Our View

No new taxes

November 9, 2012

We do not like taxes.

We can live with taxes that make sense, but to raise Mammoth’s taxes to help the town raise money to alleviate its $29.5 million, 23-year MLLA judgment is a nonsense tax—a kneejerk tax, as it were.

There is a lot of talk among the citizenry about taxing ourselves. You can hear it from the Town Council Chambers to the beer aisle at Vons. The council itself rightly has the yips over any proposal to put a tax-raising measure before the voters, knowing as it does that Mammoth already is at a breaking point.

Greg Norby

November 2, 2012

We’re going to miss Greg Norby around here.

As the manager of the Mammoth Community Water District for four years, he ran the utility with aplomb, efficiency, and a sense of humor that hardly anyone ever got to see.

We were reminded of a Planning Commission meeting more than a year ago, when Norby gave the commissioners the bad news about the then-upcoming litigation with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

It was a sobering presentation, at a time when Mammoth really did not seem ready for another load of lawsuits.

The Snow Dance

October 19, 2012

Not long ago, we got a phone call from a radio station in Los Angeles, asking if the town’s fiscal situation will help, hamper, or change the skier experience in Mammoth this season.

We said no—nothing will change as long as people do a proper snow dance right about now.

One of them goes off tomorrow evening at 6:30 p.m. at The Village. The people at the Mammoth Mountain Community Foundation are throwing a bonfire party and ski burn as a sacrifice to Ullr. If you have to ask who the heck Ullr is, you’re in the wrong town.

Greed, Terry Ballas, and MLLA

October 5, 2012

We’ve been so busy pointing fingers at the people who caused the MLLA crisis here in Mammoth that we have hardly touched a couple of central questions.

What would it feel like to put a town of 7,000 people at risk? How does a person sleep comfortably, knowing that a little, small town in the mountains would have to reduce its resources to below bare-bones levels?