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Authors: Tom Wheeler, EPIC; Colin Fiske, CRTP; Melodie Meyer, RCCER; Jennifer Kalt, Humboldt Waterkeeper

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There is a dire need for more housing in Humboldt County. Talk to a local renter or someone looking to buy their first home, and you’ll hear the stories. But where that housing goes is important to the environment and the economy. Do we want to cover our forests, fields and farms with more sprawl? Or do we want to see more housing in our existing communities? Right now, the Humboldt County Association of Governments (HCAOG) is considering a relatively obscure but important decision: how it should divvy up regional housing needs amongst various jurisdictions. This little-discussed decision will have big ramifications for the future of Humboldt.

Housing costs are fundamentally a question of supply and demand. Rents and home prices keep going up, and it’s often hard to find a home at all, especially in a neighborhood with jobs, schools, shops and recreational facilities. Just like in the rest of California — and much of the rest of the country — housing production has not kept pace with needs for decades. Renters end up squeezing into overcrowded homes with more roommates than they want, potential homebuyers keep renting because they can’t find a place to buy, and many people pay more than they can really afford for housing. In extreme cases, folks leave the community entirely or become homeless because there isn’t enough housing.

A lot of the decisions about where to build housing start with an obscure state-mandated process called the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA). Every eight years, the state assigns each region a specific number of new housing units in every income category, and requires local governments to make plans to ensure those homes are actually built. However, the region makes its own choices about how to divide the responsibility for those new homes among local jurisdictions. In Humboldt, a lot about the future of housing and transportation hinges on whether most of the homes will be built in existing job and service centers like Eureka and Arcata, or will be assigned instead to the mostly lower-density unincorporated areas of the county.

Thankfully, over the last few years, we’ve started to see significant progress in both Eureka and Arcata toward building some of this much-needed housing. From the Linc Housing and Wiyot Tribe projects in Eureka to Sorrel Place and the Yurok Tribe’s 30th Street Commons in Arcata, we are seeing more affordable housing planned and built than we have in recent memory. Crucially, these projects are all within walking and biking distance to many jobs and services, and served by multiple transit systems. This is what’s called “infill,” and it’s the kind of housing we need in order to make living in our region more affordable, improve health and safety and reduce climate pollution. (If you live in a place where a car is required to get anywhere, you almost double your effective rent when you add the costs of car ownership.)

But it’s not inevitable that future homes will be built in infill locations. The state issues Humboldt County as a whole, including incorporated cities, a set number of housing units it must plan for. HCAOG then allocates those targets to each jurisdiction in the county. HCAOG is currently asking for public feedback on its proposed formula for distributing housing responsibility among the cities and the county. Unfortunately, the proposed formula does not adequately address the economic or environmental needs of the region. In doing so, the formula would promote sprawl by over-allocating housing to be built in unincorporated areas rather than in incorporated cities.

The formula considers only two variables — existing population and existing jobs — and gives them equal weight. Locating housing near existing jobs is a good idea, and is correlated with several other important considerations, including greenhouse gas emissions, vehicle miles traveled, cost of living and equitable access to destinations. Locating housing near existing homes, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily accomplish any particular goals. The existing population only tells you where people currently live; it provides no information about their living conditions, and certainly not about where they want to live.

We believe that the formula needs to be changed. Instead of population, the region should incorporate cost burden, vacancy rates and overcrowding directly into its formula. Other state-mandated considerations, including municipal sewer and water availability and the housing needs generated by Cal Poly Humboldt, should also be incorporated. And jobs should receive more weight, since that is such an important factor in meeting both environmental and equity goals.

Changing the formula as we suggest would likely result in more housing responsibility being assigned to Eureka and Arcata and less to the county. That’s a good thing. Eureka and Arcata are great places to build housing, unlike most county lands. The demand is already high, especially in Arcata, where prices make housing out of reach for many who work or go to school there. And building more housing in town will allow people to reduce their cost of living and their environmental impacts by increasing walkability, bikeability and access to high-quality bus service.

