MENDOCINO CO., 9/3/26 — Eight households on Gibney Lane and Mallory Drive, in an unincorporated area outside Fort Bragg, draw their drinking water through carbon filters installed on their wells in 1992. The owners of the sawmill next door installed and have maintained the filters ever since because contaminants found beneath the mill were also turning up in the neighbors’ water. The state, under the State Water Resources Control Board, has been overseeing the cleanup of the sawmill site since 1995. The case is still open.
This summer, Mendocino County planners completed an environmental study for the property after the current owner, Mendocino Forest Products, applied for a county permit to park its trucks on the property, back-approve three unpermitted structures and other uses. Page 25 of the environmental study asks whether the property is on California’s list of contaminated sites. County planners checked “No Impact.”
That finding allows the county to approve new uses of the land without requiring a full environmental impact report.
But the site is on the list. Two neighbors told the county so in writing before the Mendocino County Planning Commission hearing to approve the permit on Thursday, Aug. 6, including the state case number in their written comment.
Susan Blackmer lives on Leofs Lane, at the edge of the property. She wrote to the commission Aug. 3.
“According to my son, a geologist specializing in groundwater and soil contamination abatement, this is a LUST site,” she wrote — a Leaking Underground Storage Tank site — “which is why it continues to be monitored.” She included the case number and links to the state file.
Randy and Stacey Hanks, whose property abuts the mill site, sent the same case number.
The current owner, Mendocino Forest Products, applied for a county permit to park and service its truck fleet on the 36.8-acre property, store logging equipment and materials and leave idle trailers there.
It also wants after-the-fact approval for three structures built without permits: a 44-foot fire training tower made from stacked shipping containers, a storage container and a mobile office. The application also covers asphalt grindings spread on the site’s interior roads in 2023.
County staff recommended approving the project under a Negative Declaration — a finding that it will cause no significant environmental harm and therefore does not require a full environmental impact report.
A long-term operation, a longer-term problem
The mill ran for more than 50 years, cutting and storing lumber, treating it with chemicals to prevent staining and fueling trucks from underground tanks. Fuel, solvents and the wood preservative pentachlorophenol entered the groundwater, which moves west from the mill toward nearby homes.
In 1995, Louisiana-Pacific buried a 700-foot wall across the path of the plume, with four carbon-filled gates designed to filter groundwater as it passes through.
Milling stopped in 2003. The buildings came down two years later.
“I grew up next to this mill while it was operating. It was loud, all day, every day,” Sy Scaramella, whose family built two parcels west of the site 75 years ago, wrote to the commission in July. “We still receive drinking water from the mill site owners today, because of damage caused during that last period of commercial use. That damage has never fully been undone.”
The land and the cleanup responsibility have changed hands separately.
Louisiana-Pacific sold its Mendocino County timberland to Mendocino Redwood Company in 1998, and a 2005 county staff report lists that company as the owner of the mill property. The county now names a related company, Mendocino Forest Products, as both the owner and permit applicant.
A 2007 state waste discharge order named Mendocino Forest Products. Responsibility returned to Louisiana-Pacific in 2020, and Louisiana-Pacific files the monitoring reports today.
The county’s responsibility
Before approving development on potentially contaminated land, a county is supposed to check what planners call the Cortese List, named for the state law that created it.
That is the question the county answered “No Impact” on page 25.
Its explanation rests on a footnote naming one database: EnviroStor, maintained by the California Department of Toxic Substances Control.
But the Cortese List is actually five lists maintained by different agencies. One of them is the State Water Board’s GeoTracker database — the database Blackmer pointed the commission to.
Search GeoTracker for Holquist Lane and the mill appears as a leaking underground storage tank, or LUST, site. Its status is open.
Asked which lists county staff searched, senior planner Russell Ford answered by email.
“The Cortese List is the primary resource that staff uses for that section of the Initial Study and there’s currently only one Superfund site that would fit that criteria within Mendocino County,” he wrote.
The mill is not a Superfund site. The federal government logged it years ago and turned oversight over to California. It now appears on the water board’s portion of the state list.
The county had been told long before neighbors submitted their letters
The water board told the county about the cleanup a year before the Planning Commission hearing and before the neighbors submitted their letters.
Ford produced a June 4, 2025, email from Cody Walker, an engineering geologist with the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board.
“The Mendocino Forest Products site at 32600 Holquist Lane is an open case in the Cleanups Unit of the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board,” Walker wrote.
Cleanup infrastructure, he said, “includes groundwater monitoring wells and a ‘Funnel and Gate System’ to treat contaminated groundwater.” Ford said county planners knew about the system.
“When the second referral for this project went out, we received a comment letter from the State Water Board identifying the site as being under a managed cleanup plan, so we were aware those systems were in place when the documents were drafted,” he wrote.
The company’s site plan, drawn in October 2024 and revised the following April, shows all eight monitoring wells. It also shows the fire tower, storage container, proposed fleet parking and corporation yard.
It doesn’t show the funnel-and-gate system — the infrastructure on which the water board conditioned its lack of objection. Nor does the environmental study say what the proposed new uses would sit next to.
Asked where the proposed uses sit in relation to that infrastructure, Eileen Russell, community engagement manager for the affiliated Mendocino Redwood Company, answered for Mendocino Forest Products in writing Sept. 2.
