The email below was sent yesterday by Eureka businessman/anti-homeless crusader Rob Arkley to a number of city and county officials, including supervisors Virginia Bass, Mark Lovelace and Rex Bohn and former Eureka City Manager David Tyson.

Reached for comment, Lovelace said he was not sure what the connection was between the tragic murder of St. Bernard’s Father Eric Freed and homelessness, since the suspect, Gary Lee Bullock, was not homeless. “Clearly the community is doing a lot of soul searching,” Lovelace said, “but I think [Arkley’s email] misses the mark.”

Here’s the email:

Dear All,

Fr. Eric’s death was as predictable as b following a. I truly do not distinguish between Betty Chin[sic] and the others. It is a fabric of what we have and are. The crossbow killer on the Dog Ranch had a Betty Chin [sic] free cell phone. [Note: It was actually the victim who had the phone.] So much for being different. I seriously doubt if Jesus advocated feeding and providing for our vagrants, so that they could go out and steal, commit violent crimes and the like. I suppose that some may not agree, but I am pretty confident that even the Church would agree with me. The Church and Jesus preach uplifting. Not much of that is going on in Eureka. Rather, we are simply making things worse.

Possible options: Have the County keep the cockroaches in jail until the later of 8 hours or 8 a.m. regardless of issue. When we let folks out in the middle of the night, there are no transportation and no services.

Have a limit on the number of trips to our free services and limit the not-for-profit services unless they pay a fee, since long term vagrants have huge costs borne by us and by the not-for-profit.

Allow no other shelters to be created without a full blown EIR. How we can have a spanking new facility at 7 and C is beyond me. What does that do for the business community, to the extent that we even have one anymore?

Force the electeds to have a “negative impacts” study before any more grants (social services) to make sure that the vagrants are not driving out/and negatively impacting the 99%.

Short of these, law suits seem to be best alternatives. I am going to be doing lots of Sunshine pieces and am going to use names. It has gone too far and most of you live in areas completely unimpacted by what Chin [sic] and her ilk are creating.

Vty,

Rob