Conservation Corps traded Ukiah cabins for $68 million campus in Willits

WILLITS, CA., 8/22/26 — For more than three decades, the California Conservation Corps housed its Mendocino County crews in cabins on an old dairy farm south of Ukiah, bunks the young people helped hammer together in the 1980s. Last September, the corps handed them keys to a $68 million campus: seven dormitories, a gym, a dining hall and a solar array on 27 acres of a wetland parcel on the east side of Willits.

The corps’ Mendocino Center opened at 600 East Hill Road on Sept. 26, 2025, with tribal dancers from Round Valley, the Sherwood Valley Band of Pomo Indians, the local VFW post and Mayor Tom Allman on hand. It capped a decade of work: state budget records trace the money from $200,000 for a site search in the 2015-16 budget through a $61.6 million construction appropriation, about $68 million in all. The construction contract alone came to $55.7 million.

Nothing is left to build, CCC District Director John Button said in a phone interview Thursday. The campus is “a done deal,” he said, and the first year has gone to working out the quirks of a new facility he calls a clear technology upgrade over the old one.

Filling it with the corps is another matter. The center is budgeted for 80 corps members year-round, Button said, and houses 63 to 65. “It’s not for lack of recruits,” he said — the center is just “running really low.”

The corps takes adults 18 to 25, and military veterans to 29, for a year of paid conservation work and schooling. Corps members who live in the dorms give up $500 a month from their pay for room and board. Statewide, the corps funds about 1,450 positions; a legislative review in 2018 found only about a quarter of corps members finish a full year.

Fire crews and salmon habitat restoration

The work hasn’t waited on a full house. The center runs two wildland fire hand crews with Cal Fire on a rotation that keeps one ready to roll every day of the week, and both went south to the fire that burned near Hopland in August. A third crew is in Idaho now, supporting a fire camp.

The non-fire crews spend July through the end of October on salmon habitat restoration in the coastal watersheds along Highway 20 between Willits and Fort Bragg, though this month they too were pulled onto fire support for a two-week assignment. The center’s project list for the year includes fisheries work on Willits Creek and coho restoration on Big River. Closer to home, Button said, crews have done fuel-reduction work at Brooktrails, helped on the Brooktrails community garden in the spring and turned out as volunteers for town events.

This spring, corps members and lead staff member Tori McCann built the start of a native plant nursery, which Button said the center hopes to run in partnership with the Sherwood Valley and Big Valley rancherias — teaching corps members and locals to collect seed and propagate native plants. That part isn’t running yet.

But the kitchen garden is. “It is off the hook right now,” Button said — hot peppers, bell peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, dill, parsley, all of it feeding the culinary program’s salad bar.

The campus replaced the corps’ center at 2600 Old River Road in Ukiah, a 6.7-acre former dairy farm that housed crews for more than 35 years, with a fisheries program for veterans run with NOAA among the programs that made the move. The old property went to the Mendocino County Office of Education, Button said, which has turned the former rec and culinary building into a nursing-training lab — computerized patients that score the trainees’ work. He hasn’t been inside since the conversion.

The town the campus landed in has had a harder year than its newest institution. In March, five months after the ribbon-cutting, the Willits City Council declared a fiscal emergency and laid off employees, as the Voice reported.

Allman, the former county sheriff, joined the council in late 2024 — in time to welcome the corps in September and defend the layoffs in March. Ask him what the campus has meant to the city between those two dates and he extols the program. “The three C’s to Willits are like manna from heaven,” he said in a phone interview Thursday. “They show up. They have energy. They’re polite. They’re putting money into our economy.”

Allman said he has been out to the campus about a dozen times in its first year. In town, corps members turn out for nonprofit events like Frontier Days, he said, working trash detail and traffic control. “They just do what needs to be done.”

The economics he described are small and direct: hotel rooms booked when corps members’ families visit, a vacant lot turned into a campus, food-delivery orders from a facility that, he allowed, already has “just incredible cooks” of its own. The one entry on the other side of the ledger — the campus sits on state land, off the city’s property tax rolls — he conceded and answered in the same breath. “That’s true,” he said. “They’re on solar, so they’re not impacting our electricity grid.”

Some of the corps members, Allman said, had never lived outside a city before Willits. “It’s just such a positive interaction every time,” he said. “It’s a mutual, positive relationship.”

A year in, the fire crews hold their seven-day rotation, and the native plant nursery is still a plan. The garden came in first. “I was down there yesterday,” Button said, “grazing, grabbing some cucumbers.”