Dorrington: The small town that the recession forgot?

Dorrington Realty realtor/owner Linda Payton said, “there’s not much as far as businesses in Dorrington.” Amy Alonzo Rozak/Union Democrat, copyright 2009

It seems in Dorrington, which according to state data has zero percent unemployment, even the bears — at least the glossy fake ones — are employed.
  

Of the 320 people in the labor market in Dorrington, 320 have jobs, according to August data from the California Economic Development Department.

It makes one wonder: What’s the tiny town’s secret?

“There’s no place to hardly work up there,” said resident Ray Davis, who, as an ambassador with the Calaveras County Chamber of Commerce, should know what he’s talking about. “We’re all retired.”

He’s right. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it community’s median age is a hair over 50 and nearly three-quarters of the homes are seasonal.

And with the Dorrington Hotel — whose sign boasted “No Vacancy” on a recent morning — the Lube Room Saloon, and two real estate offices making up most of downtown, the job opportunities are underwhelming.

By the Economic Development Department’s count, the mountain hamlet accounts for a small fraction of Calaveras County’s labor force.

But what of those hardy perennials that endure Dorrington’s eaves-level winter snows?

“We’re all self-employed,” said Teri Slankard, owner of Slankard Real Estate and Louie’s boss.

“I can think of a dozen contractors who are like ‘Man, I need some work,’ ” she said. “They’re all self-employed.”

Home sales in the area have dropped from about 30 a month in 2005, most priced between $350,000 and $800,000, to just eight between Memorial Day and Labor Day this year, with the highest going for $260,000, she said.

Slankard said she once counted 185 real estate agents in the area listings, which include Arnold and other communities along Highway 4, but “now there’s 65 and only 20 of them work.”

So is it possible the Economic Development Department was wrong about Dorrington?

When posed that question, Liz Baker, labor market consultant with the EDD, responded crisply: “Dorrington?”

Once directed to Calaveras County, Smith, who to her credit normally covers Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties, said her department’s monthly numbers represent an estimate based on county data and extrapolated from the 2000 Census, which happens to show zero percent unemployment in Dorrington.

“There probably are people who are, of course, unemployed in Dorrington,” said Smith, who in nine years with the EDD had never before seen a zero percent unemployment figure.

Indeed, Davis, Slankard and others all said they knew of at least a couple of people who were unemployed.

County resident Don Hicks, who Friday was handing out slices of his day-old birthday cake at the Camp Connell General Store, is among them.

“I live in Dorrington and I’m unemployed,” said Hicks, who works part-time at the Bear Valley Ski Resort.

Louie, however, takes no notice of such technicalities. And with nose deeply buried in the “Country’s Best Log Homes” catalog, it seems he hasn’t caught a whiff of the possibly half-dozen candidates hungry for his job.

“He’s supposed to be studying for his real estate license, but all he does is look at magazines,” Slankard said.