Even with this nice, dry fall weather we’ve been enjoying, construction of the trail’s southern portion — between the Bracut Industrial Park and the parking lot behind Target — won’t be finished as scheduled before Halloween, which is the hard cutoff date for ground-disturbing work in the county’s environmental permits.Reached by phone earlier today, Humboldt County’s deputy director of environmental sciences and preeminent trail guy Hank Seemann said the contractor, Arcata-based McCullough Construction, has been working steadily since spring, but a number of contributing factors led to the delay.“It’s a sensitive area next to the bay,” Seemann said. “It’s a very constrained corridor and construction area, so access and logistics are tricky. And then there’s just a lot of substantial work, including three new bridges.”Keep Reading
Last Thursday, Josh Buck was sprinting through the Balloon Track in Eureka. The executive director of the Clarke Museum was working on a time crunch to save something of historical significance from the property — a freight car weighing around 40 tons.The historic railroad track, and the locomotives it hosts, have sat in limbo for years. But now, property owner Security National has started phase one of cleanup, which means the removal of surface debris on the site.Casey Self, a spokesperson for Security National which bought the property in 2006 to develop it, said “they’re cleaning up the site and going through the piles and sorting the debris.”Security National hopes to complete the phase by 2025, she said, but didn’t know what phase two would mean — or why it’s started now.Kenny Carswell, Security National’s lead for the project, did not immediately respond to a phone call Thursday on the future of the site.“I’m assuming they wanna develop, you’d have to ask them exactly what that might be, but I think that’s their intent,” said Eureka City Manager Miles Slattery.Eureka approved the coastal development permit for this phase of the cleanup in June 2024.Jennifer Kalt, executive director of Humboldt Waterkeeper, an environmental nonprofit that has filed lawsuits against the development of wetlands at the site, said this phase involves removing the debris and foundations on the site without impacting any of the wetlands, plus some testing underneath the foundations to see how extensive contamination there is.“Humboldt Waterkeeper is excited to see the contamination cleaned up, as long as it is done right,” she said — which for Waterkeeper means a thorough cleanup and mitigation of impacts to the wetlands. The contamination stems from its time as rail yard plus an above-ground fuel storage facility, and includes heavy metals, petroleum hydrocarbons, dioxins and polychlorinated biphenols.She said the second phase, whatever it is, would mean a whole new public process and permitting, given its location on wetlands and in the coastal zone.The site’s zoning is stuck in limbo. Its public use zoning never officially changed after a ballot measure was passed to rezone the property to mixed-use zoning since the company never finished the permitting process to amend the local coastal program with the coastal commission, said Slattery. In the past, Security National’s aims were to develop the property to include a Home Depot at the proposed Marina Center.Keep Reading
Eureka is revisiting an effort to protect its gulches and greenways.At a special meeting Tuesday, the Eureka City Council talked about adding an ordinance to the City’s Inland Zoning Code to hamper the development of privately owned valleys and ravines that flow into Humboldt Bay.Inland greenways across the largely built-out city have no special protections from the city. Addressing this has been in the works since the early 2000s, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife described the regulations and standards as “long overdue” in a 2024 comment letter.During public comment, Jennifer Kalt from Humboldt Waterkeeper said she’s “looking forward to having this finally done so that those streams can get protected,” and two other commenters spoke in support of the plan.Read More
Outdoor advertising giant Outfront Media, Inc., has abandoned its efforts to resurrect a fallen billboard on the Hwy. 101 safety corridor between Arcata and Eureka. The company’s decision means the permanent elimination of a sign that was erected in Humboldt Bay’s tidelands (without a permit) more than 60 years ago.As previously reported, the company had been seeking permits from various local and state agencies in hopes of rebuilding the billboard, which collapsed into the bay during windstorms this past January. The sign was located directly across from the Indianola cutoff.Late last month, the Humboldt Bay Harbor District’s Board of Commissioners voted 3-0, with Commissioners Craig Benson and Patrick Higgins absent, to require an environmental study before determining whether the project is exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).The rebuild project would also have required a building permit from the county, which owns the property and was in a position to collect rent from the billboard, as well as a Coastal Development Permit from the California Coastal Commission — neither of which were foregone conclusions.But unbeknownst to the Harbor District commissioners, by the time they’d made their decision, Outfront Media had already asked Caltrans’ Outdoor Advertising Branch to cancel its permit for the billboard.Keep Reading
Billboards along the shoreline of Humboldt Bay are controversial and the county’s Harbor District has held off on permitting the replacement of one that blew down last winter.Owned by OutFront Media, which operates billboards nationwide, the damaged billboard is off Highway 101 south immediately adjacent to the Indianola Cutoff.The billboard repair requires permits from a number of agencies, including the county and the Harbor District.Repairs to billboards are allowed if they don’t exceed the scale of what was damaged. Once repaired, the billboards can be operated for only a period of time – enough to recover costs.Those details were outlined when the Harbor District’s Board of Commissioners considered the permitting at an Aug. 28 special meeting.District Development Director Rob Holmlund said the permit treats the billboard as a “legally non-conforming” existing use.If approved, the permit allows OutFront to do a “like to like” repair and operate the billboard for five years. After that, it must be removed.But there’s a glitch in the permitting process – the post-repair operation period is supposed to be “rebuttable” and OutFront hasn’t been given opportunity to ask for longer operation time.No one from OutFront was at the meeting to comment.During a public comment period, Jen Kalt of Humboldt Waterkeeper said the proposed repair is not “like for like” and the damaged billboard should no longer be considered as existing.Keep Reading
