UPDATE, 8:22 a.m.: The highway is open! Shortly after this post was published, Caltrans updated its alert to say it’s only the Hookton Road offramp that’s currently closed. Proceed with caution.

###

###

Caltrans is reporting that Hwy. 101 southbound is fully closed at the Hookton Road offramp, south of College of the Redwoods, due to emergency work.

This spot is at the bottom of the hill leading up to the Loleta offramp, and as you can see in the above LoCO file photo it is very prone to flooding. We assume that’s the nature of this emergency work.

The estimated reopening is currently listed as 11:59 p.m., though that may simply be a placeholder meaning, essentially, “We don’t know.”

The Outpost will update as new information becomes available.

Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

On Nov. 2, the Humboldt County Sheriff–Coroner’s office responded to the abandoned power plant in Blue Lake for a death investigation. The Humboldt County Coroner’s Office led the investigation and conducted an autopsy on the decedent. The decedent has been identified as Jason Quinton Miller, age 50, of Blue Lake. 

The autopsy confirmed that Miller’s cause of death is electrocution with extensive thermal burns, terminal fall from heights, and chronic methamphetamine abuse. 

Miller was known to be living in an encampment in Blue Lake before his death. At the time of his death, Miller was trespassing on City of Blue Lake property and appeared to be stealing copper wire from a live power line.

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

Receive HCSO news straight to your phone or email. Subscribe to news alerts at: humboldtsheriff.org/subscribe.

###

PREVIOUSLY: Sheriff’s Office Investigating Apparent Electrocution Death at the Blue Lake Power Plant

###

Providence Medical Group Eureka, which employs Humboldt County’s only specialists offering such vital services as cardiology, gastroenterology and more, has stopped accepting patient referrals for many routine procedures from offices they don’t own and operate, forcing many local patients to travel to Santa Rosa, Napa or beyond.

Angela Smith, founder and managing director of the independently owned Kidney Care Services of Humboldt, learned about this new policy indirectly back in September after she made three separate referrals to Providence’s gastroenterologist specialty group, only to have them declined. She was told that the office was only accepting referrals from within Providence Medical Group.

In a phone interview, Smith said she called the office to voice her concerns: namely, that this policy will exclude a significant number of local patients from receiving necessary services such as colonoscopies. Many of her patients require a colonoscopy before they get placed on the list to receive a kidney transplant.

“The office manager explained that the decision had come from administration,” Smith told the Outpost. “They had been advised to recommend referring patients to Santa Rosa or asking a medical provider employed by Providence if they would create the referral themselves.”

Smith found these suggested work-arounds ridiculous.

“No provider is going to regularly absorb this extra work,” she said, “and many of these affected patients do not have the means to travel to Santa Rosa for services.”

Ia Thao is one such patient. When we spoke with her in September, she was undergoing dialysis three days per week. Her referral to Providence’s local gastroenterology office was declined, and she was instead referred to the Providence-owned office in Santa Rosa. Squeezing such a trip between her dialysis appointments on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays would be a challenge.

“If I drive down there and come back the same day it’s going to be hard for me,” she said. “The traffic down there, too, it’s kind of hard for me.” Plus, the procedure typically requires sedation, which prevents the patient from legally driving for hours afterward.

Another of Smith’s patients, a man who asked not to be identified while discussing medical issues, said he, too, was denied a local colonoscopy appointment. He needs the procedure before he can get a kidney transplant. The longer he has to wait, he said, “it’s that much longer that I’m on dialysis, and it’s that much longer before I get a kidney transplant. So, yeah, it’s quality of life issue.”

Fortunately for him, he has the resources to fly to the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix.

“We’re fortunate that we can,” he said. “I feel bad for the people that can’t … . All of a sudden it turns our society into an elitist [one] because only the people with the right insurance and enough financial wherewithal are allowed to get the treatment they need.”

Local family medicine practitioner Dr. Stephanie Dittmer has also been frustrated by this new policy and its impacts on her patients.

“I’m getting my referrals rejected, and the reason that’s being communicated to my office staff and my patients is that they are no longer accepting referrals from non-Providence physicians,” Dittmer said in a recent phone interview. “It directly impacts patients, so it becomes a discriminatory thing in the sense of who can financially afford to stop work and go out of the area for something and come back.”

