ISSUE #241: The Torre Story (2/13/23)

"Bad officials are elected by good citizens 

who do not vote."

-- George Jean Nathan

You know how much I love municipal election season in Aspen. In a town of 6,336 registered voters, each vote REALLY, REALLY counts!

Read my column in yesterday's Aspen Times HERE to learn about the urban myth that "the housing bloc" controls the ballot box. I looked at the numbers - and what controls the ballot box are the registered voters in free market housing who don't bother to vote! I was gobsmacked. 

(And try not to be distracted by the headline the Aspen Times gives my columns each time they don't like the ones I send in. Remember, they don't like me or my stuff, so they do what they do, and that includes some rather aggressive editing lately.)

Your mail ballot will arrive before my next column runs, so here is what I recommend:  It's time to send Mayor Torre and Councilman Skippy packing. Their records speak for themselves. They've been wrong on every issue facing this community over the past two years. 

THIS is what I wrote recently about Skippy's candidacy. Yesterday's column summarizes Torre's abysmal record. No judgment, just the facts. It's remarkable how proud they both are about what they've done to Aspen! As I wrote, "Everything they've touched has gone to hell."

Uniquely, we have three seats up for grabs in this election and three challengers. It's straightforward. It's time to put some grown-ups in the room!

The obvious choice for mayor is local businesswoman Tracy Sutton. www.TracySuttonforAspen.com

Businessman Bill Guth is perhaps the strongest city council candidate we have had in the mix in well over a decade. He has my unwavering support.  www.BillGuthforAspen.com

If you are so inclined to vote for two council candidates because you can, then use that opportunity (vs a "bullet vote" for Bill because you must vote for him) to vote for Sam Rose. www.SamRoseforAspen.com

VOTE THE INCUMBENTS OUT.

Feel free to contact me with any voting questions or issues. Ballots are due back on March 7.

* * * 

I read that Torre announced is seeking a third, final term as mayor of Aspen. After four years in office, he hopes to continue “working for Aspen on the issues that impact our community.”  Stating an unabashed pride in the accomplishments of his two terms and optimism about where he sees Aspen headed, Torre asks for support so that he can continue his “good work.”

Atop his list of good works is the hiring of city manager Sara Ott. That’s your job, Torre. In the absence of a city manager, you hire one. It’s hardly a notable accomplishment. It’s odd that he didn’t list actually reviewing this hire, probably because it went something like, “She has nice penmanship and she shares her snacks, let’s give her a raise.”

Next was moving the seat of Aspen’s government into the new 37,500 sf Taj Mahal City Hall, the same monolith for which during 2019 campaign season Torre famously promised “a review and changes to the final design and programming” of the project because “the current iterations have unclear space/program allocations” and “do not appear to address community goals.”  Once in office, however, did he think we’d forget? Torre will say whatever it takes to get elected.

He boasted about “important land use code revisions” and the regulation of “some STRs,” without mentioning the deliberate, rushed moratoria on false “emergency” pretenses, employed to concoct extreme policies that resulted in punitive restrictions for private property owners and a convoluted excise tax that punishes traditional condo-hotels as though they are nuisance rental properties.

I was astonished to learn that Torre claims council’s action resulting in the closure of not one but two long-time childcare providers at the Yellow Brick was an act of “stabilizing early childhood care.” Perhaps the 100 affected local families can comment on the “stabilization” that befell them.

And he “supported more local businesses.” How could anyone forget Torre’s unwavering support of local businesses last summer during the catastrophic Living Lab experiment? That is some support when the business community turns out to beg you not to proceed with an ill-conceived gimmick yet you move forward in spite of them.

“More funds for arts and culture” were actually approved by the electorate in 2021, not Torre,  with a reallocation of some Wheeler RETT dollars towards the arts. Since that time, there has been no formation of a public arts commission, no arts endowment and no public art show. Instead, “the arts” received only a paltry $60K for fifteen $4K grants to creatives in 2022. 

These are just his stated accomplishments. Torre is a good guy, which is often the litmus test for voters in Aspen. (I think it’s time we leave the voting for prom king to the kids at Aspen High.) We have a $155 million enterprise to run, and if 2022 is any indicator, 71 of 72 official 5-0 votes from this council have resulted in widespread community discontent. Everything they’ve touched has gone to hell.

So before we vote, let me dispel one of Aspen’s great urban myths. The widespread belief that “the housing block” controls the vote here is patently false. Looking at the 2021 election, of 6336 total registered voters, 59% (3761) were in the free market while just 41% (2575) were APCHA owners/renters. However, of the 3761 free market voters, only 31% bothered to vote! The 2605 who didn’t vote are more than the total number of votes cast in the entire election (2351). Voter apathy can obviously be very costly. 

Furthermore, who says “the housing block” isn’t similarly aligned with free market voters, especially this election cycle? 

