Companion article: Senator Margaret Chase Smith: Honesty and Trust in the Gateway Area Plan

The Iceberg Theory

Everyone knows the Iceberg Theory. What you see is only 10% of the iceberg. The rest of it is hidden underwater. That would be 90% that’s unknown.

The same is true of the Gateway Area Plan. 

How can anyone make a decision if 90% of what’s necessary to make that decision is unknown? The answer is: You can’t.

Or how about if the information needed to make a decision has been withheld from you?

• The Community Benefits Program that the Planning Commission worked on for months has been gutted. The state reason is that the old system wouldn’t work. I have news for everyone: The new system provides less to the community, is counter to what people strongly asked for as community benefits — and it won’t work either.
• The Inclusionary Zoning program — to ensure there’d be at least some level of affordable housing — was reduced from 20% to 6% for affordable housing. The stated reason was that the figure had to be below what the State’s density bonus laws would be — but other alternatives weren’t talked about.
• The L Street Corridor full-width Linear Park:  After a year and a half of misstatements and omissions from Arcata’s staff and consultants, and repeated attempts at total dismissal of the findings of Arcata’s Transportation Safety Committee, our City Council saw the light and ruled in favor of the full-width Linear Park. Over 1,000 signatures from citizens, many letters to the City Council, and over 40 articles here on Arcata1.com on the subject helped on this also. (More on this here.)

  But the form-based code that governs building heights and setbacks has yet to be updated in response. Yes, until this is changed, the code allows 5, 6, and 7-story buildings to be constructed right along the sides of the future L Street Linear Park. If two buildings of the sizes allowed in the current code were built on each side of the linear park, the L Street pathway could get just 5 hours of sun — in the middle of August. By mid-September, it would be only 3 hours of sun a day — on a park intended for people walking, biking, sitting, talking.

• The proposed “privately-owned publicly-accessible” Open Space program hasn’t been talked about. See here. Aside from the hard-fought-for L Street linear park, the other parks and public spaces in the Gateway area are expected to be created, paid for, and maintained by the owner of the property. Is that likely to happen?
• Since the beginning of 2023, there’ve been four new members of the Planning Commission. That is, a majority of the Planning Commission is new to the Gateway Area Plan and the process of its development. Back in October and November, 2022 — over a year ago — the “previous” Planning Commission spend most of three sessions defining and listing their concerns. For many of the concerns, they requested that outside experts come in to discuss the issues with them. What happened with that list? It had the column of requests for experts removed and the list of concerns got abandoned.
• What ever happened to a discussion on homeownership possibilities? The Humboldt Association of Realtors asked for 10% of the new housing in the Gateway Area be available for home ownership. Not only was that proposal dropped, but it it not receive even one sentence of conversation.
• In November and December, 2023, lists of the Gateway Policies were brought up for discussion. These are policies that had been looked at and worked on over a two-year period. These policies were originally designed specifically for the Gateway area. Of those 149 policies, 26 of them — 17% — were deemed to no longer applicable. That left 123 policies. Of the policies that remained, there were 86 policies (70% of what remained) that were removed from pertaining to the Gateway Area Plan. Those policies have been watered down and re-worded, with the intent of making the policies be city-wide, eligible for any area where they’re suitable. Of the original 149 Gateway policies, just 37 remained — a little under 25%.
• And what of numerous public surveys, meetings, and information sessions, and town halls? What ever came of that input? Overwhelmingly people asked for homeownership opportunities and affordable housing. The engagement report that listed input from the January 2022 Open House meetings still is not complete, and likely never will be.
• What ever happened to the 3D images that we were promised? Well, they failed to appear.
• For 18 months, there was a “placeholder” page in the draft Gateway Area Plan called “Visualizations.” It said (in the 7/11/2023 draft) that “several pages will be added here to display visualizations of selected opportunity sites.”

  For three drafts of the Gateway Area Plan, the page titled “Visualizations” had been blank. The promised visualizations never arrived. Then, in a second iteration of that 7/11/2023 draft, the Visualizations page was removed entirely. 

