Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

Mark Burleigh

Earlier this year in July, Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO) was dispatched to the Redway area for the report of a bone discovery. An immediate additional search of the surrounding area utilizing specialized K-9s did not yield any further findings.

The discovered bone was sent to the Department of Justice (DOJ) to be identified. On Nov. 14, the DOJ notified HCSO that it is confirmed to be the left tibia of Mark Burleigh, age 39, who has been missing since 2017. Search efforts will continue as part of the missing person investigation. 

This case is still under investigation.

Anyone with information about this case or related criminal activity is encouraged to call the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office at (707) 445-7251 or the Sheriff’s Office Crime Tip line at (707) 268-2539.

The last time Donald Trump was president, his health care policies chipped away at the Affordable Care Act and helped eliminate federal abortion rights, leaving states to fill the gaps. In his second term, experts predict Trump’s agenda to be similar and warn that health care will get more expensive and harder to access for millions of people.

Congressional Republicans, newly empowered by Trump’s victory and the Senate moving to GOP control, have made it clear that they intend to try to implement long-standing conservative goals that include decreasing government spending on health care and further dismantling abortion rights, which are currently protected in about half of the country, including California.

Newly nominated Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has also pushed erroneous claims about vaccine hazards and exaggerated the risks of water fluoridation that could have ripple effects across state public health efforts.

The Democratic supermajority in the California Capitol, however, has spent the past several years passing laws to stymie future conservative administrations on health care, said Mia Bonta, chairperson of the Assembly health committee and a Democrat from Oakland.

Legislators have protected insurance coverage of abortion and transgender care. They have expanded health insurance programs to low-income undocumented immigrants and paid for it with state funds. They have taken pieces of the Affordable Care Act and written it into state law, expanding the enrollment period and banning lifetime limits on coverage. And they’ve invested millions of dollars into public health after the system languished for a decade.

“We were able to be very deliberate in the past several years to Trump-proof our health system moving forward,” Bonta said.

Not all state lawmakers have been happy with California’s health care expansions. Senate Republican Minority Leader Brian Jones, for instance, said public insurance for undocumented immigrants, which as of this year is available to all income-eligible immigrants, is too expensive and should be “delayed or repealed entirely.”

But Democratic lawmakers and health care advocates say they are better prepared than the first time Trump took office — though they expect the new administration to put California’s new laws to the test.

“We have their playbook from 2017, and almost everything they tried to do, California helped stop through our advocacy … or through court cases,” said Rachel Linn Gish, communications director for Health Access California. “In that way we are in a much stronger position than before.”

Affordable health care at risk

During his first term, Trump tried and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He has said for his second term that he has “concepts of a plan” for the program that insures more than 21 million Americans.

Republican lawmakers in general have shifted away from talking about eliminating the program entirely, but some leaders, including Vice President-elect J.D. Vance have suggested changes that would make insurance more expensive. Vance during the campaign said he wanted to increase choices for consumers and “make the health insurance marketplace function a little bit better.”

Eliminating the health insurance marketplace, which is also known as Obamacare, has grown deeply politically unpopular even among Republican constituents. Since Trump’s first term, the number of people enrolled has grown by more than 9 million nationally. That political leverage is something that California advocates believe will help protect the program.

“More people are enrolled in (Affordable Care Act) marketplaces than ever before,” Linn Gish said.

But in many ways the state’s Achilles heel is federal funding. Federal spending on California health care programs is more than three times greater than the state’s share. That’s more than $117 billion from the federal government to support Medi-Cal and the Affordable Care Act compared to $35 billion from California’s general fund for all state health spending, which includes public health, state hospitals and social services.

And much of California’s policies can only be fully realized with sufficient money in the bank.

With the state grappling with a third consecutive deficit next year, the most immediate and likely federal health care cut will be difficult to prevent: financial assistance for middle-class families.

Outgoing President Joe Biden approved two rounds of Affordable Care Act subsidies during his presidency, making assistance available to middle-class families for the first time. Those subsidies will expire at the end of 2025, and Trump and congressional Republicans have signaled that they don’t want to renew them.

Without them, premiums will increase by an average of $1,000 annually for residents with insurance through Covered California, the state’s Affordable Care Act program. Premiums are already set to increase by about 8% next year, and without federal assistance other out-of-pocket costs such as deductibles and copays will most likely spike as well.

Prior to Biden’s push to lower health care premiums, many Californians paid upwards of 18% of their income on health insurance, according to Covered California data. Federal assistance capped that expense at 8.5%.

“You’re talking about a world where we’re doubling how much people pay,” Linn Gish said.

