But without Vail showing us their numbers, we can’t prove it,” Moschetta said. There are more lines, more cars, more crowding everywhere on and off the mountain. “We all can look and see with our own eyes that things look different and feel different. Moschetta said locals cannot believe the operator when it reports a 12% increase in annual visitation but that peak days have not set records at its ski areas. (Sales for next season are pacing 9% ahead of last year.) Watch for how Vail Resorts balances its bragging to investors - Billions in cash! Most passes ever sold! Record revenues! - with its conversations in local communities, where relationships are growing more antagonistic. This will be the narrative for the company moving forward as it sells even more season passes. Now the company will need to repair relationships with locals who feel like they are living in the company’s Epic Pass parking lots. The company has admitted some missteps with its employees in recent seasons and a $175 million pay increase announced earlier this year is meant to repair that connection. That growing disconnect between resort operators and local communities is widespread, but especially for Vail Resorts. “In Park City and in too many other communities, Vail Resorts has benefited from completely unchecked growth.” “What this comes down to is managing growth,” Moschetta said. The Park City protest of Vail Resorts’ lift expansion plans was an opportunity for community members to get involved in how the company is growing, said Angela Moschetta, who is among the Park City residents who formally appealed the planning staff approval of the lift upgrades. A petition at the company’s Stevens Pass ski area in Washington last year ballooned with more than 44,000 signatures by skiers urging the operator to open more terrain. The company spent years battling with unionized Park City patrollers over pay and benefits. Park City locals in 2016 forced Vail Resorts to abandon its plan to trademark “Park City.” Which has happened before but not to this scale. Vail Resorts’ issues have spilled from crowding at under-staffed resorts into conflicts with communities where it operates. As Jason Blevins writes in The Colorado Sun : Both shutdowns seem driven by passion over reason, spite over cooperation. I don’t believe that the town of Vail suddenly cares about bighorn sheep anymore than I believe the town of Park City suddenly cares about chairlifts. In both cases, the reasoning sounds, and is, absurd. It is also unlikely that the East Vail employee housing project will be complete by 2023. Vail has conceded that it will not be able to complete the Park City lifts by this coming ski season, as planned (the company had fortunately not begun demolition of the existing Eagle and Silverlode lifts, though Eaglet was removed last year). Perhaps the Great Rocky Mountain Sheep Defenders are concerned that the new employee housing development would block the animals’ view of that natural marvel of an interstate.Īnyway, here we are. The town sponsored this video, in which they extoll the virtues of the four dozen or so local bighorn sheep that they have spent decades pushing up the mountainside to make way for rampant mansion development: In a 4-3 vote, the town council authorized themselves to seize the 23-acre parcel – of which Vail planned to develop just six acres – so that they could become the Great Rocky Mountain Sheep Defenders. Last month, the Town of Vail backtracked on a pre-approved agreement that would have allowed the company to build a 165-unit affordable employee housing project on land that Vail Resorts owned. The planning commission also cited the need for a more thorough review of the resort’s comfortable carrying capacity calculations and parking mitigation plan, finding PCM’s proposed paid parking plan at the Mountain Village insufficient.Īnd so, for the second time in two months, locals shut down millions in investment at a Vail Resorts flagship. The upgrades were appealed on the basis that the proposed eight-place and six-place chairs were not consistent with the 1998 development agreement that governs the resort. The Park City Planning Commission granted an appeal of a previous decision to approve two Park City Mountain (PCM) lift upgrades in a 3-1 vote on Wednesday night, effectively blocking the projects until 2023. Almost anywhere else, two lift replacements – with a total of two additional seats – may have mattered.
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