Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

Between May 19th and May 30th, 2025, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office conducted a sex offender registration compliance sweep throughout the County of Humboldt. Representatives from the Arcata Police Department, Rio Dell Police Department, Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office and State Parole assisted during the operation.

During compliance sweeps, law enforcement attempts to contact registered sex offenders in Humboldt County to ensure each offender is following their registration requirements. Pursuant to California Penal Code 290, sex offender registrants are required to register in person with the law enforcement agency that has jurisdiction where they reside. The registrants must also comply with several registration requirements, such as updating their registration annually and informing law enforcement when any changes have been made to their address or registration information. Failure by a sex registrant to keep law enforcement notified of an address change or registration information is a crime and can be punished as a felony or misdemeanor.

As of June 6th, 2025, there are 375 registered sex offenders in Humboldt County. Of the 375 registered sex offenders in Humboldt County, 46 of those offenders are registered as transient. During the compliance sweep, 317 registrants were determined to be in compliance, 23 registrants were suspected of being out of compliance, 28 were unable to be contacted, 2 offenders were currently incarcerated and 4 were discovered to be deceased. Additionally, 7 arrests were made during the operation. Investigators are completing follow up investigations into those found to be out of compliance and anticipate additional arrest warrants to be submitted to the Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office. Please keep in mind, those that were unable to be contacted do not necessarily mean they are out of compliance. Often, the compliance sweep takes place on weekdays during work hours, and it is expected that some registrants may not be home during those times.

The annual sweep is a collaborative effort to reduce violent sexual offenses in the county through proactive monitoring of sexual offenders, and strict enforcement of state registration requirements. The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office is a participant in the Region II Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement (SAFE) Team, and these enforcement efforts are funded through the SAFE grant.

The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office would also encourage members of the public to research Megan’s Law, which is a set of state and federal laws that require sex offenders to register with law enforcement and make information about their registration and whereabouts public. The primary purpose is to protect communities, particularly children, from potential harm by sexual offenders. This is achieved by providing the public with access to information about registered sex offenders and allowing law enforcement to notify communities about their presence. Megan’s Law website can be accessed at this link. Anyone with questions or possible concerns about a sex registrant should contact their local law enforcement agency.

For more information regarding the sex offender registration compliance sweep, contact Investigator Jenn Taylor at (707) 268-3642.

Additional Information on Megan’s Law and ways to protect yourself and your family at this link.

(AUDIO) Eureka Friday Night Market Chat on KSLG

The excitement is palpable around tonight’s Eureka Friday Night Market, the first of the season!

The FNM is put on by Humboldt Made, a community collaboration organization that brings together the magic of makers and entrepreneurs here on the North Coast.

Earlier today, Rosa Dixon, Executive Director of Humboldt Made, and local musician Brett McFarland (who takes the Gazebo Stage tonight), stopped by the KSLG studio in Old Town to regale DJ Dale Cooper with all the details about tonight’s festivities and the fun times to come over the next few weeks! (Tune in above!)

From the new “Non-Profit Takeover” to Brett McFarland’s locally-made cider from Crazy Ranch River and Cider Co., there’s a lot to check out at this year’s markets!

Eureka Friday Night Market runs from June 6 to August 29 and goes from 5:30 - 8:30 p.m.

Caltrans release:

As of Friday morning, Route 36 remains fully closed east of Swimmer’s Delight (PM 15.7-16.3) in Humboldt County due to an active slide and will not reopen this weekend.

Ongoing hazard surveys have identified additional trees and debris that need to be addressed prior to reopening the roadway. Site activity has hindered access to some locations. Work to complete a full site assessment is scheduled for Monday, June 9. Route 299 is available as a detour.

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This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

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In the battle over how to pay for damage wrought by climate change, California lawmakers had an idea: Create a “superfund” that makes big polluters pay.

The Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act of 2025 would make the world’s largest sources of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels financially responsible for the damage caused by wildfires, droughts and other events exacerbated by the warming climate.

