Fortuna’s staring down a budget crisis, a $1.8 million deficit caused by tanking sales tax and hotel revenue and increased insurance rates. Its city council was supposed to hear an update last night on how city officials were planning on compensating for its fiscal woes, but that item was pulled and rescheduled for a future meeting in May. (The entire meeting was less than 20 minutes long.) The councilmembers did, however, adopt an $846,000 contract with Arcata-based consulting firm Planwest Partners to complete its 2060 General Plan update after a short discussion. 

A General Plan is something like an ambitious list of goals and plans that outline how a city aims to develop and change over the next x amount of time; everything from transportation to the economy to land use to housing to safety and noise and climate change has to be addressed. Every city in California must have one — the penalties for not adopting a long-range General Plan within a specified amount of time can be painful, and delinquent jurisdictions lose their land use authority — and creating one is a massive ordeal. It’s common for smaller jurisdictions to hire a firm to complete its General Plan. Directing a limited amount of city staff to work on such a time-consuming document could force every other routine city operation to grind to a halt. 

Fortuna last adopted a General Plan in 2010 that detailed the city’s future until 2030, and it’s time to develop another. City Manager Amy Nilsen said the new one would be finished by the end of 2027 and will be valid until 2060. 

Fortuna will pay $200,000 to Planwest out of its fiscal year 2025-2026 budget, and the rest will be budgeted for the next fiscal year. Though the money is coming from Fortuna’s general fund, there’s a chance that not all of it will come from city coffers: Fortuna also applied for $261,000 from California’s Community Development Block Grant program to offset some of the cost. 

The item was on the consent calendar, but considering the fiscal impact, councilmember Abe Stevens pulled it for discussion. Nilsen explained that they chose Planwest because they’re local; they won’t have to pay for any consultant’s travel fees or deal with endless Microsoft Teams meetings. Fortuna and Planwest have also worked with one another on previous planning projects. 

It’ll be a huge task. 

“Lots of moving parts here,” Mayor Mike Johnson said. “There are a lot more moving parts than there were 20 years ago.” 

A motion to adopt the contract passed unanimously.