The long-vacant Jacobs Middle School campus at 674 Allard Avenue. | File photo.
###
After more than six years of public pressure, political scandals and backroom negotiations over a convoluted land swap deal that went up in flames, the fate of Eureka City Schools’s vacant Jacobs Middle School campus finally appears clear — though, as this saga has shown, appearances can prove deceptive.
Last night, the district’s Board of Trustees approved a two-year irrevocable option agreement giving the State of California the exclusive right to purchase the property for $4 million. The sale, if consummated, would allow the California Highway Patrol to build a new area headquarters on the property, located at 674 Allard Avenue.
Per the terms of the deal, the state will make up to two annual, nonrefundable payments to Eureka City Schools of $253,100 (for a total of $506,200) while conducting the environmental and feasibility studies necessary for the CHP project.
Eureka City Schools Assistant Superintendent of Business Services Paul Ziegler said the state’s willingness to make those cash payments suggests that the CHP is serious about the deal, which could take 18 to 24 months to finalize, according to a story by Times-Standard reporter Sage Alexander.
The vacant school site has alternately been proposed as good spot for affordable housing development, and Alexander reports that some public speakers, including members of a local tenants union, spoke at last night’s meeting, urging the board to reject the state’s offer in favor of using low-income housing tax credits to build rentals for district employees.
But a shorthanded board — with trustees Lisa Ollivier and Rebecca Pardoe absent — voted 3-0 to approve the agreement with the State of California.
The CHP’s current patrol area office, at 255 East Samoa Boulevard in Arcata, sits in a tsunami hazard zone, hence the desire to relocate.
On June 26, 2025, at 4:30am, the Arcata Police Department responded to a burglary in-progress, at an unoccupied residence, in the 400 block of Shirley Boulevard.
Upon their arrival, officers engaged in a foot pursuit with a female suspect acting as a look-out, outside of the home, while two male suspects rummaged inside. The female was taken into custody at the scene and was identified as 41-year-old Eureka resident Melissa Dale Parker. Parker was booked and lodged at the Humboldt County Correctional Facility on felony burglary and misdemeanor resistance charges, as well as an active warrant for felony assault.
The two male suspects, described only as tall and white, fled the residence on foot and remain outstanding. Arcata Police Detectives are working to identify the outstanding suspects.
Anyone with information is encouraged to contact the Arcata Police Department’s Investigations Unit at 707-822-2424, or the Anonymous Crime Tipline, at 707-825-2588.
On June 25, 2025 at 0800 hours, the Eureka Police Department in collaboration with Humboldt County
Sheriff Search and Rescue team, CARDA (California Rescue Dog Association) and WOOF (Wilderness
Finders Search Teams) conducted a third search for missing person Michael Arthur Bounds who was
reported last seen 11/27/24.
This search was conducted in a green belt between the location that the subjects’ vehicle was found
and apartments that he frequented. The search area was a total of 31 acres. There were five volunteer
search teams deployed with a total of six canines. The teams consisted of certified K-9 handlers from
counties throughout the state.
The search concluded at approximately 4PM and resulted in no findings. The Eureka Police
Department would like to thank the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office and their Search and Rescue Unit
along with the numerous volunteers that assisted in the operation.
This remains an active missing persons investigation and If you have any information, please contacted
EPD’s Criminal Investigation Unit at 707-441-4300.
Efforts continue to stabilize and clear the large landslide that has fully closed Route 36 east of Swimmer’s Delight near Grizzly Creek Redwoods State Park. This stretch of road will not reopen this weekend as anticipated. We aim to resume one-way traffic by the holiday weekend, but that timeline could shift based on additional assessments. We’ll provide updates as soon we have them.
So far, roughly 100 hazardous trees have been removed, but many more remain. Much of this additional work must be done with the help of a helicopter, which is currently scheduled for Monday. While helicopter availability has proven difficult during fire season, we are working to accelerate that schedule if possible. In addition to this work, helicopter-based LiDAR scanning is still planned to collect high-resolution topographic data that will inform a long-term slope repair later this summer. Once crews complete their efforts to safely remove hazards within the active slide zone, the focus will shift to building a catchment area and a temporary traffic lane slightly shifted away from the hillside.
We are committed to restoring safe, reliable travel on Route 36 and appreciate the public’s continued patience. Route 299 remains the only detour on the state highway system.
