By Allen Best
CANMORE, B.C. – Second-home owners in Canmore are going to be taxed at a higher rate. The increased tax also applies to primary residents who have homes they don’t live in.
City leaders in Canmore justify the targeted property tax as necessary to provide increased revenues, but also to allow it to continue as a functioning town. “We have 15 years — I wish it was longer than it is — to really turn this around and get this house in order so we can still have regular, normal working people living in this community,” Mayor Ron Casey told the Rocky Mountain Outlook.
This new tax is expected to yield an extra $1.3 million for Canmore for a total budget of $28.26 million.
A former coal-mining town, Canmore lies at the eastern gateway to Banff National Park. Of the population of 11,549 people, some 4,818 are non-permanent. The permanent population is static, while the non-permanent population, second-home owners, continues to rapidly climb.
The part-timers will be hit with an average of $420 more in taxes than the full-time residents. The full-timers, however, will have to prove their year-round residency. Also subjected to the higher tax are permanent residents who have second homes within the community for rental properties.
The Outlook reports criticism of the tax hike targeted at part-timers. Susan Barry, executive director of the Urban Development Institute, said the council had again failed to consult those who are affected.
Chris Ollenberger, president of the Three Sisters Mountain Village, a real-estate development that aims for the part-timers, similarly expressed “surprise” at the lack of public notice or consultation. A future envisioning process “talked extensively about inclusivity of the non-permanent resident and cohesiveness of the community,” he noted. He warned against alienating the non-permanent resident population.
But John Stutz, the mayor of Banff, located 15 miles away, said he found Canmore’s move “very, very interesting,” and applauded it. Banff, like Canmore, has struggled to find alternative sources of revenue.
Canmore is the first municipality in Alberta to impose such a measure, although there seems to be precedents in British Columbia and Manitoba.
Climate change draws a crowd
PARK CITY, Utah – Even when Park City was planning to host the Olympics, the town never had 1,200 people show up for a community meeting. But that’s how many turned out last week to hear scientific projections about how rising temperatures may affect Park City during the 21 st century.
Global warming, said the scientists, will change Park City plenty. Temperatures will rise, of course, and will likely mean less snow.
The base areas are at about 6,900 feet in elevation. Given the maximum continued emissions now projected, the snowline of the ski mountains could move up to 9,500 feet. Park City Mountain Resort’s top elevation is 10,400 feet.
In addition, warmer temperatures could delay snow accumulations by at least four weeks.
Computer models developed so far are uncertain about how global warming will change precipitation patterns.
“We can’t say with any high degree of certainty what precipitation will do in the future,” says Brian Lazar, a hydrologist with Stratus Consulting, a firm from Boulder, Colo. that conducted the research. “That’s particularly true in mountainous regions, because of the interactions of the climate and the topography.
“Temperatures we can predict with much more confidence,” he added.
Mid-range projections see temperatures in Park City rising 10 degrees, or about the same temperature as Salt Lake City is now. These warmer temperatures could shrink the snow depths by 15 to 65 per cent compared to historical averages.
Just how much heating occurs depends at least partly on how much greenhouse gases continue to accumulate. Concentrations of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas, were at 280 parts per million in the atmosphere at the start of the 20 th century. They now stand at 382 parts per million. Some scientists think the Earth can stand only 450 to 550 parts per million before substantial changes occur, which could happen by mid-century.
The problem, say scientists, is that once in the atmosphere, greenhouse gases take many years to dissipate.
While climates are constantly changing, most scientists now say that man-caused greenhouse gases are the major cause of changes seen in recent decades.
One of the nation’s most prominent climate-change scientists, James Hansen, from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, warns that substantial changes are needed in the next 5 to 10 years.
“I think there is still time to deal with global warming, but we need to act soon,” Hansen told scientists and meteorologists gathered in early January at a conference in Mammoth Lakes, Calif.
But as much as the science, which parallels other reports, the story at Park City is the voluminous public response.
“If I were giving out steak dinners, I wouldn’t have gotten 100 people there,” says Myles Rademan, the public affairs director for Park City’s municipal government.
Blair Fuelner, general manager of a radio station, KPCW, took the idea of a study to Park City Mountain Resort, which agreed to pay most of the $60,000 cost. Other ski areas — Deer Valley and The Canyons — also helped pay the cost.
The radio station then bombarded listeners with invitations to the meeting. It was held, said Rademan, in the biggest auditorium in Park City.
Park City had already been doing many things in response to concerns about global warming. Two years ago it began buying wind-generated electricity for municipal buildings, encouraging community members to do likewise, and staging a competition with another Utah town, Moab. Last year, it began adding a biodiesel component to its municipal vehicles.
