ISSUE #40: Why Does Ketchum Make Decisions Based on Narrative Rather Than Analysis?
Given that is the norm rather than the exception, it must be on purpose, but there are solutions!
What the heck does this say? It is engraved over the entry to the ruling council of Dubrovnik in Croatia and dates to the time of the Republic of Ragusa. It is a message to every councilor that when they go through that door, they must put aside their private interests and work for the public interest. We should engrave that over the entrance to our city council chamber.1
Who Works for Whom?
One of my themes has been the lack of analysis behind major decisions made by the Ketchum City Council. The list is almost endless, as they rarely have any substantive analysis behind their votes.
Why is this?
My observation is that the Council almost always takes the recommendation of the staff. It is almost like the Council exists to rubber-stamp what the staff wants. This was particularly egregious when Ms. Frick was the City Planner, but it has carried on into the current administration.
Examples of “No Analysis” Council Votes
Water Treatment Facility
The Water Treatment Facility (I like to call it the “WTF”) is a prime example. At $34mm in cost, it was the most expensive capital expenditure in the history of Ketchum.2 City Council time devoted to deliberate on it? About five minutes. They took the recommendation of the engineer of record to rebuild the 40-year-old WTF (and expand its capacity to accommodate the support further hotelization of Ketchum) without asking for any alternatives or analysis.3
This was a gross dereliction of their fiduciary duty. If they had bothered to do some basic homework, they would have learned we could have built a new state-of-the-art WTF on a smaller footprint with things like methane capture and biological testing for less than they are paying to rebuild the old plant.
In addition to being a better decision for a WTF, it would have freed up land at the current site for what they say is their highest priority—workforce housing.4
Lift Tower Lodge
Their plan to develop Lift Tower Lodge into low-income housing is another example. They plan to replace the 13 units of transitional housing with over 50 units of low-income housing that will exclude essential workers from living there.5 On its face, it is ridiculous.
The City values the land alone at $7mm. Think about what they could do with that $7mm. If their goal was housing, they could build far more housing, with adequate parking, on the 6.5 acres for sale next to 75 in Bellevue, which is for sale for less than $7mm. Or they could buy one of the low-density trailer parks south of Ketchum and triple the density.
That they don’t do anything like that is indicative that their Housing Action Plan is not really about housing people. It is an ideologically motivated plan rather than an economically motivated one.6
Permanent Destruction of Parking in the Retail Core
And we have all come to understand that they are permanently eliminating over 100 parking spaces in the commercial core, at a value of over $12mm in replacement costs, without adequately considering what they are doing.7 This is on top of the dozens of other parking spaces permanently destroyed during the Bradshaw regime. That same regime has increased the demand for parking in the commercial core.
I could go on and on. All you have to do is look at any City Council agenda packet to understand that Ketchum governance is a triumph of narrative over analysis.
What Could They Be Doing?
Just Say No
First of all, the Council should stop acting like such patsies.8 They should refuse to vote on staff recommendations that don’t provide analysis and alternatives. The City’s parking plan is a particular embarrassment — there is no plan in the plan. The same is true for the City’s Master Transportation Plan. These documents lack the basics of what anyone in private industry would require for a plan.
Given that the Troika of Bradshaw/Breen/Hamilton controls the Council and that math is an intellectual challenge for Ms. Breen and Ms. Hamilton, I won’t get my hopes up until after the next Council election.9. Even when an okay plan exists, they ignore the important parts and cherry-pick what substantiates what they want to do.10 As Ms. Breen said when she voted to approve the Marriott after 3,000 people objected to it—it doesn’t matter what people want; they got elected, so they get to decide.
Get the Data!
Some obvious data would significantly improve decision-making at the Council— anonymized cellphone geodata. You can buy data that tracks the movement of cellphones. We could use that data to replace a lot of the assertions that the City staff makes up to justify its recommendations.11
How many people commute to Ketchum for work? We don’t really know. But we could!
How many tourists drive to Ketchum versus fly to SUN or come in to BOI and drive? We don’t know, but we could!
How many people in Ketchum do their shopping in Hailey? We don’t know, but we could.
How many people using SUN are locals versus tourists? We don’t know, but we could!
How many Mountain Rides riders are locals versus tourists? We don’t know, but we could!
What is the average occupancy of our AirBNBs? We have zero idea. But we could find out.
The list of what we could learn from this data goes on and on and on.
Acquiring this data is so glaringly apparent that I am stunned that no one on the staff or Council has ever raised this in a council meeting — not a single time.
Require Cost/Benefit Analysis
I don’t recall ever seeing a cost/benefit analysis behind any vote for a City Council decision in the Bradshaw era of Ketchum. I can see why the staff doesn’t do it—it would take work, and the Council never asks for it, so why bother?
The City Council regularly commits to spending millions of our dollars without this most basic standard of fiduciary care. And they never hold the staff accountable for flawed assertions.
