ISSUE #38: The Ketchum Train is Racing to Aspen Station

The Troika is Stoking the Engine

This ad is in today’s Mountain Express. Mr. Maykrantz is on to something.

Sun Valley Board of Realtors Survey—Please Fill it Out

Did you receive a survey postcard in your PO Box? If so, please fill it out. SVBR is trying to conduct a statistically valid survey of people’s attitudes towards tourism.

I wonder why they are doing this now. My gut tells me it is to arm them to weigh in on Ketchum’s Comprehensive Plan process.

Tragically for the future of Ketchum, a vital demographic will not fill out this survey: the several hundred former locals who have been squeezed out of Ketchum by the conversion of their rental unit into an Airbnb over the past six years, as the Troika of Bradshaw/Hamilton/Breen presided over the gutting of market-rate workforce housing in Ketchum.

A Request

Can you hit the red button here and share The Ketchum Sun? My goal with this blog is to inform and engage the community.

My priority is not to persuade you one way or the other¹ but to get you engaged in the future of Ketchum. We get the government that we let them do to us.

As a community, we have made a tremendous error in who we have elected. Their agenda is not transparent, yet it is clear, as I lay out in the rest of this post.

We need more people to be engaged. We need more people to vote. We need more competent people to run for office. This blog is my contribution to engagement. Please help me in that mission by spreading the word by clicking the red box above. THANK YOU.

The Troika: All-In on Tourism

Our #1 quality of life challenge is that the people who run the WRV² think that tourism is all that we are good for, and we can’t have enough of it. They do whatever they can to tax locals to subsidize its growth (locals pay a lot of the LOT). From the zoning code to the LOT to the SVSA, FSVA, FMAA, VSV, and BCHA---they all exist to keep the cost structure low for Sun Valley Co. and AirBNB and to keep the tourists flowing.

Tourism Is A Crappy Industry

Aside from being one of the least climate-friendly industries, tourism is also a low-skill, low-wage, high-turnover, transient job industry--you would not choose it if your goal is to build a stable community. Tourism is okay if it is part of the economic base: it provides entry-level work experience for other industries. However, at least in Ketchum, better-paying industries are discouraged from entering under the false narrative that high-wage jobs push up housing prices for working people.

That is absurd, but it is a deeply held conviction in Ketchum’s City Hall. A City Administrator repeated this line to me recently. I witnessed a former Council Mayor state this at a Council Meeting, where he told SVED not to encourage a 30-person high-wage company to come into Ketchum.

Of course, increased demand for fixed housing supply pushes up prices, but the real competition for affordable housing comes from the tourism industry.³

The Troika that rules Ketchum colluded in handing over hundreds of long-term rentals occupied by local working people for conversion into the Airbnb market. Hundreds of former Ketchum locals have been squeezed out of town to make room for more profitable tourists. You don’t hear them complaining anymore—they are permanently gone!

How does this play out?…..

Tourists Replace Locals Unless Tourism Is Managed

Tourists will always outbid the people who serve them for housing. This is the tragedy of being a desirable place to visit. We should be mitigating this rather than subsidizing it.

In my last post, I listed some of the many ways locals are being fleeced to subsidize tourism. I also wrote a post about how Sun Valley Co. reaps myriad taxpayer subsidies as a form of corporate welfare. We should, at the very least, stop doing stupid stuff to subsidize tourism while discouraging other industries.

The Troika is Converting Ketchum Into One Massive Hotel

On the face of it, some of our zoning looks to be pro-local housing. The code promotes increased density of housing in almost all of our zones. The rationale is to prevent sprawl and to make housing more affordable. The Mayor and Council say this all the time.

This is, excuse me, bullshit. Because tourism demand can outprice residential demand, it just means more and more hotel rooms masquerading in the form of Airbnbs.

Example: If you tear down a single-family residence in Ketchum in CC2 zone (in the core), you cannot replace it. You must replace it with at least two homes (you can do as many as will fit in a three-story box on the lot). At a recent P&Z meeting, a 16,000 sqft lot-line-to-lot-line four-story box was presented as a replacement for a single-family home of about 3,000 sqft—all luxury units for the second home and Airbnb market.

