Trinity County Sheriff’s Office press release:

On Friday, April 12, 2024, the Trinity County Sheriff’s Office was alerted to potential skeletal human remains, in a wooded area of Mad River, CA. Deputies responded to the area and identified the remains as human, collecting the remains as well as items about the remains.

Although the investigation is in the preliminary phases, no signs of skeletal trauma were observed. The remains however shall be reviewed by Pathologists and a full autopsy conducted.

Evidence in the general area of the remains led to a potential identity for the individual. The family of this individual has been contacted, just to advise them of the situation and the potential that the located individual was their family member.

DNA testing shall be used to confirm the identity, and once a positive identity as well as a cause of death are obtained, further press releases will be issued.

Although the matter remains under investigation, the Sheriff’s Office does not believe that the matter presents any danger to the public.

California is taking Huntington Beach to court again — this time over a change to its city charter adopted last month by local voters that would allow the city to require voter identification in municipal elections.

Conservative city officials in Huntington Beach pushed for voter ID, a popular policy in Republican states, to address concerns from constituents about election integrity that have increasingly cropped up in the wake of former President Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

But Attorney General Rob Bonta and Secretary of State Shirley Weber announced today that they would seek to invalidate the new law for interfering with state protections of voting rights. The officials, both Democrats, argue that Huntington Beach’s ID requirement could disenfranchise voters and is unnecessary because there is not widespread fraud in California elections.

“It really is a solution looking for a problem, because we have not found this problem,” Weber said at a press conference. “We have worked very hard to make sure that every eligible Californian knows that they have the right to vote.”

The lawsuit, filed in Orange County Superior Court, contends that elections are an issue of statewide importance governed by statewide rules and that cities do not have authority to implement additional regulations that could interfere with a voter’s ability to cast a ballot.

Bonta said that Californians must already present identification and swear under penalty of perjury when they register to vote, allowing for a more expedited voting process. He said Huntington Beach had not provided a compelling reason for requiring voter ID at the polls.

“We believe that the position of the city of Huntington Beach is not only misguided, it is blatantly and flatly illegal,” Bonta said.

Huntington Beach City Attorney Michael Gates said the law — which takes effect in 2026, and also authorizes the city to add more in-person voting locations and monitor ballot drop-boxes — is intended to increase participation in elections.

“The people of Huntington Beach have made their voices clear on this issue and the people’s decision on the March 5th ballot measures for election integrity is final,” he said in a statement. “To that end, the City will vigorously uphold and defend the will of the people.”

Bonta and Weber already warned Huntington Beach last fall that its voter identification proposal would violate a provision in California’s election code that prohibits “mass, indiscriminate, and groundless challenging of voters solely for the purpose of preventing voters from voting.”

City officials put the measure on the ballot anyway and it passed by 7 percentage points in the March primary. The Secretary of State’s office finally certified those results on Friday.

State Sen. Dave Min, an Irvine Democrat who represents Huntington Beach in the Legislature and is running for Congress, has separately introduced Senate Bill 1174, which would prevent local governments from implementing voter ID requirements, a direct challenge to the city.

In his statement, Gates pointed to the bill as further evidence that Huntington Beach currently has legal authority to require voter ID in elections.

This state’s lawsuit follows another long-running legal saga with Huntington Beach over housing. California has sued the city twice in the past five years for not meeting its obligations to plan for more housing, while Huntington Beach countersued last year, though that case was tossed in November.

The city in recent years has become a symbol of resistance against liberal California, with a newly-elected conservative city council majority jumping into battles over issues such as vaccine mandates, Pride flags and library books.

###

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

###

It’s pretty much common knowledge at this point that Arcata (along with many other cities) is making a mad dash to plan for the creation of a lot more housing, both because it is badly needed and because it is required by the state. But one of the biggest roadblocks municipalities like Arcata face is that there is not a lot of undeveloped land left for building that housing. Arcata has been navigating this issue through promoting infill development, creating documents like the Gateway Area Plan, which aims to allow for housing to be built on all kinds of small or already partially developed sites that may not have been previously earmarked for development. 

