In the 2024 Peace and Dignity Journeys run, participants embark on a seven-month prayer run from Fairbanks, Alaska, and Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, converging at El Cuaca, Colombia. This journey emphasizes the commitment to prayer, underlining the obligation to strengthen spiritual connections among Indigenous Peoples across the Western Hemisphere.
Join Rory McCain and Ethan Caudill-DeRego of Redwood Voice as they meet up with and interview the runners from the north during their overnight stay with the Tolowa Dee-ni’ Nation.
Crescent City councilors last week supported a proposed partnership with South Coast Community Aquatics in Brookings to give Del Norte County pool patrons a place to swim when the Fred Endert Municipal Pool closes for construction in December.
But on Monday, SCCA President Val Early told the Brookings City Council that discussions about how the arrangement would work are still preliminary. She floated the idea of instituting a community pass for patrons on both sides of the state line since Crescent City and SCCA would be funding the program. The details still needed to be ironed out before the agreement goes before the Brookings City Council for approval, she said.
“If we’re able to put that together and [if] you feel like that’s a worthwhile project, that would be a pilot program for us to be able to gauge what our winter activity would be,” Early said. “If we’re able to put together, this collaborative effort would start to happen in December and would go through February because those are the months the Crescent City pool is going to be closed.”
The Fred Endert Municipal Pool is expected to undergo upgrades to its HVAC system as well as its pool deck and locker room floors. As a result, the pool will be closed from December through February, City Manager Eric Wier said.
Under the proposed agreement with SCCA, the nonprofit organization that took over management of the Brookings pool in 2023 would be responsible for facility-related costs. This includes heating the outdoor pool to between 83 and 84 degrees Fahrenheit, Wier told the City Council at its Oct. 21 meeting. Crescent City would provide the lifeguards and supervisory staff needed to operate the pool, he said.
Crescent City councilors hope the community, especially local businesses, come to their next meeting ready to chime in on four designs they’re considering for an entryway into Beachfront Park and the downtown area.
Their goal is to select a design and decide if Front Street should be renamed to something that’s more reflective of Crescent City. Some options kicked around Monday include Ocean Drive, Oceanfront Drive and Beachfront Drive.
But, according to City Manager Eric Wier, the City Council doesn’t have much time to make a decision. The city needs to spend the $3 million in Clean California Grant dollars it received for the project by June 30, 2026. This means it needs to hire a contractor by early spring 2025 and have the project under construction between May and October, according to Wier’s staff report.
The City Council hopes to decide on a project design by Nov. 4, according to Mayor Blake Inscore.
On Monday, though he noted that his days on the City Council are coming to a close soon, Inscore said if Front Street was renamed, he preferred Beachfront Drive over Oceanfront Drive.
“From a Google analytics [standpoint], if you put in Beachfront Park, you’re going to get Beachfront Drive and you’re going to get businesses associated with that,” he said. “I would use one term from a marketing standpoint. We have two hotels called Oceanfront. Again, from Google analytics, we don’t want to be confused with a hotel.”
Marilyn Gray Wintersteen admitted she didn’t think much about what growers were spraying on the lily fields in her neighborhood until last year when it hit her in the face.
Wintersteen was planting flowers in her backyard on Ocean View Drive when she got a face full of spray from the adjacent lily field.
“My skin burned, my eyes burned, my tongue swelled up, I had blisters on it [and] I ended up in the ER,” she said. “I got from the back of my house where they were spraying around to the front of my house and bent over to catch my breath. I could not breathe.”
Wintersteen, a 35 year resident, told her story to the North Coast Water Quality Control Board at a town hall meeting at the Smith River United Methodist Church on Monday and to the Del Norte County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.
Both meetings, and a third at the United Methodist Church in Crescent City, focused on the Water Quality Control Board’s efforts to develop water quality regulations for Easter lily bulb production in the Smith River plain. Those regulations will be in an order monitoring and mitigating the impacts of copper diuron and other pesticides and fertilizers on the watershed aquatic ecosystem.
Curry County commissioners considered two proposed uses for opioid settlement dollars on Thursday. The first proposal was an agreement with Gold Beach for a school resource officer position, while the second involved opioid use disorder treatment at the jail.
Competing proposals on potential uses for opioid settlement dollars put jail commander Lt. Jeremy Krohn at odds with the Curry County Board of Commissioners on Thursday.
Krohn’s request for $36,000 in opioid settlement dollars to provide telehealth services to inmates struggling with addiction came after commissioners supported a proposed five-year intergovernmental agreement with Gold Beach to create a school resource officer position.
Under that proposal, Curry County would pay Gold Beach $149,100 in opioid settlement dollars for the first year. This cost would cover the officer’s salary and benefits, vehicle accessories and insurance, outfitting for the officer as well as software. The county would continue paying for those expenditures throughout the five-year term of the agreement, which includes a 5 percent cost of living adjustment and step increases for the officer.
During the summer, the school resource officer would transition into a community resource officer, according to Commissioner Brad Alcorn.
Though Curry County Finance Director Keina Wolf said there were enough opioid settlement dollars to fund both programs, Krohn took issue with the SRO proposal. He said he was perturbed that he had to make a presentation to obtain approval to use those funds, but Gold Beach and the school districts benefiting from the SRO position didn’t have to make a presentation.
