Last night, incident commanders and personnel working the Hill Fire hosted a community meeting at the Willow Creek Bible Church to provide updates on the blaze that began July 15.

As of last night, the fire was 7,050 acres at 14% containment, according to Operations Section Chief Kerri Williamson.

The outlook provided was largely positive, but presenters stressed that July is early days in the fire season. Six Rivers Forest Supervisor Ted MacArthur made clear that conditions remain toasty.

“This has been very robust fire behavior conditions for this time of year considering the type of winter we had,” he said. “It’s been hot and it’s dry and it’s still July, we’ve got several months in front of us.”

The first presentation of the night was an operational update from Deputy Operations Section Chief Loren Monsen, who said the southern end of the fire has been “holding”; the western border, moving up toward Spike Buck Mountain, is looking “really good”; and the fire’s northern border is also holding and looking really good.

After Monsen, Williamson spoke about a half-acre spot fire yesterday evening near the fire’s northeast boundary and trees that ignited Tuesday on the eastern front that resulted in spread toward Sugarloaf Mountain. Williamson said helicopters and aircraft carrying retardant were utilized all of yesterday in spot fire containment efforts.

Incident Meteorologist James White, whose role is to provide localized weather information and forecasts to aid strategy (which he is accomplishing in part through launching weather balloons), and Fire Behavioral Analyst Kevin Osborne then spoke on the conditions experienced thus far and gave an outlook for the next few days. 

White noted that some weather stations locally – including in Hoopa and Willow Creek – saw the highest temperatures ever recorded during the early July heatwave which, combined with lightning and strong winds, led to the fire’s early activity. 

He said that lower temperatures and more moisture are expected to help firefighters out through next week.

Osborne’s presentation concurred. He shared that while the fire danger index in the days preceding the lightning storm that ignited the blaze set all-time records, which allowed the fire to grow as fast as it did, the coming days look good. 

Like MacArthur, Osborne also noted that fire conditions remain “robust” for July. 

“We’re not out of the woods yet, we’re early in the season,” he said.

Osborne also pointed out that the blaze’s positioning between Mosquito Creek and the South Fork of the Trinity River, both of which have strong winds, has presented added challenges in containment. Spot fires remain the largest concern, according to Osborne.

Fifth District County Supervisor Steve Madrone, who attended the meeting virtually, chimed in to ask for a round of applause for the firefighters and other personnel before Unified Incident Commander Rocky Opliger closed presentations by thanking the community for the welcoming reception firefighters in town have received.

Questions from the audience that followed the presentations focused primarily on evacuation orders and structure protection. 

“We have a lot of elderly people, we have a lot of people without a lot of income that just need some help and they need to know that someone’s going to be there,” one speaker said, adding that the lack of communication he said he’s experienced around structure protection for properties under evacuation orders has been “a little disconcerting.”

Williamson explained that additional evacuation orders were put in place when the fire moved toward Sugarloaf and said that Unified Command does have a structure protection plan in place. 

The ongoing Hill Fire response is a unified Cal Fire and the Forest Service effort that currently involves 1,920 personnel.

Last night’s meeting was live streamed on Facebook, and the video can be found here.

Yes, today LoCO saw the smile-ish face in the sky too. We are community.

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UPDATE: Humboldt’s favorite pilot penman Caleb Lesher reached out to LoCO to let us know that today’s round of sky scribbles were a way to promote the upcoming Rumble Over the Redwoods airshow which takes place Aug. 10 and 11 at ACV. Consider the word spread, sir. 

PREVIOUSLY:

• (PHOTOS/VIDEO) LoCO Talked to the Pilot Who Skywrote His Way Into Humboldt’s Hearts This Morning

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In about six years time, massive floating wind turbines – nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower – could line the shores of the Samoa Peninsula.

At a special meeting on Tuesday, staff with the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District unveiled a draft simulation showing how the Humboldt Bay Offshore Wind Heavy Lift Marine Terminal – the staging and integration facility where the gigantic wind turbines components would be fully assembled – would transform our view of the bay.

The floating turbines slated for the Humboldt Wind Energy Area, located roughly 20 miles west of Eureka, would be among the largest in the world, according to Harbor District Development Director Rob Holmlund. Each turbine tower would be mounted on a floating triangular platform, itself measuring 100 feet tall and up to 425 feet long per side. The turbine would stand at roughly 1,000 feet – about the size of the Eiffel Tower – from the ocean surface to its wing tips. Each blade is as long as a football field. 

