Why Daylight Saving Time Is Starting Again in California

Lynn La / Friday, March 8, 2024 @ 7:09 a.m. / Sacramento

The sun sets in Fresno on Aug. 30, 2022. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local

In the wee hours of Sunday morning, Californians (and most of the rest of the country) will have to move their clocks one hour forward, starting eight months of daylight saving time. The change means we get to experience more daylight later in the day, but the sudden hour of lost sleep can be jarring for some people — and can even increase health risks, experts say.

Didn’t Californians vote on this issue? Yes, sort of, but it isn’t quite that simple.

In November 2018, voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 7. But the measure only allowed the Legislature to change daylight saving time, either by establishing it year-round or abolishing it.

A change still requires a two-thirds majority of both the state Assembly and Senate and the governor’s signature. Permanently keeping daylight saving time also requires congressional action — and that hasn’t happened.

California doesn’t have to wait on Congress to use standard time, which is what Hawaii and most of Arizona do.

So this year Republican Sen. Roger Niello of Roseville introduced legislation to do away with daylight saving time for good and establish standard time year-round. (Westminster Republican Tri Ta is carrying a twin bill in the Assembly.)

Arguing that standard time makes “the most sense,” Niello says his bill has the backing of the California Medical Association. A large portion of the medical and sleep expert communities also agree that standard time coincides better with people’s natural clocks.

In its analysis of Prop. 7, the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office said continuing to switch between time standards potentially affected “worker productivity and the number of accidents.”

But California lawmakers can’t quite agree what standard we should stick with. In 2021, then-Assemblymember Steven Choi proposed a measure to make daylight saving time permanent (which, again, would still be contingent on changing federal law). The bill died before it reached the Senate.

Even now with Niello’s bill, other lawmakers expressed their preference for year-round daylight saving time — not standard time.

Niello, however, says that last fall, lawmakers from Oregon and Washington reached out to him about making standard time permanent, saying that it would be a “good idea” for the West Coast to align their clocks. There are also similar bills in Idaho and Utah.

And while Niello recognizes that not everybody shares his preference for standard time, at least more could agree with doing away with changing clocks altogether.

“I have become increasingly tired of making the switch myself on a personal basis,” he said.

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


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ELECTION TALLY UPDATE: Assembly Hopeful Chris Rogers is Big in Sonoma. Will That be Enough?

LoCO Staff / Thursday, March 7, 2024 @ 2:37 p.m. / Elections

Who will assemble for us? Left: Chris Rogers. Right: Rusty Hicks. Campaign photos.

The only contested race that is still truly up in the air, following Tuesday’s election and the slow, slow counting that follows, is the race for California’s Second Assembly District, filling the seat left open by Jim Wood’s retirement.

Del Norte Republican Michael Greer has a commanding lead over his six competitors (all Democrats) but the real race is for second place — to choose which of the Democrats will face Greer on the November ballot and almost certainly defeat him.

According to the California Secretary of State’s office, Santa Rosa City Councilmember Chris Rogers has the tiniest edge over Arcata newcomer Rusty Hicks in the most current tally of votes. Hicks, the chair of the California Democratic Party, received several high-profile endorsements, most notably that of Gov. Gavin Newsom, but for now Rogers’ Sonoma County bonafides are carrying him, with 19.6 percent of the vote to Hicks’ 18.9 percent.

Fully 84.5 percent of Rogers’ tallied vote comes from northern Sonoma County, the district’s major population center. In three of the four other counties in the district — Humboldt, Del Norte, Trinity — he places fourth among the six Democratic candidates. In Mendocino, he places third.

Meanwhile, the Humboldt County Office of Elections has just issued the first in its series of weekly updates on how the count is going. In short: The post-election tally hasn’t really kicked into full gear yet, it seems — only 238 more ballots counted between the final Election Night report and today, with around 13,000 left to go. No significant change to local results, of course. Find that report here.