Given the actions of Torre and this council, the subsidized housing folks are surely outraged by his touted “strategic housing plan” that focuses exclusively on building new housing projects like the Lumberyard, while ignoring and neglecting the construction defect lawsuits at Centennial and Burlingame, as well as underfunded reserves, expiring deed restrictions and widespread malfeasance throughout the APCHA portfolio.

If these good works, plus dusting off a 25-year-old plan for a “straight shot” into Aspen, the conversion of Aspen’s cherished historic Victorian homes into dense subsidized housing projects throughout town, real growth through the annexation of the Lumberyard and plans to grow our population by nearly 10% when it’s complete, and a future that ignores West End traffic because it’s merely a symptom of the larger “entrance” issue, are good for you, then stick with the status quo. Torre and his group-thinking council are really proud of what they have accomplished. 

On the other hand, if this horrific record of detrimental decisions with real life implications, made consistently in 5-0 echo chambers, disturbs or disgusts you, vote to stop the madness. This is your opportunity to weigh in on Torre’s record of “good work.” 

The municipal election is on March 7. Please register if you haven’t and check your voter registration mailing address. You’ll be receiving your ballot in the mail within the next 2 weeks. Your vote absolutely counts. Let’s put an end to this horror story.

The future of Aspen is in your hands. Contact TheRedAntEM@comcast.net

ISSUE #240: Life, Liberty and a Vacancy Tax (1/30/23)

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

-- Frédéric Bastiat

Someone asked me recently if city councilman Skippy Mesirow is serious about a residential vacancy tax in Aspen. In short, yes, among several outlandish ideas, a residential vacancy tax is at the center of his campaign platform for re-election. 

Read my column about it in yesterday's Aspen Times HERE.

Are you registered to vote on March 7? Is your mailing address correct? (It's a mail ballot election.) Go to www.PitkinVotes.com

YES - The Red Ant will indeed be weighing in. Please contact me for all election-related information!

A reader shared the following that I thought you'd enjoy:

From Money magazine in July 1973, "Congress Tackles the Income Tax."

"Most people have the same philosophy about taxes," says Senator Russell B. Long (D-LA), who has heard all the variations during seven years as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee which handles tax legislation. Long puts that universal theme to verse:

"Don't tax you,

Don't tax me,

Tax that fellow behind the tree."

Skippy would surely add a fourth line:

"In Aspen, hell, let's tax ALL THREE!"

* * * 

One of these things is most certainly not like the others. But a “vacancy tax” is effectively on Aspen’s March 7 municipal election ballot in the guise of councilman Skippy Mesirow who seeks re-election to a second term. 

For owners of private property in Aspen, the local taxman is a growing presence who lurks in every shadow. First, upon purchasing property, there’s a 1.5% real estate transfer tax (RETT), with 0.5% going to maintain and subsidize the historic Wheeler Opera House and 1% for Aspen’s beleaguered 30-plus-year-old, 3,100-unit subsidized housing program. 

Next there are annual property taxes, based on an appraisal of the monetary value of every property, whereby a tax is assessed in proportion to that value.

New, beginning in May 2023, is a rental excise tax to be paid to the city when one rents out one’s private property, ranging from 5-10% nightly on top of the 11.3% existing sales tax, depending on type of property and whether or not one lives in said residence on a full-time basis. There are additional permit fees and required business licenses, but with special deals for locals, of course.

And today, Mesirow proudly touts his vision for a vacancy tax, to be paid to the city for the days and nights one chooses not to be in residence, as if that’s anyone’s business. Apparently Skippy thinks it’s his.

Recall, those housing RETT dollars, $17.1 million in 2022, fund the program that requires its subsidized housing owners and renters to occupy their units a minimum of nine months a year, leaving 3 months to frolic about without penalty. The biennial housing affidavit only requires an online checkmark attesting to 1500 hours worked annually in Pitkin County. No one verifies this so why would they begin counting nights in residence? One could safely assume that Mesirow’s vacancy tax would not apply to subsidized housing residents, after all, they’re protected from the burden of paying the RETT too, despite directly benefitting from it.

Would Mesirow’s vacancy tax apply similarly to the free market, granting three months of vacancy, free and clear? Don’t count on it. He’s intentionally vague on the details of such red meat for the “soak the rich” crowd. The entire premise of his vacancy tax is to eliminate empty homes and punish those who deign to lock their doors and leave until the next visit to their personal residence. 

In his perverse mind, the “creation” of work in the form of property managers, housekeepers, landscapers and affiliated service providers to vacation homes is a detriment to Aspen and at the root of all our ills. Others might call this “job creation” for those who do the work that is essential and beneficial to the local economy. For a better perspective, ask a local property manager, which, ironically, Mesirow purports to be. 

It doesn’t sit well with Mesirow that “outside entities” can own property here; they “don’t have local ties.” Seriously? Isn’t this the very definition of second-homeowners or part-time residents, the very ones who pay the lion’s share of our property taxes and underwrite our non-profits yet don’t enroll kids in the schools nor encumber our social and emergency services? How, exactly, are “local ties” determined? And by whom?

