FORT BRAGG, CA., 8/14/26 — Fort Bragg is making a run at two big pots of state money — one to finish a stadium the community started building more than three decades ago, the other to turn the C.V. Starr Community Center into a place the coast can depend on when disaster hits.
The prize could top $18 million.
The City Council voted 5-0 on Aug. 10 to move both efforts forward, though neither vote greenlights construction. For Timberwolf Stadium, the city can now begin community outreach and negotiate a site-control agreement with Fort Bragg Unified School District, which owns the property. The project, estimated at up to $8.5 million, would provide an all-weather track and other improvements.
The stadium money would come from Round 5 of California’s Statewide Park Program, which has $188.5 million in Proposition 4 money available statewide. Grants run from $200,000 to $8.5 million, with no local match required.
City Manager Isaac Whippy said the application portal should open by the end of August. Fort Bragg High School football players and track athletes packed the Town Hall gallery for the votes.
At the Starr Center, the council authorized the city to chase either a planning or construction grant. That project, which would expand the Starr Center into a regional resilience hub, is estimated at as much as $10 million.
Fort Bragg has been here before.
The Mendocino Coast Sports Foundation, the volunteer group that built Timberwolf Stadium and opened it in 1999, has twice gone after the same state grant.
The second try nearly landed it.
“The second time we were actually finalists. The state came and visited our site,” said Merle Larson, a former foundation president who coaches track at the high school. “We just missed winning the grant by a few points.”
Now they’re coming back for another shot.
Whippy said an earlier estimate put the stadium project at $6.2 million for a rubberized track, all-weather field and new restrooms. Inflation has likely driven that to $7 million or $8 million.
One expensive piece is already done. The foundation and school district replaced the stadium lights with LEDs, work Larson said had to happen before crews could put down a new track.
The need is hard to miss in winter.
Tara Larson, a 1989 Fort Bragg High graduate who has coached track in town for more than a decade, said the program has grown beyond 125 athletes. They practice on a facility that rain can knock out for months.
“It rains so much that most of the time we are unable to practice on our dirt track and flooded field,” she told the council.
Fort Bragg also travels for every league meet. Automatic timing requires an all-weather track, Larson said, so the track team is not allowed to host league meets at home.
Then there is the stadium’s second job.
City and fire department letters identify Timberwolf Stadium as “the community evacuation center for serious emergencies,” Larson said.
Yet for much of the year, she added, “it’s muddy and wet.”
Councilmember Tess Albin-Smith knows what that costs Fort Bragg beyond high school sports.
Albin-Smith coached girls’ soccer at the high school for 14 years and once ran tournaments that pulled thousands of visitors into town.
“I ran soccer tournaments from 1997 until 2016, brought as many as 5,000 people to town on some of our tournaments,” she said. “I had to stop doing soccer tournaments in 2016 because the fields were not usable. No one would come.”
For Joe Chacon, the sports foundation’s current president, the project spans generations.
“I grew up here in town playing on that field,” he said. “Today I have the opportunity to watch my own children grow up and play on that same field.”
Expanding the Starr Center
Across town, the city is chasing a different grant with a broader emergency mission.
The Strategic Growth Council’s Community Resilience Centers program has roughly $55 million available in its second round. Fort Bragg could seek up to $500,000 for planning, with applications due Sept. 4, or up to $10 million for implementation, due Sept. 25.
The council authorized the city to pursue either.
The clock is tight.
Staff planned to meet with the city’s on-call engineers Aug. 12 to determine whether plans from the Starr Center’s shelved 2016 Phase 3 expansion can be reworked fast enough to compete for the $10 million construction grant. Those plans called for basketball courts and a larger gym.
Moneque Wooden, manager of the C.V. Starr, said the city’s grant writer believes this could be the program’s last funding round for years.
And Wooden has already watched the center become an improvised refuge.
“When the fires happened in Santa Rosa and also in Paradise, I had firefighters coming to the doors of the Starr Center looking for a place just to take a shower and to breathe and to relax,” she said. “The need has only gotten more so.”
Jeff Adair of the Mendocino County Office of Emergency Services toured the Starr Center and backed the concept, Wooden said. She told the council Adair said Mendocino County has no evacuation center equipped to house and support people, particularly evacuees coming from inland communities.
The proposed resilience center would add the machinery of survival: a commercial kitchen, backup power and battery storage, showers, clean-air rooms and food storage.
Wooden said every partner city staff approached agreed to write a letter of support, including the school district, food bank, community garden, West Company and Sherwood Valley tribe.
But the city’s appetite for grants drew some pushback.
“Every time we hear a city meeting, it’s grant this, grant that,” frequent council commenter Paul Clark said. “If we want something bad enough, let’s pay for it ourselves. When was the last time the city actually borrowed money to build something?”
Councilmember Lindy Peters pushed back from the dais.
“Do you think the city of Fort Bragg has enough money to build a big, giant community swimming pool?” he asked.
“So, yeah, we get a lot of grant money. We rely on grant money,” Peters said, arguing that state and federal programs exist in part to give lower-income communities a shot at projects they could never finance alone.
The night’s most pointed question, though, came from a student.
Sam Gitchell told the council that when Timberwolf Stadium was originally built, money intended for the track “went elsewhere.”
“Where did that money go?” he asked.
“We’re not going to answer your question right now,” came the response from the dais.
For now, the city is looking forward — and taking another swing at a project Fort Bragg has been trying to finish for decades.
“Gosh darn it, we’ve come this far,” Peters said. “Let’s get over the hump.”
The city expects to take the Timberwolf Stadium site control agreement to the school board in September. Surveys on both projects are going out to residents.
The City Council meets again at 6 p.m. Monday, Aug. 24, at Town Hall, 363 N. Main St.