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• NEW LAND ABOVE THE HIGHWAY? The ‘Arcata Cap’ Project Would Build Five Acres Suspended Over Highway 101

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When constructed, the Arcata Cap will add five acres of land to the city, suspended above Highway 101 — but the project’s in a similar state.

In 2024, City Hall announced it had earned a grant. It would be one of three cities selected to receive a slice of a $148 million pie Caltrans was carving up: the Reconnecting Communities program, created to convert “underutilized highways” into “multi-modal corridors” to “reconnect communities divided by transportation infrastructure.” The city would use whatever portion of the cash it got to start the planning process — surveying the community, conducting studies, drafting the engineering plans — and then use the rest of it to leverage more grant funding in the future. Even spending all $148 million on construction alone wouldn’t be enough to build it. For comparison: The world’s largest wildlife crossing over Highway 101 in Los Angeles County is a bit under an acre. It cost $114 million.

But any analysis of the cap’s hypothetical cost is, for now, pointless. Caltrans hasn’t distributed any of that $148 million to any of the three winners, due to the state’s rocky climb towards a balanced budget. Last year, several city council members and city staffers said they had doubts Arcata would ever receive the money.

In the meantime, the city’s been spending its own. The cap was included in the umbrella project “Reconnecting Arcata,” which also includes simpler plans to streamline pedestrian and cycling access between the two halves of town divided by the highway, and in Valley West, splintered into several pieces by both Highway 101 and Highway 299. Its budget has yo-yo-ed; the city originally set aside $300,000 for the project, then, amidst budget troubles of its own, slashed it to $150,000. A budget that small would prevent the consulting firm the city hired from delivering a “meaningful final project,” according to a staff report from the time, so the council decided to toss another $75,000 at it in July. Around then, from heaven fell manna: a $700,000 grant from Caltrans, unrelated to the big one from 2024, which will fund the second step of the project.

The venture is still in an embryonic phase. The consulting firm, Smith Group Inc., has mainly been working on conducting community outreach, visiting what could be future work sites, working on securing more grants, and working on a tiered list of “implementable transportation improvements,” according to its revised contract.

The next step will cost around $2.5 million, partially covered by that $700,000 Caltrans grant. This is where the ideas begin to take on substance: Smith Group will create renderings, models, level surveys, a historic conditions assessment, and demonstration projects.

But little of the engineering department’s communications as of late have featured the cap. Khatri, the city’s engineer, has focused on plugging other aspects of the Reconnecting Arcata project: improving non-motorized traffic across Arcata’s bridges, making it simpler to access Valley West by foot and bike. The cap hasn’t gotten much play because of the truncated budget and extended schedule, Khatri told the Outpost. It makes more sense to focus on the simpler stuff.

But they’re not giving up on the cap. Khatri said it’s not the “top priority” currently, and hasn’t been removed from Reconnecting Arcata’s scope. If the city can get the money, they’d still like to build it. In the past, federal programs have donated more than $500 million to similarly focused projects, and Khatri said he’s certain Arcata will get its money.

“I’m hopeful,” Khatri said. “I’m very optimistic and hopeful…So, once you have a good project that has a real value of making a community a better place to live, they will give the money.”

“You know,” he continued, “We may not get a billion dollars, but, even if we get 200 or $500 million in the community to do a project like this, I think that will be a big impact.”

Khatri’s also bullish on Arcata getting its piece of the $148 million Reconnecting Communities grant. When he went with other representatives from the city, Cal Poly Humboldt, and Caltrans to talk to its upper management at Caltrans’ headquarters several years ago, they were very excited about the program, he said, and he doesn’t think that enthusiasm has faded even with the state’s budget issues taking the wind out of the program’s sails. He’s been vocal with Caltrans and with Humboldt’s elected officials, asking them to support the program. “That’s what makes me hopeful that it’s not going to go away,” he said. “We just have to be persistent. Big projects like this take time, and it will happen.”

Khatri accepted the setback as part of the job. He’s glad to receive the money they’re earning. The recent $700,000 Caltrans grant was a good sign, and it’ll show them which of their designs are feasible and can be constructed, what constraints they’re working within. But he’s seen other big ideas take shape and then take form. The groundwork for the Annie and Mary Trail was laid seven years ago with a $300,000 grant, and then the work the city accomplished with that scored it a $5 million grant from the California Transportation Commission a couple years later. A similar process happened with the soon-to-be-built roundabouts on Sunset Avenue. It took years of careful planning and precise spending, but the process put Arcata on top of the heap. Doubters will doubt, but Khatri feels sure a similar thing will happen with the cap, and the Reconnecting Arcata project as a whole. The city has an excellent track record of doing things it shouldn’t be able to do.

“You cannot do anything without money, and sometimes you got to be patient,” he said. “So, yes, when you get the news that, hey, money is taken away, that day is not good. But you cannot just keep on crying about that — say, ‘Hey, well, let’s find other opportunities.’”

But in the meantime, the engineering department and Smith Group will focus on what they can control. The other aspects of the Reconnecting Arcata project are also valuable. Khatri mentioned they’d be interested in building a pedestrian bridge over Highway 101, extending 16th Street all the way to the university. There may, sometime in the distant future, also be a bridge in Valley West from Giuntoli to West End roads. He anticipates the city council directing the department on which to chase sometime next month. But these are all only ideas until more planning is done.

People will benefit if the cap is ever built, Khatri said. It’s also an economic development project. There’d be housing on it; people will get paid to build it. And, Khatri hopes, it will put Arcata on the map — similar, he said, to the Trail Town designation Arcata’s shooting for, bringing in tourists curious to see such a well-connected city.

“Connectivity is in our DNA, and it’s not from today,” Khatri said. “It’s from like 40 years ago, or 60 years ago when Highway was created. It divided the city in two ways, east and west, and slowly we’ve been trying to weave that again, slowly…But there’s still so much gap that people are not using their bikes, or not walking, because, I think, they see that highway as a big barrier. So the only way to improve is by improving the connectivity….Then we will be having more people walking, riding, using the resources. The highway is the barrier between the forest and the bay, and we’re trying to remove that.”