Mesirow’s belief is that the punitive vacancy tax will motivate free market homeowners to open their doors and rent cheaply to “locals,” regardless of where they work, and who simply want to live in Aspen affordably. It can’t but conjure images of Yuri’s house in Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago. Yes, apparently it’s come to this.

When espousing his “development neutral model for affordable housing” campaign platform, Mesirow acknowledges the economic and environmental pitfalls of new housing construction, but he most certainly intends to commandeer your house, literally and figuratively, to meet his ambitious goals. I struggle to reconcile such heavy-handed plans with his flowery eloquence of being “a passionate advocate for community connection and empowerment,” unless this loosely translates to a Fifth Amendment “taking” with a cashmere glove.

So, to summarize, you’re taxed when you purchase your Aspen property and taxed annually on the property you own. Then you’re taxed if you rent out your property and might be taxed again if you don’t. Damned if you do. Big Brother Skippy is watching. And counting. 

For one who aspires to “heal our politics from the inside out,” Mesirow, despite his lofty vocabulary, is hard to take seriously. He lacks situational awareness, common consideration, basic knowledge of democratic principles, and respect for private property. Instead, we are presented with tactics honed during the Russian Revolution by a clueless ideologue whose envy of and vitriol toward those with “more” have manifested themselves in such a way that exacerbating and perpetuating class divides are what truly define his candidacy.

A vacancy tax is far from “healing.” It’s more like stealing.

This draconian plan is hardly in the spirit of Aspen’s Paepcke-era “mind, body and spirit” ideals. It’s no “revival,” despite Mesirow’s campaign rhetoric. It’s divisive. It’s ignorant. It’s greedy. And, like Mesirow, it’s entirely wrong for the future of Aspen, where our best days are indeed ahead of us.

Are you curious about the new “intelligent” electric and water meters installed by the city last summer? Today they are monitoring your consumption data in real time. Guess why. Contact TheRedAntEM@comcast.net

ISSUE #239: APCHA's Dirty Cop (1/16/23)

"The greater the power, the more 

dangerous the abuse."

-- Edmund Burke

Never mind The Aspen Times did not like the headline I submitted, this one was a long time coming. As APCHA gives lip service to its dreaded task of enforcing program compliance, the fact they hired Mick Ireland as "hearing officer," and deputized him with the ability to sit in judgment, as well as to evict and force sales, is indicative of how our housing program is indeed rotten to its core.

Read why Mick is uniquely unsuited for this role in yesterday's Aspen Times HERE.

* * *

In 2020, when the APCHA board realized it needed some muscle to deal with program compliance issues on its behalf, it sought to hire an official hearing officer or two. This seemed like a reasonable first step toward compliance enforcement for a program riddled with abuse that relies on tattle-tales and anonymous tips to root out the scofflaws.

So, the housing authority solicited proposals from licensed attorneys who would conduct case hearings and written opinions in accordance with the APCHA rules, preferably with experience in municipal law, public administration law or criminal justice law. Once appointed, the hearing officer would hear and decide cases, such as appeals of notices of violations, special reviews and grievances, and would have the authority to assess and enforce penalties and fines, and/or require the eviction from or the sale of deed restricted units. The powerful hearing officer’s decisions would be final, and would not require board ratification.

Two attorneys applied for the job. One began by writing, “My primary motivation to becoming a hearing officer for APCHA is my personal commitment to fairness and a desire to participate in effective dispute resolution.” The other was Mick Ireland. The board expressed concern about Ireland’s “local government involvement” over the years, yet he was still offered the role of primary hearing officer at $150/hour. The other applicant declined the opportunity to be Ireland’s back-up. Later, a secondary officer from Grand Junction was hired, specifically because he was not in any way “conflicted.” 

Ireland is a tax attorney who consults for land use applications and political campaigns. He describes himself as being “intimately involved with the analysis and response to this community’s housing problems since 1988.” He has served on the Board of County Commissioners and as mayor of Aspen where helped write the APCHA guidelines. More recently, Ireland has served the county as a hearing officer presiding over citizen tax appeals; sitting in judgment of others is clearly a role he relishes.

Despite his formidable role with APCHA, Ireland his out of compliance with his own HOA, the Common Ground Co-housing Association, a property within the APCHA portfolio. 

I’ve learned about this the same way APCHA does. Someone emailed me. The Red Ant has become a repository for grievances and whisper campaigns. While curiously intriguing on some level, as problematic as some issues might seem for a program intended to house the local workforce, according to the existing rules, most surprisingly aren’t actual infractions. 

In Ireland’s case, however, it’s a lot more clear. Michael C. Ireland, PC, his law office, is located at his Common Ground residence. Only recently upon being questioned, Ireland procured a required “home occupation permit” to accompany his business license from the city. The permit application specifically encourages applicants “to check with their homeowner’s association, if any, to ensure compliance with covenants or guidelines.”