Without naming who they were, Krohn said he sent the proposed intergovernmental agreement between the county and Gold Beach to “colleagues who handle opioid settlement funds” for review.
“They said you could not fund a full position based on that IGA through opiate money,” Krohn told commissioners. “They conservatively said 20 percent to fund it. So, with that, be prepared for that to come up — that we’re over funding out of the opioid settlement funds. There will be an audit for that.”
Commissioner Jay Trost called for a forensic audit of Curry County’s treasury department and its accounting practices on Thursday, saying that an investigation of past practices revealed it may have short- changed the area’s special districts.
Trost told his colleague Brad Alcorn that he, Finance Director Keina Wolf and the current county treasurer, Nick Vicino, had conducted a reconciliation of the county treasury for two fiscal years leading into the 2023-24 budget season.
That reconciliation revealed that the county had been holding on to tax revenue that belonged to other special districts and had erroneously recorded the transfer of those dollars when they were never actually transferred, Trost said. When the error was discovered, the dollars were no longer available to be transferred, he said.
The reconciliation also uncovered several other errors, Trost said, including bank fees and $66,000 in deposits that hadn’t been recorded and $3.7 million that had been transferred into other accounts “other than those recorded in the fiscal system.”
“We had overdraft charges to the county bank account that had rolled over for 11 months,” Trost said Thursday. “We had $601,180.32 in deposits that weren’t recorded in the fiscal system for up to three months — we were obviously behind in our reconciliation by two years. And we had over $32 million in bank adjustments during that time period.”
(Updated at 3:58 p.m. with a clarification about Monday’s public meeting in Smith River from the Environmental Protection Information Center.)
Conservationists seeking to eliminate the use of “highly toxic pesticides” on Smith River’s Easter lily fields want to give residents and county officials a chance to voice their concerns next week.
Scientists with the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board also want to hear from the public as they continue work to develop water quality regulations for commercial Easter lily bulb production in the Smith River area.
The meeting on Monday will include a presentation from Water Quality Control Board staff on the waste discharge permit process and will give the public a chance to offer testimony.
Representatives with the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), the Siskiyou Land Conservancy and the Tolowa Dee-ni’ Nation will be part of that discussion at 6 p.m. Monday at the Smith River United Methodist Church before going before the Del Norte County Board of Supervisors.
Monday’s public forum will be broadcast live on KFUG Community Radio, 101.1 FM — listen by clicking here.
“We are hoping that affected community members will come to each of the two meetings and help make a compelling case as to why pesticide application needs to be more regulated,” Josefina Barrantes, EPIC’s Del Norte advocate, told Redwood Voice Community News on Thursday. “We want both the water board staff and the Board of Supervisors to hear how the pollution has affected the community so that it can motivate real change.”
The Water Quality Control Board will also go before the Board of Supervisors at their meeting 10 a.m. Tuesday in the Flynn Center, 981 H Street in Crescent City.
The North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board will hold a public scoping meeting from 4-6 p.m. Tuesday at the United Methodist Church in Crescent City. This meeting will also be held virtually. For more information about efforts to develop waste discharge permit requirements for Easter lily bulb production in Smith River, click here.
Crescent City cut the ribbon Saturday on the first amenity at Beachfront Park built using Prop 68 grant money. | Jessica C. Andrews
Wesley Phillips’ experience with pump tracks is limited — the new course at Crescent City’s Beachfront Park was his first taste.
Though the official grand opening wasn’t until last Saturday, Wesley’s dad, Tom Phillips, said his son had already been practicing. Wesley and his friends Aidan Evans and Landon and Chase Feight were demo riders — zipping over the jumps and scaling the wall ride, the wooden structure towering above the rest of the track — while Tom looked on.
“He’s blown away by it,” Tom said, watching Wesley and his buddies. “He had always ridden bikes and asked [me], ‘Can you build me a jump?’”
As the bike pump track took shape over the last two months, Wesley’s thoughts have been “nothing else but BMX,” his dad says.
A 75-year-old Brookings woman sustained facial injuries after someone threw an apple into the crowd at a Harris/Walz rally Friday.
The woman, who asked that her name not be used for fear of harassment, said the apple hit her left eye and fractured the orbital bone. She said she sustained scratches to her cornea and has had to put off cataract surgery. She said she had just had surgery on her right eye.
“I was just standing there waving the Harris/Walz sign and, bam!” She told Redwood Voice Community News on Monday. “We were getting some fair response — people honking horns and waving, so we were all waving back and stuff — and then, wham!”
“It’s important to remember that there’s no such thing as empires that last forever,” one protester, Ryan, declared before an assembled crowd.
Over 30 people by my count gathered at the Arcata Plaza on Oct. 4th at around 4:30 PM. They stood around one protester holding a Palestinian flag and two others carrying a large banner, reading: “Boycott Sabra Genocide Hummus.” Stragglers made their way from every side of the Plaza and a small marching band began to set up with instruments. Two protesters brought their own drums, another hand bells, to join in the making of noise.
Ryan — addressing the crowd with no bullhorn nor microphone, and who would later describe himself as “not some kind of grand leader, [just] some guy that felt strongly that this should happen,” — continued to address the growing crowd. “It’s a time where many of us feel powerless with the intensified Israeli assault on Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. But it’s important to remember that we can look back into our history, and we can look at tactics that have historically worked.”