The idea adopts the “Superfund” model — created by Congress in 1980 to clean up the nation’s worst toxic waste sites — and applies it to greenhouse gases, aiming to hold companies financially accountable for emissions that drive climate change.

New York and Vermont have already enacted similar measures despite massive opposition from the oil and gas industry.

But the proposed California legislation has stalled since April, even as environmental groups — galvanized by the death and destruction of the January Los Angeles wildfires — have made it a top priority.

Identical versions in both legislative houses have sat idle in Assembly and Senate committees despite a full-court press by supporters framing the superfund as a solution to California’s $12 billion budget deficit. The bills passed out of their first committees but have not advanced further.

“Nobody can afford the kind of financial crisis that the climate crisis has caused,” said Assemblymember Dawn Addis, a Democrat from San Luis Obispo, one of the authors, told CalMatters. “Oil caused the climate crisis, in large part … they lied about it as they caused the damages, and it’s time for them to come to the table and create more affordability for the very people that they’ve harmed.”

The funds would be earmarked for paying for community disaster preparedness, such as evacuation planning and emergency housing, as well as energy efficiency, zero-emission fleets and charging, and natural resource protection, among other projects, according to the bill.

Opposition includes oil companies and major business groups. In addition, despite worsening wildfires and floods, many Californians have been increasingly voicing concern that the state’s climate policies are driving up gas and electricity costs.

“At a time when Californians are struggling with a cost-of-living crisis, these bills will likely result in massive price increases for gasoline, diesel, natural gas, electricity and consumer goods.”
— Jim Stanley, Western States Petroleum Association.

Oil and gas industry lobbying has been fierce. Jim Stanley, a spokesman for the Western States Petroleum Association, the industry’s top lobbying group in the West, said in a statement that the measures were “misguided proposals to retroactively punish companies for providing a legal product that was, and remains, critical to our state’s economy.”

He said that “at a time when Californians are struggling with a cost-of-living crisis, these bills will likely result in massive price increases for gasoline, diesel, natural gas, electricity and consumer goods.”

The climate superfund also faces resistance from a powerful ally of Big Oil: California’s State Building and Construction Trades Council, a key union that has repeatedly backed the industry’s positions, as CalMatters has previously reported.

Earlier this year, the council also opposed legislation by state Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco, that would have allowed residents to sue oil companies for climate damages.

In April, Keith Dunn, a lobbyist for the trades union, told an Assembly committee that the climate superfund would drive up energy prices, kill middle-class jobs and act as a stealth tax on working families. “The affordability gap is widening,” Dunn told lawmakers. “It’s not by chance, it’s by choice.”

Both measures include “urgency” provisions, which allow them to take effect immediately if passed by a two-thirds vote and signed by the governor. That higher threshold makes them less vulnerable to certain legal challenges and exempts them from the usual legislative deadlines. (Most bills must clear their house of origin by today.)

“There was quite a bit of opposition earlier in the year so we’re continuing those conversations,” Addis said. “We have time to have those conversations.”

The bill would make companies pay for emissions from “the extraction, production, refining, sale, or combustion, including by third parties, of fossil fuels or petroleum products,” which includes oil, gas and coal.

Bill targets multinational corporations

The bill applies to companies that emit more than a billion metric tons of global emissions from 1990 through 2024 — that means multinational oil and gas corporations. Within three months of the law taking effect, the agency would publish a list of companies that would pay into the fund.

There are no official estimates as to how much companies would pay. The legislation would require the California Environmental Protection Agency to estimate costs from past and projected climate damages to people, governments, ecosystems and infrastructure every five years through 2045, using peer-reviewed science.

“It is imperative that we make polluters that caused a large percentage of the climate crisis pay for the thing that they knowingly caused,” said Maya Golden-Krasner, an attorney with the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity, which has sponsored the California bills. “They’ve known that this would cause damage since at least the 1950s, they knew that these greenhouse gases would be regulated since the 1990s and they’ve been gaslighting us all the way and blocking climate regulation.”

