At the April 9, 2024, Arcata Fire District's Board of Directors meeting, the Board discussed and approved a letter to be sent to the Arcata Mayor and Arcata City Council. That letter is re-printed here ----This letter formalizes and re-states what the AFD has been telling the City Council over these past two years. At the current time, the AFD cannot ensure the safety of people living in a building that is over 40 feet tall, which would be a three-story building.
At the City Council meeting on April 17th, Dr. Judith Mayer will be honored with a Certificate of Appreciation for her seventeen years of service on Arcata's Planning Commission. Members of the public are invited to attend and show our own respect for Dr. Mayer, for all the many ways that she has consciously added to our community. ----------------
The City Council meeting starts at 6:00 p.m., and the awarding of the Certificate of Appreciation is the first item on the agenda that the Council will enact. Don't be late!
A public hearing on a formal recommendation of the General Plan and the Gateway Area Plan will take place Tuesday, May 14, 2024. You are encouraged to attend and to send your comments and concerns to both the City of Arcata and to Arcata1.com.
The annual City Council goal-setting study session took place on April 2, 2024. This meeting was not televised, available on-line, or video-recorded. There is a rough audio recording, available on Arcata’s website’s meeting calendar page and available here.
Here is a video of the presentation from FM3 Research of the question on having a sales-tax increase measure on the November 2024 ballot. Also includes two non-tax-related questions on 7-story building height and street parking.
Cal Poly Humboldt could be contributing a substantial amount to Arcata's costs for police, emergency services, infrastructure, and maintenance. Court cases have ruled that a local university should pay for their share of the costs resulting from university-oriented population.
Did UC Berkeley bring in more students than they'd promised? How much should the University contribute to infrastructure costs? And -- is any of this applicable to Cal Poly Humboldt and Arcata ?
According the procedures of the draft Gateway Code, a four-story hotel project with 85 rooms could be approved by a single person -- the Zoning Administrator. As such, the project would never be seen by the Planning Commission. A hotel of this size could, by code, have a parking lot with 3/4 acre of asphalt.
I propose: that the criteria be much lower for Planning Commission review. Such as: PC review required for anything over 4,000 sq.ft. building area. Or: PC review required for everything (except for the simplest of projects, to be defined). How would this work? The Julian Berg Valley East project took 31 minutes to be approved. If a project is well-designed and adheres to the Form-Based Code, then approval by the Planning Commission would be smooth sailing.
The Great Redwood Trail is a planned 307-mile long trail system that starts in Blue Lake and runs though Humboldt, Trinity, Mendocino, Sonoma, Marin, and San Francisco counties -- all the way to San Francisco. One hundred miles of the trail is in Humboldt County, and about 11 miles of the trail in the southwest corner of Trinity County. You can view the draft Master Plan for the Great Redwood Trail draft master plan here.
Survey results for the potential sales-tax increase November 2024 ballot measure. Also: How did questions about street parking, parking lots, and 7-story Building Height get onto a survey about potential tax measures? Why does the survey conclude that Street Parking is "low priority" when 85% of the respondents say it is important?
Under the affordable housing provisions of the Gateway Area Plan, buildings over 14 units are required to have 14% or 16% of the apartments be affordable. But the rent amounts that are proposed wind up being higher than what renters are paying now. How can this be considered as affordable?
In what proved to be a record-setting session, at last week's Planning Commission meeting an amazing 1,825 apartment units were approved in a bit under 45 minutes. The master plan is based on seven identical 7-story barrel-shaped apartment buildings, plus an ark-shaped hotel that serves as the anchor for the project, so to speak. The 300 cubit-long ark hotel (510 feet, in contemporary terms) includes 425 guest rooms,
With an outpouring of jubilation and champagne, the City Council approved and adopted the Gateway Area Plan just prior to 10:00 p.m. on New Year's Eve, 2024. In a never-before-seen scene set at City Hall, reminiscent of an Arcata version of the warm-hearted ending of the film "It's a Wonderful Life," the entire town rallied behind the promise (or premise) of affordable housing for working people.
Cal Poly Humboldt announced last week that they had bought the Humboldt Crabs baseball team. Rumors for the rationale of the purchase run rampant. Discussion changed after a leaked memo gave clues about the fate of the Crabs.
"I couldn't care less about the Crabs," this high-level university official was reputed to have written. "It's only a bargaining chip in our negotiations with the City of Arcata about us buying the ballpark."
In what proved to be a record-setting session, at last week's Planning Commission meeting an amazing 1,825 apartment units were approved in a bit under 45 minutes. The master plan is based on seven identical 7-story barrel-shaped apartment buildings, plus an ark-shaped hotel that serves as the anchor for the project, so to speak. The 300 cubit-long ark hotel (510 feet, in contemporary terms) includes 425 guest rooms,
With an outpouring of jubilation and champagne, the City Council approved and adopted the Gateway Area Plan just prior to 10:00 p.m. on New Year's Eve, 2024. In a never-before-seen scene set at City Hall, reminiscent of an Arcata version of the warm-hearted ending of the film "It's a Wonderful Life," the entire town rallied behind the promise (or premise) of affordable housing for working people.
