V2N34: Why Ketchum's Comp Plan is So Bad (For Residents)

And suggestions on how to improve governance

The lame-duck Bradshaw administration is scrambling to impose a decade of dictates on Ketchum via the Comprehensive Plan and Future Land Use Map (FLUM) they are jamming down our throats.

I object to the process and the content, and I hope the next Council can remediate the damage. If this is TLDR for you, skip to the suggestion part and let me know your thoughts.

Bad Process Designed to Jam Hundreds of New Tourism Condos into Ketchum at the Baldy Bases

A Comp Plan (with its accompanying FLUM) is required by the state every ten years. Ketchum last adopted a Comp Plan in 2014.

When Bradshaw last ran for Mayor, he did not mention the need to issue a new Comp Plan in his next term. Once elected, he made no mention of it. It wasn’t until it became apparent that one was required that he acknowledged the need for one.

His first proposal was to take the 2014 Plan and change the date. I kid you not. This was what then-City Planner Frick proposed, with a rationale that everything the community wants for itself hadn’t changed. What? What about the influx of new residents, the advent of work-from-home, the outsourcing of the police force, the change in management at Sun Valley Co., and all the other major things that had occurred in the prior decade? Not relevant, according to her. And the Mayor agreed.

With Ms. Frick’s departure to convert her part-time role as Executive Director of the Ketchum Urban Renewal Authority (KURA) to a full-time role (to get the Washington Lot replaced by a housing project), the new City Planner wanted to do a better job than just changing the data.

Still, based on time and money, the Mayor resisted, and the City Administrator concurred. The result was a half-measure, an “audit” of the 2014 Comp Plan to update it only as necessary. This was deemed to be faster and cheaper. The real imperative was to revise the clearly outdated zoning code, which requires a new FLUM and a new Comp Plan.

The initial game plan was to hire a consultant, do the bare minimum to get the Comp Plan out, and then focus on zoning. But there was some resistance to this by some of the staff and elected officials, not to mention some of the City Hall gadflies (including me, but not just me).

This led to some focus groups and surveys to create a veneer of transparency and inclusion without actually being transparent or inclusive. The surveys were slapped up and not statistically representative of the community. As for the focus groups, did you feel consulted if you went to the City’s final one? There is a generally accepted process for a Comp Plan, but the City of Ketchum did not follow that.

The draft was released to the public on December 4th of last year, without a FLUM. Hmm. After the public comment period had commenced, a FLUM finally appeared with massive upzoning near the Baldy bases. I have attended most of the public meetings of the Council and P&Z over the past five years. Not one of them had upzoning near the Baldy bases as an agenda topic. NOT ONE. So, who put this in? No one is raising their hand, but it could not have gone in without the collusion of the Mayor, City Administrator, and City Planner.

Why? That’s when the lies started. The Mayor stated that the upzoning was intended for workforce housing in Ketchum three times in my presence. Given that he has frequently stated that Ketchum cannot regulate short-term rentals, and the empirical data shows that the incremental condos near the Baldy bases become short-term rentals and second homes, saying that this was for workforce housing was a bald-faced lie.

But this is the same guy who lied to the community that Bluebird was intended to house the “lifeblood” (his word) of Ketchum, our teachers, healthcare workers, and first responders.

The City Planner, in multiple public meetings, stated that the City couldn’t do anything to prevent the hundreds of potential condos in the upzoned areas from being STRs/2d homes.

So what is the Mayor’s real motivation? You will have to ask him.

So we have a Comp Plan and FLUM that will lead to hundreds of new tourism condos near the Baldy bases, doing the same thing to the remaining locals’ neighborhoods in Warm Springs that upzoning has done to West Ketch—turn them into a de facto hotel.

Single-family residence owners in the upzoned areas are in for a surprise when they become “non-conforming uses.” The City has tried to minimize this impact on those owners, but they know they are getting played.

Now I wish they had just changed the date on the old Comp Plan.

Bad Content: What’s the Problem With Hundreds More Short-Term Rentals?

The more you live around STRs, the more that’s obvious to you. You lose your neighborhood because you don’t have any full-time neighbors. Traffic? Goes up. Parking? Gets harder. Crime? According to data from SVED, Ketchum's crime rate has doubled as its long-term rentals with locals have been replaced by short-term rentals for tourists.

I am not against STRs. I am against the hotelization of Ketchum and the destruction of residential neighborhoods.

We are a tourist community and a tourist economy. But if that is all we are, and we prioritize our visitors over ourselves, there won’t be much left of our community in a decade under this Comp Plan/FLUM.

And most STR owners are not contributing their fair share to Ketchum. Property taxes from STRs are less than 3% of our overall budget. On a county-wide basis, renting them out contributes less than 5% of our GDP. I am willing to bet that STRs consume more than 5% of our community resources.

Even with the LOT tax, STR guests generate only about 20% of that revenue. That is less than the 25% paid by locals. Think about that. Is it really a tourist tax?

A significant portion of STRs in Ketchum, as many as a third, ignore the requirement to register with the City and conform to basic safety regulations. We don’t know how many this is, as the City hasn’t done any reporting on it over the past two years (why not?).

A lot of locals are involved in the STR industry. According to a new study commissioned by the Sun Valley Board of Realtors, 25% of STRs in Blaine County are owned by people who live in Blaine County. They don’t specifically provide the breakdown for Ketchum, but it's probably in the ballpark.

