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4/14/12

The controversial Waterfront Drive extension project is coming back before the Eureka City Council on Tuesday, and it's time to fish or cut bait, according to a city staff report.

Eureka city staff are asking the city council to either direct staff to continue working on the project by completing an environmental impact report, or stop the project and funnel the state transportation funding into another project.

The project -- a two-lane extension of Waterfront Drive from Del Norte Street to Hilfiker Lane -- has been on hold for nearly two years. The city began the project's environmental review process in 2004 but came to a standstill in 2010 due to opposition from environmental groups and the California Coastal Commission, an agency that would eventually review the project's permits. Commission staff were concerned the project is inconsistent with the California Coastal Act, and would negatively impact surrounding wetlands.

According to a staff report, $153,000 remains in the project fund for environmental work, but if the council decides to continue environmental review, it is likely the city will need to request more transportation dollars from the Humboldt County Association of Governments to complete the EIR.

”Given the amount of time that has passed since work has been done on the (draft environmental impact report), there will be additional costs with resuming work on the project and updating documentation that has been prepared thus far,” Environmental Planner Lisa Shikany wrote in a memo.

Additionally, staff recommends consulting with Caltrans to ensure the city does not have to repay the funding if the city can't complete the EIR, or can't get it certified.

”To date, Caltrans has taken the position that due to Coastal Commission's opposition and our perceived inability to permit the project, the city will not be required to repay funds expended to date,” the staff report said.

The project aims to reduce traffic on Broadway, improve access to businesses in the area and provide public access through multi-use trails. The proposed roadway would connect to Broadway at Truesdale Avenue and may have possible connections at McCullens Avenue and Bayshore Way.

Shikany's memo states the city “will face many challenges” if it moves forward, but identifies four primary concerns over the project: issues with filling in the wetlands, impacts to environmentally sensitive habitats and possible conflicts with the Bayshore Mall parking area and the Coastal Conservancy. The conservancy has funded enhancements for the PALCO Marsh, which would be adjacent to the new roadway.

The staff report also included a list, dated March 21, 1997, of projects that are eligible for the transportation funds if the council decides to abandon the project. The projects include other improvements on Broadway, Fourth and Fifth streets; improving the route to the Humboldt County Library; adding bike routes to certain areas and closing some streets between Fourth and Fifth streets for pedestrian use only. 

Original Article 

Dan Berman, con­servation director for the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conser­vation District, will describe efforts to improve kayak access at the Woodley Island Marina, Samoa Campground and Arcata Marsh at the 6 p.m. Monday meeting of Explore North Coast, at the Hum­boldt Bay Aquatic Center, 921 Waterfront Drive. He will share the draft plans and talk about how the district, Explore North Coast and other partners can work together to improve recreational boating opportunities on Humboldt Bay.

Explore North Coast is a nonprof­it association of paddlers that holds regular paddling events and pro­motes paddling safety and educa­tion. Club paddles are scheduled at a variety of North Coast locations throughout the year. The club meets the second Monday of each month and meetings are free to the general public. For more information, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. 

Or will be, if the Harbor District can open more of the bay for mariculture

4/5/12 

The oyster farmer stands in the stern of the small gray skiff, clear-eyed, a bit of smile on his wind-nipped, broad face. Weather’s supposed to turn nasty, but he’s just wearing waders over his jeans, a black cotton sweatshirt under his orange life vest, and a tan ball cap that doesn’t cover his ears.

With one hand on the tiller, the other in his jeans pocket, the farmer guides the skiff up a shiny channel between slick mudflats in North Bay, the northern bulbous extension of Humboldt Bay that nudges against Arcata. Low tide. He tips his chin at the sights: a flock of black brandts, flying in low across the bay to land in a dark-green eelgrass patch and begin nibbling. Earlier, the loon by the dock, an uncommon, speckled apparition; must be migrating through.

He slows the skiff, gently nudges its prow into a mudflat, and water clinks against the metal hull. Spread out on the exposed bay bottom before the skiff is one of his company’s oyster farms: rows upon rows of long ropes strung between short PVC pipes about a foot above the bay mud, with clumpy oblong shells woven into them every few inches. Algae and mud have coated everything in brown-green-gold, though here and there wink glimmers of pearly shell. It looks like a squat, murky vineyard. These were “planted” last fall, during a low tide, the farmer says. Though you can’t see them from the boat, each of the shells attached to the ropes has tiny oysters growing all over it; the little oysters are called “spat,” the big empty shell they’ve cemented themselves onto is called “cultch,” and together they make “oyster seed.” It’ll be two years, about, before harvesters can come in here, during a high tide, and haul the ropes in to collect the heavy adult oyster clusters.

