County Extends Permit for Remote High Desert Food Market

LANCASTER — An outpost of fresh food supplies for a remote area of the Antelope Valley was spared the bureaucratic ax Tuesday, as a county planning officer renewed the permit that allows the S-R Market to continue operating in what is technically a residential neighborhood surrounded by empty acres of Mojave Desert.

With little hesitation, Pamela Holt, a hearing officer for the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Department, not only granted the owners of the market a 20-year operating permit, but authorized them to expand services.

The market, about 15 miles east of Lancaster, serves many low-income customers who have no electric power or running water in remote desert homes. They had worried that the county would not extend the store’s exemption from the local zoning code.

But at a hearing in Los Angeles, Holt told John Lee, who runs the market with his wife, Linda, that they could proceed with plans to add an outdoor coin laundry and install a propane sales tank.

“It was good,” John Lee said. “I thought she worked in every way that she could with us.”

Lee was supported at the hearing by neighbors of his three-aisle market and by Bill and Sandi Daggett, of Boise, Idaho, who own the building he leases.

They all were concerned the store might be closed by the county because it stands on land zoned for housing, not business. They came armed with a petition to keep the store open, signed by about 300 customers, but never needed to deliver it.

Holt’s extension of the permit for another 20 years was double what other county planners recommended. She made the change after Lee explained that he thought 20-year permits were the norm and complained that $100 annual inspection fees were too high. The store now will be inspected every other year.

“You obviously have a facility that’s needed by the community,” said Holt, who also ignored a restriction recommended by other planners that alcohol sales at the market be limited to beer containing less than 5% alcohol and wines of no more than 15% alcohol, two proposals Lee said would severely cut into profits.

Though Lee said the store is barely breaking even, it is an integral part of the outlying neighborhoods of low-slung houses and trailers that stand among the tumbleweeds along desert dirt roads.

The market gets about 50 customers daily. Some of the shoppers travel miles from dwellings on land families bought from millionaire developer Marshall Redman in an alleged desert property fraud still unfolding in court. Many of the homes are without heat or electricity, and residents come in on foot seeking ice to keep their food cold when summer temperatures climb over 110 degrees.

The market was seen on film in the opening scene of the 1996 action movie “From Dusk Till Dawn,” in which bandits on the lam shoot a market clerk. Filmmakers blew off the store’s flat roof, then replaced it.

“It is barren there,” said William Thomas Sandlin, a neighbor who was at the hearing.

The area’s residents, he said, are neither criminals nor troublemakers--just struggling.

“This is a poor place,” Sandlin said. “This store is not getting wealthy. There’s not a chance. This store is just serving the people.”

Though many living near the market do not have telephones and rely on a public phone at the store, county planners recommended that it be blocked from receiving incoming calls.

“That is a condition normally put on areas with drug-sale problems,” said Holt, who opted to let the telephone remain fully operational.

Planners had received complaints from some neighbors that men loitered at the store, drinking beer and harassing customers, said Russell Fricano, a planning assistant who researched the case for the county.

Lee has said that if there was loitering, it happened before he took over the store on Dec. 1.

Loitering restrictions the county imposed on the store are directed toward potential troublemakers, Holt assured Lee, not toward regular customers who watch for the mailman to arrive or who enjoy the latest gossip with a soda on a hot desert day.

Customers of the S-R Market said recently that they look forward to the planned improvements. Though small and remote, the store has carved its niche, they said, and in return they have made it more than a lonely stop along a desert road.

“It’s kind of pretty out here when the sun is shining,” Lee said recently, looking eastward across the desert. “All the rolling hills. . . . When it gets boring, I do exercises. Some days you get enough customers that it isn’t boring.”