A hypothetical Arcata Cap. Screenshot from the City of Arcata.


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PREVIOUSLY

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An Arcata city council member voted “no” on a motion for the first time in a year and a half last night — the first time that’s happened in almost 130 straight votes — but a motion to award a $300,000 contract to design firm Smith Group Inc. to start development on the Reconnecting Arcata project still passed 4-1.

The project, a complex, ambitious plan to facilitate pedestrian and cycling travel over Arcata’s freeways, has been in limbo since it was announced last year. Though Caltrans promised Arcata a portion of $128 million from their Reconnecting Communities fund, California’s recent budget woes means the city still hasn’t received it — and some city staff and council members worry it never will, though City Engineer Netra Khatri said Arcata was likely to. 

Without that funding, the project, which may involve building five very expensive acres of land suspended over Highway 101, will be dead on arrival. Any money spent on designing the project would have been wasted. By funding the design process, the council members hope that they’ll be buying time, and a vision that will likely take a couple decades to complete might be done a little sooner, and it also signals to grant-givers that Arcata is serious about actually starting construction.

The funding will pay for “planning, community outreach and preliminary concept design” from Smith Group.

A motion to kickstart the process at the last city council meeting two weeks ago by awarding a larger $500,000 contract to Smith Group was tabled, and spending the multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars it’ll take to start designing Reconnecting Arcata spooked some of the councilmembers. 

Meredith Matthews, the sole dissenter, pointed out that Arcata has a lot of other fish to fry at the moment, including the Annie and Mary Trail, a water fund slowly drying up and other street improvement programs. Finance Director Tabatha Miller also said that Arcata is overspending its street tax fund by about $1.5 million annually.

“It’s a great program, but it’s money that we don’t have,” Matthews said. “This is money that we’re taking out of our reserves… I feel like we funded a lot of things and there’s a lot of great projects, but I am really hesitant to pull money out of reserves for something that will happen eventually, but I think we should focus on what we need to happen in the next one, two, three years [rather] than in the next 10 or 20 years.”

The council decided that they would try and ask Cal Poly Humboldt, whose students would benefit from easier access to and from campus, to kick in some money for some future development.

Councilmember Kimberley White was an outspoken advocate for the project. She lives in the Valley West neighborhood, which is difficult to get in or out of without a car, at one point calling trying to get over the freeway “real-life Frogger.”

“Valley West is always losing out…right now we are so isolated that if there was anything that would happen, we don’t have anywhere to go,” White said. “People out there don’t have cars. Most of the unhoused community don’t own a car. They ride bikes, and there’s just no safe pathway for that.”

Mayor Alex Stillman took a slightly longer-term view.

“Maybe my grandchildren will see it happen,” she said. “I know I won’t.”

Some interesting data

Matthews’ “no” vote was the first nay on any motion in the Arcata City Council since March 20, 2024, when White voted against re-electing Scott Davies to the planning commission. Since then, the council voted 125 times straight without a single “no,” though there were some abstentions and plenty of absences.