Now the City of Arcata is exploring another widely available space for development– the air. More specifically, the air above Highway 101. 

That’s right. The City of Arcata is in the process of planning a project that would build entirely new land suspended above 101 between 14th and 17th Streets, connecting Northtown to LK Wood Boulevard. The project is known as the Arcata Cap – which would create about five acres of additional land that could be used to build housing and other community resources, while also providing a bike-and-pedestrian-friendly connection between the east and west segments of the city that are divided by Highway 101. 

“The cap makes perfect sense in this area for various reasons,” Netra Khatri, Arcata’s city engineer, told the Outpost in a recent phone interview. “The area between 11th and 17th Street, if you drive through the highway, you will see that the highway is low and the grounds on either side are higher…Around it there’s a lot of dead zone – an area that’s not generally used right now. And once you put a flat area on it you will be able to use that for various things. It could be housing, it could become a community park, it could be a transit hub, anything you want.” 

Sound insane? It might be. But, impossible? Well, city and state government agencies certainly don’t think so. In fact, this plan just became part of the California Department of Transportation (CalTrans) project Reconnecting Communities: Highways to Boulevards – a pilot program created after the the adoption of Streets & Highways Code 104.3 that funds the conversion of underutilized highways into multimodal corridors. And the City of Arcata was selected to receive a big ol’ chunk of grant funding to realize this literally lofty goal. 

Khatri said that the exact amount of money Arcata will receive for this project is still unknown, but that Arcata was among three communities selected to receive the funding, along with San Diego and San Francisco. Khatri said that Caltrans has made $148 million available in grant funding, which will be divided (not necessarily equally) between the three awardees. 

And though $148 million is a hefty sum, it will not get any of these projects anywhere near completion. As you can probably imagine, building acres of new land on top of a highway will be an extremely expensive and involved project that will take years and probably hundreds of millions of dollars to complete. Khatri said that the money Arcata receives will go toward the planning phase, including conducting studies, community outreach and drafting the plan. Any remaining funds will be used to leverage additional funding in the future for implementation of the project. 

Arcata’s proposed improvement areas

Arcata’s vision for this project includes more than just the proposed highway cap. The idea, Khatri said, is to “reconnect Arcata” in the areas that have been separated by the highways, and the project also proposes improvements to Samoa Boulevard and the Valley West neighborhood. Khatri said that it is still not completely clear what those improvements would look like, but would likely include adding additional highway crossings, either building new bridges or improving existing bridges to be more friendly to bicyclists and pedestrians.

The idea, for Arcata’s project and the other projects Caltrans is funding, is that if we build more places for people to walk and bike across the highway that they will do so, and that would help further lots of California’s goals – decreasing greenhouse gasses by discouraging driving cars and improving public health by encouraging biking and walking. 

“Our city is divided by 101 exactly in half,” Khatri said. “We used to have 17 or 18 connections – streets connecting the east and west. Right now we have only five connections. Those are all bridges and some of them don’t even have proper bike lanes and sidewalks.” 

And it is true that some of the places where you can cross the highway are pretty dicey for cyclists and pedestrians. There is only one dedicated pedestrian bridge, which crosses over the highway at 17th Street and connects to Cal Poly Humboldt campus. The bridge that crosses on Samoa Boulevard (Highway 255) has no sidewalk or bike lanes, and although that certainly does not stop many people from crossing on bike or by foot, it can be pretty scary. If someone prefers not to risk it, they currently have to make their way up to Seventh street for another option to cross 101. 

But if increasing people’s ability to cross Highway 101 is the big issue, why not just focus on improving the existing bridges and maybe adding a couple more? That seems like it would be a much more feasible solution than this highway cap idea. But Khatri said it’s about more than just improving accessibility between the different sections of Arcata, it’s also about improving our environmental ecology by creating more green space on the highway cap and “reconnecting the forest to the bay.” 

