An Amazon delivery truck parked at the loading bay of a distribution warehouse. | Matti Blume, CC BY-SA 4.0.


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PREVIOUSLY

The news that online retail behemoth Amazon plans to build a 40,000-square-foot distribution warehouse at the north end of McKinleyville generated a wave of passionate resistance among a subset of the Humboldt County community. Their fury was on full display during a fiery community meeting hosted by the Humboldt County Planning & Building Department in late April.

Now, a local community group called Indivisible Trinidad hopes to harness that outrage via a ballot initiative that would permanently ban large-scale warehouse and distribution facilities in the county’s Coastal Zone. But is there enough time between now and the November 3 General Election to get the initiative on the ballot?

That’s going to be a very difficult goal to achieve, according to Humboldt County Clerk-Reporter and Registrar of Voters Juan Pablo Cervantes.

“This is a multi-step process, each with a deadline,” Cervantes said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “I’m not saying it’s impossible, but these are some really tight timelines we’re talking about.”

The big deadline for organizers to worry about is not November 3 but rather August 7, he said. That’s the last possible day for the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors to consolidate a ballot measure with the General Election. If organizers miss that deadline, there won’t be enough time to write an official analysis, collect pro and con arguments and rebuttals, finalize materials for the printer and so on. If organizers miss that August 7 deadline by even a day, the ballot initiative would be deferred to the next general election, in 2028.

Nevertheless, Tina Freedland, one of the organizers behind this anti-Amazon effort, remains confident. “We’re not going to miss the deadline,” she told the Outpost this afternoon.

With just 139 days before Election Day — and 51 days before August 7 — proponents are already months behind the schedule laid out in a Humboldt County how-to guide for citizen-led initiatives. While that guide’s sample calendar is designed to be informative rather than prescriptive, it recommends starting the initiative process more than a year in advance. In this case, organizers didn’t take the first official step until last Wednesday.

On June 10, organizer Debra Rumberger filed a Notice of Intention to Circulate a Petition with the Humboldt County Clerk-Recorder’s Office. The County Clerk (Cervantes) delivered the notice to county counsel, which had up to 15 days to give the measure a title and summary and deliver it back to the County Clerk. 

Scott Miles, Humboldt’s interim county counsel, did so in less than a week. (Click here to download the title and summary, which were received by the Elections Office yesterday.)

Now, proponents must publish the Notice of Intent with Title and Summary in a local newspaper before embarking on arguably the most difficult challenge of the whole process: gathering enough valid signatures from registered voters to qualify the initiative for the ballot.

State law gives them up to 180 days to do so, but with this effort already behind schedule, organizers and volunteers will have to work much faster. Officially, they need to get 4,874 signatures. Inevitably, some signatures get disqualified for one reason or another (people who are registered to vote elsewhere, for example, or not registered at all).  Rumberger told the Times-Standard that organizers and volunteers aim to collect 6,500 just to be on the safe side.

Freedland said that while she’s not sure how long it will take to accomplish that goal, organizers have “dozens and dozens” of volunteers ready to canvas high-traffic public gathering spots such as the Arcata Farmers’ Market and Eureka’s Friday Night Market.

“The community as a whole, in our experience, is very in favor [of this effort], so I don’t think it will be difficult, necessarily, to gather the signatures,” she said.

Still, even if organizers can start signature-gathering on Monday and manage to collect the required number in just two weeks — which would be a remarkable achievement, historically speaking — it might still be too late, Cervantes said. 

As the county clerk, he and his staff have up to 30 working days (Saturdays, Sundays and holidays excluded) to check the validity of the submitted signatures. Cervantes said that, while his office is committed to performing this task in a timely manner, employees must dilligently follow election code, which takes time. And with just seven full-time employees and two positions unfilled, his office is already swamped with work.

“We’re wrapping up another election [the June 2 primary] with its own deadlines, and we’re already prepping for November,” he said. “I’m probably going to use a lot of that 30 days because I’ll have to.”

If he somehow gets it done in half the time (15 working days), it would still be late July before he submits the item to the Board of Supervisors for placement on a meeting agenda. County policy says items must be noticed 14 days before the board meeting, which, in this optimistic scenario, would blow right past the August 7 deadline.

Freedland remains undaunted. 

“I think we’re extremely motivated because of the negative impact that an Amazon warehouse would have — specifically on the community of McKinleyville but also on larger community.” 

She argued that the proposed warehouse represents a direct threat to small businesses in the region as well as local post offices. The timeline may be short, “but if we don’t try, we won’t know,” Freedland said.

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CORRECTION: This post initially misspelled Tina Freedland’s name. The Outpost regrets the error.