Mitchel “Mitch” O. Morrow was brought into this world January 30, 1954 and left this world February 20, 2024 at the age of 70. Mitch was raised a majority of his life in Carlotta. He attended Fortuna High School and graduated in 1973.

After graduation he continued to support the Fortuna Huskies by helping with coaching and attending multiple sports events. He worked for Carlotta and Scotia sawmills.

Mitch enjoyed spending time and sharing his passion for hunting with his friends and only child, Logan, in Ruth. When he wasn’t hunting, you could find Mitch volunteering at many events throughout the county. He was a longtime member of the Moose Lodge. He also enjoyed bowling with his friends and winning multiple trophies.

He was a kind man who loved to tell his stories to everyone he met. He was always willing to help others the best that he could. He will be missed by so many. His memory will remain bright with everyone that knew him.

Mitch was preceded in death by his parents, Belva “Jean” and Grady Morrow. He is survived by his son and daughter-in-law Logan and Melissa Morrow; his grandkids Bryan, Camrin, Elektra and Kymbur; sister and brother-in-law Terry and Tim Wilson, niece Jammie, nephew Timmy, great-nephew Michael, and great-nieces Autumn and Kaitelynn.

A celebration of life will be held at the Rio Dell Fire Hall on August 10, time TBD, and the family is asking everyone to please bring a side dish and a story of Mitch. Please reach out to Logan (707-496-5858) or Melissa (707-496-5857) with any further questions.

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The obituary above was submitted on behalf of Mitch Morrow’s loved ones. The Lost Coast Outpost runs obituaries of Humboldt County residents at no charge. See guidelines here.

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The Arcata Planning Commission on Tuesday approved a final draft of the Gateway Area Plan, the city’s long-range planning effort to make way for high-density housing and mixed-use development on underutilized land on the west side of town — north of Samoa Boulevard and west of K Street. The plan will be sent to the Arcata City Council for final approval in the coming months.

“This is a major milestone in this process,” Arcata Community Development Director David Loya said during Tuesday’s meeting. “We’ve been working on the General Plan [and] Gateway code for seven, close to eight years now – from a concept to where we are now.”

The commission’s action came in the form of two resolutions: one certifying the Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR) for the Gateway Area Plan and another updating the 2045 General Plan and Gateway Code. The action was approved in a 5-1 vote, with Commissioner Abigail Strickland dissenting and Commissioner Daniel Tagney absent.

During a brief presentation on the findings of the FEIR, Loya said the document had identified “unmitigated impacts” to historic resources and air quality in the Gateway Area, but said such impacts would be addressed in the city’s Statement of Overriding Considerations.

“Any large project that’s contributing particulate matter is going to have a significant environmental impact,” he said. “What a Statement of [Overriding] Considerations allows you to do is to say, even though there’s this unmitigated impact, the social benefit that we garner from approving the project outweighs the environmental impact, and so we’re going to go ahead and make findings to do that.”

During the public comment portion of the meeting, a few community members asked the planning commission to pump the brakes on the Gateway Area Plan to give local agencies and residents more time to look over the final EIR, which was released for public review on May 10. 

Another commenter, Arcata resident Fred Wise, said there are “dozens of errors” in the Gateway Code, including one section about inclusionary zoning. “It has the information from … before you and the council came up with numbers,” he said. “These can all be fixed, [and] they have to be fixed.”

Following public comment, Commissioner Peter Lehman said he was under the impression that the section on inclusionary zoning was correct. The language was previously approved by the commission, Loya said, but the city council had since decided to pull the section out of the Gateway Code and add it to the Land Use Code “because it will apply citywide.”

Speaking to concerns that the city has not provided enough time for the public review process, Commission Chair Scott Davies emphasized that the city has had “more than 100 meetings about this project, [and] many, many hundreds of hours of discussion.”

“Whatever else people may think about how this process has evolved, it has certainly not been [a] rushed or a quick process,” he continued. “I can personally attest to that.”

After a bit of additional discussion, Commissioner Joel Yodowitz made a motion to approve staff’s recommendation to certify the FEIR and approve the update to the General Plan and Gateway Code, with a small amendment to remove the following paragraph from page 31 of the code:

Inclusionary Zoning. For projects with 30 dwelling units or more, the project provides a minimum of 4 percent of the units affordable to very low income households or 9 percent of the units affordable to low or moderate income households as defined in Chapter 9.100 (Definitions). Moderate income units shall be for sale units consistent with State Density Bonus Law. 