“At one point this was forested land and because of the industrial revolution or other aspects of human nature, we went into development and we – I wouldn’t say the word destroy, but that’s the first thing that comes to my mind – have destroyed the forest, the creek. Jolly Giant Creek at some point was an open creek but right now it’s covered by downtown.” 

By creating a highway cap, the hope is that it can help the city’s return to a simpler time, before the community was torn in half by four lanes of asphalt, when humans and other living things could freely roam across the land. 

The idea is not totally new or unique to our region and many other communities are planning, or having even begun constructing highway caps – also referred to as highway lids or land bridges – as a way of returning the highways to the land without actually removing the road. One example is the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, which is currently under construction in Agoura Hills and will cover a portion of Highway 101 to provide a place for wildlife to safely cross. Up in Portland, Ore. the I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project just clinched a $450 million grant to build a highway cap over the I-5 freeway to reconnect the Albina neighborhood to the city’s downtown. Another similar and already completed project is the Presidio Tunnel Tops in San Francisco, where portions of the Presidio Parkway run underground, with the park sitting atop. 

Again, Arcata’s project is still in the very early planning stages. As for Arcata’s next steps, Khatri said that the City of Arcata will be working with Caltrans to form community partnerships and will be working with Cal Poly Humboldt, Humboldt County Association of Governments (HCAOG), Arcata House Partnership, the Wiyot Tribe and more to draft a plan that would provide the most community benefits. The City will also be seeking community feedback and Khatri said that staff will announce opportunities for public input over the next year or so.  

Since this is a pilot program, Khatri said, all the involved agencies are still figuring out the best way to roll out the projects and allocate the funding. It will likely be at least five years before we see any actual development on the project. But Khatri is confident that it will happen and said that, even though he was very skeptical about the idea at first, the new availability of funding and the launch of other highway cap projects has made him much more confident. 

“Very frankly, like five years ago when I first heard about this, I was like, ‘Well, this is impossible. The cost is going to be in the hundreds of millions and we will never get that much,’” Khatri said. “But you know, five years ago, we were applying for grants in the amount of two, three, four million. But now we are applying for grants for like $20 million.”

Cal Poly Humboldt release:

The ocean covers most of the planet’s surface, and of that, only 5 percent has been explored. To reveal the mysteries of our ocean,  Cal Poly Humboldt is looking toward the future with a new oceanographic research vessel.

The 78-foot-by-28-foot custom-built aluminum catamaran powered by twin 1100 horsepower Tier 4 engines will travel at speeds up to 24 knots. The vessel—expected to be operational in early 2025—will carry up to 40 students, faculty, and crew on day trips and accommodate up to 14 people on multi-day research voyages. The vessel will have a variety of hydraulic deck machinery for handling up to 5,000 lb of oceanographic equipment and instrumentation. 

The deck will also accommodate divers entering the water from two dive platforms off the stern. The vessel’s laboratory and pilot house will carry a diverse array of state-of-the-art navigation and oceanographic electronics to measure physical and biological features of the ocean bottom and water column. 

“I see this as a continuation of the University’s long tradition of supporting and advancing marine research and educating our future marine scientists,” says Rick Zechman, associate dean of Marine Operations and director of the University’s Telonicher Marine Lab. “The new vessel reaffirms our commitment to ocean exploration and the University’s academic marine science programs”

That legacy of supporting undergraduate and graduate academic experiences while promoting marine research spans decades with programs and facilities that include the R.V. Coral Sea, which was purchased by the University in 1998.

Since then, thousands of Cal Poly Humboldt students have learned first-hand everything from gathering and analyzing water and sediment samples to collecting fish from the deep ocean, while also learning the basics of seamanship and what is required to work on a vessel at sea, says Coral Sea captain Jim Long.

“It’s one thing to learn about marine sciences in a class—but when students get their feet wet (literally), the science becomes real,” Long says.