(VIDEO) NEVER GIVE UP: Meet Old Town’s Busker of the Day, Who Belted Out Ballads in Front of the Gazebo All Morning

Stephanie McGeary / Thursday, March 7, 2024 @ 1:13 p.m. / Music

Video: Andrew Goff

While heading into the office in Old Town this morning, it was impossible not to immediately notice the impassioned vocals booming through the air, spinning a rendition of “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” by Stevie Wonder – adding to the already cheery atmosphere of the sunny day we’re enjoying. 

By the time I had reached the office, where I could still hear our morning crooner belting out hit after hit, adding vocal flourishes, sometimes even powerful growls to his selections, my curiosity overtook me. Who is this person singing with so much feeling, accompanied by only a karaoke machine at 10 in the morning? I had to know more, so I went out to introduce myself. 

His name is Matthew Anscher, a 40-year-old singer from Salinas, who performs with only his microphone and an amplifier, which he also uses to play the backing tracks off of his phone. Anscher said he’s in the area visiting his boyfriend (actually his fiancé, as he mentioned that they are engaged to be married. Congrats!) But there was also some bad news for Anscher: his car recently broke down, extending his trip for longer than he had planned. He belted his heart out in front of the Gazebo today to, hopefully, raise some funds to repair his car. 

“I do this all the time, but now there’s an urgency to it,” Anscher told me, as he took a break between numbers. 

Originally from North Carolina, Anscher has been passionate about music and singing for pretty much his entire life. As a child, he started out in musical theater (something he still loves, and he includes a few musical numbers in his song selection) and grew up in a college town with a “thriving music scene” that inspired him. He’s thought about going professional before, he said, but navigating the music industry can be tough. 

“The major labels – they don’t want to nurture talent anymore,” Anscher said. “They just want the next big thing.” 

Anscher started busking about two years ago and has taken his talent all over California and beyond, playing on the streets of cities including Santa Cruz and Las Vegas. He has also played in Arcata before, he said, but today is Anscher’s first time testing out his busking at the Old Town Gazebo, which he said he was really enjoying. 

“I can see why people like it here,” Anscher said, adding that he was appreciative of the clear weather we’re experiencing today. “I love days like this. That’s why I come out here.” 

In addition to busking, Anscher also plays a lot of open mics, he said, and has spent the last couple of years fine tuning his repertoire. He likes to sing a selection of generally well-known songs from different genres including pop, rock, soul, musicals, and sometimes he even throws a couple of television theme songs into the mix. Some of his vocal influences include Dusty Springfield, Dionne Warwick and “Judy Garland, of course,” he said. 

When talking about his song selections, Anscher laughed at one point and shared a story about a time he played an open mic back in North Carolina and had chosen to cover the song “Dance: 10, Looks: 3” from A Chorus Line. If you’re familiar with the number, then you know it includes some pretty saucy language, and Anscher said that it was not well received by the crowd. That experience taught him to “read the room” when making his song selections, he said. 

When Anscher isn’t singing, he drives for DoorDash to pay the bills. So having his car in the shop also affects his income. Luckily, Anscher has a rental car for the time being, and said he will be likely heading back and forth between the Gazebo and the Arcata Plaza today. So if you want to help Anscher get his wheels back up and running, you will likely be able to catch him at one of those two locations.  

Godspeed, Matthew!

PREVIOUS OLD TOWN BUSKING MOMENTS: 



Progressives Are Not Happy With Adam Schiff. Will It Matter in U.S. Senate Race?

Yue Stella Yu / Thursday, March 7, 2024 @ 7:16 a.m. / Sacramento

Buoyed by a sizable war chest, Democrat Adam Schiff spent heavily to propel himself and his desired opponent — former baseball star Steve Garvey, a Republican — into the November election for California’s U.S. Senate seat.

