MAMMOTH TOWN COUNCIL – PART 1
Perhaps the most interesting, and most telling, part of Lakota Mikulicich’s campaign is the eight years she spent in Kenya.
That’s because her intentions for running here are the same reasons she had for going there at 18.
Though Mikulicich grew up on the Eastside, in Mammoth then Swall Meadows, she left after graduating from Bishop High School to join a volunteer program in Kenya. She initially went for six months, but that trip turned into eight years, and she ended up attending university there too.
She worked on various humanitarian projects in food assistance and education.
It was her passion. But eventually, the low pay of humanitarian work squeezed her out of working in Kenya.
Moving back home, she started working at Mammoth Mountain in concessions, then moved up from there. She got a job at Parallax and managed it for a while before she moved into property management, working for Nomadness Rentals, a short-term rental company, and got a real estate license. In time, she started a housecleaning business.
Now, she’s running because she misses “the person she was in Kenya,” she said. “I miss doing things for the greater good, not just operating my own businesses.” She sees that opportunity on the Mammoth Lakes Town Council.
If elected, she has a list of policies she’d like to explore. On housing, she wants to incentivize, and potentially subsidize, more homeowners building Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) by making building plans more affordable.
She’d also like to look at lowering development and water district impact fees for developers building multifamily residential units not zoned for short-term rentals, and she wants to reassess housing requirements for major developers.
As her career might suggest, she’s not anti-STR. She said they create a lot of jobs.
“If my fireplace breaks, I’m calling a local fireplace company, whereas some of these bigger developments call whoever they contracted out from outside the area.”
On fire mitigation, she likes the direction the town is headed but would like more free green waste disposal days.
She’d also like to reinstate some version of the wildlife specialist role previously held by Steve Searles, though she didn’t specify that it needs to be him.
Mikulicich is only in her 30s, but she believes her age is a strength for encouraging involvement in public issues.
“It’s important to me to try to get my generation more actively involved,” she said.
Tarek Nuttall, Scottish accent and all, left the United Kingdom at 18 to find work as a ski instructor in Mammoth Lakes. Like many would-be lifers, one season turned into many. Now 44, he’s running for town council.
Born in New Hampshire but raised in Scotland, Nuttall didn’t set foot back in the U.S. until 2000, at 18. His father worked in the oil industry, and Nuttall was yearning for somewhere sunny where he could ski. That landed him in California.
He spent those first few seasons living in employee housing and working as a snowboard instructor, heading back to the U.K. between seasons to work. After three seasons, he returned to Scotland full-time for a four-year plumbing apprenticeship.
Moving back to Mammoth in 2009, he spent years working for other plumbers in town before starting his own business, Highland Plumbing, in 2020. He and his wife eventually bought a home and had a son.
His career in the trades has primed him to think in problems and solutions, he said. His job is objective, forcing him to take the issues at hand and solve them on the spot. Some problems are simple, and others require multiple solutions and compromise.
He serves on his local HOA board and has been its president for multiple terms, an experience that prompted him to think about other local leadership opportunities.
Cue his candidacy. He’s honest about what he does — and doesn’t — know.
“I‘ve got a lot of listening and learning still to do,” he said.
When asked about specific issues, Nuttall generally stopped short of taking firm positions. He said he wants to understand the facts and data before deciding what the town should do.
Working in infrastructure, he’s open to development as long as it’s “sustainable.”
He supported the council’s existing multi-pronged approach to housing, including down-payment assistance, Lease to Locals and the Parcel. But when asked what he would like “missing middle” housing assistance to look like in Mammoth, he said he would first need to understand what income brackets the town is trying to serve, what residents can afford and how many units are actually needed.
His interpretation of the town council‘s role is to “improve the quality of life for its constituents.” He said he wants to be proactive and productive, while recognizing that some problems take years to solve.
He said he‘ll listen to people who know more than he does, ask questions and look for ways forward.
Stacey Slichta has only been in Mammoth a little over a year. But in that time, she’s breathed new life into the culinary arts program at Mammoth High School and is now committed to breathing new life into town politics.
She doesn’t see her newness to the town as a reason to hold back enthusiasm.
“I think it’s fair to ask someone who‘s lived here 20 years and just now decides to run, ‘why didn‘t you run 20 years ago?’ I think it works both ways; if you feel like you can make a difference in a community, you do it. Why sit around and wait?”
Before moving to Mammoth, Slichta was a high-end private chef in Los Angeles for more than two decades.
Raised in Buffalo, New York, Slichta attended Rutgers University on a rowing scholarship while working at the Hyatt as a room service cashier to help pay for school. Over time, she worked her way up through the hotel industry and eventually landed a position in San Francisco as a director of catering. This led her to study culinary arts professionally.
She eventually made connections in celebrity circles, and built her career on it.
She moved to the Eastern Sierra for her son, a competitive snowboarder, and took the teaching gig upon arrival. She’s made rapid changes in the program since then, giving the students opportunities for professional certifications, having the students cater school-sponsored events, and landing them in local restaurant jobs.
Now she’s turning towards the council for opportunity, and the thing she hopes to see most is increased communication with the public.
“I’m very transparent, sometimes to my own detriment, but that’s who I am,” she said. “I’d rather be transparent and have all my cards on the table than have people wondering what I‘m not telling them.”
She isn’t pleased with the level of community outreach currently coming from the towns politicians. If elected, she’d like to hold more casual town hall meetings to meet with constituents and understand their concerns.
She pointed to the Flock cameras the council approved in 2024, which were controversial at the time and have recently resurfaced as a point of public concern after national stories about police misuse of the technology.
“That’s the kind of thing where, even if something feels like it doesn’t affect everybody, you should always err on the side of over-communicating and letting people speak their minds, rather than just pushing through the agenda,” she said.
When her son was young, she served on the school governance board for his school, LA Unified. That taught her to “let people vent.”
“A lot of the time, people just want to talk,” she said. “Once they’re no longer in an emotional place, you can actually move things forward. I’ve done that for years, both working with the school and through foster care work, working with the social work system and social workers. People would come in upset, and you’d just listen, hear them out, and then help move things forward.”
As for housing and development, Slichta said she‘s still working to figure out what vision constituents have for the future, and plans to hold more meetings and gather data to work out those ideas.
She doesn’t like the Parcel because she sees it stratifying the town into wealthy and poor neighborhoods, which she thinks is unhealthy.
On short-term rentals, she believes some owners might not find renting worth the hassle once they account for the real costs. Data and conversations with rental owners could help move more people into programs like Lease to Locals, she said.
“There needs to be more of a push, especially toward Airbnb owners, to really run the numbers on what they’re doing,” she said. “Someone should sit down and actually do that math.”
Finally, given her position as a working teacher, she hopes to lead by example and encourage students to participate in local government and voice their concerns.
