After Decades in the Shade, Mammoth Pursues Glitz

Commercial flights from Chicago and Dallas disgorging tens of thousands of vacationers a year at an expanded airport. Baby boomers dropping $900,000 for fancy duplexes on the golf course. Skiers sauntering through a crowded pedestrian village of boutiques and cafes after a day on the slopes.

It’s not the Mammoth familiar to Southern Californians, who have for decades made the 300-mile drive north to this unassuming eastern Sierra ski town. But it’s a Mammoth that local leaders are dreaming of--a future they are chasing with millions of dollars in public money.

Weary of riding an economic roller coaster, Mammoth is seeking a new upscale identity. Yet the town’s desire to woo back vacationers who abandoned the mountain for trendier slopes and to turn itself into an internationally known four-season resort is wrapped in conflicting emotions.

While many of the roughly 5,500 year-round residents say change is needed, some fret that Mammoth may be about to sell its simple soul. And some worry that the town is getting in way over its head by pursuing $30 million in federal airport improvement funds and tentatively committing about $25 million in future local tax revenues to the make-over.

“I have no real objection to becoming more of a world-class resort and filling up during the week,” said John Walter, a retired engineer who moved to Mammoth six years ago from the San Fernando Valley. “[But] the council seems so desperate to keep the bad times away they may be cutting their own throats.”

At a time when many other winter resorts in the West have become encrusted with glitz and wealth, Mammoth Lakes has remained the Sears of the ski world: reasonable, unpretentious and not very exciting.

It has stayed in Southern California’s economic shadow, struggling through boom and devastating bust. Thousands have bypassed it for more glamorous resorts like Vail and Park City, Utah. The mountain now draws fewer than 1 million skiers annually, down from its peak of 1.65 million 15 years ago, when it was the busiest ski resort in the nation.

Known for its fine skiing, the town nonetheless exudes a somewhat stale air. Its prevailing style is 1970s--wood-sided condo with an anemic dash of Swiss chalet thrown in.

“Mammoth didn’t change. The market changed,” observed Jay Becker, who belongs to a business group that wants to build a hotel-condo complex at Mammoth’s sleepy, scrub-wreathed airport.

Mountain Has Yet to Reach Its Potential

The town has for years been tinkering with schemes to shine itself up. Earlier this decade it approved a redevelopment plan that stirred enough controversy to wind up in court--where it remains stuck.

In the meantime, Mammoth Mountain Ski Area, the corporation that runs the ski complex, sought a developer to build attractions appealing to a broader array of visitors. The result was a deal with Intrawest, a Vancouver operator of such high-profile ski resorts as British Columbia’s Whistler / Blackcomb.

In 1996 Intrawest bought about 250 acres in town, much of it near the base of 11,053-foot Mammoth Mountain, along with an interest in the ski operation. Intrawest now owns 58% of the ski area, though the mountain’s legendary founder, Dave McCoy, retains majority control of the voting stock.

Mammoth “is the last great mountain that hasn’t realized its potential,” said Dana Severy, vice president of Intrawest Mammoth Corp.

He goes so far as to assert that the town could become “the premier mountain resort area in North America,” given its good weather, grand scenery, proximity to Yosemite National Park and ski slopes that are buried under an average of nearly 400 inches of snow a year.

Severy says the ski area has spent $60 million in the last three years installing faster lifts and snow-making equipment and upgrading other services. Another $90 million in improvements are on the drawing board. But that actually represents the smaller portion of what Intrawest has in mind. It is building or proposing at least an additional $600 million worth of resort projects.

Last year the company opened Mammoth’s first 18-hole golf course, beside which it is now constructing some of the most expensive housing the town has ever seen.

The 32 duplex townhomes feature such high-end standards as granite counters, maple floors, slate entryways and stone fireplaces. Fetching $900,000 each, the majority have been sold, although only a few are even finished. During the last Christmas season, some of the first completed units rented for $1,300 a night.