But the massive turnout at the meeting proves there will be support for additional changes.
“Semi-draconian measures will get a better hearing now than they would have a few years ago,” says Rademan.
Just what those changes will be, however, is unclear. “Now comes the hard part — and that’s what are you going to do about it,” he says.
A sustainability team formed by Park City’s government two years ago has been studying changes around the county. Rademan, a member of that team, acknowledges a good many ideas are likely to be discussed: reducing lot sizes in order to reduce sprawl, and also reducing house sizes.
Park City will probably study a program that began in Aspen in 2000, in which owners of large, energy-using homes must pay into a public fund if their homes exceed a specified energy budget through use of such things as heated driveways and outdoor swimming pools. That program is generating $800,000 to $1 million annually now for use in such things as energy retrofits of Aspen’s recreational center.
But in his report to the Park City Council, Rademan intends to urge balance. At the end of the day, Park City will remain a resort catering to wealthy people.
“We are not trying to turn this into a theology, and when you go into those meetings, they often turn into revival meetings. You have to be careful about that.”
Revelstoke bargains with devil
REVELSTOKE, B.C. – Developers of Revelstoke Mountain Resort have now committed $30 million toward erection of a new gondola and chairlift that should be operating next winter. With that announcement, Revelstoke, a city of 8,000 people, is more squarely facing what environmental historian Hal Rothman identified as the devil’s bargain of communities that embrace tourism.
While old ranching, mining and logging towns may see tourism as an economic savior, tourism ultimately changes them in ways that proponents usually have not anticipated, Rothman said in his book, “Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West.”
“As a viable option for moribund or declining places, tourism promises much but delivers only a little, often in forms different from what its advocates anticipate,” Rothman wrote.
Revelstoke is one of those places looking for a rescue. Created by the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s, it has had an economic foundation based on mining and also on sawmills, which continue to smoke up the Columbia River Valley. But several of Canada’s national parks are within easy drives, and a handful of heli-skiing operations operate in the nearby Purcell and Monashee mountains. The tourism economy began growing with the arrival of the Trans Canada Highway in 1962.
Ambitious eyes have been cast for 20 years on Mount MacKenzie, which towers over the town. A small community ski hill now exists, but the new resort aims to be a major international destination resort.
Similar to other destination resorts, developers are aiming at the immense baby boom generation now generally living in Canadian cities, but also a clientele that may well include Europeans and Asians. Vancouver, located 400 miles to the west, is a major portal to China and other Asian Rim countries. Banff, located 175 miles to the east, already has a major international clientele.
When the $1 billion Revelstoke Mountain Resort is completed, it is expected to have a ski-mountain capacity of 14,000 people, similar to both Whistler and Blackcomb. Squaw Valley also has a comfortable carrying capacities of 14,000, while Breckenridge has a capacity of about 15,000.
Revelstoke’s lifts and gondolas are expected to be installed this summer, allowing opening of the resort next winter. The mountain offers the potential for a vertical drop of 6,000 feet, the most in North America.
All this is seen with both elation and apprehension in Revelstoke. Housing prices have doubled in the last three years. Alan Mason, the town’s economic development director, attributes the increase to people buying property and hoping to get in "on the ground floor" before the resort develops. But there are also people moving there because they think it is a good place to live.
City officials say making real estate more affordable will be their No. 1 priority this year. The strategy is to develop more housing.
“It’s the old problem of supply and demand,” explained Mark McKee, the mayor. The city will look at increasing densities, he said, but it will also be struggling for several years at how to expand the infrastructure of city services to enable new development. “It’s kind of a chicken-and-the-egg thing,” he told the Times Review.
Times Review editor David Rooney says Revelstoke welcomes the mega-development, but is apprehensive about losing its sense of community as reflected in community dinners and other aspects of smaller-town.
“We want prosperity. We want jobs and new businesses in town. We want many, but perhaps not all, of the amenities available elsewhere,” Rooney writes, then adds: “But we don’t want to change too much. We don’t want to become unrecognizable when we look in the mirror.”
Revelstoke understands changes are ahead. On Feb. 8, a panel in Revelstoke will discuss the realities and challenges of resort development in a community setting.
But Rothman’s study of Aspen, Ketchum, and Santa Fe suggests that Revelstoke is likely to confront a stranger several years hence.
“The initial development of tourism often seems, innocuous, ‘beneath the radar’ of outside interests, lucrative but not transformative,” wrote Rothman, a professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, in his 1998 book.
