the town dandy / By Hank Sims

Backwoods Brawling

(Nov. 8, 2007)  I never claimed to be omniscient.

The record will show that a speaker at the Oct. 9 Board of Supervisors’ meeting, at which the board voted to institute a moratorium on new homes in areas zoned for timber production, issued a warning. Don’t believe it, this person said. The county now says that they only want a 45-day moratorium, but there’s no way that it’ll be satisfied with only 45 days. They’ll want to take away our rights forever!

At the time, I didn’t pay much attention to this fellow, whoever he was. (See “Town Dandy,” Oct. 11.) My assumption was that he simply didn’t understand what was at play. For me, it was clear that the county saw a political opening to achieve a goal desired by many — the end of the Maxxam Corp. in Humboldt County. By passing a moratorium, the county let the judge overseeing the bankruptcy of Maxxam subsidiary Pacific Lumber know that the company’s plan for recovery was a dead letter. There is no way, the county wished to say, that Pacific Lumber is going to crawl out of bankruptcy by subdividing 22,000 of its acres into trophy ranchettes for the ultra-rich.

Well, whoever that speaker was, I owe him an apology. The county’s message was, in fact, heard loud and clear in the Corpus Christi bankruptcy court overseeing the Pacific Lumber case. Though no decision has been made, the judge in that case referred extensively to the county’s action, and seemed to imply that it made Pacific Lumber’s proposal very weak. But now, somehow, the speaker’s warning has come true. Now, Pacific Lumber is beside the point. There is now a quickly moving proposal on the table to permanently change the rules about home-building in Humboldt County’s timber production zones. The consequences of such a change would be immense.

Here, in a nutshell, is a summary of the situation. Currently, and for the last 30 years, someone who wanted to build a home on land zoned for timber production (“TPZ land”) required only a building permit. The proposed change would require that people who wish to build on TPZ secure, in addition, a much more onerous permit that would require, among other things, that the proposed home is “necessary for the management of the timberland” — i.e., for timber harvesting. On the face of it, that would seem to equal something close to “never.”

Looked at from one angle, the proposal is perfectly consistent with the changes the county is making to its general plan, which should be updated sometime next year. A major goal of the general plan is to confine population growth to already populated areas, so as to prevent sprawl and to preserve working timber and agricultural lands from development. There’s plenty of arguments to be made that rural subdivision has major impacts on wildlife and watersheds. Environmentalists and smart growth advocates have lined up solidly behind the proposed changes.

On the other hand, there’s no questioning the fact that any change would have immediate and devastating effects on some 1,700 separate owners of TPZ lands, who together own about one million acres of Humboldt County land. Eureka attorney Bill Barnum, whose family’s company owns about 30,000 acres of land, estimates that the changes will wipe away $1 billion in Humboldt County property values — about $150,000 per TPZ parcel. Whether those figures are strictly accurate or not, the very agitated folks who have organized themselves to oppose the change certainly have plenty to fear.

There’s no question that it’s within the county’s power to impose the changes. Several neighboring counties — Trinity, Del Norte, Shasta — have similar rules in place, and have had for some time. (Others, like Mendocino County, have rules similar to Humboldt County’s current ones.) It’s startling, though, how reaction to the Pacific Lumber proposal seems to have precipitated this headlong rush to change things as quickly as possible, without the possibility of thorough study or debate. The result, inevitably, will be very nasty politics and very expensive lawsuits.

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