Issue #48: Airport Expands to Replace Locals with Tourists
They get LOCALS to pay for this
Before we get into this week’s topic, I want to address this chart:
The Ketchum Sun has hit 800 subscribers. I’d like to think that 800 people are interested in my opinions, but I know that isn’t true. I think 800 people are hungry for information and insight into what is happening in their community and that the Fourth Estate is not filling that need. If the Mountain Express did its job, that 800 would probably be much lower.1
Am I filling that need? Probably not that well. What can I do better? What should I be looking into? Suggestions are welcome.2
The major criticism I receive is that I am too negative (snarky?) and only focus on problems.3 Sorry, not sorry. I did write two positive blogs, one on ARCH and one on WRCHT. They are doing tremendous work for the WRV and deserve your support.
I also had a constructive guest blog on Citizens Assemblies—thank you, Liz! and a good one on why we have an elevated fire risk in the Sawtooths (thank you, Diane!).
At the bottom of this one, I celebrate Mountain Rides’ new direct airport service.4
The posts that get the most reads, shares, and follow-on subscribers are the ones that hit hardest at the Ketchum City Council. I think that is because most people have little idea about what they are doing and are appalled when they find out.
I am always looking for people to tell me where I am wrong. 5
Ketchum Council Frees its Schedule to Replace Locals with Tourists
Anyone who analyzes the actions of the Ketchum City Council must realize that their goal is to replace low-profit locals with high-profit tourists and create dorms with income limits to keep tourism industry wages low and maximize profits.
As I explain in Issue #47, the Ketchum Council has outsourced almost all its primary duties to focus on this. It is even working with Airbnb via SVED to accelerate the process.
The irony of ironies is that the Council figured out how to tax locals to get rid of themselves with tools like LOT tax and fire consolidation. If you voted for Fire Consolidation or LOT for Air or anything like that, the joke is on you—-you contributed to the extermination of locals. If you are a middle-class essential worker in Ketchum, you are literally paying Ketchum to squeeze you out of town.
One challenge with the “locals replacement program” is getting enough tourists into town. \The Friedman Memorial Airport Authority (FMAA) and the Fly Sun Valley Alliance (FSVA) are working on that (your tax dollars at work!).
SUN is 50% owned by the City of Hailey and 50% owned by Blaine County. The airport is supposed to benefit its constituencies. FMAA is the governing body for SUN. It comprises three Hailey politicians (chaired by the mayor), the three Blaine County Commissioners, and one at-large member the FMAA selects from applicants.
This sounds like a good check on the desire of Sun Valley Co. and the cities of Sun Valley and Ketchum for more and more tourists. If only! FMAA is supporting the hotelization of Ketchum (the hotelization of Sun Valley is a given) and maximizing tourism growth in the WRV.
FMAA, comprised of elected officials, has outsourced control of flights to SUN to FSVA, comprised of un-elected officials. Talk about bad governance. This non-governmental organization spends your tax dollars to pay airlines to fly to SUN. Sun Valley Co. has a permanent seat on FSVA and contributes to it. Why does FSVA need to use local taxpayer dollars to pay any airline to fly to SUN when fares and load factors are so high?
It doesn’t. It is sitting on millions of dollars of unspent taxes. Is that even legal?
The Airport is For Tourism (and Locals Who Can Afford It)
This data is interesting. FSVA collects it from people who use the free airport WiFi. When you log on to that, they can trace your phone, so they know where your phone lives and travels.6 If visitors and residents use the wifi at the same rate, this is a good dataset.7
Only 17% of winter passengers through SUN are WRV residents. The rest are tourists and second-home owners. It’s even more skewed in the summer. As FMAA expands its airport operations, the mix shifts away from locals to tourists. Those new flights to ORD and DEN have been part of the strategy to drive tourism growth.
FSVA increased SUN flight capacity by 20% in 2024. Next year, they will increase it even more and double the private jet capacity at SUN. Given that Ketchum is building more hotels and is converting more single-family residences to Airbnb, while Sun Valley Co has a plan to double the number of tourist accommodations, they need a lot more flights to bring in the high-profit tourists.
How Does This Benefit Locals?
How does this benefit the owners of the airport (local residents)? Well, have more flight options, and that is a good thing. But what about the fares? These have to be some of the most profitable flights in the entire USA. Load factors averaged 78% this year. Anything above 70% is considered high-profit. The fares are some of the highest per mile in the US. They are about double the fares for BOI—-using the same planes. What is FMAA and FSVA doing to negotiate fares for local residents?
One of the FMAA’s neat tricks has been to keep SUN’s flight emissions out of the pollution inventory of the Blaine County Sustainability Commission. Apparently, take-off and landing are carbon-free!8
Who Does FMAA Really Work For?
