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5/5/17

Until late last week, the City of Eureka and the Humboldt County Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District, the two agencies responsible for performing maintenance dredging, planned to dump the dredge spoils on a beach along the Samoa Peninsula, as they have for years.

EPA public affairs officer Bill Keener said beach dumping is not allowed because the sediment from the bay is primarily composed of fine-grain silts and mud, making it inappropriate for the surf zone on sandy beaches. “However, the 1998 permit for the Harbor’s dredging was inappropriately issued by the [U.S. Army] Corps of Engineers allowing continued surf-zone disposal,” Keener explained. “[The] EPA, the Corps, and the Coastal Commission all agreed to allow that permit to stay in force, in order to give the Harbor time to plan (and budget) for a different dredging operation after the permit expired in 2008.”

5/3/17

Time for a Plan B.

Back in March, Eureka Parks and Recreation Director Miles Slattery outlined a plan for where to put the sediment that has accumulated along the bay floor at the Woodley Island Marina and Eureka’s public marina. Both the City of Eureka and the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District had agreed to pursue a plan to deposit the sludgy dredge spoils on a beach on the Samoa Peninsula. That’s where such materials have been deposited for decades, including last time the marinas were dredged, back in 2007.

But yesterday, in a conference call with staff from the Harbor District and the City, officials with the Environmental Protection Agency rejected that plan in no uncertain terms. 

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3/18/17

Humboldt Bay harbor district Executive Director Jack Crider confirmed Friday that the district has been illegally renting its Samoa pulp mill property to businesses in full awareness that it is violating county land use laws.

Crider said his decision to rent to these four businesses “was all about saving jobs in this community” and said the county government is aware of the district’s actions.

Some of the businesses currently renting the district’s property — such as An Electrician, Inc. — were displaced from their previous locations due to the newly regulated marijuana industry, Crider said.

“What triggered the whole thing was the desperation of local businesses that were getting forced out because of the cannabis industry,” he said. “The warehouses in town and everywhere else were being sold at an incredible price. The tenants were being kicked out, forced to vacate.”

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3/11/17

Trinity County’s decision to nix an east-west rail line feasibility study was a loss for businesses and a win for environmentalists, groups on both sides claimed.

“A train would have been an ecological disaster,” Tom Wheeler, program and legal coordinator for the Arcata-based Environmental Protection Information Center, said Friday.

The Trinity County Board of Supervisors declined to second a motion by Supervisor Bill Burton to use $276,000 of its Sustainable Transportation Planning Grant funds for the study at a reportedly packed Thursday meeting, according to Board Chairman John Fenley. The Land Bridge Alliance Organization had agreed to match 20 percent, or $69,000, of the total $345,000 needed to fund the study, according to the board’s special meeting agenda.

Eureka City Councilwoman Marian Brady said the decision means Humboldt and Trinity counties cannot capitalize on a train service that may have connected to a port in Humboldt Bay. She said the line could have led to the development of a port for overseas markets and competitive advantages to larger ports.

Wheeler said EPIC’s concerns stemmed from plans suggesting the rail line would run across or near rivers including the Trinity, Mad and Van Duzen rivers.

“As one of the most important stops in the Pacific Flyway and a critical aquatic ecosystem home to engendered fish, such as coho salmon and eulachon, Humboldt Bay is a unique ecological treasure,” it states. “The development necessary to make Humboldt Bay a major West Coast port is extreme and would spoil the bay’s natural beauty and ecological integrity.”

Wheeler added that noise from a train, once built, would create loud reverberating sounds harmful to northern spotted owl. On its boost to the economy, Wheeler said he doubted the train’s ability to spur economic activity and said any economic boost from a port would be lost on Trinity County.

The feasibility study, he said, would have likely led to the train’s construction.

“The government doesn’t like to just spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to say ‘it’s infeasible,” he said. 

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