COVER STORY | IN THE NEWS | OFF THE PAVEMENT |
BOOK NOTES
TALK OF THE TABLE | THE HUM | CALENDAR
October 26, 2006
by HANK SIMS
on the cover:
A.W. Ericson "postcard" of Eureka's Carson Mansion,
circa 1890, colorized illustration by Holly Harvey.
GROWING PAINS
It was a gorgeous
Indian Summer weekend on the Humboldt County coast, and back
in Henderson Center the old Eureka was on display. Gearhead kids
rushed up Harris in their tricked-out autos. The fix-it customers
at Shafer's Hardware bantered with the teenage cashiers. At the
liquor store, the clerk warily conducted business with a broken-down
woman (booze, speed or both). The blocks around St. Bernard's
echoed with the cheers of high-school football fans.
This is Deep Eureka, Eureka profundo: hopelessly
square, stubbornly insular and probably doomed. Its moorings
are gone. The economic forces that created it no longer exist.
Already it's been driven out of Old Town. You can count the number
of establishments that cater to it there on one hand, starting
and maybe ending with Roy's. Downtown is next. Once, The Flour
Garden was a lonely outpost of counterculture on Fifth Street;
now that thoroughfare is dotted with Starbuck's, chain stores
and cheap eateries. Heuer's and Marcelli's are still there, serving
the same honest food they've served forever, but for how much
longer?
Eureka was a small town not so long ago. Twenty
years ago, the two pulp mills across the bay made the place smell
unbearably foul all day and night, and that left the town trapped
in its own little petri dish. Few people who didn't live there
already would even consider moving there. But the smell is mostly
gone, and Eureka is on its way to becoming an actual city, probably
one of the smallest cities in America worthy of the name. It
has a downtown and it has a few neighborhoods, each with a different
character. It has businesses and cultural institutions that serve
a broad swath of territory. It is diverse -- not racially diverse,
really, but culturally diverse. It has media, government, capital,
even a sort of homegrown aesthetic. Most importantly, it now
has politics.
Back in the glory days of the pulp mills, the good
old boys ran the place more or less unquestioned. There was the
City Council, and there were the people with money and power.
Sometimes they were one and the same; sometimes they just belonged
to the same social circle. If someone had a beef, that someone
was invited to tell it to the wall. As recently as the year 2000,
the council, in chambers, shut down people who wanted to speak
to the question of whether or not to fire the city manager, Harvey
Rose. (He was fired.)
Those days are already gone. But how far has Eureka
come?
The City Council members currently on the ballot
-- Virginia Bass, Mary Beth Wolford, Jeff Leonard and Mike Jones
-- are not of the good-old-boy era. (Well, except for Jones,
perhaps.) They have ideas of their own. They accept the fact
that not everyone is like them, and that others should have a
voice. Of them, all but Wolford grew up in Eureka. Still, if
they're at all concerned with setting themselves apart from the
good old boys, there's been a couple of occasions when they've
failed.
The first and most obvious example came in October
2004, when the council members listed above suddenly derailed
a long-anticipated effort to develop a master plan for the 30-odd-acre
parcel on land known as the Balloon Track, located near Old Town
and the bay. The move meant that the city would lose a great
deal of power to shape what eventually will be built on the site,
and that abdication of power left a lot of people understandably
angry. They had received a letter from Union Pacific asking for
the master plan project to be killed, as a potential buyer didn't
want it to go forward. At least some of them knew that the potential
buyer was Rob Arkley, the town's richest man.
Nowadays, they have plausible, heartfelt justifications
for abandoning the planning process. Leonard says, and said at
the time, that with a developer in play, a master plan (which
in his mind only served to attract potential developers) was
no longer necessary. Others say that their goal is to rid the
city of an undeveloped eyesore as quickly as possible. Regardless,
if the whole deal smacks of back-room politics to some -- if
it leads to the conclusion that these candidates are "in
Arkley's pocket" -- they have only themselves to blame.
And when shady groups like the so-called "Humboldt Business
Council" start running ads urging people to vote for these
candidates, as it did last weekend, they'll have to accept that
the impression is strengthened.
Another example, perhaps even more telling, was
the kerfuffle over Mayor Peter La Vallee's appointments to the
city's planning commission -- its second most powerful body of
government -- in late 2004 and early 2005. La Vallee had tapped
first Xandra Manns and then Robert Fasic to fill a vacant seat
on the commission. Both Manns and Fasic were eminently qualified.