Cal Poly Humboldt announced last week that they had bought the Humboldt Crabs baseball team. Rumors for the rationale of the purchase run rampant. Discussion changed after a leaked memo gave clues about the fate of the Crabs.
"I couldn't care less about the Crabs," this high-level university official was reputed to have written. "It's only a bargaining chip in our negotiations with the City of Arcata about us buying the ballpark."
The latest 7-story building to be approved for Gateway construction includes a full-height climbing wall. The Planning Commission was quite pleased at the innovative interpretation of the Gateway Code's Community Benefits program. Rather than have something as mundane in Arcata as a "parklet" with outdoor seating, trees, grass, places to congregate and talk, a place to meet up with friends, and so forth, this climbing wall will satisfy the requirements of all citizens in Arcata to be outdoors in a healthy, engaging environment.
At their first meeting of 2025, on January 11th, the Planning Commission found themselves looking at what would be the largest apartment ever to be approved by the Commission in the history of Arcata. The Houston, Texas, developer Max Buildout had set his sights on little Arcata. Six stories tall, directly on the L Street Linear Park, and with 3 Texas-size parking spaces.
Brandolini's law, also known as the B.S. Asymmetry Principle, is an internet adage that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. It states that the amount of energy needed to refute B.S. is an order of magnitude larger (that is, ten times larger) than is needed to produce it. -------- The Gish Gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person attempts to overwhelm their opponents by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments.
"You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition. You've just crossed over into... The Twilight Zone." Or crossed over to -- The Gateway Zone.
Reading time 2 minutes -- "The Orange Juice Test" is a way of determining which people are capable of solving a difficult problem, and which people are not. Home ownership in the Gateway and truly affordable housing are large problems. Difficult and demanding, but not impossible. "The Orange Juice Test" helps to determine if a specific person is capable of giving us an honest and practical solution.
Richard & Mimi Fariña --
from "Reflections in a Crystal Wind" album, 1965. **** A song for peace. **** "And will the breezes blow the petals from your hand / And will some loving ease your pain / And will the silence strike confusion from your soul / And will the swallows come again?
Richard & Mimi Fariña --
House Un-American Blues Activity Dream. A 1965 "protest" song about the plight of a man who happens to be travelling in Cuba when Castro takes over...and is thrown in jail as a result. ---------------
It was the red, white and blue making war on the poor.
Blind Mother Justice on a pile of manure.
Reading time: 3 minutes -- This article is presented here not as a guide, but for our smiles. How does an AI program describe our Gateway Area Plan? It is not entirely accurate in places. But for an overall view of the Gateway Plan, it's actually pretty good.
Reading time: 3 minutes -- This is an AI-generated essay about the impacts of the State Density Bonus Law. It's here partly for our education and partly for our smiles. Yet as an overall view, it's not bad.
Partial build-out of the Gateway Area Plan. The Plan was finally adopted in 2031, following nine years of discussion and community input. A minor typographical error in the final version resulted in a 70-story maximum height, rather than the previously agreed-upon 7 stories. As anticipated, many developers opted to build smaller buildings than the allowable maximum.
Bill Hicks was an American comedian who died in 1994 at the age of 32. His lines include: Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye. -- I am a misanthropic humanist. Do I like people? They're great... in theory.
"Deportee - Plane Wreck at Los Gatos" is a song about the deaths of 28 migrant farm workers in a plane crash in 1948. The workers were part of the U.S.-Mexico "Bracero" program, whereby Mexican farmworkers could come to the U.S to work in the fields and then be returned to Mexico after the work contract was done.
In a June 22023, e-mail with Arcata's Community Development Director David Loya, I quoted to him a key sentence from the very first paragraph of the Brown Act -- California's transparency "sunshine" law. I've quoted this to him before, mainly because I do not believe that Arcata's top planner (although with no planning degree) abides by the law. ***** In a surprising bit of irony, on the City's website the words that have the Brown Act quote are unreadable. *****
Don't know much about History -- Don't know much Biology -- Don't know much about a science book -- Don't know much about the French I took -- But I do know that I love you -- And I know that if you love me, too -- What a wonderful world this would be.
A Grange protest song from the 1880s. Recorded by Ry Cooder in 1972 *** "We worked through Spring and Winter, through Summer and through Fall -- But the mortgage worked the hardest and the steadiest of us all -- It worked on nights and Sunday, it worked each holiday -- It settled down among us and it never went away **** -- The farmer is the man who feeds us all."
