Mad River Community Hospital in Arcata. | Photo: Andrew Goff
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Press release from Mad River Community Hospital:
Arcata, CA – February 19, 2025 – Mad River Community Hospital is pleased to announce the launch of two new service lines aimed at further enhancing the quality of care and access for our community. Beginning this spring, Mad River will offer comprehensive Home Healthcare Services and two Pediatric Outpatient Clinics in McKinleyville and Arcata.
As part of our ongoing commitment to provide compassionate, patient-centered care, these new services are designed to meet the growing needs of our diverse community and ensure that care is accessible, convenient, and tailored to each patient’s unique needs.
Home Healthcare Services: Bringing Care to Your Doorstep
Our Home Healthcare Services will provide patients with a wide range of medical, therapeutic, and support services in the comfort and convenience of their own homes. This new service will include nursing care, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and other essential services designed to assist individuals recovering from illness, surgery, or managing chronic conditions.
For more information regarding Home Health, please reach out to 707-826-8420.
Pediatric Outpatient Clinics: Specialized Care for Children
In response to the growing demand for pediatric care in the region, Mad River Community Hospital is also opening Pediatric Outpatient Clinics in McKinleyville and Arcata. The clinics will offer a wide range of services for children from infancy through adolescence, including routine check-ups, immunizations, sick visits, and management of chronic health conditions. Led by experienced pediatricians, the clinics aim to provide families with accessible, high-quality healthcare in a compassionate and child-friendly setting. Weekend and evening appointments may be offered.
For more information regarding our new pediatric clinics, please reach out to 707-825-4979.
This announcement reflects Mad River Community Hospital’s continued dedication to expanding healthcare access and services for its community.
A 20 mph speed limit sign. By Famartin┃CC BY-SA 4.0
A few speed limits in Arcata may be lowered to 20 MPH at some point.
The Arcata Transportation Safety committee voted yesterday to establish a subcommittee to look at changing the speed limit from 25 MPH to 20 MPH in areas like senior centers and heavily used hiking trails.
California Assembly Bill 43, signed into law Oct. 2021, allows local authorities to slow the existing speed limit by five miles an hour by a few methods. If there are a lot of pedestrians, cyclists or vulnerable groups like the elderly or children using the street, the limit can be lowered. Up to 20% of a jurisdiction’s streets can be designated “safety corridors” on higher-risk areas and the speed limit can be lowered. Those methods can only be used after completing a traffic survey, but the speed limit in some “business activity districts” can be set at 20 MPH without one.
The subcommittee is tasked with finding those higher-risk places where it might be worth it to lower the speed limit.
There’s no word on when the limits might be lowered, but seeing as the transportation safety committee has discussed the potential ramifications of AB 43 since it passed two years ago, it’s safe to say it might be a while.
Before hauling your bamboo to the dump did you know we can accept donations of freshly cut (cut that day) and organic bamboo for Saffron the red panda and other leaf-loving friends?
Ideally bamboo should be at least 3 feet in height and have leaves; please no loose leaves of bare canes.
Bamboo can be donated Tuesdays-Sundays from 10am-3pm ; all donors please check in with the Front Gate - new donors will be asked to fill out a brief form.
For additional questions regarding bamboo donations please call Lindsey at 707-441-4229.
Press release from the Humboldt Journalism Project:
Isabella Vanderheiden of the Lost Coast Outpost and Thadeus Greenson of the North Coast Journal have tied for first place in the Humboldt Journalism Project’s 40th Award.
The award is named to underscore its mission of honoring in-depth journalism relevant to those whose income puts them in the lower 40 percent economically in Humboldt County.
Greenson won for a series of articles, including “Inadvertent Disclosure: Eureka City Schools emails shed light on Jacobs property swap.” His coverage, published in the face of a threatening letter from the school district’s attorney, shed light on the players behind a land deal that was intertwined with Eureka’s Measure F. That ballot measure, which failed in November, would have limited Eureka’s affordable housing plans and protected parking lots instead.
“These articles exemplify what can be done at the local level to ensure government accountability and transparency,” said contest judge Ricardo Sandoval Palos, the PBS Public Editor and a graduate of Cal Poly Humboldt. “These aren’t outlets with large staffs and big investigative budgets, but as intrepid journalists who know their communities, they have thoroughly explored some pretty serious issues.”
This year marks the fourth and final year for 40th Award, which began in 2021. Previous first place winners have included reporting on county redistricting, nursing home failures and health care in Hoopa. Recent honorable mentions included work on police misconduct and mobile home regulations.
The first-place winners each receive $1,500.
The Humboldt Journalism Project, a DreamMaker project of the Ink People, also awards reporting grants for public interest and investigative reporting, and it is exploring other ways to support local media, including student journalism.
The Hillsdale Apartments, located inside this 106-year-old building on E Street in Eureka, were purchased last month by Dwivedi Tower, LLC. | File photo by Andrew Goff.
Reached earlier today, 80-year-old Allen Moore said he received a phone call this morning from an attorney with Legal Services of Northern California, a nonprofit organization offering free legal assistance to low-income people and other vulnerable populations in 23 counties.
“They wrote a letter to the landlord saying it’s illegal to raise my rent by 47 percent,” Moore said.