“These are the dimensions of the turbines that you’ll see in the simulation,” Holmlund said at Tuesday’s meeting. “We decided to go with a more conservative approach and simulate a more significant potential impact. … The most important dimension here is the floating foundation. You really can’t get any bigger with our project than 425 feet inside of that triangle. … There may be future simulations where you see something smaller, but it’s unlikely that you’ll see simulations bigger than what we’re about to show you.”

Out of 137 potential simulation locations around Humboldt Bay, Harbor District staff narrowed it down to six to “represent different orientations and distances,” Holmlund said. The simulation includes views from the Eureka Waterfront at Livin’ the Dream Ice Cream, the parking lot at the Arcata Marsh, Manila Park on the north end of the Samoa Peninsula, the USS Milwaukee Memorial directly across State Route 255 from the project site, Fort Humboldt State Park and Table Bluff County Park.

Holmlund clicked through each simulation, as seen in the video below, starting with a current view of the project site. With each click a red crane appeared, then a turbine under construction and, finally, a completed turbine. A woman in the audience could be heard whispering, “This makes me sick.”

“It’s important to note that a sunny day is needed for you to see this project from a particular distance,” Holmlund said. “Another thing to consider: throughout the vast majority of Eureka and Arcata you won’t be able to see this project because of buildings. … The general rule of thumb is if you can see the smokestack, you’ll be able to see the project.”

Once the heavy-lift terminal is fully operational, which could be as soon as late 2029, Holmlund said the facility would have the capacity to assemble two turbines per week. The turbines will hang out in wet storage for an undetermined amount of time until they’re ready to be towed out to sea. 

“From there [the turbines] can either go to Morro Bay, Oregon, or the Humboldt lease areas,” Holmlund said. “Once it leaves Humboldt Bay, that’s the end of our part of the project.”

Holmlund noted several times during his presentation that the simulation was preliminary and subject to change. For example, this simulation did not depict the district’s plans for wet storage.

During the Q&A period, several community members asked about the lifespan of the project and whether it would be rendered useless once the wind turbines were assembled.

“With California’s offshore renewable energy goals, as well as Oregon and Washington, it’s likely that there will be multiple decades of construction of wind turbines [in Humboldt Bay],” Holmlund said. In addition, wind turbines that are already out in the ocean will need to be towed back into the bay periodically for maintenance. “It will be an ongoing project. … It can also be used for other projects in the future.”

Others asked what the Harbor District is doing to mitigate the noise associated with the project. “Will [the facility] be operating 24 hours a day?” one audience member asked. “When forklifts are operating they make that ‘beep, beep, beep’ noise when they’re backing up. I want to hear about that.”

In short: It’s a work in progress.

Holmlund

“It is possible that the project could be 24/7 operations,” Holmlund said. “We are evaluating sound walls to minimize sound impacts. We are also holding a number of neighborhood-specific meetings with people who live been close by … . And yes, the industrial facility will have backup beepers. We’re still conducting noise studies, and that’ll be part of what we’ll release in a couple of months.”

Audience members also brought up concerns about soil testing and the “toxic sludge” buried deep in the bay. Holmlund said the district will take samples of the dredge material, which will be sent off to various regulatory agencies for “complex chemical analysis,” but emphasized that the project will not require the district to deepen or widen existing channels in the bay.

“If there is contaminated material … then it has to be disposed of at a special landfill, but we’re not anticipating that,” he continued. “To my knowledge, there haven’t been any large dredging events in Humboldt Bay that were heavily contaminated. I’m not an expert on that but we have a world-class consultant specialized in that work.”

Someone else in the audience asked if the entire project would be scrapped if former President Donald Trump were to win the upcoming election. On several occasions, Trump has said he would stop federally-led offshore wind development projects “on day one” of his presidency.

“Could a different president alter the trajectory of this? Probably,” Holmlund said. “California is still going to have its renewable energy goals, but the federal grants that we got [could] be rescinded by a change in the administration. It’s a possibility but climate change isn’t going to stop and we have to find some sort of renewable energy path forward.”

During the public comment portion of the meeting, several audience members asked the Harbor District to pump the brakes on the project. 

“I think you’re going too fast on this, and when you go to fast, things can happen,” said former Wiyot Tribal Chair Ted Hernandez, who noted that he was speaking as a Wiyot man, not as a member of the tribal council. “You don’t know what’s going to happen 20 years from now, you don’t know what’s going to happen to our bay, but I have to protect it because of Tuluwat. That’s our home. And when we’re doing ceremony, I don’t want to see these big towers overhead because then our prayers won’t get answered and lifted up to Creator. … I think there needs to be more studies before we push this forward.”

