Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Mountain Town News


By ALLEN BEST - MTN TOWN NEWS SERVICE
Express Staff Writer

Aspen picks up pace on affordable housing

ASPEN, Colo. -- Aspen seems to be as serious as a heart attack about ensuring more local housing for workers.

Developers of commercial properties are required to provide housing for 60 percent of their workers. But the City Council is now thinking of stiffening the requirement to 100 percent, and applying it to both commercial and residential development. The Aspen-Pitkin County Housing Authority has been charged with investigating the ramifications.

The Aspen Times also reports that the council is looking at building up to 400 affordable housing units on its own during the next several years. Except at Burlingame Ranch, where 116 units are possible at a cost of $50 million, the other potential units are scattered about the city. Those sites present a host of challenges, and the total bill is likely to be several hundred million dollars, says the newspaper.

Getting all this done may require a new bond measure, to be presented to voters in November 2008, as well as reauthorization of the real-estate transfer tax and a housing/daycare sales tax.

Evidence of the council's commitment is also found in the decision to recruit somebody to push the projects to fruition. Because of the various skills required of such a position, the town expects to pay up to $100,000 a year.

School enrollments down again in Tahoe-Truckee

LAKE TAHOE, Calif. -- Student enrollment is down for the eighth time in nine years in the Tahoe Truckee Unified School District. Altogether, the district has lost 15 percent of its enrollment since 1999.

The story told by the Community Collaborative of Tahoe Truckee is a familiar one: higher costs of living are causing families with children to leave the area. This is despite a housing market where the median price has dropped $100,000 in the last year. The overall population continues to grow.

Much the same story was told in school districts in resort areas of the Rocky Mountains in recent years. However, during the last two years enrollments have begun to grow again. The Aspen Times, echoing reports from Jackson Hole to Crested Butte, this week reports increased enrollment once again in schools there.

Telluride blocks offices, and Breckenridge considers it

TELLURIDE, Colo. -- Telluride's town government has signed to become the latest ski town to draw a line on real estate and other offices in the town's retail core. Some 20 percent of the town's main street, called Colorado Avenue, is currently occupied by real estate and other offices.

The stated goal of this zoning is to "increase vibrancy of downtown core businesses." Town officials expect to revisit the issue within the next year.

The Summit Daily News says that Breckenridge, where real estate offices now occupy 20 percent of Main Street locations, is also considering such a restriction. Breckenridge's town council also passed an ordinance restricting residential development on its main street.

Many other resort towns have also adopted such zoning, starting with Vail in 1973 and followed in recent years by Aspen and, most recently, Crested Butte and Park City.

U.S. skiers still white & male, but now older

ASPEN, Colo. -- The news out of the National Ski Areas Association is that not much has changed, and that's both good and bad for ski areas.

That's good is that baby boomers continue to ski. The average age last season was 36.6 years, compared to 33.2 years a decade ago.

Customers aged 55 and older doubled over the last decade, while those aged 45 to 54—the younger baby boomers—increased by 5.5 percent.

Some 61 percent of skiers are male, and all customers tend toward greater affluence than the general population. An overwhelming majority of skiers, 86 to 89 percent, are white.

Frontier hopes to expedite review of new turboprops

DENVER, Colo. -- The expectation last year was that Denver-based low-cost air carrier Frontier Airlines was going to have its new 70-passenger Q400 turboprop planes flying to Rocky Mountains ski towns by this coming winter.

By mid-summer, however, it was clear this would not happen at most locations. A key problem is that Frontier has been unable to get certification from the Federal Aviation Administration to use the propeller-driven Bombardier Q400s.

In hopes of expediting the review, Frontier has asked for a face-to-face meeting with FAA officials, reports the Rocky Mountain News.

Among the ski towns that had most eagerly anticipated the new plan were Aspen, but also Vail/Eagle Valley, Steamboat and Jackson Hole.

Skullduggery hypothesized in case of mysterious meat

FRASER, Colo. -- It sounds like a novel one-upmanship. Police in Fraser were summoned to an apartment complex, where barbecued chicken and ground meat had been left atop a locking bear-proof trash container. The owners said they thought the meat had been left there to attract bears, in retaliation against them. Just what advantage the allegedly aggrieved party hoped to get by drawing bears to the cans wasn't clear, but the Sky-Hi News reports that the individual vehemently denied it. He did, however, observe that the bears seemed to have great fun tossing the bear-proof containers around.




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