For Yosemite Communities, Shutdown Turns Into Catastrophe : Budget: Retailers say they can’t recoup losses caused by park’s closure. Mariposa County, citing $5 million in vanished tourist income, declares disaster.

Outside the gates of Yosemite National Park, the hotels and motels, restaurants and curio shops that usually hum this time of year with holiday travelers are quiet--save for their seething owners.

They are the other victims of the federal budget impasse, they say, their lucrative Christmas and New Year’s business lost irrevocably to shenanigans in Washington.

“We’ve lost the two busiest weeks of winter,” said an angry Jerry Fischer, who owns seven hotels along the three main highways into Yosemite. “The government workers will get their back pay. Who’s going to reimburse us?”

It is difficult to estimate the direct economic loss tied to the park’s two-week closure. Chambers of Commerce sometimes play fast and loose with estimates of tourist dollars and economic multiplier effects.

But Mariposa County declared itself an economic disaster area this week--citing $5 million in lost holiday tourist trade--and even if the budget stalemate ends this weekend, the locals say it will come too late for the Sierra communities of Fish Camp, Oakhurst and Mariposa.

“Our lifeblood is the park,” said Mariposa County Administrator Mike Coffield. “If the budget is signed and the park opens tomorrow, it will be opened for the slowest season of the year. Christmas can never be reclaimed.”

Last year, more than 100,000 visitors drove through the gates of Yosemite National Park during the last half of December. This year the flow is a trickle.

The Ahwahnee and Wawona hotels in the park and Yosemite Lodge have been closed since Dec. 20 along with the Badger Pass ski area. Yosemite Concession Services, a subsidiary of Delaware North Co., reports it is losing $250,000 a day.

“What do you do if you’re a retailer inside or outside the park and you’ve purchased all this product in anticipation of the busiest season of the year--and that season never comes?” said Keith Walklet, a spokesman for the concessionaire.

More than 1,000 of the company’s employees have been idled, many of them still trying to catch up after losing Thanksgiving overtime wages because of the previous federal shutdown. The Mariposa Gazette, the local newspaper, has organized a food drive to assist them.

“A lot of the impact is hidden,” Walklet said. “You’re talking about a big ripple effect.”

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For one of the few times since 1927, the Ahwahnee was forced to cancel its famed Bracebridge Dinner, an Old English Christmas pageant complete with Renaissance costumes and rituals and a seven-course gourmet meal interspersed with carols and hymns.

The dinners--held on Dec. 22, 24 and 25--are so popular that thousands of people all over the world enter a lottery each year for the chance of attending.

Adding further insult, on Friday afternoon Yosemite Concession Services officials announced that another popular annual event, the New Year’s Eve dinner dances at the Ahwahnee and Wawona hotels, were being canceled.

Concession officials said that guests who lost out on either the Bracebridge or New Year’s Eve events would be able to carry their 1995 reservations over to 1996 without going through another lottery. Letters will be mailed to explain the process, the officials said.

Albert Pickering and his wife, Virginia, were among the 1,675 guests whose names were selected this year for the Bracebridge Dinner.

When the park closed for three days in November, the West Los Angeles couple began to fret. A few days before Christmas, with budget negotiations in Washington again at a standstill, they were told the disappointing news.

“My wife had been at it for seven or eight years. It’s like being invited to the White House,” Pickering said. “She was really ticked off. I was mildly ticked off myself. This government . . . I’ve seen better-run Little League games.”

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Along California Highways 41, 120 and 140, the western gateways to Yosemite, the tale of woe is the same.

Here at Fish Camp, outside the south entrance, the Tenaya Lodge and Resort is three-quarters empty and trying to make do. Some employees have been laid off until the budget impasse ends.

“The park’s closing is costing us about $40,000 a day,” manager Paul Ratchford said. “But we’re making the best out of a bad situation.

When Mariposa County declared itself an economic disaster area this week, citing the lost tourist business, it became an occasion for the County Board of Supervisors in this conservative mountain community to hammer away at President Clinton.

But Friday afternoon, Gov. Pete Wilson rejected the declaration.

“While unfair to the hard-working people of Mariposa County, the hardship President Clinton has created does not meet the legal test of ‘extreme peril,’ ” Wilson said.

Local officials lashed out at Wilson, warning that his decision would cost jobs and could lead to bankruptcies.

“This is a blow to all those helpless folks out there that lost their livelihoods and may lose their businesses as a result of this,” Coffield said. “We’re very disappointed.

“It was an honest plea for relief, polemics and partisanship aside,” he said.

“There are a lot of folks on the ropes here and the government needs to own up to the price of its arrogance and fix it for them,” he said.

Mariposa County has fewer than 15,000 residents. Coffield estimates that 1,600 of them--about one-fourth of the total work force in the county--are jobless because of the federal shutdown. A big chunk of the unemployed work at Yosemite.

“We’re a company town in a lot of respects and the company--Yosemite--has been shut down,” he said. “The irony is that we, the people, own the company.”

No Tourists

Towns outside the gates of Yosemite National Park have lost their lucrative holiday tourist business to the federal government shutdown.