In response to a list of questions, Providence, the not-for-profit Catholic health care system that took over St. Joseph Health in 2016, emailed a media statement saying that the new policy was forced upon them due to “a critical shortage of physicians and advanced practice clinicians” nationwide.

“The inability to accept every referral, especially those which are not urgent or time sensitive, is an unfortunate reality of healthcare today, especially in rural communities like Humboldt County,” the statement says.

But Smith said the urgency of any given patient’s situation should be determined by their doctor.

“General surgery [at Providence] has said it will be eight months out before they can get a colonoscopy because it’s not considered an urgent procedure, necessarily,” she said. “But in terms of my patients, that’s a big deal because that’s eight months of potentially missing a kidney.”

Providence’s new policy appears to have been made at the corporate administrative level, which Smith considers inappropriate.

“The way that they made the decision… is not in line with how medical offices review medical referrals,” she said, adding that such decisions should be made by medical professionals. Smith is well aware of the shortage of specialists here but said a blanket refusal to accept out-of-network referrals from practices they don’t own is not the ethical approach.

“We’re not saying that they don’t have a provider shortage; we’re saying that the way they’ve decided which patients they’re not going to see is not in line with how medical offices do this,” she said. “It sounds like an administrative decision that was taken out of the hands of a medical provider, where it’s supposed to be. .. This decision should not have come from administration. … Nobody else does that.”

Providence’s media statement goes on to say that its medical group is willing to coordinate directly with referring providers to ensure that urgent or special needs are met and the patient’s health remains a top priority.

“We also work closely with our Santa Rosa and Napa medical group providers to provide telehealth visits as an additional option to improve access to care whenever possible,” the statement reads.

Dittmer said such telehealth visits are very rarely possible, and she noted that cardiology is another specialty that has been affected by physician shortages.

“I’ve had to send people literally out of the area to Santa Rosa to get their cardiac angiograms done because the wait time to get into cardiology is excessive, even when people have abnormal studies,” she said.

Rosemary Den Ouden, CEO of the Humboldt Independent Practice Association, said the agency is in the process of credentialing a “desperately needed” cardiologist, but the shortage of medical specialists is simply a harsh reality.

“It’s hard to get some of the most basic things right now because we just don’t have the bodies here in Humboldt County,” Den Ouden said. For example, the county has a severe shortage of gastroenterologists. “We  know that for some of our members, the wait time could be up to a year, especially if it’s for routine screening.”

Dittmer said this situation is not new. 

“I’ve had to refer people out of town on the regular for the last, like, literally two years, because Providence hasn’t been able to meet the volume needs of the people here locally,” she said.

Den Ouden said the shortage is not for lack of recruitment efforts. She said Providence is doing a great job of recruiting, and every single practice in the county is continually working on both recruitment and retention of physicians. In its media statement, Providence Medical Group said that since its inception it has brought “well over 100 primary, specialty, and hospital-based providers to the community.”

However, it doesn’t say how many of those have since left the area. 

This afternoon, shortly before this post was published, Providence Medical Group sent an updated statement that included one new paragraph:

There has been a significant financial investment and time/energy spent to improve the overall access to gastroenterology care in Humboldt County. To tackle the backlog of endoscopy procedures and increase access to crucial, lifesaving GI screenings, Providence has contracted with three additional gastroenterologists and secured the commitment of five other physicians who are qualified to perform GI procedures. These concerted efforts are aimed at reducing wait times and ensuring more patients receive timely and essential gastrointestinal screenings, ultimately improving patient outcomes and overall community health.

Den Ouden said that, to a certain extent, local residents may simply have to accept that we won’t have local access to all of the care we may need.

”This might come off a little curt, but a  place like Humboldt County, we’re never going to have a left eyeball specialist,” she said. “We work hard just to have a cardiologist, an orthopedic surgeon, some GI and primary care, but there will never be a time when we have all these super-specialized positions. There will always be reasons people have to travel outside the area. I don’t think that will ever change.”

Smith didn’t argue with that notion, but she reiterated that Providence shouldn’t make executive decisions affecting broad swaths of the public without consulting with local providers and working with them to develop plans for how best to serve the community.

“It’s as if we’ve all just resigned ourselves to this powerless situation that we have,” she said. “The primary concern I have is that it doesn’t need to be that way. It shouldn’t be that way. And the clout and the size that Providence has in our community, although we’re all deeply appreciative of it, they’re not willing to sit down and have any kind of discussion at the table.”

