Mendocino County’s little conservation fund has big ideas and a shrinking wallet

MENDOCINO CO., 4/19/26 — At the Mendocino County Fish and Game Commission’s April grant hearing, commissioners spent the better part of an afternoon listening to some of the most ambitious habitat restoration pitches the North Coast has produced in years: a plan to wipe American bullfrogs out of the Ten Mile Creek basin by 2036, a red abalone captive-breeding lab in Noyo Harbor, a kelp restoration project in Caspar Cove meant to carry on the legacy of a recently deceased diving advocate, steel bollards to finally keep trucks out of salmon redds on the Garcia River, and a wildlife telemetry antenna that would fill a 150-mile gap in the Pacific Flyway monitoring network.

Except they have $80,000 to spread across all of it.