What a year. In our sliver of the North Coast, 2024 brought triumph and tragedy, drama and departures, and a host of stories that will reverberate in our communities, hearts and memories for years to come. In no particular order, here’s our list of the most important and impactful stories of the year, and this one goes to 11, with a special bonus entry, because we could all use a little more good news these days.
Occupation and Aftermath at CPH
The eight-day occupation of Cal Poly Humboldt’s Siemens Hall in April by demonstrators wanting to raise awareness to the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza, where Palestinian civilians were being killed by Israel’s U.S.-supported war effort, drew international press coverage. But it’s perhaps most remarkable locally as the rare news event that seemingly left all involved parties — and most bystanders, for that matter — aggrieved. It also laid bare simmering tensions on campus between the university’s administration, it’s faculty, staff and students.
Demonstrators and their supporters felt administrators’ decision to call in police to clear what was then a peaceful occupation of the administrative building was unjust and needlessly escalated the situation, sending police and protesters barreling toward what would become a violent confrontation. Administrators, meanwhile, said the demonstration clearly violated university policy and that protesters entered the building with criminal intent, feeling they were unjustly vilified and blamed for an untenable situation. Police, meanwhile, were caught in the middle, given directives with seemingly little thought to their consequences, creating a dangerous situation without clear, attainable goals.
After a first, tension-filled night that ended when police were told to stand down, having made three arrests, demonstrators held the building for more than a week and turned the center of campus into an occupied zone with barricades set up around Siemens Hall. Tom Jackson Jr.’s administration made the decisions to shutter campus, moving all classes online and threatening anyone who entered with arrest, prompting a vote of no confidence in his leadership and calls for his resignation.
Ultimately, the university brought in hundreds of police officers from throughout Northern California to forcefully clear the campus in the dead of night on April 30, resulting in the arrest of 30 people who were peacefully gathered on the university quad.
The Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office has declined to prosecute any of the students, community members and one member of CPH’s faculty arrested during the week-long ordeal. But there’s no question the event and its aftermath — which the university reports included a $1.2 million cleanup bill — will resonate on campus and beyond for years to come.
Jackson Out at CPH
One of those reverberations came over the summer, with Jackson announcing he would be resigning the university presidency in July. While Jackson reportedly had been mulling the move well before protesters entered Siemens Hall on April 22, most agree the division caused by the occupation and his handling of it would have made his return untenable.
The resignation — technically a retreat, as Jackson left the presidency and its compensation package of more than $400,000 annually to take a tenured faculty position paying about $173,000 per year — brought an end to a uniquely transformative and divisive tenure.
Jackson has been credited with having been instrumental in then-Humboldt State University’s push to become the state’s third polytechnic university, bringing a state investment of more than $450 million, a host of infrastructure projects and hopes for doubling the school’s enrollment, even amid declines across the California State University system.
But since Jackson moved from South Dakota’s Black Hills State University in 2019 to become Cal Poly Humboldt’s eighth — and first Black — president, his tenure has been repeatedly roiled by controversy. He’s faced sharp criticism for his handling of COVID-19 protocols, reviving a controversial off-campus student housing project, the university’s outbidding a senior living community to purchase a 9.5-acre property near campus and the decision to force students living in their cars off campus with little warning just before finals, to name a few. He also was widely rebuked for comments in a fall welcome address that many saw as an attempt to silence survivors of sexual assault and harassment.
One of the more persistent criticisms of Jackson late in his tenure though, was his perceived invisibility, with students and staff alike saying he rarely attended events and meetings and was seldom sighted on campus. It’s an open question whether his new faculty position will change that, as the university reports his focus will be supporting its “work in the global engagement space” and helping to “build relationships that can result in meaningful student experiences abroad.” Asked if that would include any teaching, a university spokesperson told the Journal, “those details haven’t been determined.”
Farewell to Arcata Dining Icons
Restaurant turnover isn’t new in Humboldt, and — post-COVID — the survival of our favorite spots can seem miraculous. But this year we said goodbye to a handful of dining and drinking spots that anchored the plaza and Northtown Arcata. Mazzotti’s, the Eureka branch of which shuttered in 2019, closed its Arcata Plaza location in January, after a costly renovation and amid employees’ complaints about chronic check bouncing and, starting in December, not getting a paycheck at all from proprietor Joe Mazzotti. His bombastic public responses added to a bitter end. Across the green, Alibi Bar and Grill shut down both sides of its operation — old and new — for good in May. Locals grieved the loss of the nighttime spot for late shows and early Bloody Marys, with which to recover. With Sidelines and Toby and Jack’s having already seen last call, leaving only the taps and bottles at Everett’s flowing, the moniker “Tavern Row” hardly fits anymore. Also in May, longtime devotees of Japhy’s Soup and Noodles lined up for their final bowls of green curry soup. A student staple, it served affordable, Asian-inspired comfort food in Northtown for 25 years. Obento, with its casual Japanese menu, has filled the spot and perhaps the niche. In September, word came that the Jam, a storied music venue and stalwart of Arcata nightlife since its first incarnation as the Jambalaya, was no more. It’s slated to reopen with food, drinks and shows under new ownership as the Wild Hare Tavern. And finally, 36-year institution Plaza Grill made a gradual change to new ownership and a new Californian-Cuban menu as Havana. It was a long goodbye for those who’d made it their spot for weekly lunches and family celebrations over the decades.