Student research continues on land at the Marine Lab, which was built in 1965. There, samples collected from aboard the Coral Sea are analyzed.

Compared to the Coral Sea, the new vessel, being built by All American Marine, will be more fuel efficient and capable of a faster cruising speed, which translates into exploring the ocean farther offshore. 

“All American Marine remains on the leading edge of manufacturing techniques and is an industry innovator, merging the latest technology into a functional and proven vessel,” says Ron Wille, president and chief operating officer of All American Marine. “We are thrilled to receive this contract for another multi-mission research vessel that will service a variety of critical missions such as offshore research, oceanographic surveys, and ocean monitoring, as well as informing the emergent offshore wind market on the West Coast. This vessel will open a new era of ocean conservation and research capabilities.”

The Coral Sea is due for retirement, says Eric Riggs, dean of Cal Poly Humboldt’s College of Natural Resources & Sciences. Though well-maintained, the Coral Sea turns 50 this year, far exceeding the average 30-year lifespan of a research vessel.  In addition, the state passed new emission standards effective in 2026 for vessels in the Coral Sea’s class, and replacing the ship’s five diesel engines to meet the new standards would cost up to $2 million. 

Acquiring another second-hand vessel presents its own challenges. It would require retrofitting with engines that meet state standards and outfitting with oceanographic equipment to handle the needs specific to the types of research being conducted by faculty and students. Given these factors, and the anticipated growth in enrollment in the University’s marine science programs, it made more sense to invest in a vessel built specifically for Humboldt, according to Riggs.

The $7.9 million new research vessel is made possible by the state’s historic investment in Humboldt’s expansion as a polytechnic university. 

As for the Coral Sea’s next destination, the vessel cannot operate in California due to the state’s emissions rules. Given those restrictions, the University is considering selling it.

The new vessel will have dual certification from the U.S. Coast Guard as an oceanographic research vessel and passenger vessel, creating additional opportunities for the University, region, and other agencies. 

Corn chips, tortillas, tamales and pupusas, while all delicious, may be missing a key vitamin for women of reproductive age.

Folic acid has long been used to prevent serious birth defects and help babies develop. Medical and public health experts advise daily consumption during pregnancy, but also in the months before becoming pregnant. This B vitamin is so important the federal government requires folic acid in certain foods such as enriched breads and cereals.

Now a California lawmaker is carrying a bill that would require manufacturers of corn masa flour — used to make many classic Latino foods — to also add folic acid to their products. Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula, a Fresno Democrat and physician, is carrying Assembly Bill 1830. The legislation would require that producers add 0.7 milligrams of folic acid to every pound of masa, and that this addition be reflected in the nutrition label.

Arambula wants to address clear disparities in who gets the necessary amount of folic acid. State public health data show that Latinas are less likely to take folic acid in the early weeks of pregnancy or before becoming pregnant when compared to other racial or ethnic groups. This puts them at higher risk of having children born with birth defects of the brain and spinal cord, most commonly spina bifida and anencephaly.

Folic acid, or synthetic folate, promotes healthy cell growth. Research has shown that when taken before and in the early weeks of pregnancy and in the early weeks, folic acid can help prevent birth defects by as much as 70%.

“Food is the best way that we can get folic acid into our communities before they’re pregnant,” Arambula told CalMatters. “Oftentimes the prenatal vitamins that we give to pregnant people are too late.”

That’s because the brain and spine begin to form within the first four weeks of gestation. Many people may not even know they’re pregnant during this time, especially when the pregnancy is unplanned.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration followed that rationale when it handed down a mandate in 1998 requiring folic acid fortification in enriched grain products, including cereals, breads, pasta and rice. Since that rule took effect, the proportion of babies born with neural tube defects has dropped by 35% — about 1,300 fewer babies every year — according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The FDA did not include corn masa flour in its folic acid mandate. Continuing to leave it out is “a real oversight,” Arambula said. Culturally, the diets of many Latinos, especially of immigrants and first generation residents, often rely heavily on corn flour.