In 2023, California lawmakers established a backstop of state funding to help more people afford health insurance, but those reserves can’t make up the gap if federal funding stops.

Health care for immigrants

Medi-Cal, the state Medicaid program, offers expansive benefits to all low-income individuals regardless of immigration status. The program could face uncomfortable cuts with a less-than-friendly federal administration.

Federal dollars cover about 70% of Medi-Cal’s program costs, while the state invests approximately $30 billion in general fund spending.

“The largest concern many of us have who have worked with our state budget is the resources we will be receiving from the federal government this upcoming year,” said Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula, a Democrat from Fresno who has focused on expansions for undocumented workers. “There are many who are struggling who need their government to help.”

About 7 million more Californians qualified for Medi-Cal after Affordable Care Act rules allowed the state to bump up income limits in 2014, and about 1.8 million undocumented immigrants have gotten Medi-Cal coverage after the state began expanding eligibility for them in 2015.

Some California Republicans have strayed from the party platform when it comes to health care for undocumented immigrants. The Central Valley relies heavily on immigrant labor, and a handful of state Republicans from those communities supported expanded access to health insurance for undocumented residents.

The state GOP, however, still officially opposes coverage for undocumented immigrants and several Republican lawmakers want the state to undo that health care expansion.

Gov. Gavin “Newsom and Democrat lawmakers insist on expanding free health care for illegal immigrants to the tune of $5 billion per year. In the midst of a multi-billion dollar budget deficit, hospitals and maternity wards shutting down, and a massive influx of migrants illegally crossing our open border, we should not be expanding this costly government program,” Jones, a Republican from San Diego said.

Immigrants who came to the United States in their youth and who are protected by the Obama-era program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) for the first time can enroll in Covered California thanks to expanded eligibility under the Biden administration.

Liberal lawmakers and policy advocates hailed the expansions as a long-sought-after victory, but they remain controversial among California Republicans. Many lawmakers and advocates expect these expansions to be challenged over the next four years.

“Anything that has Biden’s fingerprints on it is going to be the first touched. The DACA expansion is going to be high on the list,” Linn Gish said.

This year a bill expanding Covered California to all undocumented immigrants, not just those who came to the U.S. as children, stalled in committee. That measure would have allowed immigrants who make too much money to qualify for Medi-Cal to purchase insurance.

Arambula, who authored the bill, said those populations are “unjustly excluded” from buying insurance at full price even if they want to. He plans on reintroducing the measure, which could be implemented without federal approval.

Family planning and abortion cuts

On the campaign trail Trump took credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices who ended the national right to abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, but he said he would not support a national law banning abortion.

Still, California Democrats aren’t taking any chances on abortion rights. They passed more than two dozen laws to protect access to abortion, contraceptives and gender-affirming services in the last three years.

In 2022, voters also protected abortion as a right in the state constitution.

Democratic lawmakers say they have more work to do.

Bonta said she plans on introducing bills to further protect reproductive rights on the first day of the legislative session. Those bills would require hospitals to provide emergency abortions, protect birth control for Medi-Cal recipients and ease the regulation of birth centers. Bonta said lawmakers are working quickly and she expects many of the bills introduced in December to have urgency clauses that allow immediate implementation.

“It’s going to be a huge change within the health care space,” she said.

The first time Trump was president, he also dismantled Title X regulations that fund the federal family planning network by instituting a “gag rule” prohibiting clinics from performing or referring for abortions. The clinics funded have historically provided contraceptives, abortion care, sexually transmitted infection testing and treatment, gynecology services and postpartum care. After the rule change, the number of people served by Title X clinics dropped 60% nationally as a result of clinics exiting the program, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, an independent health policy research center..

In California the number of people served dropped from 1 million to fewer than 200,000, said Amy Moy, co-CEO of Essential Access Health, which administers the state’s Title X money.

California dedicated $10 million to bridge the gap, but Moy said if there is another federal cut, clinics say to expect longer wait times and fewer providers.

“We will be having to test the bounds of our guardrails and see what we can do here, but we are committed to working with partners and state leaders to do everything possible,” Moy said.

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Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit www.chcf.org to learn more.

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

On November 5th, at the dimming of the day, Antonia Dobrec took her last earthly breath and joined the ancestors. She was a descendant of the Tolowa, Yurok, and Chetco peoples. She was born in Arcata. She was the last child of four, affectionately known as Babe. She was reared in Trinidad near open fields and redwood trees.

She went to Trinidad Elementary, Arcata High School, Del Norte High School, HSU, the University of Kansas, and the University of Oklahoma. In high school she excelled in sports and band, and while at Arcata High School she received the Circle A. In 1976 she received her MSW from the University of Kansas.

