Morro Bay — A City Without a Future
By ED OCHS
Morro Bay never planned for a future without tourists. The little city by the sea, at the end of the continent where the Pacific Ocean spreads to the horizon, was a fishing village for most of its history. Before the pandemic, tourists escaping from the hot Central Valley, a two and a half hour drive inland, motoring up the coast from Southern California on the 101 and down from the Bay Area on scenic Highway 1, some from as far away as South Korea, China and Japan, the Netherlands, France and Denmark, somehow found their way to Morro Bay’s Embarcadero.
There on the Embarcadero you’d hear their different languages and they’d spend their money at the restaurants and gift shops, perhaps sighting a sea lion in the bay or, more ambitiously, renting a kayak or paddleboard to experience the bay waters up close. There are only a few dozen active Morro Bay fishermen now, so when the pandemic struck, keeping the tourists at home, it became even more obvious than never that Morro Bay hadn’t considered what a future might look like without the tourists and their money. There it was, laid bare for all to see, but no one publicly acknowledged it because it’s like facing the day without the sun in the sky, and no one wants to give voice to it, no one wants to imagine it.
It’s far easier to accept that tourist dollars support the city and always will. That way no effort is required to come up with a plan. So it stays simple: Tourists yearn to break out of their long confinement and breathe the fresh ocean air, and the Embarcadero embraces their return. Who can blame either of them? Both must survive. Who could even blame some of the tourists for wanting to move to Morro Bay someday, attracted by the temperate climate, nature-rich environment and low-key, small-town life in California by the ocean. Some of today’s residents were perhaps once tourists in Morro Bay themselves — they hail from all over the state, country and around the world. In recent decades, the tourists have kept coming in droves, that is until the pandemic swept the world and the country and changed everything, and the Embarcadero, Morro Bay’s cash register, fell silent.
It’s a delicate balance, living in a tourist town that depends so much on tourist dollars to survive, dollars that fund city services, including the fire and police departments. However, during the tourist season, which for residents seems to run year-round now, residents more or less retreat to their nests for their own safety. They give up the sidewalks to aimlessly ambling tourists, some who wear masks, some who could care less; some who obey stop signs, some who don’t; some who don’t stop for pedestrians, some who do. In the normal winter months, when the wave of tourists usually recedes, residents can reclaim the town for their own again, the town they surrender in the summers, to eat at the few resident-friendly, non-tourist restaurants, shop in peace and enjoy the short-lived-quiet streets.
Now, with the reopening of the state and county, the tourists have returned. They come again to Morro Bay to walk the beaches, take in the ocean and breathe the air. And now that the tourists are back, the Embarcadero is back. You can hear the cash registers on the Embarcadero ringing again, though not as loudly as before, and you can feel the lifeblood flowing again in the veins of the city and its heart pumping again, if you consider the cash that tourists bring to the city as the oxygen that keeps it alive, that keeps the city from dying. There is a danger there, though, in listening too long to the familiar song of tourist money and the cash register. There’s a hazard to living on the edge.
How do you plan for how a pandemic dramatically changes the world as well as your community, how the way of life we’ve lived for as long as anyone alive can remember has vanished in the blink of an eye? How do you plan for the day the tourists stop coming? You can’t change a tin-plated tourist town into a shiny silicon bay without a blueprint and the public will to see the need for one. A town has to change from the inside, at its core, to adapt, to grow, to be something more. A new generation of businesses and new buildings to house them won’t spring up overnight, nor will the land to build them on, land that isn’t in a flood plain or a farmer’s field; nor are there old, empty buildings to tear down to make way for the new. Installing high-speed, high-bandwidth fiber optic internet cable in pursuit of a Morro Bay technology fair in five years won’t replace the lost revenue from canceled car shows in a car show, motel, fish’n’chips town. But it’s a start.
Tourists will always come to Morro Bay because that’s where the ocean is, but there is still a need to replace them with a future that sustains Morro Bay without them, which is what the pandemic has so vividly and painfully illustrated. You can’t see it when the tourists are in town, but you can see quite clearly when they’re gone that there’s no future in the old fishing village.