Lonely Lompoc Looking for a Lift : Shuttle Woes Leave City Aiming for Tourism, Farming

Bruce Nix is getting a little tired of this small city being declared a Space Age ghost town.

Since word came last month that the space shuttle launch complex at nearby Vandenberg Air Force Base would be put on “caretaker” status until 1992, Nix and many others here have been fighting back against the impression that this city of about 30,000 is at death’s doorstep.

Downplaying the News

Despite the fact that at least several hundred jobs eventually will be lost, Nix, who is president of the Chamber of Commerce, and others have been trying to downplay the news. Without much success, they admit.

Nix, for one, seems certain that media reports have convinced the world outside this agricultural valley, about 50 miles northwest of Santa Barbara, that residents are boarding up windows and preparing for a mass exodus.

While agreeing there is some cause for worry, Nix believes the obituaries of Lompoc are premature.

“The City of Lompoc is not going to dry up and blow away. . . . I think right now the people here are concerned (about the shuttle), but if you read the paper, and the way the Lompoc Valley is being presented, it’s almost like we’re dead already,” Nix said the other day at the supermarket he owns.

Nix is one of many residents who have been learning the price of fame.

When the Air Force began operations at Vandenberg in the late 1950s, Lompoc became inextricably linked to space and national defense. Its fortunes--real and imagined--have soared and crashed like Vandenberg’s rockets and test missiles, leaving residents alternately giddy from high-flying affluence and nauseous from rapid descents into economic stagnation.

And some residents are fed up with such abrupt changes in course. They’ve begun looking for ways to get the city off rockets and on to a more dependable vehicle to prosperity.

Shuttle Launch Delayed

It’s a way of thinking that’s been reinforced by the knowledge that an important date has already come and gone. Last month Lompoc and its valley hoped to host 1 million or more visitors for the first West Coast launch of a space shuttle. That hope died with the crew of space shuttle Challenger in January’s explosion.

But while there’s general agreement that Lompoc--also well known for the flower-seed industry that has turned the valley into a patchwork of brightly colored fields--needs to find a new path, there is widespread disagreement about which route should be taken.

Some see this city and valley with a total population of about 50,000 as a potential mecca for tourists, industry and commuters from elsewhere in Santa Barbara County, lured by the area’s comparatively cheap housing. They want to see the city attain an identity independent of Vandenberg and an economy diverse enough to survive any single source of economic turbulence. And they maintain that development already has assured that the area will be less hard hit by the shuttle cutbacks than it was when other government projects left Vandenberg.

To County Supervisor DeWayne Holmdahl, who represents the Lompoc area, the further delay of shuttle flights from Vandenberg “reinforced what we’ve all been saying and I’ve been saying it to the other supervisors, that we need something other than the military to depend on. You’re always going to have this. It’s always been that way.”

Local real estate agent Jack Hunter is one of the many who wants to change perceptions of the city. “The outside media perceives Lompoc as this great missile complex with 200 clapboard houses around it,” Hunter said. “The community is working very, very hard to change this image.”

However, others say Lompoc Valley is already overbuilt and that golf courses, space museums and other projects will obliterate an agricultural oasis, destroying a rural way of life in favor of a small-scale parody of Los Angeles.

Robert Hibbits, a 77-year-old farmer whose father began farming in the valley just after the turn of the century, is one of those who prefers obscurity and agriculture to fame and growth.

“The Lompoc Valley is a small valley (about 3 miles by 10 miles) and if you’re going to keep the farmland, you have to keep practically all of it. It isn’t like the San Joaquin Valley or even the Salinas Valley where you have so much land you might be able to waste a little of it. . . . Of course, the history of all these good valleys is that they get covered up with houses. But somewhere along the line we hope there’ll be a stopping place, and we hope that that’s going to be here.”

His son Art declared the issue is whether the Lompoc Valley will be known as “the valley of the flowers or the former valley of the flowers.”

Said Supervisor Holmdahl: “You have a lot of people who don’t want the spotlight. The interesting part about it, it’s not only old-timers who don’t want the spotlight, a lot of the newcomers don’t want the notoriety either.”

Holmdahl and Hunter are convinced that growth, in one form or another, will keep Lompoc on the map until the shuttle program gets going again.

“You’re not going to stop it (growth),” Holmdahl said. “There’s no way it can be stopped now. Vandenberg is here, the shuttle is here and it’s going to be coming back.”

Ironically, the dimensions of the shuttle cutback aren’t likely to be known for a while. An Air Force spokesman at Vandenberg said the layoffs won’t begin until the middle of next year when the $3.3-billion launch facility is completed, adding that it’s estimated that as many as 1,700 of the 3,000 shuttle workers could lose their jobs.

The base employs about 15,000 civilian and military personnel. Published accounts of the layoffs, based on a variety of sources, have varied from 400 to 1,800. Chamber president Nix and others insist that the number of jobs lost will prove to be about 500. The last estimate of unemployment in the Lompoc area, made early this year, was 7%, down from 11% in 1980, before construction of shuttle facilities at Vandenberg began.

Moreover, President Reagan’s recent approval of construction of a new fourth shuttle seems to have boosted the optimism quotient. Last week Holmdahl said he had been heartened by the news, adding that rumors are already flying that the first shuttle flight from Vandenberg may be as soon as 1990 or 1991.

Looking Toward Tourism

Mayor Andrew Salazar maintains that by the time the shuttle cuts hit Lompoc, tourism will offset any economic loss.