Tahoe National Forest is one of the national forests in California that has acreage protected by the federal roadless rule. Photo by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters
The Trump administration’s plan to repeal a rule prohibiting logging and road construction in undeveloped parts of national forests would strip protection from more than 4 million acres within California’s borders.
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced on Monday that she will act to rescind the “roadless rule,” developed during the Clinton administration, to allow “for fire prevention and responsible timber production” on more than 58 million acres of national forests.
But experts are divided about whether allowing road development and timber harvest in national forests will help prevent wildfires. Though roads can aid in firefighting and fuel reduction and serve as fire breaks, roads can also mean more people — and people mean more sparks that can ignite wildfires. And some experts say timber harvests do little to reduce fire severity because it can promote growth of more flammable fuels in forests.
The Department of Agriculture has not said how it plans to rescind the rule, and how long the effort is expected to take. Reversing federal rules usually is a long process, requiring publication in the Federal Register and a long public comment period. The agriculture department did not respond to an inquiry from CalMatters.
California has more national forest acreage than any other state on the mainland. This map shows the roadless areas within those forests. Map via US Forest Service.
Most U.S. Forest Service land — about 69% or more than 135 million acres nationwide — isn’t covered by the rule’s protections against roads and timber cutting. In California, about 21% of its 21 million acres of national forest — 4.4 million acres — are considered roadless, ranking behind Alaska, Idaho and Montana.
These roadless areas are considered important for providing habitat for more than 200 threatened or endangered species of wildlife, including owls, salmon and frogs, and for protecting vital watersheds.
The Trump administration says revoking the rule is a “common-sense” way to help local officials protect communities from wildfires.
“Of the 58.5 million acres of inventoried roadless areas covered under the 2001 Roadless Rule, 28 million acres are in areas at high or very high risk of wildfire. Rescinding this rule will allow this land to be managed at the local forest level, with more flexibility to take swift action to reduce wildfire risk and help protect surrounding communities and infrastructure,” according to the agriculture department’s statement.
Conservationists call this a ploy to further unfetter logging by an administration that called for an “immediate expansion of American timber production” and ordered drastic cuts to the very agencies that study and fight fires.
“This move is the most irresponsible, because opening up these forests to logging roads and logging is going to degrade them. It’ll actually increase wildfire risks. It’ll harm numerous species and harm watersheds,” said Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s just a big handout to timber companies.”
Sharon Friedman, a U.S. Forest Service retiree who was a planning director in the Rocky Mountain region and worked on Colorado’s state-specific roadless rule, said she could see why the announcement caused consternation, but she expects that any outcomes that survive in court will likely be long-delayed and less severe than feared. Roadways for fuel management are often temporary and, if done correctly, should bar entry to the public, she said.
She also said she doesn’t expect that it would lead to a boom on logging in roadless areas. “It’s not like people are going to suddenly discover that, in these areas without roads, there’s a lot of desirable timber — because if it had been there, people would have gotten to it in the first place,” she said.
California officials aren’t ready to say what it means for the state.
David Acuña, a Cal Fire battalion chief and public information officer, said “we are simply going to respond if we’re called. Other than that, it is how they choose to handle their roads and/or fire management.”“Picture somebody attempting to redo your personal living room in your home. It would be inappropriate. In the same way, we are not going to attempt to navigate what a partner agency, a neighboring agency, does,” Acuña said.Tony Andersen, a spokesperson for the California Natural Resources Agency, said the agency is reviewing what rescinding the rule would mean for California. He would not provide further comment.
A trail through the redwood forest in Humboldt County. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local
LaChapelle said he could see the benefit of removing dead and diseased trees, including those damaged by bark beetle infestations. But, he said, “there’s fuels reduction, and there’s logging. If you get in there and thin out some of the forest, then that’s certainly beneficial. But clear cutting — yeah, it will reduce fire risk, because there’s not going to be any trees to burn.” Matt Dias, president and CEO of the California Forestry Association, said the timber industry supports the repeal. Dias has previously called for more funding for fuel breaks to combat wildfires, and said that the roadless rule is part of a landscape of environmental rules and regulations that limit forest management. Still, Dias said, “the roadless rules in California, as far as I know, were not a significant impediment.” He said “most of the areas” where the timber industry is working with the Forest Service on fire management “are not in areas that would be considered roadless.” The roadless rule already allows for roads to be constructed or reconstructed to protect health and safety when threatened by wildfire. And it allows for smaller diameter timber to be removed to improve habitat and reduce the risk of severe wildfires.
