SORRY, NO VACANCIES

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Greg Lopez gets lost when he drives around Parker, Colorado. And he's not from out of town--he's the mayor. Once a bedroom community, Parker is bursting with new streets and new residents--and is afflicted with a new sense of dislocation. From the steps of town hall, newly constructed grayish buildings can be seen spattered across a nearby hillside; at the town's outer limits, the wooden skeletons of half-built houses are strewed along the landscape. In five years, Parker's population has doubled, to 10,000. Last February local voters reacted to the boom by passing one of the toughest antigrowth initiatives in the U.S., a measure requiring a unanimous vote of the town council before any new areas can be added to the town. "The people are alarmed," says Lopez. "They were tired of seeing earthmovers on Main Street. We're besieged by development."

Like the people of Parker, many Westerners feel under assault by settlers, vacationers and developers. If President Clinton arrives for his planned summer vacation this month in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, there will no doubt be renewed grumblings about traffic and overcrowding as the First Entourage sweeps through. About a half-decade ago, Subarus full of Easterners and Range Rovers stuffed with Californians started trekking to the Rocky Mountain states. The refugees were tired of big-city life, traffic jams, crime and shopping malls, so they moved to a new mecca, stretching from Montana to New Mexico, where the air was clean and the water was clear. It was paradise, except for the fact that it needed more strip malls, so those were promptly built. And pretty soon some of the friends and relatives of the settlers moved in, which meant a few more strip malls were required, not to mention houses and more roads. Before long, paradise started to look a lot like Toledo, Ohio. Or Los Angeles. Now many Westerners--led, perhaps peevishly, by the last wave of settlers--are fighting to slow development and stop the influx of new residents.

Many Western towns are tightening zoning codes, imposing construction moratoriums and limiting the number of building permits they issue. Moab, Utah, a desert town, has been overrun by spring breakers, mountain bikers and other newcomers; in response, the surrounding county imposed a subdivision moratorium. The fight over growth in the West is sure to be intensified by the selection of Salt Lake City, Utah, as the host of the 2002 Olympic Winter Games, which will bring Olympic-size hype and a flood of tourists. "The Games will accelerate the environmental assault," says Alexis Kelner, co-founder of Utahans for Responsible Public Spending, a group against staging the Games locally. "The area can't take all the condos, hotels and shopping centers that will now flow in."

In an era of military-base closings and budget cutbacks, it might seem perverse for any community to shut off economic growth. But many Westerners just don't want the pace of their lives to change. Cynthia Hall, who lives outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, cherishes her daily walks in the alfalfa fields on the outskirts of town. Last February she heard that a developer was under contract to buy 150 acres in the area and was seeking to have it annexed to the city so it could be commercially developed. Hall, along with a dozen neighbors, formed the Anderson Field Alliance to block the move and attempt to raise $8 million to buy and preserve the land, an effort that is stalled in city bureaucracy. In Douglas County, Colorado, a fast-growing Denver exurb, some locals have formed the Pinery Coalition to oppose a bid by the Great Gulf Group of Companies to build houses on a pine-studded local hillside and potentially raise the number of residences from 1,900 to 2,700. "My kids are already in full classes," frets Brenda Mason, a spokeswoman for the local homeowners' association. "There's no place for more children to go."

While the well-to-do worry about quality of life, low- and middle-income residents voice fears of being pushed out of boomtowns as the increased demand for housing sends prices to the sky. Growth critics imagine the West turning into a string of Vail-like resorts, where the rich play and others stay away. Denver's Roman Catholic Archbishop J. Francis Stafford wrote in a pastoral letter last fall, "We risk creating a theme park 'alternate reality' for those who have the money to purchase entrance and around them sprawls a growing buffer zone of the working poor."

The problem is in striking a balance. In the early 1800s Jackson Hole was merely a valley where fur traders put up their tents; in the past few years it has become a vanity address for stock traders and business tycoons to erect their second and third getaway homes. Since 1986 local housing prices in Jackson have risen 15% a year, while local wages increased only 5% annually--a trend that could force out the wealth-impaired. So town and county leaders enacted a development plan barring oversize "trophy" homes with more than 8,000 sq. ft. of livable space.

Some residents believe the no-growth movement is futile and foolish. Says John Healy, a councilman in Parker: "The mind-set is 'I've got my five acres, so close the door.' " Gordon Mickelson, whose plans to develop 2,900 acres in Broomfield, Colorado, were thwarted by a local six-month suspension of planning hearings, says such measures could have dire consequences. "When you send a message of no growth, you're telling business, 'Don't come here.' "

Some towns, and a few wealthy, environmentally conscious citizens like actress Andie MacDowell, are signing over the rights to some of their property to nonprofit land trusts, thus ensuring that scenic vistas and traditional uses will be preserved. Last year the Montana Land Reliance helped set up 39 such trusts, up from just eight in 1990. And if Clinton manages to get away on vacation (as a guest of Senator Jay Rockefeller), he'll be staying near land the Rockefeller family donated to the U.S. for preservation. Giving away land may prove to be the ultimate way of keeping it intact.

--Reported by Patrick Dawson/Billings, Nancy Harbert/ Albuquerque and Richard Woodbury/Denver

With reporting by PATRICK DAWSON/BILLINGS, NANCY HARBERT/ALBUQUERQUE AND RICHARD WOODBURY/DENVER