news story / By Hank Sims

Heads Watered

Before moving to approve the three grants, Supervisor Mark Lovelace noted that the latter two projects had a lot in common, insofar as they could help owners of timber or agricultural land. “Again and again, we hear the alternative is subdivision or some other kind of development, which is not beneficial to the county’s goals, or to the goals of the landowners,” he said. “So in both of these cases, helping landowners find other ways to realize value off their land on an ongoing basis is a great thing.”

The Headwaters Fund board declined to fund three other proposals, but one of them caught the eye of Supervisor Jill Duffy and a few people in the audience. That was a request for $24,870 from the Northcoast Regional Land Trust to initiate what it calls a “Voluntary Oak Woodlands Conservation Program.” According to the application, the program would be a first step to make the owners of Humboldt County’s estimated 340,000 acres of oak lands eligible for state conservation funding. Duffy questioned Headwaters Board staffer Dawn Elsbree about the Headwaters Fund Board’s rationale for excluding the oak project from its list of recommendations. Elsbree said only that members of the board did not rate the project as highly as the others, according to the decision matrix that Headwaters Fund employs. In addition, the board wanted to keep some of this year’s $150,000 available for the next two rounds of funding.

A compromise was struck in the end: The Board of Supervisors voted to send the Oak Conservation Program back to the Headwaters Fund Board with a request that they reexamine it in the next funding go-round.

After the vote, the Board of Supervisors entertained another request for Headwaters funding. The Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District had originally hoped to secure $200,000 from a different pocket of the Headwaters Fund — the Community Investment Fund, which is aimed at infrastructure projects — to finance a before-and-after study of the socioeconomic impacts of the Marine Life Protection Act, which will soon be implemented on the North Coast. (See related story elsewhere in this paper.)

The Headwaters Fund Board had cut the request down to $50,000, asking the district to demonstrate support for the project from other interested parties before releasing any more funds. Harbor District staff asked for the original amount — work, they said, needed to begin right away to meet upcoming deadlines — but the supervisors eventually voted 5-0 to approve the lower amount, with more to follow upon the district meeting the Fund’s guidelines.

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