California tourist towns demand outsiders stay home. ‘Someone is going to get shot’
Stacy Corless opened Facebook on Monday and saw someone suggest it was time to start slashing visitors’ tires.
It was startling evidence to Corless, a Mono County Supervisor, that a frantic fear of outsiders had gripped some people in the ski resort community of Mammoth Lakes.
“I’m really concerned about the level of vitriol and xenophobia,” she said. “I’m worried someone is going to get shot.”
Mono County over the weekend banned most short-term vacation rentals in an effort to prevent tourists from carrying the new coronavirus into the isolated, resource-strapped community. The decision followed a wave of similar announcements that have derailed ski trips, hobbled backpacking plans, and landed a devastating blow to local tourism-dependent economies across the West.
After Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a statewide shelter-in-place order last week, longstanding tensions between locals and tourists have begun simmering in new ways. Hundreds of thousands of urbanites have crowded trails, swarmed beaches and holed up in vacation homes and rentals across the state. Newsom’s order said people were still allowed to go outside and exercise, but it didn’t set limits on where they could go.
Communities across the state have started fighting back. Marin County closed its parks. Truckee and South Lake Tahoe are considering plans to limit the use of short-term rentals. AirBnb and other online vacation rental companies are offering refunds. For the first time, tourism bureaus have found themselves urging visitors to stay home.
“Our locals have welcomed visitors from around the globe for generations but right now our community needs the time and space to protect our loved ones and health resources,” the official North Lake Tahoe visitor bureau website now reads. “The Sierra region will be ready to welcome visitors back when this crisis is behind us, but now is the time to stay put.”
For her part, Corless in Mono County supported action to shut the rentals down. But she said some constituents have told her it didn’t go nearly far enough. “They want us to be checking IDs on Highway 203, which is the entrance to Mammoth Lakes,” she said.
Across the state, residents in tourism towns say they were deeply troubled by the surge of visitors over the weekend.
“I’ve lived here for 50 years and Saturday was one of the top two or three heaviest visitation days I’ve seen out here,” said Burr Heneman, 78, who lives in Point Reyes Station near several popular parks, including the Point Reyes National Seashore.
“It was really amazing and kind of stunning given the context of the shelter-in-place rules we’re operating under in the Bay Area. The parks weren’t prepared for it. The stores weren’t prepared for it.”
Visit any tourism town’s Facebook group and chances are you’ll see locals begging — if not arguing with — visitors to take their recreation elsewhere for the time being.
“You live where you live. We are not supposed to be transporting our cooties all around, cross-contaminating, and keeping this thing going,” Bethany Kane, a paramedic who lives near Half Moon Bay, wrote in a private Facebook group. “When things go back to ‘normal’ people can visit our small, limited resource, limited access/egress community once again.”
In an interview, Kane said she and her neighbors were alarmed by a surge in visitors coming to their beach community over the weekend. They clogged roads, left litter everywhere, and overwhelmed the local grocery store, which was already struggling to keep supplies in stock.
Friends and family reported seeing visitors hugging and standing too close together, something that left many deeply troubled about the disease risks, she said. She felt compelled to speak out.
“It’s so hard to say that, so it doesn’t sound like we’re saying, ‘Get off my lawn,’” she said. “It immediately gets people’s defenses up because they feel like they’re being excluded, but that’s not what we’re trying to say.”
‘Love it from a safe distance’
Resort towns normally have welcome arms during March weekends. Increasingly, they’re waving people away.
Truckee officials, in coordination with the county, on Monday were weighing whether, and how best, to restrict short-term rentals.
South Lake Tahoe took similar steps on Monday, citing a surge in complaints from people who noticed out-of-towners mingling amid a pandemic. Officials called on the lodging industry, including hotels and local renters, to help deter visitors for 30 days.
“This is something I thought I’d never have to say throughout my tourism career, but please stay home at this time,” said Carol Chaplin, CEO and president of the Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority. “Once it is deemed safe by the health experts, we can welcome you with open arms and will be joining you. The mountain town you love needs you to love it from a safe distance. Stay home, stay healthy and we’ll see you when it’s safe to travel again.”
Placer County was still exploring its options but planning some sort of action, a spokeswoman said Monday afternoon.
Newsom on Monday announced the closure of parking lots at several state parks across California. The decision came after people crowded beaches and packed trails on the first weekend of the statewide shelter-in-place order.
“One cannot condemn that,” Newsom said. “But one can criticize it.”
Additional restrictions are also possible if people do not obey the social distancing requirements, Newsom said.
