‘How can we salvage the summer?’ Rural California resorts and officials itching to open economy
Adrian Ballinger has this vision of how Tahoe Via Ferrata, a rock-climbing venue he operates at Squaw Valley ski resort, will open for summer:
Customers will have their temperatures taken, to check for COVID-19, when they arrive. They’ll have to sit six feet apart in the open-air monster truck that transports them to the base of the mountain. They’ll be given masks and disposable gloves, and will scale the rock face in carefully controlled small groups.
In other words, not exactly business as usual. But this cautious approach would serve as “an important stepping stone” toward getting business back to normal, said Ballinger, chief executive of a mountain-guide company called Alpenglow Expeditions. He wants to open the mountain May 16 if Placer County allows it.
Barely a month ago, as Squaw Valley and other California ski resorts closed down to stop the spread of the coronavirus, remote communities that rely on tourism pleaded with out-of-towners to stay away. Placer County, where Squaw is located, has reported 133 coronavirus infections, the vast majority in the South Placer suburbs, and eight deaths.
Now, with the critical summer season on the horizon, business leaders in the resort towns are starting to talk about reopening, saying they can keep their populations safe while getting the economy moving.
They have plenty of company. A groundswell led by elected officials in mostly rural areas, from Placerville to San Luis Obispo County, is pushing Gov. Gavin Newsom to relax or rescind his five-week-old “stay at home” order.
Officials in these rural areas argue that small-town economies are being strangled by a quarantine mandate that doesn’t make sense outside of major metropolitan areas. In many rural counties, there have been just a handful of infections and deaths reported. Some have none at all.
“If you look at the entire north state, we’re surrounded by counties that have not experienced anything,” Les Baugh, a member of the Shasta County Board of Supervisors, told his colleagues at a meeting this week. He said small businesses are in danger of going under if they can’t reopen soon.
Some people have taken to the streets. Conservative protesters have held rallies around the country demanding an end to quarantine orders. An estimated 500 demonstrators, led by an anti-vaccination group, protested outside the Capitol in Sacramento on Monday. A few governors have heeded President Donald Trump’s call for relaxing restrictions, although Trump rebuked Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s decision to allow businesses such as barber shops and nail salons to reopen Friday.
Newsom: No rush to reopen rural California
Newsom has laid out criteria for reopening the economy, based largely on the ability to conduct wider testing for the coronavirus, and has said he won’t be rushed into anything. He has resisted calls to offer a date when tourism and other businesses can resume. As of Wednesday evening, 35,396 people in California have been confirmed infected and 1,354 have died.
“So if you’re living in a community where you think, ‘Well, we’re immune, we’re OK, we’ve got this. We’re not LA, we’re not some of these other counties in the state of California,’ I hope you’ll disabuse yourself of that and consider the fact that some of the most challenging parts of the state remain some of our rural parts of our state,” Newsom said this week.
On Wednesday, the governor announced new contracts with Verily and OptumServe to open 86 new testing sites in “testing deserts” in rural California as well as African American and Latino communities.
Newsom noted the presence of a large coronavirus outbreak in rural Tulare County. The per-capita infection rate on the Navajo Nation reservation in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah is among the worst in the country. The huge infection rates at dozens of meatpacking plants in rural areas across the country are further proof COVID-19 isn’t just an urban crisis, experts say.
“There’s nothing that makes them immune to this disease,” said Dr. John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley.
Experts say there’s an additional risk in rural areas: their small hospitals. On a good day, their rural healthcare facilities — often serving populations that tend to be older and infirm — lack the staffing and resources to handle a sudden influx of people needing critical care or a wave of doctors and nurses getting sick.
Some leaders in conservative regions, like Shasta County, are also leery of straying from the state’s shelter-in-place order too soon.
“I don’t want to be in a situation where we do something that causes people to die,” Leonard Moty, a retired police chief, told his fellow Shasta County supervisors at the meeting this week.
Cindy Gustafson, a Placer County supervisor who represents the north Tahoe area, said innkeepers, kayak-rental companies and others are talking to county officials about methods of reopening the lake’s tourism economy without compromising safety.