Over the last century, most local homes were built on former agricultural and wild lands, sprawling further and further from downtowns to places that are hard to access without driving. There is a lot of pressure to continue that kind of development. It took years of effort by tribes, public officials, planners and advocates to make projects like the ones we mentioned above possible, and they regularly face fierce backlash.

Don’t get us wrong: there are good places to build more housing in the unincorporated county, including places like McKinleyville and Myrtletown. But where most of the county’s land does not make for affordable, environmentally responsible development, almost anywhere in Eureka or Arcata does.

If you agree with us, now’s the time to speak up. You can learn more about this crucial issue, including how to submit a formal comment, on HCAOG’s website.

Don’t be deterred by all the numbers, models and acronyms. At its heart, this is a simple issue of where new homes should be built: on farmlands and forests, or in existing towns near jobs, schools and services. We think the choice is obvious, and we encourage you to join us in speaking up.

Last month I was sad. My stereo amplifier was not working and the audio repair guy in McKinleyville told me he was only working on tube amps. Lo, let despair rain from the heavens; let suffering reign; let the miserable wallow in their failures, rank with the stench of their disappointments.

Fortunately a well-timed remark from a friend reminded me that I could try going to the monthly Repair Cafe, so there I was on Sunday waiting for some help from one of the fellas who knew how to work on electronics without killing themselves. The room was filled with supplicants hauling in one item of junk apiece, waiting for it to be fixed; the scene reminded me of medieval serfs carting the dying to the latest miracle-man prophet hoping for a cure. Lamps and bicycles and sewing machines made up the bulk of the patients, though there was a couple with a DVD player the approximate size of a hope chest and a few people with computer monitors. 

My grandfather, most of his life a construction contractor with a generous streak, once told me that when selecting a repairman, people looking to get something fixed have three options to choose from but can only pick two: fast, cheap, and done well. Choosing always makes the third impossible. Going to the Cafe means opting for cost (free) and quality (though many of the volunteers told me not to expect much; fixing stuff is for most of them either a hobby or something done in a past life, and there also isn’t a ton of spare parts laying around). It is not a speedy process, though not at all by any fault of the volunteers. It took about an hour and a half of waiting until one of the electronic whizzes could give me a hand. 

Martin noticed me sitting around with my amp and — rejoice! — said he had worked in audio for some 30-odd years and could check it out, but not before some light interrogation. 

“Thrown any really loud parties recently?” he asked me. I denied the charge. 

“Are you sure?” I said I was. 

He hmmmmed. “Maybe you got spidered.” 

Disgusted but curious, we popped the top off and inspected the Sony’s innards. Every bit of the circuit board and the fuses and all of the wires were covered with dust — and Martin noticed something covering up a shiny node: a bit of spiderweb. He had been right. A speck of speaker wire making a small short probably hadn’t been helping either. He told me to hose “the SHIT” out of it with some canned air and take a Q-Tip and some denatured alcohol to my dirty flea market find. After some deep cleaning and fuse-testing, another volunteer found an old computer speaker and we hooked it up. It hissed; everyone was thrilled. 

Anywho, I didn’t have any cash on me to lend some more weight to my “thank you”s, and since several fixer-upper volunteers mentioned they wanted to get a few more people in there with stuff to mend, I hope this will do: the Arcata Repair Cafe is the second Sunday of every month at the Arcata Community Center, and if you have a broken household item light enough to carry in, you can try getting it fixed there. For free. I wish all of the kind people who spent a chunk of their weekends helping me out great riches and everlasting happiness.

Update, 10/22: A spokesperson for the Repair Cafe has asked us to clarify that the event doesn’t always happen on the second Sunday of the month at the Arcata Community Center; there will not be a Repair Cafe in December, and the event in January will be at the Eureka Municipal Auditorium. Make sure to check their Facebook page for up-to-date info.

Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

Poster. Click to enlarge.

