Where is Ketchum's commercial core? That's the multi-million-dollar question the city must answer before any hotels have a chance of being built.
Last week, the city unveiled a "massing study" of three potential hotel sites at the corner of Main Street and River Street. The study produced a rough idea of the visual impact of three new hotels there.
City planners are calling the area Ketchum's Gateway, the welcoming scene for everyone who drives into Ketchum. It's being described as an area that must be treated with great sensitivity when it comes to traffic and visual impacts.
The whole "gateway" concept is utterly inexplicable. Here's why:
In the mid 1970s, people said Ketchum's Gateway was the Reinheimer Ranch, the open fields and old barn on the highway south of town that were donated to the Idaho Parks Foundation. Then, people were overjoyed that the magnificent gift, with its views of the mountains to the north, would protect the gateway for future generations.
Later, the Weyyakin project south of the Reinheimer Ranch was proposed. The public insisted that the development be set back from the highway and that the pastures be preserved as part of the gateway to Ketchum.
Later yet, when the city of Sun Valley went on an annexation spree, officials insisted that the gateway to both cities was at the Elkhorn stoplight.
So, where does the gateway stop and the city begin? Ketchum needs to answer this question soon, or its downtown could become the victim of a kind of rampant gateway creep that could leave the town a hollow husk of something that once was and might have been.