The matchup has likely guaranteed Schiff’s November victory, since no Republican has won a California statewide race in almost 20 years. Some Democrats rejoiced at the outcome, hoping it could free up more campaign cash to support Democrats in swing districts and states.

Progressives, however, are not happy.

Schiff’s boost for Garvey drew a sharp rebuke from some progressive groups, who argued his tactics elbowed out Reps. Katie Porter and Barbara Lee — both popular among progressive voters — and could both encourage GOP turnout and dampen turnout among young voters of color to hurt Democrats in key congressional and legislative races in November.

“Adam Schiff’s selfishness may have just helped MAGA extremists win control of the same House of Representatives that oversees the presidential Electoral College count,“ said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which endorsed Porter.

Green on Wednesday called on Schiff to give millions of dollars to congressional candidates in battleground districts “that he just left out to dry.”

And Schiff’s defense of Israel in the Gaza war — at odds with progressives pushing for a permanent ceasefire — could discourage some Democrats from voting in the race, some warned.

“If Adam Schiff does not move towards a more progressive position on issues, especially with ceasefire, … he’s gonna run the real risk that base voters may sit it out this go around,” said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the grassroots advocacy group Our Revolution, which supported Lee.

Asked for comment, Schiff’s campaign pointed to a Fox11 News interview Wednesday in which Schiff was asked to respond to the criticism that his strategies could make it more difficult for Democrats to retake control of Congress.

“There’s only one Democrat who buys that argument,” Schiff said, referring to Porter, “who would think that one Democrat spending millions against another Democrat to beat each other up was a good idea for the party instead of being able to use those resources to elect other Democrats.”

Schiff also doubled down on his opposition to a permanent ceasefire, arguing it would “permanently entrench the terrorist organization like Hamas governing Gaza.”

The outrage from some progressives is a reality Schiff will have to face within his own party as he works to consolidate the Democratic vote for the November election.

While he has consistently placed first in polls among Democratic voters overall, Schiff was mostly popular among older, whiter homeowners, while Porter had more support among younger voters and those who identified as progressive Democrats, according to a UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll last week.

But could the splinter with progressives hurt Schiff’s chances of winning in November?

Unlikely, said Democratic strategist Garry South, who voted for Schiff.

“If progressive voters sit out the Senate race when the opponent to Adam Schiff is Steve Garvey, a guy who voted for Donald Trump twice, (you) might have to question their motivation,” he said.

The Gaza concern

Chants for a ceasefire in Gaza broke out minutes into Schiff’s victory speech Tuesday night, bringing the celebration in Los Angeles to a brief halt.

“Let Gaza Live!” Pro-ceasefire protesters scattered in the crowd repeatedly yelled, some holding their fists high.

It’s a signal that progressives in California are growing more frustrated with some Democratic officials’ reluctance to call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza as civilian casualties rise. During the California Democratic Party convention last November, Lee — the only one in the race to call for a permanent ceasefire at the time — won the plurality vote from party delegates, as pro-ceasefire protesters chanted her name.

Rep. Barbara Lee of Oakland addresses delegates at the Democratic Party convention in Sacramento on Nov. 17, 2023. Photo by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters

Schiff has been in lockstep with the White House on the issue, on Tuesday backing a call for a temporary ceasefire backed by President Joe Biden, Politico reported. Vice President Kamala Harris on Sunday called for an “immediate ceasefire” for at least six weeks as the administration continued to negotiate with Israel on a deal.

Biden has faced backlash from progressive voters for his stance on the Israel-Hamas war. In a February poll, 46% of the Democrats said they were dissatisfied with Biden’s handling of the situation. In states including Minnesota and Michigan, droves of voters voted “uncommitted” to express their frustration with Biden’s stance on the Gaza war as he faces a sure rematch with Trump in November. In a similar protest, California leaders with the Council on American-Islamic Relations called for Democratic voters to leave the presidential race blank.

