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LOCAL ROAD CONDITIONS,
SNOWPLOWING, CLOSURE INFO FOR THE FRAZIER PARK/MT. PINOS RECREATION AREA
12/15/01
Mountain
Biking in Frazier Park
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The road conditions shown on
this page are provided only as a public service and may be out of date or
unreliable. THE PUBLIC AGENCIES SHOWN
BELOW ARE RESPONSIBLE
Check current weather info, forecast, conditions and weathercam
links, shown above.
AREA ROAD MAP STREAM & TOPOGRAPHICAL MAPS
CHP (661)-248-6655
KERN
COUNTY ROAD DEPT. roads@co.kern.ca.us- 661-862-8850
Late
December 2007- Snowing intermittently throughout
the area.
Be prepared
for more
through the
end of the
month.
Roads
in the Mt. Pinos area are currently
covered with snow or ice, wetness. Chains
required in some areas.
Local Winter Road & Snowplowing Conditions, Chain Requirement Info- 661-248-6535
Snowplowing and other winter storm road
work is ongoing in the area during the winter. Be aware of sand, road equipment, ice &
rocks on area roadways. Drive with caution. During the winter,
ALWAYS BRING CHAINS OR 4WD!! If it is snowing on area
mountains or roads are icy, THEY WILL BE REQUIRED. The gate to
The CHP (661-248-6655) monitors roads and controls access, sets up chain
controls, etc. when required. Check with them and the
CONTACT THESE FOLKS
FOR MORE PRECISE ROAD INFO: Ask for current info about
CHP - publicaffairs@chp.ca.gov. 661-248-6655
Local SNOW INFO-
Frazier Park Chamber of Commerce- 661-245-1212 or email them at fmguide@frazmtn.com.
KERN
COUNTY ROAD DEPT. roads@co.kern.ca.us- 661-862-8850
KERN COUNTY SHERIFF- 661-245-3440
KERN COUNTY 4TH DISTRICT SUPERVISOR AT Sup4thDist@aol.com OR CALL HIS OFFICE AT(661) 868-3601 OR (661)
868-3680.
THE
LOS PADRES FOREST HEADQUARTERS in Goleta- Ask for the Recreation
Officer- (805) 968-6640
US FOREST SERVICE PUBLIC AFFAIRS & COMMUNICATIONS- Marilyn Hartley,
Director- Region 5 - 707-562-9016
KERN COUNTY BOARD OF
TRADE/TOURISM BUREAU 661-861-2367
VENTURA COUNTY SHERIFF-661-245-3489
During the winter, area road openings
and access are subject to snowplowing and weather conditions. CHECK ROAD
CONDITIONS and access before coming to the area- be prepared for rapid weather
changes and winter emergencies; bring extra clothing, food and hot drinks. A
See our prior years' letters on the subject of winter road maintenance and closures in our area below. Your support is essential to solving local roadplowing and area access problems that have existed here since the 1930's! Send us copies of your letters or suggestions, or problems encountered, and we will post them on this page. Help us solve the indifference to this situation by doing so. We will make sure your comments get to the right public officials.
"Payments to States" Funding Info Requested
Secure
Rural Schools and Community Self Determination Act (P.L. 106-393)
(Click to see links to the
law.)
All of these funds were generated in the Mt. Pinos
Ranger District here in Frazier Park. Copies of Bd. of Supervisors
agendas and resolutions relating to these funds will be forthcoming. More
of these funds were sent to
SUGGESTIONS FOR FIXING LOCAL WINTER ROAD PROBLEMS:
1. Use Kern,
2. Start a shuttle service to
3. Create a non-profit foundation to fund plowing
equipment, buses, security, restrooms, maintenance/trash disposal, area cleanup
and other support activities.
4. Use the
5. Local landowners are willing to provide parking for a shuttle.
6. Continue the pressure on the politicians and public agencies to FIX
this decades-old problem.
7. Provide a specific area for snowplay on
public property; MANAGE the winter visitor traffic.
8. Apply for roads grant money, thru CalTrans
and the Fed. Hwy. Administration, and other funds from the
9. Get out of bed earlier to plow the roads, stay up later, and plow it
before it builds up to the point where you can't!
10. Get the local agencies to get along with each other and solve the
problems instead of passing the buck to each other and pointing fingers.
11. Use Kern County-generated Green Sticker funds from snowmobile sales
and registrations for snowplowing.
12. Make Frazier Mtn. Pk.
Rd. and Mt. Pinos Hwy. STATE Highways, instead of
Kern County Roads, so CalTrans can maintain them.