She had over 30 years of experience in providing training and technical assistance for Indian tribes and organizations. This experience was grounded in the planning, development, implementation, and evaluation of family based services. Her background in family services included: Head Start, adoption, foster care, and child protective services.

From 1980 to 1997 she was president and director of projects at Three Feathers Associates in Norman, Oklahoma. Her responsibilities during that time were vast and too numerous to list here, but know that it involved great dedication to indigenous peoples all over the USA.

She is survived by her nieces and nephews, Victor Dobrec, June Sullivan, Michael Dobrec, Sally Jones, Denise McKenzie, Leslie Patrick, Bill McKenzie, Mary Dawn Ford, Lee Dobrec, and Alexander, Robert, Francine, and Michael De La O, and their families.

Toni was preceded in death by her parents, Victor Anton Dobrec and Mary Mattz Dobrec Gray, her sisters Joann McKenzie and Carmen De La O, niece Kelly McKenzie, and nephew David De La O. We are very grateful to all those who provided care for Toni, including Hospice of Humboldt, the staff at St. Joseph Hospital, and the generous friends and “Angels” who were so caring and supportive. Donations in her name can be made to NIHSDA, P.O. Box 5508, Norman, Oklahoma, 73070, or a charity of your choosing.

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The obituary above was submitted on behalf of Antonia Dobric’s loved ones. The Lost Coast Outpost runs obituaries of Humboldt County residents at no charge. See guidelines here. Email news@lostcoastoutpost.com.

Wilma Pauline Evans
March 3, 1943-October 14, 2024

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The obituary above was submitted on behalf of Pauline Evans’ loved ones. The Lost Coast Outpost runs obituaries of Humboldt County residents at no charge. See guidelines here. Email news@lostcoastoutpost.com.

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Humboldt’s going viral again!

Sometime in the last month or so, popular YouTube travel vlogger Peter Santenello visited Humboldt County to learn about the vibrant community and towering trees local farmer and songwriter Brett McFarland sings about in his song “Humboldt,” a love letter to this beautiful place we call home. Santenello’s video has amassed more than 125,000 views since it was posted this morning. 

In the video, Santenello heads out to Crazy River Ranch to chat with a barefoot McFarland about the challenges of running an organic farm, his stint in prison, the back-to-the-land movement and much, much more.

“Humboldt County … is sort of a cultural melting pot where you have people that have very different values living close to each other and working together,” McFarland tells Santenello. “That’s one of the things I think is really beautiful [about this place]. … We have people that think differently … but I feel like people are a lot more tolerant of one another.”

After spending some time at the farm with local artist Ken Jarvela, McFarland and Santenello bop on over to the Arcata Farmer’s Market to share fresh-pressed apple juice with local vendors. They also swing by the Front Porch Inn, the boutique hotel McFarland runs with his wife, Julia. Then they head over to Blue Ox Millworks to chat with Eric Hollenbeck, nationally acclaimed woodworker and star of the Magnolia Network series The Craftsman. From there, McFarland and Santenello head north to check out Humboldt’s iconic trees at Redwood National Park.

“There’s just no way to capture it on camera,” Santenello says as he points his camera skyward trying to capture the towering trees. “This is so rad.”

While they’re wandering around the forest they run into a couple visiting from Germany and Brett invites them to his birthday party later that evening. What a guy!

Do yourself a favor and click “play” on the video above. 

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The 17-year legal battle over Caltrans’ proposed Richardson Grove Improvement Project has grown longer and more winding than the road itself, and this week it took another turn as a judge ruled against a group of environmental groups fighting the project.

Humboldt County Superior Court Judge Timothy Canning on Tuesday dismissed a writ of injunction that was filed in an effort to compel Caltrans to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). It was the third such petition challenging the Caltrans project, which seeks to realign a 1.1-mile, two-lane stretch of Hwy. 101 through Richardson Grove. The realignment would allow industry-standard-sized semi trucks to pass through.

The petition was filed in August by plaintiffs Bess Bair, Trisha Lee Lotus, Jeffrey Hedin, The Center for Biological Diversity, Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), Californians for Alternatives to Toxics, and Friends of Del Norte. Together they allege that construction activities would impact the roots of old growth redwoods and other trees in the area, and thereby impact wildlife, culture and recreation.

Caltrans, meanwhile, has pointed out that no old growth redwoods will be removed, and its environmental documentation says any impacts to the environment will be mitigated to a less-than-significant level.

In his ruling, which was first reported by the Times-Standard, Judge Canning says the only issue remaining to be decided at this late stage in the long court battle was whether Caltrans had complied with CEQA in its responses to comments on the agency’s 2023 Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR) recertification and Addendum.

