After announcing her resignation from the Arcata City Council last month, Vice Mayor Emily Grace Goldstein officially stepped down today. As such, during tomorrow’s council meeting, the remaining councilmembers will consider electing a new vice mayor and reassigning Goldstein’s various liaison appointments.

Per the council’s usual annual rotation method, Councilmember Sarah Schaefer will most likely be selected as the new vice mayor, as she is the councilmember who has served the longest without having served as vice mayor before. However, the council is not required to follow the rotation method and can technically elect any councilmember to serve in the role. There is also the possibility that, for some reason, Schaefer will decline the vice mayor position. But both of those scenarios seem pretty unlikely here.

The council will also be tasked with reassigning the liaison roles held by Goldstein. According to the staff report, Goldstein served as liaison to the Humboldt Transit Authority, The Humboldt-Del Norte Hazardous Materials Response Joint Powers Authority and the Homelessness and Housing Working Group. She was also an alternate liaison to the Humboldt Waste Management Authority, Redwood Region Economic Development Commission, Arcata House Partnership, Arcata/Camoapa Sister City Committee, Cooperation Humboldt—Board Report Meetings (and CUNA), and Equity Arcata Advisory Team.

However, the staff report states, because a new Arcata councilmember will be elected in June and sworn in by July,  it is not imperative that the council assign all these roles now. Staff recommends that the council review the liaison roles and assign any that they feel concerned about having meeting coverage during the interim period.

And speaking of electing a new Arcata councilmember, we remind you that Arcata residents will be tasked with voting in a new one during the primary election on June 7. The deadline to submit nomination papers is March 11 and Arcata City Clerk Bridget Dory told the Outpost that no one has filed their papers so far. Dory said that four possible candidates have taken out nomination papers. They are: Gregory Daggett, Chase Marcum, Edith Rosen and Kimberley White (who serves on the Arcata Planning Commission and ran for council in 2020).

If you are interested in running for Arcata City Council, you can pick up the nomination papers at Arcata City Hall – 736 F Street. To qualify you must be at least 18 years old, live within Arcata city limits and be registered to vote at your Arcata residence address. Nominees must also obtain at least 20, but no more than 30, signatures of registered voters who reside within Arcata city limits. Easy, right? 

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The council will also receive an update on the Local Coastal Program (LCP), which will help guide development in Arcata’s coastal zone in the coming years. The City’s current LCP includes the  Local Coastal Element of the City’s General Plan, which was adopted in 1989, and the Land Use and Development Guide, which was adopted 1998. The city has been working for the last few years to update these plans and staff is recommending that they be adopted sometime this year.

The council won’t be taking any action on the LCP during this meeting, but will provide staff with direction, if necessary. You can review the City’s draft Local Coastal Element here.

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The Arcata City Council meets on Wednesday, Mar. 2 at 6 p.m. Meetings are now being held in a hybrid fashion and you can attend either in-person at City Hall – 736 F Street – or can attend virtually, if that’s more comfortable for you. You can view the full agenda and directions on how to participate here.

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The message was clear and, more importantly, it was loud: Progressive activists would work to block the California Democratic Party’s endorsement for any lawmaker who did not support a single-payer health care bill facing a crucial legislative deadline at the end of January.

Their threat did not persuade wavering legislators to get on board, however, and the bill was shelved without a vote. Two weeks later, the chairperson of the party’s progressive caucus announced that activists had dropped their campaign to pull endorsements from uncooperative incumbents, blaming Democratic officials for obstructing them.

“The party uses every advantage it has under the bylaws to ensure there is no democracy in the Democratic Party,” Amar Shergill, the progressive caucus chairperson, told CalMatters.

Inspired by the unabashedly leftist presidential campaign of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in 2016, a wave of political outsiders once seemed poised to remake the California Democratic Party. But the momentum of their movement, which coincided with heightened liberal energy in resistance to then-President Donald Trump, appears to have crested.

Sanders supporters organized early on to elect new delegates to the state party, giving the progessive wing more influence to push for policy positions and endorsements for candidates who could challenge establishment stalwarts including U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein from the left.