Latinas get less folic acid

Dr. Megan Jones sees many high-risk pregnancies among Latina farmworkers as a maternal-fetal medicine specialist on California’s Central Coast.

She sees babies born with neural tube defects, cleft lips and cardiac defects, among other problems.

“We just had two babies with spina bifida in the last six months, they came kind of back to back. It’s not like I would say this is something we see every month, but a neural tube defect is a big deal,” Jones said. “This impacts the kid’s ability to walk, to be able to use the restroom, orthopedic stuff. This is a huge undertaking for a family. I would say in general, even seeing three or four of these in a year has a big impact on a community.”

And while it’s difficult to pinpoint what exactly is to blame in each case, hypertension, diabetes and folic acid deficiencies can play a significant role, she said.

Stacks of tortilla packages at a supermarket in Fresno on April 9, 2024. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local

The CDC advises that all women of reproductive age get 400 micrograms of folic acid, much of which can be found in prenatal and women’s multi-vitamins. But Latinas and Black women are less likely to be taking these before pregnancy.

Between 2017 and 2019, the latest years for which state data is available, about 28% of Latinas reported taking folic acid the month before becoming pregnant, according to the California Department of Public Health. That compares to 46% of white women. Women on Medi-Cal, the state’s public health insurance program for low-income people, are also less likely to take folic acid before pregnancy compared to women on private insurance.

Regionally, women in the San Joaquin Valley and in the very northern part of the state were less likely to take folic acid.

Voluntary vs. mandated folic acid in foods

In 2008, Mexico began requiring that corn masa be strengthened with folic acid, but enforcement of that mandate has lagged, according to research conducted by Columbia University and Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government has long acknowledged the potential benefits of fortifying corn masa with folic acid, but still does not require it. In a 2009 study, the CDC wrote: “Fortification of corn masa flour products could increase folic acid intake by nearly 20 percent for Mexican-Americans, who are at a 30-40 percent higher risk for a number of severe brain and spinal birth defects.”

With mounting data and advocacy, in April 2016 the FDA approved a petition to allow manufacturers of corn masa flour to add folic acid to their products. That was voluntary and producers have been slow to act. Two years after the FDA’s announcement, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that only 10% of corn masa flour contained folic acid; none of the corn tortillas tested did.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy organization, did its own survey of hundreds of corn masa products from 2018-2022 and found folic acid in only 14% of corn masa flours and found none in the 476 corn tortilla products analyzed.

Arambula’s legislation is sponsored by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The bill has made it out of its first policy committee, and so far has no registered opposition.

The March of Dimes, which advocates for maternal and infant health, for years has advocated for folate to be added to corn masa, so that more women can get folic acid through their diets. Advocates there believe California’s decision can have national influence and bring the issue back to the forefront, said David Pisani, director of advocacy and government affairs at March of Dimes.

“Folic acid hasn’t been on the tips of people’s tongues for quite some time,” Pisani said. “You don’t read about it, you don’t hear about it, and I think it’s because there is this misunderstanding that well, isn’t it already in everything most people are consuming? Obviously, the answer is not every product.”

Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit www.chcf.org to learn more.

###

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

Anyone who does their own taxes knows about confusion. Just trying to figure out which forms to fill out in the first place practically requires an MBA, while the calculations themselves require an advanced degree in math. (The current US tax code is over 70,000 pages long.) To paraphrase Herbert Morrison, who witnessed the fiery end of the Hindenberg in 1937, Oh the insanity!

Which got me thinking about other areas of confusion, large and small, that bedevil our lives.

Units, SI vs. US

The Mars Climate Orbiter, launched by NASA in December 1998, was lost the following September during the course correction designed to take it into a Mars-orbiting trajectory — it either burned up in the atmosphere or entered an orbit around the sun, missing the planet entirely. The error that resulted in the loss of the half-billion-dollar (in today’s money) spacecraft was that, while Lockheed Martin used the usual US units (pound-force), NASA used SI (metric) units, newton-seconds, meaning that instructions sent to Mars Climate Orbiter were off by a factor of 4.45.