Sentencing Reform
In criminal justice circles, 2024 may be remembered as the year sentencing reform came to Humboldt County, though it wasn’t without missteps.
Eight days into the new year, Humboldt County Superior Court Judge John Feeney resentenced Steven Dinsmore to time served, ordering that he be released from custody that day. Feeney himself had sentenced Dinsmore to serve more than 29 years in state prison back in 2007 after a conviction for assaulting a sheriff’s deputy with a firearm, but used a new state law that had been created with Dinsmore’s case in mind to revisit the sentence and make Dinsmore a free man.
Feeney had tried to free Dinsmore in 2022 after dismissing a firearms enhancement that the Legislature had decided to make discretionary, but an appellate court overturned that decision, leading to Dinsmore being returned to jail after 15 months as a free man, during which he’d gotten engaged, found a job with CalTrans and been released from parole. That perceived injustice led appellate attorney Richard Baucher to help author what would become Assembly Bill 600, which gave California judges the power to recall and resentence inmates at their own discretion, which Feeney did for Dinsmore just days after the law went into effect.
Superior Court Judge Lawrence Killoran would use that same law in August to free Aaron Bjorkstrand, who’d been incarcerated for 26 years for robbing a gas station at gunpoint and wounding the clerk at the age of 15. Bjorkstrand’s release was rocky, to say the least, with the California Department of Corrections ordering that he be brought back into custody within 24 hours of his release — despite his having done, by all accounts, nothing wrong. After some quick work, Bjorkstrand’s public defender Adrian Kamada had him free again.
Meanwhile, the Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office remains one of nine counties participating in the state-funded prosecutor-led resentencing project, though it’s the only one that has not yet put an inmate forward for resentencing. Patrick Harvey, who has served 25 years of a 25-to-life sentence that was reportedly Humboldt County’s first under California’s three-strikes law, hoped to become the first. When the Journal reported on Harvey in April, he said the DA was reviewing his case, saying he was hopeful because his record didn’t include violent crime and, now 52, he’d dedicated himself to self-improvement. Eight months later, it’s unclear if the DA’s Office intends to move forward with asking the court to resentence Harvey, as it does not comment on cases under review.
He remains in Pelican Bay State Prison, hopeful to join the likes of Dinsmore and Bjorkstrand as free men. For their parts, both Bjorkstrand and Dinsmore say they’ve struggled to regain their footing post incarceration, though both reported positive steps, with Dinsmore again working for CalTrans and Bjorkstrand having enrolled at College of the Redwoods for the spring semester.
Klamath Dams Come Down
When 2024 began, three of the four hydroelectric dams that choked the lower Klamath River still stood. As the year comes to a close, none remain and the largest dam removal effort in United States history is complete, though an equally massive restoration effort will continue for years.
But good news on the river didn’t stop with the dams’ removal, as reports quickly flooded in of salmon returning to hundreds of miles of newly accessible spawning grounds in the Klamath River Basin that had been blocked for a century.
When we think of things that happened in 2024 that will resonate for generations to come, the undamming of the Klamath River sits atop the list. Not only will generations benefit from a restored ecosystem over the next century — just as those passed grappled with one slowly being strangled — but they will carry a tangible example of what’s possible.
They will see first-hand that it’s possible to undo past wrongs and restore what was broken, that social justice is attainable if fought for relentlessly. Perhaps most powerfully, they will see that local activism — spearheaded in this case by generations of Native community members over decades — can change the course of history, bending even the rich and powerful to its will. It’s a lesson that brings hope moving forward, a hope that’s visible in every salmon swimming upriver to spawn.
Trump Re-elected
Though national stories typically don’t rate in the Journal’s annual top 10 lists, we’d be remiss not to include the re-election of Donald J. Trump here. First off, as was the case throughout much of the country, Trump’s popularity has grown over the last eight years in dark blue Humboldt County, where he went from drawing 31 percent of the vote in 2016 to 32 percent in 2020 and 34 percent in 2024.
