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Supervisors Valerie Starkey and Darrin Short threw their support behind improvements to the Veterans Memorial Hall as a project to seek federal dollars for this year.

Randy Hooper, Del Norte’s assistant county administration officer, said the building at 810 H Street needs work to bring it into compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act to make it easier for veterans to access its second floor.

Hooper presented that project to the Board at a special meeting Friday as one of three the county could pursue Congressionally Designated Spending or Community Project Funding moneys for. The other two projects he advocated for include a South Beach Welcome Center and a Community Wayfinding Project.

The county’s goal, Hooper said, is to get a jump on the earmark process.

“What typically happens is because of the timing of the earmark process there’s a mad rush in late winter or early spring to put these together,” Hooper told supervisors. “It’s never really involved a very public process or a very Board-engaged process.”

County administrators began soliciting project ideas from the Board of Supervisors and elected and appointed department heads to forward to federal advocates Thorn Run Partners back in September. Staff also sought ideas from the county’s capital improvement technical advisory committee.

While the South Beach, Veterans Hall and way-finding projects made the short list, other ideas include getting Bar-O Boys Ranch into a “usable condition,” developing charging stations for electric vehicles and constructing workforce housing, Hooper said.

Building a justice center to house the district attorney’s, public defender's and probation offices could be a potential contender for those federal dollars as well as the replacement of the Red Mountain repeater site for public safety communications.

“This item was added to the special session because we want to get this in front of our on-call engineers as soon as possible,” Hooper said. “We’ve already solicited proposals for those services. What we would hope to do would be to package a proposal for what these projects could look like — before and after — certainly [with] a budget estimate to support the requested funding. Then [we’ll] return to the Board for a resolution and a presentation of these different ideas.”

Hooper said he hoped to have that work completed and to generate public engagement on the proposals by the end of January or the first part of February.

While his colleagues advocated for improvements to the veterans hall as a proposal for federal earmark dollars, District 5 Supervisor Dean Wilson said it’s a good time to consider the development of South Beach.

The county’s mention of a South Beach Welcome Center comes after Elk Valley Rancheria received a $725,000 California Coastal Commission grant to purchase a 9.19-acre parcel near Crescent Beach.

Wilson said Elk Valley will develop that land for public access and is also creating an elk-viewing area on the opposite side of U.S. 101 south of Crescent City. The District 5 supervisor also said Caltrans is pursuing dollars to try to “shore up that section.”

“If we can hit it while the iron is hot, so to speak, hopefully we can come up with a unified vision of developing that South Beach area,” Wilson said, adding that better “way-finding” signs are also needed. “We get a lot of criticism that government does not create jobs and that is very true. However, government can create an atmosphere to encourage economic growth.”

Starkey agreed, but said the emphasis should be on the Veterans Memorial Hall.

“Our signs may be postage stamp size,” she said, echoing Wilson’s comment about a sign on U.S. 101 pointing to Stout Grove. “But it does say ‘Del Norte County, Where We Honor Our Veterans,’ and to see that building, sometimes you question it. I would love for that to be more enhanced so that it’s a meeting place for our veterans to gather and support each other.”

Short agreed with Starkey, saying that fixing the elevator so the vets who use that building can go to the second floor “is a big deal for me as well.”

In 2022, Del Norte County was awarded $3.1 million in Congressionally Designated Spending dollars from the late U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein for improvements to the jail. Those dollars were included in a 2022 U.S. Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration appropriations bill.

In federal fiscal year 2023, Congressionally Designated Spending money was allocated for improvements to the county’s computer-aided dispatch system. And about $500,000 came to Del Norte for improvements to Pike Field, Hooper said.

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