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Press release from the Humboldt County Elections Office:

The Humboldt County Office of Elections is seeking input from Humboldt County voters on the county’s draft Election Administration Plan (EAP).

Background

The County of Humboldt will soon be transitioning to the California Voter’s Choice Act (VCA) elections format. Approved by California lawmakers in 2016, and established by Senate Bill 450, the VCA expands voters’ options for how, when and where they cast their ballots by:

• Mailing every voter a ballot.
• Expanding in-person early voting.
• Allowing voters to cast a ballot at any vote center within the county.
• Providing secure ballot drop off locations throughout the county.

Under California law the Office of Elections is required to submit an EAP that describes how the County of Humboldt will administer elections under the VCA. To meet the state’s requirements, the Office of Elections must engage voters on the draft EAP and gather public feedback.

The county’s draft EAP can be reviewed at humboldtgov.org/VotersChoiceAct.

Public Comment

Public comment on the draft EAP will be accepted until Wednesday, Aug. 16 at noon. Feedback can be submitted through the online submission form, by email at humboldt_elections@co.humboldt.ca.us or over the phone at (707) 445-7481. 

Additionally, the Registrar of Voters will hold a public hearing to discuss the draft EAP on Thursday, Aug. 17 from 6 to 8 p.m.at Arcata City Hall in the Council Chamber, located at 736 F St., Arcata, CA. Community members are invited to attend and participate in person or on Zoom to share their input. For more information on the public hearing, call (707) 445-4841.
For more information on the Voter’s Choice Act, please visit the California Voter’s Choice Act website.

About the Humboldt County Office of Elections

The Humboldt County Office of Elections is committed to ensuring all eligible residents have an opportunity to exercise their right to vote; conducting elections in a fair, accurate, and efficient manner; and providing reliable information and the best possible service to voters, districts, candidates, and other interested parties. For more information, visit humboldtgov.org/elections.

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Press release from Coast Central Credit Union:

Coast Central Credit Union (CCCU) announced that the fall 2023 round of its Community Investment Program is now open. With the Board of Directors’ approval of an increase up to $300,000 in grants annually, $150,000 is available this round to support local organizations throughout Humboldt, Del Norte, and Trinity counties. Grant amounts generally range from $3,000 to a maximum of $25,000, and there are usually 8 to 12 recipients. The giving program was created in 2008, and since then has awarded a total of over $2 million to more than 200 organizations throughout its tri-county service area. 

New change: applications are now due directly to Coast Central via email at marketing@coastccu.org or by mail to Coast Central Credit Union Marketing Department, 2650 Harrison Ave., Eureka, CA 95501. To apply and for more information, visit coastccu.org under the Community tab. For question, contact VP Marketing & Communications Colleen Toste at (707) 445-8801 x 1309 or ctoste@coastccu.org. Applications must be received by 5 pm on Thursday, August 31. Recipients will be announced mid-October. 

In 2023 CCCU is on track for an unprecedented $650,000 in total community giving through its grant, sponsorship, and college scholarship programs. Additionally, its employees have volunteered over 3,000 hours year to date throughout its three counties. Through banking with CCCU, individuals and businesses directly support these efforts.

Coast Central Credit Union is the largest member-owned financial institution in the area, with $2 billion in assets, nearly 77,000 members, and operating 11 Member Services Branches throughout Humboldt, Del Norte and Trinity counties, including McKinleyville, open six days a week and Bayshore Mall, open seven days a week. Members also have free access to Online and Mobile Banking and a fee-free network of 30,000 ATMs nationwide. More information is available at coastccu.org, facebook.com/coastcentral, @coastccu on Instagram, or by calling (707) 445-8801.

Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

Alan Wayne Mills Booking Photo | Humboldt County Correctional Facility

On July 30, 2023, at about 11:28 p.m., Humboldt County Sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to the Swimmer’s Delight Campground near Carlotta for the report of a disturbance.

While enroute, deputies learned that two adult female victims had been privately transported to a local hospital for treatment of moderate injuries.

At the campground, deputies contacted numerous involved individuals, including 22-year-old Alan Wayne Mills. During their investigation, deputies learned that an argument occurred at the campground between Mills and another male, which escalated to a physical altercation. During this altercation, Mills reportedly began throwing camp chairs, striking and injuring the two adult females.