• The “Gateway Area Form-Based Code Enhanced Content & Outreach” contract amendment with Planwest was approved at the December 21, 2022 Council meeting — one year ago. One “deliverable” product from amendment was: “Plan Area Massing Diagram.” Here is what was in the City Council agenda packet — a massing diagram (in this case, from Oakland) that Planwest included as being representative of what we would be getting from them. What ever happened to that?  That’s right — we’ve seen not one shred of it. You see, if we were to be provided with 3D images of what buildings might look like, or a massing diagram that showed a potential build-out of the construction in the Gateway area, then the people of Arcata might have a better idea as to what is going on here.

  One or two 6-story buildings on K Street might be okay — as long as the 6-story height didn’t continue on to the border of the park on the L Street corridor. But a row of 6-story buildings might not be so good. We would be able to see that — if the proposed 3D images and the massing diagrams were ever supplied to us.

  Without a building area massing 3D diagram, it is not really possible to evaluate the effect of building height on the surrounding neighborhood.

• Oh, and there’s more. Much more.

Cockroaches, mosquitoes, termites, rats, and rot.

We’ve all been there. We each have our own version of a story that’s both clear and universal.

Maybe you’ve gone camping, and you’re setting up camp in the beautiful outdoors. It’s around five p.m. or so, and you’re thinking about getting your kitchen gear together for making dinner. You hear a buzzing; the buzzing stops; you feel a sting on your neck. You slap your neck, but it’s too late. A mosquito got you. And then you hear some another buzzing mosquito.

The question at that point is:  If you have already heard or seen two mosquitoes, what’s the likelihood that there will be more as the evening goes on?

The likelihood that there will be more approaches 100%.

Okay. You’re traveling somewhere exotic, you find a hotel that’s in your budget. And then you see a cockroach. Do you honestly believe it’s the only cockroach you’re going to see? If you see one, the chance are there will be more.

Have you ever been in a house that had a rat or a mouse problem? You can kill one or two or three, but when does it stop? If you’ve killed two or three, that usually means there are lots more. 

Anyone who has bought or sold a home is familiar with the home inspection process. If there’s just a bit of rot or termite damage or powder-post beetle evidence that you can see, how much rot or wood damage is there that you aren’t seeing?

It’s like the Iceberg Theory. If you can see something rotten, there’s a very strong likelihood that there will be more.

Senator Margaret Chase Smith on the issue of trust

Margaret Chase Smith served as a U.S. representative for eight years (1940–1949) and a U.S. senator for 24 years (1949–1973). A member of the Republican Party, she served as a U.S. representative (1940–1949) and a U.S. senator (1949–1973). Smith was a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in the 1964 election and thus was the first woman to be placed in nomination for the presidency at a major party’s convention. As a Republican, she was among the first to criticize the tactics of Joseph McCarthy in her 1950 speech “Declaration of Conscience.”

During the years of the Vietnam War, she was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. At one point, the Committee found evidence of an Army general misappropriating a (relatively) small amount of funding — that is, using it for a purpose not stated in the budget. His response was “Please bear with this — It’s only 45 million dollars.”

“General,” she told him. “If we can’t trust you with the millions, how do you expect us to trust you with the billions?“

Again:  If you see some rot, some misrepresentation, or a few falsehoods — then the great likelihood is there are more that you’re not seeing.

For further reading, see Senator Margaret Chase Smith: Honesty and Trust in the Gateway Area Plan

Example after example after example….

Let’s look at the cover of the v14a draft of the Gateway Area Plan. This version was released to the public earlier this month, on December 8, 2023. The inset at the upper right corner was added as an explanation.

Read this carefully. On December 8, 2023, Arcata’s Community Development Director David Loya presented a new draft of the Gateway Area Plan that “includes proposed changes reviewed by the Planning Commission on December 12, 2023.”

That is, he anticipated how the Planning Commission would vote — four days before they even met.