Stumbling Down Main Street
A week of workshops and presentations attempts to forge a new vision
This week, residents of Mammoth Lakes were asked yet again to come up with a better Main Street.
When asked how many times he’d participated in such a process, Tom Cage, owner of Kittredge Sports and Chevron, told The Sheet, “What, you mean detailed planning processes for downtown? Oh, I’d say three or four times over the last forty years. It feels like every seven years we regurgitate something new.” Cage participated in the Downtown Neighborhood District Plan Working Group in 2009.
Dinsmore created an online survey (under the name of his other company, Crowdbrite Solutions, a DBA for Sierra Dinsmore, LLC) that asks general questions about a “downtown” Mammoth Lakes. As of press time, 73 people had participated. The survey has been up for two weeks, but is not located on the town’s website, rather, it can be found at www.connectmammoth.com.
At Dinsmore’s presentation to the Chamber of Commerce (there were other presentations to the Recreation Commission, Mammoth Lakes Recreation, Mammoth Lakes Housing, Town Council, and a workshop for the public), Mammoth Resident Quart Keyes told Dinsmore, “It was very much assumed that I would know where the downtown area was. I was like, we have a downtown? Where is that?” She also noted that the survey did not distinguish between Shady Rest Park and the Shady Rest Parcel.
Mammoth Lakes Housing Executive Director Kirk Stapp asked why the visuals provided in the survey and presentation to illustrate the development of downtown were all maps taken from the October 2016 Hart Howerton Presentation. “If you’re going to spend town dollars and staff time to do things… we need to put some of the sidebars on this,” he said, referring to Town Council’s October 19 decision to reject Hart Howerton’s plan to relocate the Post Office, Multi-Use Facility, and RV Park, ideas which Town Council member John Wentworth termed “sidebars.” Dinsmore said the Town Council’s amendments to Hart Howerton’s plan had been accounted for, although the relocated Post Office and Multi-Use Facility were still present in the maps distributed to the community at presentations and in the online survey. Dinsmore said he used Hart Howerton’s visuals because they integrated all of the existing plans into one map that was easy to engage. Participants, such as Greg Eckert, Kathy Cage and Kirk Stapp, noted that this presentation was confusing.