Example: The Ketchum P&Z just approved tearing down a single-family home in West Ketch to split the lot into two, as the zoning code permits. This will become more AirBNB housing, not more affordable housing for local working people.

This is what happens at almost every P&Z meeting.

Replacing Locals With Tourists is a Feature, Not a Bug, of The Troika’s Plan

This is not a bug in how Ketchum is run. It is the plan! The Mayor once told me his vision for Ketchum is Zermatt. ⁴ Turn Ketchum into one big hotel. Replace locals with tourists. Push working people down into Hailey, Bellevue, and beyond. Much more profitable! But it makes for a crappy Ketchum for the locals who hang on.

Part-Timers? An Easy Target, But the Wrong Target

Ironically, besides the shrinking pool of locals, the most stable part of the Ketchum community is its part-time residents. They may only spend half the year here, but they keep the restaurants going. They are the ones who donate much of the money for the amenities we all enjoy, like the free music festival, arts education, after-school programs like those from the YMCA and Far + Wise, taking care of abandoned pets at Mountain Humane, and the Hunger Coalition. And they don't use the schools or get a say in how their taxes are spent. It's a pretty nice deal for the elected officials!

So why does our Council and Housing Department blame second homeowners for Ketchum’s ills when it is the tourism industry?

Where Will Underpaid Tourism Workers Live? Endless Bluebirds

Not enough workers to run a tourism business because they can't afford housing? No problem. Ketchum will tax the locals to build subsidized housing for them. That is precisely what is going on in Ketchum.

This approach encourages the tourism industry to depress wages so their employees will qualify. But because there is almost no industry other than tourism in Ketchum, those workers can never make enough money to get out of subsidized housing, and it becomes a permanent entitlement to the tenant, so you have to build more and more and more of it as the workforce ages and the tourism industry grows.⁵ It is a death spiral.

For the Council’s last meeting, they had a presentation that justified a foregone conclusion.⁶ They are going to build a Bluebird on the YMCA parking lot, and they are going to build a Bluebird on the site of the Lift Tower Lodge. Based on previous Council presentations by the Housing Director, these decisions were made long before this “study” was produced. Once again, the City hired a consultant to give them the answer they wanted to justify what they were going to do anyway.

City of Sun Valley Opts Out

Sun Valley Co. has figured out how to exploit the Ketchum City Hall narrative that we need more workforce housing for for-profit workers. They are getting the City of Sun Valley to approve a master development plan for their resort area that will let them build hundreds of new hotel rooms with zero requirements for employee housing.⁷

Neither the City of Sun Valley nor Sun Valley Co. wants to sully Sun Valley with low-income housing. Especially not when they can get the Ketchum taxpayers to pay for it via the Bluebird program. Think about this: the Ketchum Council wants to impose an additional 2% LOT tax on short-term lodging via ballot initiative next May.⁸ Will Sun Valley do the same thing to shoulder its share of the burden? Of course not—why would they?

They are geniuses. We are chumps.

Non-Profit Policy Makers Advocating for For-Profit Corporate Welfare? Yup!

I recently witnessed a conversation between a non-profit staffer and one of her board members in which he asked her why she thinks it makes sense to subsidize housing for employees of for-profit companies. She said it is because they don’t make enough to live here otherwise, and companies won’t have employees unless locals tax themselves to provide housing.

Think about that for a minute.

She is a good person. She feels terrible that everyone who wants to live in Ketchum can’t afford to live in Ketchum. She wants everyone who works in Ketchum to be able to live in Ketchum.⁹

But she misses the critical point of a capitalist economy. Price clears the market. If an employer can’t find employees, they raise their wages until they find people willing to work for them. They pass on wage costs via higher prices and/or lower profits. If a company can’t foot the bill for their employees, they go out of business. Why is it in the public interest to insulate for-profit entities from reality by putting their employees on the public payroll via housing subsidies?