Yet in the five years since, they’ve struggled to achieve their biggest and most consequential goals, including twice failing to elevate one of their own to lead the California Democratic Party. Earlier this month, party officials adopted new restrictions on campaign contributions that fell short of progressive demands to stop taking money entirely from fossil fuel companies, law enforcement unions and health insurers.

As delegates gather virtually this coming weekend for the annual state party convention, nearly all of the sitting legislators who are running again will be endorsed on a consent calendar, while Shergill is encouraging progressives to withhold their donations and volunteer time from the party and focus their organizing energy on outside groups. He has also invited the director of the newly established Working Families Party to address the caucus on Saturday night.

The dissension reflects how the eternal ideological tension within California’s dominant political party has intensified and curdled in recent years. As newly empowered activists, many of them fresh to organized politics, escalated their tactics to demand change, so did party leaders pushing back to maintain a status quo that has largely worked to elect Democrats in the state for decades.

Though the influence of the progressive wing has not entirely waned — several political consultants declined to discuss the dynamic on the record with CalMatters for fear of angering delegates they need to woo to endorse campaigns they are working on — a lack of victories to back up their more aggressive political style has sent a signal to some Democrats to simply ignore them.

Tenoch Flores, a former communications director for the party from 2009 to 2015 who now works as a consultant for progressive causes, said there is more acrimony and hurt feelings over these fights than in the past. He attributed it to the frustration of a movement that has brought increased attention to its causes but has not grown in scope or influence to match, a dynamic that he said it would be important for Democratic officials to manage.

“One of the beliefs is that if you have impassioned speeches and you scream truth to power, you can have policy change overnight,” Flores said. “They’re not able to make good on any of their threats.”

Despite numerous interview requests, the California Democratic Party did not make Chairperson Rusty Hicks available for this story.

Internal division over party’s direction

This is not the first time the California Democratic Party has been through these battles, which are also playing out in the national party and in other states. In neighboring Nevada, top Democratic politicians and their allies established a rival campaign apparatus after the state party elected a left-wing chairperson.

Karen Bernal, a former chairperson of the California party’s progressive caucus for three terms from 2009 to 2013 and 2017 to 2019, said there’s a fundamental conflict over the function of the party between rank-and-file members, who join for ideological affinity, and politicians, for whom it is a conduit for money and other campaign resources.

“It’s always been a struggle between the grassroots and the legislative leadership,” she said.

The party experienced a similar wave of insurgent progressive activism after Howard Dean’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2004, Bernal said, then the energy dwindled during the Obama years when identity politics neutralized the philosophical divide.

But the backlash from party officials is more “iron-fisted” this time around, she said. She pointed to elaborate campaigns to elected favored slates of delegates after progressives unexpectedly swept races in 2017 and rule changes when activists have found ways to challenge the power structure.

“It’s always been a struggle between the grassroots and the legislative leadership.”
— Karen Bernal, former chairperson of the California Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus

After progressives called a meeting of the party’s executive board to pursue the ban on donations from groups they consider in conflict with the California Democratic Party platform, the rules committee proposed an amendment to the bylaws that raises the threshold for requesting a special meeting, including by doubling the number of signatures required. It was adopted in late February, during the same weekend when officials approved a scaled-back proposal that gives the party more flexibility on when to reject contributions.

Activists allege that their effort to challenge lawmakers who did not support the single-payer legislation faltered because the party misinterpreted its own bylaws that establish a process for disputing endorsements and shut them down.

Combined, Bernal said, all of these measures demonstrate an establishment desperate to hold on to the status quo — and how far it will go to silence dissent from progressives.

“Their influence is being smashed from the top,” she said. “They’ve been corralled and contained. But does it mean that their fight is not resonant? No, it does not.”

Where do progressives go next?

While this fight is unlikely to resonate outside of a narrow sliver of voters invested in party politics, several strategists said it presented an unnecessary distraction for Democrats in an election year where polls suggest they are facing growing political headwinds and could ultimately undermine progressives’ position in California.

