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Mountain News: Aspen Skiing agrees to same-sex benefits

ASPEN, Colo. – The Aspen Skiing Co. has decided to offer health insurance and ski passes to domestic partners of employees, regardless of the sex of the partners.

ASPEN, Colo. – The Aspen Skiing Co. has decided to offer health insurance and ski passes to domestic partners of employees, regardless of the sex of the partners.

Jim Laing, the company’s vice president of human resources, said the decision was made without knowledge of a potential boycott of the gay community, which for the last 12 years has held a Gay Ski Week at Aspen.

“We would not be leveraged or held hostage in this regard,” he said. “We’re open to feedback, but we’re not going to be forced into any action.”

The newspaper spoke with John Bagwell, who identified himself as a gay man from New York City. Bagwell said he was prepared to visit another resort instead of Aspen, including Vail.

Vail Resorts began offering benefits to domestic partners regardless of sex in 2002. Intrawest, the third major ski area operator in Colorado, also offers domestic partner benefits.

 

Ski towns brace for lack of visas

TELLURIDE, Colo. – The nationwide cap on H-2B visas was reached in late July, leaving many ski areas out in the cold. This means many long-time seasonals from other countries won’t return to teach skiing, but also to work other ski area jobs.

Telluride, for example,   is losing 55 employees who had worked under the H-2B visa program. All but two were ski instructors.

Instead, says Dave Riley, the chief operating officer of the ski company, Telluride has already hired 45 employees from South America with student visas under the J1 program.

Vail Resorts had sought to bring 1,900 seasonal workers into the United States through the H-2B program for its five ski areas in Colorado and California. However, only a few visas were granted for early season employees, such as snowmakers. The company employs 15,000 people at peak season.

The Vail Daily notes that in 2007 Vail Resorts had sought to hire 2,200 employees under the H2B program, about a third of them ski instructors, but with nearly a thousand short-order cooks, lift operators, hotel clerks and housekeepers.

Michael Berry, president of the National Ski Areas Association, told the Telluride Watch that the loss of ski instructors hits ski areas hardest.

“Look who is not coming back… the long-term ski instructors who have a large clientele base, which is very lucrative for the instructor and the company.”

The ski industry sees itself being caught in the national debate about immigration reform.

“You have the folks who want to build a fence at the border and have no immigration,” said Berry. “You have the Hispanic caucus that has a lot of different elements. Ski areas are caught in the middle.”

 

Will immigration continue?

VAIL, Colo. – Despite the flatness of the ski industry, a conveyor belt of money has been creating boomtowns out of mountain resort valleys. But will the conveyor belt continue to operate?

Two experts who spoke at a recent conference held in Vail by the University of Denver came to very different conclusions, reports the Vail Daily.

No, said, Chuck McLean, who lives in Aspen and runs a private consulting business called Denver Research Group. He said the baby boom generation is rapidly losing wealth, and that as many as 60 per cent of middle class retirees will outlive their savings.

But Jim Westkott, a demographer with Colorado’s state government, maintains — as he has for a decade now — that retiring baby boomers are going to create a demand for services that places like the Eagle Valley aren’t prepared to handle.

He speculated that the market for mansions may dry up, but not the desire of Americans to get out of cities. Many of these émigrés will have families and will be in the peak earning years, but others will be retirees. He speculates that the demand for services will be such that some of the larger homes may be converted into duplexes and condominiums.

 

Vans eyed for commuters

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. – With gas still more than $4 a gallon in most mountain valleys of the West, there is new talk of subscription-based vanpools between resort towns and outlying bedroom towns.

Such is the case in Routt County, where some workers who live in Oak Creek and Yampa have been spending $300 to $500 a month on gas while commuting to jobs in Steamboat, a distance of 20 to 30 miles distant. The Steamboat Pilot & Today reports that a phone survey conducted last spring found that 43 per cent were very likely to use transit for trips to jobs in Steamboat.

Town officials in Vail report similar interest in vans. There, a bus service is already in place to outlying towns, but buses have become filled, and there is insufficient money to buy enough new buses to meet the surging demand.

 

Gangs relaxing in Banff

BANFF, Alberta – Police say members of gangs from nearby Calgary have been relaxing in the bars of Banff. But there could be problems if members of rival gangs spot each other, they say. The gang violence has resulted in one murder this summer in Calgary. Of particular note in a story by the Rocky Mountain Outlook are two gangs among a dozen identified by Calgary police. One is named Fresh Off the Boat and the other is Fresh Off the Boat Killers.