Geevarghese argued that a temporary ceasefire is not enough, and that Biden’s shift toward a temporary ceasefire was merely “rhetoric.”

“The base is angry and disgusted with the conduct of foreign policy by the U.S. government, and wants to see concrete action,” he said.

“I see both the administration and Adam Schiff recognizing there’s deep voter discontent, but not necessarily fully responding to it in a way that would win back the trust of key parts of the Democratic base and motivate them.”

‘Ongoing struggle’

But efforts to elevate Porter or Lee into the November election still fell short — a result most progressive groups blamed on Schiff’s strategy.

“Ultimately, the more than $11 million scheme that Schiff and his allies invested in to keep progressive women off the ballot proved insurmountable in a low voter turnout election in California,” reads a statement from Power PAC, a progressive group supporting Lee.

But South shrugged off the criticism, arguing it is “fair game” in a top-two primary for a candidate to target any of their opponents, regardless of party affiliation.

“I know there’s all kinds of tut-tutting about the supposed cynicism of Schiff boosting Steve Garvey, but the fact of the matter is neither of the two so-called ‘progressive’ candidates, Barbara Lee or Katie Porter, had the resources to do much of anything,” he said. “This wasn’t dirty pool.”

Porter would disagree. In her Tuesday night speech, she argued she was boxed out by “special interests and the ultra wealthy” that spent millions of dollars in the race. But she also adopted a similar tactic, airing ads to boost Republican candidate Eric Early, although at a much smaller scale than Schiff.

“Like we’ve seen in this campaign, they spend millions to defeat someone who will dilute their influence and disrupt the status quo,” she said in a campaign statement Wednesday.

Lee congratulated Schiff in a Wednesday statement, touting her “grassroots” campaign for “progressive change” while acknowledging a lackluster fundraising effort.

“Despite being heavily outspent by my opponents, our values never wavered,” she said.

Lee — who has represented the Oakland area in Congress since 1998 — has never had to build a national network of donors, South noted. And while Porter’s aggressive style may have worked in questioning witnesses during congressional hearings, it may not have resonated with voters and donors, South said.

The two candidates’ failure to advance out of the primary shows an “ongoing struggle” for progressives to break through, Geevarghese said.

“It is a problem that the progressive movement got splintered in California,” he said. “There is an establishment Democratic bloc that does have the reins on power. Whether it’s through the party, and then through their candidates, it’s challenging for our movement to be able to break through.”

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



What You Need to Know About California Housing and Corporate Landlords

Ben Christopher / Thursday, March 7, 2024 @ 7:11 a.m. / Sacramento

Illustration by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters;

Some of the state’s most powerful legislators want Big Landlord out of California’s single family neighborhoods.

The Legislature will consider at least three bills this year to keep so-called institutional investors from gobbling up too many of the state’s widely coveted single-family homes.

Apartment buildings have long been an asset of interest for big investment companies, but the Big Money-owned single family rental is a 21st Century invention. During the Great Recession new companies began cobbling together rental empires out of the nation’s glut of foreclosed single-family homes.

Defenders of the business model applaud the role it played in propping up local housing markets and quickly filling homes that would have otherwise sat vacant and derelict. Critics liken these investors to financial vultures depriving would-be homeowners of a shot at the American Dream while hoarding the profits of the last decade’s run-up in national home prices and rents.

That debate ratcheted up again during the pandemic when millions of white collar renters, suddenly freed from the office, sought out more space further from the country’s urban cores. Today’s high interest rates have slowed that boom, but most analysts predict that the industry is here to stay, absent new restrictions.

California may be the first to enact some.

“Who are we fighting for? Are we fighting for the corporate interests?” San Diego Assemblymember Chris Ward, chair of the Assembly’s housing committee and author of one of the three bills, said on the Assembly floor last month. “Or are we fighting for Californians, for their dream of homeownership?”