Andrew Acosta, a political consultant who frequently works with moderate Democrats in swing districts, said the single-payer activists had overplayed their hand with the threat to pull endorsements. With voter malaise over pocketbook issues such as inflation front and center, he said it was the wrong year to take on a legislative fight that would require massive tax increases. (Supporters of a single-payer health care system argue that Californians would ultimately pay less than they do now for insurance premiums.)

“When we’re successful, great. When we’re not, it reinforces this message that the party cannot be trusted with your time and effort.”
— Amar Shergill, chairperson of the California Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

While politicians do respond to party dynamics, Acosta said, they must be cognizant first of their constituents. As Democrats try to defend legislative supermajorities that allow them to raise taxes and qualify ballot measures without Republican votes, they did not want to provide their opponents with an easy campaign attack that they are out of touch with pressing economic concerns.

“People are feeling it, man,” Acosta said, “It’s just hard to tell people they’re not.”

The outsized response by single-payer advocates to the bill’s failure last month — including warnings that they might back a challenger to Assemblymember Ash Kalra, the San Jose Democrat who carried the measure, because he did not bring it up for a vote — also turned off many in Sacramento.

Flores, the former party spokesman, called it a moment of “self-marginalization” for the progressive movement and a message for the dozens of new legislators who will arrive at the Capitol by next year after an unusually high number of resignations and retirements.

“Is that really what they’re going to want to deal with?” he said. “A lot of what’s displayed is not how you build a winning legislative coalition.”

Shergill, the progressive caucus chairperson who frequently criticizes Hicks on social media, rejected the notion that its tactics had weakened the position of the party’s left wing. He said he would continue to advocate for progressives to build their own organizations that could operate freely outside of the California Democratic Party.

“When we’re successful, great. When we’re not, it reinforces this message that the party cannot be trusted with your time and effort,” he said. “For progressives, there’s never a scenario where we lose, because either we win the issue or we’re teaching our members lessons about how to win the next fight.”

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

Kathleen Janette Huntress
March 12, 1947-November 27, 2021

Kathy was my precious sister. We grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She moved to Northern California for the love of the giant redwoods, and to be closer to the Grateful Dead as she was quite the Deadhead. Jerry Garcia was “it” to her. Another reason she stated was, “I’m tired of my thighs sticking to Naugahyde seats.” (Oklahoma can be quite humid and hot).

I find it very hard to put her wonderful life qualities into correctly chosen words that can convey, or give one even a small perspective of what a unique individual she was. She had a beautiful soul, always so sweet, so kind. She was highly intelligent. Her humor was unlike any… dry, funny, quick, with ingenious comebacks. Kathy was always young at heart. Her favorite passions from her youth continued to be her enjoyment throughout her life. She was an eternal hippie at heart and Snow White on the side. We watched the scene with Snow White dancing with the seven dwarfs many times… giggling like it was the first time. That was her very special, childlike heart. She made Christmas cards by hand that would take hours, with cut-out designs decorated in glitter, written in beautiful calligraphy, and always a poem with the most hilarious humor in rhythm and rhyme that would have you laughing out loud. Simply: she always cared enough to create a little one-of-a-kind conveyance, each creation kept to be treasured in a memory box. Christmas was a favorite memory as our parents made each and every one a childhood experience we would never forget… There would be the perfect Christmas tree, decorated like fairyland sparkles, each icicle lined on branches from the inside out, one at a time. Each light cord hidden, the gifts from our parents’ hearts that really couldn’t be afforded, the Christmas dinner so lovingly cooked.

She once wrote in a description of our childhood Christmases, “But maybe most of all— the feeling of the silent darkness of the living room in the wee hours, with the moon softly lighting the snow through the picture window, casting a dreamlike silver sparkle over all of the mysterious shapes… and above it all there was the smell of a new doll.” How blessed we were. Kathy loved her rose bushes, tending to each one with devotion. Her cats were so very precious to her. She would often go without if they were in need of care. I could speak of her life in much more detail, of her many accomplishments, but I love these sweet, simple memories of her. I will find her spirit in the Redwoods. I visualize her twirling at a Grateful Dead concert. She holds my hand to see what Santa left.

