V2N27: Ketchum Will Give Away Its $10mm Fire Station And Prime Land In the LI Zone--And Gets A Tax Increase in Return

You can't make this stuff up

There is a Ketchum Council meeting on Monday, June 2nd. The agenda is here. In that meeting, they plan to do several monumentally stupid things that will cost Ketchum taxpayers millions of dollars.

The Fire House Giveaway

If you have lived in Ketchum for the full Bradshaw debacle, you know that he spearheaded a $9.5 million bond issue for a new firehouse. Moving the firehouse meant he could give the land under the old city hall to the for-profit developer from Seattle to build Bluebird.

But he needed a new City Hall, so he sold the Washington Lot to the Ketchum Urban Renewal Agency (KURA) and used the proceeds for the new City Hall—a complicated and elegant series of transactions that began what I call his Aspenization program for Ketchum.¹

He also tried to consolidate the Ketchum and Sun Valley fire departments. He failed. But he did not give up! He successfully consolidated the Ketchum Fire Department with some of the smaller departments in Blaine County.

If you are one of the 71% of voters who voted for this, you voted for a pig in a poke. Read on and let me know in the comments if you think you voted for this.

What is the City of Ketchum giving away for fire consolidation?

• All the fire personnel as of the end of day 9/30/25, along with any form of compensation for them, the City controls.

• Every bit of fire equipment in the City of Ketchum (fire engines, autos, radios, hoses, you name it). There are no conditions for any of it to be used in or for Ketchum.

• The firehouse will be leased to the new district for $1 a year, until Ketchum taxpayers have paid off the bond. Then the City will GIVE the firehouse and its land to the new district.

• The fire training facility and the land under it.

• funding and operational support until the new district starts receiving taxes from its new property tax in January 2026.

• The City will provide irrigation and snow removal for the fire station at Ketchum taxpayer expense.

• The City will maintain the fire hydrant system at Ketchum taxpayer expense.

• $450,000 in cash. Because the rest isn’t enough?

And what do Ketchum taxpayers get in return?

• There is nothing about fire service levels in this MOU. Things could get worse, with no recourse to the City.

• A significant property tax increase to pay for services from the new district. We will lose control over how those taxes are set and spent. We don’t know what the tax level will be yet. But it will be at least 40% more than we used to pay.

• About $800k in annual property tax savings would have gone to the prior fire service regime.

Yes, the Ketchum taxpayers pay for the firehouse, the fire training center, extremely valuable land, and every bit of fire equipment, and our Council gives it all away, plus some extra cash, just so the Council could get $800k in more property taxes out of us.

This is a fantastic deal for the residents of the former Wood River and Magic fire districts. The residents of Ketchum will be subsidizing their fire services in perpetuity. However, it is a bad deal for those who live and pay taxes in Ketchum.

It is such a bad deal for Ketchum that you might think I am exaggerating. Please read the deal here and let me know in the comments what you think I have wrong.

Why Are They Doing This?

Once again, Bradshaw has cut a terrible deal for Ketchum.² His rationale? The MOU says this is intended as a precursor to county-wide fire consolidation.

That is a load of horse patootie. Based on their history, no one in the City of Sun Valley government has the slightest intention of giving up control of any of their city services. And, it looks like the City of Hailey agrees with them. As does the City of Carey. As does the City of Bellevue.³ None of them participated in this consolidation. If anyone wants to bet we will see county-wide fire consolidation in the next 20 years, I will take that bet.

In my opinion, this deal is a gross and willful violation of the Council’s fiduciary duty to the City. I hope the next Council holds them liable for their actions and does whatever it can to unwind them.

But Wait—There’s More!

That’s right. As if the firehouse hosing isn’t enough, we continue to get the short end of the Blaine County Housing Authority (BCHA) stick. Remember that, despite its name, no other city in Blaine County supports BCHA. The County itself provides less than 10% of its budget.

