The homepage on VisitArcata.com. Screenshot.


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Arcata’s city council members voted pretty much as expected on the two most interesting items on last night’s agenda — but not without a smattering of controversy. 

Tourism Website

VisitArcata.com is supposed to be Arcata’s all-purpose destination for tourists interested in exploring the area, but it’s a bit dilapidated. It’s not very accessible or easy to navigate; some of the information on the site is out-of-date; none of it is pleasing aesthetically. City manager Merritt Perry said that organizations like Humboldt Made and the Arcata Chamber of Commerce had told him that it was one of the worst in the county. (The chamber’s executive director Meredith Maier told the Outpost earlier this week she’d like to take the site over completely.)

The city is in charge of running it, but staff have little time and money to update it. “The whole problem is that we haven’t really spent any money on it historically,” finance director Tabatha Miller said; councilmember Alex Stillman decided it’d be worth it to ask staff to investigate.

An item allowing city staff to take some time to decide what the site needed and consider issuing a notice telling potential contractors that they were accepting bids to revamp it was included on the consent calendar. Councilmember Stacy Atkins-Salazar pulled it for discussion. She had some quibbles with allotting up to $25,000 for the project and wanted to wait until the city had completed its economic strategic plan, and said she thought Arcata’s Instagram was serving them well enough. 

Stillman disagreed. With the summer and peak tourist season approaching, it’d be valuable to make the website usable as quickly as possible. “It’s not doing as much as it could do,” she said. “And it’s really important, I think, with the economy, and what’s going on, to really see if we can’t attract and promote what we have.”

The other councilmembers present thought spending the time investigating the redesign options was worth it, but spending the money wasn’t. The proposed $25,000 would have come out of a $269,000 fund the council uses for community projects, such as last year’s Friday Night Markets and the Choose Humboldt campaign. The council set aside $100,000 from that fund for supporting the completion of the economic strategic plan. 

It’s not a lot of money considering the scope of the project, city manager Perry said. “Updating a website and staying on top of it for tourism and marketing is a huge effort,” he said. “$25,000 is actually a small part of that.”

Atkins-Salazar proposed that they direct the city to decide how they wanted to change the website, and then authorize spending the money when the plan was completed; the council voted 3-1 in favor of the idea. (Stillman voted “no”; Meredith Matthews was absent.)

Even if they did kick in the funds, it’s probably too late for the site to make a difference anyway, council member Sarah Schaefer said. 

“If we want to be quick on this, we should have done this back in January to have a website ready by tourism season,” she said. “Even if we’d go forward on this, it’s not going to be attracting people to Oysterfest, attracting people to North Country Fair, enjoying this lovely summer weather that we have away from the heat. It’s not going to be ready by then anyway…these things take time. We know the pace of government.”

Public Safety Committee

Arcata’s public safety committee, a citizen-led body dedicated to talking about public safety issues and giving its recommendations to the city council, hasn’t met since April 2023. Save for a representative from the Arcata Police Department, it has no members. Every month, city staff put out a notice telling the public its monthly meeting has been cancelled, and the inconvenience has become too annoying — so the city council decided to debate axing it. 

It was established in 2016 after a 28-year-old man assaulted a student near Arcata Elementary School, and it had some eager members for the first few years of its existence, said APD Chief Chris Ortega. But after a while, enthusiasm flagged, and people started to quit. Meetings were unable to achieve a quorum. Ortega said only two people applied for a position since it last met, despite the city’s efforts to fill them. 

Killing the committee wouldn’t impact residents’ ability to share their public safety concerns, Ortega said. The committee was not a “functioning body.” City council meetings, where any resident can share their input with the city, fill pretty much the same niche, he said, and there’s “ongoing engagement” between APD, elected officials, city hall, and the community.

“[Ending the committee] does not change public safety services policies, priorities, or accountability mechanisms,” Ortega said. “It simply updates the municipal code by removing a committee that is no longer active.”

Several public commenters disagreed, saying ending the committee would reduce police oversight; Sarah Schaefer clarified that it was never a police oversight committee, though there might be a place for that in the future.

“They weren’t reviewing cases,” she said. “They weren’t reviewing police conduct. They were mostly just making recommendations on various pet projects in the community or needs that they saw or heard about from the public.”

“Oftentimes, the work of these task forces can sunset, and it loses that momentum, and loses the energy behind it because the historical memory is gone,” Schaefer continued. “I think going back to the true root, and what we want, is an important part. Right now repealing this committee makes sense.”

The council voted unanimously in favor of nixing the committee.

A previous version of this article said that the committee was established after the killing of Josiah Lawson instead of an assault on an elementary schooler. The Outpost regrets the error.