“It is imperative that we make polluters that caused a large percentage of the climate crisis pay for the thing that they knowingly caused.”
— Maya Golden-Krasner, Climate Law Institute

The climate superfund fight is part of a broader national movement against major oil companies that is playing out in legislatures and courtrooms across America.

California is leading efforts to hold oil companies accountable in court for climate change, recycling a legal strategy deployed during the 1990s, when states alleged that tobacco companies knew cigarettes cause cancer.

Trump-era politics have also been at issue. In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting state climate programs, specifically calling out Vermont’s and New York’s polluter-pays laws and threatening legal action against California’s landmark cap-and-trade program.

Backers say the climate superfund is a fair solution to California’s budget crunch as well as a long-overdue reckoning for an industry that knowingly caused the climate crisis.

But the plan — which could cause oil and gas companies to pay billions for emissions over the last three decades — faces an uphill battle in Sacramento.

Last year, Californians voiced strong opposition to plans to overhaul one of its cornerstone climate programs, the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which could push gasoline prices higher. Last week, Assemblymember Jasmeet Bains, a Democrat from Bakersfield, called for California Air Resources Board Chair Liane Randolph, who led the board in its passage of that measure, to resign over cost concerns.

Likely to trigger a legal onslaught

If enacted, the climate superfund would almost certainly trigger a wave of legal challenges. Donald Sobelman, a San Francisco environmental attorney, told CalMatters that the bill is legally ambitious — and is almost certainly headed for a courtroom challenge if it passes.

The Trump administration, for instance, sued New York and Vermont over their climate superfund measures, arguing they are unconstitutional.

Another potential legal argument, Sobelman said, is that the measure could charge companies now for pollution emitted years or even decades ago. Another is that the measure could act like a tax, which could make it easier to challenge in California court without two-thirds approval by the Legislature.

And some judges may question whether the science linking the emissions to worsening fires and other climate events is strong enough to single out specific companies for climate damage, leading to the “classic battle of the experts,” Sobelman said.

In addition, courts could determine that consumers hold some responsibility for their actions, such as driving cars and trucks powered by fossil fuels, and that other industries around the world, such as power plants and farms, also emit a lot of greenhouse gases.

A spokesman for Gov. Gavin Newsom declined to tell CalMatters whether he supports the measure.

In his May budget proposal, the governor adopted “polluters pay” language to rally support for an existing California climate program, cap-and-trade, which raises money by selling pollution credits to companies.

The debate is unfolding amid a worsening budget crisis in which lawmakers are under pressure to find new revenue sources — especially ones that don’t involve tax hikes on Californians. Supporters of the Superfund Act argue that the bill offers a “polluter-pays” principle rather than new taxes.

Newsom’s budget proposal said extending cap and trade “aligns with the polluter-pays principle in which carbon emitters will fund the state’s world-class forestry and fire protection programs in the face of wildfires that have become increasingly destructive because of climate change.”

Savanah Nicole McCullough
March 21, 1993 – May 26, 2025

We lost our dear, beautiful “Savy” much too soon at the age of 32. She was a wildflower that grew by the river, blossomed in the sunshine and walked the mountain roads. She was a self-proclaimed Indian Tracker with a way of looking at life that was powerfully unique, rugged and full of soul. She was spiritual and loved God in her own special way.

Savanah was born in Eureka on March 21st, 1993. She was raised in Salyer, attending Trinity Valley Elementary school until 6th grade, when she moved to Redding. In Jr. High she enjoyed playing basketball and was known for toughness, fouling out of every game. Savanah loved and appreciated art and music and was herself very artistic. One of her accomplishments was completing her High School Graduation later in life.

