CALIFORNIA ALBUM : The Mall That Riled Bishop : Leaders of struggling city hope to attract travelers on U.S. 395 with factory outlet stores. But downtown merchants fear the project, and others say it would ruin the area’s character.

On the busy days, 20,000 cars arrive on U.S. 395 directly into the heart of this eastern Sierra crossroads town.

Some are filled with vacationers bound for the nearby trout lakes, hiking trails and scenic mountains. But it is a painful fact of highway life that the majority of motorists who cruise Bishop’s milelong business district are on their way someplace else.

They may stop for gas and lunch on Main Street. More often they just keep going, annoyed at having to slow down.

Now, tired of seeing all those dollars putter away down the highway, Bishop has a plan to induce more cars to stop. If more drivers would get out of their cars, the thinking goes, they would spend more money here and help revive the withering local economy.

As with most big ideas, this one has its complications.

The city’s plan is to use its redevelopment powers to urge development of a 30- to 40-store factory outlet mall to attract motorists on the highway. Leaders hope that it will also lure people into driving here from nearby Mammoth Lakes and from the small towns that dot the desert in eastern California and Nevada.

But from the time it was proposed, the outlet mall idea has been bitterly attacked by Main Street merchants and some residents. The project would be a huge one for this community of 10,000.

Merchants complain that the mall would force many of the town’s family-owned stores out of business. Some residents fear that the new development would overburden police, public works and other services while obliterating the personality of the town.

“Any town this size that you put a shopping center in like that, it’s going to kill the downtown area,” said John Taylor, owner of Taylor’s Family Shoes on Main Street.

Donna Milovich, owner of the Spellbinder Book Store down the street, agreed. “Of course it will drive businesses on Main Street out,” she said. “Little people cannot compete against chains and factory outlet stores. It’s just unhealthy for a little town like this.

Milovich added: “There’s nothing uglier than to see a bunch of closed storefronts on the main access route through town.”

Vern Bleich, a state employee who lives just outside Bishop, is another who argues that the outlet mall would ruin the quality of life in this community, best known for its proximity to the Sierra Nevada and perhaps for its biggest annual event, the Mule Days Celebration.

“The outlet center would bring more people, more congestion, more traffic and create just the kind of big-city atmosphere we try to avoid,” Bleich said. “We have a pristine area here--why anyone would want to ‘Los-Angelize’ it is beyond me.”

Despite the loud and persistent opposition, the city government recently voted to tentatively approve the project.

“We in the city government are small-town people too, we don’t want to destroy Bishop’s character,” said Jane Fisher, a former Bishop mayor and now a city councilwoman who edits a publication about local history. “What would destroy Bishop’s character would be for it to go totally bankrupt, which it will if we don’t do something.”

Bishop has unique economic problems. The town is a geographically isolated enclave, cut off on two sides by towering mountain ranges and surrounded by hundreds of square miles of land owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

As a rule, the DWP has been unwilling to part with its land, leaving practically no opportunity for Bishop or its economy to grow.

The community’s economy suffered further in the 1980s from major cutbacks at a nearby tungsten mine that once was the area’s largest employer and the relocation of telephone company employees to another city.

In all, about 1,000 jobs vanished, plunging the town into an economic quagmire.

“With all the jobs we have lost already, we are losing people and losing more jobs and the economy is fast sinking in this town,” Fisher said.

The city worked for more than a decade to persuade the DWP to sell a 28.6-acre parcel of land for what was hoped would be a light industrial development. However, the only bid for the property was from developer Warren Owens of Los Alamitos for the construction of the High Sierra Factory Stores.

Several shop owners see the outlet mall as a white elephant that will fail--after driving many of them out of business.

Bishop City Administrator Rick Pucci said he does not believe the outlets would hurt Main Street merchants as much as they fear.

“This particular center would be less than a mile from the downtown, and the potential is tremendous that people would stop at the mall and then go and shop in the downtown area.”

Pucci added: “Anytime there’s been change here, there’s been a reluctance to accept it. When we got another pizza parlor, some people said: ‘There goes the town. We only need one pizza parlor.’ ”

Fisher said: “This center is more of a retail Disneyland for tourists than competition to the downtown. I feel that if there had been some legitimate reason to stop this project, we would have stopped it. But in my opinion, their reasons were not legitimate ones.”