ISSUE #32: What Ketchum Council Could Be Doing For Ketchum Locals Instead of Ruining Ketchum

What would you add to this list?

What The Troika Wants for Ketchum

If you are a student of Ketchum’s City Council (c’mon and join me—it’s fun!), you cannot help but notice that its agendas (controlled by the Mayor) are focused on property development for the tourism industry. I have come to the conclusion that the goal of The Troika (Bradshaw/Breen/Hamilton) is to replace what locals remain with a combination of the poor workers imported to work for the tourism industry and the ultra-rich to pay the taxes for the corporate welfare to house the working poor in Bluebirds. I describe how they do that in Issue #30.

For fun, let’s do a little thought experiment about what the Ketchum City Council could do for the people it is supposed to represent that might make things better for them.¹ I know, I know--it will never happen.² But indulge me.

Fix the Governance Process

The first thing they could do is to fix the governance process of how the Council operates. In theory, the Council is supposed to achieve the community goals as laid out in the Comprehensive Plan. In a well-run city, each agenda item in a council meeting would be tied to the Comp Plan. So would the budget process. Every council meeting would address some aspect of the Comp Plan and provide the community with an update on the progress the City is making in achieving our goals. I know, this NEVER happens in Ketchum, but in the business world, this is a standard process.

As guest author Liz Corker wrote in ISSUE #30, Ketchum could become a far more inclusive community with the adoption of a Citizen Assembly approach to city governance.

While we are at it, it would be nice for the meetings to start with the Pledge of Allegiance to remind the council members of what government is all about, and have time for the public to raise non-agenda items like is done in normal towns.

Fix City Planning

After years of a disastrous City Planning department under Mayor Bradshaw, we have a ray of hope in the current City Planner. She is a professional.

That being said, the City is not employing the tools it should be using. We need a planning model for Ketchum that enables us to analyze the impact of development decisions. For example, if we build out all lots as currently zoned, what does that mean for how many people, how many first responders we need, traffic, etc. etc. We have no idea.

What is the carrying capacity of Ketchum as a tourism city? We have constraints on how many people can get here—there is only a two lane highway and a small airport connecting us with civilization. We approve more and more tourism development without assessing the impact on the infrastructure. The City makes huge decisions with no analysis of their impact.

The right way to do this is to start with a Comprehensive Plan that is the strategic plan for the community, then tie that to an operating model that to see what we will look like in 10 years, and then do various scenario plans around that and tie them to a financial model. This is how real organizations are run.

Why don’t we run Ketchum according to best practices? The Mayor was a Wall Street analyst. He ran Global Utilities research for JP Morgan. He knows how to do this. Yet he does not.

My read is that the Mayor has zero interest in the people of Ketchum understanding his locals replacement plan. How else do you explain it?

Fix the Zoning/Building Codes

The good news is that this is on their list. The bad news is that The Troika will control it. Some things that need to be addressed:

Get rid of the in-lieu fee. Our code requires developers to incorprate community housing into their projects. That is a good thing. But it lets them buy their way out of the obligation by paying an in lieu fee. That is a bad thing. The fee is a number that is literally made up. But having it at all is what enables The Troike to hand over City resources to for profit developers to build Bluebirds. Axe it.

Fix the FAR. The floor area ratio determines how big a building you can build relative to the size of a lot. If ours permits four story lot line to lot line boxes, then it obviously needs revision.

Return to a fourth story minimum setback. The four story box is enabled by The Troika’s removal of the minimum set back for a fourth story. That was good for their developer friends but is a transfer of scarce community character that benefits us all into the hands of a few.

Fix the five foot allowance for mechanicals. You know you can go above the roof line limit if it is for mechanicals? Guess what, every box has mechanicals that go above the roof line. This rule encourages flat roofs that are now our predominant “vernacular.”

Fix the Budget

Just as the Council should use a process to hold itself accountable to the Comp Plan as its strategic plan, the budget should similarly linked to community priorities. I wrote a post about all the things we could do to make Ketchum’s budgeting process more like how a business responsible to its stakeholders would do it.

Fix the City’s Multiple “Plans”

The Troika has adopted many plans for Ketchum Don’t you find it interesting that once they are adopted you never hear about them again?

Except for the Housing Action Plan. That’s the plan that says that anyone who wants to live in Ketchum is entitled to live in Ketchum, and if they can’t afford to, Ketchum will provide them with subsidized housing. You have to read this plan. It says people who commute more than 45 minutes are “unhoused” and people who choose not to work are part of the “workforce.” It calls for 1/3 of Ketchum residents to live in low-income housing.

We have scarce land, money and community character. Perhaps we should prioritize our resources for the teachers, first responders and health care workers we need to function? The Hailey police chief made a compelling argument for this at the Far + Wise benefit.