75% of STRs are not owned by locals. Many of them are owned by part-time homeowners who rent them out to pay the mortgage and use them anywhere from a few months to most of the year for personal enjoyment. They pay property taxes and support local businesses; some are a significant source of local philanthropy.

How many are owned by “investors?” My interpretation of the SVBR data is at least 10%. In Ketchum alone, that is dozens of units. Whether “local” or out-of-state, these people are taking advantage of bad state legislation to run under-taxed hotels in Ketchum. They are leeches.

Why would the Mayor push a future land use map that prioritizes their interests over ours?

This Is All Part of Their Aspenization Program

What I call “Aspenization” is replacing low-revenue locals with high-revenue tourists/2d home owners, while taxing everyone possible to build low-income housing projects that incentivize employers to depress wages. It turns a community into a hotel.

This process has been championed by the Troika of Bradshaw/Breen/Hamilton for almost eight years, and all we have to do is look around to see the “benefit” they have bestowed on us. In one of the rare statistically valid surveys of residents (by Visit Sun Valley), the decline in quality of life was their #1 complaint. Yet that is never discussed in a City Council meeting.

Indeed, the Bradshaw administration has outsourced almost every function of a normal city to focus on two things: building more condos and building more low-income housing. These now dominate their agendas and the budget.

Suggestions to Reclaim Ketchum For Its Residents

We could do much to make Ketchum work far better for its residents and restore inclusiveness and transparency in our governance. And we can do it more fiscally responsibly while providing better customer service for our taxpayers. Here are some of my suggestions—what are yours?

Reverse Fire Consolidation: I am for county-wide consolidation, but not for what has been done. Ketchum fire taxes are quadrupling; we give away all our assets while retaining the liabilities, and get no service improvement. The first rule of government should be: “Do no harm.” This harmed us.

Restore the Ketchum Police Department: This is not a dig at the Blaine County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO)—they serve with integrity. It is about strengthening our community. A strong community has a police force that lives in its community. We can have that. I also think it might be cheaper, but it's worth examining even if it’s not.

Eliminate the Ketchum Housing Department: a staffing and consulting budget approaching $1 million a year not to house Ketchum essential workers in Ketchum? We are far more likely to get what we need by partnering with ARCH and WRCHT at a much lower cost. While we are at it, we should join every other City in Blaine County and withdraw from the Blaine County Housing Authority.

House Our Essential Workers: Teachers, First Responders, Healthcare, and City workers provide a public function. Let’s stop squeezing them out of Ketchum. We can build excellent housing for them throughout the community and the hospital.

Replace LOT on Locals with LOT on Tourists: Locals pay over 25% of the “tax on tourists.” This is not what a LOT is supposed to be. We can fix this.

Use LOT To Offset the burden of hosting tourists: We need to stop using LOT to promote increased tourism and use it to fix our roads, sidewalks, and other infrastructure.

Reform KURA: KURA could be a tremendous asset to Ketchum. Instead of using it as a tool to build low-income housing projects in our commercial zone, we should use it to improve the infrastructure in our commercial zone. The first step should be to replace its entire board and restore its independence. Only Ketchum residents should allocate Ketchum taxes. KURA should be representative of the community in which it invests. And no council members should ever sit on KURA.

Stop Using Ketchum Taxes to Subsidize Private Profits, at least not without taxpayers knowing what is going on and their inclusion in the decision. When you total it all, millions of dollars in Ketchum taxes go to corporate subsidies via unelected boards like VSV, FSVA, and BCHA. I am all for the World Cup—great event. But I don’t think Ketchum taxpayers should be subsidizing the profits of 5B Productions. This is not about reducing tourism. It is about not using taxpayer resources to subsidize tourism growth.

Increase Transparency/Accessibility/Customer Service: There is literally “an app for that.” We need that app.

Change our Form of Government? We should seriously consider Ketchum lifer and former Council member Annie Corrock’s proposal to replace the strong mayor system with a city manager system. You can contact her at ketchumbettergov@gmail.com for more information. I hope the Library sponsors a dialogue on this.

Change how we vote: we can’t have people who 2/3 of the community votes AGAINST in public office. Let’s go to ranked choice voting in Ketchum. We should at least have a dialogue about the pros/cons.

Change how we manage City Hall: instead of managing Ketchum according to council member priorities (yes, that’s what the City Administrator does), we should manage according to resident priorities as expressed in the Comprehensive Plan. The Council Calendar can address this, as can the budget. We also need to make decisions based on data and analysis. I can address this in another essay.

There is a lot of work to do! But we can complete almost all of the above in the first year of a new City Council.

What would you add to the list?

What Can You Do?

Run for office. Our next election is in November. We will elect a new mayor and two new council members (the Troika’s terms are up). If more of us were to step up and take our turn contributing our time to running Ketchum, it would be better to run. If you do it right, it is a thankless task; it shouldn’t be something you personally benefit from; it is something you do for your community and your children.

Vote for competent people: separate the personality from the policy. Do your work on the candidates. Don’t vote for them just because you “like” them. Vote for them because you think they will do the best job in representing your interests.

Speak up; you live here. You have the right to say how Ketchum is run. You can make your voice heard at public meetings, by submitting public comments, and by bringing issues into public discourse via letters to the IME and 5B Gazette.

We get the government we let them do to us.