Mayor Chuck McGuire wants his lake back. When McGuire was a kid growing up here in California City in the early 1970s, back when speculators still believed they could sell all 50,000 lots platted into the scrublands 100 miles northeast of LA, the man-made, aquifer-fed lake in the center of town had a bowling alley, swank hotel and boat launch on its shores. Today the pond in Cal City’s Central Park hosts the kind of life you’d expect from a back-bedroom town of 12,000: ducks pecking at McDonald's wrappers in the weeds and a $1,000 wedding on the Community Center patio. The long-defunct Lake Shore Inn is on the Atlas Obscura abandoned Americana tour. McGuire and his fellow civic leaders have high hopes that the marijuana business can change all that.
McGuire is pushing to make California City a cannabis industry center because he wants the tax revenue to support an expanded lake alive with Jet-Skis every weekend and a fireworks barge on the Fourth of July—that, and at least one urgent care center in town. Former City Manager Tom Weil, under whose administration the cannabis push got started, wants the city police and fire departments to be on solid fiscal ground. City Councilman Donald Parris hopes local veterans will find pain relief right here in their hometown. “It’s a quality of life thing,” the mayor told VICE, repositioning the souvenir Sweet Dreams THC candy container next to the silver framed photo of his California Highway Patrol retirement party on the credenza in his spotless office at City Hall.
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