ISSUE #36: Ketchum Council Adopts Blaine County Bicycle And Pedestrian Master Plan

And: The Kids Are Alright

The Kids are Alright

I wrote about the Ketchum Council’s failure to achieve the Comprehensive Plan goal to attract families. While that is certainly true, childcare in Ketchum has been saved! Local non-profit leader Spur Foundation rose to the challenge and raised the money necessary to continue child care in partnership with the pre-school operation at the Church of the Big Wood. This is a win for the community. Hat tip to Spur!

More Ketchum Plans That Aren’t Really Plans—Not Even “Guidelines”

I love it when Ketchum adopts a “plan.” Plans are so hopeful! Plans are going to make our lives better! Plans will be inclusive of community impact to get us on the right track! There will be accountability!

But then I read them, and I despair.

Tick the Box and Forget About It

Most of our City plans, like the one I review below, have devolved into tick-the-box exercises. I have worked in both the non-profit and for-profit worlds and have helped draft dozens of strategic plans. What my kids would call IRL planning and what passes for planning in Blaine County and its cities have very little in common.¹

The Ketchum City Council adopted the Blaine County Community Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan Update 2024 during its Sept 3rd meeting. Did the Council members bother to read it? They didn’t comment on anything specific in it. No one in Ketchum is accountable for achieving this plan’s goals. The City Administrator said Ketchum doesn’t have to do anything about it. Despite that the City dedicated the time of a City Planner to two years of meetings to come up with this, it is an example of a tick-the-box exercise.

Did I mention the BCCBPMP was finalized in February 2024? It did not make a Council agenda for seven months. Clearly, this is an important plan!²

I also learned in the council meeting that there is a Ketchum Bicycle Advisory Group. They haven’t developed a specific plan for e-bikes.

If You Can’t Achieve 80% of Plan After a Decade, What is The Point?

The plan itself is, in my reading, a joke.³ The County picked up a bad habit from Ketchum. Rather than doing the work to develop a current plan relevant to the community, they⁴ took a plan from 2014 and “updated” it. This is precisely what Ketchum is doing with its Comprehensive Plan.⁵

The Plan takes a bunch of projects that someone came up with ten years ago and ranks them based on seven criteria to prioritize them. I am a big fan of using criteria to prioritize projects. This is a rarity in any of Ketchum’s plans. But the devil is in the details. What are the projects? What are the criteria? Who decides them?

I don’t know who devised the projects. A working group of staff across various WRV political entities developed the criteria. What little community input there is is stale and narrow. In a county of 25,000 people, how many people had input into this plan? 300 people (in 2014) and 89 (in 2022)—the wheels of bureaucracy grind very, very slowly. No attempt was made to do a representative sampling.

What was the number one priority of the working group in the update after two years of meetings? Adding Social Equity as a criterion for project evaluation. It was arbitrarily given 1.9 out of the 20 criteria weighting points. How do they achieve social equity in this plan? I spent a day reading this plan, and I have no clue.

They added another criterion to the plan, the First/Last Mile. It was also given a weighting of 1.9. In this, they prioritized projects that minimize the user's time to access them. They scored projects that connect to public transport with the highest possible rating and the lowest possible score if purely recreational. The goal here is to prioritize bike/walk work commuting and to get people out of cars.

They retained the rest of the criteria from the 2014 Plan:

Safety Impacts (4.5) Projects that increase the safety of users most or address current identified safety issues were given the highest rating of 5. Almost all identified projects address some aspect of safety.

Connecting Missing Links (4.4) This criterion addresses connectivity for non-vehicular travel in the county-wide transportation system: for example, isolated trail segments or street sections without sidewalks. Projects were given the highest rating of 5 if they connected important destinations that were highly valued by the community, according to the 2014 online survey.

Community Desire (3.5) Community Desire measures the importance of potential projects to individual community members. Participants in the public survey were asked to rank projects on a scale from 1 to 5. These scores were averaged and multiplied by a coefficient accounting for the variation in number of responses for each project.

Economic Impacts (1.9) Most projects have some economic impact, but those that have more direct economic impact with respect to tourism or local business were given higher ratings.

Health Impacts (1.9) Projects that directly address the recommended high priority areas from the 2014 Health Impact Assessment were given the highest rating of 5. This includes projects in the Hailey area due to the high overall youth population and high number of SNAP recipients, senior citizen-friendly designs in West Ketchum/Sun Valley, and connections with economic centers in Bellevue/Carey.

I noticed that Community Desire is just one of seven criteria. This may explain why they made so little effort to include the community in this plan. They know what is good for us, whether we want it or not. This is a common feature of WRV municipal plans.⁶ Each criterion was weighted, using weights they used ten years ago (arbitrarily making up weights for the two new criteria).⁷

Then, each project was evaluated for its difficulty in terms of complexity and cost. This is a step toward a cost/benefit analysis that I applaud, as it is rare in what I see come out of the City of Ketchum.

