‘We’re Trying to Do the Hard Things’, Assemblymember Rogers Told SoHum in a Town Hall Yesterday

Assemblymember Chris Rogers spent two hours Saturday in Garberville fielding questions from SoHum residents on some of the most pressing issues facing the region. The town hall, held at what used to be Cecil’s Restaurant, one of many businesses that has closed in the small community in recent years, was arranged by 2nd District Supervisor Michelle Bushnell and drew a small crowd that ranged from cannabis industry survivors and childcare providers to foresters, teachers and at least one man who just wants to be buried under an apple tree.

Rogers represents the 2nd Assembly District, a stretch of Northern California running from Santa Rosa to the Oregon border across Sonoma, Mendocino, Humboldt, Del Norte and Trinity counties. He won the seat in 2024 after longtime Assemblymember Jim Wood announced he would not seek reelection. He defeated California Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks in a close primary that drew statewide attention. Rogers said Saturday’s gathering was roughly his 30th community town hall since taking office about a year and a half ago, part of a goal to visit every community in the five-county district.

The conversation covered a lot of ground. Topics included PG&E’s capacity failures and the lack of EV charging infrastructure, the state’s forestry and biomass bills, the US Forest Service consolidation and what it means for Trinity County, Rogers’s AB 1984 targeting unlimited corporate election spending, the governor’s race, broadband construction along Highway 101, fire insurance reform, childcare funding, and California’s structural tax problems. Residents also raised two issues that fall outside Rogers’s state jurisdiction but drew discussion anyway: the proposed Business Improvement District for Redway and Garberville, and old-growth tree logging in lower Redway and enforcement of the county’s Q Zone Ordinance, which Rogers acknowledged is on his radar even as he was clear the county holds the keys.

Reporting on those topics will follow in the coming days. But Rogers kept returning to one theme throughout the afternoon, the same one state economic planners at GoBiz have identified as a key for the North Coast’s future, and the one Rogers called the foundation for everything else: healthcare.

Rogers has spent much of his first term putting that belief into action. He sits on the Assembly Budget Subcommittee covering environmental resources, transportation and utilities, and has been filling in on the Health Committee while a colleague is on maternity leave. He is a joint author on the CalCare single-payer bill, has introduced legislation to recreate the federal Health Professional Shortage Areas program at the state level after it was eliminated this year, and is pushing back on the governor’s decision to make mobile health services optional for counties. For a first-term assemblymember representing a sprawling five-county rural district, healthcare has been a consistent throughline.

“If you don’t have those focus in Garberville as a bedrock for this community, then you have no ability to drive economic opportunities,” Rogers told the room. “You don’t build housing in areas that don’t have health care. You don’t locate a business there.”

Southern Humboldt has two anchors for medical care. SoHum Health operates Jerold Phelps Community Hospital in Garberville, a critical access hospital with an emergency room. The organization is in the midst of a major project to build a new hospital. The current building cannot meet the state’s approaching seismic requirements and must be replaced or lose its hospital license by 2030. SoHum Health’s planned new facility, a two-story hospital and clinic at its Sprowl Creek Road location estimated at $75 million, has final construction documents submitted to the state for permitting as of August 2025, with construction slated to begin in 2027 and the facility expected to open to patients by 2030. The project depends on a federal USDA Rural Development loan and community fundraising.

In neighboring Redway, the Redwoods Rural Health Center has been providing primary care, dental and behavioral health services to Southern Humboldt since 1976, when a group of community members, many of them low-income, lobbied their way into establishing a federally qualified health center that serves patients regardless of their ability to pay.

Both institutions depend heavily on Medi-Cal reimbursements. Both now face the same federal policy changes Rogers said amount to the biggest crisis the state will face.

HR1, the federal budget reconciliation bill signed into law on July 4, 2025, made the largest cuts to Medicaid in the program’s 60-year history. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the bill will reduce federal spending on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program by roughly $911 billion over 10 years and result in as many as 10 million Americans losing health coverage. For California, the California Health Care Foundation estimates HR1 will cut $30 billion a year in federal Medi-Cal funding and put rural hospitals at higher risk of closure as reimbursement rates are gradually pushed down toward Medicare levels, which average significantly less than commercial rates.