Uh-oh. Right there in the Common Ground declarations are restrictions on use, specifically, that “each unit shall be used for residential purposes only and none shall be used for any commercial or business purpose.”  The homeowner’s association’s insurance carrier, speaking generally, confirms that no general liability policy would cover business activities there. Furthermore, no special rider policy would cover such activities if these were not allowed in the HOA declarations. Yes, he is putting his own HOA at risk.

Notified of Ireland’s questionable compliance given his deputized role to enforce such things, the APCHA team circled the wagons. Mick asserted that he has his HOA’s “permission” to run a business from home, never mind that if granted, the HOA board has exceeded its legal authority by doing so. It would take an amendment of the HOA declarations by a two-thirds vote and proper filing. APCHA’s executive director smugly pointed to Common Ground’s deed restriction that stipulates an owner “not engage in any business activity on or in such unit, other than permitted in that zone district.” Did you know “Affordable Housing” zoning allows home occupations? It does, which is a discussion for another day. No matter, though, the HOA declarations explicitly do not, and that’s what matters.

Ireland’s suspected non-compliance was dismissed by the APCHA board. They stated that if it’s allowed by the deed restriction according to underlying zoning, HOA matters are not their concern. At least when these concern the hearing officer, apparently. Yours is another story. And Mick will likely be the one to decide.

Ireland’s contract can be cancelled for any reason. It should be. He is currently named in pending litigation that challenges his objectivity and asserts bias in an APCHA compliance case.  The optics, if not the questionable legalities of his personal compliance issues with the program rules he serves to enforce are beyond problematic for an agency desperate to gain any semblance of public trust.

If APCHA ever intends to be respected, its staff and officers should be beyond reproach.

Mick Ireland is the wrong person to lord over decisions affecting anyone’s housing. Contact TheRedAntEM@comcast.net

ISSUE #238: A New Year with Hope on the Horizon (1/2/23)

"Hope is not blind optimism. It is not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it. Hope is the belief that destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by the men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be."

-- Barack Obama

The Red Ant loves municipal election season! Ours is a mail-ballot affair on March 7. Please register or check your voter registration at PitkinVotes.com

Local businesswoman Tracy Sutton has stepped up to challenge Mayor Torre, while firefighter Sam Rose and businessman Bill Guth are vying for the two council seats, one of which belongs to Skippy Mesirow that he intends to defend. Read news about the race HERE. 

The next nine weeks will be filled with campaign-related news and information. As always, you can count on The Red Ant for all the inside scoop, including endorsements in late February when ballots are mailed out! Stay tuned.

In the meantime, Happy New Year! Read my column in yesterday's Aspen Times HERE.

* * *

Ahhh, the season of New Year’s resolutions. It was 4,000 years ago when the ancient Babylonians began the tradition of celebrating the new year by crowning a new king or reaffirming their loyalty to the existing one, while promising to repay debts and return borrowed objects.

Later, in ancient Rome, emperor Julius Caesar established January 1 as the beginning of the new year. Significant for its namesake, Janus, the two-faced god who looked backward at the past and forward into the future, January was when the Romans made sacrifices and promises of good conduct.

Early Christians marked the occasion by examining one’s past deeds and committing to be better. Today, the focus is more on self-improvement, often marked by aspirational yet unrealistic goals. But hey, it’s January 1. Hope springs eternal.

A local reason for hope is a municipal election on March 7 offering one open council seat and has mayor Torre and councilman Skippy Mesirow fighting for their electoral survivals. In the spirit of Janus, there’s no time like the present to take a look back and focus on some leadership basics that desperately need to be reintroduced into the local discourse. 

It would be hard to do worse. Marked by a seemingly never-ending series of misguided foibles and decisions made in a congratulatory 5-0 echo chamber, Aspen’s incumbents’ records provide a illustrative roadmap for their challengers.

• ·      Talk less, listen more.  Pulled off course by both a newsworthy global occupation and a high profile local hotel development sale, our electeds became distracted far beyond their pay grades. For elected leaders who have never signed the front of a paycheck to rant about real estate pro formas and call for boycotts and media take-overs, it can’t but remind one of the metaphorical lesson from 1929 when stock tips given at the shoe-shine stand foretold the impending stock market crash.

Such diversions provided all the feel-good, warm fuzzies this council is known for, but they also fostered an environment where staff-driven regulatory overreach and punitive policies became the blueprint for a council that governs as though it knows better than anyone else about every issue.

• ·      Seek guidance. There is a wealth of knowledge and experience in this community. At the beginning of every council term, it is valuable to point out that council oversees two city employees: the city manager and the city attorney, and city staff reports to them. But each cycle, staff inevitably runs roughshod over city council, burying it in countless pages of meeting materials and driving its own agenda. 