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When I was a kid, it was understood among all my friends that my mom was cool. To me, she was just my mom, but I wasn’t incapable of seeing what they meant, especially after meeting some of their parents. As a teenager my mom had been president of something called Youth for Christ, but by the time I was in the picture she was all blue jeans and rock and roll. Oklahoma had come to feel like a stiff, even repressive environment, and of course we would eventually move to Humboldt. Still, she always found ways to remain creatively individual: she played the piano, the hammered dulcimer, and made stained glass.

In the early seventies my mom traveled widely. Beginning in London, she gradually made her way to Pakistan, India and Laos. She taught English in Laos, and deeply loved her students for their seriousness and dedication. She loved to regale with stories of her travels. For instance, there was a tense customs checkpoint in Rawalpindi. In another story which I find astonishing even as I type it, she and a few friends somehow gained entry to the Taj Mahal, and nearly fell into a deep chasm while exploring a pitch-black passageway. Before I was born, my mom was basically Indiana Jones.

She spoke French beautifully, sometimes with little justification. She would leave us confused but impressed. She loved John Steinbeck, and it was as a tourist, drawn partly by my mom’s interest in the John Steinbeck festival in Salinas, that I first visited California. We moved from Tulsa to Fortuna in 1990, and then to Eureka in 1995. She loved Victorian houses, and was blessed to live in a beautiful one for many years.

My mom was an incredibly kind and charismatic person. She supported me at every stage of my life, and she made a positive impression on virtually everyone she ever met. If you knew her at all then you understand what I mean, and if you didn’t know her, I wish you could have. I really think you would have liked her.

Kathy is survived by her sister Debby Kelsey, and her son Jonathan Moreno.

A celebration of Kathy’s life is planned for what would have been her 75th birthday: March 12. For information about this please email Jonathan Moreno at jmoreno600@gmail.com.

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Dennis Robert Rosenbach, born March 2, 1950 passed away peacefully surrounded by his wife and children on February 5, 2022.

Dennis was born in Napa to Marilyn and Robert Rosenbach. He spent his childhood in Washington as well as areas of California. They later settled in Willow Creek, where he attended Hoopa High School. After his high school years Dennis moved to Orleans.

While in Orleans, Dennis began a career in the woods he loved. Dennis did many jobs ranging from choker setter, cat skinner, loader operator and whatever else needed to be done. After many years of working in the woods Dennis was badly injured while driving a bulldozer. He took this dire experience and turned it into a positive, using the settlement money to buy his first logging truck. Dennis continued to drive his logging trucks for over 25 years.

Dennis finally decided to retire at the age of 62 after he sent his last log truck to rest in a magnificent ball of flames – which he was always willing to tell anyone about who had a moment to listen and time to see the many pictures on his camera. Pictures of the event are still donned in his house to this day.

Dennis was talented in so many ways. Dennis was talented in drawing, woodworking, metal works, mechanics and entertaining his family and friends, while always taking time to show all the young ones how to do whatever project they were doing multiple different ways, to teach them new things. Dennis loved being in the wilderness, at the rivers, backroads hunting and camping and spending time with his family. He always had a special candor for his family, children, grandchildren, and friends that will be celebrated and remembered for years to come.

In his younger years when Dennis was logging in Willow Creek, he was blessed with his first son, Scott. He married his high school sweetheart JoAnne in 1976. They were married for 46 years. They created a life with countless wonderful memories shared with so many members of their family, and friends. We all have stories of our time with Dennis.

Dennis was preceded in death by his father, Robert, and mother, Marilyn.

