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On the last day of its monthly meetings Friday, the California Coastal Commission approved a bid by the city of Eureka to ban all new digital signs and billboards.

“I’m just delighted. We think they are really ugly,” said Michele McKeegan, the head of Keep Eureka Beautiful's tree project, a volunteer community advocacy group that supported the legislation. “They’re ugly. They flash and they’re often garish. People just don’t like them.”

The bill then went to the City Council, which passed a ban on digital signs and billboards from certain parts of the city and regulated the brightness of the signs. Because Eureka is on the Pacific coast and the ordinance would change zoning policy, the California Coastal Commission — the state agency assigned to protect and conserve the state’s coastline — had to sign off. 

Not only did the commission approve Eureka's ordinance, it asked the city to go farther and enact a complete ban on new digital billboards and signs across the city. The city agreed, passed the amended ordinance and sent it to the commission for approval.  

Along with banning new digital signs and billboards, the ordinance also forces the existing billboards to only contain static messages and only transition from one message to another instantly, without any transitional effects like fading out. The ads on the digital billboards can’t change more than once every 15 seconds, and they have to conform to both the city’s brightness standards, and the International Dark-Sky Association's brightness standards.   

“What we need are trees in our community, not digital billboards, street trees,” McKeegan said. 

Jennifer Kalt, the executive director of Humboldt Baykeeper, a coastal resources advocacy group, said the signs are also dangerous.
“The digital signs are more of an issue of light pollution and safety hazards, particularly on a quite dangerous stretch of US 101 that lacks pedestrian and cycling features,” Kalt wrote in an emailed statement. “We certainly applaud the city for being proactive about this, although it should have been done years ago.” 

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Good news for fans of non-motorized transportation: The last stretch of trail needed to connect Eureka and Arcata is getting closer to realization.
“It’s a really big step,” said Hank Seemann, the county’s deputy director of public works. If all goes to plan, he said, people will be cycling, jogging, roller-skating and skateboarding between the Arcata Plaza and the Eureka boardwalk before long.
“I would fully expect it to be complete by summer of 2024,” Seemann said, adding that construction could begin on or around May 1.
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The new year is a make-or-break moment for a Richmond housing development atop a contaminated former waterfront site once owned by the global pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.
Plans for developing as many as 4,000 units on the site have survived scrutiny by officials and legal challenges from environmental groups; the Richmond City Council approved the development years ago.
But last summer, state regulators asked the company to examine whether future sea level rise pushing up groundwater should alter the cleanup remedies for the hazardous site before development begins.
“The science of sea level rise is progressing, we're listening to the community, and we're saying we want more evaluation,” Ian Utz, project manager for the California Department of Toxic Substances Control, or DTSC, told KQED. "We're going to follow where the science leads us. The sea level rise evaluation is not a one-and-done thing."
Utz also tasked two independent researchers to analyze the company's site-wide sea level rise evaluation. AstraZeneca determined that by the year 2050, the site would incur no negative impacts.
But the two scientists found the company’s conclusions inadequate. Their analysis, which KQED reviewed, shows that rising sea levels could surface buried contaminants and expose future residents to them.
The company-led sea level rise evaluation prepared by consultants found that there will be no negative impacts from rising seas by the year 2050. Still, the developer might have to modify an underground barrier to treat groundwater before it reaches the bay by the end of the century.
UC Berkeley’s Hill and University of Arkansas geosciences professor Kevin Befus, who worked on projects for the U.S. Geological Survey modeling groundwater in the Bay Area, reviewed the evaluation for DTSC.
Hill’s critique of the AstraZeneca study centers on the model the company’s consultants used to examine rising groundwater, which took a profile of the existing water table and raised it as “if it were frozen in shape.”
That’s like a “cartoon version” of how liquid moves, she said. “Groundwater isn't like ice; it's going to leak out to the sides. It won't rise in some areas as much. In others, it may rise a lot.”
The other independent reviewer, Befus, said his main concern is that the company’s report primarily focused on flooding hazards and not on how rising groundwater will affect contamination.
“Groundwater is the conveyor belt for the chemicals,” he said, adding that DTSC should further look at how sea level rise will alter the hydrology under the site. “[The company’s] approach is just not useful for saying which direction chemicals are going to flow. Are they going to flow faster with sea level rise? That's just not how their model was built.”
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The Coastal Commission was created in the 1970s after the people of California became so concerned about losing their world-famous coast to unchecked development that they passed a ballot initiative to create the agency. What many people don’t know is that the Coastal Act of 1976 also protected affordable housing. That’s right. The original law afforded as much protection for moderate- and lower-income housing as it now does for wetlands, habitat and scenic views. In the first five years of the program, the commission successfully required the construction of over 5,000 affordable, deed-restricted, owner-occupancy and rental units in high-priced areas such as Laguna Nigel, San Clemente and Dana Point. It also collected about $2 million in in-lieu fees for additional housing opportunities throughout the state. These units were built right alongside the market rate units in most instances, outwardly indistinguishable from the full-price versions.
So what happened?
Local governments objected to the lost property tax revenues. Realtors resented their diminished commissions. So in 1981, a coalition of anti-housing interests got behind a bill by state Sen. Henry Mello that stripped the housing polices out of the Coastal Act. It also allowed any developer who had not yet completed a coastal housing project to demand the commission remove the affordable requirements from the permit. And it prohibited the commission from requiring local governments to include affordable housing in their Local Coastal Plans. Affordable housing ground to a halt in the coastal zone, and thousands of units slated to break ground never materialized.

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The California Coastal Commission's King Tide Photo Project website features photos from the Humboldt Bay area and across the state. This interactive map allows you to zoom in on areas of interest. 

Anyone can upload photos online or via a smartphone app. Click HERE to upload yours.

More Articles …

  1. Embattled Planning Commissioner Bongio Steps Down
  2. Humboldt Bay gets glimpse at future sea level rise
  3. Scientists study an unexpected climate change problem: Rising groundwater levels
  4. Eureka council approves water, sewage rate increase

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