###

PREVIOUSLY: 

• With Only About 8,000 Humboldt County Votes Left to Tally, The Results are All the Same as They Were On Election Night — and are Now All But Certain (Except in Blue Lake)

###

With just over 2,400 ballots yet to be counted from across the county, things remain pretty much unchanged since last week, when we noted that only the race for three open seats on the Blue Lake City Council remains undecided.

Challengers Michelle Lewis-Lusso remains the top vote-getter among the seven candidates, followed by John Sawatzky, whose vote count stands at 249 with this latest update. Right behind him are incumbent Mayor Adelene Jones and challenger Kat Napier, both of whom, remarkably, have received exactly 243 votes. 

Incumbent Christopher Guy Firor is theoretically within striking distance with 232 votes.

It’s impossible to say how many of the remaining 2,431 uncounted ballots were cast by Blue Lake residents. Regardless, this nail-biter will drag out for at least another week. 

Up in Arcata, Alex Stillman remains ahead of challenger Genevieve Serna — with 3,221 votes to Serna’s 2,781 — all but cementing her victory for re-election alongside fellow incumbents Stacy Atkins-Salazar and Sarah Schaefer.

The “no” vote on Measure F remains just a hair below 70 percent. That thing got pummeled. 

Click the link below for the full list of updated results.

###

Here’s the press release:

The Humboldt County Elections Office has released its third post-election results update following Election Day.

The Elections Office has approximately 2,431 unprocessed ballots as of today, Friday, Nov. 22.


All valid vote-by-mail ballots will be counted regardless of the outcome or closeness of any race if they were postmarked by Tuesday, Nov. 5 and were received by Tuesday, Nov. 12.

The Humboldt County Office of Elections will continue to post the results of the Nov. 5, 2024 General Election every Friday by 5 p.m. leading up to the certification of the election prior to Tuesday, Dec. 3.

For more information on the results of the election, please visit the Elections Results webpage or call 707-445-7481.

###

The Humboldt County Planning Commission on Thursday unanimously approved conditional use permits for The Hills, LLC and Shadow Light Ranch, LLC – a controversial cannabis operation located in the hills just east of Garberville  – despite objections from neighbors and some members of the public who believe the project violates state and federal law.

The commission voted 5-0 in favor of the project, with Third District Commissioner Noah Levy and Fifth District Commissioner Peggy O’Neill absent.

The project application, submitted by Garberville resident Joshua Sweet in 2016, includes 60,940 square feet of existing cannabis cultivation (50,940 square feet of outdoor and 10,000 square feet of mixed-light cultivation), a proposed 10,080 square-foot wholesale nursery to support on-site operations, a 13,472-square-foot processing facility and roughly 5,184 square feet for employee housing. 

The proposed project also includes the decommissioning and restoration of three unpermitted ponds that were at the center of a legal dispute with the California Water Boards and California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW). Earlier this year, Sweet agreed to pay $1.75 million – $500,000 to the Division of Water Rights, $175,000 to the North Coast Water Board, $75,000 to CDFW and another $1 million for remediation work – for “diverting water from illegal onstream reservoirs without first obtaining permits required” through the state.

At Thursday night’s meeting, Sweet reassured commissioners that the state-mandated mitigation measures “are already in play,” adding that the three ponds are “no longer there.”

Sweet | Screenshot

“We’ve been in negotiations with the water board for … eight years now [and] an enormous amount of work has gone into this,” he said. “There is some wetland restoration program that has to happen in the next two years, but other than that it is resolved. There’s a few culverts that have to go in as well, but pretty much 90 percent of it is taken care of and 100 percent of it is negotiated and done. So there’s no more need to hash out anything between the agencies and myself, I feel like we’re getting along now and things should be moving forward smoothly.”

Even so, the cannabis cultivation project has drawn criticism from some residents along Wallan Road, a primary access point to the 560-acre property, who worry about increased traffic along the narrow county road. 

“[T]he biggest concern is the use of Wallan Rd as an access,” according to a letter submitted by Agnes and David Patak. “There are places on the road where it’s beyond potholes and no matter how many times you fill them they don’t last and just become worse. It is only a one lane road and cannot handle anymore traffic. They propose to build housing which takes big trucks to deliver the supplies. THIS IS NOT A COMMERCIAL ROAD FOR COMMERCIAL USE!!!”

County staff convened a neighborhood meeting at the end of last month to discuss the project with folks living near the project site. As expected, the conversation centered around traffic impacts on Wallan Road. 

