Born August 5, 1936, in Denver and shortly after moved to Selma, Calif., Jim attended Selma High School, where he earned his letterman sweater playing football, swimming, and diving.
After high school, he joined the United States Marines Corps and then the United States Navy serving 23 years including service in the Vietnam Conflict.
After retiring from the Navy Jim became involved with church ministries in the Hanford, Calif. area. Wishing to serve the Lord, Jim moved with his wife Janice, to McKinleyville, where he pastored churches, led men’s studies, and counseled individuals for 35 years until he passed on July 1, 2023, at age 86.
Jim is preceded in death by his wife, Janice Proctor, and grandson, Brandon Van Sant. He is survived by his daughter, Michelle Proctor, sons Richard Allbritton (wife Lynda) and James Richard Proctor Jr (wife Sandra), eight grandchildren, and 10 great-grandchildren.
Memorial Service ~ Saturday, July 15 at 0900 hrs ~ Telios Christian Fellowship, 1575 L St., Arcata.
Interment ~ Saturday, July 15 at 1200 hrs ~ Greenwood Cemetery, 1757 J St., Arcata ~ Military Honors.
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The obituary above was submitted on behalf of Jim Proctor’s loved ones. The Lost Coast Outpost runs obituaries of Humboldt County residents at no charge. See guidelines here. Email news@lostcoastoutpost.com.
Press release from the Humboldt County Drug Task Force:
Rucker.
On July 10, 2023, Humboldt County Drug Task Force Agents and HCSO Deputies served a search warrant at the residence of Dusty Rucker (Age 42) located on 4000 block of Van Dyke Court in Arcata. After a multi-week investigation and several neighborhood complaints, the HCDTF believed Rucker was in possession of narcotics for the purpose of sales and in possession of several firearms.
Upon arrival at the Rucker’s residence, Agents located and detained a Tamerra Schumacher (Age 43) inside the residence. Rucker was not present during the service of the search warrant. As Agents were processing the scene, Schumacher became verbally aggressive and started to physically resist. Agents were able to control Schumacher, place her in handcuffs, and secure her in the back of a patrol vehicle without further incident.
Schumacher.
Once the scene was secure, Deputy McKenzie and his K9 partner Rex assisted with the search of the residence. K9 Rex alerted to several locations inside the residence indicating narcotics and/or firearms were present.
Agents searched the areas that K9 Rex had alerted to and located two semi-automatic 9mm handguns, multiple rounds of live ammunition, homemade explosives, ballistic body armor, ¼ ounce of fentanyl, 3 grams of methamphetamine, digital scales and a CA Exempt license plate belonging to a Humboldt County owned vehicle.
After locating the explosive devices inside the residence, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team responded to the scene. HCSO EOD was able to safely remove the explosives from the residence. At the conclusion of the search warrant, HCSO EOD transported the explosives to a secure location where they were rendered safe.
Schumacher was transported to the Humboldt County Correctional Facility where she was booked for the following charges:
11370.1(A): Possession of a controlled substance while armed with a loaded firearm
PC 148(a)(1): Resisting, Delaying, Obstructing a Peace Officer
The HCDTF will be pursuing an Arrest Warrant for Rucker for the following charges:
29800(a)(1): PC Prohibited person in possession of a firearm
30305(A)(1): PC Prohibited person in possession of ammunition
11370.1(A)HS: Possession of a controlled substance while armed with a loaded firearm
11377(A) HS: Possession of a controlled substance
11350(A): Possession of narcotics
Anyone with information related to this investigation or other narcotics related crimes are encouraged to call the Humboldt County Drug Task Force at 707-267-9976.
An offshore wind turbine’s floating platform, measuring 100 feet tall and 425 feet long per side, being assembled onshore. (For scale, that’s an adult human circled in red in the lower right.) | Screenshot from Harbor District video.
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The Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District — or let’s just call it “the Harbor District” for short — will host a public “scoping meeting” Wednesday evening from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at Eureka’s Wharfinger Building, located at 1 Marina Way.
What’s a scoping meeting, you ask? Well, the Harbor District recently announced that, per the rules of the California Environmental Quality Act, it is developing a Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) for a major renovation of the Port of Humboldt Bay.
That’s right: The district is preparing to meet the needs of the multinational, federally stimulated offshore wind industry, and tomorrow night’s meeting will give the public its first opportunity to weigh in on the “scope” of environmental issues that should be included in the report.