The Karuk Tribe, which has ancestral lands in Klamath and Six Rivers national forests, also supports rescinding the rule. Tribe Chairman Russell “Buster” Attebery said burned, downed and hazardous trees should be removed. “There’s a sustainable economy out there — and those logs need to go somewhere,” Attebery said. “We believe that rescinding the roadless rule will be a good thing, but it needs to have tribal input.” Attebery and his father worked in the timber industry for decades. It was an economic driver for the region, but also a source of environmental damage. “They had one thing on their mind. They didn’t care whether they covered over the creeks and streams that fed the rivers. They didn’t care if they blocked them or muddied them,” Attebery said. “You have to put ecology first, and then the economy will follow.”
U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, a Democrat representing Northern California coastal communities and parts of Trinity and Six Rivers national forests, said the revision would threaten watersheds that provide clean drinking water, the rights of tribes and local communities, and the power of forests to hold onto climate-warming carbon.
It “puts millions of acres of forests on the chopping block to serve (President Donald Trump’s) billionaire cronies in the mining and logging industries.”
Even as the Trump administration pushes for more logging, its tariff policy has “created anxiety and uncertainty” for the timber and forest products industry, according to one financial analysis. In California, wildfires, high costs, low income and reduced use of wood products are destabilizing the industry, which saw a 25% drop in softwood sawmill capacity in recent years.
###
This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
Construction workers building an apartment complex site for an affordable housing project in Bakersfield on May 29, 2024. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local
California lawmakers are on the cusp of striking a last-minute deal to tie one of the year’s most ambitious and controversial housing bills to a new set of minimum wages for housing construction workers — a proposal that has thrown a wrench into budget negotiations just days before the deadline.
The new legislative language, buried in a sprawling budget bill put into print on Tuesday, represents a grand political bargain between pro-development advocates and the state’s carpenters union. Supporters say the new arrangement could reshape the way that future California housing legislation is written and negotiated.
There is intense opposition from other building trades unions, which are among the most powerful interest groups at the state Capitol and whose leaders argue that the bill would undercut hard-fought pay standards. That’s made for a high-stakes showdown as Gov. Gavin Newsom demands major changes to streamline housing construction as part of the budget.
The new wage rates are a major pivot in a debate that has dominated the legislative politics of housing in California for at least a decade. Past bills aimed at making it easier to build new homes have offered a trade: Ease regulations on approvals, permits and environmental regulations in exchange for, among other things, higher guaranteed pay for construction workers. The standard wage rate in those debates have been the “prevailing wages” — state-determined wages that vary by occupation and location that generally work out to what unionized workers earn.
These new proposed rates are significantly lower and are designed to serve as a more development-friendly alternative. They would apply only in cases where developers opt to use a new proposed exception to California’s premier environmental impact law, the California Environmental Quality Act. The vast majority of those projects, small-scale residential construction projects, are not currently covered by prevailing wage.
That’s why supporters of the deal are arguing that the new standards represent a wage increase.
Residential construction is “a virtually non-union industry,” said Danny Curtin, who heads the California Conference of Carpenters. “You have the ability to give those people a substantial — a modest, but substantial and important — raise.”
Even so, the pushback from other construction labor groups has been fierce.
The State Building and Construction Trades Council, a construction union umbrella group that regularly clashes with the carpenters union on labor issues, excoriated the proposal in a letter to legislative leadership yesterday.
“This proposal is a wage grab of construction workers’ wages disguised in an ‘affordable housing bill,’” the letter by council president Chris Hannan said. “We urge you to abandon any pursuit of this harmful and unprecedented proposal, which would devastate construction workers.”
Lawmakers also appeared caught off guard by the proposal at an Assembly budget hearing on Wednesday packed with union advocates.
“I didn’t come to Sacramento to cut people’s wages,” said Assemblymember Chris Rogers, a Ukiah Democrat. “I didn’t sit through months of budget committee hearings talking about how to preserve our social safety net to then, at the 11th hour, potentially kick more people onto it.”
Assemblymember Lashae Sharp Collins, a Democrat from La Mesa, called the fact that the building trades reportedly weren’t consulted “appalling.”
