Butch Kronlund

Big Sur became a central part of Butch Kronlund’s life in 1989, when he was awarded the bid to do the concrete work for the construction of Post Ranch Inn. Kronlund, a native of Burbank, had been living in Cambria since 1977, save for two years he and his wife Patte spent traveling and living in Australia.

“It was like California was 50 years ago,” Kronlund says of West Australia. “If you like to surf, and a dry climate, it’s just spectacular.”

During his time working at Post Ranch – he was asked to stay on as the site superintendent when the concrete was done and see the construction through to the end – he commuted up and down Highway 1 from Cambria. But by 1994, he says, “it became evident Big Sur was a good fit for my wife and I.”

Big Sur has been their home ever since – they live just south of Post Ranch – and in 2008, Kronlund became president of the Coast Property Owners Association, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving Big Sur’s character.

“It’s an interesting club to belong to,” Kronlund says of the Big Sur community. “It’s pretty cool, there’s a lot of love and support for each other.”

Yet it was a community that, just a few years ago, he and his wife considered leaving. That changed with two back-to-back disasters – the Soberanes Fire in 2016 and the atmospheric river in 2017 that led to big rainfall and landslides along Highway 1.

“We realized after those two watershed events it was clear to us we needed to be in Big Sur, to continue doing what we do,” Kronlund says. “We realized there’s no place else we could move and have such an impact.”

On Aug. 6, Kronlund began unwinding his contractor business and started working full-time as CPOA’s first-ever executive director, and he spoke to the Weekly about what’s next for the organization, and the future of Big Sur.

Weekly: After operating as a volunteer-run organization since its inception, why did the CPOA decide it was time to have a paid executive director?

Kronlund: The volume of work. Big Sur, in the estimation of most of us on the board, is at a crossroads. All things flow through over-visitation, and there’s a feeling that there’s some kind of long-term initiatives that require consistency and persistence to execute, and it’s just too much to ask somebody do those things. The organization has in the past been reactive to disaster – the last 10 years, that’s been our main focus. Now we’ve got an opportunity to be proactive. In context with that’s happening around the planet with tourism – Cinque Terre, Venice, Florence, the top of Mt. Everest – all these locations are being loved to death, and are losing that which makes them so great.

We’re trying to balance the environmental, social and business interests that are impacted by visitation in a way that’s beneficial for all. There’s a way to do that, and that’s our mission.

What does that look like?

Our key activity is creating a destination stewardship plan for Big Sur. We’re in the process of forming the group, to see if we’re capable of collaborating with one another. Nobody wants to waste their time, and the idea here is to come up with something that’s meaningful and enforceable, and will have an overall positive effect.

It could be as easy and simple as dealing with the restroom issue, the trash issue, or implementing new technologies like ride-sharing. And there are more radical ideas it’s too early to talk about.

How is the restroom issue going? Are tourists still doing their business on the side of the highway?

There continues to be a lot of talk, and I’m one of those people doing a lot of talking, but in terms of where the rubber meets the road, not a lot of things have happened. No efforts to clean the waste. Four to six million people a year are driving down Highway 1 – that’s a lot of people that need to go to the bathroom. I get an email every day with a picture of shit. You can smell it. I’m not inciting this at all – I want to collaborate, I want to solve problems – but there are people in Big Sur who have just about had it. The shit, trash, and just the insanity of what’s happening on the highway – if you’re a business, employees are not going to want spend three hours a day in traffic. It’s at the point now where businesses are being hurt, the resident population is really not happy, and the environment is suffering.