Based on this analysis, the projects were prioritized for action.

They spent two pages of the report on the input they got from the 89 community members, plus another 300 people in focus groups. I think there was a lot of Hailey representation, as the overwhelming community desire in 2014 was improvements on Broadford Rd.⁸

But then we find out whose input they really took into account. “Government and Resort.”⁹ I know people think I am a conspiracy theorist when I point out how much influence Sun Valley Co. has on how our tax money is spent, but here is another piece of evidence to bolster my case.

The chart above is very interesting. It is a rare example of reporting on whether a plan’s goals have been achieved. In theory, we could use a lot more of this.

But isn’t it ..damning? Of 17 projects, two were deemed “unfeasible.” Of the remaining 15, only four have been completed. In a decade. [pause to scratch head]. Hmm. The rest are “in progress.” What degree of progress? 1%? 80%?

The chart is accompanied by a statement: “As planning and implementation activities continue, many of these projects should be revisited from a maintenance or relevancy standpoint.” And who is going to do that? Isn’t that the job of the people who are responsible for the plan? Who would that be?

But here is the chart that is even more damning.

These are the projects identified in 2014 that weren’t even started. The 2014 plan had 32 projects. Two axed as unfeasible. Five out of 32 were completed. Something is broken in our planning process.

What do you do when you haven’t finished 80% of your projects from 10 years ago? You add more projects to the list. The working group added 14 more. At least this go ‘round Bellevue finally gets a little love:

I am convinced that the 2022 projects will be accomplished with exactly the same alacrity as the 2014 projects.

How Do Things Get Done Around Here? Ask Your Mayor

The way things get done in Blaine County at a practical level is that any project (not just one of the ones in this plan) has to be sponsored by a Mayor. Mayors control the City Council Agendas. If something is not on the agenda, it won’t get done. Guess where the Ketchum Mayor placed this plan in the September 3rd Council Meeting—buried in the consent agenda.

What could he have done instead? The same thing he does with only one of Ketchum’s many plans—the Housing Action Plan. About once a month, the Housing Director gives a progress update to the Council and asks for direction. While I think the Housing Action Plan is garbage,¹⁰ regularly updating the Council is a way to track progress toward goals. In the 6+ years of the Bradshaw regime, I can’t recall the Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan ever getting a hearing.¹¹

Why Is This Important?

According to Wordcounter.net, this post took you nine minutes to read.¹² I apologize. Your time is valuable, and you will never get those minutes back.¹³ So why did I write this?

To highlight just how bad our local governance is. It doesn’t have to be this bad. It’s some combination of laziness, incompetence, self-interest, and mendacity.

I would say “elections matter” and “we get the government we deserve,” and those things are true. But unless some competent people step up to take a turn in office, this kind of crap is what we have to look forward to from our elected officials. Do I blame the Mayor? Of course. He is a highly intelligent, highly educated person with tremendous professional experience. So, he probably knows how to do the job correctly, and he chooses not to.

No one should be elected mayor because they want to be mayor. They should be elected mayor because they will run a good governance process. With over six years of bad process, it’s no wonder so few residents are happy with the City’s outcomes.

1. For example, an IRL plan would have accountability baked into it.

2. Tick. The. Box.

3. You know what tipped me off—no discussion of e-bikes. NONE. There weren’t e-bikes in 2014, But there are a lot in 2024. Not a single mention. Ok, there was one on page 41 where they recommend installing e-bike charging stations in Festival Meadow.🤮

4. Who are “they?” Good question. This plan took 24 people plus 2 consultants to generate. You can find the list on page 5. It is an eclectic crew. One of them runs a faith-based organization. Some work at unidentified non-profits, including the Wood River Land Trust, and the Wood River Trails Coalition.

Mountain Rides got three seats. I find that funny because Mountain Rides hasn’t done a strategic plan for itself in almost a decade. They only show up in two of the 47 action items.

5. They call it an “audit” of the 2014 Comp Plan.

6. I think this is because a consultant is hired to write every plan. This minimizes the effort for our officials and relieves them of being too involved—they can always blame the consultant. Or ignore them. My favorite was Ketchum’s Main Street traffic study for which the Council paid $50k of our money and then…threw away. They didn’t like the consultant telling them that what they had planned wouldn’t work.

7. Thus my characterization of the plan as “a joke.”

8. page 23

9. page 24

10. you can read my posts about that!

11. Tick. The. Box.

12. Plus another minute, if you read these footnotes. According to wordcounter.net, I write at the 11-12th grade level, so no college degree required.

13. What about me? What about the hours I put into reading the plan and writing this? Why do I do this? Hey, it was too smoky to go riding my e-bike at 20 mph on the bike path.