The harvest area in the Arcata Community Forest. City of Arcata graphic
Kevin L. Hoover
Mad River Union
ARCATA COMMUNITY FOREST – Viewed from the town, Arcata’s woodlands appear stately and changeless. But they’re not - the Arcata Community Forest (ACF) is an ever-morphing entity, always changing it size, shape and content.
Some particularly significant late-summer shapeshifting is now underway, with a forest harvest in progress, an expansion planned and an overhaul of the dam on Jolly Giant Creek in the works.
Harvest time
Experienced timber operator Diamond R Ranch of Ferndale is doing the logging, cutting and hauling. The $96,544 contract for about 400,000 board feet of timber was awarded by the Arcata City Council in June.
Humboldt Redwood Co. in Scotia is receiving the logs, which are mostly redwood with a little Sitka spruce and Grand fir. Under the contract, awarded the same night as the one of the logging and hauling, Humboldt Redwood will pay $762 per thousand board feet for redwood logs six to 16 inches in diameter; $963 for redwood logs 17 to 23 inches; $1,150 for redwood logs 24 inches or thicker; and $400 and $425, respectively, for Spruce and Grand fir logs.
The single tree selection harvest is expected to take three or four weeks to complete. It is taking place in a portion of the 136.7 acre Lower Jolly Giant compartment of the ACF. This area includes Trails 4, 9 and 16, all of which will get improvements after the harvest is completed. Members of the Forest Management Committee will conduct a post-harvest inspection this fall, to which the public will be invited.
Expansion planned
More logging is in progress in the privately owned, 58.5 acre Forsyth Properties located east of Humboldt State University and enclosed on three sides by the forest. As was done in previous harvests, the city will allow use of Road 9 in the forest, which connects to Fickle Hill Road, to haul out logs. This minimizes creation of new roads on the heavily logged property. Road 9 will be used for one week this year, and possibly for one week in 2017.
This year’s road use permission comes with an unprecedented twist: it’s contingent on the city and Forsyth entering into an agreement for sale of the property, which will become part of the forest.
Not all of it, though. Some 47.5 of the 58.5 acres are zoned NR – Natural Resource, while 10.5 acres is zoned Residential Very Low Density. This year’s harvest takes place in the residentially zoned area, while the city is only interested in the larger, NR-designated parcel. The residentially-zoned area is located close to town, near Humboldt State’s Redwood Sciences Lab, and the city has no interest in adding it to the forest. “We can accomplish our goal of buffering the community forest without acquiring that,” said Mark Andre, director of Environmental Services.
The 47.5 acres will only be logged, and Road 9 used for log hauling next July, if the city and Forsyth don’t agree on a purchase and sale agreement and get the grant funding to cover it, by next year.
Andre said a sale and purchase agreement for at least part of the Forsyth Properties could take place as soon as this week. He said grant funding is “feasible and achievable.” In fact, a $400,000 USDA Community Forest and Open Space Fund grant is already in hand, and will be leveraged to help gain the balance of the estimated $1 million or more purchase price. If successful, the acquisition will clear up longstanding confusion about the near-HSU woodland. Many assume that it is already part of the forest, while students have referred to it as the “HSU Forest.”
The tract, which a staff report says was logged with use of city roads in 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010, 2011 and 2012, has been extensively modified by users, and sports numerous bike ramps and untended trails. Like the Sunny Brae Tract, acquired after decades of regular logging, the Forsyth properties will require considerable renovation to bring it up to City of Arcata standards.
Dam, what a mess
Just east of the Forsyth Properties along Road 8 is Jolly Giant Dam, a venerable structure behind which a reservoir once provided Arcata’s water supply. The city is moving to modify the aging dam to reduce the possibility of structural failure and remove it from regulatory purview of the state’s Division of Dam Safety.
That agency has been giving signals about implementing what Andre called “substantial annual fees” for its oversight of the dam. Apart from the cost, the time-consuming paperwork is onerous enough in and of itself.
“It feels like it’s Shasta Dam,” Andre quipped.