The idea, as recently explained in a thorough and informative YouTube video featuring Rob Holmlund, the Harbor District’s director of development, is to transform the district’s largely vacant former industrial property on the Samoa Peninsula (home to the dilapidated remnants of the old pulp mill and Hammond Lumber Mill) into a state-of-the-art “heavy lift marine terminal,” a compound where the jaw-droppingly massive wind turbine components could be manufactured, assembled and then loaded onto ships.
(Watch that whole video if have an hour to spare and want to get a good baseline understanding of how the industry could impact our region.)
Here’s the Harbor District’s latest conceptual drawing depicting the Humboldt Bay Offshore Wind Heavy Lift Marine Terminal:
The Harbor District is justifiably optimistic that our (currently rather sleepy) Humboldt Bay is perfectly positioned to become the epicenter of offshore wind energy manufacturing and distribution on the West Coast, a place that could potentially host the lion’s share of industrial production and distribution for floating wind farms from Oregon down to Morro Bay.
Holmlund says there is “a suite of new industries that all need to be created on the West Coast [and] that currently do not exist.”
With the Biden administration calling for 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy — enough to power 10 million homes — to be up and running by 2030, energy companies will need big supplies of everything from turbine blades and nacelles (the housings for the generating components) to mooring lines, towers and transmission cables.
All of these industries could — and by all sound reasoning — should be located right here on the shores of Humboldt Bay, according to the Harbor District. To that end, the district has entered into exclusive negotiations with multinational logistics firm Crowley, the company that aims to actually build the heavy-lift facility out on the peninsula.
While local conservation leaders are stoked about the carbon-emission-reducing potential of offshore wind development, they have voiced concern — right here on the pages of the Outpost, among other places — about just how green the port itself will be.
They point to the diesel-guzzling machinery — cranes, trucks, forklifts, etc. — that operate such ports, as well as the fossil-fueled tugboats and ships that could wind up hauling the massive infrastructure out to sea.
A community group called the Redwood Region Climate and Community Resilience (CORE) Hub has been closely monitoring this project and plans to have representatives at Wednesday’s meeting. In a voicemail left for the Outpost, a member of CORE Hub said representatives will be on hand to advocate for community benefits and protections for tribes and surrounding communities as well as the local fishery.
In a jointly authored opinion piece, local environmental leaders recently called on the Harbor District to commit to a zero-emissions green port by employing such emerging technologies as electrified terminal equipment, on-shore power stations for idling ships, fully electric tugboats and battery storage facilities.
“We would love to see a commitment to a green port from the get-go,” saidJennifer Savage, a 20-year resident of the Samoa Peninsula (and a friend of mine). “It only makes sense that a project designed to move us away from fossil fuels would be clean and climate-friendly itself.”
While the Harbor District has insisted that its port-development project extends only as far as the harbor entrance — which is to say it’s distinct from the offshore wind farms themselves — Savage and others argue that all aspects of the development, including support activities, should be identified and analyzed as part of the Harbor District’s environmental review process.
Jennifer Kalt, executive director of environmental nonprofit Humboldt Baykeeper and one of the authors of the recent opinion piece, said this kind of advocacy isn’t about obstructionism.
“It’s hard to say ‘zero emissions’ without people thinking that we’re asking them to reach an unachievable bar, but that’s not at all what we’re doing,” she said. “We don’t want to make perfect the enemy of good. We just want it to be planned right from the start.”
Kalt noted that much of the technology to facilitate offshore wind energy at this scale — from the massive floating turbines to the electrical transmission infrastructure — is still years away, so the Harbor District should be willing to rely on advances in green electrification options, too.
“This is going to be a publicly funded project to a great extent, so we need to make sure that the public trust [resources] in Humboldt Bay and all the surrounding communities … will be protected,” Kalt said.
Savage also called on Crowley to enter into a Community Benefits Agreement that includes commitments to hire locally and provide job training such as internships and apprenticeships.
“I think it’s really important that the Harbor District and Crowley see the community as valuable partners and make real commitments to make sure everything is done right from the beginning,” Savage said.
The Harbor District’s Notice of Preparation of Draft Environmental Impact Report, which you can download by clicking here, will be circulated for a 30-day review and comment period. If you can’t make it to the meeting Wednesday, you can also submit comments by emailing Rob Holmlund at districtplanner@humboldtbay.org.
