Big Bear : Mountain Community Agonizes Over Choice-- Develop or Preserve?

It was close to dusk and the pine trees threw long shadows against banks of snow edging the road where a miles-long procession of cars and buses was creeping down the mountain.

Many local merchants had been waiting for this moment. Behind the rustic facades of the ski rental shops, gift stores and specialty restaurants, cash registers were ringing up purchases made by weekend tourists who had delayed their departure to avoid the traffic.

Many local residents, meanwhile, dealt with the congestion by avoiding it. Most townsfolk had done their shopping in mid-week, before the onslaught of skiers, hikers and city slickers out for a day’s drive in the woods, and were holed up in their cabins.

It was a typical Saturday afternoon at Big Bear Lake. Once there was a slower pace of life here, even on snowy holiday weekends, according to those who sought refuge in the quiet mountain retreat more than 15 years ago. All that has changed now.

Convenient Location

The fact that Big Bear Lake, nestled in a long valley 6,800 feet above sea level in the San Bernardino Mountains, is only about a two-hour drive from 10 million people in Southern California is both the community’s lifeblood and its bane.

Each year, about 5 million visitors surge into Big Bear Valley, bringing with them the dollars that keep the wheels of commerce turning. But they also bring urban-style traffic jams, vandalism and increasing environmental damage to the surrounding San Bernardino National Forest.

With the population explosion in the flatlands of San Bernardino and Riverside counties below the mountains, local planners see no respite, forecasting even greater demands on the area’s two-lane mountain roads, sewage disposal facilities, water supply and law enforcement authorities.

The Southern California Assn. of Governments, in a study released in January, predicted that the annual number of visitors to the area will jump to more than 6 million by the year 2000. Over the same period, year-round population in the area, now about 15,000, is expected to reach 19,000, most of it jammed into narrow strips of land on either side of the lake in a 20-mile-long valley, according to a recent study by the Marina del Rey research firm of Williams-Kuebelbeck & Associates Inc.

Push for Development

This comes amid an ambitious push by civic and business leaders for even more development in an effort to change Big Bear from a primarily low-cost weekend resort to a place where families and upper-middle class professionals might spend a week or more.

Plans are under way to widen the main highway through town, beginning in 1988, and city officials also would like to expand the existing commercial district, encourage construction of condominiums and hotels around ski facilities, add parking lots, provide tram service or other transportation alternatives to cars and establish a commuter air shuttle at the local airport.

The prospect of more development, however, has prompted complaints from longtime residents, who contend that the area already is strained to the limit. These people fear that the valley is rapidly losing its attractive rural character and is on its way to becoming just another city that happens to be in the mountains.

They note that about 69% of the land within the city limits of Big Bear Lake already is occupied and building is pushing eastward into unincorporated regions of the valley. The U.S. government owns 29,791 acres of protected San Bernardino National Forest land in the area. That leaves 14,000 acres for private use. Of that, much of the easily accessible relatively flat land that has urban services has already been developed, county planners said.

New Hotels Foreseen

Nonetheless, Big Bear Mayor John Eminger confidently predicts construction of “at least one, maybe two, new hotels” within five years. About 75% of the valley’s existing motels and lodges were built before 1970.

As a first step, the state has earmarked $1.2 million for widening a two-mile stretch of California 18, the 61-year-old two-lane road that winds through Big Bear Lake. It can take as long as 20 minutes to make a left-hand turn onto the road out of town during peak traffic periods, and even Eminger concedes that congestion is so bad that the widening only may make California 18 “a four-lane parking lot instead of a two-lane parking lot.”

“We should have been at this highway situation 20 years ago,” said Jim Riffenburgh, 51, owner of Riffenburgh Lumber Co. Inc. and longtime civic and business activist in the area. “There’s so many damn pine trees here now, we shouldn’t worry about losing a few to improve the roads.”

Riffenburgh’s views seem to be in the majority in a community that Eminger describes as “close-knit” and “a little redneck.” Like about 53% of the registered voters in Big Bear Lake, Riffenburgh is a Republican. Like 97.3% of the resident population, he is white.

Has Thriving Business

Unlike most residents here, Riffenburgh operates a thriving business. Big Bear Valley, which contains one of the most heavily used lakes in Southern California, is a relatively poor area heavy with seasonal, part-time work.

According to U.S. census figures for 1980, about 20% of Big Bear Lake’s population of about 15,000 is over 55 years of age. Many live on fixed incomes. Moreover, 12.7% of the households in the area in 1980 were below the national poverty level for a family of three, compared with 11.4% for San Bernardino County as a whole.

But, even though community leaders tout the economic benefits of their move to change the community, it has created a widening rift among residents.

On one side are those determined to forge ahead with development with fingers crossed about the consequences.

For example, Ron Bangert, a real estate broker and a spokesman for San Bernardino County Supervisor John Joyner, in whose district the unincorporated east half of Big Bear Valley lies, acknowledged that widening the road, building hotels and a convention center, among other things, could create even more problems.

“These things probably will increase urban pressures,” Bangert said. “But they will also generate revenues that will help mitigate the pressures they create.”

Logic Scares Him

“That kind of logic scares the hell out of me,” said Chet Naron, 64, a retired safety engineer for the City of Los Angeles who moved to Big Bear Lake in 1977 “to get away from the rat race.”

“We’re going to literally build ourselves . . . right out of what makes Big Bear attractive in the first place,” he said. “I think we are teetering on the brink of disaster.”

Tom Atchley, a historian and teacher at the University of California, Riverside, who is helping write a book about the area, agreed, and said, “In the last 15 years, development has gone crazy,” he said. “It is hard to believe that a community is doing this to itself.”

Problems Growing

Many problems already are apparent in the mountain community. Vandalism--even at what used to be considered remote Forest Service stations--and off-road vehicle use have become serious problems.

It is widely believed in Big Bear Lake that skiers are to blame for most of the traffic. But Odell said a study conducted by the U.S. Forest Service in 1979 “showed that about 17% (of the winter traffic) is due to skiers.” The bulk of the remaining cars belong to fishermen, sightseers, campers and weekend residents.

Traffic is not the only cause of complaints heard in Big Bear Lake about the nearby ski resorts. Some merchants and residents complain that skiers rarely venture into Big Bear Lake to spend their money.

Major Employers

But Tim Cohee, a spokesman for Snow Summit, a ski resort, disagreed and noted that the resorts are major employers of seasonal workers in the area.

“We employ about 500 people on weekends, most of them local residents,” added Benno Nager, vice president of operations at Goldmine Ski Resort, about a mile southeast of Big Bear Lake. “I think the town realizes that the ski areas are a major factor in the economy of Big Bear Valley.”

Both Nager and Cohee said they plan to increase their facilities’ capacity by 22% to 35% in the near future and both support further development in the area.

Without additional full-service lodging and restaurants, Nager said, the area cannot attract the kind of “young executives and professionals . . . who will spend money here. I’ve got nothing against fishermen, but they don’t leave any money behind,” Nager said.

It’s people like Kathy Sullivan, 24, of Malibu who local business leaders wish would come up and see them more often. Loading ski equipment into a late-model station wagon parked at the base of Ski Summit, Sullivan said she and her 29-year-old husband, Paul, took to the slopes here because they only had a day to ski and “it was a lot closer than Mammoth.”

The Sullivans spent about $80 that day on ski lift tickets and lunch, among other things. But dinner in one of the restaurants of Big Bear Lake was not one of them. They try to avoid driving through town, she said, “because it takes a long time to get any place in the traffic.”