ISSUE # 9: This Could Happen in Ketchum

And it will if we don't speak out, because our Council adopted this plan

Apr 12, 2024

As of last night, The Ketchum Sun has 373 subscribers. We are adding about 8 per day. (We lost one fisherman who didn’t like my use of “Aspenization”— he thinks having one-half of your population paying to house the other half is a better idea than I think it is.).

Did everyone read the IME editorial on Wednesday? If not, give it a go, especially if you can read it online. The IME is firmly behind the Troika in their full gas pursuit of development. The comments are brutal. It is sad to see our local paper so out of touch with the readership. But then, maybe they aren’t? Maybe I’ve gotten confused, and they are a newspaper for the people who don’t live in the WRV rather than a paper for those who do.

Something is happening in mountain towns. The people are saying, “Enough.” Their governments are getting ahead of the people’s skis when it comes to housing and development. Let’s examine Steamboat Springs' cautionary tale. (Hat tip to DB for bringing this to my attention.)

A Housing Authority Goes Rogue; the Council Abets Them

In Steamboat Springs last month, the voters overwhelmingly turned down a plan for over 2,260 affordable housing units. Here’s the article: https://www.steamboatpilot.com/news/voters-reject-brown-ranch-annexation-in-preliminary-results/

Steamboat is a community about the same size as the Wood River Valley. Because they are in Colorado, their government can tax property transfers and short-term rentals to fund affordable housing. That money goes to the Yampa Valley Housing Authority (YVHA). YVHA the equivalent of our Blaine County Housing Authority (BCHA). It has a similar mandate, but unlike BCHA, it focuses more on workforce housing than just low-income housing.

YVHA got ahead of its community when it acquired 400 acres to develop into an affordable housing community that would have added over 25% to Steamboat Springs' population.

There are enough similarities between the City of Ketchum’s approach to the Bluebird Program and what happened in Steamboat to suggest some lessons for us to learn here.

First, the Steamboat City Council tried to force this down the community's throat. After an initial plan to bring it to a referendum, the Council voted to approve YVHA’s plan without a referendum. (I don’t think our mayor would ever bring anything to the people for a referendum. Most of the Bluebird 1 planning was done “off the record.”)

There was a grassroots revulsion from the Steamboat residents at this anti-democratic coup by their elected officials. The people rose up did a referendum on the YVHA program, which they overwhelmingly rejected. These weren’t a few rich NIMBYs (like the prominent resident of Cottonwood who complained the SVC dorm would hurt his property value). These people rejected the premise that their elected representatives would make such a dramatic change to the very nature of their town without their approval.

Does this feel familiar?

Our mayor and two current council members (the “troika”) have done this repeatedly to us. Bluebird 1 is a great example. They lied about who would live in it to get it done. Another example is LOT for Air, which doesn’t really go to air service—it either goes to sit in a bank account or to promote tourism. Another example: at the second meeting of the Historical Preservation Committee, one current city council member said to be careful not to get into too much detail in public meetings because you don’t want to confuse the public. And then there is the plan for the next four Bluebirds that no one in City Hall talks about.

Compared to Steamboat, our regime has been far less transparent with us, and our newspaper of record doesn’t serve the purpose of the fourth estate, so we are generally less informed than the people of Steamboat.

The Housing Plan for Ketchum

What do you think about this sentence?

“Anyone who wants to live in Ketchum should be able to, and if they can’t afford it, the taxpayers of Ketchum will subsidize their housing for as long as they want to live in Ketchum.”

That is the Ketchum Housing Action Plan in a nutshell. You probably think I am exaggerating. Maybe I am, but only a little. The HAP certainly isn’t worded that way. It is worded to say that we should accommodate more of our workforce in Ketchum, but when you parse through it, it really isn’t a plan for workforce housing at all.

Take, for example, the definition of “unhoused” it uses:

“Not housed, not having an address or residence. Examples:

Persons who live in their cars or campers
Persons who live on others’ couches
Persons who have extremely long commutes (over 45 minutes one way)”1

That last one hits me; I commuted more than that for decades to afford to live here. How did a Harvard-educated person, much less an entire committee of educated people, think that a long commute means you fit the definition of “unhoused?”

And then there is the definition of “Workforce”…

“All adults in the household must meet one of the following criteria:

An employee or contractor of a local entity in Blaine County, Idaho (at least 1,000 hours per year or an average of 20 hours per week) during their occupancy

Pursuing work in Blaine County by:

applying for work with local businesses for up to four months
have a job offer from a local business
preparing for work by participating in job training, educational programs, or programs that
assist people to obtain employment and become economically self-sufficient

Meet one of the following exemptions:

retired person who, immediately preceding retirement, was a full-time employee of an entity located within Blaine County for at least five continuous years and continued living as a fulltime resident within Blaine County following their retirement
person unable to work or who does not have a work history due to qualifying for disability as defined by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
full-time, informal caregiver if either caregiver or care-recipient lived in Blaine County for at least the five previous continuous years
be a working spouse or partner of a person qualified under one of the first two sections of this definition”2

Let’s get this straight. You don’t need to work to be in Ketchum’s “workforce.” You could apply for a job; even if you don’t get it, you are part of the workforce. Or, you could be exempt from the work requirement of being a worker because you used to work but decided not to work anymore.