Back in the open water, the skiff heading deeper into the middle of the bay, rain replaces sun and a rising wind whips the water into an alarming chop. The farmer, still standing, looks unperturbed. In command of his world.

Surely, this is the life. Following the rhythm of the tides, the ocean flowing in, flowing out, in, out. Inhabiting a world of birds and seals. Producing a food for th“It’s not the 1950s anymore; you don’t get to do whatever you damned well please,” says the farmer, whose name is Greg Dale.

As the southwest operations manager for Coast Seafoods, the biggest oyster grower on Humboldt Bay (and in California), Dale speaks from experience: Over a period of 10 years ending in 2007, in response to environmental concerns and increased regulatory pressures, Coast was forced to completely alter its harvest methods. It spent more than $1 million on permits and environmental reviews from at least nine local, state and federal agencies.

Coast could weather the expense. But smaller operators generally can’t — which is why, farmers say, there are only five growers on the bay using just 325 acres out of several thousand that could potentially support shellfish culturing.

The Humboldt Bay Harbor, Conservation and Recreation District has a plan to change that — to create a business park, of sorts, for oyster farmers by identifying a host of new sites, vetting them as a group for environmental compliance and pre-permitting them for the same culture methods currently used on the bay. The district would take on the regulatory risk, in other words. Once it completes that work, probably by 2014, the new sites would be leased out through a bidding process. Last year, the Headwaters Fund awarded the district a $200,000 grant for the spendiest part of this project — the permitting and review. It also had the district add a provision: a fee on top of the lease rate to squirrel away for future permitting costs. Now the district has to go identify those suitable sites.

The project has evoked cautious optimism from conservationists and created ripples of excitement among shellfish farmers and regulators alike — locally, regionally, nationally. Oh, and listen. Hear that? It’s the well-heeled, banging their empty plates on elegantly clothed tables, demanding more Humboldt Kumamotos.e sort of folks who care about where it comes from and how it’s grown — heck, not even able to keep up with their hunger.

A dream.

A dream, apparently, that few can afford. To hear this oyster farmer and others tell it, if you want to set up a new oyster farm on the bay — or expand an existing one — you’ll need buckets of money and the perseverance of a gull choking down a starfish to complete the slow-going, complex multi-agency permitting and environmental review process.

Not that current or prospective farmers necessarily disagree with the regulations, he says.

For more than 25 controversial years, Peter M. Douglas fought to preserve California's shoreline as well as the independence of the powerful regulatory agency he helped create.

4/3/12 

Peter M. Douglas, the controversial and resilient executive director of the California Coastal Commission, who for more than 25 years fought to preserve the natural beauty of the state's shoreline and the independence of the influential regulatory agency he helped create, has died. He was 69.

Douglas, who had homes in the Marin County city of Larkspur and on the Smith River in the state's northernmost Del Norte County, died Sunday at his sister's home in La Quinta, according to Susan Hansch, the commission's chief deputy. He was diagnosed with advanced throat cancer in 2004 and underwent months of chemotherapy and radiation treatment. In 2010, a month after he had been declared cancer-free, he found he had advanced lung cancer. He relinquished his day-to-day duties as coastal chief last June and retired five months later.

Douglas was a principal author of Proposition 20, a grass-roots initiative approved by voters in 1972 that created the California Coastal Commission and empowered it to control development along the state's 1,100-mile coast. He later helped write the 1976 Coastal Act, a landmark law that became a model for other states and countries and made the commission a permanent body with an unusual degree of autonomy.

As executive director since 1985, Douglas guided the 12-member commission on many contentious issues, including blocking offshore oil drilling and leasing, sharply restricting coastal construction and expanding public access to the beach. He led his staff in settling a number of complex disputes involving coastal resources, including an unprecedented expansion plan for the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach that added 500 acres of landfills and cargo terminals while compensating for the loss of marine habitats.

"Peter maintained public access to the coast so that it wasn't just something that belonged to the rich," said Warner Chabot, former executive director of the California League of Conservation Voters. "Probably his greatest achievement wasn't what you see," Chabot added, "but rather a political achievement .… He created a commission that enabled citizens to take direct action to protect their coast and be seen as equals with the very rich and powerful landowners along the coast."

