A small village, just south of the gate to Yosemite on highway 41 is fighting to save a beautiful meadow from development of a large hotel. Beyond the obvious environmental concerns, like much of California, Fish Camp is suffering from a severe drought and its water supply is dangerously low. Building a large hotel takes about 10,000 gallons of water a day during construction and so much more after completion, leaving Fish Camp with a deficient supply of water for fire suppression and a degraded supply of water for this small community’s daily use.
Now Fish Camp is being asked to sacrifice its very existence for another large hotel and its bed tax. Fish Camp can’t provide its residents with clean water or protect them from wildfire if it does not have sufficient water. The result of extending the outdated EIR – now well over a decade old - could be catastrophic for Fish Camp. A jewel of California’s varied landscape, Fish Camp serves as a water shed for the National Forest, with the Giant Sequoias, wild flowers, and hundreds of species of wild life depending on its water. We can’t let a bed tax driven by the greed of a few remote politicians sacrifice our meadow and all it means to our entire community. The irony is that if the Fish Camp water supply is diminished and degraded by allowing a poorly thought through development to proceed under an ancient and outdated EIR, the very beds the County is trying to add will be unprotected from wildfire, jeopardizing not only the revenue from any additional bed taxes but also the revenue the County is currently receiving from the already existing hotels. What’s the rush? The bottom line is if another hotel in Fish Camp is a good idea then another EIR based on current conditions is a good idea.
