This week, staff of the Northcoast Environmental Center issued a letter to the organization’s executive committee and board of directors announcing a strike. The letter, first reported on by the Lost Coast Outpost, lays out conditions that the group says have “severely ruptured the trust and faith of the staff and destroyed the working conditions for all employees.”

Board members from the NEC dispute these claims, saying that staff has become increasingly unwilling to take direction from the board and that, since August, they have received a number of complaints from community members about staff members’ behavior at public meetings throughout the summer.

“We are unionizing. We are striking. The strike begins today, Sept. 15, 2025, and will continue for as long as needed to have our demands met,” a statement signed by five — all but one — members of the NEC’s staff letter reads. “… Two indigenous, trans staff directors at the Northcoast Environmental Center are being targeted for off-duty, First Amendment-protected political activity.”

Political activity

The activity alluded to in the statement involves actions and statements made at an August 6 special session of Arcata City Council, during which community members and activists — advocating for a sister city agreement with Palestine and opposing the displacement of campers along a site on O Street — hurled invective at council members and disrupted proceedings such that the meeting had to be suspended.

At that meeting, community members called council members “sociopaths” and shouted insults like “f–k you all, resign.” The meeting had been intended to review a report on the Arcata Fire Protection District’s standards of coverage.

“I’d say that that was probably the worst public meeting that I’ve ever been in, in my career,” City Manager Merritt Perry told the Times-Standard in August. “We lost a real opportunity to talk about some significant issues … (and) if people can’t maintain decorum, then ultimately it may come to (removing disruptive community members from meetings). But that’s contrary to what the council wants to do. They really want people to come and to be able to participate in the public process.”

The NEC Staff Union has asserted that the participation of two staffers, identified as Moxie Alvarnaz and Carlrey Arroyo, was protected speech done in a personal capacity. The union also notes that staff, as early as their interview process, are encouraged by the NEC to share details of their commitment to activism.

“During the events in question, the individuals did not name themselves, where they are employed, nor did they claim to be present as representatives of any organization,” NEC staff asserts. “As these individuals are longtime local activists who have attended many meetings as private citizens over the years, their presence at a city council meeting was not unusual.”

‘The mayor’s effort to punish them’

In a press release issued Wednesday, NEC staff said that they had been targeted by Arcata Mayor Alex Stillman following city council’s Aug. 6 meeting, an accusation that both Stillman and board members say is untrue.

“Over the course of July and August, multiple staff members were told by board leadership that the mayor of the city of Arcata called to complain about private citizens employed by the NEC voicing outrage at anti-homeless sweeps, police violence and continued gentrification in their city of residence,” NEC staff said.

Board member Margaret Gainer said that she had fielded a call from Stillman. But she said the call had been innocuous in nature, and she had explained the nature of the call to reporter Kyle Hoover with the Mad River Union in August.

“My first question was did they identify themselves as being from the Northcoast Environmental Center,” Gainer said in a telephone interview on Thursday morning, who told Stillman that, because Alvarnaz and Arroyo had been speaking in a personal capacity, their participation in the meeting was not a cause for concern.

Gainer informed the staff members that she had spoken with Stillman and there was no cause for alarm, but those staff members say they were compelled to avoid speaking out about the incident and eventually, NEC staff said, “these assurances would be walked back to conveniently justify punishment.”

Gainer said that the statements made by NEC staff to the board and the public had been “pretty confusing.”

“There’s a lot that is not there,” she said, “a lot of background.”

Larry Glass, who serves as both a staff member and the secretary of the NEC’s board, said that it wasn’t pressure from any one person in government that prompted the board to attempt to address the issue; rather it was a series of complaints from community members that prompted them to take a closer look at staff members’ conduct.

“One of our old employees, who works for the city of Arcata, who was beloved by all of us at the NEC, Bella Waters, contacted us and said she wanted nothing to do with the NEC anymore,” Glass said. “(She said) please, don’t send her any more EcoNews. She didn’t want anything to do with it. Remove her name from any kind of list, which shocked me, because we all loved her.”

After reviewing video of the incident and hearing that board members were beginning to receive a number of complaints, the board’s personnel committee consulted with counsel and attempted to meet with Alvarnaz and Arroyo each privately.

“It wasn’t about what they were saying; it was how they were behaving. It was the bullying. It was the intimidating. It was the screaming and yelling and the disruption of the meeting that we became concerned of,” Glass said. “… It was unprofessional public conduct. Basically, that’s what we were trying to communicate to them.”

Glass said instead of meeting with the personnel committee, though, staff issued what he characterized as a “diatribe manifesto.”

Gainer confirmed that the NEC had, in recent months, experienced “multiple staffing issues.” She said that staff had seemed uninterested in learning more about the best practices of managing a nonprofit organization and have even been unwilling to meet with the board for routine feedback such as employee evaluations.

“It’s a feeling of us versus them that I’ve never quite felt,” Gainer said.

Safety of Arcata’s public figures

Stillman told the Times-Standard on Thursday morning that she was a longtime supporter of the NEC and had reached out to Gainer after the city council’s Aug. 6 meeting because she had heard from another community member that NEC staff had appeared similarly before Eureka City Council in a fractious meeting in May and identified themselves as representatives of NEC.

“I had no intention of asking for resignations or firing or anything,” Stillman said.

Stillman also said that, as a longstanding member of the Arcata City Council, increasingly combative public meetings have made her and her colleagues fear for their safety.

At Wednesday’s city council meeting, a man later identified by police as Shaine Scott Haugen eluded security and rushed the dais before being stopped by City Manager Merritt Perry. Haugen was subsequently arrested on suspicion of assault and battery, felony possession of tear gas and possession of a switchblade knife, among other crimes.

Stillman said she asks herself, “is this how it’s going to be from now on?”

A way forward

Gainer said that the board is considering a range of options to remedy the current impasse between staff and the board, but she’s uncertain what the future will bring. The board is meeting with a labor attorney this Friday, Glass said, but he isn’t optimistic about the NEC’s prospects for a quick reconciliation, but the board will be meeting with the council to discuss a potential resolution.

“I’m not sure there is a solution to it anymore, because they just keep escalating it, and they made all kinds of false accusations about me personally in this (Sept. 17) rebuttal. I mean, quoting me, saying things I never said or twisting things I said into something far from the intention … We’re exploring every possible effort now,” Glass said. “We’re not closing the door on any suggestions that people have, and we’ve had, I’d say, four or five completely different scenarios that people have brought to us to consider as what happens next.

“What’s really important for us is the meeting with this labor attorney on Friday to sort of figure out what our rights are, you know, because, we have rights too, and so we need to find out where we are in this whole picture. Obviously, they formed a union, and there’s nothing we can say about that. That’s their right.”

The NEC Staff Union says that they will not return from their work stoppage until nine specific demands are met. Those demands include protections against retaliation for off-duty conduct, a Staff Oversight Committee being given “proper authority to self-direct its own labor, policies and procedures,” assurances of staff’s independent editorial control of EcoNews, and other stipulations.

The Times-Standard attempted to reach out to NEC staffers on strike for comment but was unable to reach them before the publishing deadline.

The entirety of the NEC Staff Union’s Sept. 17 press release can be read at https://tinyurl.com/evdxd53a.

Robert Schaulis can be reached at 707-441-0585.