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Killing the Golden Goose: Part I

Let’s suppose it’s a nice, sunny day in Sea-to-Sky land and you have an irresistible hankerin’ for the last of the fresh strawberries and, as good as they are, you want something better than whatever’s been picked over down at Nes

Let’s suppose it’s a nice, sunny day in Sea-to-Sky land and you have an irresistible hankerin’ for the last of the fresh strawberries and, as good as they are, you want something better than whatever’s been picked over down at Nesters or maybe the last time you went in there you couldn’t find where they’d hidden the produce and you’re more than willing to be patient with the new reno because it’s definitely going to be better but, like I said, it’s a great day for a drive to Pemberton anyway.

So you go.

You climb up into your trusty, tan Ford Explorer – Orvis Edition, nicknamed Trout – and slip a Best of Boomers compilation CD into the player ’cuz you know your kids won’t let you get away with playin’ that crap when they’re in the car, point it north, open the sunroof, adjust the creamy leather buckets, crank the volume a couple more notches and congratulate yourself for turning off your cell phone and pager.

Somewhere on the flat stretch of road before you get to the underpass followed by the tight righthand turn at the bottom of the hill, you’re distracted looking for the "repeat" button on the CD player because you want to start the Rascals’ Groovin’ over again since it seems to have captured your mood and you’re having flashbacks to a girl – or guy, equal opportunity fantasy – whose name you can’t quite remember but whose taste 30 years later is almost as strong in your mouth as those strawberries you’re driving north to pick off the bush.

Your left rear Firestone Wilderness AT, that you’ve been meaning to have replaced but haven’t gotten around to yet because it’s not like we live in a particularly hot, demanding climate tirewise and you don’t really have too many miles on ’em anyway, blows; the tread separates like peel being stripped from a ripe apple and the next thing you know your world is a topsy-turvy carnival ride of broken glass, flying coffee cups, loose papers, McDonald’s wrappers, dust, gravel and the sound of metal being scraped into scrap.

Then it’s over. For long seconds the only sound you hear is your own blood rushing through your ears and your heart pumping like a whole rhythm section of voodoo drums on human sacrifice night down in the bayou. But you’re alive and unhurt. You’re also upside down, hanging from your seatbelt, increasingly aware you’ve peed your pants and beginning to draw a crowd unsure whether they’re about to find a living human or meat. All’s well that ends well.

Except your Explorer is a wreck and your favourite compilation CD is forever stuck in the player. The insurance company tells you it’s a writeoff – the Explorer, not the CD – and offers you several grand less than you think it was worth. You tell the bloodsucking bustads to fix it instead since you’re fond of tilting at windmills. They tell you the parts alone would cost $85,000. You find this hard to believe since the whole thing new only cost $40,000. Digging into it, you find out they’re right. Isn’t life strange?

And that’s the difference between condo hotels and real hotels. Betcha didn’t see that coming.

Real hotels are a new Ford Explorer. Condo hotels are the retail-priced parts required to build a new Ford Explorer. They aren’t nearly the same thing. They shouldn’t be taxed the same way. They didn’t use to be. It’s unfair. And it’s dangerous to the future health of Whistler, the little resort that could.

First a little history. Condo hotels were a great idea and made Whistler what it is today because back in the dark ages of disco, no company in their right mind would have taken the risk of building hotels in the nascent resort of Whistler. They wouldn’t have put that kind of dough at risk.

From a developer’s perspective, condo hotels were pretty low risk. You sold the individual units before you put a shovel in the ground and, barring incompetence on the part of your project manager, knew what your profit was going in. The risk and cost of building lodging for the funseekers was spread across the pool of condo buyers. They were promised a nice cashflow – which almost never materialized – and their "investment" was taxed at residential rates. Condos sold like hotcakes and pretty soon there were lots of places for people to stay when they came to ski.

As Whistler approached critical mass, it was safe enough for real hotels to be built. The Chateau and part of the Delta are real hotels. They were built, run and owned as commercial entities. The owners owned all the rooms, the pool, the restaurants, the spas and kept all the dough that flowed from these sources.

But that wasn’t enough. They started to bitch and moan about an unlevel playing field. "The condo hotels aren’t fair," they cried. "Condos pay taxes at residential rates," they sobbed. Remember, they’re the Explorer; the condos are the parts.

Miraculously, the taxing authorities bought this line of unreasoning and all the seekers who bought condos on a promise of a great place to stay when they came skiing as well as fabulous riches promised by the cashflow projections – and let’s remember, numbers don’t lie – received new assessment notices informing them their residential condos were magically being transformed into commercial condos and their property taxes were doubling.

This pissed the condo owners – let’s call them the Greater Fools – off. It definitely wasn’t fair. I mean, it already wasn’t fair their condos turned out to be crappy investments that didn’t even come close to meeting the bogus cashflow projections the developers and real estate agents had shown them.

It wasn’t fair greedy property management companies were gouging them up to 40 per cent of their unit’s gross revenue as a management fee and then trying to dump every single maintenance item they could onto the strata as common area expenses.

It wasn’t fair the management companies were giving wholesale travel companies deep discounts on blocks of rooms to boost overall numbers of bodies coming to the resort, puffing up the visitor count and making Whistler look like Mecca for vertical hungry skiers at the expense of the Greater Fools’ return on their investment.

It wasn’t fair the same management companies were literally giving rooms away for free to jocks and important people who came to freeload during special events and patting themselves on the back for "supporting" these events by providing complimentary lodging. Hell, they were giving away stuff that wasn’t even theirs; it belonged to the Greater Fools.

So the Fools began to fight back. But that’s going to have to wait for Killing the Golden Goose: Part II.