For all the debate, open questions about the industry’s size and its effect on the state’s affordability crisis abound. That’s in part because publicly available data about rental properties is scarce — something some state lawmakers have tried, but failed, to remedy in the past.

As lawmakers gear up to take on corporate landlords, here are seven things to know:

1. What would these bills actually do?
  • Assembly Bill 2584, written by Assemblymember Alex Lee, a Milpitas Democrat, would ban an institutional investor from buying or investing in additional single family home properties and then renting them out.
  • Senate Bill 1212, by Senate Housing Committee Chair Nancy Skinner, a Berkeley Democrat, would go a step further. It would ban institutional investors from “purchasing, acquiring, or leasing” a single-family home or duplex for any reason.
  • Assembly Bill 1333, authored by Ward, would ban developers from selling homes in bulk to big investors. This is aimed at increasingly popular “build-to-rent” projects, in which developers build single-family subdivisions with the specific aim of selling them to single-family rental companies. This bill is backed by the state’s association of REALTORs, who have an interest in banning bundled sales that cut their members out of the buying and selling process.

2. What are “institutional investors” anyway?

It depends on whom you ask. Even the three bills described above use different definitions.

Lee’s bill uses the size of a company’s investment portfolio as the cut-off, deeming any “business entity” with at least 1,000 single family homes on its books as “institutional.” That would apply to just four companies who own a total of 17,300 homes, according to estimates compiled by the California Research Bureau, which conducts research at the request of state lawmakers.

Skinner’s proposed ban would apply to a broader category of investor: Any managed fund, including private equity funds, and real estate investment trusts , which are publicly traded companies that invest in real estate.

Ward’s bill uses Lee’s 1,000-property cut off, but also specifically calls out those trusts in his bill language.

3. Do corporate landlords own a lot of homes?

Businesses that own at least 1,000 single family homes own roughly 446,000 properties nationwide, according to an estimate by the Urban Institute, though the report’s authors concede that the “data and definitions are somewhat fuzzy.”

Nearly half a million homes is a big number on its face. It’s more than the total number of homes in San Francisco. But compared to the housing stock as a whole, it’s less than half a percent. Even looking at just single-family rentals, the vast majority of which are owned by small and medium-sized landlords, the Urban Institute’s “large institutional” share makes up around 3%.

“I think that the investor problem is kind of a boogeyman for the housing market,” said Daryl Fairweather, economist with the real estate listing website RedFin. “People want to blame someone for high home prices and it’s easy to blame investors just because they’re, like, an opaque group of people…Really, the problem is just the lack of supply of housing.”

The industry’s critics counter that nationwide figures mask clustering in particular regions — and within regions, in particular cities, or even neighborhoods. They also say that the industry is growing.

Earlier this month, RedFin estimated that roughly 13% of all the homes sold in the final quarter of last year were single-family homes bought by investors.

That’s a sizable chunk, but again, the devil is in the definition. RedFin labeled an investor as any buyer with one of a number of tell-tale corporate signifiers in its name, such as “LLC” or “trust.” That would likely include a lot of “mom and pop” landlords, who have opted to put their properties into corporate structures to shield themselves from legal liability.

4. What about in California?

Lists of top single-family rental markets vary, but Atlanta, Georgia; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Jacksonville, Florida regularly come out on top. California does not appear to be a destination of choice for the nation’s largest investors. Less than 2% of single-family homes are owned by investors with 10 properties or more, statewide, according to the California Research Bureau.

What institutional investor-friendly markets have in common: Rapidly growing populations and relatively low real estate prices compared to rents.

“That does not describe California at all,” said Laurie Goodman, an economist at the Urban Institute.

When big investors do show up in California it’s disproportionately in the state’s quickly growing, still relatively affordable regions: the Inland Empire, the southern half of the San Joaquin Valley and the Sacramento suburbs. The county with the highest share of single family homes owned by big investors is Fresno at 5.9%, according to the California Research Bureau.

