The Humboldt County Election’s Office sent out voter information guides last week, a reminder that the November General Election is little more than a month away. 

LoCO has already spoken with most of the folks running in local city council and mayoral races, and today we’re going to hear from the two people running for Eureka’s Fifth Ward: Kathleen Herrera and Jeff Leonard. The seat is currently held by Renee Contreras-DeLoach.

If you’ve paid any attention to local news in recent years, you know Eureka’s Fifth Ward — encompassing the city’s waterfront, Old Town, downtown and some of the city’s most picturesque Victorian neighborhoods — has been at the center of numerous controversies, including the push to address illegal homeless encampments, as well as the fight over city-owned parking lots and multi-story affordable projects.

Where do our city council candidates land on these issues? Let’s find out!

Kathleen Herrera: ‘I Like Eureka, I Hike Eureka, I Bike Eureka’

Herrera has called Eureka home for the better part of 50 years. She relocated to the North Coast from the Midwest in the late 1970s, first moving to Fort Bragg before making her way up to Eureka to attend College of the Redwoods. She didn’t intend to stay in Humboldt, but, as so often happens, she “met a guy,” got married, had kids and ended up sticking around. 

Herrera

“I grew to love Eureka very much, more than any place I’ve ever lived,” she told the Outpost during a sit-down interview this week. 

Herrera, now retired, spent the first part of her career in real estate before landing a job at Café Marina, where she worked as a bartender for 17 years. (“Lots of great memories!”) She moved to Siskiyou County in 2004 and worked as a teacher’s aide, a medical office manager and a supervisor at the U.S. Postal Service. She returned to Eureka in 2024. 

Herrera made the last-minute decision to run for the Fifth Ward seat after learning that Contreras-DeLoach wasn’t seeking reelection and Leonard would run unopposed. She wanted to ensure voters had options. 

“When people only see one person on a ballot, I think that some disinterest might settle in,” she said. “As I have found out, a lot of people think the city doesn’t care what they think, that everything’s already cut and dried, and I want to get people to participate [in local government], and running for local office seemed like a good way to do that.”

“I mean, whether I win or not is really irrelevant,” she added, noting that her primary goal is to get people to register to vote. 

Herrera described Eureka as a small city with big city problems, referring to housing shortages, aging infrastructure and economic downturn.

“Eureka is beautiful, and it has a lot going for it,” she said. “The image [of Eureka] as a charming Victorian seaport city is all there, despite all of its problems — big problems — but we’re working on things all the time.”

Eureka’s homelessness crisis is top of mind for Fifth Ward residents, though opinions are split on how the city should address the issue. “I’ve heard everything from ‘give them all free housing’ to ‘put them all in jail,’” Herrera said. 

She credited the city for adopting the Housing First model to help people get off the street and into transitional housing, emphasizing that different people need different levels of care. Some people with severe mental illness wouldn’t be able to live in an apartment by themselves and would require long-term care, she said, while others just need access to affordable housing.

“They may have issues, but they need an apartment,” Herrera said. “They don’t need a campground with a fence around it and porta potties or a bus ticket to go somewhere else; they need an apartment,” she said. “I know people who pay a lot of taxes are chagrined at the thought that their money is going to give people free housing. Well, we can’t have people in and out of jail constantly, and that’s not cheap either. I’m pretty sure jail costs more money than one of those [transitional units].”

“We’ve got a lot of apartments coming up and, hopefully, this will make a dent in the number of people that are living on the street,” she added, referring to the Linc Housing developments.

Herrera also wants to increase opportunities for aspiring homeowners. She highlighted the Eureka Builds It! program, which offers streamlined permitting and financial assistance to encourage property owners to build accessory dwelling units and/or split their lots in half.

“That’s a way that some people can get to be homeowners,” she said. “It would be a small place, but it would be a place that was theirs. Then when they’re ready, they can either add on to it, or they can sell it and get something bigger.”

One of the most-discussed issues in Eureka’s Fifth Ward in recent years is parking in Old Town and downtown. A few years ago, the city council voted to “surplus” several city-owned parking lots to make way for new affordable housing developments. The council’s decision sparked outrage among some local business owners who claimed the loss of parking would destroy the local economy. The action triggered a lawsuit from Citizens for a Better Eureka, which was ultimately dismissed, and a ballot measure, which failed.