If you looked solely at their resumes, you'd think the city would
be crazy to turn either of them away. But the council members
listed above, in various combinations, refused to approve their
appointments to the commission, leading to a months-long, high-profile
standoff that became an advertisement for municipal dysfunction.
Why did the council reject Manns and Fasic? It's hard to escape
the conclusion that they looked at more than Manns' and Fasic's
resumes -- they looked at their dress, clothes and bearing, and
what they saw didn't jibe with what their idea of what Eureka
should be. They saw hippies, in a word, and that was grounds
enough for disqualification.
These are some of the things that fuel the opposition
to Wolford, Leonard, Jones and Bass, the latter of whom is challenging
La Vallee for mayor. And they're the kinds of things, too, that
fuel the enthusiastic support for La Vallee and for Larry Glass,
Ron Kuhnel and Nan Abrams, the three primary contenders for the
city council seats up for election. These candidates quite plainly
and proudly are not of the good-old-boy network. None of them
grew up in Eureka. They may shop at Shafer's or eat at Roy's
on occasion, but they are not a part of Eureka profundo.
They represent what much of the rest of Eureka wants the city
to become.
But Deep Eureka eyes them with suspicion, and in
doing so it has a point. It's not that the above candidates sneer
at "regular" Eurekans, or that they're "anti-business"
-- both charges are ludicrous. It's that the new boss, if it
comes to that, is simply the flip side of the old boss. That
point -- that La Vallee, Glass, Kuhnel and Abrams represent a
new good-old-boys network, a nascent left-to-left-of-center political
machine -- is just a little bit harder to explain away.
You can start with the basics. Their campaigns
are coordinated; they all work together. They've all endorsed
each other. To one degree or another, they've all cautiously
expressed their skepticism of the Arkleys' Marina Center project
for the Balloon Track, or disapproval at the city process that
led us to this juncture. (Glass is the exception, perhaps --
he helped form a group, Citizens for Real Economic Growth, or
CREG, that has been loudly critical of the Marina Center plan,
though the candidate himself has tempered his public stance somewhat.)
They've all been endorsed by the same lefty groups -- Local Solutions,
the Humboldt County Democratic Central Committee, the Eureka
Greens. They have all been generously funded by Bill Pierson,
owner of Pierson Building Center and therefore a man who would
stand to lose considerably if the Marina Center, with its Home
Depot big-box anchor store, comes to pass. (As has Supervisor
Bonnie Neely, who is also up for reelection and has received
a similar set of endorsements; her challenger, former Eureka
Mayor Nancy Flemming, is likewise associated with the ticket
headed by Bass. See "Supes On," the Journal's
May 18 cover story, for a rundown of the candidates.)
Finally, there's the fact that Richard Salzman,
the Trinidad political consultant and sworn enemy of Arkley,
has played a large role in shaping the ticket. Salzman personally
recruited Nan Abrams to run against Mike Jones in the Fifth Ward,
as Abrams herself verified last week. La Vallee's campaign hired
him this year. He works with Glass in the CREG effort, and, according
to Glass, helped to remind Maria Hershey, a potential vote-splitter
in the First Ward, to drop out of the race by deadline. Before
Ron Kuhnel officially announced his candidacy for the Third Ward,
Salzman approached Randall Herzon, another potential candidate,
and asked him to drop out. Herzon eventually accepted Salzman's
logic -- that a divided vote would ensure that Jeff Leonard would
be reelected -- but is still galled that Salzman would pressure
him to withdraw. (In the absence of the thoroughly sensible proposal
to adopt instant runoff voting, or at least a return to citywide
primaries, such pre-election machinations are perhaps inevitable.)
What does all this signify? It's not that the candidates
in question are slavishly loyal to Salzman, or even to Pierson.
"You don't run for city office without getting calls from
Richard Salzman," said Ron Kuhnel last week, and as he said
it he looked genuinely weary of such calls. He keeps his campaign
apparatus separate from that of Glass and Abrams, even if he
does cooperate with them, because of his discomfort at being
thought of as a member of a "slate." But turnabout
is fair play, and people who accuse Bass, Wolford, Leonard and
Jones of being mere tools of Rob Arkley should be prepared to
answer similar charges against their own candidates.
What it finally amounts to, though, is growing
pains. Eureka is becoming a city in the true sense of the word,
and it's also developing true city politics -- interest groups
battling each other for control, rather than hometown luminaries
sent up to the council as a matter of routine. It's a sign of
maturity. And on all sorts of matters currently facing the city
-- from big ticket items like the Marina Center project, reform
of the police department and economic development, all the way
down to seemingly mundane matters like traffic -- what happens
in this election is going to determine the course of Eureka's
future for quite a few years to come.
