A Dampening Effect

Clobbered again by Mother Nature, businesses in this sodden community began patching themselves back together again Tuesday and talking of ways to woo back customers.

In hard-hit Laguna Canyon, mudslides, road closures and power outages conspired to close many businesses while, downtown, most shops opened on time.

Bill Paulsen, who owns Canyon Towing and Canyon Auto Repair in Laguna Canyon, stayed open by using a generator to operate his telephones, lights and radio. Mud closed his auto repair shop.

“Every year I’ve been open we’ve had something,” said Paulsen, referring to the city’s string of disasters. “This is probably the worse so far that I’ve seen.”

Many downtown businesses, however, have seen worse.

After years of flooding woes, many merchants have installed wooden blockades on their storefronts to keep mud and water at bay, a tactic that seems to have worked, Chamber of Commerce President Bonnie Rohrer said. “Those that have them have no damage,” she said.

Throughout town on Tuesday, merchants shared good-news/bad-news stories.

The Fahrenheit 451 bookstore on South Coast Highway escaped serious damage as customers pitched in to help, even using toilet plungers to unplug outdoor drains, owner Robert Aikens said.

But at Laguna Village across the street from the bookstore, a crumbling cliff forced the closure of a shell shop and eliminated the outdoor seating at Laguna Village Cafe.

“I used to have 19 tables on the ocean front,” owner Karl Ziegler said. “Now I don’t have any.”

Farther south, Ben Brown’s Restaurant and Aliso Creek Inn Resort was closed after Aliso Creek jumped its banks Monday night and flooded the resort. The restaurant had been scheduled to close March 1 anyway for renovations.

The resort’s water logged golf course has been closed since mid-December, despite efforts to restore the grounds by installing sod. “The rains just kept washing it away,” one employee said.

Employees say it is not clear when the resort and the golf course will reopen.

Meanwhile, the news was brighter from Tivoli Terrace, a seasonal restaurant and outdoor wedding chapel that was damaged by a landslide last week. Nature’s latest wallop did not worsen the problem there, general manager Bob Fader said.

“We’re actually hoping to be up and running in May, if not earlier,” he said.

The greatest challenge for some Laguna Beach businesses now will be finding ways to persuade customers to venture back into town. Aikens, a chamber board member, said he planned to pitch an aggressive marketing campaign at the chamber meeting Tuesday night.

“Granted, we’re the poster children for disaster,” Aikens said, “but when the weather is nice, it’s really nice.”

And despite the ongoing problems, merchants say they intend to stay.

“We’re still better off than Florida,” said Frans Barnhoorn, whose family business, Barnhoorn Automotive, in Laguna Canyon was closed Tuesday morning. “It was a bad day in paradise, [but] what the hell?”