While the prospect of another four years of Trump in office for Humboldt comes with the same promise of mass deportations, tariffs and political division that will be present across the nation (not to mention a lineup of maverick cabinet nominees that signal upheaval in federal departments), there is the potential for some outsized impacts locally. On the campaign trail, both Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance talked about developing public lands to meet housing demands, and Humboldt is both rich in public lands — including a lot held by federal entities — and short on housing.
But the biggest impact might be to plans to develop a large-scale offshore wind farm about 20 miles of the Humboldt coast, which local officials say will both help address the climate crisis and fuel the local economy. Long a critic of wind energy generally, Trump pledged during the campaign to sign an executive order to “end” offshore wind energy if re-elected.
Measure F and Jacobs
For land-use nerds, political junkies and parking lot proponents alike, perhaps no local story was more captivating in 2024 than Robin P. Arkley II’s scorched earth attempts to derail Eureka’s affordable housing initiatives.
Deeply troubled by the city’s plans to convert municipally owned parking lots in Old Town and downtown into multi-family affordable housing developments, Arkley launched a multi-pronged approach to scuttle them. And in 2024, anyway, he failed resoundingly.
Having already funded efforts to file a series of lawsuits seeking to invalidate the city’s plans (all of which have thus far been unsuccessful), Arkley cast a wider net in 2024. Most notably, his company poured more than $1.2 million into a Eureka ballot measure — making it the most expensive in history — that sought to block the housing projects, while promising to rezone the former Jacobs Middle School campus for housing development. Confusingly dubbed the “Housing for All” initiative, the campaign was panned by many as disingenuous, from accusations of theft and vandalism of its signs to assertions that it would lead to development of the Jacobs site, which is owned by Eureka City School, which is again in active negotiations to sell it to the California Highway Patrol.
The Jacobs site also captivated local media attention for much of 2024 after the district broke off negotiations with the CHP in December of 2023, agreeing to a strange property exchange with a mystery buyer who offered $5.3 million in cash and a house on I Street for the sprawling campus.
A steady trickle of revelations came throughout 2024 about the unusual agreement and mystery buyer — from Brown Act violations committed when the district board agreed to enter into the contract, to news that the mystery buyer employed the same attorney and spokesperson as Arkley and the Measure F campaign, to emails indicating district officials thought Arkley was behind the exchange deal — until the mystery buyer failed to make good on the agreement, sending the district back into negotiations with the CHP.
When the dust settled from the Nov. 5 election, 69 percent of Eureka voters rejected Measure F, meaning the campaign spent more than $343 for every vote it got. The city’s housing plans, meanwhile, continue to move forward.
Birthing in Humboldt
Simply put, 2024 will be regarded, at least for some time, as the year it became a lot harder to be an expectant family in Humboldt County.
First, in August, Mad River Community Hospital announced it would suspend labor and deliver services beginning in October, shuttering its Trillium Suites Birth Center, a beloved local birthing option for scores of mothers who wanted to deliver in a hospital setting but without the clinical feel of St. Joseph Hospital (and free from its restrictive religious policies).
With Redwood Memorial Hospital having shuttered its childbirth services three years before, many bemoaned another reduction in local options and expressed concern this would mean longer drives to the hospital for many, bringing increased risks of complications and bad outcomes.
Then in September, the California Attorney General’s Office filed a lawsuit against Providence St. Joseph Hospital, alleging it had denied emergency abortion services to a mother who desperately needed them in February. Specifically, the suit alleges that Anna Nusslock was 15 weeks pregnant with twins when her water broke, and she rushed to St. Joseph, where a doctor told her the babies wouldn’t survive, and she needed immediate abortion care. But doctors at St. Joseph reportedly refused to provide it, telling Nusslock there was nothing they could do so long as the fetuses had a detectable heartbeat. Nusslock was eventually discharged to drive to Mad River, where she reportedly arrived having passed an apple-sized blood clot and deteriorating rapidly before she was rushed into emergency surgery.
Just this month, another local woman — identified in court filings only as Jane Roe — also filed suit against Providence St. Joseph Hospital. Jane Roe alleges that, similar to Nusslock, the hospital denied her necessary abortion services on the three separate occasions in which her water broke pre-term, and she was told her babies would not survive. In one instance, Jane Roe alleges she almost “hemorrhaged to death,” later requiring a double blood transfusion, while another forced her to labor for 19 hours before she spontaneously delivered “her deceased baby in a hospital toilet.”