Idries Shah (1924-1996) was a prolific was a prolific Indian author and teacher in the Sufi tradition. Emphasizing that Sufism was not static but always adapted itself to the current time, place and people, he framed his teaching in Western psychological terms. Shah made extensive use of traditional teaching stories and parables, texts that contained multiple layers of meaning designed to trigger insight and self-reflection in the reader.
Gateway Housing is here!
Following five years of Planning Commission deliberations and a dozen local developers saying it couldn’t be done, Arcata’s all-female City Council has achieved the impossible in just six days of “taking care of business.” “We made it fun,” said City Manager Karing Dreamer. Vice-Mayor Merriment Usemath chimed in. “We’re vibrant, we’re ageless, we’re fabulous. We make decisions with a smile. Why be so serious? Everything takes forever when it's a drag. Or... it's a drag when it takes forever? Well, whatever."
HUMOR: Last Tuesday’s PlanCom meeting brought direction that impacts all future-oriented Arcatans, whether they are animal, mineral, or vegetable. In a 6 to 1 vote (with Commissioner Kermit Junn dissenting as usual), the PlanCom strengthened their determination to prohibit occupancy of ants from the Gateway Area. --- “This was always the intention from the start of this process, hundreds of millions of years ago,” remarked Elated Boya, Arcata's Community Development Director. “Possibly you missed those early meetings. For Arcata to have a micro-micro-grid of bicycle lanes, ants would only get in the way.”
“I got the idea after watching ‘Being John Malkovitch’,” explained Planning Commissioner Ivegotta Nyedear. “In the movie, a developer built an office building where the 7-1/2 floor has a ceiling height of just five feet. We did a market analysis.” He continued: “With housing in such demand in Arcata, we found that 78% of renters would live in an apartment with a five-foot ceiling if the rental price was under $750 a month.” ---- Splitting existing apartments into upper and lower units was the brainstorm. “In an evolving world, the renter population must evolve as well,” said Commissioner Achingho Mowner. “This solution is perfect.”
In a stirring turn of events, Gracelessway Plan decisionmakers resolved fourteen months of stagnation in under five minutes at last Tuesday’s meeting. "We haven't even started, and we're done!" Commissioner Eyefigueroa Dittout announced with a big grin. And suddenly the Commission has nothing to do.
Paul Simon's timeless song. Eight versions plus lyrics and notes. -----
Many’s the time I’ve been mistaken --
And many times confused --
Yes, and I’ve often felt forsaken --
And certainly misused --
Oh, but I’m all right, I’m all right --
I’m just weary to my bones --
Still, you don’t expect to be --
Bright and bon vivant --
So far away from home, so far away from home.
Almost everything in China is done on a scale that is just about unimaginable for us. So what happens when bike-sharing companies that own millions of bikes go out of business? The photos here tell the story.
"The Tale of Melon City" is a parable of a well-meaning king whose desire for justice becomes confused by questions of responsibility and blame. --- "The ruler of a certain city one day decided that he would like a triumphal arch built, so that he could ride under it with all pomp, for the desirable edification of the multitude. But when the great moment came, his crown was knocked off: The arch had been built too low."
Is the Gateway Plan an example of how "the can-do spirit of the times that led people to devise a number of illogical schemes that would purportedly solve social and economic ills." ****** See Arcata on a fictional map from the 1726 satirical novel "Gulliver's Travels."
Siddhartha Claus is coming to town!
He knows when you're trapped in duality.
He knows when you're not awake. He wants you free of all desire. So be free for Nirvana's sake!
In Bruce Springsteen's words, "This is one of the greatest songs about human freedom ever written." With versions by Bob Dylan, The Byrds, and Bruce Springsteen. Includes the performance before 300,000 East Berliners, a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The President, he's got his war. Folks don't know just what it's for.
Unreal values, crass distortion -- Unwed mothers need abortion.
Tryin' to make it real, compared to what?
"It's very considerate of people to separate their trash."
Perhaps require new construction to accommodate or have collection services for food-waste -- as is done in Korea currently.
Ry Cooder from his second album "Into the Purple Valley," 1972. The song is a Depression Era late-1930s song, in protest to California's "No More Migration" laws. Also here is the Sis Cunningham version from 1976,
Woody Guthrie's song "Pretty Boy Floyd" contains the famous verse: "Yes, as through this world I've wandered,
I've seen lots of funny men; Some will rob you with a six-gun, And some with a fountain pen."
Which words are repeated hundreds of times in the draft Gateway plan? And which words are conspicuous by their absence? Hint: You won't find the word "sun" or "sunshine" there. Or "solar shade" or "solar shadow" either.
There are over 28,000 words in this document. "House" and "Home" do not appear even once.
A single panel from "City of the Future" as imagined by Robert Crumb in 1967. "Everyone will be tuned in to everything that's happening all the time!" Note the captions on the buttons on the electronic devices: Economy, Politics, Science, Literature, Art, Facts, Fancies, Opinions, Ideas, Notions -- just like a modern website news page.