Others expressed concern that Humboldt County is just being used as a “guinea pig” for offshore international offshore wind developers. Some spoke to the greater issue of climate change and the need for a diverse array of renewable energy resources. 

Socha

“In the United States, we burn a billion tons of coal every year. Every single year. That translates into over three million tons of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere,” said local resident Matthew Socha. “Coal is absolutely the dirtiest, worst, most poisonous form of electricity we’re producing. Anything we can do to take a bite out of that [industry] is going to be helpful. … It will take a combination of things and different alternative resources. This [project] is a part of the puzzle.”

Matt Simmons, a climate attorney with the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), acknowledged that there are many, many questions surrounding the port project and offshore wind development as a whole. “Everyone is still learning.”

“I think it’s actually super helpful and important that we’re having these visualizations so early in this process to help us learn as much as we can about this project,” he said. “I’m hearing a lot of questions from everyone about offshore wind, and you’re not alone. It’s different.”

EPIC, in partnership with the Redwood Region Climate and Community Resilience (CORE) Hub and the Humboldt Waterkeeper, recently launched a website to help answer some of the community’s questions about offshore wind development. Simmons urged attendees to check it out. “I’m not saying you have to support or oppose the project. What I’m saying is let’s all get educated.”

Check out the video below for Holmlund’s full presentation. More information on the heavy-lift marine terminal project can be found here.

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• (VIDEO) Aircraft Crashes Near Kneeland Airport, Sparking Fire
• Two Killed in Kneeland Plane Crash, Sheriff’s Office Confirmed; Additional Details Released

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Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

The Humboldt County Coroner’s Office has confirmed the identities of two deceased individuals following the fatal plane crash that took place near the Kneeland Airport around 11:15 a.m. on Tuesday, July 23.

The Cessna’s pilot has been identified as that of 49-year-old Gabriel Joshua Kulp of Grass Valley, Calif. The passenger, a helicopter mechanic, has been identified as 60-year-old Thomias Edward Smith of Carmichael, Calif. At this time, only these two bodies have been recovered from the wreckage.

Next of kin has been notified. An autopsy will be completed in the coming days to confirm cause of death. The cause of the crash remains under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The NTSB can be contacted at (202) 314-6000.

The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office extends our deepest condolences to the families of those lost in this tragic accident.

Gov. Gavin Newsom today ordered state agencies to remove homeless camps throughout California, his first major show of force since the Supreme Court granted state and local authorities more power to clear encampments.

Newsom’s executive order mandates that state agencies and departments adopt policies to clear camps on state property. It also encourages local governments to do the same.

“This executive order directs state agencies to move urgently to address dangerous encampments while supporting and assisting the individuals living in them — and provides guidance for cities and counties to do the same,” Newsom said in a news release. “The state has been hard at work to address this crisis on our streets. There are simply no more excuses. It’s time for everyone to do their part.”

The move comes almost a month after the U.S. Supreme Court upended six years of protections for residents of homeless encampments in California and other western states. Previously, cities were prohibited from punishing people for sleeping outside if they had nowhere else to go. As a result, local courts ordered several cities, including San Francisco, to halt or pause encampment sweeps.

Reversing that precedent in Grants Pass v. Johnson, the justices last month found it is not unconstitutional for a city to ban homeless encampments, even if there is no shelter available. The ruling, which Newsom cheered, gives city leaders broad authority to crack down on camps.

Per Newsom’s new order, state agencies are to model their encampment policies around one that Caltrans has used for several years to remove camps on highway on and off ramps, under overpasses and on other land maintained by the transit agency. State agencies should warn residents at least 48 hours before clearing a camp. They also are required to store residents’ belongings for at least 60 days, and to request services for displaced residents from local organizations. If an encampment poses an “imminent threat” to life, health, safety or infrastructure, the agency can remove a camp immediately.

Caltrans has cleared 11,188 encampments since July 2021, according to the governor’s office. Newsom has personally attended some of those cleanups, wearing a baseball hat and gloves to help pick up trash left behind.

But Caltrans has faced backlash for the way it handles encampment cleanups. In 2020, the agency agreed to pay $5.5 million to settle a lawsuit that accused it of destroying property belonging to homeless Alameda County residents.

Newsom took a softer tone with local governments, urging them to voluntarily adopt policies similar to the one used by Caltrans. He also promised the state, via the California Interagency Council on Homelessness, will provide guidance and technical assistance to help local leaders set up programs.

It’s unclear how the order will be enforced, and whether there will be any penalties for cities and counties that don’t ramp up efforts to clear homeless camps. Newsom could withhold funding from local governments that he feels are not meeting his expectations, as he’s done in the past. In 2022, he briefly rescinded $1 billion from cities and counties after accusing them of failing to take big enough steps to reduce homelessness.

