FORT BRAGG, CA., 11/8/26 — The state has $1 million for cities, tribes, harbor districts and nonprofits that can watch a beach, a bluff or a kelp bed through what forecasters say could be a record El Niño, and tell the state what they see. Applications were due Friday night. No Fort Bragg or Mendocino County agency or group had announced plans to ask for it.
The California Ocean Protection Council said it would look at late proposals until Friday, Nov. 13. The grants run about $50,000 to $250,000, for up to a year, to pay for “rapid monitoring, assessment, and targeted intervention” on what the El Niño does to the coast and ocean. The money comes from Proposition 4, the climate bond voters passed in 2024.
Cities, harbor districts, tribes, public universities and nonprofits can apply. The council’s call says the El Niño could bring “more frequent and severe coastal flooding, beach and dune erosion, bluff instability, and impacts to coastal habitats, infrastructure, communities, and public access.” Applicants get points for whether they can tell state managers about “the nature, scope, scale, and potential contamination risks, where applicable, of an emerging threat.”
The council recently told its subscribers there may be more. The State Coastal Conservancy “is considering an additional $1 million in funding to support projects through this solicitation, pending approval at its December 3, 2026, board meeting.” The conservancy’s stated priority for its share is comparing natural and armored shorelines “particularly in San Francisco Bay and Southern California.”
A county with no money
On Oct. 6, Travis Kilmer, Mendocino County’s chief recovery resiliency officer, told the Board of Supervisors that the governor’s Sept. 21 El Niño emergency came with no funding attached. “The state was very clear with us,” he said. “There are no funds we can tap into through that at this point.” Supervisor Madeline Cline said, “The state is putting us in a position to be reactive instead of proactive.” Then interim Chief Executive Officer Sara Pierce said the greatest impact on the coast would likely come during the king tides, which fall Nov. 24-26, Dec. 23-25 and Jan. 21-22.
The council’s fund isn’t part of that emergency. The council approved it Sept. 18, three days before the governor’s proclamation. It handed the award decisions to its executive director, Jenn Eckerle, so the money could go out without waiting for the next quarterly meeting. She is due to report the awards to the council Dec. 8. The council also kept the right to fund work nobody proposed, “should staff identify a clear need that is not addressed by proposals received through the call.”
The council has already made one award through delegated authority, and it went south: $199,380 to UC Santa Cruz to monitor kelp at 12 sites in Monterey Bay.
The Mill Pond and its Nov. 17 deadline
On the old Georgia-Pacific mill site, Pond 8, the Mill Pond, holds about 106,000 cubic yards of dioxin-contaminated sediment behind a dam with a crib wall of old redwood timbers facing the sea. The state Division of Safety of Dams calls the dam “seismically deficient.” Mendocino Railway, which runs the Skunk Train and is responsible for cleaning up the site, owes the state Department of Toxic Substances Control answers by Nov. 17 on its cleanup plan. One of the state’s questions is how the dam and the beach berm in front of it would hold up against rising seas. One week after that, the first king tide reaches Soldier Bay.
Nothing in the council’s call would pay to fix the dam or haul out the sediment. “Laboratory-based projects are not eligible,” it says. What it could pay for is field work. Somebody would watch the beach and the outflow and tell the state what’s happening. The council’s one precedent for money this fast is $275,000 it gave the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project in early 2025 to track water quality, sediments and wildlife after the Los Angeles fires.
The Fort Bragg City Council’s latest agendas had nothing on El Niño, storms or the grant. The Noyo Harbor District’s Oct. 8 packet was full of storm money, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s approval of $2.9 million of the $4.1 million the district asked for to build a sediment containment cell. It had nothing on the council’s fund. The district does run a wave and temperature buoy at Noyo with UC Davis’ Bodega Marine Laboratory. And in October, it approved a fiscal sponsorship agreement with the Noyo Center for Marine Science, a nonprofit, because the district “is not a 501(c) 3.” The center’s executive director, Sheila Semans, was “senior staff to the California Ocean Protection Council” at the Coastal Conservancy before she came to Fort Bragg, according to the center’s website.
The conservancy’s old plan for the dam
The Coastal Conservancy has had a hand in the Mill Pond since 2005. That year, its board approved $4,165,000 so the city could buy about 35 acres of headlands on the mill site, a purchase that closed in 2009. In 2012, it added $1,362,000 for the Ka Kahleh coastal trail and the four-acre Johnson property on Soldier Point. Its October 2012 staff report said the middle of the site “will be closed to the public while the former Mill Pond is remediated and the structurally unsound Mill Pond Dam is removed,” and it expected the north and south parklands to be joined by 2016.
The dam is still there.
The project manager on that 2012 grant, Joel Gerwein, is now the conservancy’s North Coast regional manager. The conservancy’s Dec. 3 agenda hasn’t been posted yet. For its last six meetings it posted agendas about two weeks ahead, which would put this one around Nov. 19, two days after the railway’s answers are due.
The North Coast asks not to be forgotten
The written public comment the council posted with the item came from Monika Krach, executive director of the Greater Farallones Association. She wrote to the council, OPC for short, on Sept. 17 to “encourage OPC to ensure that North Coast bull kelp ecosystems and established regional monitoring and restoration partnerships are included in both the scientific coordination and rapid-response investments.”
The council’s own staff report says this year’s ocean is “closely matching the disastrous conditions of 2014-2016,” when a marine heat wave and El Niño wiped out most of the North Coast’s bull kelp. The state’s response to that collapse came in August 2020, when the council put $500,000 into paying commercial divers to clear purple urchins out of Noyo Bay and Caspar Cove. The Natural Resources Agency said then that “more than 95 percent of the offshore kelp canopy in Sonoma and Mendocino Counties has been lost since 2013.”
The council’s El Niño page says “a repeat event could undo years of recovery progress.”