Council does not work for staff. It’s time for our elected representatives to push back and question staff’s proposals, drawing from their own experiences and seeking feedback from the community, especially subject matter experts.  

• ·      Foster relationships with all constituents. Widely acknowledged bad decisions such as Summer 2022’s “living lab” on Cooper Avenue and Galena that removed 44 parking spaces and tested a nonsensical auto-bike-pedestrian maze could easily have been prevented by first meeting with local downtown businesses and taking their feedback to heart. But those relationships don’t exist. The same holds true for residents of Aspen’s West End who seek the city’s assistance in reducing dangerous traffic in their neighborhoods. 

Just who are our local government’s key constituents? With a long list of issue groups they’ve ignored, over-regulated and disenfranchised, it’s hard to know. There’s much fence-mending to be done. Consider our second homeowners. As convenient as it’s been to blame them for all of Aspen’s ills, our taxation-without-representation neighbors are savvy investors who might just be wisening up and, not unlike seasonal residents, registering to vote here to protect their interests. (Hint, hint.) 

• ·      Build trust. The easiest way to gain trust is through transparency, but a long-ingrained culture of secrecy in city hall has lived up to its reputation with the surprise moratorium on short term rental (STR) and residential development permits in 2022. In the absence of a meaningful public process, constituents were blind-sided by the foregone conclusions and resulting regulations that decimated their private property rights. 

Government regulations will never be popular, but a proper, transparent and inclusive process that courts various viewpoints and weighs data instead of feelings is a far better way to determine new policies. 

• ·      Be nice to tourists. It’s outrageous to even have to say it, but when our own chamber of commerce, partially funded by the city, surveys local residents to gauge the degree that tourists negatively impact our lives, we are long overdue for a course correction. The unwelcoming behavior, the spite and the resentment are not a good look for Aspen, and much of it stems from the punitive attitudes emanating from city hall.  

Aspen’s is a tourism-based economy, and yes, this has “impacts,” but don’t we all? Those in glass houses ought not throw stones.

No one loves campaign season as much as I do. The next nine weeks will provide illuminating contrasts between decisions of the recent past and future leadership potential. Here’s to much-needed change in the new year. 

Check your registration or register to vote at www.PitkinVotes.com  Ballots will be mailed around February 17. Contact TheRedAntEM@comcast.net

ISSUE #237: Don't Shoot The Messenger (12/19/22)

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks."

-- William Shakespeare, Hamlet

They've been after me lately with some of the most vitriolic and the most nonsensical Letters to the Editor yet. Apparently, they think they can intimidate me to make me stop writing. LOL. Right.

No one is fooled. Instead of ignoring the issues and hoping I'll quiet down, it's time to face them - with solutions! 

I can't be the only one out there with a bunch of straightforward ideas!?

Read my column in yesterday's Aspen Times HERE.

I've been writing The Red Ant in one form or another since 2008. Back in the day, during the holidays I summarized the political year in a poem. 

The last stanza was always the same:

At The Red Ant

The fun never ends.

Christmas blessings to you,

Your family and friends.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Elizabeth

* * * 

I’ve struck a nerve. Good. Now we can get to work. The issue is no longer whether or not APCHA is broken, it’s how to fix it.

And what a shame. What was in no uncertain terms the gold standard of subsidized housing programs, certainly in the mountain west, has become a glaring example of what not to do.  But fix it we must, just like the airport and the Castle Creek bridge. Doing nothing is no longer an option.

The program’s original intentions were pure, and for quite some time, they served the community well. But APCHA has lost its way. This is not because of its residents. It’s APCHA’s failed policies that have enabled rational actors to operate fully within the rules to utilize our subsidized housing inventory in ways no one ever contemplated at the program’s inception. I’ll say it again, it’s not the people who are wrong, it’s what the program allows, beginning with something as straightforward as eligibility: working “1500 hours per calendar year in Pitkin County and/or for a Pitkin County employer.” That little “and/or” is the remote work enabler, and it’s there in black and white. Then there’s the biennial affidavit, detailed about employer and salary for renters, but an online checkbox attesting only to the 1500 hour work requirement for owners. 

It’s time to look critically at over 40 years of experience combined with the near build-out within our urban growth boundary and ask ourselves, are we really going to try to build our way out of our worker shortage without specific housing data to direct us? We annexed land for Burlingame and the Lumberyard for massive housing developments, and we’ve recently altered our land use code to allow subsidized multi-family housing complexes to be built anywhere in town. This may seem like the answer, but it’s fraught with unintended consequences, one of which is unabated growth.

Meanwhile, I’m told the word “audit” terrifies people. That’s not the intent, but it does make me wonder what people are so afraid of. An audit is simply a count, with data queries on job, employer and income bracket to inform future policy decisions. It is vital to know which sectors of our community are under-represented in our housing program in order to react responsibly. It’s staggering how strong the resistance is to this knowledge. The palpable fear of program oversight signals that there is either a lot more malfeasance than originally thought or widespread acceptance of APCHA’s overly-lenient policies. All the more reason to look into it. How about we use the word “census” from now on? In any case, we still desperately need one.

