Is it in, or is it out of the tourist business? If it's not in the tourist business, what business is it in?
These are the primary questions facing the city of Ketchum.
Last week, city leaders gave an icy reception to developers with a proposal for a five-story hotel on Main Street.
On one hand, Ketchum says it recognizes the area needs hotel development.
On the other, it looks to be making hotel development financially impossible by heaping housing requirements on top of severe height limitations and hamstringing hotel financing by limiting the number of condo/hotel units that may be owned by others.
Hotels are a good deal for the local economy. They allow visitors to come, stay, spend and leave—without contributing to suburban sprawl like second homes.
How acute is the need for new hotels? A few statistics tell the tale.
Since June 2003, the Sun Valley area has lost 320 hotel rooms, or 25 percent of its total hotel capacity, says the Sun Valley-Ketchum Chamber & Visitors Bureau.
Here's the list of lost rooms: Elkhorn Hotel, 202; Heidelberg Motel, 30; Christiania Motor Inn, 37; Idaho Country Inn, 18; Ketchum Korral, 17; Ski View Lodge, 8; River Street Inn, 8.
This list should be recited at the beginning of every meeting in which Ketchum considers hotel development proposals. It unequivocally shows the damage that the engine that drives the local economy has sustained.
Instead of the 954 hotel and motel rooms it should have today, the area has just 634. When 716 condo units are added in, Ketchum has 1,350 total rentable hotel and condo units available.
That's a small fraction of what the competition offers. In Colorado, Vail/Beaver Creek has a total of 4,594 hotel and short-term rental units. Aspen/Snowmass has 4,058; Steamboat 3,502; Park City, Utah, 4,459; and Jackson, Wyo., 4,571.
While the Wood River Valley business community is working hard to bring visitors to the valley, with $400,000 pledged in an up-front effort to get Frontier Airlines to fly here from its Denver hub, Ketchum seems to swim in quicksand every time it confronts a hotel proposal.
Ketchum will never see a perfect hotel. To wait for one is a formula for failure. Ketchum needs to embrace "good enough" and then get out of the way.
Otherwise, all its plans to decorate Fourth Street and to make downtown a nicer place will be for naught.
Sun Valley and Ketchum don't have to become Vail or Aspen to be competitive in the resort marketplace. But at the very least, they must be themselves, not less of themselves.