Asked for her thoughts on the ongoing parking-versus-housing debate, Herrera maintained that “parking is available” in Old Town and downtown, noting the free lots at the Adorni Center and Madaket Plaza. “It’s just that people may not want to walk that far,” she said.

“Why do people want to complain about parking when there’s all these other options?” she asked. “Let the tourists have the street parking. We need them to be there, spending their money in our stores and the restaurants and stuff. I don’t think that [Old Town and downtown] employees need to have priority parking places. That goes for county employees, too.”

She suggested the city bring back its trolley system to draw in tourists. 

Herrera is a big fan of alternative transportation and the city’s push to build more bike-friendly infrastructure, like the C Street Bike Boulevard. The controversial project reconfigured C Street between Waterfront Drive and Harris Street to deter drivers from using it as a north-south corridor and make the road safer for cyclists. However, many residents claim the city didn’t provide adequate notice about the project’s construction.

As an avid cyclist, Herrera said she enjoys riding the route, but is sympathetic to concerns surrounding the city’s noticing process. 

“I’ve heard from people on C Street … and there are people who absolutely love it, and there are people who are very upset,” she said. “If I lived there and I owned a car, I think I would be upset because I could only drive a certain direction to get to park near my house.”

Herrera didn’t have a solid stance on the proposed G Street Bike Boulevard, though she generally spoke in favor of more bike lanes. She emphasized that the city should give community members more time to weigh in on the project if it moves ahead. 

Asked for her thoughts on what the city has gotten right in recent years, Herrera said she was happy to see the council approve the 45-day moratorium on data centers to give staff time to develop zoning standards and regulatory controls for the facilities. 

Asked what the city’s gotten wrong, Herrera said she really doesn’t like the city’s new Passport Parking Program, which requires app-based pre-payment through a smartphone.

Want to learn more about Herrera’s campaign or ask her a question of your own? Give her a shout on LoCO Elections.

Jeff Leonard: ‘Expect More, Eureka!’

After representing Eureka’s Third Ward on the city council for two terms, Jeff Leonard is now vying for the Fifth Ward seat.

Why run for a third term?

Leonard

“I just love Eureka,” he told the Outpost during a sit-down interview this week. “I’ve always enjoyed serving my community … and I think I did a great job when I was on the council from 2002 to 2010. … Now that I’m coming up on retirement here pretty soon, it’s time to get back into community service mode and take another shot at it.”

Leonard has lived in Eureka for most of his life. He attended college in Oregon and lived in the Bay Area and Hawaii for a little while, but eventually made his way back home to Humboldt and had a family. He currently works for State Fund, the workers’ compensation insurer for state employees. He’s also taught high school and dabbled in professional photography.

When Leonard was elected to the city council back in 2002, he said he and his peers were focused on a “mandate for change.”

“It was a very transparent council in relation to older councils, and it was a younger, a little bit more progressive council,” he said. “I tried to spend that entire eight years as a bridge-builder. … I was always trying to bring both sides of that group together … because we had a couple of people on the council who were a little bit more conservative in their views, but also had a couple members who were more liberal in their views. We were always trying to find a way to represent everyone with our actions.”

Leonard’s list of accomplishments includes the development of the Eureka Skate Park, the formation of the Redwood Coast Energy Authority, improvements at Hammond Park and early plans for what would later become the Humboldt Bay Trail. He also had a hand in cracking down on blighted properties owned by local slumlords, Floyd and Betty Squires.

During Leonard’s first term on council, the city was embroiled in controversy over the future of the Balloon Track, the old rail yard between Broadway and Waterfront Drive. In 1999, Union Pacific agreed to sell the 34-acre parcel to Walmart, but the plans fell through after voters shot down Measure J, a ballot initiative that sought to rezone the site to accommodate the big-box store. A few years later, city staff drew up a master plan that would have guided future development of the site, but the city council struck down the proposal at the eleventh hour, citing funding concerns.

As detailed in a Nov. 4, 2004 article in the North Coast Journal, Leonard apologized to staff, but said, “I’m not willing to go any farther forward down this particular road. A hundred thousand dollars is actually, in my mind, a lot to pay for a study.” 

Leonard told the NCJ at the time that, a few months before the vote, he had learned that Security National founder Rob Arkley was poised to buy the Balloon Track and wanted nothing to do with the master plan. After the plan was shot down, Arkley bought the parcel and began planning for the “Marina Center” project, a mixed-use development anchored by a Home Depot. Eureka voters approved a ballot measure to rezone the site in 2010, but the proposal was determined to be incompatible with the Coastal Act and the development never moved ahead.