To be clear, any changes that I suggest are on a “moving forward” basis, which means they wouldn’t apply to anyone in APCHA today. Current residents would be grandfathered in. Yes, this implies effectively running two different systems as one gets up and running while the other winds down, which may take a generation, but no one is suggesting that anyone in compliance lose their housing. It’s just that the status quo cannot continue and we all know it.

So stop the fear-mongering, especially about retirees. The 2012 AACP stated, “We need a focus on the issues surrounding retirement in affordable housing, as we are on the brink of a rising retiree demographic.” At the time, there were 310 retirees in deed-restricted housing, and the expectation was for more than 800 by 2021. Despite a half-assed affidavit system and the $1.4 million Hometrek system that yields sketchy data that toggles between units and residents, a November 2021 report to council showed over 268 units owned by those 70-plus and another 998 owned by those 50-69. You can do the math. The “Silver Tsunami” is coming, yet no retirement strategy has been discussed since 2012.

It’s time for ideas. I met recently with the president of the APCHA board and gave him four actionable ideas that could be tested the very next day. These were straightforward, easily-implemented experiments that would inform potential policy changes. They were just ideas, but by trying them, we’d learn how the market might react. At the very least, we’d free up units. And each one dealt with utilizing the housing we already have.

My favorite is a limited buy-out test for interested retirees. We hear about people who are anxious to move but have found out the hard way after years of deed-restricted ownership that the sale of their APCHA unit doesn’t give them much buying power elsewhere. Let’s offer them a carrot. If a new APCHA unit costs the community $1.2 million to build, how about a $100,000 bonus to the first 12 retirees who opt to sell? Everyone wins: 12 retirees get an incentive, 12 qualified employees get housing, and the community frees up 12 units for the cost of building one. Maybe it’s scalable. It’s certainly no-growth.

That’s just one idea. I have several. And while it’s really easy to criticize people who are willing to share their ideas, that never solves anything. If you don’t like mine, what are yours?

The key to our worker shortage is the efficient utilization of our existing subsidized housing inventory. I won’t quit. Contact TheRedAntEM@comcast.net

ISSUE #236: What Are They Hiding? (12/6/22)

"It's frightening that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence."

-- George Orwell

ASPEN TIMES COLUMN

Apologies for the delay in getting this one out, but personal travel delays and a subsequent powder day shifted the priorities a wee bit.

I'm never going to rest until we have an independent audit of APCHA. The more I learn, the more appalling the details become.

Read my column in Sunday's Aspen Times HERE.

And while I'm at it, HERE is a great recent letter to the editor. I couldn't agree more. With a municipal election (mayor and two council seats) set for March 7, voices like this are what we should all be listening to.

I encourage anyone reading here to check your voter registration and, where possible, register to vote in Aspen. If you're new or if you're seasonal, you can bet seasonal workers will be signing up. You should too! Talk about a place where your vote REALLY counts!

***

Everyone is talking about subsidized housing. Everyone except the city and APCHA. Despite it being a city council priority, they refuse to discuss it. It’s just build more, anywhere, at any cost. And APCHA, despite the well-intended community volunteers who serve on its board, is stuck in the mud following a detrimental 2019 decision that placed elected officials from both council and the BOCC in leadership, resulting in an entrenched bureaucratic embrace of the status quo and the perpetuation of proven poor policies and zero transparency.

A cursory glance at the local papers each morning tells a very different story. The usual suspects are speaking out, but more importantly, new voices are weighing in. A particular nugget captured the root of the problem: APCHA’s original sin was allowing units to be sold versus rented. Another cautioned that any sort of program audit was on par with Big Brother and the surveillance state, and neighbors snitching on neighbors is not a good look for Aspen.

I’m not alone in my obsession. Columnist Roger Marolt supports building more subsidized housing because we need a higher ratio of people living here on subsidy in order to replenish the community with “true locals.” And Mick Ireland, godparent of Aspen’s subsidized housing, regularly defends housing’s precarious state of affairs in order to perpetuate “Aspen, land of the free: free spirits, free buses, free nordic trails, free concerts, free lectures” for people “who don’t want to spend a lot of money.” 

A colleague shared an analogy comparing Aspen’s subsidized housing quandry to making a pot of soup with three main ingredients: workforce housing, employee housing and community housing. Workforce housing is housing for workers, both the essential ones (healthcare, education, law enforcement) as well as those in the tourism-related industry (retail, recreation, lodging, restaurants). Employee housing is more discretionary; it is local employer-owned housing for proprietary employees. And then there is community housing for everyone else: non-locally working workers, retirees and other non-workers. So, when the community wants more soup, just add more of everything, right? 