“As places acquire the cachet of desirability, they draw people and money; the redistribution of wealth, power, and status follows, complicating local arrangements. When tourism creates sufficient wealth, this becomes too important to be left to the locals.”
Beetle kill underestimated
WINTER PARK, Colo. – Town officials in Winter Park are revamping their strategy for dealing with the bark beetles. For the last several years, the town had been paying homeowners $55 per tree to remove dead and dying pine trees. The bill ran $300,000 to $400,000 per year.
But seeing the wave of dying trees, town officials now think they can better use the money on a community wildfire protection plan. “It’s bigger than all of us think,” Mayor Nick Teverbaugh told the Winter Park Manifest. “It’s getting to the point where we can’t afford to keep cutting every tree.”
Aspen celebrates 60 years of skiing
ASPEN, Colo. – Aspen, as a ski destination, is now 60 years old. Although people were skiing before World War II with the aid of a contraption called the boat tow, the first lift was installed in 1946 and put into official operation in January 1947.
With that single-chair ski lift, Aspen emerged from what is often called its quiet years, the period that began when federal subsidies for silver ended in 1893, ending the mining boom. Aspen, reports The Aspen Times, foresaw lift-served downhill skiing as “a new, good, and profitable way of life,” in the words of a columnist of the time, Leonard Woods.
That people who were part of Aspen’s rebirth remain alive testifies to the relative youth of the ski industry. Klaus Obermeyer, who later began manufacturing ski clothing, was a ski instructor that first season. He remains in Aspen, as do two brothers, Frank and John Dolinsek, who worked on the construction crew that erected the first lift.
But while a great many people have lamented the changes at ski areas in recent years, it’s doubtful anybody laments that first chair lift. The lift ride took a half-hour, and grease and oil frequently dripped on passengers. The ski company promised to dry-clean any ski clothes that were soiled. “They did a lot of dry-cleaning,” Obermeyer told The Aspen Times.
Ski prices are another matter. Aspen charged $3.75 a day that first season, although the $140 season’s pass seems steep, given the wages of the time.
Silver lining in avalanche cloud
WINTER PARK, Colo. – The avalanche that blocked Highway 40 on the east side of Berthoud Pass on Jan. 6 had a silver lining. Businesses in Winter Park tell the Manifest that they had an unusually good day of commerce. Too, some think the publicity will help Winter Park in coming months. If not entirely accurately, the news reports repeatedly identified Winter Park as the closest resort to Denver.
For people trying to catch planes — the avalanche occurred mid-way through a Saturday morning, turnover day at ski resorts — the avalanche was a costly nuisance. The drive from Winter Park to the Denver airport, normally two hours, was more than doubled, probably more for drivers unfamiliar with the winding, circuitous route through Kremmling and Silverthorne. The ski area operator estimated a 10 per cent drop in business.
The avalanche of the Stanley Slide caught eight people, knocking two cars off the highway. Nobody was seriously hurt, however. Avalanche experts estimate the winds that day had loaded the avalanche path within an hour. Snow in the slide path is routinely set off by highway crews using a howitzer.
Ski bums remain
KETCHUM, Idaho – People have been heralding the death of the ski bum for at least 20 years. It’s still happening.
I.M. Chauncey told the Idaho Mountain Express that he’s part of a dying breed. A telemark skier, he’s been ski-bumming at Sun Valley for 11 years. “All I have to do is turn out the lights when I leave, because the ski bum is dead in Sun Valley,” he said.
But Jeff Smull, a former freestyle skier and racing coach who is now 47 years old and skis 100 days or more a season, says ski bums are different, but remain.
“We’re professionals who are ski bums,” says Smull, who sells real estate. “We’re not professional ski bums. I think the new ski bum has a retirement package.”
Towns seek higher ground
ALMA, Colo. – The stakes are rising, so to speak, in the argument about who has the highest town in the United States. So are tempers.
For many years, the dispute was between Alma and Leadville, two old mining towns located on opposite sides of Colorado’s Mosquito Range. Leadville has an elevation of 10,182 feet on its main street, Harrison Avenue, but city employees several years ago began using the municipal water tower, elevation 10,430 feet. Alma responded by establishing an elevation, 10,578 feet, between its post office and water tank.
Still, by common consent, both towns claimed superlatives: Alma was the highest town, and Leadville the highest city. The distinction is grounded in Colorado law. Municipalities of less than 2,000 are towns, and Alma has an estimated population of 231 people. Places of greater than 2,000 people can be incorporated as cities, which Leadville did. It has a population of 2,764.
Then along came Winter Park. Last summer, the town — it has a population of 827 people — annexed the ski area, which reaches a maximum elevation of 12,060 feet. The purpose was to give the town jurisdiction over all of land-use decisions involving the ski area, bypassing county authorities.
