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The People versus Rex Maughan Billion$ !

Is this your lake, or mine?

Lake Berryessa Oakland Tribune Article

By Douglas Fischer, STAFF WRITER 

Article Last Updated: 8/27/2005 07:38 AM
 
Serious fight brews about place to play. Government plan has Berryessa vacationers in hot water.  
  
 
A FIGHT JUST short of civil war is unfolding here on the shores of what might just be Northern California's best boating lake.  Advancing fast is the federal government, owner of both land and reservoir, with plans to open the lake in eastern Napa County to a broader slice of the public. A blueprint mapping that effort is due this fall from the Bureau of Reclamation, and the agency already has taken small steps toward change. 

In the trenches are owners of the trailers and mobile homes. They lease the shore-front land beneath their vacation getaways from the bureau under a month-to-month deal that's gone on for 50 years. The bureau would prefer to open that land to a more short-term and public use. The trailer owners and nearby businesses say about 1,200 vacation homes are about to be destroyed for no good reason. 

The fight has been brewing for years. The first figurative shots came this summer, when the bureau handed management of one of Berryessa's seven trailer resorts to a new operator with the requirement that all trailers come off the property by mid-December. 

A comparison with the opening cannonade at Fort Sumter in 1861 might not be too strong. 

"One down; six to go, no time to lose to make sure the (agency's) destruction plan does not include us," proclaimed an e-mail alert to trailer supporters. "WE MUST WIN THE WAR." 

Simple question? 


On its face, Berryessa's question is simple: how to best use public land. It gets complicated as the government attempts to balance the desires of those who have used the lake for decades against those who insist the lake must be opened to more people.

The bureau created Berryessa 48 years ago by damming Putah Creek and flooding the rugged hollows of Napa County, 30 miles due north of Vallejo. Today, the 21,000-acre reservoir, a two-hour drive from the Bay Area, sports a 165-mile coastline chock-a-block with secluded coves. The lake is considered a top-flight spot for anglers, water-skiers and motor boaters.

But it also has a reputation as a "private" lake, given the trailers and the gated resorts that all but control access to the water. That's what the bureau wants to change.

The private resorts had their start in 1960, after the bureau built the Monticello Dam and walked away, leaving Napa County scrambling to find some level land to accommodate the hordes that descended upon the new reservoir. The lake is three times the size of the Camanche Reservoir in the Sierra foothills and nearly one-fifth the size of Lake Tahoe.

By the time the federal agency resumed control in the mid-1970s, it inherited a network of leases and concessions running counter to the modern bureau's philosophy of short-term, public use of its lands.

The theory is that by opening the lake to as broad a range as possible, more people get to enjoy a public facility — particularly when that facility has precious few flat spots near the shore to pitch a tent or put a trailer or launch a boat.

Limited access


Seven concessionaires manage each of the seven resorts. They lease land to mobile-home and trailer owners who, for $300 and up a month, get what amounts to a private vacation home on the lake. Day users — those without a lease — pay $10 to $15 to launch a boat or camp or picnic on the shore.

The bureau manages 348 reservoirs throughout the West. Of those, 347 have a policy of free access and short-term use.

The exception is Berryessa.

"There's a perception (the lake) is generally not open to the public," said Mike Finnegan, the bureau's area manager for Central California, which includes Berryessa. "The question is ... whether or not people will move to the lake, whether there's a market for the lake. Our guess is 'definitely yes.'"

The bureau is considering four options. One is "do nothing" — a non-starter in the bureau's view, given that concessionaire leases start expiring in 2008 with no option under the law for renewal.

The second option calls for the removal of most, if not all, trailer sites — 1,200 in all. Existing resort areas would be redeveloped as RV parks, campgrounds, picnic areas, all potentially under management of a single company, much the way concessionaire giant Delaware North Cos. manages all lodging in Yosemite National Park.

Moving expenses

Trailer owners would remove mobile homes at their expense. And the lake would be zoned to facilitate different uses, with portions closed to motor boats in favor of kayaks or canoes. Still, 90 percent of the lake would remain open to motorboats.

A third option offers concessions to the pro-trailer faction, keeping some mobile-home sites but retaining an overall emphasis on short-term use. The final option leans more toward environmentalists' demands, further restricting development and boating activities.

