On a recent Sunday, the Marconi Conference Center opened the doors of its capacious Buck Hall. Hog Island oysters were being shucked and Lagunitas beer lay chilled over ice as members of the Marshall community mingled and plans outlining the center’s reformation were displayed throughout the hall.
In November, the center—a 62-acre historic state park above Tomales Bay—began offering its meeting rooms to community organizations free of charge and renting its 40 single overnight rooms to the public.
At the same time, rental costs for conferences have gone up. The rooms and other facilities have undergone renovations and the chef is expanding her farm-to-table program.
These efforts stem, in part, from financial instability. According to tax records from the last four years, the center is losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. It is also operating on a three-year contract from California State Parks, after its 25-year agreement expired last year. In January, the center extended its contract for three years, until 2020.
“My hope is that, over time, we will become a place that locals will use,” Amy Beilharz, the center’s executive director since last summer, said. “Whether it’s a yoga instructor or the Geography of Hope Conference, I’d hope our place would become the place that people would work out of. There are so many wonderful things going on around here, and right now they’re a little disconnected. If we could connect them, that would be wonderful.”
Hoping to shed the image of what she called “the silent entity on the hill,” Ms. Beilharz said Marconi has begun to offer its meeting rooms free of charge for use by local organizations. The East Shore Planning Group is now holding its monthly board meetings there, she said.
“If you have a local group that needs a meeting place and is not staying overnight, I’m happy to make our meeting spaces available,” she said.
The center has also embarked on a partnership program with local business—25 have joined so far. Under the program, Marconi purchases products and services from local vendors and then markets the businesses with fliers to conference guests and on its website.
The center has also begun renovatations. The rooms have been refreshed with mattress toppers made of wool from from Casari Ranch in Point Arena and blankets from Coyuchi.
For the last few years, Joanne Fusco has been the head chef for the center, which she said now sources about 65 percent of its food from local providers. “Once a week I pick one or two local producers and then I go out, talk to them, buy the products and then develop a recipe,” she said. “Farm-to-table is not just an expression; especially in Tomales! A lot of local producers there don’t have distributors.”
At the open house there was a spread of cheeses that Ms. Fusco individually picked up the morning before the event. “People don’t really realize how many cheese producers there are within a three-mile half-radius,” she said.
Ms. Fusco is hoping to both overhaul the menu so that it is entirely locally sourced and expand the center’s restaurant to allow locals to come in for meals.
“We want to be a showcase for West Marin instead of this place people come to for a conference and never really get a sense of where they’ve been,” Ms. Beilharz said.
She added that she’s negotiating with the parks department for a longer operating contract.
Vince Anibale, interim superintendent for the State Parks Bay Area district, said the relationship with the Marconi Conference Center is in a good place.
“No complaints on our end,” he said. “They’re a good partner.”
The Marconi Conference Center opened its doors in January 1990 after the property was gifted to the California State Parks Foundation by the San Francisco Foundation, with help from the Buck Trust. The S.F.F. had purchased the property in 1980 from the Synanon Foundation, then a Santa Monica-based drug rehabilitation organization, which had made Marshall its world headquarters.
Between 1964 and 1980, Synanon members built residences, a warehouse, a geodesic dome, a firehouse, an airstrip and a dump on the property. Prior to Synanon, the land was a bustling center of progressive technology. The Marshall Receiving Station for the American Marconi Company housed radio technology that made almost instant communications possible throughout the Pacific.
To learn more out about renting rooms or using meeting rooms, visit marconiconference.org or call (415) 663.9020.