This October will be the 4-year anniversary of the disappearance of Emmilee Renea Risling.  The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office is once again asking for the public’s help locating Risling.  She was last seen October 14th, 2021, on the Pecwan Bridge near Johnson (Wautec).

A $20,000 reward is being offered for information leading to the safe return or information leading to the location of missing person Emmilee Risling. Risling is described as a Native American female 32 years old (at the time of her disappearance), 5’- 2”, 140 pounds, brown eyes, and short dark brown hair. 

Anyone with information is asked to call Cold Case Detective Mike Fridley at 707-441-3024.

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

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Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have allowed California’s car dealers to tack on another $175 in fees to the cost of buying a vehicle.

On Monday, Newsom announced he wasn’t going to sign Senate Bill 791, which would have raised the fees dealers can charge to process Department of Motor Vehicles and other paperwork from $85 to up to 1% of the purchase price, capped at $260.

In his veto message, Newsom said the fee increase made little sense since a car buyer would be paying a dealership “for only minutes of data entry.”

“At a time when Californians are already struggling with the high cost of living,” Newsom wrote, “this bill would raise the document processing fee to three times the current $85 cap – far beyond what an inflation adjustment would justify.”

Brian Maas, president of the California New Car Dealers Association, said in an emailed statement that the state’s car sellers “were extremely disappointed” by the veto.

Maas said the current $85 cap on the document-processing fee is “by far the lowest in the country.” The now-dead fee increase, he said, would still have been at “the bottom quartile of such charges across the nation.”

Car dealers argue that the Legislature continually passes new laws that add to their costs. They say other kinds of businesses are allowed to recoup those costs through service charges, but dealers can’t because the $85 cap is set in state law.

The dealers were especially frustrated with Newsom’s veto because he also signed a measure this month that adds a number of requirements on car dealers that are intended to prevent buyers from getting suckered as they haggle over the price of a vehicle.

Notably, that measure, Senate Bill 766, creates a first-in-the-nation policy that allows a used car buyer to return a vehicle for a full refund within three days if the purchase price was less than $50,000. Dealers can charge a restocking fee.

The new law requires dealers to disclose the full costs up front, and it prohibits dealers from charging for add-ons that have no benefits to the buyer, such as free oil changes for electric vehicles — which don’t need oil changes.

The law takes effect Oct. 1, 2026.

Maas said “the Legislature continues to place more burdens on dealers. SB 766 only added significantly to those responsibilities, which makes the veto of SB 791 all the more disappointing.”

The California New Car Dealers Association has donated at least $3 million to legislators since 2015, according to the CalMatters Digital Democracy database.

How did the fee increase easily pass?

It was perhaps surprising that the bill to hike fees made it to the governor’s desk at all, given that legislative leaders from both parties had promised to lower costs this year.

Yet the Senate overwhelmingly passed an earlier version of the bill that was even more expensive. It proposed upping the fee to $500.

Only one of the Legislature’s 40 senators, Calabasas-area Democratic Sen. Henry Stern, voted “no.”

After CalMatters reported on the controversial measure passing the Senate, its author, San Jose Democratic Sen. Dave Cortese lowered the proposed fee in the Assembly first to $350 and then eventually to $260.

Cortese said in an interview the amount the Legislature settled on would have provided the minimum dealers need to recoup their costs to pay employees who might “spend an hour and a half filling out documents” state regulations require for a single sale.

“There’s 113 different documents now that we’ve created,” he said. “Every single one of them is legislative created. … We were trying to get fair remuneration for fair work.”

In the Assembly, the bill passed with only three Democrats – Alex Lee of San Jose, Jacqui Irwin of Thousand Oaks and Tasha Boerner of Solana Beach – voting “no.” Seventeen other Assembly members didn’t vote at all, which counts the same as voting “no.”

As CalMatters reported, Democrats almost never vote “no” on their colleagues’ bills. Instead, they typically don’t vote at all. In the Capitol, it’s seen as a more polite way of saying “no” and less likely to lead to retaliation from other lawmakers and lobbyists.