In the process, Douglas made many enemies. Both Democrats and Republicans tried to remove him from his post and slashed the commission budget. Developers' advocates campaigned strenuously to reduce his and the commission's influence. The most serious challenge came in 2002, when critics led by the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation won lower-court rulings that found the method for selecting commission members unconstitutional, which threatened to overturn hundreds of commission decisions. The conflict was settled by the California Supreme Court, which rejected the critics' arguments.

"The goals and objectives of the Coastal Act are to better the environment, give due-process rights and protect the liberties of property owners. Unfortunately Peter Douglas and the Coastal Commission ignored the protections that are guaranteed in the act," said attorney Ronald Zumbrun, a frequent adversary who led the constitutional challenge.

At the same time Zumbrun acknowledged that Douglas brought formidable skills to his leadership of the agency. "Peter has been such a dominant person and so effective in his maneuvering and political instincts, I doubt anyone can match that," Zumbrun said.

Bearded and fond of wearing Birkenstock sandals to the office, Douglas described himself as a "radical pagan heretic," who often spoke of his deep spiritual bond with nature.

As his cancer progressed, he wrote of his beliefs about life and death in lengthy, highly philosophical emails to friends. He halted mainstream Western medical treatment in favor of Eastern therapies, abandoned his strict vegan diet and wound up outliving his doctors' dismal prognoses by many months, applying the same drive and optimism to his personal fight as he had to his job as chief steward of California's coast.

"Part of the reason for his success is he was not the typical bureaucrat," said Melvin L. Nutter, who was commission chairman when Douglas was promoted to executive director. "He was a poetic visionary. His vision … helped sustain the coastal program as well as his career."

Douglas was born in the German capital of Berlin on Aug. 22, 1942. When he was 2, Allied bombers destroyed his home, causing him to flee with his family to a friend's farm near the Polish border and eventually to an area in Bavaria controlled by American forces. In 1950, he immigrated to the United States.

While crossing the English Channel, Douglas was mesmerized by the churning seas and his first sighting of a whale, an experience that he said forged his "intangible, unbreakable, lifelong bond" with the ocean.

He grew up in Southern California, surfing off Redondo Beach and camping in the desert and mountains.

In 1965 he earned an undergraduate degree in psychology at UCLA. After studying for a year in Germany, he entered UCLA's law school, where he plunged into anti-war and social justice movements and co-founded a law collective. After completing his law degree in 1969, he and his German-born wife, Roe, moved abroad for a few years. Environmentalism was not yet on his radar.

He returned to the U.S. in 1971 and accepted a job in Sacramento on the staff of then-Assemblyman Alan Sieroty, a Democrat from Los Angeles, who put him in charge of writing legislation to safeguard the California coast. The challenge "quickly grabbed me and never let me go," Douglas recalled in a personal blog last year.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, oil spills off Santa Barbara and waterfront developments in enclaves such as Malibu had created a sense of urgency about threats to the state's scenic shoreline. The coast, Douglas told The Times in 1996, "was in a very precarious state. It was clear that unless something drastic was done, it would be irretrievably lost or compromised."

Despite fierce and well-financed opposition by coastal landowners, developers and oil companies, the Coastal Commission was created in 1972 when voters passed Proposition 20. Douglas then helped craft the Coastal Act, which was adopted in 1976 with bipartisan support. In 1977 Douglas joined the commission staff as deputy director. Eight years later, he was narrowly approved as executive director.

He counted among the commission's most significant achievements defeating a proposed toll road skirting San Onofre State Beach, a liquefied natural gas terminal off the Ventura County coast and the development of Hearst Ranch. He considered the decision to allow housing subdivisions along the Bolsa Chica wetlands one of its worst failures.

During his tenure he weathered about a dozen attempts to oust him, the most serious of which came in 1996, when the commission was dominated by Republican appointees. The effort failed after hundreds of Douglas' supporters packed the commission meeting in protest, many of them chastising members for what they considered a blatantly political move. Douglas attributed the attack on him to his opposition to the Bolsa Chica housing project and Southern California Edison's efforts to renege on a promise to mitigate environmental impacts caused by the San Onofre nuclear plants in northern San Diego County.

"The coast," Douglas told The Times in 2001, "is never saved. It's always being saved. The job of environmental stewardship of the coast is never done. It's never dull, and it's never done."

He is survived by his two sons, Vanja Douglas and Sascha Douglas; his ex-wife, Rotraut Douglas; a sister, Christina Douglas; a brother, Dieter Claren; and two grandchildren.

Services will be private, but the commission plans a public memorial this summer.

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