Definitely not. Last week, APCHA confirmed that within the city limits, we have 4072 bedrooms in our subsidized housing portfolio. This number does not include employer-owned units, such as those owned by the schools. Using a very conservative multiplier of 1.25 people per bedroom to account for couples and families, that’s enough bedrooms for 5090 people. With a city population of 7241, that’s room for 70% of our local population in APCHA subsidized housing. So, a question for Roger and Mick, how many more people above 5090 do we need to house until you’re satisfied? We are already housing two times the total population of Telluride, yet somehow our sense of community and number of “true locals” are supposedly extinct.

Meanwhile, as the voices grow louder, the solutions become increasingly clear. Today, we’re operating on anecdotal evidence and assumptions to support our opinions. As you’re well aware, I believe the program lacks sufficient seasonal rental housing for the community and resort service industry workforce. I base my opinion on the well-documented shortage of service industry workers who sustain our tourism-based economy. But without scientific data, I could very well be wrong. I can admit that.

What we need is an independent audit of APCHA. We need to know who we’re housing. We need to know what work they do in our community. And until we change the structure of APCHA, as long as we rely on income levels to distribute our inventory, we need to know people’s income brackets.  It’s the only way to honestly identify which segments of our economy are being provided for at the expense of others. Besides, the habitation of a subsidized APCHA unit is based on contributing to a community purpose. Providing such information is not punishment, it’s a condition. The days of APCHA providing the same conditions as the free market but at a subsidized rate must end if the program is to survive.

An independent audit will clarify our housing needs and highlight our inefficiencies with facts, not feelings. And we’ll be rid of the debunked “EPS regional housing study” the city relies on simply because it concluded we need an additional 3000 units in the upper valley which supports their narrative. (A quick call to the EPS principal to gain an understanding of the research for its findings yielded the critical tell, “There was no formula.” And the young associate who wrote the report? “He is no longer with the firm.”) Incidentally, this study serves as basis for The Lumberyard planning.

In short, we need:

• ·      An APCHA audit
• ·      Employer participation in the APCHA ownership lottery
• ·      A revised APCHA employment affidavit
• ·      A needs study not based on consumer demand

A housing audit is not unlike the city’s “Treeplotter Inventory” that tracks all 11,502 trees within the city limits via GIS mapping and lists them by species, right down to Kentucky Coffeetrees (3), Siberian Elms (12) and Crabapples (384). Tamper with any one of these and it’s big trouble for you! Why should our multi-billion dollar taxpayer subsidized housing inventory operate any differently?

The willful ignorance about who we are actually housing in no way helps those we should be. An audit is the answer. Contact TheRedAntEM@comcast.net

ISSUE #235: Punishing Tourists Won't Save Aspen (11/22/22)

"Don't mistake my kindness for weakness. I'll choke you with the same hand I fed you with."

-- Anonymous

There is no doubt in my mind that Aspen is facing some real issues, but somehow, lashing out at tourism doesn't strike me as the best way to go about saving our town.

I also believe that our ongoing labor shortage is a direct result of our inability and unwillingness to provide housing for our workforce despite having over 4000 APCHA bedrooms in the city alone. (We have plenty of housing - we have simply chosen not to manage it efficiently nor require that it be utilized by people who work in our community and resort service industries.)

My column in Sunday's Aspen Times (read it HERE) revisits Aspen Daily News columnist and lifelong local Roger Marolt's recent screed. For this grandson of early Aspenites and ski pioneers, and the son and nephew of winter Olympians whose accomplishments and lives' works, like those of his brothers', contributed greatly to the growth of the ski industry, to profess such disdain for the visitors to Aspen who make it all possible for the rest of us, really galled me.

This thinking is all wrong. And dangerous. Yet it is frighteningly prevalent.

***

My former colleague Roger Marolt recently penned an op-ed in support of ballot measure 2A, “the STR tax.” Marolt is surely feeling his oats today because the Aspen electorate overwhelmingly approved the measure. In his eyes, this special excise tax on renters of private residential property is what is needed to save our town. 

According to Marolt, this 5% - 10% addition to Aspen’s 11.3% nightly sales tax rate will not only bolster our subsidized housing coffers, it will send a message to our visitors “that they create immediate negative impacts on our town while they are here that need to be mitigated.” It’s not visitors who stay in hotels who do this, just the ones who stay in condominiums, apparently, including those that were built and have functioned as traditional tourist accommodations for the past 50 years.  He posits that “visitors to Aspen could have the most positive impact by not vacationing here at all.”

Now remember, Marolt is from Aspen. He has never lived anywhere else. Therefore, his limited worldview and frame of reference are exceedingly narrow. He is obsessed with nostalgia and wants nothing more than for Aspen to return to what it was half a century ago. Lamenting that Aspen has become a resort and is no longer what he considers “a town,” Marolt believes that to make Aspen a “real town” again, we need to “get rid of second homeowners.” 