Mills was arrested and booked into the Humboldt County Correctional Facility on charges of battery with serious bodily injury (PC 243(d)), assault by force likely to produce great bodily injury (PC 245(a)(4)) and causing injury to an elder adult (PC 368(b)(1)).

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

Ashley Hooks always planned to retire at Lakewood Regional Medical Center, where she has been a nurse for 12 years. But now, Hooks said, staffing issues are so bad and burnout so severe that she’s rethinking how she wants to spend the rest of her career.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the number of nurses at the hospital dropped from just below 500 to 330 according to her union’s roster, said Hooks, who is 53.

“It wasn’t even this difficult during the height of the COVID pandemic,” she said.

Hooks’ stress reflects pressure many California nurses are under because of steep understanding that she and others say is driving many professionals out of the industry.

According to the Hospital Association of Southern California, nursing vacancy rates among local hospitals exceed 30%. Prior to the pandemic the average vacancy rate was 6%.

“Within the last year and a half or so, it’s really gotten worse,” Hooks said.

Now the Legislature is looking at several ideas to address the nursing shortage by bringing more early-career nurses into the field. But so far, the groups with most to gain — or lose — are at odds over how to solve the staffing problems afflicting California’s health care workforce.

Labor organizations and hospitals want nursing schools to prioritize certain applicants for admission, such as people who already have experience in the industry.

“We don’t have enough nurses entering the system as opportunities are opening up for them to leave the system,” said Peter Sidhu, a nurse and executive vice president of United Nurses Associations of California/United Health Care Professionals.

But the schools say that won’t help them graduate more nurses. They need more faculty and more hands-on training opportunities to increase class sizes.

Hospitals and unions say they don’t have much time to waste. Estimates show California faces a shortage of about 36,000 licensed nurses, according to the UC San Francisco Health Workforce Research Center on Long-Term Care.

Preliminary data from a statewide survey conducted in 2022 shows nurses cut back on the number of hours worked per week since 2020, and nearly half the workforce reports symptoms of burnout, said Joanne Spetz, director of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at UC San Francisco, who has studied nursing workforce issues for more than a decade.

More nurses, even those as young as 35, are thinking about leaving the profession entirely or retiring within the next two years, and half of the workforce had at least one patient die of COVID-19, Spetz said.

“There is a lot of trauma in the nursing workforce,” Spetz said. “The numbers are not good.”

Union-backed bills for nursing shortage

Labor advocates say the nursing shortage creates a vicious cycle. The nurses on shift wind up doing more work. They get burned out and flee the industry, worsening the problem.

Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the United Nurses Associations of California/United Health Care Professionals turned their attention to the state’s community college system, where graduates can earn degrees to become nursing assistants, licensed vocational nurses or registered nurses. Both groups say community colleges offer the most affordable and efficient way to earn a nursing degree.

One of their ideas aims to help high school students get into nursing schools faster. Another would give entry-level workers the chance to move into more skilled and higher paid positions like nursing.

Kaiser Permanente health care workers strike outside a Kaiser facility in Sacramento on July 25, 2023. Workers are on the picket lines to protest patient care crisis and unsafe staffing at Kaiser hospitals. Photo by Rahul Lal for CalMatters

Sidhu’s union is sponsoring a bill that would create a pilot program for high school students who take extra classes to have preferential admission into a community college nursing program.

A second measure, which is co-sponsored by SEIU and the California Hospital Association, would require community colleges to set aside 15% of enrollment slots for health care workers looking to further their education with a more advanced degree. They say helping current workers get higher-paying jobs within health care will help with retention.

“When we talk to our hospital members, workforce issues are the number one thing that keep them up at night,” said Jan Emerson-Shea, spokesperson for the California Hospitals Association. “We also hear from employees that they’ve tried getting into community college programs, but because they’re so impacted, it can take them three, four or five years to get into the program.”

California colleges skeptical of union bills

But community college and some university nursing school leaders contend neither bill will boost the number of graduates. Nursing programs are full, they say, and the proposals do nothing to expand the number of admission slots.

“These bills come up and I wonder who on earth would propose something like this to impact the community colleges without getting our input,” said Tammy Vant Hul, south region president of the California Organization of Associate Degree Nursing Program Directors.

