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Mountain News: Visa program not working for Jackson

Jackson Hole’s absent high season work force

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. – It’s high season in Jackson Hole, where summer is far busier than winter at such properties as the Four Seasons. But employers who have come to depend upon seasonal workers from Mexico and other countries are hard-pressed. The H2-B visa program has been sluggish in delivering workers. By one estimate, the program is 30 per cent backlogged.

The Four Seasons, reports the Jackson Hole News & Guide, is asking employees to work overtime, and has shipped in employees from Scottsdale and Philadelphia. Jackson’s mayor, Mark Barron, who owns a dry cleaning business, was denied the 20 workers he had applied for.

“Two, three, four years ago, the H2-B program was meant to supplement the workforce, but now it is a core element of our workforce that we are dependent on,” said Tim O’Donoghue, executive director of the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce. “When there are changes in the program, there are significant ripple effects.”

 

Worker pinch foretold

INVERMERE, B.C.   – The tourism sector of the Kootenays, in south-central British Columbia, should expect that getting employees will be much more difficult in coming years.

An organization called go2, the human resources arm of Tourism B.C., said tourism businesses are likely to need 40 per cent more employees by the year 2015. Tourism businesses will grow, but several new resorts are planned.

But the population is aging in Canada, with baby boomers an even more powerful influence than is the case in the United States. As such, resort employers must offer better compensation — a difficult proposition in the short but busy season of summer, notes a report in the Invermere Valley Echo.

 

A tangled housing web

KETCHUM, Idaho – Oh what a tangled web the Idaho Mountain Express reports in a matter of run-down housing in Ketchum. If only by association, the web in this case reaches the graft-tainted Bush administration.

The story begins with the importing of Thai marijuana in the 1970s by two local men, who also bought 14 housing units in a project called Bavarian Village. After the handcuffs fell on their wrists several years ago, the U.S. Attorney General attempted to sell the condominiums. The Attorney General's office usually splits the proceeds from ill-gotten drug deals with local law-enforcement agencies.

An auction was held in adjoining Sun Valley. The minimum bid set by the U.S. attorney was $3.4 million, which estimated the potential value at $14 million. The only bid was $2.3 million from a local affordable-housing organization, which was to have been aided by the local public housing authority.

The U.S. attorney accuses both Ketchum and Sun Valley of informing prospective rival bidders that they would have a hard time getting a development plan through Ketchum’s planning process.

“Baloney,” says Sun Valley Mayor Jon Thorson. “It’s simply not true, period,” said Ketchum Mayor Randy Hall. Hall also says the minimum bid price was unrealistic, given how dilapidated the condos are.

Ketchum has now hired a former congressman, George Nethercutt Jr., who is being given $25,000 and unlimited airline travel, if approved in advance. His job? Knock on the right doors in Washington to find a federal grant to buy the condominiums for local affordable housing.

The hope is that he can take this case to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who has been having his share of problems. But the company the ex-congressman, Nethercutt, has been keeping, hasn’t exactly embellished his reputation. The Express notes that Nethercutt was a partner with Steven Griles.

Griles had been the No. 2 man in the Department of Interior from 2001 to 2005. As such, he was the point man for President Bush’s plans for federal leases on gas, oil and coal deposits beneath public lands. He has now been sentenced to 10 months in prison for influence peddling. Seems he was getting $285,000 from former clients while arranging meetings between these former clients and partners with other officials in interior.

Another partner was Andrew Lundquist, who led Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force in 2001. The task force met in secret and then called for increases in gas and oil drilling on public lands.

 

Family over mountains

CANMORE, Alberta – Like most mountain resort towns, Canmore continues to get distinctly more middle-aged grey even as housing prices rise, with single-family homes now averaging $750,000.

For younger couples, the choice comes down to whether to accept that “you and me and baby makes three” are unlikely to have a white-picket fence. Or if they do belly-up to a big mortgage, that they are unlikely to spend much time hiking and skiing the trails that drew them in the first place.