“We have never really marketed tourism here per se ,” Salazar said. The mayor and others say Lompoc can take advantage of local attractions, namely the fields of flowers that bloom for much of the year as well as the annual summer flower festival, a new professional golf course that is scheduled to open this fall a few miles from the city, the La Purisima Mission, which attracts 110,000 visitors annually, and a wealth of motels, most of which have opened since last fall.

In fact, the motels, which were built at least partly in anticipation of shuttle-launch crowds, have become ammunition for both sides of the debate. Boosters say motel space, which skyrocketed from about 400 to 1,200 rooms in less than a year, means Lompoc can compete with nearby Santa Maria and Solvang for tourist and business travel dollars. Skeptics and growth enthusiasts such as Holmdahl contend that some of the motels are bound to fail, even if more tourists come to Lompoc.

While admitting that the fate of the motels remains to be seen, George King, manager of the 156-room Embassy Suites which opened in May, said a hotel-and-motel association is being formed to promote tourism. King also said that Vandenberg-related business promises to remain strong because the base is the center of a number of other programs--including testing of strategic missiles--besides the shuttle.

“People were saying, ‘What are you going to do with a 156-room hotel in Lompoc?’ I said, ‘I’m going to fill it,’ ” King said, noting that the motel has been filling rooms well ahead of projections this summer, as much as 89% of capacity.

Within the next couple of years, valley officials are also hoping the local economy will benefit from construction of a facility that will supply offshore oil rigs. Holmdahl estimated the supply base will employ about 150 workers, plus an additional 250 to 300 on the offshore rigs themselves.

A Growing City

Moreover, Mayor Salazar expects the city to grow. Sometime this fall, the mayor said he expects the city to annex 300 acres just north of the current boundary. The city also has a 120-acre industrial park and is seeking light industry for that site, city planning director King Leonard said.

Leonard said the city has committed itself to not expanding into prime agricultural land, primarily the flower and vegetable fields to the west and east of the city.

If it doesn’t get more space, the city will soon have no room for housing or industry, he said.

Leonard conceded that the housing vacancy rate is “a bit on the high side” at 5% to 7%, partly because much of the city’s housing is in rental units serving short-term residents. But real estate agent Hunter and wife Lawnae said single-family home sales are strong, thanks to an influx of county residents who have been attracted by housing, which starts in the $80,000 range--half as costly as housing in Santa Barbara. Prices more than offset many new residents’ 50-minute commute to Santa Barbara, they said.

Although it will be years before Lompoc will see a shuttle launch, Salazar is betting that he can raise $10 million for a space museum that is to be built on a 145-acre site which has already been acquired. In fact, Salazar, whose full-time job is as director of engineering at Vandenberg’s Western Space and Missile Center, said he won’t be running for re-election this fall so that he can spearhead the museum fund-raising drive.

Salazar said $60,000 has been raised and he hopes to substantially increase that amount with a November fund raiser. The first phase of the museum, which will include an IMAX movie theater, would open in three years, he said.

Those who oppose or want to limit growth say that hopes for tourism through a space museum and other attractions, boosts in the local economy from oil and possibly other industries and the general optimism expressed by area civic leaders is a smoke screen. Much if not all of the economic life-savers are not yet tangible, they point out. Furthermore, they say public optimism may mask private fears that Lompoc is heading for an economic disaster similar to the one it experienced when the Manned Orbiting Laboratory project was canceled more than a decade ago.

And, they add, Lompoc is about to pay for an orgy of shuttle-related growth that was ill-advised and poorly planned.

Carol Nash, who has lived in Lompoc since 1961 and whose husband works at NASA, said she has no quarrel with growth but thinks that local history and the flower fields have been neglected in the rush for a shuttle payoff.

“It’s not a question of not growing. It’s just that they’re willing to toss out so much of what you need to make a community valuable,” she said.

Hills Shrouded in Fog

Nash said she never took seriously the talk of shuttle enthusiasts who saw the valley raking in a windfall profit from tourists. In fact, she said, the valley’s frequent fogs and the hills that screen Lompoc from Vandenberg would have made shuttle watching a disappointing affair. Nash lamented the fact that the character of the city has changed since she came, noting that the flower fields inside the city limits have disappeared under houses and streets. She also expressed regret that one of the area’s flower-seed producers left the valley last year.

However, Kim Bodger of Bodger Seeds Ltd., said a competing company’s decision to leave the valley was based more on the economics of the business than Lompoc’s growth. But over the years there has been “a definite reduction in flower acreage,” he said.

Michael Benedict, who operates the Sanford & Benedict Winery and said most development “seems to be opportunistic. It anticipates expansion at the Air Force base.”

Hopes for a big payoff from the shuttle “struck me as silly from the beginning,” he said, because the orbiters were to carry secret military payloads and the launches will not be the public events that launches from Cape Canaveral in Florida were.

“There’s a lot of desperation in the town now because this big balloon they hoped to take a ride on has popped,” Benedict said.

There seems to be little question that Lompoc hoped to ride the shuttle to a new identity, one that would put it alongside more glamorous Santa Barbara, about 50 miles to the southeast.

Supervisor Holmdahl said he has told less-growth-minded supervisors: ‘We’re going to take over control of the county. . . . We want to be recognized, we want to be part of the County of Santa Barbara and we’re going to set some standards for the county.”

And wine maker Benedict conceded that economics are on the side of those who want to see Lompoc grow. Many who live on the land are fighting the same problems that bedevil farmers elsewhere in the country and would “love to sell out for big profits” to developers, he said.