The new wage proposal received a similarly icy reception from many Democrats in the Senate, which also held a budget hearing on Wednesday.
“You’re presenting something at the last minute, I don’t know who you consulted with, and you reached this conclusion to completely change the structure for the way that workers in the construction industry would be paid,” said Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, a Los Angeles Democrat and a reliable ally of the trades.
The bill was scheduled to be voted on Friday. In the face of furious pushback a budget committee hearing vote in the Senate was delayed on Wednesday, making the timing of its final vote uncertain.
Though the last-minute addition of contentious labor language threatens to divide legislative Democrats, the party holds two-thirds of the seats in both legislative chambers, giving the budget bill ample opportunities to pass even with significant defections.
A debate months in the making
This new proposal is the latest addition to a policy idea introduced in March by Oakland Democratic Assemblymember Buffy Wicks. The bill would exempt most new apartment buildings in urban areas from CEQA, the environmental law.
The 55-year-old law is the frequent target of lawmakers and pro-housing advocates who argue that it can be weaponized to slow or impede desperately needed new housing and other projects. Many environmental advocacy groups and organized labor groups defend the law as an important check on unwanted or environmentally harmful development.
Wicks’ idea got a helpful boost last month when Newsom opted to fold it into his proposed budget for the coming year, putting it on a speedier and surer path to becoming law. He has since threatened to withhold his signature from the budget if legislators do not approve the sweeping housing measures, some of which are still being negotiated.
A key part of that budget package — what’s called a trailer bill — is before the Legislature now. The bill includes Wicks’ exemption tied to the new labor language, along with key components of other housing bills, including a proposed freeze on building code changes, limits on the fees that landlords can charge tenants and an expanded tax credits for renters.
Assemblymember Nick Schultz, the Burbank Democrat who authored the building code freeze bill, noted that he wasn’t informed by the governor’s office or Assembly leadership that his proposal was being tucked into the budget bill. He said he found out from an advocacy group.
By setting wages far below the “prevailing wage” rates required by law for publicly funded projects — and frequently demanded by construction unions for their support for housing bills — it is meant to offer a more financially feasible alternative, while still boosting the pay of workers at the lowest end of the labor market.
In Oakland, for example, a carpenter making the state-set “prevailing wage” for a residential project earns at least $99 per hour including benefits.
The new minimum wages would only require that the majority of construction workers across the Bay Area covered under the policy be paid at least $40 an hour. Less skilled or experienced workers would require at least $27 per hour. Smaller housing projects of 25 units or fewer would be exempt entirely.
The budget bill also includes language that would give unions the right to take contractors to court for workers compensation, insurance and payroll tax violations.
“Yes in my backyard” advocates that have historically looked askance at prevailing wage requirements are celebrating the new deal.
“This is one of the biggest wins for housing in a generation,” California YIMBY president Brian Hanlon said in a statement. “Building infill housing is not a threat to the environment — it’s how we save it.”
Carpenters and YIMBYs collaborate again
Though new wage rates only apply to Wicks’ urban infill exemption, hammering out a deal with a major labor group allowing for pay significantly below prevailing wage would spell a significant shift in California labor policy.
This isn’t the first time the state’s carpenters union has cut a high-profile deal to push a major YIMBY-backed housing bill across the legislative finish line.
In 2022, Wicks’ bill to fast-track apartment construction along stripmall corridors earned the endorsement of the carpenters after she added a prevailing wage requirement, along with some other benefits.
At the time that was considered a political concession. For years the state’s other major construction worker union group, the Trades Council, had made the inclusion of so-called skilled-and-trained standards — essentially, a requirement to hire predominantly unionized workers — the price of their support for housing bills.
Learn more about legislators mentioned in this story.
In breaking with the trades, the carpenters have long argued that clearing the way for the construction of more housing, even at the expense of higher mandatory wages, represents an “organizing opportunity” for the union.
After Wicks’ bill passed over the Trades Council’s strenuous objection, other pro-development lawmakers came to see that deal as something they could effectively copy and paste into their housing legislation, all but guaranteeing the support of an unlikely coalition of developers, union workers and YIMBY activists.
Supporters of this new deal say the lower wage standard could be the next go-to legislative language for future housing bills.
“This bill is a big step forward and an important test of whether the ‘YIMBY-Carpenter alliance’ can enact housing bills that generate housing production at scale,” UC Davis law professor Chris Elmendorf wrote on X.