Fresno is a bit of an unusual case, in that the largest single owner there, JD Home Rentals, is a local outfit whose portfolio of some 2,000 homes are clustered in that region.

Statewide, the largest single corporate owner is also the country’s biggest. Invitation Homes kicked off the corporate single-family rental rental trend when it started buying up distressed houses, rehabbing them and putting them on the rental market in 2012. Originally funded by the private equity giant Blackstone, the company has since become its own publicly traded company. The company owns 84,567 homes, of which 11,862 are in California, according to its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

5. Do corporate landlords cause rents to go up?

There are plenty of anecdotes of big investors sweeping into a neighborhood, only for rent hikes to follow. Do big investors cause rents to rise or do rising rents attract big landlords? When researchers have tried to disentangle those two trends, they’ve produced mixed results.

One national overview found that rising rents in a city reliably preceded an increase in single-family investor activity three months later. But they didn’t find that the reverse was true, implying that investors chase after rising rents, but don’t cause them.

“I think that the investor problem is kind of a boogeyman for the housing market.”

— Daryl Fairweather, economist, RedFin

But another study found that single-family areas with higher concentrations of corporate ownership did, in fact, see modestly higher rents than comparable neighborhoods. These companies were able to exploit their relative control over a neighborhood’s housing stock to extract higher than fair-market rent from tenants, the researchers found. But the researchers also found a second explanation behind the rental run-up: By beefing up security across a slew of properties in the same area, they were able to lower crime rates and “enhance neighborhood quality.”

Many larger landlords also use rent-setting algorithms designed to squeeze the highest rent possible from new tenants. Defenders of the industry say those programs simply allow landlords to find an area’s market rent, though renters, prosecutors and federal regulators have argued that, at least in the apartment rental industry, it has amounted to illegal price-fixing.

6. Do big buyers take homeownership opportunities away from first-time buyers?

Every house that’s bought by a major investor and converted into a rental is one fewer opportunity for a would-be first-time buyer. That zero-sum trade off is particularly acute in places where few new homes are being built. A study out of Atlanta found that an influx of institutional investment in a neighborhood predicted a decline in the area’s homeownership rate. In contrast, a study in the Netherlands found that the reverse was true: When cities banned investors from converting homes into rentals, the number of first-time buyers shot up.

Defenders of the industry offer a counterpoint: So what? In places where home prices are out of reach for the average person, putting more single-family houses on the rental market gives more people the opportunity to enjoy some of the trappings of the American Dream — a yard, a garage, maybe a better school district — even if they can’t afford a down payment. The fact that major investors specialize in buying up homes in need of repair means they are often “competing for separate types of products” than first-time buyers anyway, said Goodman.

There’s also some evidence to suggest that allowing more rentals in single-family neighborhoods, no matter who the landlord is, makes those neighborhoods more economically and racially diverse. Case in point: The study of the Dutch corporate landlord ban also found a decline in the number of rentals, an overall rise in rents and an influx of older, richer and whiter residents in the neighborhoods in which those restrictions went into effect.

It’s unclear how relevant that all is in California. “We sell 99% of our homes to individuals,” said Dan Dunmoyer, president of the California Building Industry Association, a trade group representing the state’s home builders. For most first-time homebuyers in California, “it’s not like you are competing with a big institutional player, other than a rich, single person from the Bay Area.”

7. Are corporate landlords bad landlords?

It depends on what you mean by “bad.”

Large institutional landlords appear more likely to run by-the-book, standardized operations. There are upsides to the corporate touch: Large corporations are more likely to operate 24/7 property management hotlines and have plumbers and electricians on retainer. Studies have also found that when filling a vacant unit, corporate landlords are more likely to use impersonal tenant screening systems, which are free of explicit (if not necessarily implicit) racial bias.

The downside: Corporate landlords can be ruthlessly efficient, with an emphasis on “ruthless.” One study, for example, found that they are significantly more likely than small landlords to file eviction notices as soon as they are legally allowed to.