The Rocky Mountain Outlook talked to one such couple, Angeline and Joe Thiboutot, who met in 1999 and married in 2005. Deciding to start a family, the couple decamped to Quebec, where he was from originally. There, for $100,000, they could buy four bedrooms and a nice yard.

They wanted the yard and a bigger house, and they wanted time together, and it just didn’t seem to be in the cards in Canmore, a town of 11,600 permanent residents near the entrance to Banff National Park.

Since the mid-1990s, those aged 14 and under has shrunk from 24 per cent of the population to only 14 per cent now. The reverse has happened among those aged 45 to 64, according to a report from the Biosphere Institute.

Those aged 24 to 44 — the Gen Xers such as the Thiboutots — remain the most populous age group, but from 43 per cent of the total population their share has shrunk to 34 per cent.

 

Nothing celebrated

TELLURIDE, Colo. – Some 13 years ago Telluride decided to take a breather from its busy summer schedule of festivals and have a three-day Nothing Festival. Nothing much normally goes on, although assuredly shop and restaurant doors are open for business.

But this year, reports The Telluride Watch, the concept has been taken one step further. The local theater, called the Nugget, is offering movies — for nothing. But these aren’t reruns. Among the showings was the new film, “Evan Almighty.” (Although, in fairness, some reviews of the film have said it was worth just about that, nothing).

The producer of “Evan Almighty” is Tom Shadyac, who doesn’t own a home in Telluride but who nonetheless has an unusual relationship with the Telluride community. Earlier this year, he donated the final $2 million that allowed the community to spend $50 million to preserve a large parcel of land at the town’s entry as open space.

 

Big boxes debate coming

CANMORE, B.C. – Canmore is getting ready for a major community discussion about whether it will adopt a policy that makes it difficult for big-box national and international retailers such as Wal-Mart to set up shop in town. The council, reports the Rocky Mountain Outlook, ordered a law be drafted to restrict big boxes in all commercial areas, with the hopes it will spark a more definitive discussion.

 

Revelstoke seeks hotel tax

REVELSTOKE, B.C. – Revelstoke continues to plot its future as a major destination resort. Most recently, municipal officials have been aiming for provincial funding, to be used to develop tourism infrastructure and expand marketing. To do that, local hoteliers had to agree to an additional 2 per cent tax on top of the existing 8 per cent tax, reports the Revelstoke Times Review.

 

Thompson focus of symposium

ASPEN, Colo. – Hunter Thompson is gone but surely not forgotten. Even as a new generation of Echo Boomers learn about his “strange and terrible” time with the Hells Angels and “fear and loathing” on the presidential campaign trail, a symposium is being planned in Aspen to focus on Thompson’s writings and political leanings.

Participants at the July 21 symposium will include journalist Carl Bernstein, historian Douglas Brinkley, and the writer John Nichols. The Aspen Institute is the sponsor.

Juan Thompson, the late writer’s son, said the goal of the event is to “bring attention, through discussion, to the enduring qualities of Thompson’s writing… in terms of content, theme and style, to examine how these qualities might be relevant to the present, and to explore how they can be developed and encouraged in a new generation of writers.”

 

Noise interrupts Vail dreams

VAIL, Colo. – Ah summertime, and in Vail, the living is… noisy. Interstate 70 slices through the town, groaning with ever-more traffic every year.

The annoyance worsens in summer, when the natural tendency is to open windows to take in those lovely night-time breezes. Julie Hansen, who lives along the highway at the foot of Vail Pass, says it’s hard even to fall asleep with windows open.

Hansen distributed petitions signed by 200 people calling on town officials to get noise barriers erected as part of highway reconstruction. A third lane, to allow for slow-moving trucks, is being planned on the approach to Vail Pass. The hope is that state funds will pay for the barriers, as town officials believe noise walls are too expensive.

The disruptive nature of Interstate 70 has spawned talk in Vail since at least the early 1970s of burying it. Another and even more ambitious plan was introduced last year. Jim Lamont, a former municipal planner who now represents many property owners in the town, returned from a visit to the Alps with visions of tunnels in his head. He has proposed a tunnel through Vail Mountain, forcing people in a hurry to bypass the town.