Her life was not easy. God’s perfect child, she was brilliant, beautiful and active. She was struck with epilepsy at the ripe age of just eight years old. Her life would become a battle that was fraught with pain and suffering. As she would often say, “it is what it is.” She also had many life adventures that were rare and exciting in ways we can’t even imagine. She was loved, cared for and continually supported by her parents, family and close friends.

What we remember is her distinctive sense of humor, independence, creative style and resilient outlook. We will miss her quips, her stories and her individualism. Her wry smile, silly chuckle and bold comments will stay with us. Savanah will be in our hearts forevermore and loved eternally. She is in Heaven now, without struggles or pain, complete, whole and perfect with God and family gone before.

Savanah is survived by her parents Troy McCullough & Brenda Grant and Stefani & Todd Clark. Her siblings Lily & Art Mastel, Jedidiah McCullough and Olivia McCullough and step brothers Dylan Clark and Ty Clark. Her Grandpa Stephen Wahl, aunts and uncles Penny and Harv Grant, Nicole McCullough and Erick Ammon, Macky and Dena McCullough, Michael Hyatt and Michele Ray, and her many cousins, her nieces Tayler Davaris and Elizabeth McCullough.

A service will be held for Savanah at the Salyer Wayside Chapel, conducted by Toni Burchard at 1 p.m. on Saturday, June 21. In lieu of flowers, any donations can be made to Mountain of Mercy Rehabilitation Center, 50525 Mattole Rd.., Honeydew, CA 95542 or the Salyer Wayside Chapel.

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

With great sorrow, we announce the passing of our Dad and Mom, Dave and Kitty Simera.

Dave Joseph Simera was born on September 11, 1954 in Fontana, Calif. He passed away on April 23, 2025, following a short illness. Dave was a well known masonry contractor for over 40 years. His beautiful craftsmanship adorns many homes and businesses throughout Humboldt County. Dave passed on his talents and knowledge to his son who carries on his legacy with Simera Masonry. Dave loved the outdoors. Enjoying fishing with friends and family, gardening and watching his grandchildren enjoy the swimming pool at the cabin in Trinity Village.

Kitty Renee Wilber was born on April 2, 1953 in San Bernardino. She passed away on May 26, 2025. Kitty was a devoted wife, mother, grandmother and friend. She was warm, loving, generous and kind. Kitty never missed a chance to make you feel special, especially on birthdays and holidays. She loved to sew, learning in high school, she made many of her clothes including her wedding dress. Her grandchildren were everything to her. They in return loved their Tee/Nana. Kitty volunteered her time at Hart Animal Rescue and The Pregnancy Care Center for many years and made many friends. Her bible study group of friends from Calvary Chapel were very dear to her heart.

Dave and Kitty fell in love in high school and were married on June 18, 1971 in Fontana. They moved with their children to Humboldt County in 1982 and made it their forever home. They were married just shy of 54 years and won’t have to spend their upcoming anniversary apart.

They leave behind their daughter, Carrie Cleveland and son in law Andy. Their son Jeremy Simera and Stephanie. Their four grandchildren, Kyle Cleveland, Dalton Cleveland, Hayley Simera and her fiance, Justin, Brendan Simera and his wife, Cyrie and great granddaughter Bonnie Simera. Uncle Dave and Aunt Kitty dearly loved all their nephews and nieces whether near or far.

Thank you to Gina Parrott and Steve Wilber for all the care you showed our parents and us during this most difficult time.

A small church service will be held on June 28 at 11 a.m. at Calvary Chapel located at 1300 California Street in Eureka. A celebration of their lives will also be held on June 28 at 2 p.m. at the Gene Lucas Community Center at 3000 Newburg Rd. in Fortuna.