And even companies with in-house legal teams might not always follow the law. In January, Invitation Homes paid $3.7 million in fines and restitution for hiking the rent on nearly 2,000 tenants in excess of what state law allows. In 2021, JD Home Rentals settled a class action lawsuit over habitability complaints.

“Relationships are much more formal when it’s Invitation Homes as opposed to the guy next door and there are pros and cons to that,” said Goodman, the Urban Institute economist. As an example, she noted that her adult daughter had a landlord who used to accept pizza as amends for a tardy rent check.

“You can’t send Invitation Homes a pizza,” she said.

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



OBITUARY: Ione Franz, 1936-2024

LoCO Staff / Thursday, March 7, 2024 @ 6:56 a.m. / Obits

We are saddened to announce that our beloved GG, Ione Franz, passed away peacefully holding her husband’s hand on February 24, 2024.

Ione was born February 26, 1936, to Joe and Mary Leonardo. She grew up in Ferndale with her siblings Mary, Evelyn, Joe and Frank. In 1953 she was crowned Queen of The Holy Ghost Portuguese Celebration. Ione graduated from Ferndale High School in 1954 and spent her life in the field of bookkeeping. On July 17, 1970, she married the love of her life Lee Franz, and they were happily married for 53 years.

Ione was known for her amazing sense of humor, love of Wildcats Football games with her cowbell in hand, volunteering at The Ferndale Museum, going to her great-grandkids school and sporting events, anything that involved spending time with her family and most of all … she loved to SHOP!!

Ione is survived by her husband Lee Franz, children Sandy Hosley, Debbie Hosley, Steven Hosley and daughter-in-law Claudia Hosley. Grandchildren, Rendy Hosley, Janessa Campbell (Kyle), Hollie Kostick (Wes), Keri Hosley, Dennis Hosley JR. (Kelly) and Lee Hosley. Great-grandchildren, Avery Ione and Darian Campbell, Kelsey and Donovan Atkinson, Dalton and Sullivan Hosley, as well as many more loved ones.

Ione was proceeded in death by her mother Mary, father Joe, brothers Joe and Frank, sister Mary and her son Dennis Hosley.

While we mourn the loss of our beloved GG’s passing, we take comfort in knowing that she has been reunited with her friends and loved ones up above. We will carry her memory in our hearts for a lifetime.

Matthew 5:4 – “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

Services will be held on March 15 at 3 p.m., at Sanders Funeral Home, 1835 E St. Eureka. In lieu of flowers, we request donations to be made to the Cancer Society or St. Jude’s Hospital.

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



Eureka Man Robs Bank, Feels Bad About It, Quickly Turns Himself In

LoCO Staff / Wednesday, March 6, 2024 @ 6:58 p.m. / Crime

Eureka Police Department press release: 

On March 6, 2024, at approximately 9:20 am., Eureka Police Department (EPD) officers responded to the 700 block of 5th Street for the report of a bank robbery that had just occurred. The reporting party stated a male subject entered the bank, passed the teller a note stating he had a weapon and this was a robbery. The teller complied with the suspect and the suspect fled the bank on foot with an undisclosed amount of cash.

While officers were searching the vicinity for the suspect, EPD’s Communications Center received information that that suspect was being detained inside the courthouse on the 5th Street side. Upon officer’s arrival, they met with a Humboldt County Sheriff’s Deputy who had detained the suspect at the security check point. EPD Detectives responded to the scene and took over the investigation.

The suspect was identified as 58-year-old Jonathan Hening of Eureka. The investigation revealed that after committing the robbery, Hening began to regret his actions, entered the courthouse and surrendered himself to the security personnel at the checkpoint. All the cash from the robbery was recovered on Hening’s person at the time of his arrest and no weapon was found.

Hening was placed under arrest and booked at the Humboldt County Correctional Facility on a robbery charge.