We went to press before Humboldt County's Community Development Services Director Kirk Girard came out of closed-door negotiations on Tuesday to announce a settlement with Housing For All, the housing-advocacy outfit that intervened in a lawsuit filed by Humboldt Sunshine. In the settlement, the county agrees to set a firm deadline to finish its plan to rezone more land for multifamily housing.

The Times-Standard's Donna Tam-a-lam-a-dam (sorry, Donna, everybody's doing it) put together a fine report once the negotiators emerged and fired off a news release.

The gist: Humboldt Sunshine, Inc, associated with our man-about-town Robin Arkley Jr., sued the county because the county's housing element was out of compliance with the state mandate to find ground to build housing for all income levels. The group also said the county's land inventory figures were bunk.

Housing For All -- a much different group -- jumped on as interveners, saying it wanted the low-income folks to have a voice in the matter.

Without an up-to-snuff housing element, the county stands to lose out on grants that help fund low-income housing projects, and worse:

The settlement provides a timeline for completion of the multifamily rezoning effort in order to avoid a court-imposed building moratorium... . If the county does not obtain its recertification for its housing element by Aug. 15, the Humboldt County Superior Court will impose a permit moratorium that could take effect on Oct. 3.

You can read about the rezoning program in this week's Journal:  Keeping up with the Rezoneses and The Multifamily Myth and Are you "low-income"?

If you read those, you'll gather we've got about a month of serious angst -- expect hives, hair loss, tantrums -- left to finalize the rezone maps. Some folks are removing their properties from the rezone list, others want on, and Humboldt Sunshine is not budging from the lawsuit -- it wants a re-do on that land inventory.