The motion was approved 5-1.

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The Arcata City Council will review the proposed changes to the Gateway Area Plan and Gateway Code at tonight’s regular meeting – agenda here – but the council is not expected to make a final decision on the plan until July. 

The council will hold a public hearing on May 29 to consider the adoption of the FEIR and the Statement of Overriding Concern. At another public hearing on July 17, the council will consider final approval of the Gateway Area Plan.

Above: The boundaries of the Gateway Area. Zoom in and around if you like.

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The development of a floating wind energy installation 21 miles off the Humboldt County coastline could wind up being the most significant industrial project in our region’s history. It’s a key component of the Biden administration’s Energy Earthshots initiative, which seeks to address the climate crisis through a variety of investments and innovations in clean energy production over the coming decade.

But what will it mean for us here in Humboldt County?

That’s the question addressed in the latest episode of “Reimagining Rural,” a podcast series produced by nonprofit public policy think tank the Brookings Institution.

Host Tony Pipa recently visited our shores, and over the course of the nearly hour-long episode he speaks with a cross-section of locals, including Humboldt County supervisors Natalie Arroyo and Rex Bohn, Economic Development Director Scott Adair, Hoopa Valley Public Utilities District General Manager Linnea Jackson, county Planning Commissioner/Cal Poly Humboldt INRSEP+ Coordinator Lonyx Landry and more. 

The episode reflects on our region’s long history of resource extraction and exploitation, and the panel of local sources discusses efforts to ensure that doesn’t happen this time around. Those efforts include the Redwood Region Climate and Community Resilience (CORE) Hub, a coalition of local stakeholders aiming to reach community benefits agreements with the wind energy developers who will soon be our neighbors.

You can listen to the episode via Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Over the next few weeks, Lost Coast Communications — the Outpost’s parent company — will be doing some work in conjunction with the California Department of Health and Human Services’ “Never a Bother” campaign, which exists to help teens and young adults recognize their power to make a difference in the lives of people experiencing crisis. And also to remind those people that they are never a bother.

Radio hosts from our four sister stations — KHUM, KSLG, KWPT and KLGE — will be talking to local people whose work and whose presence in our community exemplifies this mission, and we’ll be sharing those interviews here on the Outpost.

First up: Chuck Rogers of KWPT (“The Point”) recently had the good fortune to sit down with the wonderful Florence Parks, executive director of the local chapter of Big Brothers Big Sisters and general all-around mover/shaker in Eureka, especially in kid-related matters.

What has Parks learned about being there for kids experiencing suicidal thoughts or other types of mental health crises? What kinds of resources does Big Brothers Big Sisters have to offer?

“Young people, what we’ve learned is they need five positive adults in their lives to thrive,” Parks says. “So that could be a great mom and dad and a grandparent, maybe an auntie or uncle, but maybe that fifth person just isn’t there in tune to what they need. And so a formal program like ours offers that opportunity to families.”

Below: Chuck and Florence. Funding for this project comes in part from the California Department of Health and Human Services.

Everyone seems to agree that Arcata’s population is going to grow. The Arcata School District is wondering if it needs to update its two main campuses to accommodate a future enrollment spike. But at the moment, it doesn’t have the money to do so.

The district could start collecting developer fees, a one-time charge to builders of new homes and commercial buildings located in the school district, paid during the permitting process. That funding would be for updating and expanding schools to accommodate the new students who would be a direct result of new development. So, for instance, if a new subdivision brings a few dozen school-age children into the area, the local elementary school district would be ready to absorb them. 

Most school districts in California collect these funds, including Eureka City Schools and other local districts. Citing upcoming development in Arcata – like the Sorrel Place Project, Gateway Area Plan, and Cal Poly Humboldt expansion – Arcata School District Superintendent Luke Biesecker told the Outpost that the district has been considering collecting these development fees for a while. At the moment, there is no urgent need: In March, Arcata voters passed Measure B, awarding the district $12.5 million in bonds. But the idea did percolate to the surface at a meeting this week.

On Monday, the Arcata School District board considered a resolution to levy a fee of $3.11 per square foot of residential development and $0.50 per square foot of commercial development. If, as predicted, 375 new homes are built in the next five years, these fees would amount to more than a million dollars, according to a justification study the company SchoolWorks completed for the district. 

The few community members and builders who commented at Monday’s meeting said that the district would be asking too much.

