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Living the Life O’Reilly

Former mayor Hugh O’Reilly on his new life in Maui and why he left Whistler
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“The hardest thing would have been to have not run and still be in Whistler.” former mayor Hugh O'Reilly

By Vivian Moreau

Cluttered with empty boxes, there is no place to sit in the reception area to Hugh O’Reilly’s office at the end of a strip mall on Maui. Sales people walk back and forth talking loudly on cell phones, heading briefly outside to the 30 degree parking lot only to march quickly back inside. A techie kneels in front of a laptop that’s propped on a spare chair.

“Okay, try it now,” he says into a phone.

A fading wall poster with a photo collage that includes Whistler Village is the only indication this tattered beige office is an Intrawest operation. The place looks as if it’s just been moved into or being readied to vacate.

“How long have you been here?” I ask the receptionist. “Dunno,” she shrugs.

Anyone who thinks Hugh O’Reilly left his job as Whistler’s mayor for a cushy Intrawest job is dead wrong.

It takes O’Reilly 10 minutes to leave the phone call on which he’s drumming up interest in the $1.2 billion beachfront condominium project across the street. He immediately suggests we go for coffee at the opposite end of the strip mall that faces the 40-acre site Intrawest is developing with two other partners, Ledcor and J.P. Morgan. Right now the site is just a scraped patch of red earth with two silent cranes parked in the middle. Two jazzed up trailers house models for the two-stage project of 628 condos and 72 townhomes that start at U.S.$600,000 and top out at $5.5 million.

In Hawaiian shirt, shorts, flip flops and tousled hair O’Reilly looks 10 years younger than 50. With a long, easy stride and tanned skin he could easily pass for a local, an endless surfer who came to Maui for the waves and never left. But he’s not. He’s Whistler’s former mayor who shocked the community a year ago, announcing he would not be guiding the town through to the Olympics and was instead moving to Maui, before his term was up, to sell condos for Intrawest. It was as if Captain Picard had said he was going over to the Borg.

But O’Reilly says it was time to leave. Not just because approaching 50 he and wife Patti felt a need for a change. Or because both their children had recently left home and the couple now had the freedom to head wherever they wanted.

“The hardest thing would have been to have not run and still be in Whistler,” O’Reilly says. Amidst rumours that he might not be able to bag a fourth term as mayor O’Reilly considered what it would be like to live in Whistler after having been mayor. “I talked to other people who’ve done that, who’ve been there. When you step away and you’re still there, that’s the hardest,” he says.

So he and Patti, who met as travellers in their early 20s, became travellers again, with O’Reilly studying for and passing realtor exams and signing up with Intrawest. In the past 12 months he’s worked in San Diego, Kauai and Maui. And although he says they intend to make Maui their home, he could work at any of Intrawest’s properties around the world. But even so he says they will still keep a home in Whistler.

Whistler. When O’Reilly speaks of the town he was mayor of for nine years he speaks as if he still lives there, like when comparing Maui’s frustrating lack of infrastructure to Whistler’s.

“I realize how easy it is that we do have a recycling system, how great our bus system is, I can see where we’ve had success,” he says about Whistler. “Is it perfect? No, but we’re still continuing, committed to going ahead,” he says.

“But here (Maui) they are just not making any inroads, and it’s going to impact in the negative in the long term if they don’t get on fairly quickly.”

He reads Pique online every week to stay in touch with issues at “home.” Says he’s surprised the P3 sewage treatment approach didn’t go through (“I would have loved to have seen what they were going to develop.”), is pleased sustainability is still the buzz and surprisingly, says bringing in the 2020 plan, not the 2010 Winter Games, is his proudest achievement.

“Anyone who knows me knows the key with 2020 is that by adopting that document it would be able to enforce 2010 and would drive the 2010 initiative. Because I always thought we’re going to do a great job of the Games, that’s the Canadian way, we’ll deliver on that, but there was this opportunity for Whistler to leverage the Olympics and demonstrate some sustainability initiatives within the venues.”

Charming and considerate, O’Reilly washes off Maui’s ubiquitous red dirt from a golf cart’s white seats before heading out for a tour of the development site. He explains why the non-native beachfront trees are to be cut down. (Their prickly thorns are just as discouraging to today’s beachgoers as they were to natives for whom they were planted over 100 years ago. “White missionaries didn’t want natives sitting on the beaches not working and having fun,” he explains without a trace of irony.) Then he offers a candid insight:

“Everyone just assumed that I was going to be the mayor through to the Olympics,” he says. “And one of the challenges to that was that to do that I would have to have been in office another six more years and that would have put me at 56. I worried that to change and take on a job at 56 may not have been very attractive to employers.”

Knowing there was a window of opportunity before their kids might settle down and start having children, he and Patti made the lifestyle switch, which has required some adjusting.

In the midst of an election that covers municipal, state and federal territories, O’Reilly is frustrated with the arcane process.

“I’m dumbfounded,” he says. “I’ve not been able to find one person that can explain the system to me. Nobody understands it here. They don’t know how people get elected, they don’t know what the terms of office are, they know some of the candidates and some of the issues, but they really don’t know much about who is doing what.”

He points out that Maui has similar issues to Whistler: a wealthy tourism-based economy faced with a shortage of affordable housing and shrinking hospitality labour force, he also hears familiar refrains about over-development and lack of supporting infrastructure.

He says although he doesn’t miss Whistler’s fall rains he does miss spring alpenglow at his Nicklaus North home and also misses good restaurants.

“You don’t appreciate how great Whistler and Vancouver are for food. There’s some good places here, but the quality is significantly lower,” he says.

O’Reilly winds up with a rant about poor roads, lack of initiative and resistance to off-island solutions before admitting that his response is to sit back and watch.

When it’s pointed out that selling condos is not as prestigious as being mayor O’Reilly comes his closest to bristling. He says the pay is much better, although how much better he’s not saying. And there are other perks. Always physically active — he was a ski patroller at Blackcomb from the day it opened — he and his wife snorkel in the afternoons, as well as golf and play tennis. They’ve joined a golf club and yacht club and Patti is learning to hula. He’s even tried surfing.

Their two-bedroom apartment has a 180-degree view of the ocean and islands of Molokai and Lanai. “We see the sunset every night and when the whales are here for six months we can see them jump and leap,” he says.

Born in Washington and raised in California, O’Reilly has dual citizenship but spent most of his adult life in Canada. He feels younger in Maui for more than one reason.

“I might as well be 19 years old, I have no credit rating.”

Credit card applications have been rejected.

“I’ve had to write letters, then they finally give it to me with a very small limit. I’m a non-person.”

He feels that status in other ways, like when he walks down streets and no one recognizes him. “In Whistler you couldn’t go anywhere without people coming up and talking to you.”

He and Patti have had to learn to establish new friendships, to become part of a new community and to rely more than ever on each other. With son Trevor at university in Victoria and daughter Danielle working in Dubai the couple have rediscovered the roots of their relationship. Next year they plan on celebrating their 30 th wedding anniversary with an African safari.

“We’re kind of going back to where we started, except we’re not just hitchhiking or backpacking, we actually have 10 cents to our name.”