California City Fees
By: Wayne Nosala, CORVA Field Rep.
Fees? To use the desert?
As many know, The City of California City has seen an explosion of off highway
activity these past few years. The City has roughly 12,000 residents. A weekend
like Thanksgiving or New Year’s can see up to 60,000 visitors. Now if you can
imagine a city of 12,000 managing 50-60k of visitors with only a handful of fire
and law enforcement personnel on staff.
Yes we have been receiving grants from the Green Sticker fund to offset some of
the costs put on the citizens of Cal City. As we know grants are tough to get
and they are not enough to cover city services. The idea of collecting fees has
been in the works for almost 10 years.
Ed Waldheim and I got involved with this about two years ago.
I will be honest, I am not a big fan of these fees being imposed, but we are
faced with the grim reality that the City leaders say that the OHV community
must reimburse the city for services or they will be forced to close the entire
area. Had this gone un-checked by Ed Waldheim and myself, on behalf of CORVA
members, this thing could have gotten way out of hand. Some residents wanted to
impose fees well over $100.00, and certain residents would rather we all just go
somewhere else.
Cal City is the ONLY city that I am aware of that actually welcomes the OHV
community; try this in Riverside or San Bernardino County. Those counties would
“ordinance” us out of the desert as they have done so already for their citizens
riding on their own private property.
Answer to a couple of questions that I have received on this,
(Q) Does the $$$ collected go directly into city bank account?
(A) No, there is a separate account controlled by the Cal City Police Department DIRT team
(Q) What do we get out of this?
(A) Emergency services, access to trash receptacles, showers, water and additional RV dump station improvements, education, signage and trail maintenance.
(PS, please don’t tell me we don’t need these services. The Cal City website posts an incident log every day. You should see the amount of OHV responses on heavy weekends.)
(Q) We dump money into that town every time we pass though, Why not use that?
(A) The city sees revenue from sales tax = about $1 per $100 spent on gas, food, what not.
(Q) How will this be enforced and collected?
(A) As of date of this article, Fees will be collected at the DIRT (Desert Incident Response Team) substation located at Borax Bill Park.
On line purchase via
PayPal will be available through http://www.californiacity.com In the near
future.
Fee structure as follows, $20.00 for single vehicle pass. $40.00 for family pack
Family pack includes pass for tow vehicle, 4 stickers for OHVs and access to
Water and dump services. $8.00 for each additional OHV vehicle. Day use passes
are also available.
Am I for this fee?,.... No
Do I want to see families continue to be allowed to use Cal City, you bet!
Personally I have had pretty good response to this program while talking to
people in the field here.
I am sure there is some hard feelings, but it’s still cheaper and more fun than
taking your family to Disneyland or a ball game.
All I can say is try this anywhere else in California, we would be locked out
before something like this would ever see the light of day.
No city that I am aware of welcomes off highway vehicle visitors in the west
like California City. Please stop in on your way though and show the city we
support the people and the businesses.
Regards,
Wayne Nosala
Cal City Police Department DIRT web site
Google Map link where the dump station is located
Cal City Fee schedule on .PDF format
Printable permit form in .PDF format.