“Developers will be forced to pass on the additional cost to homebuyers or tenants, further contributing to housing affordability challenges,” said a representative of Adams Commercial General Contracting. 

Kyle Boughton, owner of North Star Development, suggested that families would be pushed out of the district due to higher living costs, decreasing enrollment rather than increasing it. He also speculated that most new housing in Arcata will be rented to incoming Cal Poly Humboldt students who might not have school-age kids. 

The City of Arcata seems to be of two minds about the fee. “While the City has concerns regarding how this fee will affect much needed housing production, we also understand the need to ensure revenue to support critical programs and education,” Arcata Mayor Meredith Matthews wrote in a letter to the school board.

“The City requests that prior to your final consideration to enact a developer fee that you attend and share the District’s vision for this fee with the community at a City Council meeting. This opportunity would allow the District to explain why this fee is preferable to a bond/parcel tax measure, the necessity for the funds, the process that you will use to calculate and collect the fees and how you propose to communicate these transactions with the City to best serve the developers in our City.”

Sarah Kollman, a lawyer whose firm represents the North Coast Home Builders Association, suggested on Monday that the district’s intended use for the funds might be unlawful. This interpretation may be based on the five-year parameter of the SchoolWorks study, which identified the need to modernize existing facilities to accommodate a predicted 5-year increase of 55 students, rather than build new buildings. Kollman said that her understanding of the law was that development fees cannot be used for maintenance.

“The law around the imposition of developer fees is very clear, that developer fees cannot be used to address deferred maintenance and long-term maintenance items,” Kollman said. “For a school district, they have to be directly tied to increased student capacity and an additional level of service.”

Biesecker later told the Outpost that despite the SchoolWorks study’s time frame, the district is looking beyond the next five years. “Looking long-term, our concern has been mostly with the potential need for new facilities,” he said. 

On Monday, the board decided to table the item for now, with plans to consult legal counsel next month and attend a city council meeting in the meantime. School districts don’t legally need city or county approval to levy developer fees.

If the Arcata School District does ultimately charge a fee, it might enter an agreement with the Northern Humboldt Union High School District to split funds. If they did, builders would probably pay $5.17 per square foot of residential development and $0.84 per square foot commercial development, which is the maximum amount districts can currently charge for developer fees (this number adjusts every two years to reflect inflation).  

For now, no action. But that could change soon. 

“At some point I think the board’s serious about this,” Biesecker said on Monday. “But there’s a timing element, and knowing that it’s the right time for students and the community I think is important.”

The first $3.3 billion of bonds approved by voters in March to build and rehab housing and treatment beds for people with mental illness will be available to counties months ahead of schedule, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday.

And counties, he emphasized repeatedly, had better get to work.

“You’re either part of the problem or you’re not. Period,” he said at a press conference in front of Cordilleras Mental Health Center, in Redwood City.

“Let’s move out of the way. Let’s do the right thing. And let’s have the sense of urgency that people in the state of California demand.”

The funding, slated to come online July 1, is more than half of the $6.4 billion in bond money promised under Proposition 1, one of Newsom’s signature mental health initiatives. Prop. 1 also requires that counties spend more of their existing mental health funds on people who are chronically homeless. Despite early expectations that it would sail through, Prop. 1 barely squeaked by.

The announcement comes at a politically tricky moment for Newsom, who last week announced more than $30 billion in one-time and ongoing cuts as he seeks to close a sizable state budget deficit.

Newsom noted Tuesday that his administration is rolling out the money much faster than has been the case with past bonds, including a similar measure known as No Place Like Home. The process of distributing the funds for that $2 billion 2018 housing bond took years, and has yielded much less housing than voters were promised.

Prop. 1 comes coupled with several other major mental health initiatives, including conservatorship reform and CARE Court.

The announcement was part victory lap for Newsom and part frustrated exhortation of the counties to move faster.

“It’s time to do your job. It’s time to get things done. You asked for these reforms. We’ve provided them. Now it’s time to deliver,” he said.

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The CalMatters Ideas Festival takes place June 5-6! Find out more and get your tickets at this link.

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

Two state bills would allow public colleges and universities to hire undocumented students, which is currently barred by federal law. The proposals are based on a legal theory that the law doesn’t apply to state agencies. colle

In January, the University of California Board of Regents broke the hearts of undocumented students by halting a proposal to allow them to work on campus. A few days later, David Alvarez had a plan.