BCHA is a tool of the Ketchum City Council. Its Executive Director is the Ketchum Housing Director, and the staff of BCHA is the staff of the Ketchum Housing Department (KHD), plus the hours they get out of other Ketchum City staff (like the communications director).

In the Monday Council meeting, BCHA or KHD (what’s the difference?) will ask the Council for a budget of $1.9 million. That’s about 20% of the City’s run-rate budget (after jettisoning the fire department). I have stated in previous posts that staffing costs alone are approaching $500,000. I was wrong. They want a staff budget of $678K for the coming year, up from $475K, plus another $140K for consultants—labor costs of $818K a year.

What do Ketchum taxpayers get for this $1.9 million? It’s in the picture above (the red stuff is theirs, not mine).

• $818K for a team that will build the equivalent of 1/2 a Bluebird on the Y parking lot that will not be available to house essential Ketchum workers, and that runs the Lift Tower Lodge

• $500k goes back to BCHA. For zero services to Ketchum that I can determine.

• How much goes to actually housing people? Only $500k.

We pay $1.9mm to yield $500k in actual housing.

If you voted for the 0.5% for Housing, how do you feel knowing that only 0.125% is going to housing, and that almost none of that goes to housing Ketchum essential workers—some of it goes to house people who don’t even work in Ketchum.

Do you think you might have been misled?

Our Council goes along with this as if nothing is wrong with it.

Have The Boys Sold Out?

I have come to expect Council Members Breen and Hamilton to accommodate the Mayor’s giveaway programs. That’s why I call them “The Troika.”

However, our newer council members ran on pro-locals platforms. What happened to them?

When he voted for fire consolidation, Council Member Cordovano admitted this was a Ketchum taxpayer giveaway to the rest of Blaine County. Boy, was he right. It’s not his money.

Both Hutchinson and Cordovano are fully onboard the program to build more Bluebirds, fully aware that the way the City is proceeding will not provide housing for Ketchum’s essential workers, or even Ketchum workers, or, in some cases, people who work at all.

They were so excited to get the World Cup to Ketchum that they supported the hundreds of thousands of dollars of Ketchum taxpayers’ resources to boost the profits of Sun Valley Co. and 5B Productions. It was a great event and a good party, but it would have happened without public taxes going to support private profits.

And now they are on board with the upzoning for more tourist condos near the Baldy bases, in direct defiance of most of the residents of those neighborhoods and the good of Ketchum.

With their support for fire consolidation, the Ketchum Housing Department, and upzoning, they have sold out the voters and taxpayers of Ketchum. For what?

Has “The Troika” become “The Cinco?”

What Can We Do?

For now, not much. Show up at meetings and be ignored by your elected officials. Write letters to the paper that the Council doesn’t care about.

But on the first Friday of September, you can do something that will lead to change. You could run for office.

If you don’t have thick enough skin for that or the time for it, find someone competent to run for office.

In November, determine who the most qualified people are running for Mayor and the two Council seats, and knock on doors to get them elected.

Or else you will get four more years of this horse patootie. Your taxes will go up, and your quality of life will go down. Ketchum will become one big AirBNB with hundreds of new condos for tourists, hundreds of new housing units for underpaid tourism industry workers (at your expense), and buildings as big as the “new” zoning code will permit. Good-bye Ketchum. Helloooo [Aspen, Vail, Jackson, Park City].

Elections matter.

1. Aspenization is when you zone a city to benefit the tourism industry and provide millions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies to the tourism industry for low-income housing projects to keep its wages depressed, increase hotel and tourism condo density, and squeeze out the middle class so their long-term rentals can be Airbnb’d.

2. The list is long and includes no workforce housing in the Dog Park deal, the hundreds of thousands of dollars lost on the Sun Valley Rd takeover, the Main Street project, Bluebird, the Marriott (on its way to litigation), the hole-in-the-ground situation, and whatever else you think I missed.

3. I note that none provide funding to the Blaine County Housing Authority (BCHA). Only Ketchum is that dumb.