“[It] is a county-maintained road and has nothing to do with me,” Sweet said. “During that public meeting, I point-blank asked everyone ‘Do any of you know which cars are associated with my project or not?’ and not one person could say. So, basically, they were unaware of … who was doing what and when. I had already implemented the program to send heavy equipment [and] delivery trucks … around the back road, so the traffic that they’re talking about is not me. It’s an accumulation of 45 different parcels, five cannabis companies and four heavy equipment operator companies.”

During the discussion, Planning Manager Cliff Johnson acknowledged the recent appellate court ruling that determined cannabis is illegal in California “because federal law says so.” The shocking determination emerged from a lawsuit – JCCrandall LLC v. County of Santa Barbara – over the legality of transporting an illegal product on a private easement without explicit permission from the property owner.

“It’s the county’s position that that court case is not applicable to the situation in Humboldt County,” Johnson said. “[Santa Barbara] County’s land use development code requires that the county must find that the streets and highways are adequate and properly designed to carry the type and quantity of traffic generated by the proposed use. … That’s a different situation than what occurs in Humboldt County.”

All three speakers who spoke during the public comment portion of Thursday’s hearing brought up the recent state appellate court decision and asserted that the Planning Commission would be breaking the law if it approved the permit.

“You cannot approve a conditional use permit for cannabis – particularly to transport cannabis – because by approving this permit without consent [of neighboring landowners], you are forcing [them] to violate a federal law,” said one commenter, who did not identify herself. “And in that case, the court clearly says that cannabis is illegal under federal law … regardless [of] what California wants to believe. … This is the law of the land right now [in] California, and in the Supremacy Clause that’s all that counts.”

Another commenter, who did not identify himself, noted that the county’s position on the easement issue “is clearly at odds with the decision made by the appellate court” and, like the previous speaker, urged the Planning Commission to deny the project.

“It doesn’t really matter what ordinance – or any other doctrine or document  – that the county has talking about easements; it cannot trump the federal law,” he said. “If the commission chooses to thumb its nose at this decision, it’s going to be on record and it’s going to come back to bite the county later on … and I don’t think the taxpayers really want to be putting up more money to fight legal situations that could have been averted by a simple Planning Commission decision saying, ‘Hey, look, this isn’t right.’” 

Appearing via Zoom, Deputy County Counsel Joel Campbell-Blair said the county is still trying to figure out “what it all means,” given that the ruling was issued less than a month ago and is being appealed by the County of Santa Barbara. 

“When the state issues permits, it doesn’t apply to us and, therefore … it doesn’t have the force of law,” Campbell-Blair explained. “The state has not stopped issuing permits. They don’t feel like that applies to them either. We’ll kind of see where it goes … but I would just maybe warn or caution everybody not to over-apply the case. You know, when judges make law, they make law only as to the issue that was right before them, and that was [the case with] the Santa Barbara County code provision.”

Commission Chair Thomas Mulder asked about transporting cannabis on forest service roads, which are federally maintained. “I do recall that there are some projects out there we’ve approved that use forest service roads, and there’s a direct comment from the U.S. Forest Service if memory serves, that says it’s federally illegal and they don’t support it,” Mulder said. “This isn’t the first time federal illegality has been referenced in regards to accessing a project, is that correct?”

Early in the statewide permitting process, Planning and Building Director John Ford said the county adopted a policy that it would not “approv[e] the use of the road” for cannabis transport. Instead, the property owner would be responsible for “taking the risk.”

Fourth District Commissioner Jerome Qiriazi noted that the Planning Commission is “not approving [the] transport of cannabis, we’re approving production.”

At-Large Commissioner Sarah West acknowledged concerns raised during public comment but emphasized that she and other commissioners are not lawyers and, as such, rely on county counsel’s legal expertise. “They are the expert in this situation … so I will be depending on them for their legal interpretation.”

After a bit of additional discussion, First District Commissioner Iver Skavdal made a motion to approve the project and associated permits. Qiriazi offered a second but asked to amend the motion to correct a couple of small inaccuracies in the mitigated negative declaration (MND) for indigenous artifacts. Skavdal agreed and the motion was approved 5-0.

###

###

PREVIOUSLY: 85-Year-Old Garberville Man Found Shot Dead on Bell Springs Road Yesterday; Case Still Under Investigation

###

The above documentary short, directed and produced by Keely Brazil Covello and Michaela Brazil Gillies, investigates the unsolved 2021 murder of 85-year-old rancher Richard “Dick” Grayson Drewry, who was shot in the head while sitting in his vehicle on Bell Springs Road, near Island Mountain Road.

With the proximity to “Murder Mountain,” the killing naturally gave rise to speculation about the incident’s connections to the illicit marijuana industry. The people interviewed in this handsomely produced short (which was released via the website Real Clear Politics, of all places), describe various theories surrounding the unsolved case, including whether Drewry was the victim of organized crime, a personal vendetta or something else.