I like this person, but the fact that she does not understand this and that she has an influential role in local policy scares the bejeezus out of me.

Worse—she is not alone! BCHA, the Ketchum Housing Department, The Troika, Blaine County Sustainability Commission, Ketchum Community Development Corporation, Ketchum Urban Renewal Agency (KURA), the Wood River Land Trust, Spur Foundation, The Hunger Coalition, and the Mountain Express are all pushing this narrative.¹⁰ There are probably others I missed, but interestingly, the first six in this list are all pretty much the same thing—local government.

It is troubling that our local government entities work toward having more residents dependent on government subsidies. Morally, shouldn’t they work toward the opposite?

Essential Workers Get The Short End of The Stick

Bluebird tenants will service the tourism industry (and retirees)-if they work at all (it is not required for tenancy). Meanwhile, the essential workers residents need for a functioning community are excluded from the Bluebird program—they make too much money to qualify for tenancy.¹¹ So, essential workers like teachers, first responders, and healthcare workers are shit-out-of-luck for living in the community they serve. At the same time, we build housing to import¹² low-paid tourism industry workers who will never make enough to escape from Bluebird.

Doesn’t spending scarce taxpayer resources to help for-profit companies depress wages and replace locals while not providing the economic necessities for essential workers in our community sound…immoral? Unethical?

How Ketchum Will Raise Taxes for More Bluebirds

One of the highest priorities for every Ketchum government entity is to build more Bluebirds. The Council says so. KURA says so. BCHA says so. Even the Wood River Land Trust says so. Right now, they don’t have enough money to do it on the scale of their ambitions. They have figured out how to address that.

• The sneakiest way: they will raise your taxes with Fire Consolidation, which is on the ballot for this November. This is the slimiest approach to getting revenues I have seen out of the Troika so far. Your taxes will go UP, but you won’t get any benefit. It contradicts the Idaho requirement that all taxes have a specific purpose. See Issue #37 for how that works.

• They just raised the in-lieu fee by 30% for “community housing” for projects in the core that want to build more than a two-story building. It’s kind of like a bribe. If you want to build a big box in downtown Ketchum, you fork over $600 per sqft on 7% of your square footage to the Ketchum Housing Department for its Bluebird program. You could build a deed-restricted unit in your project instead of paying the fee, but what developer wants to sell luxury condos with low-income housing tenants in the building? They almost always fork over the bribe.¹³

• Next on the agenda is a 2% increase in the LOT on hotels/Airbnbs. This will go on the ballot for voter approval in May. The Troika plans to cooperate with supporters of the Bluebird program to conduct a door-to-door get-out-the-vote campaign. ¹⁴

• They apply for government grants and tax incentive programs. They also do this in pretty slimy ways.¹⁵. These grants come with such onerous strings that this kind of housing cannot address our workforce challenges.

• I almost forgot. You can donate to the City of Ketchum for its housing program—but not necessarily for housing in Ketchum. They could build it anywhere in Blaine County.¹⁶ The link is here. I am told that they have received zero in the past two years.

That is what the people who make decisions for us think is "smart growth."

What Can YOU Do About This?

Participate. Show up to City Council and P&Z meetings. Ask to meet with Council members 1:1. Sign the KBAC petition.¹⁷ Write letters to letters@mtexpress.com. Get your friends to sign up for this blog!

But I don’t see much changing unless we get people who can do math to run for the City Council.

The next election is in November 2025. We will elect a new mayor and at least two council members. I plan to run for a council seat. But I cannot change Ketchum’s path all by my lonesome. YOU NEED TO RUN.

1. Okay. That’s not true. I really really want you to agree with me.

2. Not just the Troika! Judging by their actions, this is true of the Mayors/Councils of Sun Valley and Hailey and the Blaine County Commissioners, as well.

