on the cover / By Ryan Burns

Future at Bay

Rails, trails, kayaks and commerce in the Harbor District elections

(Oct. 15, 2009)  Humboldt Bay is having an identity crisis. Poor thing’s feeling insecure and, frankly, a bit depressed. (Peek into her wallet and you can understand why.) The grand sense of purpose she possessed back when trees and fish seemed inexhaustible and the mighty railroad kept her company has grown murky and diluted (though the water itself is clearer these days). The the pulp mill sits idle on her shore; the fishing industry struggles through various forms of jeopardy; and the rail through the Eel River Canyon lies in shambles.

Enter the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District, whose commissioners serve as chaperones, trying to steer the bay toward a brighter future. There are at least two things this year’s batch of candidates agree on: First, there’s immense potential for our bay, which remains the largest natural coastal harbor between San Francisco and Seattle. Second, that potential is not being met. Beyond that their visions diverge. Should the district hold to its long-established — albeit ever more challenging — plan to transform the bay into an international shipping hub? Or is it time to abandon that dream and focus instead on smaller goals like short sea shipping, expanded recreation opportunities and finally building a trail around the bay?

Woodley Island Marina. Photo by Ryan Burns

GALLERY >

Intermingled in this larger debate are several messy issues — like money, for one. Drastic cuts to the district’s $3.5 million budget earlier this year only partially allayed fears of impending bankruptcy. Some candidates, noting the absence of customers requiring deep-port services, have questioned both the economic and ecologic wisdom of continuing to dredge 1.5 million cubic yards of sediment from the bay annually at a cost of roughly $5.6 million (courtesy the Army Corps of Engineers). Then there’s the Marine Life Protection Act, a state-mandated redesign of marine ecosystem protections that has local fishermen up in arms, fearing the loss of their already tenuous livelihoods.

With no shortage of hot-button issues, here’s a primer on candidates’ prescriptions for renewal.

Division 3: Arcata, Manila, Bayside, Freshwater, Kneeland

Mike Wilson, incumbent: An outspoken skeptic of major port development, Wilson sees himself as a realist. He was on the board that cut more than a quarter of a million dollars from the district’s $3.5 million budget earlier this year and says yet more cuts will be required to keep the agency solvent. But what’s really needed, he says, is a shift in strategy.

Over a bowl of curry noodles at Arcata’s Pacific Rim Noodle House, Wilson argued that a business model dependent on rail simply won’t bear fruit for a host of reasons — geologic, geographic, economic, political — that exist not just here but in Marin and Sonoma counties as well. “These are extreme challenges stacked one on top of the other,” Wilson said, “and any one of them make this [strategy] an extremely tenuous proposition.”

Which doesn’t preclude a shipping industry, he said, provided the infrastructure is scaled in proportion to demand. “The things I like to focus on are those businesses and industries that have both the people and the energy that are moving forward today.” Foremost among those, in his view, is Stephen Pepper’s Humboldt Maritime Logistics, designers of a local container-on-barge service that could potentially tap into the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Marine Highway program. Short sea shipping, as such services are called, would not require deep dredging of the bay and could drastically reduce shipping costs for local companies, according to Pepper.

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