Supporters of HR1 pointed to a $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Fund included in the bill as a counterweight, with senators like Idaho’s Mike Crapo calling it the single largest investment in rural healthcare in more than 20 years. But independent analysis from Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families found the fund covers only about one-third of the $137 billion in projected federal Medicaid cuts to rural areas, runs for just five years while the cuts are permanent, and was later restricted by federal regulators so that no more than 15% of the funds can go directly to health providers, including rural hospitals.

For a critical access hospital like Jerold Phelps, that kind of reimbursement cut lands hard on an organization already running on thin margins and mid-project on a $75 million replacement facility. When reimbursement rates fall below the cost of care, small rural hospitals start making impossible choices.

Rogers outlined several other problems he said Southern Humboldt residents should expect to see.

HR1 now requires Medi-Cal patients to re-enroll every six months instead of annually. Rogers said, county workers, already stretched thin, take roughly three months to process each re-enrollment. The result is people cycling on and off coverage in a near-constant loop. People who fall through the cracks do not stop getting sick. They show up at the emergency room, where the hospital is still required to treat them, with no reimbursement coming. That uncompensated care burden falls directly on facilities like Jerold Phelps.

The Medicaid cuts Rogers described will likely shrink the pool of insured patients and reduce reimbursements, leaving rural ERs with fewer resources and thinner staffing. That, he said, makes an existing problem worse. When a patient arrives in crisis, whether from a car accident or a mental health emergency, the firefighter or officer who brought them in cannot leave until the patient is handed off to a qualified professional. At an understaffed rural ER, that wait could stretch hours. In a region where fire, law enforcement, and EMS crews are already spread thin across a large geographic area, a firefighter or paramedic pinned down in a hospital hallway waiting for a handoff is not responding to the next call. If that next call is a structure fire, a serious crime, or a second medical emergency, the delay can matter.

The governor this year also reclassified mobile health services from a required program to an optional one for counties, a budget move Rogers called “self-inflicted.” For a county like Humboldt, optional often means unfunded. Rogers said he has written to the governor and is pushing to reverse it in the budget process.

Garberville, Rogers noted, qualifies as a Health Professional Shortage Area under a federal program that recognized communities with documented shortages in mental, physical and dental healthcare, and provided financial incentives to attract providers. HR1 eliminated that program. Rogers has a bill in the current session to recreate it at the state level.

He is also a co-author on the single-payer CalCare bill, though he acknowledged it will not cross the finish line this year. Moving Medicare dollars from the federal government back to the state requires a federal waiver the current administration is not going to grant. Still, Rogers said the bill keeps the conversation alive around how rural and critical access hospitals are funded.

“Having health insurance is not the same thing as having health access,” Rogers said. “And if you have hospitals/clinics that really struggle with what services they can provide, then that’s going to impact everybody.”

For SoHum Health and the Redwoods Rural Health Center, the policy fights Rogers described in Sacramento and Washington are the difference between stability and joining a national trend that has claimed more than 180 rural hospitals since 2010, with hundreds more currently rated as vulnerable to closure.

Rogers said he plans to return to the area roughly every three weeks. Residents can reach his district office through representative Heidi McHugh, who handles Humboldt, Del Norte and Trinity counties, or through Rogers’s office website. His office, he said, is there for all of it, including, as it turns out, attempting to help an 85-year-old man navigate conflicting state and county policies around the apple tree he’d like to be buried under someday.

Reporting on other topics raised at Saturday’s meeting will follow, including the proposed Garberville Business Improvement District, Rogers’s forestry and biomass bills, his Citizens United bill AB 1984, the governor’s race, and the federal Forest Service pullback from Trinity County.

Articles in this series: 

• • ‘We’re Trying to Do the Hard Things’, Assemblymember Rogers Told SoHum in a Town Hall Yesterday
  • ‘It’s a Big Club and You’re Not In It’: Assemblymember Chris Rogers on Dark Money, Rural Power and the June Primary
  • Old Trees, New Laws: Southern Humboldt Brings Its Forestry Concerns to Town Hall