Letters/emails
Sent Regarding
Please support us by sending similar correspondence to your elected state, local and federal representatives. Responses to these letters have been received and are available for your review at our business. Closure of roads leading into our town is a Restraint of Trade and Interruption of Commerce and we are dealing with these issues legally.
Received email 1/22/01 from Chamber of Commerce Board Member:
Lloyd,
Please remove my store phone number from your website as snow information. What
are you thinking?Thanks
Harry (Ace Hardware)
Response Sent to above email:
Harry-
I have removed your phone # from our pages. Where do you, as a Chamber
officer, suggest that I now send these people for this info? I am no
longer
willing to be the only public information resource for Frazier Park, or for
merchants
like yourself that benefit from our great visitor
traffic.
I hope you understand the severity of the community's winter public
relations problem that I have assumed responsibility for all of these years.
I have covered the Chamber's, CHP's, Forest
Service's, Town Council's, local
businesses', etal's butts for two decades by taking
care of all of these
inquiries, including when the Chamber decides to support closure of
area roads into the community. I will no longer do so. Each of you
makes
money off these visitors, and each of you express a
desire to promote
tourism here. How will you now accomodate their
inquiries? I have done my
share of promoting this community to everyone else's benefit. It is
somebody else's turn to handle the calls.
As an organization, you need to figure out how to get an updated daily snow
report, road conditions, etc. on your tape or otherwise, so I don't have to be
the only
one dealing with it. I am phasing out that part of our business, other
than what I put on our Internet pages, and will not take sole responsibility
for everyone's mutual community customers. The COC should look at this as
a
positive situation for our town, and respond to it in that
light. You will
also need to figure out how to deal with them when the roads are closed.
Maybe I should give them the CHP's #.
Lloyd
12/30/01 To:
Tom Kuekes, Ranger
Mt. Pinos Ranger District
Los Padres National Forest
U.S. Forest Service
Frazier Park, Calif. 93225
From:
Lloyd Wiens
P.O. Box 1510
Frazier Park, Ca. 93225
Under authority granted by the Freedom of Information Act, please provide
the following information related to funds generated from within, or paid
by, the Mt. Pinos Ranger District within the last 3
years. If 2001 is not
yet completely available, please provide such information as is now
currently available and advise when the complete year's report(s) will be
completed and become available. If necessary, I will bring a copier to
your
office to copy the requested information. Please provide this information
within 30 days.
Adventure Pass Funds:
1. Copies of any and all bank statements, ledgers, balance sheets and other
accounting documentation related to Adventure Pass funds revenues and
expense allocations or account(s), funds allocated to investments, and funds
allocated for any purposes or uses both within and outside of the Mt. Pinos
Ranger District, and indication of where and to whom expense funds were
allocated to.
2. A monthly breakdown of revenues for
the Mt. Pinos Ranger District.
Payments In Lieu Of Taxes:
1. Total monies paid to the County of Kern by either the Mt. Pinos Ranger
District, Pacific Southwest Region or national office(s) of the U.S. Forest
Service as Payments In Lieu of Taxes (PILT's), as
related to funds generated
by or from either the Mt. Pinos Ranger District or
those from or applicable
to zip codes 93225, 93222 and 93243.
In addition, could you advise the status of the land exchange between your
District and
permit for the facility at Camp Sid Ostrow on
like a copy of the financial statement submitted to your office for West
Side Recreation & Park District's operations at
2000 and 2001.
Thank your very much.
Lloyd Wiens
cc Ken Peterson, Kern Bd. of Trade, CHP, Kern Roads, Region 5-USFS, Chamber of
Commerce, Town Council,
2/17/01 to Ken Peterson, Kern County 4th Dist. Supervisor
Ken:
It has been a few years since I have complained about the winter road
situation up here, but this is the weekend I am going to do it.
After 25 years here, I see NO change in the management plan by
in terms of plowing our roads up here, even our main street in town, let
alone for visitors who bring tourism dollars and tax revenues to Kern.
Pinos Way
a serious safety and liability hazard to the county. The plows worked on
this main thoroughfare for 1/2 hour on Tuesday, at 1pm by the way- it was
totally closed prior to that time, another safety hazard,
..........and they
haven't touched it since- 4 days later!!.