“There’s nervousness that orders start to get lifted and there’s a mass exodus up to the mountains,” said Gustafson, who used to run the north shore’s tourism association. “We’re not ready. Our hospital isn’t ready.
“Nobody wants to reopen and have to close down again,” she said.
But tourism executives are becoming desperate for some sort of reassurance that they can open in the near future. Even an estimated date would help them arrange for employees to return, get the word out to customers, plan a budget, and buy thermometers and masks.
“How can we salvage the summer? How can we rebuild our business and welcome our visitors?” said Jerry Bindel, manager of the shuttered Forest Suites Resort at Heavenly Village in South Lake Tahoe. “That’s what we do.”
Loving resorts ‘from a distance’
The slogans are warm and fuzzy, like this one on the North Lake Tahoe Resort Association’s website: “We ask you to keep loving North Lake Tahoe, from a distance.”
But the underlying message is unmistakable: Stay home. Don’t think of visiting, even for a day.
Resort towns have been urging tourists to keep away for the past month, fearing urban visitors would infect the local population and overwhelm small-town health care networks.
“Our hospital does not have the capacity and resources to handle a hot spot situation,” said Carol Chaplin, chief executive of the Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority, which serves the south shore area.
California’s 280 state parks remain closed to vehicle traffic, and 81 of them are closed altogether. The U.S. Forest Service has closed “developed recreation sites, excluding trailheads,” through at least April 30.
Just a week ago, in fact, El Dorado County supervisors voted unanimously to impose a $1,000 fine on anyone who violates the county’s ban on nonessential travel to Lake Tahoe.
But now there’s talk of welcoming visitors back.
“People are hurting,” said Mono County Supervisor Stacy Corless. “It’s a fine line we have to walk, but we have to have a plan for reopening.”
The isolated small rural county, home to Mammoth Mountain ski resort, took the extraordinary steps of banning short term rentals at vacation homes and advocating postponing the start of the trout fishing season so anticipated it’s known locally as “Fishmas.”
The moves made sense at the time. With 24 positive cases and one death in a county of 14,000 people, Mono County had among the highest rates of COVID-19 in California’s small counties.
“Our primary objective is to try to slow the spread, but the other thing I think we’re realizing is you can’t keep people out forever. You just can’t,” Corless said. “Half the homes here are owned by people who aren’t primary residents, so it’s tough. I don’t really have a great answer other than it’s going to be a balance, but health concerns have to be the first factor in all of this. Public health has to drive us out of this.”
Many rural counties, especially those in the Central Valley and the remote regions north of Sacramento continue to see people traveling at greater rates than in urban areas, according to a new analysis of cell phone tracking data released this week by the technology company SafeGraph.
Experts say that’s not terribly surprising since poor, rural counties tend to have greater shares of “essential employees” exempt from the governor’s stay-at-home order.
What will reopening look like?
Tahoe residents are reeling from the just-announced permanent closure of a small but iconic business: The Lakeside Inn and Casino in Stateline announced it wasn’t going to survive the coronavirus shutdown, closing just shy of its 36th anniversary.
The four big south shore casinos remain closed, with no timetable for reopening, but industry consultant Ken Adams said they’re likely studying what’s happened in the Asian gambling hub of Macau. There, the casinos reopened at reduced capacity, with many slot machines and gaming tables closed. Customers and employees had to wear masks.
In Reno and Tahoe, casino executives “are starting to talk more about, ‘What’s the plan for reopening?’ ” Adams said.
They aren’t the only ones. On the quieter north shore, 70 percent of the housing stock consists of vacation homes. About 60 percent of the workforce depends on tourism, said Liz Bowling, spokeswoman for the North Tahoe resort group.
“Our business community is going, ‘We need to reopen as soon as humanly possible,’” she said.
She said business owners are formulating strategies for reopening safely, everything from masks to signage on beaches to promote social distancing. “What testing do we need to be in place? What thermometers do we need?” she said.
The Truckee Chamber of Commerce is batting around ideas for a “welcome back” public relations campaign. Chances are it won’t have the usual fizzle of a tourism PR blitz.
“We caution ourselves (not to) reopen with any kind of grand fanfare,” said Colleen Dalton, the chamber’s tourism director. “This is going to be a stop-go, herky-jerky, green light-red light type of reopening.”
