House the essential workers, not the ski bums

Hooray to our Pitkin County commissioners for saying “no!” to Aspen’s attempted reach into Pitkin County taxpayers’ pockets to satisfy the bottomless pit of demand for socialist-taxpayer-subsidized housing for everyone who chooses to live in Pitkin County.  Nancy Reagan famously said “just say no” to the demands of such addicts. Teddy Roosevelt told the freeloaders of his time the same thing and then said “bully!”

As the former chair of the Citizens’ Grant Review Board for the town of Snowmass Village, I can share a perspective on giving where giving counts and to saying no to giving where giving may be popular but where it is clearly not essential to supporting the welfare of our community.
I suggest for our Board of County Commissioners that we consider the decision matrix that I put in place for TOSV grants: be as generous as possible to our most essential community members and say no to everyone else. To our policemen and women, to our EMTs and our other first responders, to our emergency room nurses, to our firemen and women, and last and not least, to the beloved teachers of our children and teenagers, let’s subsidize the housing needs of these pillars of our community to the max.  

And let’s give our less essential community members, however popular they may be, in particular our unnaturally glorified ski bums, the nudge to say goodbye to Peter Pan.

John Hornblower

Snowmass Village