Vant Hul is also dean of nursing at Riverside City College, the second largest community college nursing program in the state. High school students would not have completed enough prerequisites to apply directly to a nursing program, much less be guaranteed admission, Vant Hul said, and existing health care workers already get additional points during the admissions process.

The problem isn’t generating career interest in nursing; it’s creating more spots, program leaders say.

Karen Bradley, president of the California Association of Colleges of Nursing, said nursing programs have an overabundance of competitive applicants.

“We have not had a dip at all in enrollment in my program. I have a waiting list,” said Bradley, who is also dean of California Baptist University’s nursing program. “Every dean is going to tell you that they have a waiting list or enough qualified applicants that they turn away students.”

About 14,000 new students enrolled in nursing programs during the 2020-21 school year, according to the Board of Registered Nursing’s annual school report. That’s about 1,000 fewer students than the previous two years due to smaller class sizes, but schools across the state received more than 55,000 applications, a 10-year record.

The bills’ sponsors say they have spoken with the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, which has not taken a position on any of the workforce bills.

Separate from the bills, United Nurses Associations of California/United Health Care Professionals lobbied for a $300 million investment over five years to double the state’s nursing school capacity. It was included in the state budget Gov. Gavin Newsom signed earlier this summer.

The details of how the money will be spent have not been decided, Sidhu said, but it could be used to increase faculty salaries and overcome other factors that limit class sizes.

More room needed for California nurse trainees

Representatives for nursing programs say the money will be helpful, but they’re worried about other bottlenecks that they say prevent them from enrolling more students.

Lack of nursing faculty caps class sizes, for instance, with potential educators instead choosing to make more money working in health care. They also say hospitals are not offering enough opportunities for their students to get hands-on training.

“As we move forward with the nursing shortage, clinical placements are an issue. So many hospitals kind of downsized their willingness to bring on students during the pandemic, and those spots never came back,” said Linda Zorn, legislative chair for the California Organization of Associate Degree Nursing and executive director of economic and workforce development for Butte-Glenn Community College District.

A third proposal in the Legislature attempts to clear that hurdle by guaranteeing clinical placement spots for community college students. A mix of opponents are fighting the bill, including hospitals, four-year universities and some community college advocates who say it will take spots away from other students and overwhelm nursing staff.

“Some hospitals aren’t big enough. They can’t take on hundreds of students. They have 25 beds,” said Sarah Bridge, senior legislative advocate for the Association of Health Care Districts, which represents primarily small, rural hospitals in the state.

During the 2020-21 school year, the most commonly cited reason by nursing schools for decreasing class sizes was “unable to secure clinical placements,” according to the Board of Registered Nursing’s annual school report, in part due to workforce challenges resulting from the pandemic. The report states that more than 15,000 students were impacted by restricted training spots compared to roughly 2,200 students during the 2018-19 school year.

Bridge said many small and rural hospitals also are teetering on the edge of a financial crisis. It costs about $7,000 to train one student, not including the salary cost of nurses who supervise students. Multiply that by the number of student trainees accepted and some hospitals can’t foot the bill, Bridge said.

Zorn said nursing schools know they have to be sensitive to how many students get sent to any one hospital, which is part of the reason many are skeptical of the bill. The number of student training spots recently has been limited by the profession’s thinly stretched workforce.

“It can close down the rural hospitals if you don’t have the correct staffing,” Zorn said.

Leaders from four-year degree programs also say the proposal would displace their nursing students in favor of community college students.

The bill sponsors say the intent of the legislation is to create more training capacity, not to displace existing students, as some critics have claimed, said Eric Robles, legislative director for United Nurses Associations of California/United Health Care Professionals.

“If hospitals are getting bailouts, I would sure hope everybody believes our nurse workforce needs a bailout too,” Robles said. “And that bailout can come through strengthening the pipeline, growing the workforce and maintaining the workforce.”

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

“The multiverse is undoubtedly catchy. It appeals to a generation that has grown up with (among other things) the Marvel Cinematic Universe; an audience fascinated by the notion that the multiverse of Doctor Strange might actually be true.”

— Jim Baggott, science writer, in Prospect

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Between the MCU, “The Man in the High Castle,” and a bunch of otherwise sober-minded theoretical physicists*, multiverse theories seem to have become entrenched in the popular worldview of our time. They’re also pseudoscientific bullshit. Lacking a scrap of empirical evidence, any multiverse theory shares the same memespace as astrology, god or Tinkerbell.

