A Narrative History of the Quest to Incorporate Mammoth Lakes
It might come a surprise to even longtime residents of the Eastern Sierra that Mammoth Lakes only legally became “The Town of Mammoth Lakes” in 1984. Having been born and raised in the Eastern Sierra myself, it certainly surprised me. Forty years is a long time for human beings but on the timescale of communities it’s an eyeblink.
The moment is captured in an unassuming, charmingly grainy local news video, recorded forty years ago this week, August 20, 1984. Mammoth Mountain’s gondola ferried more than a thousand people to the summit, in celebration of Mono County’s first incorporated town. Against the stunning background of the Minarets, rendered in beautiful lo-res VHS tape quality, Mammoth Mountain representative Gary McCoy reads an apologetic letter from “our congressman in Warshington [sic],” who couldn’t attend. Speaking in the cadence of an overnight AM radio preacher, Chamber of Commerce representative Terry Kerr proudly touts Mammoth’s new status as the highest incorporated municipality in the nation (it has since been displaced for this surprisingly competitive title; the last several champions are in Colorado).
Mammoth’s first town council is sworn in, to the great applause of the assembled crowd. Among the council was a man named Boyd Lemmon, who would be Mammoth’s first mayor, and was perhaps more responsible for its incorporation than any single other person. Regarding the incorporation and its importance to the community, they interview a shaggy-haired guy named Mike, who may not have understood the assignment. As Mike tells us, “It feels about the same as being a member of the old town of Mammoth Lakes.” The next interview is an older gentleman in a large cowboy hat who preferred things how they were before. “Well, I’ve kinda resisted it all along,” explains the cowboy. “I liked the country the way it was in the- the small-town atmosphere…”
Mike can be forgiven for not really understanding or caring about the implications of his community’s bureaucratic semantics. After all, a town is a town, even if it isn’t a town in the legal sense. From the outside looking in, it probably felt like a distinction without a difference. Who could really care all that much if it were Mammoth Lakes, or The Town of Mammoth Lakes? What real difference could it make?
From the perspective of local governmental resources, it turns out that the difference is substantial. Any tax revenue an incorporated city takes for itself is revenue that once went to the county. The rest of Mono County wasn’t going to let that go lightly. Tax revenue was an issue for the rest of the county, while Mammoth residents also sought more responsive services than they were getting from other governmental bodies at the time. Specifically, as reported in the Reno Gazette in October 1969, Mammoth Lakes did not at the time have 24-hour law enforcement. In other words, the legal and financial issues were complex and multi-faceted. Concluded in 1984, the political process to incorporate Mammoth Lakes began at least fifteen years earlier, forming one of the central local political issues of the early 1980s.
In October 1969 the Mono Herald reported on a meeting regarding the community’s proposed incorporation, which took place later that month. It was spearheaded by special incorporation committee chairman W.E. “Chip” Van Nattan and Mammoth Chamber president Dick Engel, two names that ought to be familiar to longtime Mammothites. They met again in January 1970, but again, nothing came of it. At the time, though, Engel still believed at that time that Mammoth would be incorporated by August 1970.
There doesn’t appear to have been another meeting on the subject for a full year, when in February 1971 the Mammoth Chamber of Commerce again took up the question. They intended to meet again in May of that year, as the Herald took the step of printing a Q&A explaining what the changes would mean for the average taxpayer, perhaps hinting at some anxiety and uncertainty among the populace regarding incorporation. We find further evidence for that anxiety in May 1971: the meeting was continued until the end of August that year, “to allow for additional protests to be filed.” Proponents of incorporation would try again in 1973, putting a proposal before the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO). It was at this time that Mammoth Mountain Ski Area filed notice that they’d prefer their domain to remain outside the city limits.
For most of the decade of the 1970s, it seems the drive behind incorporation went quiet. The gap in newspaper coverage on the issue lasts for years. The political energy behind incorporating picks up again in late 1982, as the now-merged Mono Herald and Bridgeport Chronicle-Union reported on an incorporation feasibility study commissioned and reviewed by LAFCO. At the same time, in early 1983, a push grew to also incorporate June Lake as well. This reflected a political movement across California to incorporate various small communities. In August of that year, the Chronicle-Union reported that the June Lake Incorporation Group had commissioned a feasibility study from an Oceanside consulting firm on potential cityhood. The study suggested that June Lake would have made a legal viable city at the time. The Chronicle-Union reported further in the same article that Mammoth would vote on cityhood in April 1984.
The great majority of the work to incorporate Mammoth Lakes occurred in late 1983. In September of that year, Boyd Lemmon told the Chronicle-Union that the incorporation committee had collected the signatures of 1,000 of Mammoth’s 2,200 registered voters in just ten days, well surpassing the 550 signatures they’d needed. LAFCO met in December 1983, approving a tentative agreement on Mammoth’s incorporation.
Even still, LAFCO’s own consultants at the time noted that incorporation would be fantastic news for Mammoth and not so good for the rest of the county. The county, the consultants noted, would be forced to swallow an enormous decrease in revenue. “Mono County has one heavily-populated urban area that has one-half the county population,” said consultant Fred Christensen in December 1983. “That’s a very unique situation.” Consultant Bill Zion said in the same month: “For the same reasons that incorporation is financially positive for Mammoth … it is financially adverse for the county.”
Mammoth’s financial relationship to the rest of the county was a sore subject at the time. It was certainly an extremely sore subject to Boyd Lemmon, who argued that Mammoth was getting “short-changed” and essentially subsidizing services for the rest of Mono County. That fight heated up a bit in December 1983, as Mono supervisor Bill Reid argued that the proposed transitionary period of Mammoth’s incorporation (Aug. 20, 1984—July 1, 1985) would unfairly privilege Mammoth at the expense of the rest of the county. Lemmon countered that Mammoth had been contributing far more than it was getting back for years. This was echoed by then-Chamber of Commerce president Gary Flynn, who said in 1983, “Mammoth contributes 60 percent of total revenues and only receives 40 percent in return.”