TOP
THE FACE OF EUREKA
La Vallee, Bass, Droz
Whether you're voting for the left-of-center candidate,
the right-of-center candidate or the angry outsider, when you
cast your vote for Eureka mayor you're voting for a figurehead.
And that's the way it's supposed to be.
Under Eureka's somewhat unusual city charter, the
mayor has very little power, apart from the power of the bully
pulpit. The mayor runs the meetings of the City Council, acting
as a sort of emcee, and can cast a tie-breaking vote when a matter
the council deadlocks on a matter (usually because of one member
is absent). Otherwise, the mayor is meant to act as a sort of
ambassador, leaving policy to the City Council and city government's
day-to-day operations to the city manager. The mayor meets with
visiting dignitaries from other government agencies or business
representatives, and is presumed to speak with the voice of the
city.
Peter
La Vallee (pictured at left), 57, a native of Detroit,
Mich., was elected mayor four years ago in a razor-tight race
against Cherie Arkley, a former City Council member and the wife
of local developer/businessman Rob Arkley. He is the director
of the Redwood Community Action Agency's Youth Services Bureau,
and oversees programs aimed at helping at-risk children. A couple
of weeks ago, as he went door-knocking to help get out the vote,
he spoke about his accomplishments as mayor, and talked about
why he thought he was the best candidate to take the city forward.
Most of all, he believes that he has contributed
to the opening of City Council meetings to all residents, bringing
good government to the city. In the past, he said, citizens coming
to meetings to address the council felt unwelcome; now, a spirit
of openness and inclusion governs the meetings.
"I really like getting people involved in
city government," he said. "And the mayor really sets
the tone for that."
As an example of that openness, he cited a phone
message he had received from Cherie Arkley, who is leading the
Marina Center project, after a City Council hearing on the subject.
Though the Arkley family has made no secret of their distaste
for him, he said that Cherie Arkley had appreciated his conduct
of the hearing. "By the time I got home from that meeting,
Cherie Arkley had left a message on my machine thanking me for
the way I ran the meeting," he said. "I'm proud of
that."
In his role as the city figurehead and principal
representative to the business community, La Vallee said that
he would continue to support local business and clean industrial
development. He said he was "tickled" by Evergreen
Pulp and the work that it has done to clean up the emissions
from the old pulp mill across the bay, and supported the company
wholeheartedly. He said that the city had done good work in streamlining
its design review guidelines for builders and developers, and
that work needed to continue. And he cited his membership on
the North Coast Railroad Authority's board of directors and enthusiasm
for port development as evidence of his work to bring new money
into the economy.
"Let's keep and develop Eureka for the uniqueness
it has," he said.
La Vallee has been endorsed by Rep. Mike Thompson,
state Sen. Wes Chesbro, Assemblymember Patty Berg, Supervisors
Bonnie Neely and John Woolley and Eureka Councilmember Chris
Kerrigan. (See peterlavallee.org for a full list of endorsements.)
Virginia
Bass (formerly Bass-Jackson), 44 (pictured at right), has
served on the City Council for six years. She is from an old
Eureka family -- her father, O.H. Bass, represented the town
on the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors. She is a close friend
of Cherie Arkley. Nowadays, she runs runs the family restaurant,
O-H's Town House, a steak place at the foot of Sixth Street,
where she discussed her reasons for running last week.
Bass said that she decided to make a run for mayor
because she has become disturbed by the pessimistic perception
of Eureka that she finds out in the community. "I've seen
a greater deal of the `no' factor," she said. "We don't
need to be seen as a community that just says `no.'" She
said that she decided to run because as mayor, she would be in
a better position to counter that perception than as a voting
member of the City Council.
She said the most telling example of the `no' mentality
came when Calpine, a large energy firm that has since gone bankrupt,
made an initial proposal to locate a liquefied natural gas terminal
on land owned by the city on the Samoa Peninsula back in 2004.
The City Council held a hearing on the question at the Municipal
Auditorium; over 1,000 people showed up, most of them criticizing
the proposed deal. The company withdrew its offer shortly afterwards.
"In the end, maybe it wasn't going to be a good fit for
our community," Bass said. But she still thinks the company
got an unduly poor reception, and that left a black mark on the
city's reputation.