* Like Brian Green, cosmologist and science popularizer, who says that multiverses “are turning out to be harder to avoid than they are to find.”

The most general idea is that multiverses solve the “fine-tuning problem”: We live in a Goldilocks universe, one in which the physical constants that shaped its evolution to allow for us must have been fine-tuned — they’re just right — otherwise we wouldn’t be here. Change any of those constants by a smidgen, and you wouldn’t get hydrogen atoms, or stars, or sufficient time for life to evolve. According to the multiverse theory, the only way for our universe to be so finely tuned is that there are zillions (perhaps an infinity) of universes, and that at least one of them — ours, for instance — happens to have the right conditions to spawn intelligent life. If, on the other hand, there’s only one universe, the odds of it having just those tightly-constrained conditions is too unlikely.

The flaw here is that we have no idea whether the conditions in our universe are likely or unlikely, since we only have a sample of one. The only way to judge odds is to take a representative sample. (If you’d never seen a coin before, and you observed a single flip of a coin landing heads, by that reasoning, you’d assume all flips would come up heads.)

So you don’t need multiverses. It may be that our universe is the way it is because it’s the way it is. No problem, nothing to explain. See this for a fuller discussion.

Another reason given as evidence for multiverses is that they solve the so-called “measurement problem” of quantum mechanics. The “many worlds” interpretation of QM says that, every time a measurement is made, like a photon traveling through one of two slits, two (or more) universes appear, with each outcome happening in its own brand-new universe. But we only see one of them. According to this version of many worlds, anything that is possible is real, in some universe; in another universe, your doppelganger is reading this right-to-left.

This, like the many other ideas supporting the multiverse theory, suffers from the same problem: multiverses are unobservable. They’re completely, 100% undetectable, now or ever. (If they were detectable, they wouldn’t be multiverses, they’d be part of our universe.) Since, by definition, they’re disconnected from our universe, no observation can ever prove their existence, and to claim otherwise is not scientific. But by the same token, it’s unscientific to claim their non-existence, either. Like god (or fairies, or the simulation hypothesis, or the flying spaghetti monster) multiverses are ascientific: Science has nothing to say about them one way or the other. If you want to believe in them, there’s probably no harm in it, like belief in Tinkerbell (which makes her real!). Unlike believing in, say, a vengeful god watching your every move, which can cause real harm.

Bottom line: Since there’s no possible way to detect or even to test for multiverses, they’re metaphysical, outside of the purview of science.

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NOTE: None of which takes anything away from my heartthrob Michelle Yeoh, who discovered her many alter egos (besides that of an overwhelmed laundromat owner) in the parallel universes of Everything Everywhere All at Once, winner of seven Oscars. Not to mention Jamie Lee Curtis. Loved it!

Walkability expert Dan Burden took Humboldt by storm last week, leading walk audits in Blue Lake, McKinleyville, Arcata, and Eureka. Dan joins the show to talk about how we can rethink our road system to be safe for all people on foot, on bikes, and in cars.

READ MORE:

• ”How Do We Make Our Communities More Walkable? Dan Burden Knows, and He’s Coming to Humboldt to Help Us Out,” Lost Coast Outpost, July 14.
• ”In Conversation With an Expert: Dan Burden of Blue Zones,” Strong Towns,” April 19.

Nellie Brown Groves, the youngest child of Salmon and Abbie Hinckley Brown, was born in Rohnerville in 1878. Today she is living in Poulsbo, Washington.

I first learned of this remarkable little lady when I was checking out a batch of books about the abolitionist John Brown, from the local library. Susan Groves, a young library assistant, asked me why I was interested in John Brown. I explained that the widow of John Brown had once lived in Humboldt County, as had several of his children. I was just curious about all the Browns.

“Why, I’m descended from John Brown; my grandmother has lots of pictures and clippings about the family; I have a pebble that was picked up in the creek that runs through the Salmon Brown property at Bridgeville. I’ve never been there,” she said, “but I’ve heard about it from my greatgrandmother.”

Thus I became acquainted with the Groves family of Bainbridge Island, who pride themselves in the accomplishments of their famous ancestor.

Salmon Brown at his home in Portland. Photo courtesy of the Groves family, via the Humboldt Historian.