Dennis helped create a legacy that will proudly continue with his wife, siblings, children, and grandchildren; Wife: JoAnne Marie Rosenbach, Brother: Harold Rosenbach-Spouse Cindy, Sister: Marla Hillman-Spouse Randy, Son: Dennis Scott Atteberry-Spouse Lisa, Daughter: Shannon Renee Wilson-Spouse Rollans (Ron), Daughter: Amy Denise Preyer-Spouse Aaron, Son: Jeremy Russell Rosenbach-Spouse Jeanette. Grandchildren Nathan, Jacob, Brandy, Josie, Wesley, Ryan, Ailie, Andrew, and Isabella as well as three great grandchildren & numerous nephews and nieces.

There are pieces of the life Dennis lived in all our houses, as well as permanent remnants that will forever remain in our hearts. We will always cherish and remember all the years we were blessed to have him with us as a son, brother, husband, father, grandfather and friend.

Our celebration of life for Dennis will be held May 14 at 1 p.m. in Orleans at the Old Mill Pond. Please join us in our celebration for the life of Dennis Robert Rosenbach.

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Emiko Miranda passed away at home February 23 just short of her 99th birthday. She was born in Iwate Ken, Japan on March 22, 1923. She was raised in Japan and as a young woman drove a bus in Tokyo, which was very rare for a female to do at that time.

She met, and married, Celso (Cecil) M. Miranda in the chapel at St. Luke’s Hospital in Tokyo, where Cecil worked. Her husband was born 1897. She was 27 and he was 54. He was a Phillipine/American and had been an X-ray tech in the US Army 1942 through 1946. He had spent considerable time in Japan. They moved to the United States after they were married. They lived in several places in the US before settling back in Eureka, where his family was.

Emiko worked many jobs in her life from driving the bus in Tokyo to working at the County Hospital in Eureka, and later working at the Eureka Elk’s Lodge for years cooking, hosting and organizing parties. They had one daughter, Katherine, who was born in Japan. Cecil and Katherine preceded Emiko in death in 1984 and 2000, respectively.

Emiko sang Japanese Karaoke for many years, often going to San Francisco to sing in competitions. She always dressed in full Japanese regalia with beautiful kimonos. She loved singing locally with her Japanese friends in Eureka. Emiko’s friends Alex Duperior, Clint and Sue Hunter and Wanda Wahlund have helped her through the years after she no longer drove cars, to get to doctor appointments, shopping and getting to her beloved Bingo. She was a familiar face at the Cher-ae Heights Casino and on the Bingo Bus (pre-COVID), where she always sat in the front seat next to the driver. She played bingo 4-5 days a week.

She will be missed by her many friends in the Japanese community, at Bingo and those that were like family to her.

Services for Emiko will be at Sanders Funeral Home on March 8 at 11 a.m.

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Lawrence Watts
March 10, 1944 - February 17, 2022

After a two-year battle with pancreatic cancer, Larry passed away at home peacefully and is survived by his wife Rosalie of 55 years and four children with their spouses — Jed and Janera Watts, Starline and Mark Pitlock, Mindy and Brad Adorador, and Larz and Summer Watts. Larry is also survived by his eight grandchildren: Janessa, Chandler, Sharlene, Kendall, Bella, Nicolas, Oliver and Reid.

Larry was the second eldest of four. He was a veteran stationed in Germany as well as a black belt Judo champion and instructor. He loved hunting and fishing and was quite a comedian. He also loved to cook, appreciating all types of cuisine. He had a special interest in Asian culture.

Larry worked for Pacific Gas and Electric Company in the gas department for 46 years; first in San Jose and then in Eureka. Larry will be greatly missed by all who knew him. We are comforted in knowing that he is in the presence of our Lord Jesus and is no longer suffering.

Family and friends are invited to a celebration of his life, which will be held on Saturday, March 12th at noon. E-mail pitlocks@gmail.com for details.

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Humboldt’s short-lived shortcut to Tahoe will soon be gone.

Less than five months after launching the service, Aha Airlines has made it known to local air travel officials that they will cease operating their route between ACV and Reno-Tahoe International Airport.

The following was posted by Fly Humboldt, a local organization that advocates for increased air service to and from Humboldt. 

LoCO has reached out to a member of Fly Humboldt to inquire if there is anything else remotely interesting to say about this development. We will update this post if there is.

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