She said said that city needs "to adjust how
we do business," to welcome investment with open arms and
to do everything in the city's power to help retain Eureka businesses
that are seeking to expand and grow. Economic expansion is one
important key to solving the city's most pressing problems, she
said, and she vowed to clean up the city's image in the business
world.
"When we become a community where people want
to be, our options open up," she said.
Bass has been endorsed by Supervisor Jill Geist,
former supervisorial candidate Richard Marks, Eureka City Councilmember
Mike Jones and businessman Harvey Harper, among others. (See
virginiabassformayor.com for a full list of endorsements.)
A third candidate, Jerry Droz, is running a low-budget,
independent campaign for the office. He has said that he is concerned
with quality-of-life issues, and wants to see fewer halfway homes
in the city. He blames such conditions partly on La Vallee, who
he says contributes greatly to the problem through his work at
the RCAA, and blames Bass for allowing the halfway homes to creep
into the city while she has served on the council. At times he
has become exasperated at the usual rules of decorum that prevail
during political campaigns -- the police were called to the scene
when he loudly interrupted a La Vallee press conference. For
some time, he has called himself the "Acting Mayor of Eureka,"
and in interviews he has defended his appropriation of the title.
TOP
THE POLICY-MAKERS
The City Council race in three wards
If the mayor is the city's public face, the City
Council is its brains and its muscle. It sets city policy and
it oversees the work done by city staff -- police, firefighters,
city planners, engineers, public works employees, etc.
Again, the city charter's definition of the way
council members are elected is rare and unusual, and bound to
be confusing to newcomers. The city is divided into five districts,
or "wards." Candidates for a seat on the council must
run for the ward seat in which their home is located. However,
the city at large votes for candidates from all of the wards.
There are no primaries -- candidates for each seat compete for
a plurality of votes
In long conversations with each of the candidates,
the Journal asked each of them what they thought about
two particular topics that are sure to eat up a lot of council
time in the coming months, or years: the Marina Center Development
and issues of morale, recruitment and reform at the Eureka Police
Department.
First Ward
Like
the other incumbents up for reelection, Mary Beth Wolford, 74
(pictured at left), has served on the council for four
years -- one full term. Wolford has represented Eureka's First
Ward, which encompasses Old Town and the town's run-down West
Side. A former educator in the Los Angeles area, since moving
to the North Coast she has been a proponent of Old Town revitalization
and historic preservation. She has served as executive director
of the Humboldt Senior Resource Center. By nature, she's a booster
of Eureka, and even has an official campaign song that sings
the city's praises.
In an interview at Ramone's last weekend, Wolford
defended her vote to kill the city's public planning study of
the Balloon Track, which would have been partially funded by
a grant from the county's Headwaters Fund. She said Rob and Cherie
Arkley, who now own the property and are proposing a Home Depot-anchored
development for the site, will have to go through similar hoops,
and will be doing it with their own money.
"They were going to have to go through the
same study, with private funds, that we were going to do with
Headwaters money," she said. "I felt that it was not
necessary to be duplicative of the process." Wolford said
that if reelected, she would continue to watchdog the development,
to make sure that the final proposal put forward by the developers
would fit well into the community.
Wolford said that policing in the city has been
managed decently, despite a staffing crisis at the Eureka Police
Department (at one point, the city had seven vacant positions
to fill). As an example, she cited the city's hiring of private
security guards to patrol Old Town, which she said had been an
effective program. But she acknowledged that salaries for the
patrol officers needed to go up, and added that other innovative
opportunities existed to help police the city. For instance,
she said, she'd like to see the city offer low-interest loans
to police officers who might be willing to live in the West Side.
The city is recruiting a new police chief, and
she said that she would look to that new chief to provide some
stability, to keep patrol officers interested in working in Eureka.
"I feel that as a new leader is hired, that leader will
be able to bring in his own ideas," she said.
Larry
Glass, 58 (pictured at left), has operated The Works,
his record store, in Eureka since the '70s. He served as president
and executive director of Eureka's Business Improvement District,
and was for many years a member of the board of directors of
the Northcoast Environmental Center. Over tea at Old Town Coffee
and Chocolates, he talked about why he decided to challenge Wolford
for the council seat this time.
He said that his principal reason for running did
not have to do with the Marina Center, as many had suspected.
Despite his involvement with Citizens for Real Economic Growth
-- an anti-Marina Center group -- he is mostly running on a platform
of good government and public safety. "That's the reason
municipalities exists," he said of policing. "Everything
else comes after."
