Why I cannot support the Marina Center development
My Word
By Neal Latt
I’m writing to respond to Brian Morrissey, senior vice president of Security National (which owns the Eureka Reporter), whose guest opinion ran in the April 23 Eureka Reporter, replying to one I wrote which ran April 20.
Mr. Morrissey wrote to address my feelings of being “railroaded� into accepting the Marina Center development as the only option for Balloon Tract development. Unfortunately, my feelings remain the same. Here’s why: I feel the public process was stolen when Rob Arkley apparently called four of five Eureka City Council members the day before a master plan to study the site and look at all the options was to be given final go-ahead, urging them to kill it (which they did), so that his (Security National’s) project could proceed uninhibited and unchallenged by other potential developments.
I feel a master plan for the Balloon Tract, as called for by the city’s own current Strategic Visioning Plan, is necessary to look at all the options for the site in a public process, to determine the highest best use, and then proceed accordingly. The land is zoned public and zoning should only be changed if it is in the public interest — how are we to know if it is in the public interest without examining any other possible options?
Times have changed in Humboldt: Land prices have gone up roughly five-fold over the last
15 years. I feel that the Balloon Tract, representing the last contiguous 30 acres of bayfront property in the center of Eureka, is going to be developed under any scenario — the only question is how. A master plan is the first essential step in doing this.
I feel that a key part of the Arkley/Morrissey/Reporter strategy has been a conscious conflation of Balloon Tract cleanup with development of the Marina Center (as they ultimately decide it): That the former is contingent on the latter. I have read this untruth in half a dozen letters printed in the Reporter; despite daily proclamations of “independence� and commitment to not printing letters with “significant factual errors,� the Reporter continues to print this piece of disinformation that I believe is key for it to help develop public support for the Marina Center.
It is for these above reasons I cannot support the Marina Center development at Eureka’s Balloon Tract.
Neal Latt is an area contractor. He lives in Eureka.
The opinions expressed in My Word pieces do not necessarily reflect the editorial viewpoint of the Times-Standard.