ISSUE #21: KURA Hears from Its Constituency

Ketchum's Business Community is pretty upset with them

PSA: Sign Up for ARCH’s Fundraiser on July 24th!

Last week, I wrote about the extraordinary work being done for actual workforce housing by a local non-profit, the Wood River Community Housing Trust.

This week, I want to mention another local non-profit that creates permanently affordable workforce housing for essential workers in the Wood River Valley—Advocates for Real Community Housing (ARCH). I will write up their approach the week after next, but I wanted to highlight that they are community-supported and are hosting their annual fundraiser on July 24th. You can check out their website at the red link or mail Shelley at shelly@archbc.org for more information.

When Your Constituency Asks You to “Tap the Brakes," What Do You Do?

The June 24th Ketchum Urban Renewal Agency (KURA) meeting was packed.

The purpose of the meeting was for KURA’s executive director to get KURA approval to hold a public workshop for public input on the design of the workforce housing building KURA plans to build on the Washington parking lot.

But that wasn’t why the record crowd for a KURA meeting showed up.

They were there to ask KURA to “tap the brakes” on the Washington Project.

The road work on Main Street has galvanized Ketchum’s business community. They now realize what the City’s plan to permanently eliminate 102 parking spaces in the retail core will mean for their businesses—disaster.

The newly formed Ketchum Business Advisory Board delivered a petition with over 1,000 signatures asking KURA to pause this project until the City finishes the new Comprehensive Plan, including a parking plan. In Issue #3, I addressed how the City’s current Parking Plan is no plan at all.

Commercial Core Parking is EXTREMELY Valuable

One of KURA's failures (and the City of Ketchum's, for that matter) is that it doesn’t do any cost/benefit analysis. For example, neither KURA nor the City has analyzed what the loss of 102 parking spots will mean for local businesses, LOT revenues, or the value of that parking.

We know that parking in the commercial core is extremely valuable. We know this because the City of Ketchum staff and the KURA staff have repeatedly told us that it is so valuable that they don’t have enough money to pay for it.

During the Bluebird deliberations, the lack of parking for that project was a major topic of discussion. The developer, GMD, said that building the parking a project like that would use would just cost too much. The City Administrator said parking in the Ketchum core is worth about $70,000 per spot. During the Washington Lot deliberations, one presentation cited a cost of underground parking at $120,000. When KURA and the City eliminate 102 parking spots, they are destroying a public asset between $7 million and $12 million. They do not factor that into their decisions.

I suggested to the City (in a letter to the IME and as a public comment to the Council) that before taking such drastic action, they do a dry run— block off the parking spaces for a couple of weeks and see the results. The City declined to act on that suggestion. But the Main Street project has highlighted how crippling it is to local businesses to lose parking near their stores. And these are just a few spots in the Main Street Project. Add on the permanent elimination of 65 more with KURA’s Washington Project, and the impact on local businesses is devastating.

The Cost to Residents of the Washington Project is Roughly $20MM (or more)

No one at KURA has done the math on what the Washington Project will cost the people of Ketchum. Destroying 65 parking spots is $8 million of parking that will eventually need to be replaced. KURA has committed $8 million of cash to the development. The land itself is worth on the order of $4 million. The building will be exempt from property taxes for the life of its lease—that is at least a $500,000 loss to the City. In sum, KURA is committing over $20 million of current Ketchum resident assets — the largest single expenditure of Ketchum assets in its history.

One community member suggested that an expenditure of this magnitude, with its likely impact, is worthy of a referendum. A referendum makes good sense given how out of touch KURA and the controlling Troika of Bradshaw/Breen/Hamilton of the City Council are with the community.

Whose Interests Is KURA Representing if Not the Business Community?

KURA is supposed to exist to “renew” the blighted commercial core of Ketchum. Instead, the Mayor has hijacked it to advance his agenda of building five four-story lot-line-to-lot-line apartment complexes with insufficient parking. While Ketchum does need workforce housing, replacing parking in the commercial core with apartment complexes is not the way to “renew” a downtown. It is how to destroy the vibrancy of the community's commercial hub.

Neither KURA nor the City proactively solicits sufficient input from the people whose decisions they will impact. The fact that the KBAC has 1,000 signatures opposed to what KURA is doing is stark evidence that KURA is out of step with the business community it is supposed to be supporting.

Several commenters at the meeting expressed frustration that one of the biggest proponents of the Washington Project on KURA, Gary Lipton, doesn’t live in Ketchum. It is abysmal governance to have non-residents decide how resident resources get allocated, but poor governance is a feature, not a bug, of the Bradshaw administration (look out for next week’s post on the budgeting “process.”)

The Mayor controls appointments to KURA. He appointed Mr. Lipton and his Troika compatriots Breen and Hamilton.

Housing vs Parking is a FALSE Choice—We Can Have BOTH

The tragedy of the Washington Project is that it is the right project in the wrong location, and there is no compelling need to put it in the commercial core.

You can build housing outside of the commercial core. You cannot create commercial core parking outside of the commercial core. This is an obvious truism. It is a head-scratcher for why KURA doesn’t see it.

As I wrote in last week’s issue, the developer of this project, the Wood River Community Housing Trust, is a local non-profit building the workforce housing that the Wood River Valley needs—that is good! But it can only build where it gets free land, and the City has manouevered the supposedly independent KURA to give free land to the WRCHT. While the business community would very much like to see more workforce housing, they are united that KURA’s Washington Project hurts them, it doesn’t help them.

As I have repeatedly written about and commented in public meetings, we can have both parking and workforce housing. By my calculation, the City owns four acres of land that would be more suitable locations for workforce housing. That land could accommodate more units and provide them with sufficient parking while not squandering our money, our land, and our community character.

Furthermore, the City is sitting on a valuable and under-monetized commercial site in the core that should be sold. The proceeds could be used to acquire less costly land in a better location for housing. Plus, at the Lift Tower Lodge site, the City owns a piece of land valued at $7mm that could also be sold to purchase a much larger property in a much better location.

Additionally, if the City scrapped the arbitrary “in lieu of housing” fee, it could generate many more units of housing distributed more broadly through the community rather than in massive low-income housing projects. And they would come more quickly.

None of this is in the City’s Housing Action Plan. None of this is discussed at City Council meetings.

Will KURA Do the Right Thing? 🤞

Will KURA fulfill its mission of supporting the business community in the commercial core? Or will it let itself be used to further Troika's anti-local agenda?

While I hope for the best, I am prepared for the worst. The Mayor has salted KURA with his representatives. The majority of its staff is accountable to the Mayor. The Executive Director is the person who delivered Bluebird for the Troika and its for-profit, out-of-state developer.

The Mayor has stacked the cards against the Ketchum Business Advisory Council. But I still hope KURA sees the light and does the right thing.

If they don’t, the irony will be that Ketchum will need an Urban Renewal Agency to repair the damage to its commercial core caused by the Ketchum Urban Renewal Agency.

Let’s tap the brakes on the Washington Project.