Lamont says he believes that quality of life, instead of economic development, is now emerging as the key issue in Vail. An environment free of noise is one of the key issues, along with the devastation of bark beetles to adjoining forests.

He says the tunnel idea remains, and that power players within the community are deciding whether they’re going to take up the idea, who will do so, and how they will do so.

 

Barkley visits scene of Fire

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. – Former basketball superstar Charles Barkley took time out from a golf tournament at Lake Tahoe to tour the Angora Fire, which destroyed 254 homes.

“If we stay over there at the golf and casino, we’re not going to think anything is going on here,” Barkley told the Tahoe Daily Tribune. “That’s why I wanted to come here with a camera. When you live in different parts of the country and they show you two houses burned down, you don’t get the full effect.”

Barkley donated $25,000 to victims of the fire and planned to take 100 firefighters to dinner. Barkley did something similar when he visited New Orleans last February, although there he donated $1 million.

 

Toughing it out at age 89

SILVERTHORNE, Colo. – The Summit Daily News tells the story of the disappearance and then rescue of Ed Carlson, who is 89 and still goes rambling in the Gore Range. That we all should have such problems at that age.

On July 6, he borrowed a horse and with his dog, Boo, at his side, set out to explore the Slate Creek drainage for several days. But he encountered a severe blowdown across the trail, and in trying to move through the downed trees, the horse fell, pinning Carlson’s leg under the horse’s body and then both of them under a sapling.

Carlson, fully prepared, used a hatchet to free both himself and the horse. He unloaded the gear off the horse and set up camp. However, during the night, the horse got loose.

What Carlson did for the next two days was unclear, but by the third day, the horse had returned to the valley with neither rider nor saddle — an ominous sign. On the morning of the fourth day, a Forest Service crew found Carlson, a few hundred yards from the trail. He accepted help, but was able to walk from the helicopter.

Why he didn’t walk from where he had been stranded that first night was not clear. Still, his brother Wes told the paper there was no doubt that Carlson would soon return to the area, where during the 1930s and 1940s he sometimes spent up to a month at a time camping and fishing. “He has an obsession with Slate Creek,” said Walt.

 

Earth Aid more talk than walk?

ASPEN, Colo. – “Earth Aid,” Al Gore’s multi-continent extravaganza to draw attention to the planetary pillaging of the climate, provoked a smattering of comment in ski town newspapers of the West.

In Aspen, the city government’s Canary Initiative had the concerts and associated film broadcast via a Jumbotron in downtown Aspen while distributing energy-efficient lift bulbs. Letter-writer Dawn Dexter was annoyed. “Please walk your talk,” she said. “Being aware doesn’t do any good unless we all take action to reduce our own impact.”

In Jackson Hole, rancher and lawyer Brad Mead was dubious of the value of the concerts. The mundane day-to-day efforts of “turning off lights, turning down the thermostat and recycling do more for the environment and the climate than trotting off to a concert in Rio,” he said.

 

Plastic bottles off the table

BASALT, Colo. – Plastic bottles are back off the table at Basalt Town Council meetings. The council had asked for a ban on the bottles a couple of years ago, but they returned with the explanation that there were doubts about the effectiveness of the town’s dishwasher in washing the glasses. News of that decision sparked protests, says The Aspen Times, and so now the town has a pitcher of water and disposable paper glasses.

 

Charter school will target Hispanics

GYPSUM, Colo. – A charter school that is geared specifically for Latinos and other students who have difficulty in English will be opening later this summer in the Eagle Valley. Targeted will be students aged 15 to 21.

The school, operated by New America, will be located on the second floor of a business in Gypsum, 37 miles down-valley from Vail, and with classrooms also in Avon and Edwards.

Hispanics compose 40 per cent of Avon’s full-time population, 31 per cent in Gypsum, 27 per cent in Edwards, and 25 per cent in Eagle.

