Mammoth Lakes Faces a New Era : Sierra Getaway Learning to Handle Urban Woes, Politics, Redevelopment

For many tourists who come for the fishing, mountain bike trails and High Sierra scenery, summer in Mammoth has an idyllic appeal that lasts until the first snow brings skiers speeding up the highway from Southern California.

But the resort and its 4,000 year-round residents have been confronted this summer with evidence that Mammoth Lakes, the first incorporated town in mountainous Mono County, is no longer an escape from the pressures that complicate life in American cities.

Times Change

So far this summer, local headlines have screamed about a drug ring that kidnaped and tried to murder a police source. Trees and meadows will soon give way to three new large developments, including the eastern Sierra’s first urban redevelopment project. And, less than five years since it was formed, the Town Council faces a recall led by disgruntled businessmen and the former mayor.

All might be common occurrences in other California towns and cities, but in Mammoth Lakes they are signs of new times and, to some, a new order. Once a small community of motels and steak houses at the foot of a promising ski mountain, the Mammoth Ski Area has burgeoned into one of America’s largest and the town has grown with it.

A real estate boom, the first since a volcano threat in 1983 that spurred a local recession, is bringing more year-round residents, pushing Mammoth further over the edge from resort to modern American town. The community calendar still includes regular meetings of High Sierra Fly Fishers and volunteer firefighters. But there are also weekly sessions of Alcoholics Anonymous, Adult Children of Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous. A rape crisis center is scheduled to open soon.

“You couldn’t find a married couple with kids when I moved up here,” said Wally Hoffman, publisher and editor of the Mammoth Times, the more colorful of two weekly newspapers in town. Now the schools are filling up.

The most telling sign is not the crime wave, which by urban standards was small and short-lived. Mammoth Lakes police cracked a drug ring and arrested 23 people, including three women charged with trying to beat to death another woman they suspected of working with police.

More explanatory of the upheaval in Mammoth is the effort to recall the Town Council. Officially, recall leaders complain that the town pays its help too much and doesn’t listen to the people. But many people here agree a changing of the guard is behind the dispute.

Became More Sophisticated

“There was a good ol’ boy mentality that has been here forever,” said John Eastman, a Town Council member. “The community demanded a higher level of sophistication.”

The turning point was a move this spring by the Town Council and an aggressive new town manager, Paul Marangella, to stop giving a portion of the 9% tax on condo and motel rentals to a group of local business people. The group is supposed to use the money to promote Mammoth in Southern California.

Around town some feel the group, the Mammoth Lakes Resort Assn., has done its job well. “The MLRA was designed to bring visitors here,” former Mayor Boyd Lemmon says. “We are getting substantially more summer business.”

But others are leery. Three years ago an association executive embezzled more than $100,000 and was sent to state prison. There is no hint of theft now, but the Town Council decided there must be a better way to lure tourists than letting the resort association spend more than $600,000 a year of town taxes on advertising and promotion. “We can’t continue to be unsophisticated,” said Town Councilman Kirk Stapp, a high school government teacher. “We’re in competition with Colorado and other areas.”

Led by Marangella, town officials also questioned the group’s practices, which include using some of the tax money to finance a telephone service that refers skiers to selected motels and condos.

The Last Straw

The resort association challenge was the last straw for business people who dislike the changes in Mammoth Town Hall. “They want to control that money,” said Tom Cage, owner of Village Sports Center and a recall leader. “We incorporated this town for the people, not for bigger government.”

Some animosity stems from the council’s hiring last fall of Marangella, the stocky, intense town manager. He has angered Mammoth old-timers in a variety of ways, from calling for an end to the town’s policy of free child care and proposing a fee for tennis court reservations, to getting free snow boots as part of his contract.

“You can’t imagine how disruptive he has been in this community. It’s unbelievable,” said Lemmon, who was mayor until he resigned from the council in 1986.

Marangella’s most controversial step may have been a written report that alleged the Mono County Grand Jury might investigate threats of retaliation by disgruntled resort association members. “The message--perhaps unintended--was ‘if you mess with us, we will break you politically,’ ” Marangella said in the report.

But Marangella has also brought a professional edge to the town offices, a side that was sorely lacking, according to his defenders on the Town Council.

“We looked for aggressive city management,” said Mayor Gary Flynn, a longtime Long Beach resident who came to Mammoth to publish a magazine. “We got it.” Said Councilman Stapp: “In the nine months that he has been here, we’ve probably accomplished three years of business.”

Took Charge

Marangella, who came to Mammoth from the Bay Area city of El Cerrito, acknowledges stepping on toes and shaking up things, but says Mammoth Lakes needed to mature as a town.

“The administration was in total disarray,” he said. “There’s a little different value system now at the town offices. We don’t accept gifts . . . we’re not doing things in the back rooms.”

He took over just as Mammoth Lakes was finally rebounding from the economic effects of a 1983 U.S. Geological Survey warning that a swarm of earthquakes in the eastern Sierra might presage a volcanic eruption near Mammoth. Cinder cones and steam vents found all over the area indicate a high level of geologic activity, so the alarm was not a total surprise.

Property values plummeted after the volcano warning. But a year later, after frenzied lobbying by residents and developers, top U.S. Geological Survey officials said the threat was overstated. Volcanoes are still not a subject spoken of often locally, and the evacuation road that was judiciously carved through a forest is known simply as the Mammoth Lakes “scenic loop.”

Now town officials have begun plans to change what one calls “the texture of the community,” encouraging the first luxury hotels and pedestrian villages with shopping and restaurants for skiers. There is also talk of building a conference center and expanding the airport. The airport is served by a commuter line, Alpha Air, but it has only one runway and cannot accommodate jets or strong crosswinds.

Projects Under Way

On a meadow south of town, the area’s first golf course, plus a hotel and skiers village are now under construction. The developer, Tom Dempsey, is a former ski instructor at Mammoth Mountain who has built hundreds of Mammoth’s condos. Controversial plans to include a new ski area, called Sherwin Bowl, have yet to receive U.S. Forest Service approval.

The town’s redevelopment project would be a joint effort of Dempsey and Mammoth Mountain to extend a ski lift into the north village area of Mammoth Lakes and add another hotel. The third big project, still in discussions, would be built in the undeveloped center of town and would also bring a new, luxury-class hotel to a town better known for ski condos and older motel-style lodges.

By providing more amenities to skiers and summer tourists, locals hope to give themselves a hedge against the hard times inevitable in a mountain resort.

“It’s a tough town to survive in,” said Mayor Flynn. “Living costs are high. Winters can be harsh. You’re totally dependent on the weather, because if there’s no snow there won’t be any customers.”