Like other examples of the unsolved-weed-murder(s) genre, this one deploys a bit of sensationalism. However, the case does have genuine built-in thriller elements. Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal, at one point, says Drewry’s killing “has all of the Hollywood makings of a hit,” meaning a planned execution rather than a box office success, we assume. 

“Dick Drewry’s investigation — his homicide — that case is absolutely the manifestation of what everyone is concerned about who works out in the hills,” Mendocino County Sheriff Matthew Kendall says in the film.

Eventually, after multiple sources back out of interviews, the two investigative filmmakers nervously travel to the remote New Harris General Store, where co-owner Rob Gellman tells them, on camera: “We know who killed him. The cops know who killed him. It was over water.”

Gellman declines to identify the alleged perpetrator. Nonetheless, the clues lead the duo to some suspicious Facebook posts in which a local woman appears to be implicating her own father in the crime.

A title card before the closing credits says the case remains open.

UPDATE, 8:22 a.m.: The highway is open! Shortly after this post was published, Caltrans updated its alert to say it’s only the Hookton Road offramp that’s currently closed. Proceed with caution.

###

###

Caltrans is reporting that Hwy. 101 southbound is fully closed at the Hookton Road offramp, south of College of the Redwoods, due to emergency work.

This spot is at the bottom of the hill leading up to the Loleta offramp, and as you can see in the above LoCO file photo it is very prone to flooding. We assume that’s the nature of this emergency work.

The estimated reopening is currently listed as 11:59 p.m., though that may simply be a placeholder meaning, essentially, “We don’t know.”

The Outpost will update as new information becomes available.

Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

On Nov. 2, the Humboldt County Sheriff–Coroner’s office responded to the abandoned power plant in Blue Lake for a death investigation. The Humboldt County Coroner’s Office led the investigation and conducted an autopsy on the decedent. The decedent has been identified as Jason Quinton Miller, age 50, of Blue Lake. 

The autopsy confirmed that Miller’s cause of death is electrocution with extensive thermal burns, terminal fall from heights, and chronic methamphetamine abuse. 

Miller was known to be living in an encampment in Blue Lake before his death. At the time of his death, Miller was trespassing on City of Blue Lake property and appeared to be stealing copper wire from a live power line.

Anyone with information about this case 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.

Receive HCSO news straight to your phone or email. Subscribe to news alerts at: humboldtsheriff.org/subscribe.

###

PREVIOUSLY: Sheriff’s Office Investigating Apparent Electrocution Death at the Blue Lake Power Plant

###

Providence Medical Group Eureka, which employs Humboldt County’s only specialists offering such vital services as cardiology, gastroenterology and more, has stopped accepting patient referrals for many routine procedures from offices they don’t own and operate, forcing many local patients to travel to Santa Rosa, Napa or beyond.

Angela Smith, founder and managing director of the independently owned Kidney Care Services of Humboldt, learned about this new policy indirectly back in September after she made three separate referrals to Providence’s gastroenterologist specialty group, only to have them declined. She was told that the office was only accepting referrals from within Providence Medical Group.

In a phone interview, Smith said she called the office to voice her concerns: namely, that this policy will exclude a significant number of local patients from receiving necessary services such as colonoscopies. Many of her patients require a colonoscopy before they get placed on the list to receive a kidney transplant.

“The office manager explained that the decision had come from administration,” Smith told the Outpost. “They had been advised to recommend referring patients to Santa Rosa or asking a medical provider employed by Providence if they would create the referral themselves.”

Smith found these suggested work-arounds ridiculous.

“No provider is going to regularly absorb this extra work,” she said, “and many of these affected patients do not have the means to travel to Santa Rosa for services.”

Ia Thao is one such patient. When we spoke with her in September, she was undergoing dialysis three days per week. Her referral to Providence’s local gastroenterology office was declined, and she was instead referred to the Providence-owned office in Santa Rosa. Squeezing such a trip between her dialysis appointments on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays would be a challenge.

“If I drive down there and come back the same day it’s going to be hard for me,” she said. “The traffic down there, too, it’s kind of hard for me.” Plus, the procedure typically requires sedation, which prevents the patient from legally driving for hours afterward.

Another of Smith’s patients, a man who asked not to be identified while discussing medical issues, said he, too, was denied a local colonoscopy appointment. He needs the procedure before he can get a kidney transplant. The longer he has to wait, he said, “it’s that much longer that I’m on dialysis, and it’s that much longer before I get a kidney transplant. So, yeah, it’s quality of life issue.”

