The Humboldt Transit Authority board of directors was set to consider making the Quail Bus available to the general public on a limited basis, according to a front page report in this edition.
Tom Hansen, HTA Director, said the board at its meeting was to consider boosting ridership on the Quail on runs to Eureka and Fortuna by letting the general public fill empty seats. Currently, only seniors and handicapped persons from Benbow to Weott are permitted to use the 12-passenger bus. Besides lunches twice a week at Miranda and Garberville, the Quail shuttles passengers two Wednesdays a month to Eureka and one Wednesday a month to Fortuna. Dial-a-ride service is slated for Tuesdays, Hansen said, and some miscellaneous trips are made when six or more riders can be scheduled.
The report goes on to state that during the previous year, the Quail had transported 4,500 passengers, down 19% from the previous year. At that time, about 25% of the operating cost of the Quail was being recovered from passenger fares.
The Small Business Council had held a meeting the prior week in Garberville to discuss mass transit, according to Hansen, where it was proposed that empty seats on the
*****
The Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) was expected to arrive in the area “real soon,” according to another front page article. Attorney General John Van DeKamp had characterized the upcoming operation as “war on California pot growers” but Humboldt County Sheriff Dave Renner said it would closely resemble what his deputies had been doing, but with helicopters. Renner said that the county had only joined the CAMP operation after being assured that there would be no “assault-type raids” and that his office would control the operation.
”One of the key issues that got us to accept this program is that they will be under our charge in the field,” Renner said. “We didn’t want panic and paranoia.” He promised that he “would throw ‘em out of the county” if CAMP got out of line.
*****
A Board of Supervisors’ plan to make waste disposal in the county pay for itself took another incremental step last week as fee collectors took over the Fruitland Ridge and Whitethorn container dump sites. The base rate for dumping was set at $3 per yard, with a minimum dump fee of one dollar. The fee collector for the Whitethorn site was Jack Egan, a Whitethorn resident. Betty Kinebrew was selected to be the fee collector on Fruitland Ridge. Both were working as employees of the Wayne Hooper Trucking Company, which had the contract for operating the sites.
According to Hooper, an influx of garbage over the weekend prior to the fee startup necessitated double the usual number of runs by his truckers hauling full containers of garbage to the Redway Transfer Station for compacting and subsequent hauling to the Eureka landfill.
”We worked all day Sunday,” Hooper says, “and hardly made a dent in it. The history of fees is that everybody’s mad when they first start, so the volume of garbage drops off to nothing but then it starts building up again.”
Hooper said that the first load they hauled off from Whitethorn after the fees started was made up mostly of trash that had accumulated over the years that the site had been unstaffed. He said that he hoped having the site cleaned up would discourage further littering and illegal dumping.
Font Resize