With so much talk of lowering costs this year, Cortese said he could understand why the governor wasn’t as receptive to his arguments about fairness to car dealers as his colleagues in the Legislature were.

“The perception was stalking us the whole way through, no question about it,” Cortese said. “And I can understand why the governor would be sensitive to that.”

Rosemary Shahan of Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety said she was “thrilled to bits” that Newsom vetoed the would-be “junk fee” increase and signed the law protecting car buyers from “the kind of bait-and-switch that goes on” when buying a vehicle.

She said the new three-day cooling-off period to return a vehicle will be especially helpful, allowing buyers to review their paperwork without pressure. They can also have their vehicles inspected by an independent mechanic to make sure they didn’t drive a lemon off the lot.

She called Newsom’s actions this year “huge wins for California car buyers.”

In Loving Memory of Stanley Daniel Stevens II
March 25, 1985 – Oct. 9, 2025

It is with heavy hearts that we announce the passing of Stanley Stevens, a devoted husband, loving father, cherished son, brother, and uncle. He left this world on Oct. 9, 2025.

Stanley was a man of deep loyalty, strength, and heart. He proudly served his country with honor and dedication through his six years/ SRG E5 /Army, embodying the true spirit of service and sacrifice. His commitment to the military and his fellow servicemen and women was matched only by the love he had for his family.

When he wasn’t serving his country, Stanley found peace and joy in the outdoors. Hunting wasn’t just a pastime — it was his way to connect with nature, reflect, and share meaningful time with those he loved. Whether in the woods at sunrise or telling stories around a campfire, he brought warmth and laughter wherever he went.

Preceded in death by Grandma Amy, Grandpa Etcyl, Grandma Lloyce, Grandpa Duane, Grandpa Shermon, Grandma Dorothy, Grandpa Clide, Grandma Penny, Uncle Shannon, Uncle Chuck,Aunt Lenore, Uncle Bryan.

He is survived by his loving wife, Emily Stevens; his 5 children, Elizabeth, Lolah, Weston, Duane, Derick; his dad Stanley Stevens, mom Sharold Stevens, mother Paula Fulcher; and his siblings, Dorothy Stevens, Tisha Hanson, Lenore Weber, Spencer Stevens, Sidney Stevens. He will also be deeply missed by many nieces, nephews, and friends who were blessed to know him.

Stanley’s legacy of love, courage, and devotion will live on through all who were fortunate enough to be part of his life. Though our hearts ache, we find comfort in knowing he is at peace and his spirit will forever guide us.

A service to honor his life will be held on Oct. 26, 2025 at 1 p.m. at Bull Creek cemetery. Take South Fork Honeydew off ramp. Turn right and follow out to cemetery. A celebration of life and potluck will be held at the Veterans Hall in Fortuna immediately following. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to veteran’s organization.

Born January 25, 1941 in Milwaukee, Wisc. to parents Alonzo Joseph and Jeanette Marie (Guilbault) LaFlame, and departed on October 8, 2025. She was the youngest of three siblings. Her sister Mary Janice (LaFlame) Boyd Proctor, brother Alonzo Joseph LaFlame Jr., brother in-law James ‘Jim’ DeMoss, and ex-husband Richard ‘Dick’ Ross Jones are since deceased.

She is survived by her son Robert ‘Bob’ Ross Jones, daughter in-law Beth (Turner) Jones, and grandson Owen Ashby Jones; sister in-law Patricia LaFlame and sister in-law Sone (Jones) Piper; nieces Lisa LaFlame, Cindy (LaFlame) Justice, and Karin (Piper) Harmon; nephews Mark Piper and Bill “Billy” Boyd.

Her family moved to Southern California when she was still in high school. She graduated from Hollywood High in 1959 with the likes of Linda Evans and Stephanie Powers. She met her first and only husband on a blind date and they were married shortly thereafter in 1961. She and Dick loved to take road trips to places like Las Vegas and Virginia City.

