looking for might be typical of more robust and comprehensive planning efforts, like a full General Plan Update, but it’s beyond the scope of what’s usually done for a housing element update. Some of the projects she mentioned are still in the conceptual stage and thus not considered “reasonably foreseeable” for housing element purposes.

Napier defended the approach of pumping the brakes for the sake of increased scrutiny. She said asking questions about the housing element doesn’t mean somebody is against affordable housing; it’s about due diligence.

“To me, now is the time to ask those questions,” she said. “Now is the time to have more scrutiny rather than after the fact and have to live with regret.”

During the public comment period, former mayor Adelene Jones — who lost re-election to Napier by random chance following an exact tie at the ballot box — urged the council to move quickly to adopt the update, saying the city needs affordable housing and lamenting the fact that she and her former council colleagues hadn’t approved the update long ago.

Other public speakers, including Lisa Hoover, Beckie Thornton Raygoza and Lori Ponte, voiced support for the slow and deliberate approach and thanked the new council members for their efforts.

Council Member Michelle Lewis-Lusso, who’s a holdover from the previous council, proposed a timeline with a completion date of Dec. 31, but Scafani and Napier both said the city should take more time. [CORRECTION: Lewis-Lusso was elected in November.]

“I am of the mind to go with a much more cautious timeline,” Napier said. She went on to suggest that she had questions about a geotechnical study and suggested that perhaps it should be sent out for peer review. Napier also said the next few months should be focused on budget matters.

At that point, Interim City Manager Dani Burkhart spoke up. 

“While I love that we want to be thorough and do our research, we also need to remember that we pay subject matter experts to be that, and you do not have thousands of hours to dedicate to becoming subject matter experts in every single policy that comes before you for consideration,” Burkhart said.

She suggested that the council needs to prioritize efficiency, adding, “Your conversation about the budget will become moot if we are fined into oblivion.”

Scafani later made a motion to submit the updated housing element to the state by the end of the year and aim to complete the required rezoning no later than Feb. 28, 2026. 

Asked for his take on that plan, Reese said the city could get pushback from the state for such continued delays. However, the motion passed unanimously.