County says yes to Forever Wild's visitor's center

Months after Ty Pennington and the rest of the Extreme Makeover Home Edition team piled back on their bus and left the High Desert, the finishing touches are being put in place on the animal shelter they renovated.

Thursday, the Phelan-based Forever Wild Exotic Animal Shelter got a reprieve from the San Bernardino County Planning Commission. The commission overturned a previous ruling by county staff that would have required the non-profit animal shelter to pay millions of dollars to pave a rugged dirt road before they could open a new vistor's center built by the reality show's volunteers back in February.

"It just didn't seem necessary," Chemaine Almquist said Friday. The Almquist family has run the shelter for 12 years, offering a home to abandoned and abused exotic animals, including tigers, poisonous snakes and snapping turtles. "We all live on dirt roads out here. For us to shell out to pave a mile and a half of it didn't seem fair."

The county's department of Land Use Services wanted Buttemere Road, one of two roads that leads to Forever Wild, paved from Phelan Road, a job conservatively estimated at $1 million.

"Once [contractors] found out that we had a dip along Buttemere, it went to $4 or $5 million," said Almquist.

That's not an expense the Almquists can afford, said Hesperia architect Tom Steeno, who drew the plans for the family's renovated home, and who accompanied them to Thursday's meeting to lend support and translate the ruling for them.

"It's not going to happen," Steeno said Friday. "It's about a million dollars a mile to pave that road. The county doesn't have that money and neither does a private citizen."

In the end, the commission voted 3-0 (two commissioners were absent) that the county should approve Forever Wild's permit without the shelter needing to pave Buttemere.

"I did more work on this site than any site that I've done in the county. I went out to the site once, and then I went out there two times on my own to check traffic," Planning Commissioner Russ Blewett said Friday. "The amount of traffic they generate is frankly infinitesimal."

So now, the wait to open the Forever Wild visitor's center is almost over.

"We're still waiting on our final fire inspection," said Almquist. "And [visits] will be by appointment only. We can't have thousands of people trooping through like the San Diego Zoo."

The planning commission must still approve a revised plan, which could be presented to the commission as early as July.

"People could start coming here in the next couple of weeks," Almquist said. "Hopefully it won't take that long."

Beau Yarbrough can be reached at 956-7108 or at beau@hesperiastar.com.