ISSUE #10: Ketchumspeak -- Not What you Learned in School!

The City has redefined words to mean the opposite of the dictionary definition

Apr 15, 2024

I just listened to Audible’s excellent production of Orwell’s “1984.” One of the themes of that novel is how the government controls language to impose its ideology. Farfetched as it may sound, a similar process has been going on in Ketchum. The Mayor and Staff have redefined common words to mean the opposite of what you were taught they meant.

Let’s examine a few common words, compare the standard and City definitions, and then analyze why the City might have redefined them.

Transparent

Dictionary1:

free from pretense or deceit
easily detected or seen through
readily understood
characterized by visibility or accessibility of information, especially concerning business practices

City: holding public meetings as required by law + “Heard on the Street” email

Analysis:

If you say you are transparent, and you say it a lot, and you say you are proud of how transparent you are, yet you do not act transparently, are you actually transparent? I think Ms. Fraser, my fourth-grade English teacher, would say no. I think this is true in other English-speaking countries like Zimbabwe and England.

Take the City’s Parking Plan. Before they announced it on Monday, they had already created a net reduction in parking for residents. They increased demand for parking while they took away parking spots—actually, a lot (pun intended) of parking. Before sharing their plan to take away 89 parking spots in the commercial core with the community, they just did it. Is that transparent?

Bluebird process? I made an information request for all City communications on Bluebird prior to its approval. I got…pretty much nothing. Nothing on the cost. No analysis of the cost/benefit to the residents. Nothing about who it would house. Lots of emails with the developer that said “call me.” The Mayor seems to have learned a thing or two from his time on Wall Street, where there is a saying “email is jail.”

The two things I learned. 1. The City only proactively solicited one bidder—GMD. 2. The Mayor named the project Bluebird. How can a City hand over tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer resources to a for-profit developer with no paper trail of the planning? Is that transparent.

Then, there are numerous committees and advisory groups that recommend policies for Ketchum residents but hold their deliberations in secret. This includes the Sustainability Advisory Committee, which has done little, so maybe that is for the best. There has been no report from that committee to the City Council in…years.

Why does The City need to do things in secret? Why do they need secret technical advisory committees for zoning code changes? 2. There is a citizens advisory committee for the Comprehensive Plan process that holds its meetings in private. The City has a timeline for its Comp Plan process that it hasn’t shared with the public. The City has bought at least one condo to hand over to BCHA—in secret.

I could keep going, but I think you can see the pattern that what Ms. Fraser taught me the word transparent means does not mean the same thing to the City of Ketchum. None of this is transparent. All of this is the opposite of “transparent.”

Unhoused

Dictionary3: not housed, such as:

not having a dwelling place or shelter : HOMELESS
not covered by a protective housing

City4: “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)”

Analysis:

Re-read the last point in the City’s definition—I lifted it directly from the Housing Action Plan. You can be housed, but if you commute more than 45 minutes, the City of Ketchum officially considers you homeless. The prior Council unanimously adopted this plan with no objection to this definition. I wonder if they even read it? These are highly educated people with graduate degrees—they must know what they are doing when they redefine a word to mean its opposite.

This is so obviously absurd that it begs the question: What is their motivation? My guess is that it’s so they can say that some portion of the people who work in Ketchum are homeless and deserve taxpayer-subsidized housing, like all the ones who choose to live in Shoshone, Fairfield, Carey, Twin Falls, or Stanley.

Workforce

Dictionary: the workers engaged in a specific activity or enterprise.

City: “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”5. (Emphasis added).

Analysis:

Reflect upon this. If you ~~pretend~~ intend to work (someday), or have chosen not to work, you are part of Ketchum’s workforce. I know it is confusing.

This definition is used to call places like Northwood Place or Bluebird 1 places that cannot require people to work and may be full of retired people workforce housing! Doesn’t workforce housing sound much more acceptable than just the low-income housing that it actually is? The problem with filling housing with people who don’t work but just want to live in a nice place like Ketchum is that you then need to build ever more housing in the hopes that some of its inhabitants will actually work.

But no need to work full-time in Ketchum to qualify. It’s actually dumb of you to do that. If you work a full-time job in Ketchum, you will probably make too much money to qualify for income-capped housing in the multi-Bluebird program. This is very good for the BCHA/City Housing Staff bureaucracy because it means they get to build twice as much housing as would be needed if we asked people living on the taxpayer dime to work full-time.

