Vail struggles with monument

VAIL – Maybe the third time will be the charm at Vail’s Bridge Street, where town officials have struggled for nearly a decade with what to put into the middle of Seibert Circle, the plaza named after resort founder Pete Seibert.

The debate goes back to 1997, when Seibert was still alive. Some thought he needed to be acknowledged with a statue. Others demurred, and so the town enlisted Jesus Morales, a well-known sculptor, to create stoneworks that metaphorically represented the landscape of the Gore Creek Valley.

Nobody was particularly enamored with the result, least of all pedestrians. So, despite the $700,000 spent on the sculpture, the town several years ago stored the rocks and installed innocuous landscaping. This too, pedestrians have ignored. And then yet another idea, an obelisk with some water fountains, was shot down.

Now, if business owners along Bridge Street succeed in raising $122,000, the town will spend altogether $672,000 for yet another vision: water in a fountain that jumps and cascades, intermixed by cloud-bursts of fire. The idea was conceived by the same company that created the fountain at the Bellagio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

In an interview with theVail Daily, one of Vail’s best-known figures, hotelier Sheika Gramshammer, herself once a dancer in Las Vegas, poo-pooed the idea. “We are not an Olympic village,” said Gramshammer, a native of Austria but 40-plus year resident of Vail. “We are getting too pompous. Everything has to be big and expensive. Why not keep it simple.”

Mountain biking booms in Whistler

WHISTLER, B.C. – Responding to lagging business, Whistler knocked down its prices, using the code-word “value.” And the market really responded this summer.

Tourism Whistler reports that room nights are projected to be up 13 percent from last year. The record for room nights was set in 2002, before the increasing strength of the Canadian dollar began making Whistler vacations more expensive. But even against that record year, Whistler expects to gain by 9 percent.

Mountain biking is partly responsible for this surge. The International Mountain Bicycling Association held a major conference here in June, and the Whistler Mountain Bike Park again showed an increase of 10 percent, continuing a streak of double-digit growth that began in 1999. Finally, the Crankworx freeride mountain bike festival produced 24,000 people per day.

As well, two new excursion trains from Vancouver began delivering customers to Whistler this summer, and the conference center was far busier than the year before. Golf numbers were also up.

Coming off several slower and even disastrous winters, Tourism Whistler projects a better winter this year, if still 11 percent less than the resort’s benchmark season recorded during 2001-02.

Resorts towns continue to prosper

ASPEN – Several years ago U.S. President George W. Bush said American citizens should not have to sacrifice because the country is at war. Indeed, the economy has roared in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

In Steamboat Springs, for example, sales tax collections declined in 2002 and rose by less than 1 percent in 2003. Since then, reportsThe Steamboat Pilot, it’s been all gravy, with increases of 7 and 8 percent and, during the first half of this year, 12.5 percent.

In Aspen, even as the national real estate market cooled, the surge in prices has been breathtaking. The average price of a single-family home has risen from roughly $3 million to $4.5 million in the past two years alone.

This has produced a vast amount of real-estate transfer tax receipts, some $11 million probably this year alone, reportsThe Aspen Times. Altogether, the real estate tax collections have doubled in the past three years.

But Paul Menter, the finance director in Aspen, says the town expects the market will cool. “We don’t expect it to continue at its current level over the long term,” he said. The local real estate market tends to move in spurts, and the most recent spurt has lasted longer than any of the previous ones, he noted.

Menter also explained that while the national real estate market generally reflects the national economy, Aspen’s market is more closely tied to the investment market.

Growth off chart in Garfield County

GLENWOOD SPRINGS – Growth projections for Garfield County continue to provide a stunning view of population growth along the I-70 corridor during the next quarter century.

Garfield County includes Carbondale, Glenwood Springs and Rifle – all considered “down-valley” bedroom communities for Aspen and also for Vail. Now at 50,000, the county’s population is projected to reach 139,000 by the year 2030, according to a study by BBC Research and Consulting. That projection assumes no expansion of oil shale production. If that does occur, numbers are likely to rocket even more.

Because of geographic constraints, the Glenwood Springs area is projected to no more than double in population, to 22,000. Far larger growth is projected for the Rifle area. The town itself had about 8,000 people last year. With adjoining areas, the population is expected to hit 44,000.

Growth patterns are reflected in schools. Enrollment in the Basalt-Carbondale-Glenwood schools is projected to increase from 5,100 students to 8,100. Schools serving the Rifle-Silt-New Castle area are projected to jump from 4,100 students to 17,000 students.

Telluride links food and carbon

TELLURIDE – While there is a great deal of vague talk in mountain resorts of “sustainability,” in fact virtually none are remotely sustainable. From the tourists who arrive by jet planes to the big logs hauled hundreds of miles to create the “natural” look in homes, life depends on using vast amounts of fossil fuels.

Somewhat overlooked in this energy equation is the amount of fossil fuels used to deliver food, something noted by the Telluride Ecology Commission. The blame cannot be simply assigned to the coal-fired power plants or gas-guzzling vehicles, points out Colin Hubbard, who sits on the Ecology Commission.

“We’re a really long way from our food,” said Kris Holstrom, a local organic grower, who noted that the average meal travels more than 1,500 miles.

Agribusiness consumes 10 calories of fossil fuels to create one calorie of food energy, Holstrom said. Industrially manufactured meat, which depends upon growing corn and other grains to feed cattle, has a ratio of 16 to 1.

I-70 corridor sprouts new big box

GYPSUM – A Costco is now open in Gypsum, located between Vail and Glenwood Springs. With that new store, seven big boxes of at least 100,000 square feet can be found along the rapidly urbanizing I-70 corridor.

Drawing customers from Aspen to Breckenridge to Steamboat Springs, the 155,000-square-foot store is a tax bonanza for Gypsum, a one-time blue-collar precinct that is also about to get its first gated community. Gypsum expects $3 million to $4 million annually from Costco, allowing the town to pay for its new recreation center twice as fast as was originally projected.

In the neighboring town of Eagle, there’s less to like. Because of a revenue-sharing agreement, the town will get about 10 percent of revenues, but at least half the traffic impacts. With that in mind, some locals found poetic justice in the fact that independently scheduled work on a new traffic roundabout delayed some travelers intent on getting to the store’s grand-opening.

Ski area discounts avalanche threat

CRESTED BUTTE – Crested Butte Mountain Resort continues to want to expand its resort to a new mountain, called Snodgrass, in order to get more intermediate-level ski terrain. A report on the geology of the expansion area has now been issued, and it finds nothing that sinks expansion hopes.

The report does say that the natural instability of the slopes could be stressed by the addition of more snow, such as is created by snowmaking, triggering more landslides. But John Norton, the project consultant for the resort, believes the problem is something less than an Achilles’ heel.

“With the exception of Purgatory, at Durango, there is not a ski resort in Colorado that is not built on slide terrain,” he told theCrested Butte News.

– compiled by Allen Best