Why Mammoth Is So Weird

August 14, 2005

From Mammoth Monthly Magazine
August 2005 Issue

    We’re now convinced that the adoption of a General Plan for Mammoth will not create consensus in our little town; it will merely mean that we have a plan on paper that complies with state regulations.
    The long process produced no rallying vision—or visionary, for that matter—for what Mammoth should be. Rather, it revealed why Mammoth probably will continue on its clumsy bearing, fueled not by vision but by pure market forces colliding with government regulations.
    Most of the United States works on a government model that is strictly vertical. There is the federal government on top, then the state, then the county, then the town. In the rest of the country, everyone has a pretty good idea of which one does what.
    Here, the federal government, in the form of the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, is a pervasive presence. So, too, is the state, what with the Department of Fish and Game occupying an extensive presence, not to mention CalTrans, which owns Main Street and the road leading to the ski area. The county government, 45 miles away in Bridgeport, exerts itself in many ways in Mammoth. Then there is the City of Los Angeles, with its Department of Water and Power.
    That leaves the town, whose government operates in the shadow of the huge economic engine of Mammoth Mountain Ski Area—a private company that ultimately is answerable only to itself. Ski Area CEO Rusty Gregory, in the May/June issue of Mammoth Monthly, characterized the relationship between the ski area and the town as one of “respectful independence.”
    If Mammoth really wanted a general plan, all these entities would have been active participants, wholly engaged. But they weren’t. And so we sail on, bickering and sniping, into the future.

—George and Jean Shirk

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