Have you read the Master Transportation Plan? Did you know it exists? The Troika adopted it and then did… nothing It predicts intersection failures from the increased traffic they are creating. There is nothing in it to get people out of cars and onto the bus. No one is accountable for anything. It is a joke.

How about the Sustainability Plan? The Parking Plan? Has the Troika ever graded themselves on what they have achieved in the Comprehensive Plan?

Of course not. They just ignore it. They don’t want to be accountable.

Fix the Roads & Sidewalks

Given what the Mayor has done with his Main Street project and how over-budget he went on Sun Valley Rd, you may think I am crazy to say fix the roads. As Mr. Cordovano pointed out, the math is a bit daunting!³

The point here is that Ketchum has no real capital budget. They are creating a capital reserve for the first time, which is a good step, but that’s not capital budgeting. Capital budgeting involves tracking depreciation of your asset base and setting aside the money to maintain it. Ketchum doesn’t even have a process to budget for maintenance of capital assets it builds (like a Fire House, or Water Treatment Facility). This leaves us in the position of reacting to infrastructure failures.

The Ketchum Urban Renewal Agency (KURA) is supposed to fix the roads and sidewalks in the commercial district. Ha! The vast majority of its budget (your tax dollars at work) it being spend on The Troika’s “locals removal program.” It it were me, I would dissolve KURA. It is an unaccountable group used to further bad governance.

Fix the Parking Problem

Despite the 1,400+ petition signatures complaining about parking, the Troika doesn’t agree that there is a parking problem. They are fixated on their false narrative that the NIMBYs want parking rather than people. Which, for some people could be true. But we really don’t need to make such a choice.

With the Main Street and Washington Lot projects, the City is permanently destroying over $10mm of public parking assets (using the City’s estimate of a surface spot value of $100k).

The City’s Parking Plan is a joke. I dissect in in Issue #3. It is a discussion piece that lays out some options, which the Council has not taken up. The current plan of The Troika is to increase demand for parking while permanently eliminating the supply of parking, and pushing parking out from the commercial core into the residential areas next to the core.

Key point: you can’t have a Parking Plan without doing the City Planning to forecast supply and demand for parking. Until the City gets its planning process fixed, we are going to have a parking crisis.

Fix the LOT

I am for the LOT. The Local Option Tax is supposed to give us a way to tax tourists to offset the costs of hosting them. And it does. The bulk of it goes to pay for our first responders, the largest budget items we have. However, the Bradshaw administration has perverted the LOT beyond what Boise intended.

We should repeal LOT for Air. It might have been needed at one point, but it isn’t any longer. Have you compared SUN fares to BOI? Same planes, 2x the fares, and BOI doesn’t pay the airlines. We don’t need to either. And did you know that more than half of the LOT for Air doesn’t go to Air? It goes to Visit Sun Valley to promote tourism. And guess who gets to allocate this tax money? Un-elected people.

Most importantly, we should stop using the LOT to tax locals. The City does not report on how much of the LOT revenue comes from LOCALs, but my back of the envelope is that it is at least 20% and could be as much as 30%. This is supposed to be a “tourist tax.” Let’s raise the lodging tax and eliminate the sales tax. We can do it to be revenue neutral.

Instead, the Council is proposing just raising the lodging tax. They LOVE raising taxes!

Fix the Corporate Welfare Scam

I know some people thing I have gone a overboard on singling out of Sun Valley Co. as a recipient of the public’s largesse. But I don’t think so.

I know the WRV is on the map because Averill Harriman built his ski resort here, and that without it Ketchum would look more like Loman. That being said, we seem to perpetuate a system that used to be more symbiotic and that now seems, at least to me, more exploitative than it should be.

The LOT tax is a direct subsidy for Sun Valley Co. They even get to decide how to spend it given their permanent, unelected seats on FSVA and VSV.

The Ketchum taxpayer money to “community housing” is also a subsidy to Sun Valley Co. Sun Valley Co has a page on its employee website telling their employees how to apply for subsidized housing. They have multiple underpaid employees lining up for Bluebird. Why are we paying to house people for Sun Valley Co? Why don’t the people of the City of Sun Valley contribute even a single dollar to this kind of thing? Because their council is a lot smarter than ours.

Sun Valley Co is bringing the World Cup here in March. That is exciting. But why are they asking Ketchum taxpayer to pick up some of the tab for it?

Sun Valley Co has a master plan to grow its guest capacity by over 75%. That means its employee base will need to grow by over 75%. Their master plan has no plan for housing them. City of Sun Valley has a de minimus requirement for SVC employee housing — they know Ketchum will end up paying for it. They are well aware that the City of Ketchum housing department has a master plan for more Bluebirds to help Sun Valley Co keep its wages depressed.

