Refusal to Equip Boat Pier Amounts to Bureaucratic Mutiny

It’s a little thing, really. But being a simple, little thing, you’d think government could get it right.

I mean, how much vision, creativity and skill does it take to screw three boat cleats onto a small pier? And if the government of the state of California cannot handle this minimal service for the public, you’ve got to ask, what can it do right?

Educate our children?

Run an honest lottery?

Buy all the electricity for private utilities?

This is the sad, stereotypical saga of a bureaucracy with blinders that is going to do things its way, by gum, regardless of any directions from the top. Regardless of who’s governor. It happens to be the bureaucracy of the state Department of Parks and Recreation. But it could be any government outfit.

“You get a bureaucratic mentality. People think, ‘I was here before the governor was here and I’ll be here afterward,’ ” says Sean Walsh, former spokesman for Gov. Pete Wilson. “They know what’s best.”

The setting is one of California’s scenic wonders, Emerald Bay at Lake Tahoe. Carved by a glacier, it sits in a spectacular granite bowl fed by Sierra waterfalls. The main man-made attraction is historic

Vikingsholm Castle, a fine example of Scandinavian architecture. There’s also a nice beach. And toilets. All are run by the state.

The public has two ways to get here: a steep, one-mile hike--or a boat. Some boaters beach their craft, but that grinds up bottom paint. So many jockey to tie up at the little dock.

The setup is this: a fixed, L-shaped pier, with a floating dock alongside the pier.

Now we need to back up.

Three years ago, I wrote that this dock/pier deal was “abysmal . . . with dangerously protruding nails.” Wilson aides called the parks department and ordered repairs. “We were assured it was going to get fixed,” Walsh remembers.

It wasn’t.

One summer later, I returned with Gov. Gray Davis’ new parks director, Rusty Areias, who shook his head in disbelief. The floating dock listed badly. Jagged metal jutted from the pier. But there were fix-up plans.

By last summer, both the pier and dock were fit for a postcard (cost: $152,000)--sanded surfaces, rub rails, new cleats. . . . Cleats? There were cleats to tie up maybe three small boats on the floating dock, but none on the fixed pier. The old pier cleats had been tossed and not replaced. Boaters had lost two to five mooring spots.

Yet a pier sign proclaimed to boaters: “Loading and unloading only.” How do you unload if you can’t tie up? I asked a park aide. Heave people onto the pier as you cruise by? “That’s the way they want it,” she answered.

But I was appeased temporarily by her colleague who interrupted, “The pier’s just being finished. The cleats aren’t there yet.”

And they still weren’t there last week, a year later.

“What’s it for,” one boater grouched as he veered away from the pier at the last moment, “if it hasn’t any cleats on it?”

You can’t blame the governor. He called his parks director two years ago and told him, only half-jokingly: “If you have to, go get a hammer and some nails and fix it yourself.”

Davis also pumped $157 million into his state budget for long-deferred maintenance at all California parks.

As it turns out, Areias drove to Tahoe last summer and “insisted,” he says, “that they put in more cleats.”

The bureaucrats’ response was almost comical. They put more cleats on the floating dock, which already had plenty, but none on the pier. So there now are nine cleats bunched in a space that needs maybe five--and none where they’d really be useful.

Again, I mentioned to a park aide last week that a boater cannot tie up to unload a vessel without cleats. “That’s why we don’t have cleats,” she replied.

And what’s wrong with tying up at a taxpayer-owned pier? “We need to keep it open.” Why? “Law enforcement emergencies and for loading and unloading the handicapped.”

I gave up.

One thing is certain: If this were the Vikingsholm Bar & Grill run by some entrepreneur--there’d be dozens of cleats and a dock boy to welcome boaters.

I just figure there’s a strain of anti-boat bias in the bureaucracy; eco-zealots who believe they’re saving Emerald Bay and the planet.

Fortunately, Areias recently bought his own first boat. And he’s convinced more than ever that this wasted pier needs cleats. “Gonna put them on this afternoon,” he told me Wednesday.

He’d better count on using his own hammer and nails.