They adopted their only child at six weeks old in 1966, while living in a small apartment in Glendale, Calif. They relocated to Bakersfield, Calif. shortly after in pursuit of Dick’s career as an embalmer and funeral director. She had a variety of odd jobs, including working the switchboard at Three-Way Chevrolet and doing hair at the funeral home. Unfortunately after her initial debilitating injury in the early seventies, she endured a countless series of surgeries throughout the rest of her life, most of which revolved around multiple fusions of her spine. In spite of these setbacks she was a model of vitality.

She was a devoted wife and mother and helped to raise Great Danes. Their travels became largely consumed with showing dogs until they divorced in 1980. Afterwards, she and her bestie Shirley Hall, also recently divorced, hit the town like they had a new lease on life. They spent many a night whooping it up and two-stepping at Trouts or one of their favorite spots in Morro Bay or playing bingo. She eventually settled in with a new bunch of friends like Breck and Carl, with whom she happened to share a birthday, who she’d hang out with at the piano bar in the old Padre in downtown Bakersfield.

She relocated to Arcata shortly after her grandson ‘Owie’ arrived in 2006, and lived out the rest of her years there.

“Nana,” as she came to be known by many of those closest to her, was loved for her open heart and adventurous spirit. She even inspired a rousing chant of “Bob’s mom rocks!” that can still be heard every year around the campfire at Mike & Bob’s Easter Xtravaganza. She had an uncanny way of making friends with the most unlikely people, like Patty and Melissa in Bakersfield, or Beverly and Kay in Arcata, all of them notably younger than her — with the exception of Carl — and maintaining those ties until the end. She also had the curious ability to get the better of a slot machine, after which she’d always share her winnings with whoever she was with. She maintained a winning attitude in spite of her various afflictions and was a wealth of moral support to those she loved. Our worlds will never be the same without her.

As she was a great lover and defender of animals. Please give to your local animal shelter in lieu of flowers. A special thanks to her caregivers at St. Joseph Hospital in Eureka, Hospice of Humboldt, and Timber Ridge in McKinleyville. There will not be a memorial service but a local celebration of life will be announced.

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Michael Shaun Dolan, affectionately known to most as “Shaun,” was loved just as much as “Milt” or “S.D.” left us much too soon on Monday, July 28, 2025. He was born on April 14, 1965, in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Columbia, Maryland. Shaun had passions for sports, music, and spreading smiles. He loved the Grateful Dead, The Meters, The Baltimore Orioles and the Washington Redskins.

Shaun attended Atholton High School before graduating from St. Vincent Pallotti High School. He excelled as both a baseball and football player. He continued his athletic journey at Salem University on a partial baseball scholarship. After college, Shaun’s adventurous path took him to Ocean City, Maryland. He made his way to Eureka via Allentown, Pennsylvania, Lake Tahoe and San Francisco. Shaun’s web of love and friendships spread far and wide. 

Shaun found his true calling in the music industry. His talent for booking and promoting musical acts was invaluable to many bands who appreciated his hard work. From George Porter of the Meters, Melvin Seals of the Jerry Garcia Band, and many others. Perhaps one of his best-known accomplishments was the “Las Tortugas” festival, hosted at the Evergreen Lodge near Yosemite National Park.

Shaun is survived first and foremost by his daughter, Avery, who was the light of his life and the pride of his heart. He is also survived by his sister Erin Leishear and stepbrothers, Bob Newman and Scott Hildreth, and countless friends.

Shaun will be remembered as a beloved father, friend, teammate, mentor, coach, umpire, and presence at many community and musical gatherings. Whether on the sports field, enlivening the Medieval Fair, or dancing with you at a live show, Shaun’s presence brought people together and filled every gathering with warmth and laughter. His wide circle of friends is a testament to his generous spirit and irrepressible humor.

Shaun’s family and friends invite all who knew him to remember his vibrant spirit — with music, laughter and stories shared in his honor.

A celebration of life/memorial will be held on October 18, 2025, at the Septentrio Winery Barrel Room, beginning at 12 p.m., for close friends and family. There will be a fundraising celebration, including music for all, starting at 6 p.m. 

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