GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME … $1.1M
Nearly six years after the Mountain View Fire tore through Walker, Mono County supervisors decided last Tuesday how to spend the $1.1 million the county won from the utility blamed for it.
The money, won in a lawsuit settlement between the county and Liberty Utilities in 2025, reimburses what the county spent responding to the fire. The plan, decided over various community meetings this summer, splits it across five projects.
More than half of the money will go towards the purchase of nine water tanks, priced at $630,000 total or $70,000 each, that were requested by the Antelope Valley Fire Protection District. Each 30,000-gallon tank can deliver 250 gallons of water per minute for two hours, which could improve the district’s ISO rating, the score insurers use to set fire coverage.
Fire Chief Richard Nalder said the district has worked on the idea for several years because the valley has no fire hydrants. Two tanks would go in Topaz, one in Coleville and the rest in Walker.
The second-largest share, up to $300,000, would go toward land for a community recreation center championed by Deb Bush. The land could then be used as leverage in grant applications. Her letter suggested a parcel at Hackney and Mule Deer. Supervisor John Peters said it sits across from Mountain Gate Park.
Bush imagines a facility with a basketball court, exercise equipment and classrooms, and thinks it could help the valley keep young families.
“I love this community,” she wrote. “But love alone will not bring young families back. You must acknowledge the reasons they are choosing elsewhere and begin building the positives that will draw them here again.”
*Ed note: How about an aquatic center?!?!?!
Up to $193,000 of the money goes to the Mountain Gate Park Recreation and Revitalization Project, which the county describes as a plan for trails and watershed improvements that benefit fish and bird habitat and public access. The money would pay for environmental review, trail alignment, surveying and mapping, habitat restoration recommendations and landscape architecture, not construction.
A memorial to Sallie Joseph, who died in the fire, would receive up to $5,000, and another $10,000 would go towards a defensible space program that would clear hazardous brush within 50 feet of structures on consenting owners’ properties.
The priorities came from a summer-long community process that ended with an Aug. 10 town hall. Each attendee at the meeting got ten sticky dots to place on projects however they liked, even all on one. The tanks drew 256 dots and the recreation center 73. The Antelope Valley Regional Planning Advisory Committee then voted 7-0 to send the top five to the board in that order.
That being said, none of this money is out the door, and many of the projects have logistical kinks to work out and/or need people to champion them.
For the funds to be released, a group for each project must submit a detailed plan and clear environmental review, or the board could pay on a reimbursement basis.
The Mountain View Fire started Nov. 17, 2020, in Walker. It burned about 20,000 acres, killed one person and destroyed 80 structures according to Cal Fire. Cal Fire said the most likely cause was a Liberty power line that touched the ground.
State regulators have since moved against the utility. On Sept. 25, the California Public Utilities Commission’s enforcement staff proposed a $16 million penalty over line safety violations which would go to the state’s General Fund.
