From Roller Derby to the Dais: Natalie Arroyo Talks Trails, Housing and What Sticks Around

Some of the best local government stories are not about the vote itself, they are about what happens four or five years later when the thing everyone argued about actually gets built.

Natalie Arroyo now represents District 4 on the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors, but she spent eight years on the Eureka City Council before that, and on the latest episode of the 100% Humboldt podcast, she sat down with Scott Hammond to talk about both jobs: the county projects finally coming out of the ground this summer, the council decisions still paying off years later, and the long, occasionally unglamorous road that got her from council chambers to the county dais.

Before Humboldt, there was Miami, a childhood spent watching space shuttle launches from central Florida, a hurricane that reshaped her plans in New Orleans, and an AmeriCorps posting that landed her in Petrolia with a car full of belongings and no idea what she was walking into.

“I had a lot to learn,” she said. “I was a little green.”

From there the story moves through the Redwood Community Action Agency, two council terms, her move to the Board of Supervisors, the Coast Guard Reserve, a classroom at Cal Poly Humboldt, and a roller derby track at Redwood Acres, where she skates under the name Bronn Luke Picard.

Arroyo talks candidly about the parts of the job that wear her down, the ones that keep her going, and a specific loss in federal housing funding that is about to hit some of the county’s most vulnerable residents. She also lays out five things she would like to see happen in Humboldt before she is done, and explains why she thinks the fix for the county’s traffic safety numbers is not more enforcement.

There is also a hurricane, a proposal on roller skates, and a very good explanation of the difference between a stun gun and a taser that never actually comes up, but you get the idea. Some stories are better heard in her own voice.

Click here for this episode of 100% Humboldt.