North Bay Construction Corps training young people for jobs in depleted construction industry

Devon Litchfield, 18, is the kind of youth Sonoma County desperately needs.

The Windsor High School graduate has his sights set on a career in commercial plumbing or another construction trade. That expertise is in great demand in the North Bay, particularly after the 2017 wildfires.

But Litchfield, who last week completed a construction trades boot camp, also said he sees Oregon in his future.

“I’m definitely moving out of California because it’s too expensive,” Litchfield said. “I don’t want to live with multiple people. I want to live on my own.”

On Friday, Litchfield was one of ?125 young people who completed the North Bay Construction Corps regimen, a five-month internship aimed at educating and training young construction workers. The program’s trainees has grown dramatically in the nearly two years since the fires.

Ironically, with his training, Litchfield is prepared to land an entry level job that could pay up to $22 an hour. That’s twice the state’s minimum wage for companies with 25 or fewer employees, and in some cases more than what some college graduates make straight out of school.

With local home prices and rents continuing to rise, albeit slower than last year at this time, is it enough to keep the next generation of trained house ?framers, plumbers, electricians and ?general contractors in Sonoma County?

“If we’re going to keep them here, the way we do that is by offering them a decent wage,” said Drue Jacobs, coordinator of the Sonoma Valley chapter of the North Bay Construction Corps.

A well-paid trades job could be a step in the right direction for local youths who don’t want to go to college, Jacobs said. Without career technical education like the construction corps training, these young people are likely to stay in minimum wage jobs for years.

Increasingly, he said, Sonoma County and other Bay Area communities are seeing a widening income gap between low-wage and high-wage earners.

“This is hopefully something that’ll bridge that gap,” Jacobs said.

Keith Woods, CEO of the North Coast Builders Exchange, a key partner in the North Bay Construction Corps, said there’s no guarantee the youths trained will remain in the county. At least the training is giving them a fighting chance at making a living wage, he said.

“They’ll start out at 50% percent or more above minimum wage, that’s very encouraging to them,” Woods said. “Most of these students now seek construction as their best opportunity to be able to afford to live in the North Bay. ... These students really have an opportunity, and they know it.”

Ethan Brown, program manager at the Sonoma County Economic Development Board, said Sonoma County needs about 1,000 more residential construction and trades workers by 2025 to keep pace with the area’s current housing development needs.

Brown said the figure, calculated for the economic development board by Moody’s Analytics, takes into account the amount of time it takes to build one housing unit and the number of workers necessary to accomplish that.

North Bay Construction Corps is a partnership between the builders exchange, the Career Technical Education Foundation, or CTE, Sonoma County Office of Education and the Santa Rosa Junior College. The corps receives major funding from the CTE Foundation, formed in 2012 to develop workforce education programs in Sonoma County.

A year later, the foundation received $500,000 from the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors and the John Jordan Foundation. Three months before the October 2017 wildfires, the construction corps graduated its first nine newly trained trades workers.

The following year, the number of graduating interns jumped to 27. Yet by May 2018, the shortage in construction workers had become what county builders and construction industry experts were calling a crisis.

The Tipping Point Community, a Bay Area organization that funds anti-poverty programs and campaigns, gave CTE Foundation a $1 million gift that made it possible to expand the North Bay Construction Corps to four nearby counties - Napa, Marin, Lake and Mendocino.

One site in Marin County, a class at Terra Linda High School, is funded by the Mario Ghilotti Family Foundation and overseen by the Marin Builders Association. Trying to fill the demand for construction workers is imperative, said Ribon Bartholow, director of the North Bay Construction Corps.

“For every five retirees in the construction and trades industry, we have one entering that workforce,” Bartholow said. “We’re filling up the shortage from a while back, but we’ve got a lot of ground to make up for.”

Kathy Goodacre, executive director of the CTE Foundation, said the Tipping Point grant plan calls for training 300 more young people via the construction corps training by 2020. After three years, she said, these students have the potential to earn up to $50 an hour as journeymen in their chosen trade.

On Wednesday, a few dozen construction corps members donned white construction hats and yellow and orange safety vests at a construction site on Round Barn Boulevard, next to the Keysight Technologies campus in Santa Rosa. The young trainees worked on modular homes being built in partnership with Habitat for Humanity, for renters who lost homes during the 2017 wildfire.

The location is one of seven construction sites where corps trainees are working. For years, Habitat for Humanity has tried to address the high cost of housing by helping families build their own homes. In addition to working with the North Bay Construction Corps, the nonprofit builder has launched its own construction training ground.

On Friday, Habitat held a grand opening for a Habitat Center, a residential construction factory and training center in Rohnert Park.

Similarly, the county economic development board is working with SRJC to secure money for a construction training center at the junior college. The plan calls for training 750 construction students a year, Brown said.

The 2017 fires that destroyed 5% of Santa Rosa’s housing stock hurt the local residential real estate market and home building industry in many ways. In the aftermath of the blazes, home prices and rents soared, while the limits of available construction workers and builders have been stretched.

“It’s a sad way to have growth in an industry, to experience those tragic fires,” said Woods of the builders exchange. “Within a few days, the fires created the biggest rebuild effort in the county’s history.”

Woods said the construction and trades industries now are taking any qualified person they can find, and the demand is still there. Efforts to train local youth could pay off greatly, he said.

But “there’s no guarantee they’ll stay,” he said.

For that reason, Brown of the economic development board said it’s wise to train more construction workers than the estimated 1,000 needed by 2025.

“At this point, we need all of the construction training that we can get and all of the qualified individuals on the ground possible,” Brown said.

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 707-521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @pressreno.