The community group calls itself North Coast Action. Suggested uses include a fish farm, a Monterey-style aquarium, Habitat For Humanity housing, a public park, a marsh that would naturally render sewage harmless as has been accomplished by the City of Arcata, low cost housing, and retail shops.
So-called community input is just part of the process G-P needs to go through on their way to doing whatever is going to make them the most money. Who really controls Hawthorne is hard to know, and neither G-P nor Hawthorne is saying. Hawthorne bills itself as a financial management outfit unrelated to timber with links to public employee retirement funds in several Western states.
At the root of local skepticism is an offshore resources map some people vaguely recall having seen during the offshore oil drilling protests fifteen years ago. It also was said to show oil deposits on the west or the other side of the San Andreas fault, a perhaps fact some protesters pounced on. The long-anticipated closure of the mill last year left G-P with acres of prime coastal industrial property, including an abandoned airstrip and a megawatt power plant β big enough to power most of Fort Bragg, but small by commercial power plant standards.
An expanded power plant serving the Coast is another widely circulated rumor. It has considerable appeal given recent manipulations of the power grid; small is better, argue its proponents. G-P has always been closed-mouthed about its plans. But, east of the fault line, extending underneath the GP property, according to the mystery map, was a large field of natural gas.
The first big protest to resist possible oil extraction off the Mendocino Coast took place at Crown Hall in Mendocino in Flo Norvell, Sue Miller and Dobie Dolphin managed to mobilize local opinion for a federal declaration which would have permanently prohibited commercial exploitation of the seas off the Mendocino Coast, but professional pols, including Gray Davis, soon opted for an annual federal ban against offshore extractions that gave them an annual photo op as defenders of sanctity of Northcoast waters.