The school offers flexible, work-friendly class schedules on Monday through Thursday, and stipends of $200 per month for students with children, to defray child-care costs.

Kathy Brendza, the principal, says she realizes many students at the new school won’t be interested in college. The idea is to give those students the ability to function in an English-speaking work force. “If you’re going to be a housekeeper, be the best-educated housekeeper you can possibly be,” she said.

 

CB limits professional offices

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. – Real estate salesmen, lawyers, bankers and mortgage brokers — or at least new offices for them — have once again been declared persona non grata from the ground-level storefronts in Crested Butte’s main tourist-friendly shopping district along Elk Avenue.

Following the lead of Vail in 1973 and several other ski towns in more recent years, Crested Butte last year banned the offices. That initial ban was opposed, but this new ban grandfathers in offices at existing locations.

While Crested Butte’s real-estate economy has done back-flips during the last several years, its retail economy has snoozed. The Crested Butte News reports that town and business officials also plan to hold a farmer’s market and special evening activities in the hopes of restoring vitality — and competing with new businesses planned at the nearby town of Mt. Crested Butte, located two miles away at the base of the ski mountain.

“This is about the character of the town,” said a councilman, Ski Berkshire. “If there were two or three of the real estate stores scattered on Elk, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.”

Another council member, Margo Levy, said that the move helps “set the table” for the 600,000 annual skier days anticipated by a possible expansion of the ski area. The ski area is currently doing 300,000 to 400,000 skiers per year.

 

7-Eleven shooters sought

BASALT, Colo. – In a case that appears to be about the immigration debate, police are trying to figure out who fired five bullets into a 7-Eleven store.

Two Latino males went into the store one evening in late June and asked cashier Bruno Kirchenwitz if he was the man who wears a baseball cap that says “U.S. Border Patrol.” Kirchenwitz, reports The Aspen Times, acknowledged he was the guy, but that he does not wear it while on duty.

Kirchenwitz told police the men threatened to show him how they felt about the hat and warned that they would hang around outside the store until he got off. He got off at 10 p.m. and caught a bus. About an hour later the shots were fired through a front window at the cashier’s area. Nobody was hurt, although five people were in the store.

Later, in a letter to the Aspen Times, Kirchenwitz declared that his visitors were gang-members. He was dismissed from his job, but 7-Eleven insists it had nothing to do with the shooting. The Latinos who had words have been identified only as “persons of interest,” reports the Times.

John Colson, a columnist for the Times, warned against seeing the incident as an antecedent to a rise in racial and social tensions. “I don’t see it,” he said, “but such things can feed upon themselves to the point where they suddenly become real, even when based on nothing solid.”

 

Questions raised about use of trails

RICO, Colo. – Confusion reigns about whether motorized uses are allowed on several trails on U.S. Forest Service land west of Rico.

The Rico Bugle explains that three trails — Bear Creek, Ryman Creek, and the Calico Trail from Cayton to Priest Gulch — are identified on maps as open to motorized vehicles.

However, the San Juan National Forest listed the trails in 1992 as open only to semi-primitive, non-motorized use. That use allows bicycles, horses and foot traffic, but not motorized dirt bikes or Jeeps.

The Forest Service can provide no evidence of doing the environmental analysis required by federal law to allow motorized use.

Steve Beverlin, manger of the Dolores District Field Office, said it was not clear why various maps issued for the public lands have been inconsistent, but that a travel management plan revision now underway will address the matter.

Mike Curran, a board member of the Rico Alpine Society, which publicized the inconsistencies, wants the trail use returned to non-motorized in fact while the new plan is being prepared. Many motorized users already think their rights are being taken away, he said. “But what if the rights they think they have never legally existed in the first place?” he asked.

 

Telluride to consider Bush impeachment

TELLURIDE, Colo. – Telluride Town council members were scheduled this week to discuss whether to call for the impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. The Telluride Watch says 40 cities and towns have passed such ordinances, among them Chicago, Detroit and San Francisco.