Fortunately for him, he has the resources to fly to the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix.

“We’re fortunate that we can,” he said. “I feel bad for the people that can’t … . All of a sudden it turns our society into an elitist [one] because only the people with the right insurance and enough financial wherewithal are allowed to get the treatment they need.”

Local family medicine practitioner Dr. Stephanie Dittmer has also been frustrated by this new policy and its impacts on her patients.

“I’m getting my referrals rejected, and the reason that’s being communicated to my office staff and my patients is that they are no longer accepting referrals from non-Providence physicians,” Dittmer said in a recent phone interview. “It directly impacts patients, so it becomes a discriminatory thing in the sense of who can financially afford to stop work and go out of the area for something and come back.”

In response to a list of questions, Providence, the not-for-profit Catholic health care system that took over St. Joseph Health in 2016, emailed a media statement saying that the new policy was forced upon them due to “a critical shortage of physicians and advanced practice clinicians” nationwide.

“The inability to accept every referral, especially those which are not urgent or time sensitive, is an unfortunate reality of healthcare today, especially in rural communities like Humboldt County,” the statement says.

But Smith said the urgency of any given patient’s situation should be determined by their doctor.

“General surgery [at Providence] has said it will be eight months out before they can get a colonoscopy because it’s not considered an urgent procedure, necessarily,” she said. “But in terms of my patients, that’s a big deal because that’s eight months of potentially missing a kidney.”

Providence’s new policy appears to have been made at the corporate administrative level, which Smith considers inappropriate.

“The way that they made the decision… is not in line with how medical offices review medical referrals,” she said, adding that such decisions should be made by medical professionals. Smith is well aware of the shortage of specialists here but said a blanket refusal to accept out-of-network referrals from practices they don’t own is not the ethical approach.

“We’re not saying that they don’t have a provider shortage; we’re saying that the way they’ve decided which patients they’re not going to see is not in line with how medical offices do this,” she said. “It sounds like an administrative decision that was taken out of the hands of a medical provider, where it’s supposed to be. .. This decision should not have come from administration. … Nobody else does that.”

Providence’s media statement goes on to say that its medical group is willing to coordinate directly with referring providers to ensure that urgent or special needs are met and the patient’s health remains a top priority.

“We also work closely with our Santa Rosa and Napa medical group providers to provide telehealth visits as an additional option to improve access to care whenever possible,” the statement reads.

Dittmer said such telehealth visits are very rarely possible, and she noted that cardiology is another specialty that has been affected by physician shortages.

“I’ve had to send people literally out of the area to Santa Rosa to get their cardiac angiograms done because the wait time to get into cardiology is excessive, even when people have abnormal studies,” she said.

Rosemary Den Ouden, CEO of the Humboldt Independent Practice Association, said the agency is in the process of credentialing a “desperately needed” cardiologist, but the shortage of medical specialists is simply a harsh reality.

“It’s hard to get some of the most basic things right now because we just don’t have the bodies here in Humboldt County,” Den Ouden said. For example, the county has a severe shortage of gastroenterologists. “We  know that for some of our members, the wait time could be up to a year, especially if it’s for routine screening.”

Dittmer said this situation is not new. 

“I’ve had to refer people out of town on the regular for the last, like, literally two years, because Providence hasn’t been able to meet the volume needs of the people here locally,” she said.

Den Ouden said the shortage is not for lack of recruitment efforts. She said Providence is doing a great job of recruiting, and every single practice in the county is continually working on both recruitment and retention of physicians. In its media statement, Providence Medical Group said that since its inception it has brought “well over 100 primary, specialty, and hospital-based providers to the community.”

However, it doesn’t say how many of those have since left the area. 

This afternoon, shortly before this post was published, Providence Medical Group sent an updated statement that included one new paragraph:

There has been a significant financial investment and time/energy spent to improve the overall access to gastroenterology care in Humboldt County. To tackle the backlog of endoscopy procedures and increase access to crucial, lifesaving GI screenings, Providence has contracted with three additional gastroenterologists and secured the commitment of five other physicians who are qualified to perform GI procedures. These concerted efforts are aimed at reducing wait times and ensuring more patients receive timely and essential gastrointestinal screenings, ultimately improving patient outcomes and overall community health.

Den Ouden said that, to a certain extent, local residents may simply have to accept that we won’t have local access to all of the care we may need.

”This might come off a little curt, but a  place like Humboldt County, we’re never going to have a left eyeball specialist,” she said. “We work hard just to have a cardiologist, an orthopedic surgeon, some GI and primary care, but there will never be a time when we have all these super-specialized positions. There will always be reasons people have to travel outside the area. I don’t think that will ever change.”

