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This year’s Rio Dell City Council election is uncontested but will bring new faces to the governing body of the city of roughly 3,400 residents.

With three open seats, incumbent councilmember and Mayor Debra Garnes is set to take one. Two newcomers are also seeking to join the council.

Candidates we spoke to want to work on infrastructure projects over their upcoming four-year terms, including a trail, the city’s water systems and street paving.

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Brett Barsanti has served on the Rio Dell Elementary School District board for over two decades, and has enjoyed seeing projects gradually come to life, like the construction of a new gym. He’d like to see this with city efforts, too.

“I think that it’s a good, up-and-coming community. There’s a lot of good that the council’s doing,” he said, in a recent interview with the Outpost.

Barsanti, who works construction for Caltrans and has lived in Rio Dell his whole life, would like to see an uptick in road paving in Rio Dell — particularly Second Avenue and nearby streets. He sees opportunities for community development work to clean up the city, like tearing down the charred remnants of a home on Monument Road.

He is in support of raises for Public Works employees to prevent the turnover he’s noticed at the department. “In Public Works, they come, they train and we lose ‘em,” he said.

Serving on the school board, he said salary increases were instrumental in raising the quality of the school he and his children attended.

The city’s budget constraints, he says, will likely be the biggest obstacle to these goals.

Bringing jobs to the community is especially important to Barsanti, who recalled a time when the city had five gas stations, multiple restaurants and stores. He’d like to see more businesses in the city’s historic downtown area, Wildwood, or a larger development.

“I think bringing jobs back to the community would be huge,” he said.

He thinks CalFire’s plan to construct its North Coast Headquarters on the 18-acre “Todd Property,” purchased by the state in 2023, will be a great thing for Rio Dell.

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First sworn into the city council in 2014, Mayor Debra Garnes decided to run again to see projects she’s been working on for years to their completion. “And, I want to just keep doing what I need to do for my community,” she said.

She wants to see the Eel River Bike Trail completed. The trail, currently under development, would be an ADA-compliant quarter-mile path along the Eel River with a new access point to the river bar, according to city documents.

Garnes also wants to see two projects in the city’s water/wastewater system completed. The Rio Dell Painter Street Wastewater Upsize Project aims to prevent overflows of wastewater-tainted stormwater during storm events, caused by an undersized pipe.

Plus, a massive project to rebuild much of the city’s water system, which was extensively damaged in the 2022 earthquake, is another she’d like to see wrapped up.

Overall, she wants to make sure the partnership between the council, the city and the community continues to work.

Garnes said serving on council is a volunteer position, one of the few in Humboldt county without a stipend, and gave her kudos to the other candidates for stepping up.

“It’s kind of an honor, I think anyway, to be entrusted as part of a team that’s trying to solve problems and make things better,” she said.

Garnes served through the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2022 earthquake and its aftershocks that caused serious damage to the city. She said, wryly, she hopes for a smooth four years ahead.

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Candidate Jeffrey D. Berry, a caregiver, did not return emails or a message to a social media account associated with him before publishing time.