###

CORRECTION: The headline of this post has been corrected from its original version to reflect that Providence is refusing referrals from practices it does not own, rather than from patients who are out of network.

California State University is only partially meeting its bold plan to graduate 40% of its students who started as freshmen by the end of four years. In newly released data this week, the system saw its four-year graduation rate inch to an all-time high of 36.2% this year — more than double the graduation rate it posted in 2013.

The system has one year left to make good on its Graduation Initiative 2025 goals, which it debuted in 2015. The splashy effort was buttressed by a combination of system and state funding increases that over time reached $400 million annually. That money has gone toward hiring more professors, opening more classes in courses with high waitlists that students need to graduate, cutting the number of students finishing classes with Ds and Fs and reaching out to students who dropped out.

The growth in graduation rates overlapped with a 31% spike in freshmen enrollment between 2009 and 2019, meaning the system’s graduation rate increased even as it was absorbing an additional 15,000 students.

The type of students Cal State enrolled changed as well, explained Jennifer Baszile, an associate vice chancellor for the system, at the board of trustees meeting Wednesday. In that same period, the university saw a 50% jump in freshmen who were the first in their families to attend college, come from low-income households or identify as Black, Latino or Native American — all groups that campuses have historically struggled to graduate at rates similar to other students.

“We are opening up opportunities for students who traditionally have not had them,” said Diego Arambula, vice chair of the board of trustees, at Wednesday’s meeting.

Among transfer students, the system is even closer to its 2025 goals, having graduated 44% of students within two years who came from community colleges — just shy of the 45% target it set for itself. Graduation rates are calculated separately for students who start as freshmen and those who transfer. Lately, about 40% of Cal State’s new students are transferring from other schools.

Gaps remain between racial and ethnic groups

But for the system’s other core goals to eliminate the differences in graduation rates between Black, Latino, Native American and all other students, the gaps remain recalcitrant.

The six-year graduation rate for Latino students, the system’s largest racial or demographic group, dipped from a high of 58% in 2021 to 56% in 2024 — well short of the 2025 goal to have 70% of all students who started as freshmen graduate within six years but higher than the 52% in 2015.

White and Asian students as distinct groups reached or surpassed the 70% goal by 2020.While the traditional timeline for earning a bachelor’s degree is four years, the six-year graduation rate is a common metric that reflects the modern realities for many students: They work to afford their education and care for families, activities that require them to enroll in a reduced number of courses, which means they take longer to graduate.

For Black students, the graduation rate remains stubbornly low — at no point has Cal State graduated more than 50% of Black students at the end of six years who started as freshmen. At spring’s end this year, the rate stood at 49 percent — a full 21 percentage points below the 70% goal.

Cal State is the nation’s largest public four-year university system and is home to more than 400,000 undergraduates.Another immovable gap is the one between students receiving federal Pell grants because they come from low-income families and those who don’t.

At Cal State, nearly half of students receive this benefit and they graduate at rates 10 to 12 percentage points below those of students from families with higher incomes. The gulf between students with and without Pell grants is supposed to close completely by next year under the goals Cal State set forth.

“Closing equity gaps is really, really hard,” said Christopher J. Steinhauser, a trustee who was superintendent of the Long Beach public k-12 school system, among the state’s largest. “Sometimes when you have initiatives and people do better, the gaps actually grow, and we actually have seen that here in our own system.”

Covid’s impact

One force constraining graduation rates is the effect the COVID-19 pandemic had on students remaining in school. A key early measure of whether students will graduate is how many return after their first and second years of school. At Cal State, that so-called retention figure gradually grew until the pandemic struck. Among students who started as freshmen in 2019, about 85% returned after their first year. But for those who started in 2020, the year Covid devastated the world’s public health systems and plunged many families into financial distress, the share of returning students dropped to 83% and the next year to 81%.

Once students leave, it’s difficult to persuade them to return, higher-education experts say.

Still, Cal State has a higher overall graduation rate than most other similar universities in other states. The University of California, which rejects far more applicants than Cal State, graduates about 72% of its freshmen within four years — double that of Cal State.

###

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

Johnnie Elaine Hillegeist passed peacefully at home on November 17, 2024. She was born on September 9, 1935, in St. Augustine, Texas. When she was eight years old, she left The South and moved to Bakersfield, but would never leave her Southern accent behind. At 13 years old, she met and married Pedro Hillegeist, whom she would be happily married to for 65 years, until his death in 2014.