Again, educated people decided to redefine the definition of a common word to mean something it doesn’t mean.

Why would they do that? Could it be so that they could call just about any housing they want to subsidize “workforce housing?”

That’s what I think. How else do you explain the Troika describing Bluebird 1 as workforce housing when they knew that they could not, by Federal law (because they used Federal tax credits to finance it), require its tenants to work? The other giveaway was when they adopted a retiree “preference” for Bluebird 1.

Guess who lives in this kind of housing in Aspen (the mountain town with the most of it)? And Ketchum (in Northwood Place). Some working people. And retirees. Like we need more retiree housing in Ketchum.

Should Ketchum Subsidize Housing for 1/3 of its Residents?

The rest of the plan takes unscientific data and asserts it as fact to prescribe how much housing Ketchum needs. The result is a call to build or preserve over 600 units of low-income housing over ten years at a cost of potentially over $350 million and to put as much of it as possible in the commercial core of Ketchum.

Six hundred units of housing will house at 1,200 people or more. The population of Ketchum is 3,555 people.3 The Ketchum Housing Action Plan calls for us to increase our population by one-third.

I bet most of the people reading this did not know that. Why do you think that is?

Who gets to decide this for us?

For the section header while this is called the Ketchum housing plan, 8 of the 19 members of the Housing Task Force who came up with it don’t live in Ketchum.4

It’s more of a manifesto than a plan. Plans have timelines, responsibilities, and prioritization for allocating scarce resources. They also have measurements for return on investment and key performance indicators to ensure the plan accomplishes its goals. None of that in the HAP. No metrics means no accountability.

An Irreconcilable Conflict of Interest?

The Ketchum Housing Director and the BCHA Executive Director are the same person. BCHA has “outsourced” its staff to the City of Ketchum. This is ironic, as the City of Ketchum delegated its housing department to BCHA and then, years later, created a new one when BCHA failed to do much.

This is becoming a pattern for Ketchum. For years, the City Planner and the KURA Executive Director were the same person in an epic failure of both the appearance and reality of the supposed independence of KURA. Who gets to make these “dual-hatted” decisions? Yes, the Mayor, with the acquiescence of the Council. It is bad governance.

I raised the BCHA conflict of interest with the City. The City attorney dismissed it because Ms. Connelly gets “independent” marching orders from the BCHA board and the City Council. Anyone who attends Council meetings knows that is a farce. If it is not technically a legal conflict of interest, it is, in my opinion, an ethical conflict of interest.

Why do I say that? Look at the last page of this grant application from the City of Ketchum to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. I love the honesty of this paragraph:

“The City of Ketchum’s current Mayor and City Council have proven to be extremely prohousing and have supported and led on a wave of progressive efforts to house low- and moderate-income individuals in our community. There is a possibility that the Mayor and Council composition will change during the course of the grant period, making the execution of some projects more challenging. We have accounted for this work by proposing that BCHA, a non-political entity somewhat insulated from the vagaries of elections, be involved with Affordable Housing Gap Fund and by front-loading activities into the first 12-24 months of the grant period. “

There is a lot to unpack in that paragraph. First, note that the writer did not mention workforce housing, just income-restricted housing. Second, it describes BCHA as “non-political.”

But what is shocking to me is the disdain for us, the residents of Ketchum. The author doesn’t want the people elected by the people to determine how City resources are used. She wants to get the money out of the hands of elected officials and into the hands of people who are unaccountable to us so they can spend it as they want. She is trying to assure HUD that the money will be spent under bad governance.

This is from a person that you and I pay.

The City Housing Staff applied for a grant under the rubric of the City of Ketchum that it plans to hand over to BCHA for the stated purpose of getting it out of the hands of the City of Ketchum (that applied for it), yet the Housing Director for the City of Ketchum is, at the same time, the Executive Director of BCHA. I guess it’s the same people in City Hall who define conflict of interest as those who define the unhoused and workforce. It’s Orwellian.

As I pointed out in my pieces on KURA and FSVA/VSV, there is a pattern of getting huge amounts of taxes out of the hands of the City Council to unelected (and even corporate) people to spend as they see fit—often for their own benefit

What Is the Goal of the HAP?

The third item in this grant application is the plan to develop Lift Tower Lodge into Bluebird 3. Lift Tower Lodge is currently used as sub-optimal transitional housing (a motel, not an apartment building) and has been under-maintained for years. But it is sitting on a piece of land that the City of Ketchum values at $7mm. The staff of the City of Ketchum wants to put low-income housing on one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the entire state of Idaho, with as little input into the project from the people of Ketchum as they can get away with. This is terrible governance, yet it is not only condoned but is encouraged by our Mayor.

This is not about maximizing housing for working people. If it were about housing, we would take that $7mm and buy one of the trailer parks near the hospital and build some nice high-density workforce housing, with parking, in a place more convenient for working people, in a way that doesn’t squander Ketchum’s scarce resources of money, land, and character.

Lest this be the first of my pieces you have read, and you think, “he just criticizes people trying to do their best and doesn’t offer alternatives,” well, I did. To the Ketchum Housing Task Force. I also laid out some better options in Issue #5. But others probably have better ideas than mine, and I am all for that. Let us know in the comments section.