According to Marjorie Groves, Nellie’s daughter-in-law, Mrs. Groves has a few vivid memories of her Humboldt days. Her earliest memory is of a wagon trip from Bridgeville to visit her grandmother, Mary Brown. It was a trip that took all day and involved crossing a large body of water, so it seemed to the little girl. (Since Mary Brown left Rohnerville in the winter of 1881, Nellie was probably about 2 1/2 years old at the time.) She remembers the two-mile walk to school and the lady who came out from town to give her violin lessons.

Salmon Brown had operated a flourishing business out on the Bridgeville ranch since 1875. The 14,000 black Spanish Merino sheep that ranged over 3,000 acres made him a prosperous man. It is interesting to note that Salmon’s biography in Elliott’s History of Humboldt County, 1882 made no mention of the fact that he was the son of a man whose deeds inflamed the nation. Apparently, it was not a negative reaction that he feared, but a well-meaning public who was determined to overwhelm the family with kindness. Twice Brown felt compelled to publish in local papers a refutation of the rumor that his mother and his family were in dire financial straits.

The May 27, 1871 Humboldt Times carried a notice signed by Salmon Brown and his sister, Sarah, stating that “… John Brown’s family… are all well and are doing well, and wish to maintain decent self respect and merit the reputation of having ordinary sagacity, if possible …” Ten years later the Times carried a similar statement again.

It was in 1891 that the Brown family moved to Ferndale, where they spent the next two years. According to the memoirs of Nellie’s mother, Abbie, their departure from the Bridgeville ranch, and subsequently from Humboldt, was precipitated by the hard winter of 189091, when they lost 8000 sheep. (The Rohnerville Herald reported a fire that devastated 2000 acres of the Brown ranch in the fall of 1890.) Then, in 1893, came a sharp drop in the wool market, heralding a four-year national depression. Proud Salmon Brown was suddenly destitute.

After more than 20 years in Humboldt, the family packed their wagons and headed north to Salem, Oregon. Of the eight children, only Cora and Minnie, who had accompanied their parents on the trip from New York to California, remained behind. Cora had died in 1878 after a fall from a bucking horse. Minnie had married Tom Burns and was busy raising her family.

In Salem, Salmon set up a meat business. Nine years later, when the two boys, John and Edward, left the States to try their luck in Alaska, he and his wife made their home in Portland.

It was in these later years that Salmon and Abbie began to look back on their lives and realize that they were an important footnote in the history of the United States. Abbie’s memories of their hazardous journey across the plains in the midst ofthe Civil War were published in the Portland papers. Salmon’s articles about his famous father appeared in several west coast publications.

During the last years of his life, he was bedridden. In 1919, Salmon Brown, aged 82, took his life with a gun said to have a sentimental connection with his father, John Brown.

Talented Nellie was 14 when the family came to Oregon. In Salem she continued her musical studies and added art to her widening interests. By the time she was 18, Nellie had developed not only musical and artistic expertise, but also a certain flair for the dramatic. While she played violin for the Presbyterian Church orchestra in Salem, she heard about the work of the Salvation Army. Entranced by the Army’s good works and the opportunity it offered for travel, little Nellie Brown became Lieutenant Brown and played in the Army Band.

A year later she met her future husband, Edward Groves. The two worked up a vaudeville act and toured the circuit for a few years. Finally, they settled in Washington state, where Edward took up the practice of dentistry, first in Aberdeen and later in Seattle. Nellie bore him one son, Wellington.

At the age of 85, she was once again deeply involved in the musical world. She organized the Seattle Senior Citizens String Ensemble, in which she played first violin. For five years she kept this group playing at churches, at social groups, and in the lobbies of Seattle’s hotels. Failing eyesight forced her to give up these activities, but she was able to keep house alone for several more years before the disabilities of her 98 years confined her to a nursing home.

On July 17, 1980 five generations of John Brown’s family gathered around a cake lit with 102 candles to sing Happy Birthday to his grandaughter, Nellie Brown Groves.

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The story above was originally printed in the May-June 1980 issue of The Humboldt Historian, a journal of the Humboldt County Historical Society, and is reprinted here with permission. The Humboldt County Historical Society is a nonprofit organization devoted to archiving, preserving and sharing Humboldt County’s rich history. You can become a member and receive a year’s worth of new issues of The Humboldt Historian at this link.