“To the extent that the comments raised significant environmental issues, the Court finds that Caltrans’ responses were adequate,” Canning writes in his decision. He goes on to conclude that the project meets CEQA requirements.

Regarding the dispute over whether the project will harm old growth redwoods, Canning notes that Caltrans says it won’t and continues, “Future events may well prove Caltrans wrong; but perfection in prediction is not the standard for CEQA review.”

From the ruling:

Caltrans also points to the benefit the Project will provide for transportation of goods and materials in and out of Humboldt County. On balance, the Court finds that petitioners have not made a significant showing of irreparable injury to the public interest should the Project go forward compared to the benefit to the public of the Project.

A request for comment from Caltrans was not returned by the end of business hours Friday.

Reached via a text message, EPIC Executive Director Tom Wheeler told the Outpost that plaintiffs are still reviewing the decision. “[B]ut I will note that we have previously lost in Superior Court [only] to later win at the Appellate Court,” he said.

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obscurity: 1. Deficiency or absence of light; darkness. 2.a. The quality or condition of being unknown.

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The old Washington School in McKinleyville recently received a new coat of paint, and that, unlikely as it may seem, prompted me to recall a bit of the past. The building has long served as a rooming house but in its original guise gave its name to the nearby road, and in the process it obscured a bit of history.

The two lanes of pavement that separate the erstwhile school from the Mill Creek Shopping Center approximately follow an east-west line that appears on the earliest of the area’s maps. The line, drawn in the 1850s, depicted not a road but a boundary, with a then substantially smaller Humboldt County lying to the south and its now all-but-forgotten neighbor to the north.

That other county once stretched from this line all the way to the Oregon border and from the Pacific’s crashing surf to the crest of the Salmon and Siskiyou Mountains. It is the only such unit ever to be disbanded by the state of California — the calamitous county of Klamath.

When it was carved from Trinity County in 1851, Klamath had but two bases for its economy — mining, and supplying the miners. The mines were situated along the Klamath and Salmon Rivers in the vicinity of rough-and-tumble towns like Orleans Bar, Happy Camp, and Forks of Salmon. Their supply points were the ports of Trinidad and Crescent City. Trinidad became Klamath’s first county seat, but by 1854 Crescent City had grown so much that the seat was relocated there by an act of the legislature. Agitation by the inland miners subsequently resulted in the removal of Klamath’s government to Orleans Bar.

The miners may as well have moved the county seat to Mars. Orleans Bar lay more than 50 miles from the coast and offered “no radiating roads, only a wild river and mountain trails” to connect it with the rest of the county. The effect was to overburden what had already become an embattled bureaucracy.

Two years earlier, in 1855, Klamath’s Board of Supervisors reported their county to be $25,000 in debt, with its books in disarray and a substantial sum of money unaccounted for by the sheriff. Despite the deficit, the supervisors had assessed no tax for two years. Faced with these difficulties, the county’s response was to add to the deterioration: in another two years, the debt in the sheriffs account had grown to $32,461.27, which was especially baffling since he was now “absent from the county” and had apparently done little work previously—16 murders had been committed over the last three years “without the least notice having been taken of any of them.” By then the Crescent City newspaper had concluded that “we do not think…the Treasurer himself has ever had any idea how his books stood, much less been able to make any intelligible report from them.” A grand jury was similarly befuddled by the Treasurer’s record keeping but did determine that “the Assessor is delinquent in the sum of $39.”

The handwriting may have been missing from the ledger books but it was on the wall for Klamath: Such unabated deficits and disorder could only be followed by the county’s demise.

The only surprise was that it took as long as it did. Not until 1874 did the legislature finally approve dissolving Klamath, dividing its land, assets, and debts between the neighboring counties of Siskiyou and Humboldt. Even then, a lawsuit by dissatisfied Siskiouians prolonged the agony for two more years before the dissolution became complete.

Today, Klamath’s calamitous quarter-century is no doubt as nearly forgotten as the significance of School Road. The Humboldt County assessor and recorder’s offices house small collections of official Klamath documents, but neither is readily accessible to the public. Our local archives contain no copies of the wonderfully named Sluice Box or any other of the county’s various newspapers. Although some remnants of Klamath’s mining heyday are still visible at Orleans and similar remote spots, the remaining artifacts and architecture leave us a long way from sensing what life was like for Klamath’s challenged citizens.

What we do have to help us, however, are some interesting numbers. The 1870 census gives us a last official glimpse of Klamath before it ceased being a source of statistics. Let us look at a representative set of surveys done in the sector of the Martin’s Ferry post office. The area included a stretch of the Klamath below Weitchpec that was still the province of the miners, and added, to the south, the Bald Hills region that was returning to ranching after a hiatus during the Indian-white conflicts of the 1850s and early 1860s.