Last week, the Arcata City Council awarded a $179,675 contract to Wallace Structures to renovate the dam. The company outbid GR Sundberg Inc., which submitted a bid for $227,700.
The project will include construction of a bypass spillway and a lower pipe outlet that allows water to pass both through and around the dam if the water inlet becomes plugged. In the early 2000s, the inlet was deliberately plugged by persons unknown, who stuffed it with disused camping gear.
The inlet was subsequently altered to minimize the possibility of tampering. But since a vintage wooden flume fell down several years ago, the dam has lacked a spillway.
Award of the bid came after an unusually messy process. Two of the three initial bids for the work came in well in excess of the $150,000 the city had budgeted for the work. One bidder, Wallace Structures, submitted a bid for less than the budgeted amount, while two other bids were far in excess of it.
Wallace then asked that its original bid be abandoned due to errors, and the city decided to reject all the bids and re-bid the project. The second request for proposals included clarifications of the plans, but the attachment was erroneously labeled in the bid packet as “Addendum No. 1.”
“That was a mistake,” said City Engineer Doby Class. “It was really an attachment.” He called the second bid package “sloppy, quite honestly.”
According to a staff report, an addendum usually involves a substantive change to plans rather than a clarification. “Typically, a true bid addendum is a separate document with important additional information provided after the bids are issued, requiring bidders to acknowledge in writing that they received the additional information,” states the staff report.
One bidder, GR Sundberg Inc., returned a second bid with the addendum properly signed and acknowledged. Wallace Structures did not, instead marking the returned bid with a zero, indicating that no addendum had been received.
But city staff decided that it didn’t really matter, on the grounds that the addendum was really an attachment, that it didn’t change the specifications of the project, alter the cost or favor any of the bidders.
“The failure of the bidder to sign page C of the bid book did not affect the amount of the bid or otherwise give the bidder an advantage over other prospective bidders,” states the staff report.
Casey Poff of GR Sundberg Inc. prepared two bids that the city rejected. He told the council that his company had cut $50,000 from its original bid, followed all prescribed procedures regarding the addendum, and, unlike the winning bidder, returned the proper paperwork with its second bid.
Allowing Wallace to withdraw its original bid, then resubmit a second, defective one which won the contract didn’t seem fair to GR Sundberg Inc. Poff sent in a protest letter, to which he said the city didn’t respond. He implied that the bid award to Wallace was possibly pre-destined, and asked the council to think about the way the process had gone down.
The protest letter lists variances from normal bidding procedure in which Wallace was given unusual latitude, and asks that GR Sundberg Inc. be awarded the bid for the dam work.
Normally, an inadequate or defective bid would be rejected, and the contract awarded to the next-highest bidder. In effect, with the unusual back-and-forth, Wallace Structures had, arguably, been allowed to negotiate the contract rather than pass or fail on the strength of its bids.
It’s not clear why the bids came in so far in excess of what the city budgeted, or why the bidders submitted such wildly disparate price tags for the same work. In a cost breakdown, Wallace Structures estimated that the spillway channel would cost $41,300, while GR Sundberg Inc. listed the cost at $73,000. The cost of something labeled “structure” was priced at $4,000 in the Wallace bid, but $13,500 in the GR Sundberg Inc. bid. Wallace Structures estimated $80,000 for a spillway conduit, while GR Sundberg Inc. put that at $63,500.
To cover the difference between the nearly $180,000 final bid and the $150,000 the city had budgeted, the council approved an additional $50,810 from the Storm Water Fund Reserves. The contract also includes a 15 percent “project contingency” of $26,951 to cover cost overruns.
City Attorney Nancy Diamond said it was a simple “mistake of labeling,” that all the bids had been “fully responsive to all the information,” and that the problems with the first set of bids were irrelevant. “It does not give the bidder an advantage over the others,” she said. “The same relief was given to both of the bidders.”
Class also denied that the untidy process favored any of the bidders. “I don’t see a true advantage,” he said.
Swirling toward closure
Andre said he has been trying to advance the dam repair and Forsyth Properties issues for years, and acknowledged that they form sort of a professional bucket list.
“All this time they’ve been swirling around,” he said.