Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Environmental report card zings Sun Valley with ‘F’

Scoring system greatly penalizes developing resorts


By TREVON MILLIARD
Express Staff Writer

Sun Valley Resort ranked next to last out of 82 Western ski resorts in terms of efforts to curb its environmental impact.

The ranking was revealed in the 2010-11 Ski Area Environmental Report Card annually assembled by the Ski Area Citizens' Coalition, a nonprofit group consisting of 24 Western conservation groups. The coalition said it judges each resort by mailing surveys to each and filing information requests with government agencies—often the U.S. Forest Service—to ascertain ski areas' policies and plans. All the documents are posted alongside resorts' scorecards. The coalition largely relied on Sun Valley Resort's 2005 master plan to grade it, establishing the resort's final score of 48.3 percent after combining individual category scores for habitat protection, protecting watersheds, addressing global climate change, and environmental practices and policies.

These four categories aren't weighted equally. The greatest scoring power is given to habitat protection, meaning not developing any undisturbed lands. The best score possible is 230 points, and habitat protection constitutes 104 of those points, making it worth about half the possible points even though it's only one out of four categories. For that reason, resorts like Sun Valley are greatly penalized for developing undisturbed areas. Sun Valley lost 54 points just for habitat protection, bringing down its score far more than any other scoring category. The reason for the markdown was that Sun Valley recently cleared forests for a gondola, and is planning new trails and development.

Resort spokesman Jack Sibbach said he hasn't seen the scorecard yet, but the resort has historically been judged primarily on its master plan, being penalized for development plans.

The coalition asserts that "development of undisturbed forest lands is the single most damaging impact a ski area can undertake." The coalition focuses entirely on Western resorts because 97 percent of those resorts, including Sun Valley's Bald Mountain, are on public lands administered by the Forest Service.

The coalition claims that terrain expansions are largely unneeded because the number of skiers has nationally increased less than 2 percent since the 1978/79 ski season, which is less than one-tenth of 1 percent per year. However, the resulting stiff competition in attracting this limited number of skiers has caused resorts to expand terrain in an attempt to stand out.

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Michael Berry, president of the National Ski Areas Association, said the coalition's scoring method and penalization for any resort in its "expansion phase" doesn't tell the entire story of a resort's environmental conscience.

"Clearly, they're nostalgic for a simpler time," Berry said, adding that the weighting should be reorganized to give more balance to environmental issues in general: energy consumption, recycling and so forth.

Sun Valley Resort has recently embarked on several energy-efficient initiatives, according to a report that the National Ski Areas Association publishes annually called Sustainable Slopes. The association, whose 325 member resorts constitute 90 percent of skier visits nationwide, started the Sustainable Slopes program a decade ago—in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Forest Service and other government agencies—to guide resorts on how to lessen their environmental impacts. It's a voluntary program in which the resorts are encouraged to annually submit a report detailing their earth-friendly efforts.

Berry said Sustainable Slopes doesn't exert "pressure" to adopt its practices but is merely "educational." About 190 resorts endorse the program but only 61 completed the 2010 survey, representing 18 percent of its member resorts. Sun Valley Resort was one of the responders. The report said Sun Valley's most observable change over the past year has been its emphasis on recycling. The resort collected 300 tons of recyclable waste, representing 27 percent of its total generated waste for the year. Snowmaking guns are being replaced with more energy-efficient models and a 17,000-square-foot storage facility has been retrofitted with new lights, cutting the building's lighting energy consumption by half. Water fixtures, such as showerheads, faucets and toilets, are being replaced with low-flow devices.

"The Holdings [Sun Valley Resort's owners] are great stewards of the land," Sibbach said in a phone interview, adding that they are also creating jobs.

Trevon Milliard: tmilliard@mtexpress.com

10 highest scores

Squaw Valley, Calif.

Park City, Utah

Alpine Meadows, Calif.

Aspen Mountain, Colo.

Aspen Highlands, Colo.

Buttermilk Mountain, Colo.

Deer Valley, Utah

Jackson Hole, Wyo.

Sundance, Utah

Bogus Basin, Idaho

10 lowest scores

Breckenridge, Colo.

Sun Valley, Idaho

Arizona Snowbowl

Taos, N.M.

White Pass, Wash.

Copper Mountain, Colo.

Brundage Mountain, Idaho

Solitude, Utah

Las Vegas Ski & Snowboard, Nev.

Brian Head, Utah




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