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Bob Berkowitz discusses District 5 race with KFUG Community Radio's Paul Critz and Wild Rivers Outpost's Jessica Cejnar

Though he campaigned on a five-year fix for Last Chance Grade in 2016, the Bob Berkowitz of today concedes bypassing U.S. 101 around the landslide that quickly wasn't possible.

But, the District 5 incumbent says, at least he had a goal.

“If you don’t have a goal, nothing’s going to be done; there’s no reason to get anything done,” said Berkowitz, who is seeking a second term on the Del Norte County Board of Supervisors. “My objective was at least ‘let’s get a goal.’ We may not make the goal, but at least we’ve got something out there that we can work towards.”

Berkowitz spoke about Last Chance Grade — the landslide south of Crescent City — early in an interview with KFUG Community Radio’s Paul Critz and the Wild Rivers Outpost on Friday. He said he thinks his campaign is going well, but he won’t know for sure until election day on Tuesday.

Berkowitz is running against Kevin Hendrick, chair of the Del Norte Democratic Central Committee, former director of the Del Norte Solid Waste Management Authority and currently a consultant managing grant programs in Washington State.

In addition to speaking about the accomplishments of the Del Norte County Board of Supervisors since his election in 2016, Berkowitz took the opportunity to throw some barbs at Hendrick. Berkowitz pointed out that his opponent received sizable donations from unions based in Eureka. The District 5 incumbent also took issue with Hendrick’s claim that he works well with Republicans.

“I can’t find a single instance where he has supported a Republican platform or policy,” Berkowitz said, referring to Hendrick. “How does he say he can work with Republicans?”

The district Berkowitz wants to continue to represent as a supervisor starts at the Humboldt-Del Norte county line. It includes Klamath, Klamath Glen, Requa, South Beach, the Bertsch Tract and Parkway Drive.

District 5 encompasses Last Chance Grade, Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park, parts of Redwood National Park and the Crescent City Harbor. Three local tribes — the Yuroks and Resighini and Elk Valley rancherias — have their headquarters in District 5.

According to Berkowitz, though former supervisors and others have wanted to fix Last Chance Grade for years, real progress on the issue began around the time he was elected to the Board of Supervisors. He and his fellow supervisors, the Crescent City Council, former supervisor Chuck Blackburn and Kurt Stremberg, a local realtor whose parents were killed in a car crash on Last Chance Grade, began reaching out to Congress and federal transportation officials in Washington D.C.

“We basically said, look, you’re spending a lot of money keeping this highway open year after year after year, let’s see if we can get some kind of plan to be able to bypass this,” Berkowitz said. “The upshot is after a lot of cajoling, a lot of travel, a lot of persuasion, we were able to come back with $50 million to get the process started.”

The process Berkowitz speaks of is a project to reconfigure U.S. 101 around the Last Chance Grade slide. Caltrans is considering six possible routes, varying in length from 1.5 to 3.5 miles and in cost from $300 million to $2 billion.

Four potential alternatives include bridges. Three include tunnels. One possible alternative consists of a full tunnel running parallel to the existing alignment, costing an estimated $1.1 billion to $2 billion in 2019 dollars.

The $50 million that Berkowitz referred to was allocated to the project through the California Transportation Commission in 2017, 2018 and 2019 for geotechnical and environmental studies of the project.

In addition to Stremberg, Gitlin, Berkowitz and Blackburn, who died in 2018, others advocating for rerouting the highway include a stakeholder group spearheaded by Congressman Jared Huffman, who represents Del Norte County. The county’s representatives in the state senate and assembly, Mike McGuire and Jim Wood, have also advocated for a bypass.

In August, project manager Jaime Matteoli, of Caltrans, told the Outpost that the full environmental document is expected to be finished in 2026. Construction on the project overall is expected to be completed by 2039, according to Matteoli.

Now that environmental studies on the project have begun, Berkowitz said he thinks Caltrans will issue a new timeline for the project by this spring.

“There’s a lot of talk on this, but don’t hang your hat on it, but (it could be) something like 2030,” he said. “The reason is because we’re trying to be able to cut through all the regulatory garbage — CEQA and NEPA and all of these others. We have the federal government behind us with NEPA, let’s cut through those regulations. I think it’s going to be somewhere around 2030 and it may even be closer than that.”

To ensure that his constituents’ needs are met, Berkowitz said he established a daily town hall meeting from 6 to 7 a.m. at Fisherman’s Restaurant. Ordering from the restaurant isn’t required, he says, people can present whatever idea they have in mind and receive feedback — something that’s not possible at a Board of Supervisors meetings, he says. Berkowitz estimated that he’s held more than 1,600 meetings since he took office.