Two decades later, Leonard stands by his decision.

“The idea of the Balloon Track Master Plan was to tell another property owner, ‘this is what you need to do [with your parcel],’ and it wouldn’t even have been enforceable,” Leonard said. “Why would we spend all that money to tell somebody what to do with their property when they’re free to do whatever they want? It seemed like a waste of money to me.”

“My big goal with that whole piece of property was just to get the cleanup done,” he continued. “If there’s going to be criticism of that whole thing, it probably comes down to [the city council] not being as aggressive as [it] could have been.”

Leonard acknowledged that the council took heat for engaging with Arkley, but he felt it was the council’s duty to hear him out as a community member.

“I think you have to be courageous as a council member, and you have to go into a conversation with anybody who’s an interested party in a project, and sit down with them and be willing to hear what they have to say and do your best to work with it as a city,” he said. “If another occasion comes up and I find myself in the room with him again …  I’m not going to duck that meeting or chicken out, so to speak.”

Shifting to present-day hot-button issues, I asked Leonard where he stands on the parking-versus-housing debate. He said he could see both sides of the issue, and chose to look at it as an opportunity rather than an either-or situation.

“My family owned a retail business in downtown Eureka for a number of years, so I understand how businesses operate, and the number one need is foot traffic,” he said. “It’s going to be important for downtown businesses in the future that we built all that housing because that’s going to increase foot traffic. … It’s going to help downtown Eureka [become] the place to be.”

Still, the city will have to be creative in coming up with new spots to compensate for the loss of Old Town and downtown parking lots, Leonard said. He floated the idea of turning F and G streets into one-ways with diagonal parking on either side of the street to create more spaces.

“Other cities have been in our spot and have found creative ways to fix that issue, so I think that’ll probably be the job of the next council,” he said. “We’ve already got a parking plan … and I’m sure we’ll be looking at that to see how well it’s working and taking feedback from local businesses as we go forward. … Maybe we need to build a parking garage downtown. That would be a great idea.”

Several times during our conversation, Leonard underscored the city’s role in supporting the local economy and creating “business-friendly” policies.

“Let’s open the doors up and hear what people’s ideas are,” he said. “That’s my main goal going back onto council. Let’s get the city taking a close look at how [it can] help businesses be more successful.”

Leonard predicted that the first thing businesses would ask for is more parking and for the city to take a hard line on homeless encampments in Old Town. He spoke in favor of revisiting the anti-camping ordinance that was rejected by the council last year, underscoring the need to balance accountability with compassion. 

“As a community, there just are certain standards, certain rules that apply to everyone, and everyone needs to meet that standard,” he said. “I think littering is a big one. … I’ve ridden out here on the trail on a number of occasions and seen the trash from [encampments] sprawled out across the trail. … That doesn’t match our goal of trying to be a tourist-centered city.”

Shifting to the subject of alternative transportation, Leonard, who rode his bike into Old Town for our meeting, said he’s a fan of the city’s push for more bike lanes, including the C Street Bike Boulevard. Still, he understood why some residents didn’t like it.

“I guess my philosophy is, when you know something is coming up on the council agenda and the public is gonna have a reaction to it, then your job as a council member is to reach out ahead of time,” he said. “I don’t know if the outreach to the public was sufficient. [It] seems like a lot of people were caught by surprise by the actual design. Even people living on the street didn’t know what was going to happen until it happened to them.”

Asked what the council has gotten right and what it’s gotten wrong in recent years, Leonard declined to weigh in on the negative. “That’s not productive,” he said. On the “right” side, he expressed support for the city’s ongoing partnership with the Betty Kwan Chinn Foundation to help get people off the streets and into transitional housing. 

“That’s a huge achievement,” he said. “I think everyone should take pride in that.”

He also gave a hat tip to the council and staff for moving forward with affordable housing projects on city-owned parking lots. 

“It takes a ton of work to secure those grants, put together a project that meets those grant requirements, get that project moving [and] get it built,” he said. “These multi-story projects are going to bring a lot of local foot traffic to downtown, and so I’m really excited about that.”

You can learn more about Leonard’s campaign at this link. Want to ask him a question? Visit LoCO Elections.