CalMatters has requested additional details from the governor’s office regarding the scope of his executive order and how it will be enforced, and will update this story with more information.

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

In November, voters in Eureka will decide whether to scrap a housing development plan that was approved by California housing regulators in 2020 — and, in the process, risk thumbing their noses at Sacramento.

City planners in the Humboldt County town have spent years figuring out how to lay the ground for nearly 1,000 new units by the end of the decade, a quota they’ve been assigned by California’s Housing and Community Development Department. A key pillar of the city’s plan is to convert a dozen of the city’s public parking lots into affordable housing projects.

That big idea triggered a local political firestorm over the proposed housing, the loss of parking and the very future of Eureka. Hence the November ballot measure, which would slap costly new parking requirements on those proposed lot-to-home conversion projects and direct development to an abandoned middle school on the far end of town.

The fight over Eureka’s parking lots is distinctly Eureka in many of its details, but the broad contours of the story are familiar. Over the last half decade, state lawmakers have passed dozens of new laws requiring local elected officials to approve more housing, whether they want to or not. Regulators and the state’s Department of Justice have grown increasingly unyielding. Lawsuits in Huntington Beach and La Cañada Flintridge and legal settlements in Fullerton and Coronado speak to the new regulatory reality.

What makes the housing kerfuffle in Eureka unusual is that it’s not local elected leaders who are contesting state regulations. In November, it could be the voters themselves who give the state-sanctioned plan the boot.

If they do, that could put the city in unsettled legal waters. As more state-imposed housing deadlines creep up, other California cities may soon find themselves similarly adrift.

Mixed messaging from the courts

For decades, California slow-growth advocates have used the citizen initiative process to hold back the tide of unwelcome development. An analysis published by a Bay Area think tank and development advocacy organization, SPUR, identified 208 successful local initiatives that restricted housing construction between 1973 and 2023.

Eureka occupies a special place in that history. In 1949, city officials voted to use federal funding to build “low-rent” housing reserved for veterans. The local backlash spawned a statewide campaign that ultimately added Article 34 to the state constitution, a provision that gives local voters veto power over new public housing projects. Seventy five years later, housing advocates still haven’t managed to expunge that provision from state law.

But the political sway of the anti-development voting bloc may have started to wane. Since 2022, majorities in Menlo Park, Laguna Beach, Santa Cruz, Costa Mesa and Nevada City have either rejected anti-development measures or passed initiatives to roll back prior ones.

If Eureka voters buck that recent trend and turn out to preserve the parking lots, recent judicial precedent doesn’t offer a clear view of what might happen.

Judges have ruled that when local restrictions — even those passed by popular vote — make it impossible to abide by state housing requirements, the state laws tend to win out. But in cases where local restrictions don’t make it impossible, but simply more costly or more complicated, for cities to follow state decrees, guidance from the courts has been inconsistent.

Encinitas, in San Diego County, has been ground zero of this judicial confusion. The city has a law on the books requiring voter approval of any major change to housing and land use policy. When in 2016 the city put its state-mandated housing development plan up for the electorate’s approval, the voters rejected it. The city tried again in 2018 and again, voters refused to cooperate.

Finally, a local judge stepped in, writing that “the Court is required to find a way out of the impasse” and let the plan go forward over the electorate’s objections. But when the city itself turned back to the court, asking it for permission to ignore the electorate for all future housing plans too, another judge refused. The first ruling, which suspended the voters’ referendum power, was evidently only a one-off — and only after the voters had given the “wrong” answer multiple times.

The politics of saying no

Such legal ambiguity has put some cities in the tough position of having to choose which law to follow and which to break.

In 2021, the city of Alameda, caught between a state requirement to permit more housing and a local ballot initiative, reaffirmed by voters in 2020, that effectively banned the construction of any apartment buildings on the island, simply decided to ignore the will of the electorate.

That conundrum is likely to crop up for cities across the state. Sausalito, across the bay from San Francisco, may have to reconsider a voter-enacted waterside development ordinance if it wants to permit construction in some of the places it told the state that it would.

And in Orange County’s Yorba Linda, where voters rejected a measure to rezone many of the parcels identified by the city as suitable for development in its housing plan, city officials are trying again, while working toward and praying for a more amenable outcome.

“The City is in the process of presenting a revised Housing Element proposal to the voters in November 2024,” said Yorba Linda spokesperson, Geoff Spencer, in an email. “This revised proposal was developed with the help of a resident working group that included residents from across Yorba Linda to come together to create a plan that their neighbors could all get behind and support.”

