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August 31, 2006
Who's a Eurekan?
by HANK SIMS
As you drive around Eureka these days, you may
ask yourself -- are all the "Tish Wilburn for City Council"
signs? Where's the evidence of her campaign? Any objective
political observer would have to mark Wilburn as the long shot
candidate in the race for Eureka's First Ward seat. Doesn't that
just mean she has to work harder? Maybe. But for her part, Wilburn
says that no one she knows is too worked up about the Nov. 7
election ... yet.
"I think everyone is just kind of waiting
until after Labor Day, like normal human beings," she said
Friday. Being a normal human being herself, she's going to save
her energy for that final sprint. No doubt she's out stretching
her limbs as we speak.
Politically, the city of Eureka is a pressure cooker,
and its thermostat is veering dangerously into the red. You've
got a major election this time around -- the city's mayor, its
county supervisor and the majority of its City Council are all
up for vote. All of the county's usual political forces are itching
for another fight, and, for once, there's no other election of
importance elsewhere that might prove a distraction. Once a rock-solid
bastion of the Humboldt County old guard, recent elections have
shown that younger folks and refugees from the big city have
pushed Eureka's politics well to the left. The old guard is pushing
back. Sometime in the next 10 weeks, this pot's going to blow.
Issue A-1 is, of course, the Balloon Track, that
sprawling stretch of nothingness on the edge of Old Town. Rob
and Cherie Arkley, town billionaires, want to build a Home
Depot there, and they promise jobs and a boost to the economy.
They call their project "Marina Center." Well, some
people say, there's nothingness and there's negative nothingness,
and a Home Depot is worse than nothing -- it's a first step toward
turning Eureka into yet another bland, white-bread Nowheresville,
U.S.A., and our best chance at stopping the thing is to elect
like-minded citizens to the City Council, which will have a veto
over the proposal.
Both sides know how to fight. And, pace Wilburn,
when we've all finished paying our respects to the contributions
of the American laborer this Monday, you can bet your bucky they
will.
First on the agenda: Where does Larry Glass
actually live? The candidate for the First Ward seat -- representing
downtown, Old Town and a good portion of the city's rundown West
Side -- has already been anointed by Local Solutions, the progressive
political action committee. He's the founder of the Citizens
for Real Economic Growth (CREG), the preeminent anti-Marina Center
group, and he's owned The Works, a Eureka music store, for over
30 years. But no one ever thought of him as a Eureka resident
-- his place is out there on Old Arcata Road, near Indianola.
People are just starting to unleash the "c" word --
"carpetbagger!" -- and they're already chuckling over
the fact that a group named "Local Solutions" is plumping
for an imported candidate.
What's the facts? Well, those are the facts, pretty
much. But Glass has complied with the letter of the law, and
he makes a proud and unashamed case for his candidacy.
Up until May of this year, Glass hadn't even been
registered to vote in Humboldt County for a good long while.
He had been registered in neighboring Trinity County, using the
address of a vacation home he owns up near South Fork Mountain.
Then, last May, he filed his affidavit with the Humboldt County
Elections Office, officially becoming a citizen of our county.
But when he did re-register, he used his Old Arcata Road address,
which is far outside the Eureka city limits. A few weeks ago,
on Aug. 7, he re-re-registered, this time giving the address
of an apartment in Old Town -- within the city limits, now, and
within the First Ward. Three days later, he filed as a City Council
candidate.
Reached last week, Glass insisted that the address
he gave is now his actual address. He lives there. "I knew
I would be under scrutiny, so I knew I actually had to move to
Old Town to run," he said. "So I did that." He
would have made the move sooner, he said, but a deal for a different
apartment he had been shooting for fell through. The house on
Old Arcata Road? He's handing that over to his daughter.
Glass said last week he knows that people have
been talking about it, and he was ready to talk back. All in
all, he said, he's spent over 30 years at The Works and in Eureka.
He knows the town like the back of his hand. He knows just about
everyone with a business in his neighborhood. He's paid sales
tax to the city time out of mind, and he's paid his business
license fees to the city. Does it really matter where he lays
his head?
"I've always been frustrated because you can't
count where you work as where you live, even though you spend
the majority of your time there," he said. "So I've
remedied that now, and I'm willing to make that change in order
to remedy the other changes I've seen around here."
So, how's life in the big city? Glass said that
his day-to-day is a lot simpler now because his girlfriend also
lives in Old Town, and because he's able to walk back to his
place and spend his lunch hour at home. But there haven't been
any surprises. "To be honest, I've spent the majority of
my adult life here in Old Town, wherever I've been living, so
I'm no stranger to the night life here," he said. "I'm
not seeing anything I'm not already very acquainted with."
One of his opponents -- Tish Wilburn -- says, in
her typically snarky style, that if elected she would change
the laws so that you have to live in the city for six months
before running for elected office in Eureka. "He's a carpetbagger!"
she shouted, gleefully. But Glass' main competition, incumbent
First Ward Councilmember Mary Beth Wolford, was more magnanimous.
"I think every candidate needs to meet the requirements
stated in our elections procedures, and he has," she said
last week. "He's moved into the Old Town area, and he's
registered to vote." She said she was ready to challenge
Glass on the issues.
Moving into cyberspace: Who the hell is running
balloontractwatch.org? Everyone knows ballontrackwatch.org
is an anti-Marina Center web site run by Mike Buettner,
a Eureka web designer and all-purpose agitator on matters of
coastal development. But balloontractwatch.org? No one
knows. Which is all the stranger for the fact that the "tract"
site doesn't do anything except load up Buettner's "track"
web site, which contains writing and information pertaining to
the Marina Center proposal.
The question came to a head when an anonymous poster
on SoHum blogger Eric Kirk's web page insisted that everyone
change their links from the Buettner page to the mystery one.
Why? And who put up the mystery site to begin with? There are
four theories.
Maybe the mystery people want to get everyone used
to going to their site, and will soon insert their own politically
charged content into Buettner's pages. Maybe they simply want
to monitor the traffic going to Buettner's site. Maybe they want
to make a political point -- to some, and for some reason, calling
it "the Balloon Tract" signifies an opposition to all
things Arkley. Or, most likely, maybe someone just wanted to
make sure that people find the page, whichever URL they happen
to type in.
Buettner was initially puzzled, but he came in
with some partial intel Tuesday afternoon. "It seems some
of the CREG folks recall 'someone' buying the TRACT domains,
but no one remembers who it was," he wrote the Journal.
Whoever it was, we note that the mystery site is
hosted by 1&1 Internet, which is just about the closest thing
the web hosting world has to a big box store -- vast, impersonal,
dead cheap. But our will to know trumps the temptation to scold.
Balloontractwatch.org, step forward. All will be forgiven.
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