The Main Street project is just one example that went over time, over budget, and cost local retailers dearly. No one will be held accountable. The City Council should have been suspicious about this given the cost overruns of the last project the City took over from the State—the Sun Valley Rd project. They let Mayor Bradshaw bully them into taking on this project.12
Capital Spending Approval Should Require a Maintenance Cost Analysis
This seems obvious but is never done. The City doesn’t conduct any depreciation analysis of its capital assets, but it takes on large capital projects with no assessment of the ongoing maintenance costs. Warm Springs Preserve is an example.
Common Sense
These are not novel suggestions. They are fundamental requirements in the private sector. Why aren’t they fundamental requirements for our City Council? Is it because it would make the Troika’s plan to turn Ketchum into One Big Hotel more obvious? That every decision the Council makes leads to the replacement of low-revenue locals with high-revenue tourists?
Even Mr. Cordovano and Mr. Hutchinson, who ran to protect the locals, have been sucked into the Troika program—-neither has accomplished a single one of their campaign promises.
The number of residents of the Ragusan Republic wasn’t that much greater than that of Ketchum. They were paranoid of having too much control concentrated in the hands of too few people. Despite the divide between nobles and commoners, their government was far more inclusive and far more transparent than that of Ketchum. Its motto was "Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro": "It is not good to sell liberty for gold." For 450 years they rotated the mayor position every month. No Troika problem there!
$17mm for Ketchum residents. This will likely be exceeded by KURA’s Washington Lot development, which will easily cost us over $20mm ($4mm in free land, $8mm in cash, $7mm in permanently destroyed parking assets, and over $2mm in foregone property taxes).
Compare this to the 60 minutes of deliberations at the Council about pickleball courts.
While they claim this is their highest priority, they do not act like it. They only want to build dense low-income housing on absurdly valuable land that does nothing to solve our “missing middle” crisis or achieve the goals of our Comprehensive Plan. Their Housing Action Plan is more about social engineering than workforce housing.
No teachers, nurses, or first responders will qualify to live in it, just as none qualify to live in Bluebird. They make too much money. The Mayor blatantly lied about this. This is not housing for the people Ketchum needs to function as a community—it is corporate welfare for Sun Valley Co and other tourism industry businesses.
For example, in a Council meeting, Ms Hamilton once said Bluebird “had to be” built in the commercial core of Ketchum so that rich people know there are working people. I kid you not. If you were to ascribe an economic motivation to them, it would be to provide taxpayer subsidies to the tourism industry—corporate welfare.
The City says it will cost $120k to replace a parking spot in Ketchum.
The P&Z Commission has historically been worse than the Council. Only in the last meeting have I seen them deny a staff recommendation.
Mr. Bradshaw ran Globals Utilities Research at JP Morgan. He must know how to add. On the other hand, Ms. Breen went to law school (no math required). Ms. Hamilton is a lobbyist. No math is needed for that, either. You should have watched them struggle with setting the in-lieu fee. In the end, they just literally made up a number.
The #1 priority of the Comprehensive Plan is to preserve the character of Ketchum. Does anyone reading this think that is a priority at any level for the Bradshaw administration?
Like the “nexus study” they cite to justify the housing plan. It is an embarrassment to anyone with a basic knowledge of statistics. Or the statistically invalid “survey” data they use to justify the Housing Action Plan.
Watch the video of that Council meeting. They didn’t really want to do it. He really wanted to do it. He pressured them and they caved.
I wrote ISSUE #40 in a bit of a hurry (I'm in Ukraine for a couple of weeks). I should have noted that when the City does employ analysis, it is often after the fact, or is, to use a technical term, garbage.
For example, they just paid a consultant to tell them to put up a Bluebird on the Y parking lot and another one at Lift Tower Lodge. They had already decided that months and months ago (see prior Council presentations). This was a total waste of our money designed to put lipstick on their pig of a housing program.
Along the same lines, BCHA, which is the exact same thing as the Ketchum Housing Department (same staff, same leader), paid for a study they call the "nexus study," which is a statistical and analytical embarrassment, full of literally made-up numbers. It is another study designed to justify their narrative rather than to optimize the allocation of scarce taxpayer resources.
The Mayor is a very smart guy. He has a master's degree in engineering along with an MBA. He was a Wall Street Analyst before moving to Idaho for the good life. He rose up the ranks to be Global Head of Utilities Research for JP Morgan--a big job. He knows how to do this stuff right. The fact that they don't do the work is either dereliction or mendacity.
Perry, again spot on! The city has proven their incompetency time and time again. Almost every project that they’ve taken on has been over budget and behind schedule but they continue to bully forward. Clearly, a recall is a challenge, but all citizens of Ketchum should vote in the future for change that benefits the locals and help preserve the character of town while at the same time, managing growth and tourism consistent with these values. Creating win-win solutions that benefit current and future residents and visitors can be mutually inclusive.