First in a series of profiles on candidates for Ketchum City Council.
Larry Helzel
Age: 59
Experience: Investment manager, no government positions held.
Why running: "I've got those skills which will complement the skills of the three incumbents. I have the time to do it. My wife and I love living here, and this is the best way I can serve the community."
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Larry Helzel has a vision for his role on the Ketchum City Council, and that vision is to fill the shoes of departing Councilman Steve Shafran who brought a new kind of corporate financial vision to the city.
"I think Mayor Randy Hall and the existing council have done a really good job over the last 14 or 15 months," said Helzel, 59. "With the retirement of Steve Shafran in particular, there is a gaping hole in their skill set. These are really good people, but they need a financial person. They need a person with investment and financing experience outside the walls of this valley.
"Everything Ketchum faces is finance dependent," he said. "I'm the only one running who has that background."
Not in this order, Helzel outlined five primary platform planks:
- Build workforce housing by bringing full-time residents back to town.
- Execute the downtown master plan to make a more inviting and workable city center.
- Get serious about business development and new business formation.
- Revive tourism by attracting hotels.
- Expand Ketchum's entertainment, arts and educational offerings.
Helzel and his wife, Rebekah, moved to Ketchum in 2001. Rebekah Helzel became active in the affordable housing arena and founded Advocates for Real Community Housing. Larry Helzel maintained involvement in his investment businesses, as well as serving on the board of the Sun Valley Center for the Arts and as past co-president of the Wood River Jewish Community.
Larry Helzel said he and his wife are "motivated by our love of this community" and stressed that his wife's advocacy of affordable workforce housing in the Wood River Valley does not create a conflict of interest for his candidacy. ARCH has never asked Ketchum for money and, further, is moving away from its original advocacy role to one of creating housing.
"The city needs to play a multifaceted and more direct role in bringing affordable workforce housing to town," Helzel said. "Over the past two years Ketchum has relied solely upon inclusionary zoning so that developers could create deed-restricted ownership units for qualified workers. While this approach addresses a portion of future affordable workforce housing needs as a function of overall growth and development, it does nothing to address the large existing housing deficit that accumulated over the past 20 years."
Helzel said Ketchum needs to explore solutions on a variety of fronts because they aren't universal.
He said housing should be built on city-owned land, and the possibility for rental units should be studied more intently. Rentals would compliment the current drive for deed-restricted ownership units.
"Not every qualified family desires to be a homeowner," he said. "We must also provide attractive rental solutions."
Helzel said the city has identified the correct tasks.
"But there's a difference between identifying the tasks and executing them," he said. "My business experience is all about getting projects done."
Helzel said he supports the new layers of government and government advocacy in an urban renewal agency and non-profit community development corporation, and he stressed that implementation of the visions outlined in the city's downtown master plan depend on URA funding.
"This will obviously be the biggest piece of financing that Ketchum has ever tried," he said. "You have all of these issues, whether it's the downtown master plan or trying to create housing on city-owned property, and they're all heavily financing dependent."
In the arena of business development, Helzel said the Sun Valley-Ketchum Chamber & Visitors Bureau has a business development committee "that hasn't been all that useful." He said it would make sense for the city to continue to contract with the chamber for the purpose of marketing while contracting eventually with the CDC for business development.
"Why not have another functional body that takes this role" of business development, Helzel said. "The CDC is supposed to represent the best and the brightest of our concerned citizenry, and I think it's the right place to start."
The hotel discussion is one for which Helzel said the city had dropped the ball to a degree, and that is because it has not offered prospective hotel developers enough clear guidelines.
"The problem is, the ugliest thing in town right now is to look at the two new for-sale signs on either side of River Street, one on the Gateway property and one on the Bald Mountain property" where plans for two separate hotels were recently scrapped. "If we go though this another year ... this is just a tragedy. I'm not convinced the city has done the best possible job in this respect.
"Part of it is that we haven't fully defined what it is we want and why we want it, and we haven't had the sensitivity to understand what the financing issues are for hotels these days."
He said building hotels is not as simple as compiling equity, walking down the street and asking for $70 million. Rather, he said it's extremely complex.
"We haven't been proactive. In other words, we have been reactive to proposals that have come in the door. If you really want to accomplish something for the community benefit you have to be proactive."
For expanding arts, education and entertainment in Ketchum, Helzel said, again, that the CDC is the correct interface, but added that "this should be a priority of the city government."
"Our non-profits do a fabulous job. (Without them) the richness of life here would be gone. We would just be a ski town," Helzel said. "The city government has been content to just let this be. I think there should be a linkage here in terms of organizing things so there could be a full-year schedule."
Helzel coined himself a fiscal conservative and "risk-averse." However, he said the opportunities that face Ketchum, combined with the "dismal state of affairs of two years ago" when the current administration took over, there were some budgetary risks that were necessary.
"I think they had to take the risk of jump starting some of these projects," he said. "The money in terms of (consultant Tom Hudson), whether it was too much or too little, I think the result, which was the formation of the URA and the CDC—these are fantastic accomplishments, and they were well worth the cost."