All of this was occurring against the backdrop of an ongoing recall election, spearheaded by a group called “Monoans Against Unresponsive Supervisors,” intended to remove county supervisors Al Leydecker and Mike Jencks. In November 1983, the group was successful—Leydecker and Jencks were removed, in favor of Bob Stanford and Tim Alpers. Leydecker was described leaving the Bridgeport office for the final time, taking his Jimmy Carter coffee cup with him. Incorporation was not listed in the Chronicle-Union’s reporting as a specific reason behind the recall, but one of Leydecker’s other political rivals who’d run against him in the June 1982 election, Alice Watkins, did mention it. “I’ll be interested in seeing what happens in county government and in the coming Mammoth Lakes incorporation,” she said after the successful recall in November 1983.
That same month, Leydecker, in colorful language, implied the existence of an astroturfing conspiracy behind his removal from office. “I expected to lose,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned the good old boys can have their f—ing county back. Basically I feel a number of large developers working with a number of large contractors decided they liked the way things used to be so they put on a recall effort. It was a major effort, with a lot of manpower and money behind it to try to overturn the results of last year’s election. They were successful.”
By late 1983 it seemed clear that Mammoth voters would approve of incorporation. The sticking point really was the date that it would take effect. Boyd Lemmon and the Mammoth incorporation group wanted August 1984, while the rest of the county wanted January 1985. Both sides preferred their respective dates for financial reasons. In December 1983, the Chronicle-Union reported that Mammoth’s supervisors, Andrea Lawrence and the recall-elected Bob Stanford, favored the earlier date, while non-Mammoth supervisors Bill Reid and Paul Johnson preferred January. Tim Alpers basically abstained, while expressing support generally for incorporation. This inspired some delightfully colorful language from Lemmon: “If lightning had struck me and burned me to a crisp, I would not be as shocked as I am at this extremely illegal action on the part of the board of supervisors,” he said in December 1983. “Jesse James was a Christian evangelist in comparison to this board of supervisors.”
To be clear, this was Lemmon’s reaction to the board debating a five-month change of effective date.
The following January, the Mono County Board of Supervisors held a protest hearing for those who were opposed to incorporation. No protestors attended; opinion had swung towards cityhood. One who did attend was Boyd Lemmon. A few weeks after stating that the board of supervisors was worse than famed murderous outlaw Jesse James, Lemmon stood before them again. Committee Chairman Bill Reid asked him if he had any statement to make. Where before he’d chosen colorful metaphor, Lemmon was circumspect on this occasion: “I would just say, I’m in favor. Thank you.”
While no protestors showed up against incorporation of Mammoth, June Lake was a different story. Sixty protestors showed up when Mono’s Board of Supervisors met on the issue. The debate got hostile, as anti-incorporators claimed that proponents were holding “secret meetings” without public input, and June Lake’s incorporation committee charged that opponents were “hiding in the closet.” June Lake Incorporation Committee Chairman Jim Cross was quoted in the Chronicle-Union in June 1984: “There is no organized opposition to incorporation. The only opposition we have are blind, unsigned letters … baseless, false information and rumors.” Bob Toomey echoed these comments, stating that those against June Lake’s incorporation had composed “well-written, blatant untrue statements.”
In the same month that June Lake’s residents overwhelmingly rejected incorporation, Mammoth Lakes approved it. Only two months after the vote, August 1984, newly-elected mayor Boyd Lemmon, the new town council, Mike, the old cowboy, and about 1,500 other Mammothites were atop Mammoth Mountain, celebrating the formation of their new city.
In a June 1985 edition of the Reno Gazette, Lemmon and Town Manager Ray Windsor were all sunshine and optimism about the one-year performance of the young governmental body, while citizens quoted in the piece were less uniformly positive. Mammoth resident Jeanne Standley, who’d lived there since 1965, expressed disappointment at some of the new town’s expenditures. Mammoth Lakes Hotel owner Jim Greenleaf called the new town council “very naïve,” though he did not regret supporting incorporation.
By April 1986, a little less than two years after incorporation, Lemmon was basically running victory laps. Another piece in the Reno Gazette calls him “the Father of Mammoth Lakes.” The piece describes Lemmon as “winding up” as Mayor, as if he did not actively campaign for the job and was instead called to office in spite his Washingtonian reluctance to personally assume the reins of power. “I became concerned that if people saw that I was making a major issue out of incorporation but wasn’t willing to run for office, it might create some opposition,” Lemmon said in 1986. “I was more afraid of incorporation losing than anything.”
An interesting postscript to this story stood out when I began searching for the Chronicle-Union reporter who’d done most of the work on this issue in the early 1980s, a woman by the name of Ziba Rashidian. Today she is Doctor Rashidian, Professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University. In 1984, as the fight to incorporate Mammoth Lakes was coming to its end, the reporter who’d written most of the articles I used for this piece was beginning graduate school at American University in Washington D.C. In 1986 she became the director of the Folio Fiction Poetry Awards for her Literature Department, and in 1994 she became a full-time instructor at Hilbert College in New York State. Eastern Sierra NOW has reached out to Doctor Rashidian to ask if she has any interesting memories from the political drive to incorporate Mammoth Lakes, almost precisely forty years ago from the moment of this writing. If any of you who were around back then would like to share your own memories with us, please, do not hesitate to do so.
If you’d like to contact Kevin McCormick, email [email protected].
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