Closing the road for this weekend at Flying J will have totally damaging
effects on our community and economy. I assure you that I will personally
lose 4 to 5 thousand dollars. Maybe your family can afford this, but mine
cannot. It's time for all of you at the government level who profess to
be
pro-tourism and pro-small business to put those philosophies into practice
at OUR local level. At this point, I seriously doubt that Kern gives any
damn at all about what this does to our town. There are many local
landowners who have been willing to help with parking for many years, but
somebody has to coordinate it. At this point, there is not even parking
on
CHP is harassing them regularly for blocking the road. If the berm was
simply moved over, there would be plenty of room. That means the plows
have
to move it. The parking lot at the park has also not been plowed
yet. I
have other winter recreation development opportunities here in town, but why
would I do it if the road will be closed at the freeway??
There ARE solutions to this problem and you have to provide the leadership
to solve it, not simply leave all of this up to the community. Your
office
has legal and ethical responsibilities to do so. I realize how much time
you spent in prior years on this problem, Sno-Park,
etc., as have I, but
Kern cannot turn a blind eye to our dilemna and walk
away from it. It will
only get worse as more development occurs up here.
Before advertising "Come to
be a commitment to being ready to receive those people when they arrive, not
turn them away. You have done many good things for our community and I
appreciate it. This problem will not go away and someone has to fix it at
your level, not turn our community into a police state. Several of our
customers cars were towed away on
back?
If I can help coordinate this, I will do so, subject to your regular
involvement and leadership. I hope I can count on you.
Lloyd Wiens
2/17/01:
Ken: Just as a followup to my earlier email:
It has been totally dead in this town since 2pm today, because of the
lockout.
The thing that irks me most about all of this, and has for 25 years, is that
there is zero information that comes to those of us in the business
community ahead of time about your plans to shut down our town. In view
of
the taxes we pay, the jobs we provide, our dependence on tourism revenue
here, etc., the insensitivity of government agencies to our interests is
unfathomable. At the least, you owe it to all of us to pre-notify the
businesses, so we can pursue alternative activities for these weekends.
It
is in no one's interest to continually keep us in the dark on this,
especially if you sincerely believe in a responsive, democratic society that
represents the peoples' interests. From what I gather, these decisions
were
made early in the week and there was plenty of time to tell us about it.
Did anyone make that effort? And......., after the area is closed, it is
always up to us to explain it to the public. Conveniently, there is never
anyone around at the county level for our customers to talk to while these
actions are taking place. Why is it our responsibility to answer the
public's questions when government agencies make the decisions while
excluding us??
I want you to know that it is my intention to hammer this issue daily
between now and the next election. In view of the assistance I have
provided on prior campaigns, your unresponsiveness on this issue and my
requests for clarification on my
you would want to continue to lose thousands of dollars per year on this
camp instead of making money is beyond me, and is certainly not in the
taxpayers' interest.
My activities here have ALWAYS been centered on
sensitivity to the community and in providing good, clean family activities
through my business. The support I have received for this effort from
attempt to undermine numerous things I and other recreation businesses have
tried to accomplish here. Apparently, Tejon
Ranch and other major interests
or contributors in this area control our destiny. I assure you I intend
to
change that, and to even more aggressively market Frazier Park over the
Internet until someone fixes this.
Lloyd Wiens
2/17/01:
Kern County Board of Trade
Attention: Barry Zoeller
Barry:
I have thought some more about our road dilemna this
holiday weekend, and
totaled our major financial losses because of the roads closure, and have
made a couple of decisions I wanted to share with you.
As you may know, we have been in negotiations for the last couple of years
with
developing and opening snowmaking/snowboarding activities in our area.
One
of these opportunities involves bringing in major outside investors as
limited partners. These folks have been very enthused about such a
project,
because of our location, temperatures and what our foreign snowmaking system
supplier says are the best snowmaking weather conditions that he has found
anywhere in the world. We are well on our way to being able to do this
type
of project, and have a minimum of $30,000 of our own funds committed for
basic startup equipment. We anticipate providing a minimum of 10 full and
part-time jobs with the project.
After great early feedback and support at the county level for our
a yes or no from our county supervisor's office. Considering the fact
that
this camp operates at a major financial loss each year, I find this
confusing at best. I spent significant money in putting this proposal
together, and only proceeded after receiving an enthusiastic verbal go-ahead
from the supervisor through
numerous times since then. I also submitted petitions signed by over 400
local residents from ALL community locations in our area, in support of the
project, to Bob Addison and Ken Peterson. This proposal involved only
using
EXISTING facilities at the site already in place, and built at major
taxpayer expense, with a substantial percentage of our gross income and a
basic lease fee going to West Side, the Childrens'
Camp organization and
Our private property locations opportunities elsewhere in the area are still
an excellent possibility, and I hope to be able to proceed sometime in the
future. However, until I can receive guarantees from the county and the
CHP
that what has happened this weekend with road closures will not happen again
after we open, I have NO intention of proceeding with any of this, or
approaching our investors for additional funding. Unless our customers
are
able to enter the area, it would be financial suicide for us to do
otherwise.
