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A local doctor wants to develop an abandoned Eureka church property into a project that would deliver two of the community’s top priorities: housing and medical care facilities.

It may look like a bell tower but this is actually a 60-foot cell phone tower, erected by Verizon in 2009.

Dr. Deepak Stokes, an OB-GYN currently working with Providence Medical Group, has requested a zoning change and general plan amendment that would allow for construction of a multi-use development including eight two-story townhomes – for a total of 16 new housing units – plus a rural health care facility offering urgent care, women’s health services, primary care and more, according to tentative plans submitted to the city.

The 1.01-acre parcel, which is currently home to a vacated Apostolic church with a parking lot and a detached five-car garage, occupies the northern section of a block on Harris Street between Williams and D streets, near Henderson Center.

The land has a land-use designation of Low Density Residential, but Stokes has asked the city to convert it to Neighborhood Commercial and to change the zoning to Henderson Center, which is a mixed-use designation that allows for multi-family housing, medical facilities and commercial offices.

“It’s awesome that they want to do housing on there, but [the project] is still in the very early stages,” said Millisa Smith, an assistant planner with the City of Eureka. 

The city recently issued a notification to neighboring property owners informing them about the rezoning request and offering a broad overview of Dr. Stokes’s plans. 

According to Smith, Stokes hopes to set up a rural health care clinic in the church’s 5,285-square-foot basement with more medical offices upstairs, including medical spa facilities offering plastic surgery, injections, laser treatment, massage and esthetician services. 

Calls to Dr. Stokes’s Eureka office were not returned by publication time. 

The development will require compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and so an Initial Study/Mitigated Negative Declaration (IS/MND) is being prepared. Smith said that document should be posted publicly later this month.

From there the project must head to the Eureka Planning Commission for a public hearing, and the City Council will need to hold at least two public hearings of its own – one to approve the environmental documentation and another to approve the general plan amendment and zoning change.

Smith said the “very tentative” timeline calls for those latter hearings to take place in June.

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Representatives from the McDonald’s Golden Grants Program joined Food For People staff outside of the non profit’s 14th Street site on Friday morning to present them with a $10,000 check to help support the Food For People Backpacks for Kids program. 

Carly Robbins, executive director for Food For People, told the Outpost that this grant money will help provide meals for school-age children who are struggling to meet their nutritional needs. The Backpacks for Kids program was launched in 2006 in response to teachers and administrators at local schools noticing that many children were having trouble focusing and displaying behavioral issues when they returned to school on Mondays. They identified that many of these children were not meeting their nutritional goals over the weekends, Robbins said. 

Backpacks for Kids helps combat the issue by working with the schools to identify children who are struggling and sending them home on Fridays with a backpack full of nutritious food – enough for two breakfasts, two lunches, two dinners and snacks – to get them through the weekend. Currently the program serves 37 different sites, with around 600 children signed up, but there are many more children in need and this funding will help expand the program to serve more families. 

“We always have children on the waiting list that we just don’t have the funding to serve,” Robbins said outside of Food For People on Friday morning. “So this [grant] is huge. This will allow us to expand out and serve more children on the waiting list, which is really wonderful.” 

And the program has been very successful, Robbins said, and teachers have reported seeing a significant improvement in the recipients, with children arriving at school on Mondays with more energy, more ability to focus and less behavioral issues. Robbins added that this crucial program is “very grassroots,” receiving no state or federal funding. It is completely supported through grants and local contributions. 

The McDonald’s Golden Grant Program is made possible through donations from McDonald’s owners and operators, who donated $40,000 in funding this past year. The program aims to support nonprofit programs that benefit children, including nutritional or educational programs. Out of more than 100 applicants, Food for People was selected for the top grant award of $10,000, and 16 other applicants throughout Northern California received somewhere between $1,000 and $5,000. 

Cosmo Fagundo, the owner operator of all the McDonald’s in Humboldt County, said that the grant committee selected Food For People’s application because it offers help to a lot of local children and has a noticeable positive impact. 

“Our communities are really important to us,” Fagundo told the Outpost about the grant selection process.  “This is a great program – it serves so many people. Food for People does an amazing job, so that’s really the reason for it. They’re making a huge impact.”

After an inspection yesterday, the county’s Division of Environmental health shut down the popular Moonstone Grill — that restaurant just above Moonstone Beach in Westhaven — due to what the health inspector described as

… rodent access to all areas of the facility inspected, along with evidence of ongoing contamination of critical surfaces, and potential/actual contamination of utensils (food contact) and food.

The restaurant was deemed to be “an immediate health hazard” due to the infestation, the inspector wrote. In particular, the inspector noted rat feces in a corner of a food prep sink, on floors throughout the kitchen and elsewhere. Chew holes were identified in various locations throughout the facility.

In addition, many of the restaurant’s employee handwashing sinks were determined to be defective. The sink in the employee bathroom provided no cold water, the inspector wrote, and the hot water was 136 degrees Fahrenheit “making [the] sink unusable.”

Yesterday, on Facebook, the Moonstone Grill posted that “due to equipment failure, we will be closed this weekend due to repairs.”

The health inspection report noted that the restaurant would have to remain closed until a professional pest control company eradicates the rat infestation and various other violations of the health code are addressed. The restaurant’s owners have 15 days to request a review of the health inspector’s decision to shut the restaurant down.

DOCUMENT:

“Official Inspection Report,” Moonstone Grill, March 7, 2024.

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PREVIOUSLY: At a Two-Day Conference in Eureka This Week, North Coast Tribes Advocate for ‘Meaningful Engagement’ With Offshore Wind Developers, Federal Regulators

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The Yurok Tribe posted the following announcement to its Facebook page Wednesday evening, just hours after news broke that Crowley Wind Energy plans to let its partnership agreement with the Harbor District expire without signing a lease to develop a heavy-lift marine terminal on the Samoa Peninsula:

[On Wednesday], the Yurok Tribal Council voted to formally oppose the development of floating offshore wind energy projects off the Yurok Coastline.

The Tribal Council opposes offshore wind for the following reasons:

• The 900-foot-tall offshore wind turbines will indelibly tarnish sacred cultural sites from the coast to the high country.
• There is insufficient scientific research on the adverse environmental impacts associated with the massive floating wind turbines and platforms. The Tribe is gravely concerned about potential risks to the interlinked ecosystem extending from the deep ocean to the headwaters of the Klamath River.
• The federal government has not recognized the Yurok Tribe’s unceded ocean territory or its sovereign authority to determine whether and how this territory should be developed.

In January, the Yurok Tribe hosted a two-day Offshore Wind Summit in Eureka. The summit featured presentations from West and East Coast tribal leaders, local, state and federal officials and industry representatives. In part, the Tribal Council organized the meeting to hear from tribes on the East Coast, where the offshore wind industry is further along in the development process. The East Coast tribes voiced grave concerns about developers’ attempts to subvert laws that protect tribal lands and spiritual sites.

Last month, the National Congress of American Indians, the largest national organization of tribal governments, issued a resolution asking the Biden administration to suspend all scoping and permitting of offshore wind projects until the “completion of a comprehensive and transparent procedure adequately protecting tribal environmental and sovereign interests is developed and implemented.”

The Yurok Tribal Council will soon issue a resolution on the tribal governing body’s opposition to proposed offshore wind projects in Yurok ancestral territory.

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.

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: 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: 

• Second Street Serenade
• THE HUMBOLDT HUSTLE: Marco Alvarez, ‘El Hombre Torcido,’ Will Break Your Heart for Tips in Two Languages
• ‘Veteran and His Dog Sing For Tips’: The Story of an Old Town Busker and His Singing Canine Companion