3. The SVBR survey is a data point that supports this.

4. No cars in Zermatt, which may be why the Mayor and Council are so big on permanently eliminating parking in Ketchum. Zermatt has eight trains a day to an international airport. We ripped out the train line to the Shoshone station in the 1970s. The WRV is an island in the sea of Idaho; cars are our boats. They aren’t going away. Indeed, ITD projects traffic through Ketchum to almost double over the next twenty years.

5. Are you aware the Ketchum Housing Department plans to build a 108 unit low-income housing complex? They have not disclosed the location, but the project is called “Trail Creek” and will be more than double the size of Bluebird. This kind of a secret plan is what passes for “transparency” in the Bradshaw administration.

6. Consistent with Mayor Bradshaws commitment to transparency (sic), the analysis was not made public prior to the meeting. That is a standard Bradshaw tactic to minimize public input.

7. They used to have to put a paltry 5% of resort square footage additions into employee housing. Given that the City of Sun Valley has a master plan arrangement with SVC rather than a planned unit development, the City of Sun Valley counsel the 5% requirement isn’t legal. See this IME article. Isn’t SVC genius!

https://www.mtexpress.com/news/sun_valley/sun-valley-council-to-discuss-village-future/article_365583d8-6ec7-11ef-95cf-936dceb3e13f.html

8. I am for a LOT. I am for a LOT on Lodging. Indeed, I have advocated a substantial increase in LOT on Lodging, but only if the LOT on locals is removed and that LOT funds go to provide essential service and housing for essential workers. That is the legislative intent of the “tourist tax”—tax tourists to offset their costs on locals. Ketchum has perverted this by taxing locals to subsidize tourism. We are with Alice down in Wonderland here.

9. That’s also the principle behind Ketchum’s Housing Action Plan. But that plan redefines the English word “worker” to include people who don’t work and the English word “unhoused” to include people who are housed but don’t like commuting. Check out page 7.

10. If any one associated with any of these organizations objects to me calling them out for it, email me for a chat. I’d be ecstatic to be wrong. Boylehp@yahoo.com.

11. Yes, I know that the Mayor said that Bluebird was being built to house these people. He lied. The unanswered question: why did he lie?

12. There is almost no unemployment in the WRV. By definition, incremental workers need to be imported from somewhere. SVC likes to do if from Eastern Europe in the summer and South America in the winter on visas so they can pay them the bare minimum and get rid of them easily.

13. Legally, it is not technically a bribe. I call it a bribe because it goes to the Housing Department to fuel their corporate subsidy agenda. It also slows down affordable housing. Instead of getting an affordable unit with every new development, we wait years for the in lieu fund to go to Bluebirds. From RPF to CO, it will have taken six years for Bluebird. Meawhile, the longer the money sits with the City, the less housing it can buy because of inflation in building costs. And then, it requires a large bureacracy at City Hall to deploy the in lieu of funds. We should get rid of this option.

14. I find it fascinating (and depressing) that the Troika supports door-to-door tax increases for corporate welfare but suppresses community participation in most other areas—like the Comprehensive Plan process.

15. For Bluebird, the City only sent their RFP to a single developer—GMD, who the Mayor had worked with on Northwood Place. No surprise—GMD was the only bidder on Bluebird. This is a scummy way to operate. But it’s not an isolated incident. Ketchum’s Housing Director also serves as the Executive Director of BCHA. This is a massive ethical conflict of interest. Wearing her Ketchum hat, she applied for a HUD grant to develop Lift Tower Lodge. On the last page of the grant application she said that as soon as the grant came in the money would be transferred to her other employer BCHA. Why? She said it was to get it out of the hands of the Ketchum City Council’s oversight. Personally, had I been Mayor, instead of rewarding her for this I would have fired her for it.

16. Which might not be a bad thing. If the goal was to build workforce housing, you wouldn’t build ANY of it in the commercial core of Ketchum, as you could get a lot more for the money building it outside of the Ketchum commercial core. So why does The Troika target some of the most valuable land in Idaho for low-income housing—-the center of Ketchum? Ms. Hamilton once stated that it had to be in the core so that rich people know there are working people.

17. Link to petition: https://chng.it/yLp6SQxLZn