And guess who decides if you are in the workforce when you aren’t really working? You do. You self-certify. Who checks to make sure that you aren’t fibbing? No one! That’s right. No one. I know this because I made a records request for Northwood Place from IHFA, which is supposed to be enforcing this.

All of this is, of course, a massive waste of taxpayer resources that should be going to housing essential workers who bust their tukases in the occupations that are required for a functioning community. Is this what you think you voted for if you voted for the “0.5% LOT for Housing” they got enough people to vote for during Slack to pass. Wait. In Ketchum you could not vote just for 0.5% for Housing. You could only vote up or down to split the 1% for Air into 0.5% to pay about 1/4 of that to an airline, half of it to promote tourism, and half to go to unspecified housing efforts and the rest to sit in a bank account.

In my analysis, the entire Housing Action Plan is a path to the destruction of what makes Ketchum a special place to live. It sacrifices the well-being of the people who work hard to live here for people who don’t live here but want to—maybe just working part-time, or even not work at all!—at your expense.

Parking

Dictionary: a place to park a car, truck, etc.

City: Parking is not necessary for the future the City has planned for us.

Analysis:

The City is against parking in the downtown core. I know they don’t come out and transparently say it, but if you examine their actions since the Mayor first got elected, they have consistently increased demand for parking while reducing the amount of parking available.

The City Administrator has said it costs $75,000 to construct a parking spot in Ketchum. The most recent City plan to permanently remove 89 spots equals $6.675 million in destruction of public parking value.

At the same time, Bluebird 1 and Bluebird 2 will convert about 100 cars into public parking spaces. That’s a gift of about $7.5 million of community resources to the owners of these developments—one of whom is a for-profit, out-of-state developer.

Net, net, in decisions made in the last four years by the City of Ketchum, the residents of Ketchum have lost about $14mm in parking resources.

This is just recently. The City let KETCH be built without parking, 32 units. I bet that is at least 32 cars, and more likely 40+. Anyone who can afford to pay $1800/mo for a 330sf studio needs to own a car just to have some storage. The Mayor said they could park in the Washington Lot. Gary Lipton of KURA begs to differ. Using the City’s $75k, I’d say the developer got $2.4 million in parking abatement subsidies.

I suggested that before the City permanently removes parking spaces, the impact could easily be tested. Block them from being used during a peak demand period. Nope. They are digging up Main Street right now to remove 25 spots there. At the same time, KURA is plowing ahead with plans to replace the Washington Lot with 66 units of income-adjusted housing (less supply/more demand).

Vibrant

Dictionary: pulsating with life, vigor, or activity

City: low-income four-story, sidewalk-to-sidewalk apartment blocs (with insufficient parking) in the commercial core

Analysis:

I know my City definition sounds a little bit…snarky…but I think it’s pretty spot on. The Mayor was elected, twice, on a platform of vibrancy. But how is it vibrant to cram hundreds of people (and the plan is for at least 600)6 who either don’t work or don’t make very much money into the center of town with grocery stores that are the most expensive for hundreds of miles around? Who goes out to eat a lot if their income is capped at $40k to live in a subsidized small apartment?

Vibrancy is not just people; it occurs when people engage in commercial and recreational activity. If you put a lot of people who cannot afford to shop/dine in Ketchum in the very middle of Ketchum while taking away the parking for the people who can afford to shop in Ketchum but don’t live in the commercial core, is that the recipe for vibrancy? Or a recipe for disaster? As I have written in previous issues—we have better choices for our housing initiatives—and for our downtown.

Maybe they think vibrancy is a lot of cars driving around looking for a parking spot.

Urban Blight

Dictionary: a deteriorated condition in a city

City: the entire commercial core of Ketchum (and then some)

Analysis:

Were you aware that downtown Ketchum is a blighted urban area? Apparently, it is so decrepit that we require an Urban Renewal Authority to siphon off property taxes to “revitalize” it.

I agree there are a few things that could use some touching up. Like most of our sidewalks and a lot of our streets. The good news is that an Urban Renewal Authority is designed to deliver exactly what we need in that arena. And we have one! The Ketchum Urban Renewal Agency (KURA). It’s been around for over 15 years.

