Views on Planned Projects Make for Mountain Divide

The hermits and the single moms, the rugged individuals and the retired professionals, the commuters to Los Angeles and to Bakersfield: They all live on this wind-swept top of the Tehachapi Mountains because they don’t like the big city.

But the city may be coming to them with two huge developments proposed on nearby Tejon Ranch and hundreds of homes planned around Frazier Mountain High School.

Many of the 10,000 residents of Lebec and Lake of the Woods, Pine Mountain Club and Fort Tejon, Gorman and Frazier Park, and the Cuddy and Lockwood valleys aren’t happy about that.

Then again, others who live in those high valleys blanketed by snow last week say more stores and jobs are needed because hardly any new businesses have been built in the area in decades.

And some old-timers say they’d like to subdivide the acreage that pioneer ancestors handed down to them.

“It’s a collection of very independent-minded people who are hard to organize in any effective way,” said community activist Lloyd Wiens, a critic of the proposed 70,000-resident Centennial project on Tejon Ranch that is wending through the Los Angeles County planning process.

White-bearded Wiens, 62, ran a Frazier Park ski shop for 25 years and now -- like many of his neighbors -- works varied jobs to make ends meet: substitute teaching and coaching football, manufacturing snow-making equipment and setting up trade shows in Los Angeles.

As editor of the Ridge Route Reporter, an Internet site, he has tried to rally the mountain communities against Centennial, which would be built about a dozen miles away near the junction of Interstate 5 and California 138.

But even Wiens is of two minds about the proposed new city of 23,000 homes and 14 million square feet of commercial space at the Kern and Los Angeles county line, and a second project, Tejon Mountain Resort, a community of perhaps 4,000 homes planned a few miles away in Kern County.

“Tejon Ranch will develop. They have that right. And there are benefits -- more jobs, more tax money for the schools and more residents, which means more political clout,” said Wiens last week over a hot shot of caffeine at Coffee Cantina.

“But my concern is the urban sprawl,” he said. “It’s going to change the rural face of our little town. It’s going to tax our natural resources, especially water. And I want to give people a good, rational voice in helping with the planning.”

The community is split over development, with maybe 60% of residents against it and 40% for it, he said -- “But I could be 10% off either way.”

Kate Donahue, the 43-year-old owner of Coffee Cantina, is pro-growth. She landed in Frazier Park 16 years ago, after she noticed its beauty while plowing snow for Caltrans and decided she wanted to raise her two kids in a small town with good schools, intense blue skies and four distinct seasons.

“I’m a businessperson,” said Donahue, standing near a colorful surfboard in her cafe that charts the $33,000 the community has donated for a student music program. “And I’m going to have to close my doors if we don’t have some growth.”

The folks of Frazier Park all seem to have opinions about change. And they expressed them recently in chilly ad hoc gatherings on the town’s snowy main street.

Dave the handyman, who wears bright yellow wader boots and uses no surname, arrived six years ago from Massachusetts via the San Fernando Valley and is known for helping raise $15,000 for a children’s skate park.

He likes the town as it is, he said: “Part of the charm is that we rough it.” But Centennial is of no particular concern, he said, because “it’s 20 miles down the road.”

But Dave’s neighbor, Kalen McGarry, 37, her pink cheeks peeking from a thick bundle of winter clothing, doesn’t see it that way.

She and her husband are school bus drivers in Los Angeles, commuting 120 miles to and from work, leaving home at 4:30 a.m. and getting back about 7:30 p.m.

“We do that because we like it up here -- no police sirens, no firetrucks, and houses are half the price of the [ones in the San Fernando] Valley,” she said.

“If there’s more people, then they’ll want a Vons and a Wal-Mart,” she said. “My neighbor owns a market, my neighbor owns a pharmacy, my neighbor owns the little gas station. These are people I sit with every week in church, people who help in times of need. What will happen to them?”

Then there’s Brian Tait, 48, an avid drag racer of super-stock cars, who runs a fly-fishing business and whose family settled in the area about 100 years ago.

“I’m for controlled growth, considering I’m sitting on 400 acres,” he said with a laugh.

Don Cuddy, 49, his wife, Daisy, and his aunt have about 100 acres. Seven Cuddy cousins own several hundred more along picturesque Cuddy Valley Road, which descends from 8,831-foot Mt. Pinos to Cuddy Canyon, where Frazier Park is nestled.

Cuddy’s great-great-grandfather, Irishman John Fletcher Cuddy, was one of the area’s first settlers, having arrived from Kansas with the first garrison of U.S. soldiers at Fort Tejon in 1854.

For most of their five generations in the area, the Cuddys have dry farmed and worked the mines that were the backbone of the local economy.

Don Cuddy still does.

But in recent decades, he has seen hundreds of houses pop up in small-lot subdivisions in nearby Pinon Pines, and million-dollar spreads built just up the road.

“The wildness went away a long time ago, I’m afraid,” said Cuddy after he had cleared his driveway of snow with an aging International bulldozer and Daisy had finished the job with a mini-plow attached to an all-terrain vehicle.

Cuddy would never subdivide his land. But he doesn’t oppose growth.

“It’s inevitable,” said Cuddy, rubbing his thinning hair. “People got to live somewhere. Water’s a concern: I know they’ve had a problem with wells up here. But growth’s OK, as long as they plan it.”

For Daisy, who moved to the area 24 years ago to join her father, who worked on the California Aqueduct, growth is good and bad.

“I love the beauty and the peace and quiet,” she said. “But I would absolutely love to be able to go shopping closer than 45 to 50 miles from home. Now it’s Bakersfield or Valencia for a lot of things.”

A mile or so up the road from the Cuddys’ house, native Dutchman John de Leeuw, chairman of the statistics department at UCLA, doesn’t buy that argument.

“It’s the stores again; I’m sick of the stores,” he said. “Whatever the quality of the development, it’s still going to be 100,000 more people up here. It will destroy the area as we know it.”

De Leeuw fled Venice Beach with heart problems seven years ago. Now he lives on five acres, which provide him and his pack of pound dogs with less noise and stress and more room to breathe.

As a leader in the Tri-County Watchdogs group opposing rapid growth, De Leeuw said the mountain community was deeply divided.

In broad strokes, he said, it’s a rift between lower-income Republicans who live in older towns such as Frazier Park for the cheap housing, and more affluent Democratic professionals with environmental leanings who seek a remote retreat in newer subdivisions such as Pinon Pines or Pine Mountain Club.

“That sort of tension comes out at almost every occasion” when growth is discussed, he said.

It came out, in fact, at the end of the dirt road that De Leeuw drives to reach paved, two-lane Cuddy Valley Road.

There, Joel Petersen, 66, who retired from General Motors in Van Nuys and now does maintenance work at Gorman Elementary School, said his 31 years in the area tell him growth is needed.

“It’ll be good for the whole darned area,” said Petersen, a self-described “character,” as he leaned on a plow blade tied to the bumper of an old pickup truck -- one of 20 vehicles he keeps at his home, formerly a turkey ranch.

“There are not a lot of good jobs in this town,” Petersen said. “You almost have to leave here to be successful.”