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

Charles F. Peterson was born August 14, 1946 at the old Trinity Hospital in Arcata. My parents were Aaron Peterson and Mabel (Light) Peterson. After a brief sudden illness I passed away peacefully at the age of 78 on May 27, 2025. Most people called me Charlie but I was also called Chuck, Pete and from some of my old motorcycle rider friends, “Sweetpea”. Growing up in Bayside and the Jacoby Creek valley was a great experience and many basic skills were learned at an early age as we lived on a small farm with Jacoby Creek running through it. My dad and two older brothers taught me to drive tractors, cars and ride motorcycles but there were also chickens, cows, a horse, a couple of acres of garden and lots of family picnics by the creek. I didn’t take much to riding the horse though and as my dad used to say, “they didn’t have a switch to turn them off”!

I started school at the original Jacoby Creek School and graduated from Arcata High School in 1964. After attending Shasta Junior College for a short period of time, the allure of becoming a famous flat track motorcycle racer brought me back to Humboldt County. After several seasons of flat tracking, a little motocross and some enduro competitions, in 1981 I hung my helmet on the wall next to my steel shoe, some various body part braces, crutches and a cast that had been sawn off. Although motorcycle racing was very exciting, I decided there were many other ways to enjoy life and have fun!

I went to work for Arcata Redwood Company at the Brainard Remanufacturing facility in the summer of 1965. My first job was as the delivery person, the lowest position at the facility. After several position changes, a company change of ownership and making many long-time friends, I retired after 43 years as Superintendent of the Brainard Remanufacturing Division of the California Redwood Company subsidiary of the Green Diamond Resource Co.

During these working and retirement years many days were spent fishing on the Mad River in an effort to outsmart that elusive steelhead trout. I especially enjoyed hunting locally with my long-time hunting partners primarily in the Maple Creek area as well as making several hunting trips to Oregon, Montana and Idaho. With my wife Karen, of 28 years, we traveled to many places in the U.S attending golf tournaments, motorcycle races, various types of auto racing, quilt shows, air shows and simply taking in natures beauty. We also enjoyed spending time at our place in Willow Creek, with its four definite seasons you could experience all weather conditions and to top it off we had great neighbors. Having grown up with a father and two older brothers who were always working on cars or motorcycles, I too inherited those traits. After “tinkering” with many vehicles throughout the years I subsequently ended completely disassembling a 1935 Ford coupe and then rebuilt and modernized all of its operating systems making it into a fairly nice, bright purple street rod which I still love to take for rides with country, rock or pop music blasting away on the cassette player.

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As family members looked over this recount of Chuck’s life there are some things he left out. One thing in particular and as Karen often said, he was a “cat whisperer”, if he was working on any project there was usually a cat right there, “helping” with his current project. There were many special cats throughout the years and they all left paw prints on his heart.

Charlie is survived by his wife Karen Peterson, brother and sister-in-law Jim and Rita Peterson, sister Gayle Bear, sister in-law Rachel and her husband Rick Fusi and too many nieces, nephews and cousins to list. He was predeceased by his parents Aaron and Mabel Peterson, grandparents Harry and Annie Light, Milford Peterson, older brother Jerry Peterson, sister-in-law Sharron Peterson and niece Terri Peterson. Also, aunt Dorothy (Light) Anderson and her husband Runar, uncles Andrew James Light (KIA in WWII), Roy Light and his wife Lee, Richard Light and his wife Margie, and cousin Robert Miller who was a dear friend since childhood and most likely as infants they laid side by side while their mothers changed their diapers. Robert was also a partner in just about all of his activities in one way or another.

We would like to thank Doug & Judy White and Don and Barbara Darst for the support they have given us through this process.

At his request no services will be held. He had a great life but not a complicated one, so in the end he wished to keep things simple as well. He’ll be laid to rest at the Greenwood Cemetery in Arcata in the Light family plot. In memoriam, plan a family get together and discuss your family history with the younger generations. As he stated, most of us realize in later life that we should have listened more carefully to our parents and grandparents when they were explaining their family history and life experiences when they were growing up. And if anyone desires, in lieu of flowers you can contribute to a local animal shelter, that would be “pawsome”!

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