Fix the Police

Ketchum does not have a police force. We outsource our policing to the Blaine County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO). I don’t think any of our police force lives in Ketchum. As far as I can tell, there has never been any evaluation of whether bringing back the KPD might be an improvement in both service and cost. It might not be, but wouldn’t a responsible Mayor at least examine this periodically? Personally, I would love for the City to prioritize housing for first responders so that we can be policed by people who live in our community. I think it might be cheaper, too.

Fix the Non-Enforcement Approach

The City doesn’t enforce short term rental registration requirement. According to its own data there are hundreds of unregistered short-term rentals. They wouldn’t want to upset the tourist industry investors, would they? I say that because in one Council meeting the Mayor referred to the importance of not upsetting them. What about upsetting the locals? Doesn’t seem that important to him.

While they are at it, they could enforce the deed restrictions on income restricted units like those in the Scott Building which have been notoriously abused, or in Northwood Place.

Fix the Sustainability Sham

Every year, Ketchum taxpayers spends over $100k on staffing a sustainability effort. Yet, Ketchum is becoming demonstrably less sustainable.

Ketchum has had a Sustainability Action Committee since 2020, let by a member of The Troika (Hamilton—she is a professional sustainabilist). They issued one report a couple of years ago. Do they still meet? If so, why do they meet in secret? What have they accomplished? Why are there no progress updates to the Council? What is the City’s Sustainability Plan?

Ketchum taxpayers are the majority funders of the Blaine County Sustainability Commission and have been for years. BCSC just issued a strategic plan. I dissect that plan in ISSUE #32. Not only will it not make the WRV more sustainable, it guarantees that our greenhouse gas footprint will increase. The plan is, to my analysis, greenwashing.

Even our Dark Skies have become a joke. Sun Valley Co uses pictures of Ketchum lit up at night in its marketing materials. It is very pretty. And not dark. Our Dark Skies Ordinance is easily gamed. It is just about exterior light fixtures. The promotional materials for the Marriott on the PEG website advertised its floor to ceiling windows lit up at night. There is a building at Thunder Springs that is lit up like a lighthouse all night.

A better approach would be about light emissions. Some cities have adopted that approach, but not Ketchum. Which makes me think that our Dark Skies approach is just more greenwashing for tourism.

If we aren’t going to take the actions necessary to make Ketchum and the WRV more sustainable, we should save the money and get rid of some bureaucracy. And the hypocrisy.

Fix the Housing Conflict of Interest

As a resident Ketchum taxpayer, you probably think that your money to subsidize housing is going to house people who work in Ketchum. Some of it is. But an increasing amount is not. Some of it goes to house people who have never lived or worked in Ketchum… in housing outside of Ketchum. Yup.

How can that happen? Your elected representatives (The Troika) approved it. The adopted the Housing Action Plan, that says that anyone who wants to live in Ketchum has a right to live in Ketchum, and if they can’t afford it or simply don’t want to work full time, the Ketchum taxpayers will provide them subsidized housing—for life. I know it sounds absurd. Read the plan and tell me where I am wrong.

To compound the farce, and to send your money outside of Ketchum, The Troika approved the takeover of the Blaine County Housing Authority (BCHA) by the Ketchum Housing Department. The staff you pay to run the Housing Department for Ketchum also runs the housing program for the entire County. This is an irreconcilable conflict of interest that has led to bad governance, bad accounting, and sending your money out of Ketchum in ways you probably have no idea about. Let’s give BCHA back to the County. Keith Perry, as chair of BCHA, can you fix this?

Fix the Post Office

I saved this one for last. The Ketchum City Council has been an epic fail on this issue. Amanda Breen first ran for election on this topic as been as effective on this as she has been on the rest of this list. The solution is for the City of Ketchum to sue the US Postal Service to get us either free mail boxes or home delivery, per postal service regulations.

While they are at it (in my utopian world where the Council represents the citizenry), the Mayor might ask Amazon to resume residential delivery via UPS/FedEx. It would reduce the burden on our over-worked and dedicated postal workers.

WHAT WOULD YOU ADD TO THIS LIST?

None of this is getting done. Because none of it helps close the gap in Ketchum real estate prices with the prices in Aspen and replace the local middle class with wage-depressed people dependent on public housing.

With six years of the Bradshaw administration, expecting Ketchum to work in favor of its residents defies our experience. I have come to the conclusion that the only way to change the path of Ketchum is for a recall of the City Council. I would recall the entire council and start with a clean slate. It is the same time and effort to recall them all as it would be to do just the Mayor.

To get this done will require a leader, a committee and some money. Any volunteers?

1. SS—I wrote this after you emailed me about not applying my intellect to actionable ideas to improve the community. LMK know what you think—are these ideas actionable? Clearly, they have not be actioned by The Troika in their 6.5 years of control.

2. Well, at least not under the current regime.

3. It’s $7mm to fix Main Street from River to 6th. That is less than a mile. The City has over 40 miles of roads it is supposed to maintain. Do that math.