As the Outpostreported earlier this month, the building’s new owner — a corporation called Dwivedi Tower, LLC, owned by 33-year-old real estate investor Anil Dwivedi — recently notified tenants that all existing month-to-month leases would expire on Feb. 28, with new leases starting March 1 at the following fair market rates:
Studio: $1,065
One Bedroom: $1,132
For most if not all residents, including disabled and low-income seniors like Moore, these figures represented massive rent hikes of 40-60 percent or more. The California Tenant Protection Act makes it illegal for landlords to increase rent in any 12-month period by more than 5 percent plus the increased the cost of living (following the Consumer Price Index) or 10 percent total, whichever is lower.
In non-metropolitan areas such as Humboldt County, the 2025 CPI increase is 3.8 percent, meaning local rents can’t legally be increased by more than 8.8 percent in any one-year period.
Rebecca Smith, managing attorney at the Eureka office of Legal Services of Northern California, said she’s unable to provide specific information about any client cases being handled by the organization, but she offered more details about tenants’ rights in California.
Not only does state law limit the amount that landlords can increase rent each year, but California Civil Code 1947.12 says that even if a lease has been signed, it cannot be enforced if its provisions conflict with the Tenant Protection Act.
That’s what happened to Moore, who said he signed a new lease agreeing to the massive rent hike only after being personally approached by his new landlord, Dwivedi, who presented him with a stack of papers to sign and implied that failure to do so could result in his eviction. (The original notice taped to tenants’ doors said tenants who don’t agree to the new rent amounts “can choose to vacate the property on or before February 28th, 2025.”)
Moore said he learned this morning that attorneys with Legal Services of Northern California notified Dwivedi that he could be subject to fines for violating state law.
“This month, Legal Aid is going to suggest that I just pay [my former rent amount of] $720 a month for my rent minus the extra I paid for last month,” Moore said.
Asked what that refund will mean to him, he replied, “Oh my gosh, I’ll be able to buy food and gas.” He previously said that the 47 percent rent hike he’d agreed to under duress would likely make him homeless in a matter of months.
What will the longer-term restrictions on rent increases mean for him?
“Well, it means that I can survive [and] keep my head above water,” he said. “And as long as I’m not retaliated against … I think I’m doing fine.”
Such retaliation is also against the law, Smith said.
“California Civil Code 1942.5 broadly protects tenants from retaliation in the form of evictions, rent increases or any decreases in services by a landlord [responding to] the tenant’s assertion of rights, included their rights under the Tenant Protection Act,” she said.
Refusing to sign an illegal lease is itself an assertion of tenants’ rights, making it unlawful for a landlord to terminate the lease in response, Smith explained.
Other Hillsdale Apartments tenants have asserted their rights, too. Don Swall, an 84-year-old military veteran who’s been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, told the Outpost that both he and his downstairs neighbor, 68-year-old Vanessa Vachon, sought help from Legal Services of Northern California. They heard back last week.
“Legal Services called both Vanessa and me and let us know that slumlord had agreed to raise our rent only the state allowed amount of 8.8%,” Swall said in an email to the Outpost last week.
Dwivedi did not immediately respond to a voicemail and email seeking comment for this post. We’ll update readers if we hear back from him.
Legal Services of Northern California will host a “Tenants Rights Presentation” on Jan. Feb. 28 from 4-6 p.m. at the Labor Temple in Eureka, located at 840 E Street. Here’s a flyer with that information in both English and Spanish.
Legal Services of Northern California is located at 123 Third Street in Eureka and can be reached via phone at (707) 445-0866.
Everything is expensive now. You might feel like you’re being slowly crushed by the ballooning costs of the things you need to live, like housing and groceries. Perhaps you feel like no matter what you do, there’s no way to keep on surviving in a world that’s pricing you out and aging you a little every day. But chill out! It’s not all doom and gloom. Turns out, whenever you bring your own reusable tupperware to an Arcata restaurant, you get 25 cents off of your order.
The little-known law was adopted in 2020, but we here at the Outpost got a press release on Friday from Arcata’s government encouraging all of you too lazy to cook your own food or too shy to eat out in public to bring your own containers whenever you order takeout. As long as your tupperware isn’t damaged, the wrong size, or simply disgusting, the food vendor will likely dish you up.
But beware…if you decide to use the restaurant’s fiber-based compostable takeout containers, you will be charged an EXTRA 25 cents, thus plunging you a little further into the muck of financial instability. Be warned, foodies.
The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice | Meta
Everything is going great. Sure, every morning we awake to a world in which our phones are breathing informational fire at our faces, but let’s try to focus on something dumb and frivolous for a hot minute, yeah?
Amidst the light doom and gloom of the present, Humboldt’s new state assemblyman, Chris Rogers (D-Santa Rosa), found time to introduce Assembly Bill 666 — well-timed, I guess — which designates none other than our beloved Bigfoot as California’s official state cryptid. “Finally,” the citizenry cried out in unison!
For those invested, the entirety of the text of Rogers’ bill is as follows:
AB 666, as introduced, Rogers. State cryptid.
Existing law establishes the state flag and the state’s emblems, including, among other things, the golden poppy as the official state flower and the California redwood as the official state tree.
This bill would state the intent of the Legislature to enact legislation that would designate Bigfoot as the official state cryptid.
Bill Text
The people of the State of California do enact as follows:
SECTION 1. It is the intent of the Legislature to enact legislation that would designate Bigfoot as the official state cryptid.
The peoples’ business. Gettin’ ‘er done.
Real quick, though. If we may assert one quibble with this pandering legislative gesture, Assemblyman Rogers: A cryptid, by definition, is a creature “that has been claimed to exist but never proven to exist.” So, essentially, you are attempting to codify into California state law that Bigfoot is mythical.
Hmm. Well, enjoy your next trip to Willow Creek, Chris. Expect lively debate.