Some of the usual trappings of summer on the lake have already been scrapped, like the north shore’s July 4 fireworks show at Incline Village. South shore leaders are still hoping to salvage their fireworks display and other big gatherings like the popular American Century celebrity golf tournament, which is set to begin July 7 and has become famous for its party atmosphere.
Officials acknowledge that reopening Tahoe will have to be done carefully. Chaplin said most visitors will insist on safety precautions such as the presence of hand sanitizers.
The gondola at Heavenly will take smaller groups than before. If the golf tournament does take place as scheduled, spectators might not recognize it, she said.
“Will it look like last year? Probably not. How do we celebrate that event that has become a tradition and still model that behavior that we have to? No answers, I don’t have any answers.”
Protesting coronavirus rules at the Capitol
Woodland resident Angela Husted was among the hundreds of protesters outside the Capitol in Sacramento demanding an end to Newsom’s “stay at home” order.
Carrying a sign that read, “We washed our hands, Now let us work!” she said Newsom’s order fails to distinguish between congested metropolitan areas and less populated communities like Woodland.
“A lot of the smaller communities are very agriculture-based,” said Husted, an IT worker whose career has been put on hold. “They’re not interacting with the public, they’re not interacting with a lot of different people on a daily basis.
“But they’re being prevented from supporting their families. And we’re not talking about rich, wealthy, urban families, either, in San Francisco.”
Although she got a $500 stimulus check, she said she needs something besides cash from the federal government: “I need to get back to work.”
Adrienne Williams of Ripon, another protester, said her husband, a solar panel salesman, needs to get back to work, too.
“We don’t have any income,” said Williams, who brought her 9-year-old son Wyatt to Monday’s protest.
Williams said a friend was hospitalized with COVID-19 and acknowledged the severity of the pandemic. But she was adamant that things must change: “You can’t just put restrictions on everything.”
The rally is likely to be the last for a while, at least at the Capitol. The California Highway Patrol on Wednesday announced it won’t issue any permits for events at the Capitol or other state properties. The CHP said Monday’s protesters, many of whom stood shoulder to shoulder without masks outside the Capitol as speakers claimed the pandemic was being blown out of proportion, violated state orders on social distancing.
But that won’t put an end to all demonstrations. The “Reopen California” Facebook group, which has 85,000 members, posted claims that COVID-19 is a liberal political ploy and frequently invites its members to rallies against the shutdown orders.
Roger Gitlin, a county supervisor in Del Norte County, helped organize one small protest Tuesday in his North Coast community.
“Our County and our State have ‘quarantined’ us,” Gitlin wrote on Facebook afterward. “I always thought you quarantined the sick. Since when are healthy folks subject to deprivation of our Rights?... Nobody wants welfare. Remove the shackles which prevent us from surviving. OPEN UP DEL NORTE COUNTY.”
Others elected leaders in rural areas are taking a more formal approach.
Seven of the nine mayors in Stanislaus County co-signed a letter telling Newsom to “pursue an aggressive strategy for reopening our county for business.”
Last week the Placerville City Council voted to send Newsom a similar letter. “I’m getting really frustrated at how these businesses are being disadvantaged,” said Vice Mayor Dennis Thomas — himself a recovering COVID-19 patient.
In Shasta County, supervisors this week debated how to get their businesses back on their feet.
Taking the lead was Baugh. He told his fellow supervisors he recognizes the impact of the disease — he was friends with all three of the Shasta residents who’ve died of COVID-19 — but warned that small businesses are on the verge of going bust.
“If we had no smaller businesses operating for the next two months, they would not exist,” he said. “Period. They don’t have the ability to recover from it.”
But the county’s health officer Dr. Karen Ramstrom struck a cautionary note, and so did Supervisor Steve Morgan.
“If we lift the regulations too much … we’re going to get an influx of people into the short term rentals, all the different motels up in the north county, over in Fall River Valley and those areas,” Morgan said. “And who knows what they’re going to be bringing in.”
This story was originally published April 23, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘How can we salvage the summer?’ Rural California resorts and officials itching to open economy."