In the first lawsuit, St. Joseph and the AG’s Office agreed to a stipulation under which the hospital pledged its care staff will follow California’s Emergency Services Law by allowing physicians to terminate a patient’s pregnancy when necessary to protect a mother’s health. Both lawsuits remain pending as Humboldt County enters 2025 with Providence St. Joseph as its only option for people wishing to give birth in a hospital setting.
Judge Kreis Resigns
It’s rare that a superior court judge gets in trouble, and rarer still that one does so in such a spectacular fashion that they admit to 17 ethics violations, while agreeing to public censure, resign their post and never seek judicial office again. Alas, 2024 was not kind to former Humboldt County Superior Court Judge Greg Kreis.
The Commission on Judicial Performance rocked the legal community in February when it announced it had filed a notice of formal proceedings against Kreis, who’d been appointed to the bench in 2017 and was actively seeking re-election. Kreis faced allegations of sexual assault, drug use, disrespect, failing to recuse himself from cases and disclose relationships with litigants in his courtroom, and more.
After Kreis lost his re-election bid, he agreed to resolve the complaint, admitting to 68 specific allegations of misconduct, though not the most salacious ones he faced. He resigned his judgeship May 27. April Van Dyke, who won election in the March primary, is set to take his seat in January.
Goodbye to Sumo and Noni
It was a sad year at the Sequoia Park Zoo with the passing of two of the community’s most beloved furry denizens: Sumo the red panda and Noni the black bear.
One of the original red pandas to call the Eureka facility home, Sumo arrived to much fanfare in 2010 and went on to have two litters with his mate Stella Luna, helping to increase the endangered species’ population by producing three daughters, one of which — Masala — made national headlines after escaping from the enclosure in 2015 and evading capture for several days.
When Sumo died in August at 15 — a red panda’s typical lifespan in the wild is eight to 10 years — his passing was “not entirely unexpected due to his advanced age,” but “no less heartbreaking for the staff, volunteers, and guests who loved and cared for him,” the zoo said at the time.
In November, the zoo announced the arrival of Saffron, a 1-year-old cub nicknamed “Baby Spice” by his caretakers, marking the beginning of a new generation of the bamboo-eating favorites to call Eureka home, although it might be a few months before the public gets its first look.
Noni’s time at the zoo was much shorter, but the yearling also left her mark, with visitors delighting in watching the yearling and her adopted littermate Tule grow up before their eyes.
Noni, who earned the nickname “Twinkle Toes” for her seemingly gravity-defining ability to balance on the thinnest branches at the top of the redwood trees in the bear habitat, died in October from colon damage caused by connective tissue. She was 2.
Orphaned as cubs, Noni and Tule formed a tight bond while being nurtured back to health at a Tahoe wildlife care facility but both deemed unsuitable for release back to the wild and arrived at the zoo as a pair in 2023.
The zoo described Noni as “a truly beautiful bear with a gorgeous coat, long eyelashes, blonde eyebrows and a perfectly heart-shaped nose that would wiggle as she sniffed out her favorite treats, including peanuts, yogurt and honey.”
BONUS: A Community Forest and Land Returned
Two stories that failed to dominate local headlines but will be felt for generations to come played out miles and months apart.
First, in February, the McKinleyville Community Services District made history, purchasing a nearly 600-acre property on the east side of town to preserve as a community forest, becoming the first special district in the state to hold title to a community forest. While decades of fundraising and work remain before the land resembles anything like the recreational haven that is the Arcata Community Forest, the purchase is a gigantic step for a town that has long dreamed of shifting the swath of land covered with Sitka spruce, redwood and Douglas fir trees from Green Diamond Resource Co.’s holdings to municipal hands.
“I won’t personally be able to enjoy its full splendor in my lifetime,” MCSD Board President Scott Binder told the Journal, noting the years of tree growth, restoration efforts and trail work needed to bring the town’s vision for the property to fruition. “But my children and my grandchildren will, and that’s why I’m doing it.”
Nine months later, the Wiyot Tribe held a private ceremony and celebration for a similar — yet inherently different — land acquisition: the official return of Digawututklh, a 350-acre section of ancestral land in Samoa with significant historical and cultural importance to the tribe.
The property — known to many as the “Dog Ranch” — had been managed by Friends of the Dunes since the nonprofit purchased it from Robin P. Arkley II with the ultimate goal of its long-term conservation. The tribe has plans for ecological restoration work on the property and for “returning the land to good health” through environmental restoration and the return of cultural practices, said Tribal Administrator Michelle Vassel.
“This place is incredibly special to us,” said Tribal Councilmember Hazel James.
Journal arts and features editor Jennifer Fumiko Cahill, news editor Thadeus Greenson and digital editor Kimberly Wear contributed to this report.
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This article appears in Top 10 Stories of 2024.