Remember: This project is about port development, not the offshore wind farms. Check back later this week for a report on Wednesday’s meeting.
Below, one more image to convey the gob-smacking size of the floating platforms, atop each of which will be mounted turbines that are more than 1,000 feet tall from the ocean surface to the tip of the blades. If you were somehow able to lower one of the platforms into the heart of downtown Arcata, it would cover virtually the entire Arcata Plaza and obliterate several surrounding businesses:
On July 2, 2023, at 7:20am, the Arcata Police Department responded to the 5000 block of Boyd Road, for a man down in the roadway. Upon arrival, officers located a male subject, deceased of an apparent gunshot wound. The decedent has been identified as 36-year-old Joshua Paul Gephart, who was recently living in the Arcata area.
APD Detectives have secured an arrest warrant for PC 187(a)- Homicide, for 24-year-old Gregory Nelson Mattox, of McKinleyville in connection with the homicide.
Gregory Nelson Mattox is described as a white male adult, approximately 5 foot 11 inches tall, thin build, with dark hair and blue eyes. He was last seen wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and tan pants. Mattox may be in possession of a handgun and is considered armed and dangerous.
APD asks if you see Mattox, immediately call the Arcata Police at 707-822-2424 or call 9-1-1. This case is still under investigation and anyone with information is asked to contact Detective Johnson at 707-822-2424. More information will be released when available and appropriate.
Crossed wires. Photo by cottonbro studio via Pexels.
The latest report from the 2022-2023 Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury paints a not-so-pretty picture of the first floor of the Humboldt County Courthouse, where the Board of Supervisor, the County Administrative Office and the Office of the County Clerk Clerk of the Board — the latter two of which support the Board’s work — are quartered.
These offices are the head of the snake of county government. As the GJ notes, the Board of Supervisors is both the legislative and the executive head of the county. Supervisors not only decide how the county should spend an annual budget in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars, but also oversee the projects that they undertake with that half a billion.
So it’s not so good, in the opinion of the Grand Jury, that the firehose of information that comes into these offices isn’t adequately tagged and managed and forwarded to the appropriate inbox for action and/or information. The result, it alleges, is “poor
direction, poor oversight and missed deadlines.”
One way this chaos manifests, according to the Grand Jury, is in the sometimes very slipshod and haphazard way in which various county-created advisory boards and commissions meet … or don’t. The Jury writes:
The Humboldt County Board of Supervisors is at the center of a complex “input” and “output”
information flow, but there is no log or calendar of communication received or due to be
received or sent systematically distinguishing information from action items. The BOS is, for
example, unaware that several committees may only be meeting sporadically, may have
vacancies, may lack diverse community representation, may not be submitting mandated
advisory reports to the BOS, or may be inactive. The Audit Committee, Behavioral Health
Board, and Disaster Council are cases in point.
What’s the problem with these cases in point? Well, for instance, the Disaster Council, which was instituted in 2015 and to which the Board of Supervisors appoints a member every year, appears not to have ever met since that date. The Audit Committee has met only three times in the last two years.
Why do we have committees and commissions and councils on the books that meet rarely or never? The GJ believes that the County has more or less forgotten that they exist, or hasn’t been able to unbury itself from the informational deluge long enough to get them going again.
“It appears the BOS has a reactive approach to County tasks instead of a proactive approach,” the GJ writes.
What’s the solution? The Grand Jury doesn’t care for the fact that the Board of Supervisors share clerks from the County Clerk’s office to help manage the info flow. Hire more clerks, the GJ says, and also assign each supervisor her or his own, dedicated clerk. Do that starting in January! Also, get those functionally inactive committees up and running again. Simple!
Elsewhere in their tour of the top offices, the Grand Jury finds that:
There’s a general lack of representation from Humboldt’s eight federally recognized tribal entities in the Board’s advisory bodies. Get more tribal representation on those committees, please!
The county should employ a full-time grant writer, so as to go after more grants.
Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:
On July 8, 2023, at about 7:53 p.m., the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office Emergency Communications Center received a call regarding skeletal remains found by California Department of Fish and Wildlife biologists in the Mattole River near the Ettersburg bridge.
A Humboldt County Sheriff’s deputy responded to the scene and took custody of the remains, which were identified as a human jawbone (mandible). No additional remains were located.
Today, July 11, Sheriff’s deputies are conducting a ground search of the surrounding area in an attempt to locate additional remains.
Identification of the remains has not been made at this time.
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.
