Fact: The Clean-Up is being stalled by G-P|Koch and Mendocino Railway. 

The clean-up of Noyo Headlands has been in limbo since 2018. Regardless of who owns the property, the law says that it must be cleaned up before it can be repurposed and safe for humans or wildlife (including the fishes in the sea.) Georgia Pacific|Koch and Mendocino Railroad now share the responsibility. The City of Fort Bragg is not and never has been the reason for delay. The Department of Toxic Substances Control has signed off on some of the property, albeit putting severe restrictions in place as to what can be done in those areas. The section known as OU-E (Operating Unit E), which includes the old mill ponds and crumbling berm holding ponds back from a rising ocean and the forested strip along Hwy 1 opposite Safeway has no approved action plan for remediation. 

If you are interested in more background, detail, and the very real situation, here are additional sources. Reports correspondence between all parties can be found on www. savenoyoheadlands.com. 

The Fort Bragg Headlands Consortium  is a team of scientists and professionals whose experience, training, education, and principles motivate them to look beyond rampant rumor, political hype, marketing language, and corporate greed and dig deeper for the truth. See Bill Lemos story "When the  Berm Bursts" or Dave Jensen's  "The Obfuscation of Averaging"  Lemos's article including pictures of the rickety struture built of flotsam and already condemned by the Derpartment of Dam Safety that protects the Pacific from  human ignorance, greed, disdain.... You decide. It depends on the decade we are talking about. Dave, along with a number of local experts and scientists, spend a great deal of time peeling back the layers of nonobjective studies, lengthy delays, and bottom line priority over science to come up with inadequate findings and declarations such as "The site is completely cleaned." The sign below, posted by Mendocino Railroad looks unsurprisingly like the ones posted for two decades by  G-P|Koch. With the exception of the brilliant work and persistence of the City of Fort Bragg in building the Coastal Trail (Fort Bragg's biggest tourist attraction), coastal residents and visitors would have no access to the Ocean in Fort Bragg. As it is the gate to most of the headlands is still chained.