Despite a drumbeat of warnings — and local officials’ pleadings — some in the Tahoe Basin have been slow to get the message, said Mike Stram, a retired civil engineer who lives full-time in Truckee. He and his neighbors were appalled when a local homeowner put a vacation rental online under the title, “’Shelter in Place’ in a Sparkling Clean Luxury Home — Hot Tub & Steam Shower!”
“I know a bunch of people up here locally saw it on Facebook and just absolutely assaulted that woman (online),” he said. “She realized that was a bad idea.”
Stram, whose wife is a local nurse, said he knows Truckee’s 25-bed hospital couldn’t handle a surge of critically ill patients on a good day, let alone manage dozens of COVID-19 patients needing immediate, life-saving care.
Tahoe Forest Hospital District is one of 34 federally designated “critical access hospitals” with less than 25 beds in rural California. Experts say the small medical facilities could be among the hardest hit in a COVID-19 surge.
Many have just a handful of ventilators necessary to keep patients breathing, and they are particularly at risk of having a shortage of healthcare workers should they start to come down with symptoms of the disease.
“(The local healthcare system) is going to be quickly overrun shortly, and I think even with the local crowd they’re already in bad shape,” Stram said. “They couldn’t even handle what’s here let alone if you put several thousand more people up here.”
Wendy Mastroianni, 49, has similar concerns. She’s lived full-time in the Truckee area for about 15 years. A nurse at the local hospital, she’s taken to heart recent warnings from health and elected officials.
She had a front-row seat over the weekend to people who aren’t doing the same.
The home across from hers is a short-term rental, she said, as is one a couple of doors down. Rentals are in the fabric of the local ski-town economy. But seeing jam-packed rental home driveways and car-loads of people on her street over the weekend was disconcerting.
“Maybe they think ‘OK well it’s just four of us,’ ” she said Monday. “But if you multiply that by 50 houses or 100 houses, that’s a lot of extra people in Truckee Tahoe going to the grocery store, going to the gas station, going into atrial fibrillation and needing to go to our ER for something completely not related to COVID-19.
“It’s upsetting.”
An adult who lives in eastern Nevada County contracted COVID-19 and was recently hospitalized, county health officials announced Monday. It was the county’s second confirmed case and believed to have been from community transmission with an unknown spread.
Cascade of rental bans
AirBnb is offering guests full refunds and hosts no-charge cancellations for reservations booked on or before March 14 with check-in dates April 14 or before. VRBO is offering similar flexibility, according to its website.
Many cities, counties and tourism boards are discouraging travel but steering clear of any authoritative bans. In a way, it follows what Newsom and others have done by hoping social distancing and stay-at-home orders are embraced so widely they don’t need enforcing.
Though they have not yet issued a ban on short-term rentals, city officials in Bishop, a world-renowned climbing destination in Inyo County, are asking spring break adventure-seekers to stay home.
“We understand our small town with a Big Back Yard is a lovely place to recreate, and further recognize that while trips here can be seen as ‘needed,’ they do qualify as “non-essential,” officials wrote. (About a dozen weekend rentals were available on AirBnB midday Monday.)
The city has embraced the #AdventureCanWait hashtag.
But the Southeast Utah Health Department went a step further and issued far-reaching bans that all-but-shuttered tourism in the region, including slickrock strewn areas around Moab.
The month-long order that took effect last week blocks camping and overnight check-ins for people not in the area for work. It applies to hotels, motels, RV parks, campgrounds and short-term rentals. The city on its website threatens jail time and fines for those who violate the rule.
And in Colorado, Estes Park on Monday enacted a similar month-long ban on overnight stays at hotels short-term rentals. Like Truckee, the mountain community at the entrance to the now-closed Rocky Mountain National Park is heavily reliant on people making an hour’s drive from Denver or Fort Collins.
“This is an incredibly difficult decision made with the health of the people in our community in mind — our number one priority,” Travis Machalek, the town’s administrator, said in a statement. “We hope that the sooner we take these measures, the sooner we can celebrate the reopening of our businesses.”
Most restrictions announced thus far are in effect until mid-April. There’s no guarantee things will open up by then, and public officials have told people hunkering down might be a monthslong endeavor.
The longer it goes on, the more people will be tempted to head for the high country, Mastroianni, the Truckee nurse, said. That makes her even more anxious.
“Don’t go anywhere, but especially not here,” Mastroianni said. “Stay home. We have to care for one another. That’s part of this message. It’s not about you and your selfish, ‘I want to get out of here and go up to Tahoe.’ It’s bigger than that. Your actions affect other people.
“And it could be adversely.”
This story was originally published March 24, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "California tourist towns demand outsiders stay home. ‘Someone is going to get shot’."