Oscar Tang, 35, watches over kids as they play at Modern Education Family Childcare in San Francisco in January. The center had to close as a precaution after a child tested positive for COVID-19. Photo by Thalia Juarez for CalMatters.
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, California’s three days of paid sick leave for full-time workers was not enough to cover quarantines or vaccine side effects. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law requiring companies to offer as much as 80 hours of supplemental sick leave for employees.
Now, advocates are urging state lawmakers to increase paid sick leave and expand who can receive it to promote public health and equity.
It’s one of a series of bills before the Legislature that supporters say would improve work-life balance for Californians. Opponents, however, say the bills are an unreasonable burden to put on small businesses.
Newsom wouldn’t say Monday whether he would sign the sick leave bill if it’s passed. He did say that he broadly supports doing more for families, but also recognizes the cost.
“We have a parents’ agenda, and paid sick leave is certainly part of that,” he said after a bill signing event. “We look forward to doing more in the future. We just have to sort of balance those priorities against others in the short term.”
Senate Bill 616 would raise the number of paid sick days that can be used by employees from three to seven days per year and expand how sick days are accrued and used. Under existing law, employees can accrue as many as seven days per year. This bill would increase the total to 14 days a year, and allow seven sick days to roll over to the next year, up from three days.
The bill, approved by the state Senate on a 27-9 vote and by an Assembly committee, is before the Assembly appropriations committee. Since being introduced, about 150 organizations have come out in support of the measure, while more than 60 groups oppose it.
According to the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, “paid sick leave guarantees are seen by many public health experts as one of the strongest tools in stopping the spread of infectious diseases,” while the Economic Policy Institute finds that low-wage workers are particularly susceptible to having limited paid sick leave.
“COVID-19 presents a perfect example of why expanding paid sick leave is not simply good public policy, but a dire necessity,” bill author Sen. Lena Gonzalez, a Long Beach Democrat, said in a statement included in the bill analysis. She added that “studies have found that, for those without earned sick days, missing three and a half days of work equates to losing a family’s entire monthly grocery budget.”
The California Work & Family Coalition, a co-sponsor of the bill, argues that it is “a commonsense change…ensuring that California workers do not have to choose between their health and paying the bills.”
However, a coalition of organizations said in an opposition letter that many small businesses have not recovered from the pandemic and are now dealing with inflation.
The opposition coalition includes the California Chamber of Commerce, which has placed the bill on its 2023 “job killer” list because it “imposes new costs and leave requirements on employers of all sizes.”
The Chamber supported another bill, which failed in committee, that would have increased paid sick leave from three to five days — instead of seven — and would have allowed employers to ask for documentation from workers. “The more than 100 percent expansion is something that really not all businesses can afford to do,” said Ben Golombek, the Chamber’s executive vice president for policy.
Jenya Cassidy, director of the Work & Family Coalition, says that depriving basic rights and dignity to workers should not be a strategy used by small businesses to grow.
“Your business grows when your workers can thrive, care for their families and care for themselves while keeping their jobs,” Cassidy said in an interview. “We just need to normalize people not working themselves to death.”
Expanding family leave
Another bill would expand who can take as long as eight weeks a year inpaid family leave to include “chosen family” — loved ones whom people consider family but without a legal or biological relationship. Assembly Bill 518 would also allow an employee to take paid time off to care for an elderly neighbor, cousin or friend, for example.
Currently, family members who can receive paid leave are children, parents, grandparents, grandchildren, siblings, spouses, or domestic partners. The leave can be to care for a baby or a seriously ill person, or during a military deployment.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 82% of American households depart from the traditional nuclear family structure, and the number of multigenerational and LGBTQ homes is increasing.
“California’s current Paid Family Leave program reflects an outdated nuclear family model and only allows workers to receive partial income replacement to care for certain narrowly defined family members,” Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat who authored the measure, said in a statement included in the bill analysis. “This definition leaves out both chosen family and extended family members such as aunts, uncles and cousins.”
Assemblymember Buffy Wicks poses for a photo with her newborn baby on the Assembly floor after her request to vote remotely was rejected on Aug. 31, 2020. Photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters.
Wicks has history on this issue. She became a national symbol of work-life balance in 2020, when she had to bring her infant to the Assembly floor to vote on a parental leave bill because she wasn’t allowed to vote by proxy.