###
Alexei Koseff contributed reporting to this story. This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
The Ma-le’l Dunes is just one of several locations in Humboldt County “eligible for sale” under the public lands sell-off. | Photo: Jen Kalt - Humboldt Waterkeeper
###
UPDATE: Sen. Mike Lee introduced a revised version of the bill — linked here — shortly after our story was published. While the updated version does not include public lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service, it still calls for the mandatory sale of up to 0.5 percent, estimated at 1.2 million acres, of Bureau of Land Management lands located within five miles of a “population center.”
###
Original post: For a couple of weeks now, social media feeds have been clogged with news of a Republican-sponsored plan to sell off millions of acres of public lands across Western states, including protected areas along the North Coast, a plan that, for the moment at least, is dead.
The controversial proposal, introduced by Utah Sen. Mike Lee, sought to mandate the sale of more than 3,200 square miles of federal lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service to accommodate new housing and infrastructure developments. The mandate was ruled out of the GOP’s tax and spending bill on Monday after the Senate parliamentarian determined it would violate the chamber’s rules. Lee has vowed to revise and reintroduce the bill.
The plan has sparked concern among local conservationists who fear the mandate would result in the forced sale of public lands here in Humboldt, including the North and South Spits of Humboldt Bay, a piece of the Ma-le’l Dunes, portions of the King Range and large swaths of the Six Rivers, Klamath and Trinity National Forests, among others.
A map showing public lands eligible for sale in Humboldt. To zoom in, go here.
An interactive map published by the Wilderness Society indicates that over 250 million acres of public lands — including 16 million acres in California — “are eligible for sale” under the current version of the bill.
In a recent interview with the Outpost, Rep. Jared Huffman emphasized the distinction between eligible and mandatory sales. “I think it’s important to distinguish lands that would be eligible and lands where sales would be mandated,” he said. “My understanding in reading Sen. Lee’s bill is that there would be a requirement that at least three million acres would have to be offered up for sale, but they could go up to the full amount of 250 million eligible acres. That is theoretically possible in the way this bill is written.”
Still, there’s no telling where those sales are going to happen, Huffman said. “The mandatory sale of those three million acres … would be somewhere on this map depicting 250 million acres of eligible land, but we don’t know where.”
Lee took to social media on Monday night to announce his intent to “SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE the amount of BLM land in the bill,” noting that “only land WITHIN 5 MILES of population centers” would be eligible for sale. He added that he would “REMOVE ALL Forest Service” land from the plan.
So, if the bill were amended to exclude Forest Service land and focus only on public lands near population centers, what would that mean for those protected areas along the Samoa Peninsula?
Reached for additional comment, Tom Wheeler, executive director of the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), emphasized that Lee’s amended proposal still poses a “credible threat.”
“The North Spit, for example, is adjacent to existing communities and its coastal property in California. It’s not beyond the bounds of reasonable imagination that someone would want to see some development there,” Wheeler said. “Could the Ma-le’l Dunes be turned into a housing development? I don’t know. There would be obstacles — including the California Coastal Commission, Humboldt County’s land use ordinances and local opposition — but it could be sold to somebody who has a couple of million dollars and wants to try to do another Sea Ranch.”
However, Huffman said he wasn’t so sure that there would be obstacles to a federal public lands sell-off, noting that the Trump Administration has been “chopping away” at the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and other federal conservation laws. “If some of these lands ended up making the cut and were put up for sale, I don’t know that there would be a lot of public process and safeguards to control what happens,” he said.
“This is not something the American people want to see,” Huffman continued. “It’s not something that communities that care about these public lands want to see, certainly not the people who care about recreation. The hunters and fishermen? They don’t want to see this. This is coming from a few ideological extremists in Congress who are taking this vulture capitalist approach to our natural resources, where you just try to monetize, liquidate and create fast cash.”
While the public lands sell-off no longer presents an immediate threat, Huffman warned that the “zombie” bill “won’t be fully dead until Democrats have a majority and can enact some permanent protections for some of these places.”
“In the meantime, I think we have to sleep with one eye open,” he said.
California has more national forest acreage than any other state on the mainland. This map shows the roadless areas within those forests. Map via US Forest Service.
A trail through the redwood forest in Humboldt County. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local
