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New OHV park in Bakersfield!

Goatman

NAXJA Forum User
NAXJA Member
Location
Bakersfield, CA
The Kern County Planning Commision tonight approved and issued a conditional use permit for the new Bakersfield SVRA. The site is 11,000 acres about five miles northeast of Bakersfield in rolling hills and canyons. This is an exciting moment, since the last state OHV park in CA was built 20 years ago. One of the commisioners said that this was the largest turnout of people for any meeting of the planning commision, there was standing room only in a pretty large meeting hall. It was nice to see a well orchestrated effort and comments by the OHV community and a very typical and emotional response from the mostly environmental group opposition.

Among those who spoke in favor of the proposal was a past state OHV commision member, the head ranger of the Hungry Valley SVRA in Gorman, our local Democratic state assemblywoman Nicole Parra, and a rancher who owns adjacant property. It was a pretty interesting meeting. There is still much that needs to be done, and many potential snags still exist, but the approval process is well underway. The state OHV commision and state parks department is in favor of the new park, and the state assembly has already set aside $2 mil for the project, $1 mil which has already been spent on studies and the proposal and locating a site.

Who knows how long a process it will be to actually get it off the ground and built, but it's real nice to see all the support for more OHV opportunity. There is supposed to be some steep rocky canyons out there, so we should get the chance to go out there and work on developing some hard trails. We'll see how it all pans out.
 
It's the newest suberb of LA..........just to the north. :)
 
Recently when I drove out to bakersfield in the middle of the night to pick up some rockrails I noticed that the freeway leading into bakersfield smelled like popcorn.


I think these trails could lead to weight gain due to the popcorn smell making me hungary on the trail.
 
Rick doesnt get out much....lol

Good to hear that we are going to have more options for wheeling. It always seems like something is getting closed, and so its refreshing to hear something is OPENING.
 
Wow... what great news!

Rich, is there anything NAXJA can do? I assume you were involved either directly or indirectly with this new OHV park? I also will assume there is a great need for support still?

I don't know if I speak for the other two SC BOD guys, but I think I (or a chapter) might like to take on helping with something like that. Bakersfield is almost SC.:viking:
 
Scrappy said:
Wow... what great news!

Rich, is there anything NAXJA can do? I assume you were involved either directly or indirectly with this new OHV park? I also will assume there is a great need for support still?

I don't know if I speak for the other two SC BOD guys, but I think I (or a chapter) might like to take on helping with something like that. Bakersfield is almost SC.:viking:

This is a great idea! Maybe we can build, name, and adopt the first trail????:dunno:
 
We should have the opportunity to do that. The lion's share of the support for this new park is coming from the motorcycle gang and ATV users, but of course 4x4 trails are included in the plan. It's interesting, five years ago when the initial document was written to start the process of proposing this park, there were 18,000 OHV's registered in Kern County (green and red sticker) and now in the document that was presented last night there are 33,000. That's amazing growth in the last five years, and helps to demonstrate the need for more OHV parks. It was stated that 1 in 4 households in Kern County own OHV's.

When it comes time to develop trails we will be involved. While I haven't done any work on this project, I have stayed in communication with the the people who are, and our local club is in the loop on information that is distributed. We should get a chance to do some trail developing, which could be fun. :)
 
I was going to say it would be cool to see something opening instead of closing for once.
 
Awe man, got my hopes up.. I would have had a reason to drive the jeep back home once in a while.

So now I'm interested in what happened to this too.
 
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