the town dandy / By Hank Sims

Hundred Flowers Bloom

Meanwhile, there’s yet another lefty candidate for the Second District who may be on the verge of entering the race. That would be Rio Dell resident Steve Harris, district representative for Operating Engineers Local No. 3 and one of the fabled “Three Amigos” of Humboldt County politics, along with his pals Richard Marks and RichardMostranski.

Reached Tuesday afternoon, Harris said that he wasn’t prepared to make an announcement either way. But he said he was seriously considering it, and his decision would largely depend on whether or not he felt the other candidates in the race would adequately represent labor issues.

“I’ve thought about it, and I’ve actually formed an exploratory committee,” said Harris. “That’s as far as I’m going today. Film at 11.”

It happenedjust a moment too late for last week’s paper, but the Board of Supervisors last week took a great big deep breath on the timber production zone issue that has so riled spirits in recent weeks (see “Town Dandy”s from Oct. 11 and Nov. 8). The board had considered last week whether to extend a moratorium on building in lands zoned for timber production; when the four votes required for the extension were not forthcoming, it instead decided to let the moratorium lapse later this month.

The swing vote was Supervisor Jimmy Smith, who represents the outskirts of Eureka and the Ferndale area. Reached after the vote, Smith said that he wasn’t comfortable continuing the emergency ban on building in timber country, given that he’d received an immense amount of feedback from concerned property owners.

“What I heard — and if you were in my office, I’d show you the list — was literally hundreds of contacts by e-mail and phone,” he said. “And universally the concern I heard was that the process had speeded up.”

As we noted last week, the temporary ban began life last month as a way to sink the Houston-based Maxxam Corp.’s bid to keep hold of the Pacific Lumber Company. Maxxam had proposed to subdivide some 22,000 acres of its land to build an ultra-luxury development of 160-acre “kingdoms.” The board’s moratorium was a way of letting the bankruptcy court know that the plan would never fly.

And the mission was accomplished, apparently — at the following hearing, the judge in the bankruptcy case made numerous references to the moratorium and cast a skeptical eye at the company’s plans. Last week Smith defended the board’s rationale in passing the original moratorium, deeming it necessary to preserve the county’s say in Maxxam’s reorganization plans.

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