Elizabeth Hansburg, a pro-housing development advocate in Orange County, said Yorba Linda’s approach gives too much deference to local voters who don’t want added density in their neighborhoods.

“The city council, the planning commission, the city manager, the planning department, their actions are all bound by the courts,” she said. “But you can just get one random dude or a collection of NIMBYs with enough money to create a ballot proposition that really wreaks havoc on the whole process.”

A major change in the political dynamic over the last decade: Anti-development ballot measure writers aren’t just contending against local opponents anymore.

“You can just get one random dude or a collection of NIMBYs with enough money to create a ballot proposition that really wreaks havoc on the whole process.”
— Elizabeth Hansburg, pro-housing development advocate in Orange County

The administrations of Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta have proven themselves more willing than their predecessors to penalize cities that don’t comply with the letter of state housing law. In February, Bonta’s office entered a brief with Humboldt County Superior Court to defend Eureka’s housing plan against one of a handful of lawsuits filed by many of the same proponents of the local ballot measure. “The City is actively fulfilling state policies to facilitate much-needed housing development in precisely the areas those policies encourage to reduce environmental harm and improve livability for all Californians,” the brief reads.

With California’s top law enforcement officer on their side, opponents of the Eureka measure now have fearsome and newly credible consequences to wave before undecided voters: State litigation, funding cuts and the dreaded “builder’s remedy,” a state law that allows developers to essentially ignore local zoning restrictions in cities and counties that don’t have state-approved housing plans.

So far this year, the Housing and Community Development Department has decertified housing plans in two cities, both in the San Francisco Bay Area: Portola Valley and Saint Helena.

“The interesting question is whether the existence of the Builder’s Remedy and HCD’s willingness to decertify housing elements…changes the politics of voting for this thing,” said Chris Elmendorf, a UC Davis law professor.

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

Long before irate local business owners began descending on public meetings, before opponents filed four environmental lawsuits warning of snarled traffic and rampant crime, and before a local finance tycoon with a penchant for political controversy decided to fund a ballot measure campaign that would upend everything, city officials in Eureka thought their proposal was a real no-brainer: Turn some city-owned parking lots into affordable housing.

Hugging Humboldt County’s Lost Coast some 280 miles north of San Francisco and 150 miles west of Redding, Eureka is strapped for places to live. The county has more homeless people per capita than anywhere else in the state, with a disproportionate share living on the street — a problem that’s especially conspicuous in downtown Eureka. Like every California city and county, Eureka is also on the hook under state law to scrounge up space for new housing. The downtown economy could use a little goosing too.

The parking lot-to-affordable-housing plan was supposed to tackle all those problems at once. More housing. More foot traffic downtown. A satisfied California Housing and Community Development Department. Yes, the planned developments would leave the area with more people, more cars and fewer spaces to park, but that, city officials have said, is a worthwhile trade-off.

“Truth be told, I would rather deal with a parking shortage than a housing shortage,” said current City Council member G. Mario Fernandez.

Not everyone sees it that way. A group of ticked off locals with concerns that ranged from traffic congestion to business viability to public safety to state overreach launched “Citizens for a Better Eureka.” They did so with the financial backing of magnate Robin P. Arkley II, whose company, Security National, manages property and trades in real estate debt and is one of the city’s largest employers. Shortly thereafter, many of the same activists qualified a local measure for the November ballot to scrap the city’s plan and replace it with one that would require any new housing to preserve all existing parking. Developers and the city say such a costly requirement is tantamount to a development ban. The initiative would also backfill any lost city center housing by rezoning a dilapidated former middle school on the other side of town.

The parking lot wars on California’s Lost Coast are part of a statewide trend of voters taking their gripes with state housing mandates to the ballot. Over the last half decade, state lawmakers have passed dozens of new laws requiring local elected officials to plan for more housing, whether they want to or not.

When these conflicts wind up in court — and they often do — courts have generally sided with state agencies.

But in Eureka, the political stars are aligned a bit differently. This is not a wealthy suburb in which elected officials are vowing to resist what they see as overreaching state bureaucrats. Eureka city officials are on the same page as the state housing department in wanting to see more dense housing downtown, parking be damned. It’s the voters, this November, who will have the opportunity to slam on the brakes.

Whether the ballot initiative, called Measure F, would actually put the city at odds with state law is an unsettled debate, one that’s now playing out as dueling political soundbites as the election approaches.

That makes the local ballot fight more than a mere turf battle over a few lots. In a spat between business and property owners, current and former elected officials, environmentalists, state regulators and a human lightning rod in the form of a local loan mogul, it’s also a story about who has the ultimate say over what a town looks like.

