Editorial: An Involved Community Makes This Mountain a Powerful Place to Live

  • Clean Up The Ridge Route volunteers (shown above while working to move a boulder blocking the roadway) are just a few of the hundreds of volunteers who labor to benefit our small community each year.

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    Clean Up The Ridge Route volunteers (shown above while working to move a boulder blocking the roadway) are just a few of the hundreds of volunteers who labor to benefit our small community each year.

  • Rotary Festival of Books volunteer storytellers.

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    Rotary Festival of Books volunteer storytellers.

  • Center of the World Festival volunteers gather to celebrate.

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    Center of the World Festival volunteers gather to celebrate.

  • Taste of the Mountain gathering on Environmental Impact Reports hosted by The Mountain Enterprise.

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    Taste of the Mountain gathering on Environmental Impact Reports hosted by The Mountain Enterprise.

By Patric Hedlund, Editor

Last week’s issue of The Mountain Enterprise offered reports that inspired pride and optimism about what is happening in our community.

As early issues of the October 8 newspaper hit the newsstands and mailboxes on Thursday, I heard from a friend at a Chamber of Commerce mixer who has returned to town after being away for several years.

He said apathy is to blame for the community’s disinterest in the activities of the Municipal Advisory Council (MAC) appointed by Supervisor Ray Watson.

I disagreed with him. I suggested that people are too busy actively working together to create meaningful change to attend meetings for the sake of meetings. Then I went home to write a list. Here is a small sample of the active involvement on the mountain from just last week:

  • The parents who formed their own charter school five years ago (Pine Mountain Learning Center) have now seen it become the school with the highest Academic Performance Index of all public schools in Kern County.
  • An air-monitoring effort has been funded with a $25,000 grant to measure the pollution levels at El Tejon School, Frazier Mountain High School, the neighborhoods adjacent to I-5 and Pilot-Flying J’s yard of big rigs idling overnight (plus other sites of concern). That effort started with the Town Council’s request for a monitor from the state. It has evolved into this new project by the TriCounty Watchdogs to teach members of the community to monitor air quality scientifically.
  • There is a call to community volunteers to help finish the visitors plaza at the corner of the Pilot-Flying J property. “Let the Condor Fly” is the campaign The Mountain Enterprise helped launch to get that plaza finished. This weekend and next people are asked to show up at 8 a.m. to help build a masonry wall.
  • A community initiative has been called for volunteers to upgrade the high school weight-training room so it is a place where the kids will want to be. Larry Skiba made a community-unity campaign of it, inviting people to work together to fix the situation.
  • Another parent is starting a campaign to hold school administrators more accountable to set clear policies about cyberbullying, violence and discipline in the high school.
  • A meeting to “Keep the Lights On” in Frazier Park’s business district this week was reported on the front page of The Mountain Enterprise. The MAC is hosting that meeting.
  • The Clean Up the Ridge Route (CUTTR) group has been working for four years to reclaim the historic Ridge Route from storm damage. They want to open it up again for tourist visits and special events. They celebrated their progress Saturday, Oct. 9 by hosting tours for antique car clubs from Los Angeles, Orange and San Luis Obispo counties to the Ridge Route. CUTTR’s spectacular success will add to the attraction of this area for cultural and historical tourism.
  • The Ridge Route Communities Museum was a main stop for the antique car tour. Over the last four years the all-volunteer museum has extended its exhibits outside and is now refurbishing both inside and outside to create a wonderful sampling of the life and culture of those who created these charming and unique mountain villages. That is a completely locally created and sustained volunteer effort.
  • The Holiday Faire Fantasy of Lights Parade committee is calling for community groups and sponsors to get together to finance, design and build cartoon-themed floats bedecked with lights to create a dazzling event December 4 to which we can invite visitors from surrounding urban areas to kick off their holiday season.
  • Business people met Friday with resource professionals for the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) from WEV to review a “Shop Local” survey to help local merchants assess how to serve our community more successfully, and to learn how to help our community understand how vital it is to “shop local” so local services will be able to stay here.
  • The SBDC is a direct outgrowth of the Synergy Summit movement begun by The Mountain Enterprise in November 2007 to work together to envision economic development for this region that will maintain the beauty of these mountains while creating sustainable jobs. In its first meeting, the group—from hunters to tree-huggers—hit upon ecotourism as a development model they could all agree upon.
  • Second, we brought in workshops and economic development partners to coach our local nonprofits to benefit from Board of Trade tourism grants. Since those first efforts, our community has won over $76,000 to promote this area, all through volunteer work.
  • We began recruiting resources to help our small business infrastructure survive this recession and turn it into an opportunity. This editor went to Bakersfield to invite Small Business Administration representative Mike Souza to meet local business owners. He helped recruit partnership with University of California at Merced’s SBDC regional network director Diane Howerton, who agreed to tour the mountain and meet with local businesses, which led to bringing in Santa Barbara-based WEV to help fund and manage the Mountain Communities SBDC satellite office.
  • The reason they decided to invest resources here is because of our ability to work together productively. The model of local volunteers working with regional resource people is expanding.
  • The Fort Tejon Historical Association is holding a Ghost Tour of the fort that is being marketed in Los Angeles, Lancaster and Bakersfield as an ecotourism offering this Saturday, Oct. 16. An experienced event promoter from Sherman Oaks is producing the event, which she believes will lead to more widely marketed events at the fort. This is growing with local volunteer efforts in partnership with regional volunteers.
  • Now our goal is to bring these visitors westward to become acquainted with the rest of the mountain’s offerings.
  • Today, Meals on Wheels, a group of volunteers who have been working together multiple times a week for 15 years, meet at the Frazier Mountain Park Community Center kitchen to prepare, package and deliver 30 meals for ailing and elderly neighbors in a completely locally-funded effort.
  • The Mountain Shakespeare Festival, the Center of the World Festival, the Arts for Earth Foundation, the Frazier Park Car Club, Lilac Festival, Mountain Memories’ Fiesta Days, the Chamber of Commerce Holiday Faire, Run to the Pines, Wine in the Pines and the Pine Mountain Village Merchants Association are all developing plans for this next season of volunteer-run events.
  • The Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) in Pine Mountain is organizing for the Great Shake Out on October 21. This is 36 active, trained and certified volunteers working together as advance teams for first responders.
  • Six volunteer water boards are meeting this month to keep our mountains livable: These volunteer boards are the Lebec County Water District, Frazier Park Public Utilities District, Krista Mutual Water Company, Lake of the Woods Mutual Water Company, Pinon Pines Mutual Water Company and Mil Potrero Mutual Water Company.

This list is just the tip of the iceberg. I could go on. You could too. These are all real people doing real work. No wonder they don’t have time to show up to a meeting just to talk. They are also holding full-time jobs and raising families, many with four-hour commutes each day.

This is a community of involved people meeting to solve real problems and to make real progress to improve the quality of life in this beautiful island of nature and history we call home. We are optimistic about the future here.

Perhaps the appointed members of the MAC should be called upon to stand up for their community’s right to elect its own representatives. Self-determination is the bedrock of our democracy. It is also the core of the Mountain Spirit here.

The MAC is asking for greater community support, and county workers are continuing to pretend that the appointed MAC is their only avenue of communication with the community.

Rosamond elects their MAC representatives. Why should our community expect less?

The members of this MAC can earn respect by showing respect for the dignity and self-determination of the people they wish to represent. They should request that Supvr. Watson restore the bylaw that he deleted from the community’s MAC proposal in 2009. They should ask the Board of Supervisors to enable the Frazier Mountain Communities to elect their own MAC representatives. It won’t take place until the 2012 general election, but now is the time to repair the harm that was done when that right was denied.

This is part of the October 15, 2010 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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