Glass said that he thought that additional monies
could be found within the city budget to fund raises for police
officers and to hire more cops. As an example, he cited the hundreds
of thousands of dollars that the city has spent studying the
extension of Waterfront Drive, a project that the state Coastal
Conservancy has frowned on. And he hoped that a "charismatic"
new chief could bring some stability back to the department.
As regards the Marina Center development, Glass
said that he had two main issues with the proposal. The first,
he said, was that the current council (as well as past councils)
should have demanded a full cleanup of pollutants on the Balloon
Track site, and that an impermeable "cap" of the site,
as the developers propose, is an unacceptable solution. Second,
he objects to the way that the City Council has handled the issue
to date. "Derailing the public process was a mistake, and
it's one in a long line of mistakes the current council has made,"
he said.
Glass added that he believes the council should
take a different tack when it comes to economic development.
"This town's always been looking for the big bang, and we've
passed up the small opportunities," he said. "I believe
in starting small and building results with more sustainable
growth." And he said that he hoped to get the Council to
look at amending the city charter, so that candidates are elected
only by voters in the ward they serve, rather than the entire
city.
Tish Wilburn, 71, an unaffiliated candidate, is
also running for the First Ward council seat. She's a Libertarian,
a former journalist and an outspoken woman with a to-hell-with-them-all
attitude. She told the Times-Standard that her main function
on the City Council would be to provide "comic relief."
Third Ward
Ron
Kuhnel, 66 (pictured at left), has been a member of the
Eureka Planning Commission for four years. Before he and his
wife moved to Eureka full-time eight years ago, they lived in
Sacramento, where he had a long career in California government,
including service as the state's Chief Information Officer. He
is retired, and is taking courses for a master's degree in sociology
through Humboldt State University's Over 60 program. He is also
president of the Eureka Heritage Society.
"I learned an awful lot about how government
works," Kuhnel said a couple of weeks ago of his time in
Sacramento, and he believes that he can use that experience to
better the community. He said that there was "not much"
wrong with his opponent, incumbent Jeff Leonard, but that he
believed he could take the city farther down the path ahead of
it.
One of Kuhnel's four campaign planks is public
safety, and though he acknowledged that times are tough for the
police department, he praised the EPD officers who have stuck
it out. "I really do think we have a police department that
tries its best under very difficult circumstances," he said.
However, he said, the city does need to raise police salaries,
attract a talented new chief and provide better training in order
to avoid catastrophe in "extremely complicated" situations
such as the standoff with Cheri Lyn Moore last April.
The City Council's abandonment of the Balloon Track
master plan study "showed poor judgment," he said,
but it wasn't one of his main concerns: "I think it's a
deal, but it's not a big deal. That's not why I'm running for
office. I think this election should be about the long-term future
of the city." He said he was more troubled by the back-and-forth
between the mayor and the City Council over appointments to the
planning commission. As for the Marina Center proposal itself,
he said he was basically untroubled. "If the Environmental
Impact Report is a quality document, and the City Council insists
that it be so, and the preponderance of evidence shows this is
a good zoning decision, there's no reason in the world why it
shouldn't be built," he said.
In his campaign, Kuhnel is also championing the
idea of forming city-sponsored neighborhood associations, which
he believes would bring people into city government and allow
the city to respond more effectively to their concerns.
Jeff
Leonard, 42 (pictured at left), a Eureka native and the
incumbent in the race, is a worker's compensation insurance adjuster
for State Fund. He serves as the city's liaison to the Redwood
Coast Energy Authority, a coordinated effort between cities and
the county to develop the region's energy infrastructure.
In an interview at the Lost Coast Brewery last
week, Leonard acknowledged that the police department has had
more than its share of problems lately, and said that the council
had addressed them well in recent months -- new officers had
been recruited, and the department now stands only one officer
short of a full complement (though several of the new recruits
were still being trained.) He said that the problem was principally
one of retention, and that a new chief had to be someone who
could address the problem of morale. "From my point of view,
the selection of the new police chief is a critical component,"
he said. "This new chief has to be someone who comes in
there and creates a team environment, so people want to stay
here in the community." He said that the department's new
cooperation with the county's Mental Health Department was a
positive sign, and pointed toward the kind of training opportunities
that the department should be pursuing.
On the Balloon Track, Leonard, like Wolford, said
that he believed the plan was redundant once it became clear
that a private party was already looking at the site. "We
went from attracting a developer to having one attracted,"
he said. He has since been a proponent of the development, arguing
that the deal would lead to a speedy clean-up of the site and
its return to productivity.