The Democratic assemblymember from Chula Vista huddled with student organizers and decided to draft a bill to compel the UC, as well as the community colleges and California State University, to do what the UC regents would not.

Federal law prohibits employers from hiring anyone who is undocumented, but Alvarez’s Assembly Bill 2586 says California’s public colleges and universities should be exempt and allowed to hire undocumented students for on-campus jobs. The approach rests on an untested legal theory backed by law scholars at UCLA and 27 other prominent academics. It’s based on the argument that a pivotal federal employment law from 1986 doesn’t apply to state agencies, including public colleges and universities.

Assemblymember Sabrina Cervantes, a Corona Democrat and chair of the California Latino Legislative Caucus, has introduced a similar bill addressing just the UC that, if passed, would be taken to CA voters in the form of a ballot measure.

Both bills are priorities of the Latino Caucus.

“We wouldn’t have to do this if the federal government actually did their job and passed immigration reform,” said Alvarez in an interview with CalMatters.

Instead of working on-campus jobs like their peers, undocumented students must seek employment as independent contractors or find under-the-table jobs, where some students say labor exploitation is rampant. If Alvarez’s bill prevails, an estimated 60,000 undocumented students could benefit.

Last May, the UC Board of Regents promised to study the plan to allow undocumented students to work. In January, the regents reversed course, voting 10 to 6 to delay any implementation by a year. The decision gutted student advocates, who sobbed in the public meeting space, castigated the regents and reverted to an agonizing square one in which they lacked the legal right to work.

Assemblymember David Alvarez on the floor during the end session at the state Capitol in Sacramento on Sept. 14, 2023. Photo by Rahul Lal for CalMatters

Alvarez’s bill cleared its first hurdle in April, but it faces a bigger test tomorrow during an opaque legislative process known as the suspense file, in which members of the appropriations committee decide in relative secrecy whether bills with a price tag advance or die.

A committee analysis says the bill could cost California a few million dollars to implement these hiring changes and to handle the legal fees, should someone decide to sue a college or university for hiring undocumented students. Those costs could become a large obstacle as the state battles multi-year budget deficits in the tens of billions of dollars.

How much of an impact the bill would have on undocumented students is an open question: Most students — regardless of their immigration status — work off campus. Federal law is clear that private employers must follow the employment ban. The bills by Alvarez and Cervantes do not extend to the many other state agencies where undocumented students could work after graduation and earn competitive wages.

‘It is not fair’

For Alvarez, the bill is a continuation of California’s commitment to make college affordable for undocumented students. Already the state extends tuition waivers, grants and loans to these students, but they’re barred from receiving federal dollars. A campus job would allow them to cover the difference when financial aid falls short; it would help them with major expenses like housing, transportation and food.

“I’m out here fighting for the right to be given the opportunity to apply to a job on campus,” said Karely Amaya Rios in April to a panel of lawmakers. The 23-year-old is a graduate student at UCLA and has a pending job offer from a professor to help him write a book and teach his immigrant rights courses. Though she’s lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years, she’s undocumented and ineligible for the job. “It is not fair,” she said.

Rios previously told CalMatters that she cobbles together enough money to cover rent and food costs by babysitting and selling clothes at a swap meet with her mother. She also receives some scholarships and stipends.

“I fear that all of you do not understand how disappointing and gut-wrenching it feels to be denied my humanity and my right to access the same opportunities as my peers,” added Fatima Zeferino, an undocumented Cal State Long Beach student, at the April hearing.

Cervantes’ proposed constitutional amendment would target just the UC, a potentially necessary move because the UC is constitutionally independent. The Legislature’s bills can rarely force the system to do something.

Still, Alvarez’s office believes the UC “would be bound” by his bill, his district director, Lisa Schmidt, wrote in an email. She added that “even if it were not formally bound it would comply with the law once the Cal State and (community colleges) were doing so.”

Why public colleges are worried

The UC isn’t formally opposed to the bill, but its government relations office wrote a letter to lawmakers warning the bill could expose UC hiring managers to civil and criminal prosecution and jeopardize the billions of dollars in federal research grants the university receives. Alvarez bristled at one objection the UC raised: that the bill as law could expose “undocumented students and their families to the possibility of criminal prosecution or deportation.” He called that “borderline offensive to students” who already have to navigate the legal complexities of their immigration status outside of school.

Alvarez cited his own experience as a child born in the U.S. living in fear of what would happen to his undocumented parents. They were eventually granted legal status through the same 1986 federal law that now bars undocumented residents from working.