“I think that a lot of this is maybe not about parking lots,” said Tom Wheeler, who runs the Environmental Protection Information Center in nearby Arcata and who supports the city’s housing plan. “Parking lots are a proxy for a larger kind of identity politics issue for what Eureka is.”

Eureka’s big idea

The fate of Eureka’s parking lots hinges on a promise that the city made to the State of California in 2019.

Once every decade, cities and counties are required to lay out plans for new housing to accommodate local population growth. In the case of Eureka, a city with some 26,000 people, officials were tasked with laying the ground for 952 new units, 378 of which have to be affordable for people earning less than $46,200.

To boost the chances of actually meeting those goals, officials opted to lease or sell city-owned land to developers. They went all in on the idea, putting nearly 90% of their state affordable unit quota on 14 public parking lots. Supporters viewed such lots as abundant and dispensable. The Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities, a local environmental nonprofit, estimated that 34% of the “developable land” in Eureka’s downtown is set aside for off-street parking.

Initially, City Manager Miles Slattery said his office didn’t hear much pushback. In 2019, staff held a series of public meetings to find out what locals want future development in the city to look like. Most participants favored the dense, high-rise, pedestrian-centric layout common to the city’s Old Town neighborhood along the waterfront.

“It was very clear that people wanted Eureka to look like what you see in Old Town,” said Slattery. “When that happened, I didn’t see any potential for anything to be a problem.”

The parking lot on 3rd Street between G and H Streets in Eureka on June 17, 2024. The lot is the site of a proposed Humboldt Transit Authority Hub that would include housing. Photo by Mark McKenna for CalMatters

The old Jacobs School site in Eureka on June 17, 2024. Eureka City Schools recently sold the school site. Photos by Mark McKenna for CalMatters

Slattery was wrong. The backlash began as soon as the city started taking solicitations for development and downtown business owners were suddenly facing the prospect of losing parking at specific sites.

The city invited property owners and tenants surrounding the lots to attend a series of initial public meetings. They were, in Slattery’s words, “a shitshow.”

The loss of parking would mean the eradication of local businesses that cater to a car-driving clientele, some said. Eurekans accessing downtown services, employees who work in adjacent Old Town and people with physical disabilities would be inconvenienced. Some said the idea of the “15-minute city” — the urban planning concept that housing, necessary businesses and services should all be reachable by foot within a quarter of an hour — was a poor fit for Humboldt County. Others claimed affordable housing would lead to more crime, a common complaint that lacks evidence.

Some locals also felt caught off guard. In April 2021, the planning commissioner offered his surprise resignation in the middle of a Zoom hearing, saying that he could not abide the city’s “minimized” public outreach efforts which amounted to “tyranny.”

“I think that a lot of this is maybe not just about parking lots”
— Tom Wheeler, Environmental Protection Information Center

A spokesperson for Linc Housing, the affordable developer that stepped up to develop the first round of lots, said it held two community meetings in 2021, conducted a survey and has since held 19 small group information sessions.

“Many, many, many, many meetings happened for this,” said Slattery. “A lot of them were commandeered by a local business owner to get their employees to come and express their concerns.”

That local business owner is Rob Arkley.

Arkley initially agreed to be interviewed for this story, but then bowed out, offering no explanation. He did not respond to further questions. But in both public comments and private conversation with elected officials and developers, Arkley expressed particular concern about the development of one lot that, he has said, more than two dozen of his Security National employees use.

When Citizens for a Better Eureka popped up to push back against the city parking lot plan, it did so with “startup funding” from Security National, according to the group’s website. Describing itself as a coalition of roughly 50 downtown businesses and property owners, the group filed four lawsuits challenging various aspects of the parking lot plan. (A fifth suit challenging a city decision to put the measure up for a vote in the November election rather than on the earlier March ballot was dismissed and the group has appealed). Each suit alleged violations of California’s signature environmental protection law, the California Environmental Quality Act.

In its case challenging the city’s overall general plan, the group, through its lawyer Bradley Johnson, argued that Eureka failed to analyze both “the traffic and transportation impacts associated with eliminating off-street public parking.” But, mirroring Arkley’s public comments, the group also raised safety concerns.

Eliminating the lots used by downtown workers will expose people “to unsafe conditions, including risk of violent crime, associated with traveling longer distances to and from parked vehicles,” the suit claimed.

With the lawsuits still pending in Humboldt County Superior Court or pending appeal, many of the same activists behind Citizens for a Better Eureka went out and gathered nearly 2,000 verified signatures to qualify a measure for the ballot. As of the most recent campaign finance report filed at the end of last year, the committee raised $290,000. All but $500 came from Security National.