In 1956, Mom and Dad, with their two young sons, settled in Humboldt County. They raised us here while enjoying Humboldt County’s many treasures: collecting agates, digging for old bottles and whatever else they may find. They also enjoyed antiquing, fishing, hunting and much later in life, they found pleasure in the local casinos.

She is survived by her son David (Jennifer), her grandchildren Erin Mentesh (Michael), Kelly Dodd (Greg) and William Hillegeist (Jodi), as well as nine great grandchildren and many nieces and nephews. She shared much love over the years with her niece, Angelique. A very heart felt thank you to Pedro Vega for being her partner and a special part of our family for the past six years. We are so grateful for you, Pedro!

She was preceded in death by her husband Pedro Hillegeist, her son Michael and his son Michael Brian Hillegeist, her sister Demerace Crutchfield, her brother Jim Quinn, as well as many others who were near and dear to her heart.

Funeral services will be held at Ocean View Cemetery on Tuesday, November 26, at 11 a.m.

###

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

###

Press release from the Eureka Police Department:

On Monday, November 19, 2024 at approximately 9:49 a.m., school administrators were made aware of a school shooting threat written in a restroom of the main building. Upon notification, Eureka Police Department Officers, including the School Resource Officer, immediately responded, took actions to ensure the safety of students and staff, and began investigating. At approximately 11:52a.m., a second threat was found in the same building.

After an extensive investigation, the School Resource Officer and Criminal Investigations Unit Detectives identified a suspect. On Thursday, November 21, at approximately 10 a.m. the juvenile suspect was arrested, charged with PC 422 Criminal Threats, and booked into Juvenile Hall.

This incident was determined not to be associated with similar threats reported at schools in the past few weeks.

According to Commander La France, “We will continue using all internal and external resources to identify any individuals involved in this type of criminal behavior as threatening the safety of children in the community is completely unacceptable. Individuals involved in these types of school threats should expect to be identified, arrested, and booked into juvenile hall or jail.”

###

PREVIOUSLY: 

• Yet Another Shooting Threat Found at Eureka High Before Homecoming; Student Arrested, No Connection to Previous Incidents, EPD Says
• Eureka High on Lockdown For the Third Time This Month, Following Another Threat
• Eureka Police Department Seems to Say That Yesterday’s EHS Lockdown Involved Two Separate Threats, One After The Other, Or Something Like That
• Eureka School Briefly Went on Lockdown in Response to Threats Tuesday Evening

###

Earlier this week, the Outpost heard a little rumor that local fitness chain HealthSPORT has plans to close its By The Bay location in Old Town Eureka. We quickly launched an investigation into the matter and discovered that HealthSPORT is not closing By The Bay, per se, it’s just moving all operations and equipment at that gym over to its Eureka location on Pennsylvania Avenue in Myrtletown.

Reached by phone this morning, HealthSPORT Marketing Director Courtney Haraldson took great pains to avoid saying By The Bay is “closing,” insisting instead that HealthSPORT is simply “relocating” and “consolidating” Eureka’s gym offerings.

“The building will no longer be something that we’re renting, but the word ‘closing’ isn’t really true because By The Bay is just moving to [the Myrtle Avenue location in] Eureka,” Haraldson said. “It’s no longer a space that we need. It doesn’t serve us for the programs that we need to offer.”

Asked if HealthSPORT’s decision to consolidate gym services was in response to dwindling attendance at its Old Town location, Haraldson said “that’s not really what we’re looking at,” adding that By The Bay was “designed for small group classes.” 

“A lot of the people that come to work out at By The Bay do so because they work down [in Old Town] or it’s closer for them, but all of our members that we’ve really talked to are excited about moving it to one spot,” Haraldson said.

Over the coming months, HealthSPORT plans to expand services and classes at its Myrtletown location and include more family-oriented activities.

“We want to focus more on families and our families [live] out that way,” Haraldson said. “We’re currently renovating our pool [at the] Myrtle [location], but our family swims are really popular there and we’re hoping to expand on that. We’re also looking forward to more youth birthday parties and field trips. … It’s more of a communal vibe. We also have a very large parking lot there and plan to host food trucks or other little community events. We want to create a space for people to spend more time together.”

HealthSPORT will close relocate By The Bay at the end of December, though some pilates classes may continue at the Old Town location through January while the new space is getting set up. HealthSPORT’s program schedule can be found here.

###