He also believes “a real town has more than half its residential units occupied by people who work in town.”  But he neglects to identify just what kind of “work” qualifies.  I assume he means people who live in subsidized housing. He probably thinks all those folks actually “work in town.” (They don’t.)

Marolt is clearly confused. He has wrongly placed blame for the negative impacts of recent growth squarely on our visitors. I get it, he doesn’t like that our roads are clogged with workers who drive in every day and is frustrated by what he hears about businesses desperate for employees. But he wrongly assumes the Highway 82 road warriors are coming solely to service tourists and second homeowners. He ignores the fact that the more full-time residents we subsidize, the more nurses and doctors and teachers and police and waiters and bartenders we need on a 24/7/365 basis. The system is stressed. I can’t argue there. But we also can’t ignore the dramatic impacts of massive growth of our full-time population, including in the subsidized housing ranks, which are far greater than seasonal tourism. In short, the problem is us. 

2A passed. But despite its projected revenue stream, we have zero plans to house actual workers. Instead, we’re building subsidized two- and three-bedroom units, to be filled with full-time families who will place even more demand for services on the community and resort workforce without participating in either. Everyone knows, once in the APCHA system, it’s time to “work remote” for a better paycheck and the purchasing power for that second home in Moab or Palm Springs or France to rent out as an income-producing STR. (How ironic.)

So, as we lambaste and heavily tax a critical segment of our tourism economy ostensibly to return Aspen to the locals, will this actually save us? Hardly. We have become so distracted by our labor shortage that we’ve justified a punitive money-grab to build more housing for the wrong people. And somehow, we try to convince ourselves that this growth isn’t growth at all. Only visitors and tourists cause that.

Whether we are a town or a resort is not what we should be focused on.  (Can’t we be both?) Nor should we be intentionally crippling our economic engine. 

The fact is, demand for subsidized housing in Aspen is essentially unlimited, as is demand for any valuable good provided at a price far lower than its free market equivalent. We should acknowledge that our economy relies on tourism, and embrace it. Then focus on what that economy needs - workers – not what the end users of subsidized housing want. In a free market system, we are programmed to prioritize demand from the consumer perspective, but our housing program is not the free market so the consumer demand approach is all wrong. We have been focused entirely on households desiring subsidized housing, not services requiring workers. This is precisely why we are not housing enough of them.

We have a labor shortage, not a housing one. Instead of trying to house the workers we actually need, we are housing people who simply want to live in Aspen affordably. They are not the same. And all growth is growth, the impacts of which are bad for everyone. Acknowledging this is what will really save our town.

Then we can focus on our actual customers: the visitors who make it all possible.

Marolt is clearly angry and frustrated, but his ire is misdirected. It’s time to get our priorities straight. The last time Aspen was only a town and not a resort, it was the 1930s, and it was a ghost town.  Careful what you wish for.

Someone please tell Roger and the other anti-tourist malcontents to check their privilege and change their attitudes. Contact TheRedAntEM@comcast.net

ISSUE #234: Housing at ANY cost, even history? (11/6/22)

"A respectfully restored historic structure or site honors the history and culture of our town, whereas a demolished one erases a piece of the Aspen story forever."

-- The AACP, Aspen Area Community Plan, ca. 2012

There is no end to how far the city is willing to go to achieve its publicly subsidized housing goals. Next on the block is the bastardization of 205 W. Main Street. The plan is to allow developers to move the prominent corner Victorian to the side to accommodate nearly 8,000 sf of subsidized housing to be built behind and to the side of it (see rendering below). Standing in the way is Aspen's historical preservation commission (HPC). Their guidelines are clear and the proposal does not meet several of them. But with city council and staff strongly advocating for an approval, will HPC capitulate? I rarely ask you to get this involved, but I can't live with myself if I don't. Please read my column in today's Aspen Times HERE and follow up with a letter to HPC, to be included in their November 16 meeting packet. HERE is an email link. Facts are critical. Please note "205 W. Main Street" on the subject line and be sure to remind them that: The proposed project's density and scale are in no way proportional to the Victorian, as required by the historic preservation guidelines The proposed project does not meet the required open space standards on the site, as required by the historic preservation guidelines The Victorian makes a notable contribution to Aspen's historic character, which prevents it from being moved, as stipulated in the historic preservation guidelines The project is all wrong and antithetical to Aspen's historic preservation values The recent trend of marginalizing historic properties by building/adding enormous subsidized housing complexes must stop Any other thoughts about the inappropriateness of this proposal and others like it It is not HPC's role to assist developers in diminishing our historic buildings; they are the appointed stewards of Aspen's history. Please show HPC your support for prioritizing our history over anything else. (Let our elected city council make any and all tragic decisions that stand to destroy our historic resources.) Here's what they have in mind. If it can happen at the corner of Main Street and First, think where else they'll be doing it. Please speak up about this detrimental trend.