A new filing is due at the end of July. Gail Rymer, who works as a spokesperson for the ballot measure campaign, Citizens for a Better Eureka and Security National, said “it’s still the case” that Security National is providing the vast majority of the funding for the Yes on Measure F campaign. “We don’t actively solicit other donations,” she said.

‘Our local Scrooge McDuck’

If you have a conversation with anyone in Eureka about the years-long parking lot kerfuffle, it’s only a matter of time before Arkley’s name pops up.

Arkley is regularly described as Eureka’s “local billionaire.” It’s difficult to verify his exact net worth and Arkley now lives part time in Louisiana. No matter, he still remains keenly interested in the local affairs of his hometown.

His wife, Cherie Arkley, is a former City Council member. The two funded a center for the performing arts that towers over downtown and which bears the Arkley name. Arkley money has also funded improvements at the zoo, at Cal Poly Humboldt and along the Eureka waterfront. For a time, he ran his own newspaper to compete with the local Times-Standard. A wealthy benefactor in a post-industrial town where patrons are in short supply, he is, in the words of the Environmental Protection Information Center’s Wheeler, “our local Scrooge McDuck.”

Critics of the ballot measure campaign are quick to dismiss the entire effort as an Arkley front-group.

“I do think that none of this would have gotten as out of control as it has if it weren’t for basically a guy with a huge amount of money throwing a massive temper tantrum,” said Colin Fiske, director of Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities.

Supporters of the ballot measure say their coalition is made up of a broad array of downtown business owners. But there’s also nothing unseemly, they argue, about a civically-minded businessman taking an interest in a matter of critical local importance.

“If the Arkleys wouldn’t have come in here and pumped the money into the community like they did, I don’t know what it would look like, but it wouldn’t look as good as it does now,” said Mike Munson, co-chair of the November ballot measure campaign, speaking of Arkley’s financial footprint in the area. “A lot of people don’t like it. I don’t know why.”

The answer is, mostly, politics.

“None of this would have gotten as out of control as it has if it weren’t for basically a guy with a huge amount of money throwing a massive temper tantrum.”
— Colin Fiske, director, Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities

A GOP donor of some national importance who has hobnobbed with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, Arkley is a poor fit for Eureka’s current political scene. “Everybody’s a Democrat in Humboldt County,” said Slattery, the city manager. “It’s just a matter of how far granola you lean.”

Arkley’s past interventions in local land use policy haven’t always endeared him to the left-leaning public, either. After Arkley purchased a defunct, overgrown railyard at the edge of downtown, Security National convinced the City Council in 2010 to put a zoning change necessary for its redevelopment on the ballot. Voters signed off on the change. A decade-and-a-half later the 43-acre “balloon track” remains a defunct, overgrown railyard.

In 2015, Eureka’s City Council passed a resolution to cede Tuluwat Island, the site of one of the most infamous massacres of native people by white Californians in state history, back to the Wiyot Tribe. Arkley publicly protested giving the public land back “to the natives” and vowed to buy it from the city first. The city went through with the land transfer to the tribe.

Finally, when the city said it planned to repurpose the downtown parking lots, including one where Security National employees regularly park, Arkley was irate. The local press reported on a profanity-laced meeting with city officials.

The Arkley Center for the Performing Arts in Eureka on June 17, 2024. Photo by Mark McKenna for CalMatters

More than two years before proponents began circulating the initiative petition, Arkley was publicly considering the idea of floating a ballot measure to stop the city’s lot-to-housing conversion plans and to relocate housing to an old school site.

“Low-income housing brings crime, period, end of discussion,” he told local talk radio host Brian Papstein in 2021. “Why don’t we pick an area of one of the schools that’s been closed? They’d have better services, they’d have shopping, the land is there.”

Researchers who have looked into the question have consistently found no evidence that affordable housing development leads to more local crime and in some cases have found the opposite.

When the city began moving forward with the plan over Arkley’s objections, Security National purchased a lot right next to city hall where city employees regularly park. He then offered to swap that lot in exchange for the one closer to Security National headquarters. The city refused. The lot now sits empty, closed to any would-be parkers by concrete barriers.

Humboldt County Supervisor Natalie Arroyo, who sat on the City Council when the parking plan was approved, said she took a meeting with a mad-as-hell Arkley in the months after the vote.

“He just wanted to let me know that I’m going to buy the parking lot next to city hall and so and so at the city is going to be sorry,” she said. “I got the sense it was more of an emotional argument and about resistance to change.”

