on the cover / By North Coast Journal Staff

Top 10 Stories of 2008

It was not to be. Smith trounced his opponent — Ferndale dairyman John Vevoda — in the June primary. Arcata activist Mark Lovelace also took the Third District seat in the first round, pushing aside financial planner Bryan Plumley, who ran to his right, and Arcata City Councilmember Paul Pitino. (Incidentally, Woolley’s retirement notice provided the year’s top political drama, as potential candidates jockeyed to replace him. Among others, former Arcata City Councilmember Elizabeth Conner and Bay District Commissioner Mike Wilson threw their hats in, then snatched them back out again.)

The conservative resurgence had failed. In November, a three-way race for the Second District seat was more notable for intra-anti-Rodoni squabbles between proponents of Fortuna apple farmer Clif Clendenen and former KMUD News Director Estelle Fennell. Even if Rodoni’s widow, Johanna, was able to pull off her uphill write-in campaign, the pro-development, anti-regulation faction had already lost the war. The eventual election of Clendenen — a committed smart-growther — was just the coup de grace.

— Hank Sims

10. EXEUNT

It’s hard to overstate the collective shock that overcame the county when Second District Supervisor Roger Rodoni was killed in a freak automobile accident in April, on his way to his first campaign event of the year. At 67, the man was healthy as a bull and still going strong — he still relished the fight — and few of the thousand-plus mourners who gathered to remember him at the Humboldt County Fairgrounds could quite accept that he was gone.

He was a man of parts — cowboy, artist, student of history. A rancher by trade and a lifelong Humboldt County resident, he entered politics with a libertarian bent that favored marijuana growers and resource extraction industries just about equally. Which isn’t to say that he didn’t earn enemies. He was bluff. Cocksure. Hard-headed. Almost regal in disposition. There was no doubt that to his political opponents, Rodoni could be a Grade A son-of-a-bitch. But he was our son-of-a-bitch. He belonged to this place completely, and embodied an old, disappearing Humboldt County way of life in a way that no one will again.

Another figure from the past left the stage in October. John Campbell was serving as mayor of Fortuna when he succumbed to cancer, but most still remember him as the face of Charles Hurwitz’s Maxxam Corp. during the height of the Timber Wars. Campbell was instrumental in helping along the corporate raider’s acquisition of the closely held Pacific Lumber company in 1985, and was eventually elevated to head the 150-year-old timber giant. During his reign, the company accelerated the cut threefold and turned itself into a scourge of the environmental movement.

Pretty much everyone would come to hate Maxxam, but many of them were converted to the cause only after Campbell stepped aside. Word from his friends was that Campbell had modified his opinions later in life — that he came to oppose Hurwitz’s wholesale liquidation of the forest — but he never let on publicly to such sentiments. Perhaps his legendary gentlemanliness prevented him from speaking rude truths. In any case, his death was nearly simultaneous with Maxxam’s bankrupt retreat from Humboldt County.

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