As you well know, similar winter snowboarding/skiing resorts at Big Bear,
Wrightwood, Shirley Meadows and Sierra Summit don't face this type of
closure action, and that is who our competition will be. Unless we can
assure our customers acces, believe me they will go
elsewhere. Obviously,
roads to each of these resorts are frequently subject to snow chain driving
requirements, as would we. I understand that. But to totally close
our
area to access, on a state and federally-funded road, is highly suspect and
certainly not conducive to such business developments. It will kill us.
I know that you are personally committed to promoting tourism in
loss as to how to solve them. No one seems to really care enough to fix
it,
so at this point I am looking outside of the county to do this project,
unless we see some immediate changes. The economic losses to
and Frazier Park should be obvious, but apparently are not too important.
If tourism is a priority, I need to see it. Tourism grants for
organizations in our area will do nothing for us if they can't get here!
And......... if shorter trips
are the rage, as reported in your "Kern County
Business" publication, it doesn't get much shorter than coming to Frazier
Park. We had 140,000 hits on our website in January, 350,000 since the
first of November, and have had numerous requests for lodging and other
local services in the process. But our hands are tied-
we cannot offer
anything if people do not have access. If you
are in fact marketing to the
So.
additionally enriched if it is not.
Maybe you can help. I hope so. Thanks for trying.
Lloyd Wiens
2/19/01- Sent to Mr. Peterson and to Commissioner D.O. Helmick,
CHP,
February 19, 2001
To: Ken Peterson
Kern County
4th District Supervisor
Mr. Peterson:
As you are aware, the closure of Frazier Mtn. Park
Rd. just west of Peace
Valley Road by Kern County and the California Highway patrol resulted in
substantial economic loss to our community, specifically $5,000 to my
business, over the last 3 days. This action occurred on February 17, 18
and
19, 2001.
Under the California Records and Information Act and the federal Freedom of
Information Act, I hereby request that the following information be
provided:
1. Please advise what, if any locations elsewhere in
State of
3 years. If no other similar actions occurred, this action is arbitrary
and
discriminatory. It is also an unauthorized interruption of commerce and
restraint of trade, and an unauthorized termination of my right to pursue my
occupation, livelihood and means of employment.
2. Please provide documentation of any and all regulations providing
authorization to conduct such an action.
3. Please provide name(s) and position(s) held by individuals who
implemented this decision, and under what authority they acted.
4. Please provide copies of any information you hold as to precisely which
State of
involved in this action, discussion(s) or decision(s) relating thereto, and
any representative(s) thereof involved in this action.
5. Please provide a statement as to the precise reason(s) for which this
action occurred, and justification for those reasons.
6. Copies of agreements between any and all state, county and federal
agencies relating to the manner in which this or similar closures have been,
are or will be conducted.
7.
of
to this construction and the granting or use of these funds was this action
taken?
8. What standard(s) were applied, and to which vehicles, by the California
Highway Patrol in granting access beyond the point of closure on Frazier
Mountain Park Road? Please provide copies of regulations and authority
granting such access supervision or restriction, and the basis on which such
access is to be granted, and to whom. Please also provide a statement as
to
the precise reason(s) vehicles were not allowed to pass the point of closure
once this and other connecting area roads were passable by vehicles without
requiring the use of tire chains.
9. Please provide copies of all documentation used, procedures, priorities
and regulations to be followed by the Kern County Dept.'s of Roads and
Resource Management in plowing fallen snow from Frazier Mountain Park Road
and other local Kern County roads and/or Highways.
10. Please provide copies of any and all agreements or permits between
maintenance of all roads lying within the Mt. Pinos
Ranger District of the
11. Please advise which agency within
receiving our demand notice for compensation and reimbursement to us of our
economic, livelihood and employment losses suffered as the result of the
above action.
12. Please advise what agreements exist between
Forest Service relating to the use of
snowplowing for
and/or
13. Please provide copies of any and all regulations relating to parking and
traffic control that apply to roads and highways in our area, and to this
action.
Your response within 10 days is requested.
Lloyd Wiens
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