California Work Program for Young Is Threatened

MOUNT TAMALPAIS STATE PARK, Calif. — An hour before sunrise, Jason Prue, a shaggy-haired member of a California Conservation Corps work crew, stood scrubbing a breakfast dish in the rain, shaking off a night of sleeping in a wet tent and loving every minute of it.

“I like working in the rain,” Mr. Prue, 21, said on Thursday. “It’s beautiful. And it’s a free shower.”

But Mr. Prue, who joined the corps after living in his car for a stint, and hundreds like him could soon be jobless. A budget crisis has put the California Conservation Corps, the country’s largest and oldest work program for mostly hard-luck teenagers and young adults, on the chopping block.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to eliminate the program as the state struggles with a $42 billion budget deficit. Under the governor’s proposed budget, the state would take back the $34 million in general funds it spends on the corps each year, though some money would be funneled into work corps programs run by local governments and nonprofit groups.

“The expense of the program did not justify keeping them,” said Sandy Cooney, a spokesman for the state’s Natural Resources Agency, which oversees the corps. “This is about making hard decisions.”

That the governor might gut the corps even as President Obama’s new administration evokes themes of public works, national service and overcoming odds galls some youth advocates, who say the program serves as a model for the type of “green collar” jobs promised by the Congressional stimulus package.

“To cut off the opportunity for disadvantaged kids to get their feet on the first rung of the ladder to future green careers is criminal,” said Van Jones, author of the best-selling “Green Collar Economy” and founding president of the Oakland-based nonprofit agency Green for All.

Mr. Jones said the California program was the prototype for at least 13 similar corps in other states and an inspiration for conservation work programs being considered by the Obama administration.

“How can you be a green governor and be taking the tools to green the state out of the hands of young people?” Mr. Jones said.

California’s program is modeled on the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put three million young, unemployed men to work from 1933 to 1942. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “tree army” or “soil soldiers” planted more than two billion trees, restored eroding soil in the Dust Bowl states, developed 800 new state parks, erected one million miles of fences, and built bridges, roads and 13,000 miles of hiking trails in places like Yosemite and Grand Canyon National Parks.

“This was without a doubt the most popular New Deal program; it radically transformed the landscape of this country,” said Neil Maher, an associate professor of history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University and author of “Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement.”

Each year the California corps — whose motto is “Hard work, low pay, miserable conditions ... and more!” — employs more than 1,300 young people between the ages of 18 and 25 for a year of hard labor in far-flung corners of the state. They restore salmon habitat in the redwoods, clear brush from highways and build trails in state parks. Most are unemployed young men hailing from poor urban neighborhoods, and nearly half have not graduated from high school.

Though he has a high school diploma, Mr. Prue said he was living as a drifter in an old Dodge Intrepid with a dog named Buddy before joining. “I decided I needed to do something, to find a job I loved,” he said, standing on a muddy slope, surrounded by the pinging sound of pickaxes hitting rock. “This is it.”

Plans to terminate the program have united an eclectic group of advocates, including those who benefit from the corps’ work, like off-road-vehicle enthusiasts, hikers, firefighters and sport fishermen. They are writing to the governor to urge that the program not be eliminated.

Last week, four former governors signed a letter urging the same, including Attorney General Jerry Brown. Mr. Brown founded the corps program as governor in 1976 because, he said, “kids need to get out of the concrete of the urban world and encounter the complexities of nature.”

While legislators continued to wrangle over what to cut and where to tax, a corps crew under a canopy of oak and fir trees on Mount Tamalpais hauled rock, rolled wheelbarrows brimming with dirt and hacked at stumps, carving a wheelchair-accessible trail in the mountainside.