Posted on May 8, 2017
By Natalya Estrada, Times Standard
Ron Cole owns a boat in the Eureka marina called Loco Boco. He pays $400 a month to have his boat docked at the marina and when it hits low tide in Humboldt Bay, he can’t move his boat because it’s trapped in mud.
Like other fisherman and boat owners, he is worried the plans to dredge Humboldt Bay won’t come fast enough.
“For 24 hours a day, I’m afraid to move it because if I pull it back in the mud is going to get my props up and if those go up my boat will sink,” Cole said. “What good are these environmental impacts if my boat sinks and 50 gallons of diesel go into the bay?”
Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District Executive Director Jack Crider acknowledged those worries along with Eureka Parks and Recreation Director Miles Slattery at a meeting Wednesday night at the Wharfinger Building in Eureka to discuss bay dredging options with the public.
“Basically, we’ve seen that the Samoa Beach option for dredging will take up to three years to start. We can’t wait that long,” Crider said. “We’ve come up with an option that we could potentially start this year that involves disposing of the bay at the Samoa lagoons and using clarifiers to clean the water and dump it back into the bay or ocean.”
This would mean 30,000 to 40,000 cubic yards of dredge material would be disposed of at the lagoons each year.
This was one out of eight disposal options up for evaluation by the public, but boat owner John Brown questioned whether or not the state and federal agencies who imposed environmental regulations on dredging communicated with each other at all.
“You guys need to make the decisions because we’ve all been through [these talks] three, four or five times,” Brown said. “I live out here [in the bay]. Property is being damaged, public property is being damaged because of the continuous silting of our marina. What are we supposed to do with this data? Contact our representatives? What do we do to get this moving forward?”
Slattery stated the public should use the data and do everything they could to contact local representatives about their situation to move the project forward.
“A single person isn’t going to have a say as to whether or not we get permitted or not, but what we want to do is we want to make sure we can address any concerns from people now and bring them up to the regulatory agencies and not have that same issue again,” Slattery said. “When we’ve had a plan to do something before certain agencies and people came in at the very last minute and said this is not what we want, which was rightfully so, they should have the option to say that, but they did not.”
Slattery added at the end of the public meeting that harbor district and the city open to newer ideas especially with sea level rise and the potential to use the sediment deposited by dredging to help.
“There are many conflicting obstacles from different federal and state agencies,” he said. “We’re a local agency so we must answer to all of them.”
Source: Times Standard