Proponents argue that the bill is important for California’s low-paid workers, who cannot afford to take unpaid leave to care for their chosen and extended family. They also say that this bill adopts definitions that are inclusive to aging adults and LGBTQ families who rely on a wide network of caregivers and multigenerational households, which people of color are more likely to live in.
Craig Pulsipher, legislative director at Equality California, a statewide LGBTQ+ civil rights organization, says that recent public health crises have shaped the policy in this bill: During the mpox outbreak last year, some gay men lost their income because they contracted the disease, formerly known as monkeypox, or because they had to care for someone with it.
“These experiences reinforced for me how important protections are for the LGBTQ community, many of whom don’t have close family members or biological children,” said Pulsipher.
According to a study by the Center for American Progress, fewer than half of LGBTQ Americans are likely to rely on their biological family for support when sick, while fewer than one-third are likely to rely on a spouse to whom they are legally married.
While there is no federal law that guarantees the right to paid leave for caregiving responsibilities, states including New Jersey, Washington, Connecticut, Oregon and Colorado have adopted expansive definitions of family in their paid family and medical leave policies.
“Your business grows when your workers can thrive, care for their families and care for themselves while keeping their jobs. We just need to normalize people not working themselves to death.” — Jenya Cassidy, director of the California Work & Family Coalition
More than 80 groups publicly support this measure, while two groups oppose it, including the Sacramento-based California Landscape Contractors Association, which advocates for landscape contractors, architects, designers and their vendors.
The group argues that the bill’s use of the term “designated person” is vague and ripe for misuse by workers who can claim the leave benefit for potentially anyone they know.
In an opposition letter to the bill, the association wrote that “small businesses often do not have or can’t afford full-time human resource professionals to manage and track all the various requirements coming from new Sacramento employment regulations,” referring to the provision in the bill that allows the “designated person” in need of care to be identified by the employee at the time the claim for benefits is filed.
Sandra Giarde, the executive director of the organization, said that it is not opposed to making room for LGBTQ and multigeneral relationships by adding to the relationships already codified into state law.
“But “designated person” and “family-like relationship” — those are very broad and ambiguous, and that’s where the crux of our opposition lies,” Giarde said.
Supporters say that the terminology used in the bill was put into law last year, giving employees the right to take leave to care for a “designated person.” The bill currently being considered extends that law by offering paid leave while they care for their chosen family.
Protecting caregivers from discrimination
The rights of caregivers continue to be on the minds of legislators as the Senate labor committee is set to hear a bill Wednesday that would prohibit employment discrimination based on family caregiver status. To stay alive this session, the bill needs to get through the committee by Friday.
AB 524, also proposed by Wicks, would add “family caregiver status” to the list of protected characteristics such as race, sexual orientation and religion, meaning that caregivers couldnot be discriminated against when applying for or holding a job.
“On top of the emotional and physical toll that can be associated with caregiving, caregivers also face discrimination in the workplace,” Wicks said in a statement in the bill analysis, pointing out that demand for caregivers will increase as the population ages.
Discrimination against caregivers disproportionately impacts women, people of color, and low-wage workers.More than 63 million Americans care for at least one child under 18, and 40.4 million Americans provide unpaid care to someone aged 65 years or older, according to federal data. The term “sandwich generation” has been coined for caretakers — the vast majority of whom are women — who care for their aging parents and minor children at the same time.
Though the bill was amended to clarify that employers are not expected to provide special accommodations for caregivers, more than 110 organizations are opposed, including the California Chamber, which calls it a “job killer” and warns it could lead to more lawsuits.
Opponents argue that “family caregiver status” is very broad and “family member” is not limited to an actual relative in the bill.
“The employer has no ability to dispute an employee designating themselves as having family caregiver status,” said a coalition of the bill’s opponents, including over 60 chambers of commerce, in a statement in the bill analysis. “Any dispute would open the employer up to costly litigation.”
However, research from the Center for WorkLife Law found that the four states with similar laws — Alaska, Delaware, Minnesota, and New York — averaged one lawsuit per state per year.
Golombek of the Chamber said that New York’s law includes clearer language, defining caregiver status as providing “direct and ongoing care” instead of California’s language of “contributing to the care of.”
“Most of our members are women of color, and women are often tasked with the role of caregiver in their family,” the association said in a statement in the bill analysis. “We strongly believe no one should be denied job opportunities based on their status as a family caregiver.”
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CalMatters politics reporter Alexei Koseff contributed to this story. CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.