Next

“Today’s Sunday. I’ll see you next Thursday,” you tell me.

“Wait, do you mean four days from now or eleven days from now.”

“I said next,” you reply. “If I meant this Thursday, I’d have said so.”

(Try explaining that to a new immigrant in an ESL class.)

13/30, 14/40, 15/50…

“Do you realize that at least fifty percent of ESL students have trouble differentiating thirteen from thirty when they hear it?”

“You’re kidding. That’s funny.”

“Funny peculiar or funny ha-ha?”

Biweekly

I hate this one, and still have to check every time someone uses the word. (Ditto bimonthly and biannual.) According to Merriam-Webster, biweekly means both:

1: occurring, done, or produced every two weeks

2: occurring, done or produced twice a week

A commentary by the M-W editors notes, “The problem lies in the prefix bi-: it means (among other things) both ‘coming or occurring every two,’ and ‘coming or occurring two times.’ This too is a long-established fact that we cannot ignore. English is sometimes simply obstreperous.”

Glad we got that cleared up.

Time Change

I hate time change. You too, I’m guessing. Not just for screwing up biorhythms (there’s always a spike in traffic accidents twice a year) but for mundane stuff like Amtrak; every October, any Amtrak train running on time stops at 2:00 a.m. and waits an hour before getting underway again, so as not to mess up the schedule. Sigh. Airplane crews use Zulu/UTC time — which, if adopted by the USA, would eliminate so much confusion.

Days and Dates

Being a limey from Britain, my instinct is to write my birthday as 6/9/1942, that is, day/month/year, as is done in the UK, along with Europe, Mexico and nearly all the rest of the world. Here, of course, I have to invert the day and month (for 9/6/42) — in this the US is unique. Almost. In Canada and South Africa, there’s no official standard and you can go either way.

(By the way, the sun was firmly in the constellation Leo when I was born, so how come my sun sign is Virgo? Because of the precession of Earth’s axis since the Babylonians originally settled on 12 signs of the zodiac 5,000 years ago.)

Noon and Midnight

11:59 a.m. is one minute before noon, so why isn’t 12:00 a.m. noon? Actually, it is in Japan. And was, in this country; the style manual of the US Government Printing Office ordained 12 a.m. for noon until 2008!

I’m too confused to keep going. Time for one of my bi-hourly breaks.

###

PREVIOUSLY:

• The Sequoia Park Zoo Foundation Announces That it is Dissolving; City of Eureka to Take Over Fundraising Duties, Press Release Says

###

Press release from the City of Eureka:

Eureka, CA – The City of Eureka acknowledges the Sequoia Park Zoo Foundation’s recent decision to dissolve their operations as a 501 (c) (3) non-profit fundraising organization and is very grateful to the Sequoia Park Zoo Foundation for their many years of philanthropic support.

The City of Eureka and Sequoia Park Zoo wishes to reassure the community that the Foundation’s decision will not impact animal care, guest access, operations, or staffing.

“We will continue to meet and exceed the highest standards of animal wellbeing while providing guests with experiences that create and deepen connections to wildlife and wild places,” says Jim Campbell-Spickler, Sequoia Park Zoo Director. “We have seen record-breaking growth over the past few years, and I am excited for what the future holds for our little zoo in the redwoods.”

The City of Eureka has owned, operated, staffed and made all capital improvements to the Sequoia Park Zoo since it opened in 1907, and the Zoo has been proudly accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) for over 25 years.

“The City remains committed to preserving and promoting the unique history and mission of the Sequoia Park Zoo,” says Donna Wood, Director of Community Services for the City of Eureka. “We look forward to continuing to shepherd the success of the Zoo in collaboration with our community partners.”

Anyone wishing to stay connected or learn more about the future of the Sequoia Park Zoo may visit www.redwoodzoo.org.