We learn first of all that only four types of people were counted — all the whites; all the Chinese (who in this case were all males); all the children who had at least one white parent; and all the Indian women living with white males. Anyone else (which meant most of the Indians) was ignored by the census takers.

Living in the Martin’s Ferry-Bald Hills area were a total of 100 adult males; of these, 68 were white and 32 Chinese. There were no Chinese women and only three white females, but there were 15 Indian women, listed, like their white counterparts, as “keeping house.” Most of the White/Indian couples were unmarried; it is likely that some of the Indian women did not freely choose their living arrangement. White/Indian children outnumbered white children 32 to 8, a four to one ratio. Only one person was more than 60 years old — Bald Hills rancher William Hopkins, 79, whose census entry bore the note “soldier of 1812.” One of the unmarried Indian women, Maggie Hopkins, had her first child at age 15.

I considered this information, which revealed much about how Klamath’s citizens ordered their lives within their chaotic county. But I found my sociological speculations repeatedly sidetracked by thoughts about Maggie Hopkins, pulled so suddenly from her aboriginal adolescence into a motherhood within the world of the whites.

With more research, pieces of her story emerged. The man she lived with was Horace Hopkins, a farmer and former miner, originally from Exeter, Maine, who was 20 years her senior. Horace owned a ranch in the Bald Hills west of Schoolhouse Peak. On the neighboring ranch lived his two brothers and their father, William, the aged veteran of the War of 1812. In the year of the census, Horace reported an amazing agricultural phenomenon on his ranch; after planting, growing, and harvesting a field of wheat, “a splendid crop of oats” spontaneously cropped up. Hopkins swore that the “ground has not been disturbed in any manner since the wheat was harvested.”

Barely more than a year after this miraculous event, the flame of Hopkins’s good fortune had burned itself out. A newspaper account from August 19, 1871 announced a

… cutting affray last Sunday night between A. Shelton and H: H. Hopkins. Report says the difficulty arose over a game of cards, which the parties attempted to settle with knives. We learn from Dr. Lindsay, who attended the wounded men that Shelton is severely cut, while Horace Hopkins is dangerously injured.

Three days later, Horace Hopkins died in Trinidad. His will was probated before the end of the year. He was found to have debts of $1,960.77 and an estate worth $3,000. Two of his nieces, Anna and Ida Butterfield, were named “legatees in the sum of $500 each,” which left less than $40 to be disbursed. Horace’s brother, Albert, was granted possession of the late rancher’s “premises.” Nothing was said about Horace’s two young children, Frederick and Ellen, nor was there any mention of their mother, Maggie.

By the time of the 1880 census Klamath County had joined Horace Hopkins in the ranks of the deceased. The Hopkinses’ Bald Hills ranches were now in Humboldt County, where only one of the original Hopkins clan remained, Horace’s other brother, John. Living with him was his Indian partner, Annie, their own two children, and Fred and Ellen. Maggie fails to appear anywhere in the census.

Here I paused, for Maggie’s fate as the Indian mate of a white settler eerily echoed the story of Willie Childs, the Yurok woman I’d written about in the Summer 1997 issue of the Historian. Not only were they both left with little or nothing by their white partners, but the piece of property that could have been each woman’s salvation was one in the same, for it was the Hopkins Ranch that William Childs later purchased and then willed not to his longtime Indian partner, Willie, but to the white woman he eventually married, Christina.

I began this piece at School Road, seeking to illuminate a small part of Klamath County’s obscurity. But following that road has led me back to a ridgetop ranch site in the Bald Hills and taught me, more than any school could, a lesson about another type of obscurity — of the impulse that prompts a Horace Hopkins or William Childs to take up a knife or pen, and with a slash of anger or a stroke of greed forever alter the lives of those who will live beyond the perpetrator’s own death.

Perhaps in pondering this, we can also consider one last lesson: We don’t have to go to McKinleyville to encounter School Road. We each come to a road that is its equivalent many times in our life, and each time we do, we are given a choice — whether, like William Childs and Horace Hopkins, to cross into obscurity, or, mindful of the fates of Willie Childs and Maggie Hopkins, to cross into light. School is always in session.

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The story above is from the Spring 1999 issue of the Humboldt Historian, a journal of the Humboldt County Historical Society. It is reprinted here with permission. The Humboldt County Historical Society is a nonprofit organization devoted to archiving, preserving and sharing Humboldt County’s rich history. You can become a member and receive a year’s worth of new issues of The Humboldt Historian at this link.