Monday, 19 Jul 1999
LEE VINING, Calif.
I arrived in town late in the afternoon, having nowhere to stay. A slew of motels lined the central street, but against my intuition I took the advice of the park ranger I'd met just outside town and pulled up in front of the Best Western. I entered a lobby teeming with tourists. "You got a reservation?" the woman behind the desk shouted. "No," I said, "no, I just got here." "Oooh, well we don't have any rooms left, and neither does anyone else in town. Nope, you're too late, everyone's booked." She paused, turning momentarily toward the back window. "Unless, of course ... you want the trailer."
Now, let me be honest up front. In my line of work, we don't generally trust state departments of transportation. And I think it's probably safe to say they don't care for us too much either. These guys (and I mean guys) had a lot of fun building the Interstates for four decades. But now it appears they're stuck in a gear they can't get out of, like a scratched old Frank Sinatra record. So when I tell you that last year the town of Lee Vining and surrounding Mono County requested that their transportation funding be spent on widening sidewalks and other pedestrian safety measures, and that they were rejected by the state and told to put the money into the highway widening project instead, maybe you won't be surprised.
That's part of the reason I'm here. I heard Lee Vining's "David and Goliath" story soon after arriving in California. I had worked on the federal transportation bill in Washington, D.C., lobbying for more local control over decision-making and better long-term planning and coordination. So when grants became available for one of the more promising community planning programs that we helped get into the bill, I immediately thought of this place. What shocked me the most is that we actually helped Lee Vining win the grant, an award of $180,000 for a two-year publicly driven planning process to balance tourism with environmental protection, to help the town better serve as the eastern gateway to Yosemite and possibly the staging area for a future public transit system planned for the park, and last but not least, to win its main street back.
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