Smith didn’t argue with that notion, but she reiterated that Providence shouldn’t make executive decisions affecting broad swaths of the public without consulting with local providers and working with them to develop plans for how best to serve the community.

“It’s as if we’ve all just resigned ourselves to this powerless situation that we have,” she said. “The primary concern I have is that it doesn’t need to be that way. It shouldn’t be that way. And the clout and the size that Providence has in our community, although we’re all deeply appreciative of it, they’re not willing to sit down and have any kind of discussion at the table.”

###

CORRECTION: The headline of this post has been corrected from its original version to reflect that Providence is refusing referrals from practices it does not own, rather than from patients who are out of network.

California State University is only partially meeting its bold plan to graduate 40% of its students who started as freshmen by the end of four years. In newly released data this week, the system saw its four-year graduation rate inch to an all-time high of 36.2% this year — more than double the graduation rate it posted in 2013.

The system has one year left to make good on its Graduation Initiative 2025 goals, which it debuted in 2015. The splashy effort was buttressed by a combination of system and state funding increases that over time reached $400 million annually. That money has gone toward hiring more professors, opening more classes in courses with high waitlists that students need to graduate, cutting the number of students finishing classes with Ds and Fs and reaching out to students who dropped out.

The growth in graduation rates overlapped with a 31% spike in freshmen enrollment between 2009 and 2019, meaning the system’s graduation rate increased even as it was absorbing an additional 15,000 students.

The type of students Cal State enrolled changed as well, explained Jennifer Baszile, an associate vice chancellor for the system, at the board of trustees meeting Wednesday. In that same period, the university saw a 50% jump in freshmen who were the first in their families to attend college, come from low-income households or identify as Black, Latino or Native American — all groups that campuses have historically struggled to graduate at rates similar to other students.

“We are opening up opportunities for students who traditionally have not had them,” said Diego Arambula, vice chair of the board of trustees, at Wednesday’s meeting.

Among transfer students, the system is even closer to its 2025 goals, having graduated 44% of students within two years who came from community colleges — just shy of the 45% target it set for itself. Graduation rates are calculated separately for students who start as freshmen and those who transfer. Lately, about 40% of Cal State’s new students are transferring from other schools.

Gaps remain between racial and ethnic groups

But for the system’s other core goals to eliminate the differences in graduation rates between Black, Latino, Native American and all other students, the gaps remain recalcitrant.

The six-year graduation rate for Latino students, the system’s largest racial or demographic group, dipped from a high of 58% in 2021 to 56% in 2024 — well short of the 2025 goal to have 70% of all students who started as freshmen graduate within six years but higher than the 52% in 2015.

White and Asian students as distinct groups reached or surpassed the 70% goal by 2020.While the traditional timeline for earning a bachelor’s degree is four years, the six-year graduation rate is a common metric that reflects the modern realities for many students: They work to afford their education and care for families, activities that require them to enroll in a reduced number of courses, which means they take longer to graduate.

For Black students, the graduation rate remains stubbornly low — at no point has Cal State graduated more than 50% of Black students at the end of six years who started as freshmen. At spring’s end this year, the rate stood at 49 percent — a full 21 percentage points below the 70% goal.

Cal State is the nation’s largest public four-year university system and is home to more than 400,000 undergraduates.Another immovable gap is the one between students receiving federal Pell grants because they come from low-income families and those who don’t.

At Cal State, nearly half of students receive this benefit and they graduate at rates 10 to 12 percentage points below those of students from families with higher incomes. The gulf between students with and without Pell grants is supposed to close completely by next year under the goals Cal State set forth.

“Closing equity gaps is really, really hard,” said Christopher J. Steinhauser, a trustee who was superintendent of the Long Beach public k-12 school system, among the state’s largest. “Sometimes when you have initiatives and people do better, the gaps actually grow, and we actually have seen that here in our own system.”

Covid’s impact

One force constraining graduation rates is the effect the COVID-19 pandemic had on students remaining in school. A key early measure of whether students will graduate is how many return after their first and second years of school. At Cal State, that so-called retention figure gradually grew until the pandemic struck. Among students who started as freshmen in 2019, about 85% returned after their first year. But for those who started in 2020, the year Covid devastated the world’s public health systems and plunged many families into financial distress, the share of returning students dropped to 83% and the next year to 81%.

Once students leave, it’s difficult to persuade them to return, higher-education experts say.

Still, Cal State has a higher overall graduation rate than most other similar universities in other states. The University of California, which rejects far more applicants than Cal State, graduates about 72% of its freshmen within four years — double that of Cal State.

###

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