Salcido

Ed. note: The Mono County District 5 Supervisor race is the only Mono County contested race in on the June 7 Primary Election ballot. The candidates are Lynda Salcido and Seth Guthrie. The Times interviewed both candidates separately over the phone. Part 1 of the interviews ran last week, in the May 5 issue of the Times. Part 2 is continued below.

LYNDA SALCIDO: Salcido, 72, is a longtime Mammoth and Mono County resident, a Registered Nurse, a former Mono County Public Health Director, and a current Town of Mammoth Town Council member. She moved to Mammoth Lakes in 1996 and was hired by the Mono County Public Health Department in 1997.

She became the Mono County Public Health Director in 1998. She was in that post until she retired in 2017. She returned to work as the Public Health Director full time in April 2020 to manage the pandemic.

Q: One of the biggest challenges facing the county is a lack of enough housing that is affordable for locals. What are your solutions to this problem? A:

I agree that this is a huge issue – and not only for those working in visitor services. Even Mammoth Hospital is having a hard time attracting hospital staff and the county and Town of Mammoth governments are having a hard time recruiting staff.

A big part of that is due to the lack of housing, along with the extremely high prices for the housing that is available.

That is why the

Town of Mammoth and the Town Council has been working very hard on this issue for many years and I do think we have had some real successes, including purchasing The Parcel (The Parcel is 26 acres of land in the middle of Mammoth that will be developed into about 450 units of workforce housing over the next several years).

In this case, we bought raw land with no sewers, no streets, no anything, meaning we had to start from scratch. That taught us a lot about how to acquire more housing in the community, lessons that I think I can bring to the county, which is facing the same problems. I don’t necessarily think government has to do all of the work to provide affordable housing, but I do think we need to be creative in finding public/private partnerships that will allow us to tap more grants and funding sources, similar to the process we went through to develop The Parcel.

The resources are out there if you know where to look, meaning it’s really critical that we are smart and diligent in our efforts because if we are not, we will not have people who can continue to come here to live and work and we won’t have a good experience for visitors, either.

Q: What is it that you like most about Mono County and why? A:

I think that within our county and the Eastern Sierra, we have an amazing group of people with a wide variety of life experiences and talent. The county is big enough to have all kinds of different people, but not so large that we don’t know each other. For example, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit us, we were able to immediately set up an Emergency Operation Center (EOC) which was headed by the (Mammoth Lakes)

Fire Department, the Town of Mammoth and Mono County. This was something that was literally done in one night, on the back of an envelope, saying we need to set up an EOC and asking ourselves, how do we do that?

I was part of those conversations because I was on Town Council. So, partners in this effort sat down and looked at each other and said to (Mammoth Lakes Fire Chief) Frank Frievalt, “You run it, you have the most experience in emergency operations. And you, (Town of Mammoth Lakes Manager) Dan Holler, you are the Town guy; you have a lot of experience in how the Town works so you take that role” and so on. And people stepped up and they began to strategize around how we were going to keep our community operational and how we were going to provide support for the people that live here.

I never asked anybody in our county for anything in the name of public health that they did not provide. There wasn’t anyone from the restaurants, the lodging community, anybody who didn’t just say “Ok, now how are we going to do that?” For example, Mammoth Lakes Tourism set up the food banks first and later, helped get the volunteers for all the immunization clinics organized. The Chamber of Commerce stepped up immediately, the Restaurant Association and so many others stepped up immediately. They got money and food out to those people who had lost their jobs due to the closures, or those who were going to have to be quarantined.

Like I said, I think our county is the perfect size because we know each other well enough to pick up the phone and call a cell phone number and tell that person we need some help. Not one of us ever signed up for a pandemic, I can assure you, not Dr. Boo (Mono County’s Public Health Officer for the first half of the pandemic) who was working 60 to 80 hours a week for that first year nor Stuart Brown, who was the Parks and Recreation Director and who ended up doing all of the Public Information Officer work for the entire pandemic, or any of the others who did all this work.

No one complained, no one said they wanted to be paid extra, they just did it. That is something I think this county does really well.

Q: What is something Mono County doesn’t do well? A:

We don’t wear stylish shoes! Seriously, we don’t. We all have multiple pairs of shoes with really good tread on them. I have so many pairs of black boots because the first thing I do when I go to shoe-shopping, is try to find a pair with good tread on them. Anytime I go to a meeting here, I find I have never seen so many functional shoes. We will use anything that works so long as it means we don’t fall and slip in the snow and ice. So yes, wearing fancy shoes is something Mono County doesn’t do well!