This quite possibly made Winter Park the nation’s highest town, although Alma officials, when contacted by Mountain Town News, said they didn’t really know how high their town went up the slopes of adjacent mountains. In Winter Park, both town and chamber officials said they had no intention of bragging about their thin air.
But that was then. In December, the Fairplay Flume revisited the issue — and found cranky officials in Alma and stealth marketing in Winter Park.
Alma Mayor Mark Dowaliby dismissed Winter Park’s claim as a “desperate ploy for attention.” Alma, he said, refused to recognize Winter Park as the higher town.
“We could always annex Mt. Bross,” he said, referring to a nearby 14,000-foot peak. “But I think it’s silly. We’re the highest town, and that’s that.”
Winter Park town officials had decided to exploit their superlative distinction, erecting signs at the town’s entrances to proclaim the title as the highest U.S. municipality.
Following up on those plans, the Colorado Springs Gazette spoke with Vince Turner, a town trustee in Winter Park, who acknowledged marketing ambitions. “People back in New York trying to book a vacation say, ‘Let’s go to the highest place. They’re bound to have the best snow,’” he said.
In Alma, meanwhile, people contacted by the Gazette were having none of it. Dean Misontoni, a saloon customer, said Winter Park’s claim was bogus, because no people lived at 12,000 feet. Most people in Winter Park live at little more than 9,000 feet.
But if Winter Park can claim an elevation of 12,100 feet, could another ski town claim even higher?
Breckenridge has the easiest opportunity. It has a base elevation of 9.600 feet, but the adjoining ski area has a maximum elevation of 12,998 feet. However, neither the town staff nor town council has discussed the idea of annexing the ski area, reports town spokesman Kim DiLallo.
Silverton doubles
SILVERTON, Colo. – With apologizes to Steamboat Springs, which long ago laid legal claim to the phrase, tiny Silverton still has a good claim to being “Ski Town USA.”
Steamboat has two ski areas, Howelson Hill and Mt. Werner, the latter home to the Steamboat Mountain Resort. But Silverton, while much smaller, also has two ski areas.
Best known is the new Silverton Mountain Ski Area, a place that has nothing but black diamonds. It has one lift, which was recycled from Mammoth Mountain.
The other, and older ski area is Kendall Mountain Recreation Area, a place of short runs and a not exactly fearsome 400 feet of vertical. Owned by the town, it formerly had a rope tow, but now has a second-hand double-chair lift. The lift, reports the Durango Herald, was originally installed in 1970 at Vermont’s Quechee Ski Area, but was purchased for $50,000 and then installed in Silverton at an additional cost of $83,000.
This lift is being welcomed by teachers in Silverton schools who do double-duty as ski instructors on Friday afternoons. Carrie Cline sees a day when local students fostered by Kendall Mountain and then Silverton Mountain will become Olympians. “How cool would it be to put a Silverton skier in the Olympics some day?”
Steamboat has had 69 Olympians, most of any town in the United States. The title “Ski Town, USA” was claimed because of not only the Olympians, but also the high school’s marching band, which performs on skis.
Silverton has no band — or basketball or track teams, for that matter. Enrolment dropped after the last mine closed in the late 1990s, and schools now have only 58 students, including kindergartners.
Immigration hashed out
CARBONDALE, Colo. – A public meeting is scheduled for Jan. 17 in Carbondale to review the Tom Brokaw television broadcast on immigration. The hour-long report focused on the parallel and intertwined stories of a building contractor and an illegal immigrant in the Carbondale-Glenwood Springs area, with lateral interviews of teachers, parents, police and others in the region.
“As is typical with most mainstream broadcast news magazines, the documentary was somewhat superficial and rather incomplete in the end,” noted Carbondale’s Valley Journey.
But there’s also value in leaving the issue without a conclusion, noted the newspaper. It optimistically suggests that “with some better understanding of the issue, perhaps we can come up with some solutions.” At least that’s what the meeting aims to do.
Gas line rupture has chilling effect
CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. – Eruption of a natural gas pipeline that services Crested Butte had people cold in early January. The line ruptured on Thursday, Jan. 4, and affected 2,200 customers, with some customers not getting natural gas again until almost three days later.
Luckily, the temperatures were above average at first, although they dipped far below zero by the second night. Homeowners who had become accustomed to the luxury of natural-gas heating resorted to wood-burning stoves, while others made a run on electric space heaters. Several restaurants were forced to close during the outage, while others made do. The town was filled with college students, who seemed to take the disruption without great complaint, town officials said.