It was at one of these meetings that a constituent floated the idea of installing port-a-potties on South Beach during the Fourth of July. Berkowitz said the group fleshed the idea out, determined if private enterprises would buy in to the scheme and if his colleagues would support it, and decided to have portable toilets available through July and August.

Another ask that had its genesis at a Berkowitz morning town hall came from David Jones, president of the Klamath Chamber of Commerce. Jones asked if the Board of Supervisors could possibly allocate some funding to the Klamath Fire Protection District, Berkowitz said.

“It’s very unusual for (one) entity to contribute money to another entity to make things happen,” he said. “We have to convince the board that this was to everybody’s benefit.”

In the end, the Board of Supervisors allocated $1,000 in money previously earmarked for the cleanup of a Caltrans median to the Klamath Chamber of Commerce. Jones said the organization he represents wanted to purchase equipment and repair vehicles for the Klamath Fire Protection District.

Though he conceded that $1,000 isn’t a lot of money, Berkowitz argued that it set a precedent.

Though he praised Berkowitz’s accessibility to his constituents in the Crescent City area, Critz asked how often the incumbent speaks with Klamath residents. Berkowitz said he was in Klamath on Thursday to speak with Kamp Klamath owner Aaron Funk, who was concerned about the road his RV park sits on.

“The potholes were big enough so that RVs were having flat tires,” Berkowitz said of Klamath Beach Road. “We got the road department down there to fix some of the potholes in that particular area.”

Berkowitz also mentioned his relationship with the Yurok Tribe. Berkowitz said Yurok Tribal representatives came to him with concerns about a baseball field in Klamath that had fallen into disrepair.

Berkowitz said the tribe wanted to take over ownership of the ball field so it could use grant money to refurbish it. Now, he said, the Yurok Tribe may do the same for a playground in the Hunter Creek subdivision.

“The tribe got a grant for all kinds of playground material, swings and all of that kind of thing,” Berkowitz said. “The county doesn’t have any money for that, so on the next Board meeting, we have an agenda item to see if we can turn over that playground to the tribe.”

Berkowitz said he didn’t pursue an endorsement or a donation from the Yurok Tribe because of the county’s decision to transfer the ownership of the ball field.

“I didn’t want that to look like I’m saying, ‘Yes, we gave that to them, therefore I need a donation from them,’” Berkowitz said. “I don’t want to do that. I’m not going to accept those kinds of donations.”

Asked to speak on the feelings of some Klamath residents of feeling overlooked by the rest of the community, Berkowitz said he’s in Klamath at least once a week. He said he tries to do the best he can.

“You’re always going to get that kind of argument because they don’t feel like they get the attention like in-town gets,” Berkowitz said. “My last election where I ran against Finigan, the only precinct I lost was down there in Klamath, the 18th precinct.”

Like other candidates in the Board of Supervisors, Berkowitz had his ideas about how to solve homelessness in Del Norte County.

The issue, he said, isn’t new, but hasn’t received much attention until recently because the community is receiving state and federal dollars to try to solve the problem.

Berkowitz mentioned the consultant Del Norte County hired with a $75,000 No Place Like Home technical grant — Chico-based Housing Tools — and the potential options for a permanent supportive housing program that could work for the community.

“One of their solutions, of course, on Williams Drive, where we have the old juvenile hall building,” Berkowitz said. “What do we put in there? There’s all kinds of ideas from tiny houses to community. What are we going to do about people who are drug addicted, people who have animals with them…”

One way to address Del Norte’s homelessness woes could be to build a mental institution in the county, Berkowitz said. Many people deemed a danger to themselves or others are transferred to Redding and other areas outside of the county, he said, and “it’s costing us an absolute fortune.”

To build a mental health hospital in Del Norte County would need buy-in from the state, Berkowitz. But, he said, because elected officials at the state levels want the homeless situation solved, they may be approachable.

“A lot of the money that’s supporting transferring over and back and meals and, let’s say, transportation and housing for the people that are being transported over there, that’s probably costing us more than what it would cost to build and maintain a facility if we kept the people here,” he said.

Berkowitz also noted that a lack of mental health professionals is a problem for Curry County, just over the Oregon state line. Cooperating with legislators in Oregon and convincing them that a facility in Del Norte would also serve their constituents may be key to addressing the mental health needs of both communities, he said.

Solving complex issues like homelessness, housing and mental health starts with an idea, Berkowitz said.

“Then you start fleshing it out with other people and once you get the outline then you can present that to a future facilities committee of the Board and then have them flesh that out with staff,” he said. “You gotta start somewhere.”

Del Norte residents have already started to vote by mail, but the polls for California’s primary will be open from 7 a.m.-8 p.m. Tuesday. For a map of precincts and polling places, visit the Del Norte County Elections Office website.

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