 

Vail seeks conference centre

VAIL, Colo. – For more than 20 years Vail has periodically talked about building a conference centre to help fill hotel beds during the shoulder seasons. Several times, voters rejected tax increases for a conference centre, but the latest proposal would not necessarily include public moneys.

The proposal, notes the Vail Daily, is part of a package deal by a Dallas-based company to redevelop the municipally owned LionsHead parking structure. Included is a 44,000-square-foot conference centre.

Greg Moffet, a former town council member, supports the idea. “The only way you get people to come here (in May, June, September and October) is to have them required by their employer to come here, and that’s what a conference centre does,” he told the Daily.

The politics of the proposal are involved. The landowner is Vail Resorts, the ski area operator, which has a different — and perhaps competing — proposal nearby for a project called Ever Vail. Town authorities and Vail Resorts have been squabbling for more than a year about employee housing, but also parking needs.

 

Russian oil money in Aspen

ASPEN, Colo. – The real estate market has slowed, but there are still people out there with oodles of money. The Aspen Times says that one home in the Aspen area recently sold for $20.75 million, and another one at Snowmass Village sold for $14.5 million.

The purchaser of the latter property is a Russian, Eugene Shvidler, who was ranked No. 161 on the Forbes richest people list in 2007. He is also a business partner of Roman Abramovich, an oil tycoon from Russian who paid $36 million in April for an estate outside of Aspen.

 

Filmmaker Barrymore dead

KETCHUM, Idaho – Ski filmmaker Dick Barrymore has died at the age of 74. He had suffered from brain cancer.

Barrymore began his ski filmmaking carrier at the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, Calif. He rarely worked from a script as he began his films, but rather was a monster of improvisation, says the Idaho Mountain Express.

Jim Stelling, one of his favorite performers in his movies during the 1970s, tells the newspapers that he was a consummate storyteller.

“He would hold court at dinner, always entertaining, bringing up the same stories you heard the year before, only the next year you probably found yourself in the stories he told. For him, it was the art of the tale.”

A ski magazine once described him as a rather delightful maniac, and he rather liked the description.

 

Bears lose out to vehicles

BANFF, Alberta – The first weekend in August, a holiday weekend in Canada, was a deadly one for bears in the Banff region. Three bears were killed by trains or vehicles, including a grizzly that died after running in front of a motorcycle. It was the second grizzly to die this year after being smacked by a motorcycle rider, notes the Rocky Mountain Outlook. The rider in this case, a 50-year-old woman from Calgary, suffered injuries, but they were not life threatening.

 

Greenhouse gas inventory complete

GUNNISON COUNTY, Colo. – An inventory of greenhouse gas emissions caused by people and visitors to Gunnison, Crested Butte, and other parts of Gunnison County has been completed.

The report finds that transportation is the largest chunk, some 39 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. This, however, does not count the airline flights and cars used by people traveling to Crested Butte or to Gunnison, home of Western State College.

Buildings are responsible for more than half of emissions, 30 per cent from residential and 21 per cent from commercial. Landfill decomposition is responsible for 6 per cent, and agriculture and other sources are responsible for 4 per cent.

Several of the local governments during the last several years have signed the Mayors’ Agreement on Climate Change or otherwise committed to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. The first step in reducing emissions, organizers say, is to measure your current use, as a way of marking future progress.

George Sibley, of the Office of Resource Efficiency, the group that conducted the inventory, told one town council that he sees greenhouse reduction being a long-term process.

“We’re talking about a multi-generational process,” he said. “For something like that, having the local governments on board seems absolutely critical.”

Next up is — what else? — a conference in September, at which the locals will talk about how to get from A to Z.

 

Mill gears up for beetle-killed trees

KREMMLING, Colo. – A mill in Kremmling built to make pellets for wood-burning stoves began production this week. The plant, located about halfway between Steamboat Springs and Kremmling, is now producing a product called Eco-Flame Pellets from the dead and drying lodgepole pine trees.

Mark Mathis, the proprietor of the company, Confluence Energy, said he expects the pellet mill will employ 75 people either at the mill, cutting the trees, or hauling them by truck. This week he also announced plans for an expansion of the plant that will increase capacity by a third.

He tells the Middle Park Times that heat produced by burning the pellets will be 35 per cent cheaper than burning natural gas and 60 per cent cheaper than propane or electricity.