Hovering in plain sight is the concern that a potential Trump White House would wage an aggressive legal attack on the university. It would potentially repeat a judicial system showdown that saw the university successfully sue to block Trump’s attempts to end job protections for undocumented workers who came to the country when they were young. That previous legal saga involved the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, but federal courts have since halted the federal government’s ability to accept new applications.

“I fear that all of you do not understand how disappointing and gut-wrenching it feels to be denied my humanity and my right to access the same opportunities as my peers.”
— Fatima Zeferino, undocumented Cal State Long Beach student

The UC Office of the President never appeared persuaded by the legal argument put forward by the UCLA scholars. It sought outside legal opinion, and the conclusion was that the plan wouldn’t be “legally viable,” a regent told CalMatters in January.

UC’s April letter to legislators underscored that worry: “However, after receiving advice from both inside and outside legal counsel, we concluded that there were considerable risks for the University and the students we aim to support.”

Ahilan Arulanantham, one of the two UCLA legal scholars behind the theory that state agencies are exempt from the federal rule barring undocumented residents from working, sought to assure lawmakers in April that no hiring manager could be prosecuted if universities began hiring undocumented students.

“The risk that people would actually be criminally prosecuted for following state law is, in my view, vanishingly small,” he said then. “And we’re not aware of any example where people have been criminally prosecuted by the federal government for following a law that they were required to follow as a matter of the state.”

“After receiving advice from both inside and outside legal counsel, we concluded that there were considerable risks for the University and the students we aim to support.”
— Letter of the University of California to the Legislature on April 2024

More likely is that the state would be sued and the matter would play out in courts, Arulanantham said. “If the universities lost that lawsuit and they still kept trying to hire people, of course that would present a different question.”

The state’s attorney general would defend the campuses in those suits, Alvarez said. The press office of the attorney general wouldn’t comment on Arulanantham’s legal argument or whether the attorney general would defend the campuses in a possible suit.

Cal State has issued no position, though it reiterated another point the UC made: The bill “could have consequences on the federal aid the CSU and our students receive,” wrote Amy Bentley-Smith, a spokesperson for Cal State. The fear isn’t unfounded. When the UC system weighed the issue, Republican Congressman Darell Issa wrote a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom asking that he “please inform Congress how the system intends to refund its current federal funding, as well as provide a detailed estimate of the fiscal impact to students by foregoing future federal assistance.”

Can community college students benefit?

While the legal risk of the bill looms large, the impact of the legislation on undocumented students may be limited in scope. That’s because the majority of undocumented students attend community college. The Cal State system has fewer undocumented students, and the UC campuses have the least, according to estimates from each system.

Yet community college students are the least likely to work on-campus jobs. When they do work, only 7% of them have a campus job, according to an analysis provided by California Student Aid Commission. The rates are higher at Cal State and UC campuses, where 16% of working students at Cal State and about half of working students at the UC are employed on campus.

Many community college students work full time in the private sector, whereas campus jobs typically restrict students to no more than 20 hours a week. The hourly limit comes from research that says working more hurts students’ grades.

Over the past six years, Jerry Reyes has studied at Reedley College, just south of Fresno, though he left at various points. He’s undocumented and ineligible for DACA, which offers temporary work permits for undocumented youth.

He worked anyway, taking a job at an agricultural packaging house, where he made around $15 an hour. They “didn’t really ask” about his immigration status, he said.

Better jobs are hard to find, he said. “I just ignore potential opportunities because I know they’re just going to turn me away because of my status.”

After a brief stint at San Francisco State, he returned to Reedley College, where he’s pursuing a new major in business administration and serving as a trustee on the community college district’s board. The position is supposed to pay $375 per month, but he said the district won’t compensate him because of his immigration status.

“It’s frustrating,” Reyes said, to watch others get paid for student jobs when he does the same amount of work. He supports Alvarez’s bill but he wants a broader solution too. “A lot of these (undocumented) students don’t work campus jobs,” he said, “and even the jobs they take don’t pay as well.”

Alvarez said he’d consider future legislation to open job opportunities in other sectors too, but not before passing this legislation. “Look, this is already a heavy lift,” he said. “It’s not going to be easy.”

Adam Echelman covers California’s community colleges in partnership with Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education.

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The CalMatters Ideas Festival takes place June 5-6! Find out more and get your tickets at this link.

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