But the project is still in its initial phase,
he said, and nothing will be decided until all the papers have
been filed. "All these things in concept sound great,"
he said. "But my job is to make the decision on the last
day." He added that he was among those that had pushed for
more open space to be added to the design -- a request that has
since been accommodated -- and that he'd continue to push the
developers to include plans for transportation between the project
and Old Town.
His work at the energy authority, Leonard said,
led him to realize that the area of alternative energy was a
natural fit for Humboldt County, and one of the areas that we
should look to for new economic development opportunities. He
praised the innovative work being done by DG Energy Solutions,
the San Diego power company that bought the old Fairhaven Power
Plant, and said he believed that Humboldt County could attract
many more such businesses.
Fifth Ward
Mike
Jones, 59 (pictured at left), is the back-to-basics representative
of the Fifth Ward, a position he has held for four years. By
day, he is a broker with the Penfold-Leavitt Insurance Agency.
Jones said earlier this week that if he is reelected, his primary
focus going forward in the next four years will be traffic. He'd
like to see city staff that work on traffic and circulation issues
to prepare a sort of "State of the City" report that
could be delivered to the council. And he said that his number
one goal would be to get a stop sign installed at a corner near
his home, something he has been unable to accomplish as of yet.
As far as problems with the police department go,
Jones said, the city of Eureka is up against some powerful obstacles
-- not the least of which is our less-than-desirable weather.
That, plus the comparatively low salaries offered by the department
mean that there are natural impediments to recruiting and retaining
officers. Also, there's more crime in the city than elsewhere.
"We've got county-seat problems," he said, alluding
to meth, gangs and the other social issues that come with urban
life. "We're at a crossroads of development." Still,
he said, the council has been doing a good job with the resources
it has, and he lauded the California Highway Patrol for agreeing
to step in and help patrol the city for traffic violations for
a few months earlier in the year.
He had every confidence, he said, that the Arkleys
have the resources and the will to build a worthwhile development
on the Balloon Track site. He said that the environmental clean-up
proposed by the Arkleys looked to be a good deal for the city.
"They're willing to do it, and they're willing to do it
quickly -- not diddle-fart around," he said.
Jones said that like Virginia Bass, he was disappointed
at the reception that the energy company Calpine got when they
proposed a liquefied natural gas terminal in Humboldt Bay. He
said that their pullout meant that all the study and development
work that the company would have done, regardless of whether
or not they eventually built the terminal, would have been of
great use to the city. "We could have had a great study,
there," he said. "It could have been on our shelves.
But people were so paranoid that a study means we buy the project.
It doesn't mean that at all."
Traffic
is also on the mind of Nan Abrams, 59 (pictured at left),
the woman running against Jones for the Fifth Ward seat -- traffic
and responsive government. (She first ran for the seat eight
years ago.) Abrams is a vocational counselor with the county,
specializing in welfare-to-work cases, and like Glass, she has
served on the board of directors of the Northcoast Environmental
Center. She will be retiring from her job early next year, she
said.
While out campaigning, she met a group of people
on Grotto Street who told her that they had been trying for years
to get a stop sign at a dangerous intersection in their neighborhood
reconfigured. But they had been unable to get any response from
the city, Abrams said. "It wasn't that they got a no --
it was that they got no answer at all." She helped the group
form a neighborhood association, she said, and is pressuring
the city to hear the citizens' complaints.
Traffic is also one of her concerns about the Marina
Center project as it stands. "It wouldn't be at the top
of my list of good ideas," she said about the proposed development,
but she acknowledged that it was not her place to decide what
would be built on the site. She did say, though, that as a council
member she would push for a complete clean-up of the site, rather
than the "capping" proposal, and she lamented the fact
that the city abandoned its proposed master plan.
"This has got to be a public process,"
she said. "I do not begrudge the Arkleys their money, but
I cannot tolerate their arrogance."
Abrams said that she wanted to see the reinstitution
of neighborhood policing in Eureka, and she hoped that the city
could find some money to raise officers' salaries. She criticized
the current council for letting the situation at the police department
deteriorate on its watch: "It's like they're out of touch,"
she said. "I wonder why they've allowed the police department
to go so short-handed for so long?"
Abrams said that one of her principal efforts if
she is elected would be to get the city's redevelopment agency,
which is headed by members of the council, to invest more of
its money into the West Side, rather than focusing all its efforts
on Old Town. She said that addressing the issue of blight in
those neighborhoods could help solve the crime and other problems
in that area, as well as generate business in the area.
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