“But wait,” you say, our sidewalks and streets are pretty bad. Wouldn’t KURA have spruced them up by now? 15 years seems like plenty of time. They have done a few blocks. But if you thought that was why we have a URA, you would be mistaken.

Ketchum’s URA #1 priority is low-income housing.7 They plan to spend the lion’s share of ~~our~~ their resources on Bluebird 1, and Bluebird 2, and probably Bluebird 4. “But wait,” you say, “public housing isn’t in the legislative mandate for a URA.”8 That is what IHFA does.

Except in Ketchum. In Ketchum, we have also redefined what an Urban Renewal Agency is. A URA is supposed to invest in infrastructure like parking, not destroy millions of dollars of it. Parking is actually in even Ketchum’s URA mission statement. Yet, the Mayor, by controlling the appointments to KURA, has turned a URA into a public housing agency.

How will the sidewalks get fixed, especially when we have to walk everywhere in the winter (see definition of Parking above)? That’s a very good question. Email Gary Lipton and ask him. You can reach him via participate@ketchumidaho.org. Let me know what he says.

Dark Sky Preserve

Definition: an area, usually surrounding a park or observatory, that restricts artificial light pollution.9

City: for this one, I think we need a picture, care of Visit Sun Valley, which uses the photo below to promote tourism.

I know that you can see stars, but is this what comes to mind when you think, “dark skies?” I am betting that this photo was brightened up a bit in Photoshop, but still. Why would you advertise (with taxpayer dollars) a brightly lit skyline for a Dark Sky Reserve? Unless you didn’t care about that.

Analysis:

The Dark Sky ordinance for Ketchum is, to my observation, “greenwashing.”10 It merely requires outdoor lights to be enclosed and face downward. Unless they are outdoor Christmas trees. In that case, light ‘em up!

Do you want the floor-to-ceiling windows of your six-story hotel lit up all night? No problem. PEG advertises that as a feature of their six-story Marriott at the town's entrance. It’s on their website.11

A better ordinance might be to limit lumens at 100 ft above a property between sunset and sunrise to whatever limit is required for a dark sky to be…dark. Let homeowners accomplish that any way they want.

Local Option Tax

Dictionary: a tax on tourists to offset the impact of tourism.12

City: All of that, but also a tax on LOCALS, to PROMOTE TOURISM.

Analysis:

This one is probably the most dangerous redefinition of them all, as it provides the fuel to finance the plans of the Troika.

I am all for a LOT tax. Like the one we think we have that taxes short-term lodging to pay for the cost of first responders to deal with the tourists and to repair the infrastructure wear and tear from tourism.

But Ketchum (and Hailey and Sun Valley), don’t just tax tourists. They also tax locals every time we eat out or buy a beer. And then, they don’t use that money just for our first responders, they give it to VSV and FSVA to bring in more tourists. A tourist tax that taxes locals to promote tourism isn’t really a tourist tax.

What could we do differently? Eliminate the sales tax on restaurants and bars and jack up the sales tax on hotels and Airbnbs. And put it all into fixing the stuff tourists help break.

Why do you think we don’t do that? I asked that question in a Ketchum Council meeting. I was told that Ketchum models its LOT on Sun Valley’s. Think about what genius it is for Sun Valley Co. to get not just its company town but also Ketchum and Hailey to tax their own citizens for the benefit of SVC. If the Crown family gets a spillover benefit, no skin off their nose. I wrote about this at length in my corporate welfare two-part series.

Whose dictionary are we living in?

I know if I look a little harder at the City’s dictionary, I can find other new definitions of words that I thought I knew what they meant.

The City's blatant misuse of language to achieve non-transparent goals is like something from a dystopian novel—Orwell’s Animal Farm comes to mind. Redefining words to mean what they don’t mean is a common ploy of autocracies—not small towns like Ketchum.

ISSUE #10: Ketchumspeak -- Not What you Learned in School!

The City has redefined words to mean the opposite of the dictionary definition

Transparent

Unhoused

Workforce

Parking

Vibrant

Urban Blight

Dark Sky Preserve

Local Option Tax

Whose dictionary are we living in?

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