The counter proposal

November’s ballot initiative wouldn’t ban housing on the parking lots outright. Instead, it would require any developments at any of 21 city-owned lots to preserve whatever parking is already on site and then provide additional parking for incoming residents.

For some proponents of the city’s plan, requiring so much additional parking and banning the proposed housing is a distinction without a difference. Adding a structured parking lot can add an additional $44,865 per unit to a project (in inflation-adjusted terms), according to a UC Berkeley Terner Center study from 2020.

California’s Housing and Community Development Department signed off on Eureka’s housing plan in the fall of 2022. If voters ultimately approve the ballot measure, they would be rewriting that contract.

That would require state approval. If the city doesn’t get it, Eureka would lose state funding, open itself up to litigation from the attorney general’s office and lose the ability to apply its own zoning restrictions through a legal quirk known as the “builder’s remedy.” The city would also likely lose the “prohousing” designation it received from the state earlier this year, which gives it first dibs on some state funding.

Measure F supporters say such warnings amount to scare tactics, not only because the initiative doesn’t prohibit downtown development, but because it would also rezone an abandoned middle school for possible housing development. City officials counter that striking the downtown parcels from the city’s new housing plan would still leave Eureka short of the number of designated affordable units required under state law.

“If I just submitted this as written I don’t think (the California Housing and Community Development Department) would certify it,” said Cristin Kenyon, Eureka’s Director of Development Services.

State housing regulators have so far refused to say how they would react should the measure pass.

Competing visions

Susan Seaman, Eureka’s former mayor, said she remembers Old Town 30 years ago: “That place was scary.”

There are still the old, scruffy dive bars and vacant lots around Old Town. There are still a proliferation of “For Lease” signs and a glut of under-trafficked cannabis stores. There are still plenty of people living in tents, under closed shop awnings and in dinged up RVs. These are the visual reminders of how Eureka has long played the role of economic also-ran to its upmarket northern neighbor, Arcata.

But things have changed in the last decade or two. Boutiques and cafes have sprouted up beside the old Victorian hotels barnacled in historic designation plaques. Expanding businesses consider Eureka in a way they just wouldn’t in years past, said Seaman, who now works as program director with the Arcata Economic Development Corporation.

Local politics have changed too. She describes an early “good old boy” culture that pervaded city hall in decades past, back when Eureka was “governed by nostalgia” for an early time when timber and fishing were enough to sustain the proudly out-of-the-way working class town.

A project at the corner of 3rd and G Streets in Eureka on June 17, 2024. The project is slated for mixed commercial and residential use. Photo by Mark McKenna for CalMatters

So, no, Seaman wasn’t especially surprised when the city’s plan to turn parking lots into affordable housing sparked a backlash. This was, in her view, more of the same old local divide. Last decade, Eureka pushed through plans to replace car lanes with those reserved for bikes and to build bulbed-out sidewalks at certain intersections to keep cars from quickly cutting around corners.

“The same people who are behind this initiative hate the bike lanes, hate the bulb-outs, hate anything that slows down traffic,” she said. They hate it because it makes driving more inconvenient, she said, but also because they represent unwelcome imports of ideas common in California’s bigger cities.

“Everybody wants things to be different, but nobody wants things to change,” she said.

“People don’t live in Humboldt County to live in an urban area.”
— Mike Munson, co-chair, Measure F campaign

Just a few blocks away from Seaman’s office near city hall, Munson, co-chair of the ballot measure campaign, works out of a glass-walled office overlooking the harbor in Old Town. A wealth manager who moonlights as a local restaurateur, Munson has been a Eurekan since his mom moved to town when he was a teenager. That, he said, still makes him a newcomer by the standards of some third- or fourth-generation locals.

Munson came to the politics of local land use by way of those early fights about bike lanes, which he opposed. The parking lot battle has been a continuation of a theme.

“I wouldn’t say the main thing is the parking,” he said of the current ballot battle. “I think it’s more about the whole vitality and the vision of ‘what is Eureka going to be 10 years, 20 years, 30 years from now?’”

One version of that vision — Munson’s — is to treat Old Town as an area that prioritizes local businesses and tourists. He has a fantasy about the waterfront. A plaza facing the harbor for farmer’s markets and live music. Mooring for cruise ships that channel into a phalanx of fancy shops. A development to welcome the outside world into Eureka. Old Town already has as much housing as the neighborhood can comfortably accommodate. New housing ought to be built, he said, but in the same places and in the same way that housing has been built in Eureka for the last 80 years: away from the city center.

“I can tell you that people don’t live in Humboldt County to live in an urban area,” he said.

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