By PHILIP SANTOS | [email protected] 
PUBLISHED: January 30, 2019 at 5:29 p.m. | UPDATED: January 30, 2019 at 5:30 p.m.

People are going to move to Arcata whether or not residents like it. That was one of the takeaways from Wednesday morning’s State of the City event.

How to plan for that reality is up to the city, Community Development Director David Loya said at the event.

“Other parts of the state are going to become uninhabitable,” he said. “We aren’t going to prevent people from moving here; there’s going to be climate migration, so we need to plan for it.”

Loya was one of three panelists, joined by Arcata City Manager Karen Diemer and Gregg Foster, the executive director of the Redwood Region Economic Development Commission. The three took turns updating the full crowd at the Minor Theater on what the future holds for the city in terms of the economy, the labor force and where everybody is going to live.

“Over the course of the next 20 years, we’re going to experience a real crunch on housing and in our quality of life if we don’t plan for it appropriately,” Loya said. “In areas where we’ve seen that jurisdictions haven’t planned … housing conditions get worse, affordability (decreases), people wind up sub-leasing closets and stuff like that.”

The changes to come in the next 20 years will differ from those we’ve seen in the past two decades, he said. A primary area currently being eyed by the city is what the city refers to as the “K Street corridor,” which incorporates an approximate area from north of Samoa Boulevard to 17th Street, which is bordered by K and Q streets.

“One of the plans we’re looking at is taking that K Street corridor … and the downtown and really trying to concentrate a lot of the development into that area,” he said.

In anticipation of the many future residents to come to the city, Loya said a comprehensive overhaul of the city’s General Plan is in the works. The general scope is to identify and implement policies and programs that will result in “appropriate development” for the expected demographic shift. Loya indicated there will be extensive community outreach efforts to whittle down exactly what it is the community would like to see developed in the future.

Diemer touched on other developments including city infrastructure. About $1.2 million in street projects are funded each year, she said, with the main project this last year focusing on Janes Road from the Guintoli roundabout to the St. Louis roundabout. The city has funded 16 projects that went to bid with about $11 million, Diemer said, noting about $7 million was sourced from grants.

“Significant projects that we’re working on are water storage and water lines,” she said. “We’re just finishing acquisition on a parcel (for) our third new water tank in the last five years, and that should round out what the city needs in water supply both for fire suppression and for growth for the next 10 years.”

Reduction of greenhouse gases and overall energy use have been two primary values for the city, Diemer said. A 50-kilowatt solar array is set to be constructed by the marsh treatment plant, and the library will be all electric and zero net energy use by the end of the year.

“For the last two years, we have operated 100 percent on renewable electricity,” she said. “We’re working on converting out all of our facilities, moving away from gas to electricity and then we’ll start working on our fleet as well.”

The biggest project, Diemer said, is a complete rehabilitation of the wastewater treatment plant.

“It will be the largest project that we’ve seen in this community really since we built the wastewater treatment system,” she said. “We will phase it in over five years. It will likely cost … close to $50 million.”

Other developments include new bleachers at the Arcata Ball Park and the construction of a futsal court, with construction planned to begin this spring. Diemer also highlighted the city’s Plaza Improvement Task Force, which is “in the information collecting stage” to assess a number of ways to improve the plaza including programs, activities, physical improvements, and economic and regulatory changes.

Diemer closed by touching on the fate of the President William McKinley statue as well as the status of the alcohol licenses of Toby and Jacks.

An environmental report is set to be reviewed by the council on Feb. 20, she said, after which they will discuss relocation further.

“I would expect some change on that in the spring, and some decisions to be made here in February,” Diemer said.

Concerning the status of the liquor license for Toby and Jacks, Diemer said the fate of the license is still to be determined. The initial recommendation to revoke their license has been appealed by the owner of the bars, she said.

“Somewhere between March 7 and May 7 we should have a decision out of the Alcohol Beverage Control Board of Appeals.”

After that point, the owner still has the ability to appeal through the courts, she said.

Gregg Foster took to the state of the economy and emphasized the need to focus on attracting talented workers rather than focusing specifically on following an industry. Particularly with cannabis, there is a need to reinforce intellect and ingenuity, he said.

“We don’t want to be the Napa Valley of cannabis, we want to be the Silicon Valley of cannabis,” he said. “We have the intellectual power.”

What Arcata doesn’t want to do, he said, is to assume “the thing that’s doing it for us now is going to” be what does it for us in the future.

Foster then turned to a graph which depicts the county’s depleting labor force in a time of growth and recovery and asked why this was the case.

“That’s an important question to ask, and try to address,” he said. “We’re a much more diverse economy now than we have been … if we deal (with issues) in the simplistic way, we’re always going to fail and if we always point to a person and blame them for something, we’re never going to succeed.”

Philip Santos can be reached at 707-441-0506.