“As property owners, we know where the wells and funnel-and-gate systems are, and our proposed use of the site will not impact that system in any way,” she wrote. She said the previous landowner, not Mendocino Forest Products, is responsible for monitoring the wells.
The county’s Environmental Health division did not comment. Its line in the staff report reads “No Response.”
Ford said the new uses would not affect the existing contamination.
The fleet parking, stored materials and fire tower “were not seen to impact the existing pollution in any significant way, positively or negatively, thus ‘no impact’,” he wrote.
Under state environmental law, a project is generally judged against conditions that already exist when environmental review begins. That starting point is called the baseline.
Because the pollution predates this application, the county treats it as part of the baseline rather than an environmental harm caused by the new project.
Ford applied the same reasoning to the fire tower. Although it was built without permits in 2022, it was standing when environmental review began, so the county “is not required to establish an artificial baseline at some point in the past,” he wrote, citing two appellate decisions.
The baseline rule means the county does not have to re-litigate how contamination got into the ground. It doesn’t eliminate the requirement to describe what is there.
The county study runs more than 10,000 lines. “Private well” does not appear. Neither do pentachlorophenol, acetone or MTBE. “Drinking water” appears once, in a passage about employee restrooms.
The fire tower belongs to the Mendocino County Fire Chiefs Association and was purchased with PG&E settlement money, said Steve Orsi, who answered questions for the association. Coastal departments use it four to six times a month and conduct about a dozen live-fire exercises a year.
The chiefs were told they needed no permit for “these cargo boxes erected into a tower,” Orsi wrote.
“Of course, we found out later that the information was wrong and now we are trying to make it right.”
The association is “working hard to ensure we don’t affect the surrounding residents,” he wrote, including respectful driving, containment around tower openings during burns and “only using non-painted, non-treated wood in their fires.”
Russell gave the company’s account of how the tower got there. The Fort Bragg Fire Department “asked about leasing land for the purpose of having a fire training center,” she wrote, and the company issued the department a license agreement in May 2022.
“We require tenants or those using company land to acquire necessary permits,” she wrote. Once the company learned the tower needed one, “we have been working in support of the Fort Bragg Fire Department to obtain the necessary permit.”
The environmental study did consider whether fire training could contaminate groundwater. It looked at firefighting foam containing PFAS chemicals and found no risk because state law bars PFAS foam from training exercises.
Orsi said the chiefs burn wood, not foam.
Neither the question nor the answer addresses the contamination already beneath the site.
“The county is not following the law”
Marie Jones has served more than five years on the Mendocino County Planning Commission and is also Point Arena’s city planner.
She did not attend the Aug. 6 hearing because her property lies a little more than 500 feet from the mill parcel, within what she calls a gray area of conflict-of-interest law. She wrote to the commission as a neighbor instead.
“If you have a biological study that has a lot of mitigations in it, you have to do a mitigated negative declaration. You’re not allowed to do a negative declaration,” Jones said in a Voice interview. “It just doesn’t follow the law. The county is not following the law. Their own law, state law.”
She also questioned allowing trucks to park on bare ground.
“The idea that you can just let vehicles sit on bare earth without having any kind of stormwater treatment system for them or catchment basin or any kind of system. It just flies in the face of what’s normally required in the coastal zone,” she said.
Jones said the environmental study treats the mill as though it never stopped operating. It finds the proposed project consistent with coastal policy because the property “has been in use for more than 50 years.”
But a 2005 county staff report on the same parcel said the mill’s use permit “expired in 1987 and has not renewed.”
Jones also found that the county study omitted some special-status species identified in the project’s biological report.
“It appears that was simply an oversight,” Ford wrote. “It was initially overlooked that the biologist found a frog on the site, and the documents didn’t get aligned well enough before they were released.”
The wells the study never mentions
Ford said the neighboring wells were deliberately left out of the environmental study.
“Because there was no reasonable connection between the Project and existing off-site private well treatments, it was not addressed in the Neg Dec,” he wrote.
“Private well” does not appear anywhere in the document.
Luckily, the contamination is declining.
Pentachlorophenol in monitoring wells on the property once reached 940 micrograms per liter. Last year it fell below the state’s limit of 1.
No contaminants were detected in the neighbors’ wells during the first half of 2026, or in the sentry wells downstream from the treatment gates.
The neighbors acknowledge the improvement.
“If you look at the history of the monitoring going back to 2005, you will see how the contamination levels have slowly declined over the decades,” Blackmer wrote.
Then she explained why she still opposes the permit.
“Reactivating this site will mean reintroducing soil contaminants that will leach into the groundwater and recontaminate wells.”
In a report filed in May, the cleanup consultant told the water board it “considers this site to be ready for closure.”
The board has not closed it.
Asked how the company would protect the neighbors’ wells from fleet storage and servicing, Russell said the details are still being written.
“As requested by Mendocino County Planning Commissioners, MFP will be preparing a more detailed permit application that will address how fleet storage and service will be handled,” she wrote. “Those details will be available for review as part of the permitting process.”
More than two dozen people wrote to the Planning Commission before the August hearing.
“Thankfully my well is not yet contaminated, but some of my neighbors’ wells are,” Brookfield Drive resident Roslyn Moore wrote. “I see no compliance or enforcement mechanism in the plan, and I have no reason to trust the Draft Negative Declaration.”
The commission continued the matter Aug. 6 without setting a new hearing date.
Weaseled their way in 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