Juniper Springs Lodge, a 174-unit condominium complex opened last summer at the foot of the mountain, is virtually sold out at prices ranging up to $600,000 for a three-bedroom. The sales have stunned locals, who complain it does not live up to Intrawest’s advance billing of architecture evoking Yosemite’s Ahwahnee Lodge.

All told, Intrawest intends to construct about 2,300 housing units in Mammoth, which now has about 8,000 beds available to visitors.

Concern That Workers Will Be Priced Out

The company’s centerpiece would be The Village, a pedestrian complex replacing a scattering of uninspiring motels and commercial buildings along Minaret Road on the town’s northern end. Slated to open in 2002, it would include lodging, shops, restaurants and a gondola to the slopes.

Along with the roaring California economy, Intrawest’s arrival has already wrought changes in this town of 4 square miles surrounded by federal land. Realtors say prices of houses, condos and vacant lots have roughly doubled in the last four years.

Rents, too, are rising, highlighting one of the great concerns of a Mammoth metamorphosis: that the town’s working class will be priced out.

“It doesn’t mean my wages are going up. It means my rent is going up,” grumbled Ben Carey, a sunburned, 31-year-old cook, rock climber and sometime construction worker who is emphatically anti-growth. “They’re going to make a big mess of it,” he added as he sipped a mug of coffee at a local hangout.

Others say Intrawest is just adding another badly needed dimension to Mammoth, not unalterably changing it.

“I don’t think they’re here to consume our community,” said Paul Payne, president of the local Rodeway Inn and a director of the Mammoth Chamber of Commerce. “They’re building higher end. It’s a completely different mix [now] absent from Mammoth and long overdue.”

All the same, town leaders say they are determined not to repeat the mistakes of posh Colorado resorts, where billionaires are shoving out the millionaires and workers have to be bused in from afar.

“We don’t want to lose our community,” said Councilman Kirk Stapp, who teaches English at the local high school. Intrawest has to help provide hundreds of affordable housing units, he and others say.

The company has indicated it will, but it is also making its own demands.

This spring, Intrawest complained that rising construction costs were endangering its plans for The Village. The town would have to step in with some backup funds if the project were to move forward.

Municipal officials scurried into negotiations, recently arriving at a tentative deal: The town would eventually pay Intrawest about $14 million in future bed-tax revenues for new parking garages and infrastructure improvements initially financed by the developer.

The agreement also calls for the town to pay the ski complex back for about $11 million the company would front for a new terminal at the airport and some local matching funds for the Federal Aviation Administration grant.

Altogether the town’s potential commitment adds up to nearly three times its annual operating budget of $9 million.

Municipal leaders are a bit nervous about the town’s financial involvement, but argue that growth is inevitable and, by becoming a player in the development, the community can exert greater control over it.

Moreover, they say they are structuring the agreement to protect local coffers. If sufficient new revenues don’t materialize from the airport and Intrawest projects, the town won’t have to repay either the mountain operation or Intrawest. One of the keys to Mammoth’s reincarnation is expansion of the small airport 6 miles south of town, which would allow the resort to draw from beyond its traditional Southern California base.

After mounting a lobbying effort in Washington, the ski area and town officials last year obtained congressional backing for a $30-million request for a multiyear federal grant to lengthen the airport runway to accommodate commercial jets.

The FAA is expected to make a decision on the funding by the end of the summer. The ski operation is negotiating for service with American Airlines and, according to Mammoth Mountain Chief Executive Rusty Gregory, is willing to guarantee American $10 million in annual fares for five years.

The airline would land jets seating up to 180 people. Projections are that 150,000 passengers a year could be flying into Mammoth within seven years of the airport’s expansion, due to start next spring.

The idea of tourists arriving daily at this traditionally isolated Sierra vacation spot perhaps more than anything else suggests how different the town could be in a decade.

“Do I want it to change? No,” said Mayor Rick Wood, one of Mammoth’s many transplanted Southern Californians. “Will it change? Absolutely.”