If you were the Hailey mayor and chair of the FMAA, charged with running the airport to benefit your citizens, is this how you would run it? Would you encourage FSVA to bring in more planes with more tourists and more pollution to benefit the tourism industry in Ketchum and Sun Valley? Meanwhile, your constituents constantly complain about the airport, and you ignore them.9
FMAA is supposed to be working on moving the airport—it’s called the “dual path.” News flash: that will never happen.10 Sun Valley Co. and the tourism industry want the airport to be exactly where it is. As long as they control FSVA and can bring in as many planes as they want, they will never let it be moved. Private entities are making too much money off the publicly-owned asset.
From their perspective, SUN is close to perfect. Less than half an hour from Ketchum and Sun Valley, yet the tourists never hear or see a plane—that’s for the servant class down the valley. And they keep growing the capacity for the billionaire class’s private jets.
NEW Direct Mountain Rides Service to SUN!!
I have been complaining about this for several years, so I am thrilled to see Mountain Rides has initiated direct airport services for those of us in Ketchum and Sun Valley. This info is not yet on the Mountain Rides website (it will be posted in December), but I am told the service is running.
The "one-seat" service on the Valley Route is structured to meet the needs of passengers on all year-round arriving and departing flights (except for the 7:30am departure).
This eliminates the transfer in Hailey and takes only 35 minutes from Sun Valley circle! Save the parking fee. Lower your carbon footprint. TAKE THE BUS TO THE AIRPORT.
Mountain Rides' Airport Service: Via the Valley Route (Every Day)
Service to the Airport, via the Valley Route southbound from Sun Valley/Ketchum, is available every day, as follows:
Valley Route departs Sun Valley (Dollar Circle) at 11:00AM, arrives at Airport (SUN) at 11:35AM.
Valley Route departs Sun Valley (Dollar Circle) at 12:00PM, arrives at Airport (SUN) at 12:35PM.
Valley Route departs Sun Valley (Dollar Circle) at 10:00PM, arrives at Airport (SUN) at 10:35PM.
Valley Route departs Sun Valley (Dollar Circle) at 12:00Am, arrives at Airport (SUN) at 12:35AM.
Service from the Airport, via the Valley Route northbound to Ketchum/Sun Valley, is available every day as follows:
Valley Route departs Airport (SUN) at 1:15PM, arrives in Sun Valley (Dollar Circle) at 1:50PM.
Valley Route departs Airport (SUN) at 2:15PM, arrives at Sun Valley (Dollar Circle) at 2:50PM.
Valley Route departs Airport (SUN) at 10:45PM, arrives at Sun Valley (Dollar Circle) at 11:15PM.
Maybe 0!
But I reserve the right to ignore them.
That’s even my own criticism of myself. You should read the first drafts if you want snark. I usually write them, wait a day, then edit them for tone. And they are still snarky. A friend has offered to edit me, so if some of these get less snarky, it’s his impact. You got a full snark one in Issue #47 where I pushed the send button by accident.
As I usually travel to the East on the early morning flights, that’s still not available for people like me.
Thank you, Mr. Fraser, wherever you are.
On an anonymized basis.
I wonder if visitors use it more than locals, or the other way around? How could we test for that?
I did an analysis of the BCSC report. It is, in my analysis, unlikely to make Blaine County more sustainable. It is, in my opinion, lipstick on a pig.
It’s more hypocritical than that. She doesn’t ignore them—she tells them she “hears” them.
Watch all the negative responses I get to this assertion.
I don't know why organizations are so resistant to change. Please keep bringing things to our attention. Please run for office. Once you hit a tipping point, the momentum that can come out of this could bring changes quickly. Unless the reality is that the remaining locals are too much in the minority, or actually want Ketchum to become Aspen so they can make money selling out. Perhaps the battle is already lost.
Perry, I agree with AF that the City Council doesn't sit around plotting to replace locals with tourists, but it may be an inevitable consequence of their not-necessarily-disinterested actions. I also agree that "exterminate" is too strong a word. But whether myopic, incendiary, or plaintive, I applaud all the digging you do and encourage you to keep doing it. For me, 98% of the value of your reporting is the facts you dig out about what this or that organization or program is doing. I occasionally attend City Council meetings and other municipal functions, but without the Ketchum Sun's reporting I'd be lost. You provide an invaluable service in that regard and may very well be moving the needle. At the very least, you are moving the needle indirectly for many (at least 800) of us. If the price of that service is your editorializing, I'm fine with it. Let's face it, "facts" are never reported from a completely unbiased source. I consider myself perfectly capable of filtering fact from opinion and checking facts. Some of those opinions I agree with, some I half agree with, and some I disagree with. So what?!
Two suggestions: 1) append a glossary of acronyms somewhere (at the end?) of each issue. There are too many to keep track of, especially for those of us whose attention waxes and wanes; 2) honestly report what has happened to the budgets of the WRV's various municipalities over time. This might be difficult given all the outsourcing you say the Ketchum City Council has done as well as all the nonprofits (e.g., Mountain Humane) that use private dollars to perform what are traditionally governmental functions.
Thanks.