Trailer owners say none of those options work. The leases provide year-round stability and an economic base to the region that will disappear once they're gone.

"I don't think any concessionaire would tell you they could make this work without the mobile homes," said Peter Kilkus, editor of the Lake Berryessa News, executive director of the recently revived Lake Berryessa Chamber of Commerce and a mobile-home owner who's serving as a representative for other owners on the lake.

"You'll never get the thousands and thousands of kayakers out here to replace the thousands and thousands of boaters."

Glimpse of future

But the future — at least one view — arrived this summer on the lake's south shore, where a finger of the lake stretches deep into what was once Wragg's Canyon.

Earlier this year the Bureau, citing contract violations, stripped the Pleasure Cove Resort concession from operator Steve Petty and opened it for bidding. Arizona-based Forever Resorts Corp. got the contract and arrived with a business model unlike anything the lake has seen.

Forever Resorts say they inherited a shuttered bar, a run-down campground and 79 mobile home sites.

It intends to remake the place as an RV park, with full hookups, cabins for rent, a refurbished lodge and bar. It wants to rent houseboats by the week or weekend, at $2,800 a pop. Open the area to day users. Create an extended season.

It has no choice. The contract Forever Resorts signed with the bureau requires that the 79 mobile homes and trailers now in Pleasure Cove must be gone by year end.

"It's not us who are trying to get rid of these people," said Pleasure Cove Marina manager Terry Sparkman. "It's the Bureau of Reclamation trying to turn public land back to public use without private property on it."

To those who say such a plan won't pencil out, Forever Resorts points to any number of properties the company manages on reservoirs throughout the West — at Don Pedro, Trinity Lake, Lake Mead, Lake Mojave.

Business models

All are businesses run based on day- and weekend-visitors. None has long-term trailers.

"The model works," said spokeswoman Darla Cook. "We definitely see potential here. This is a beautiful lake."

Not that the company backs everything the bureau is mulling. One proposal being pushed by the Sierra Club would impose a 5 mph, no-wake zone the length of the finger sheltering Pleasure Cove. That would kill the marina, Sparkman said. "It'd take three hours to get up the narrows to the lake."

But Kilkus, the newspaper editor whose son learned how to become a championship jet-skier on Berryessa's waters, doesn't understand why the bureau remains so dead-set against trailers. "Most arguments are set up to lead to a conclusion that you must get rid of mobile homes," he said earlier this month.

"Our goal always has been to be inclusive of all forms of recreation. And mobile homes are a valid use of public land."

Leases are needed

And while Forever Resorts says it can be profitable with a day-use crowd, others with more history at the lake say the slow mid-week and the dramatic drop in visitor numbers once summer ends would make income from the leases invaluable.

"Without those people, we'd be dead," said Yevo Jeworowski, proprietor of Boone's Saloon on the lake's west shore.

"It's not the people who come up here for one weekend, it's the people who come up here every weekend. It's their'hood.'"

The lake's problems — the perception of a party lake, or a members' only place with run-down facilities — result largely from mismanagement by government overseers, opponents say. Concessionaires can't get loans to pay for upgrades with three years left on their lease. The bureau has never really policed the place.

Replace the trailers with rental cabins, Kilkus said, and you eliminate a class of people "who are very family-oriented and very stewardship-oriented."

Hogwash, say those pushing for more access.

"The transition will actually begin, in many ways, as soon as the decision comes down," said Carol Kunze, Napa County Sierra Club president and executive director of Berryessa Trails and Conservation. "There are lots of places on private land, which is where these people should be ... that would give them a place if they wanted to remain a part of the Lake Berryessa community."

Indication of where the bureau is leaning should be out in mid-September. Its final decision won't be known until late October at the earliest. Finnegan, the agency manager responsible for Berryessa, is hopeful all sides will see this as a "balanced decision."

But there's a lot at stake here.

"It's so ludicrous," said Chuck Cushman, executive director of the Battle Ground, Wash.-based American Land Rights Association, which has joined the fray on behalf of the mobile home owners.

"They (the government) may win. They may win. But it's going to be a hell of a fight."


Contact Douglas Fischer at dfischer@angnewspapers.com.