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Saddle Sore: We must deal with it or leave

Tony Vagneur writes here on Saturdays and welcomes your comments at ajv@sopris.net.
Tony Vagneur/Courtesy photo

We hear today from fellow workers, other columnists, interested citizens, and raconteurs of various disguise that there is unhappiness amongst the local class. Attribution usually goes to too much money in town; no respect for the history of the town; self-entitled people making life miserable for those working in restaurants and other tourist-serving industries. Short-term rentals are taking away long-term worker housing.

These sentiments are not exactly new. To paraphrase Vern Gosdin and his best-selling song, may I say, “This Ain’t Our First Rodeo,” folks.

Years ago, I posed the question in this column, “When did big money take over Aspen?” The answer, of course, was when B. Clark Wheeler came to town in 1880 and basically took it away from the original settlers. And, he owned the local paper. The one in which this column appears. You can look it up.



The building code change that allowed the development of condominiums in the early 1960s was a very contentious issue; two sides squaring off, plugging concern for the small-town environment against developers and real estate folks. The concern was that condominiums catered primarily to wealthy second-home buyers and tourists rather than locals or working families. We know how it shook out and should be thankful that all those condo units aren’t single-family houses or apartment buildings scattered around the countryside. The first condominium complex built in Aspen likely was the Mittendorf over on Original in 1963.

This condo development, which coincided with other rapid growth in Pitkin County, had turned much of the population against sprawl and development. The 1970s era of Shellman and Edwards, the downzoning geeks, with help from Michael Kinsey, had passed legislation telling farmers and ranchers what they could do, and how they could do it, with their land. It wasn’t quite fair; only a few people owned most of the larger tracts of private property in Pitkin County, but many others, including non-property-owning individuals, felt compelled to get behind the downzoning. Many bad feelings, never to be repaired, were created. As Michael Kinsey said to me, years later and in retrospect, perhaps the BOCC should have brought the farmers and ranchers into the conversation from the beginning. Thank you for your honesty, Michael.




It was the late 1980s, we’d sold the last ranch, amid some familial contention, just as there was for the others, but that seems to be the major evolutionary force of ranching sales in this country. For many of them, the third generation seems to find the thread that unravels it all — decades of hard work, dreams realized, marriages, children, divorces, prized horses, well-bred cattle, great cow dogs, beautiful open spaces, and then one day, it’s gone.

Big changes were underfoot in Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley. People were becoming more demanding; ranching was being squeezed out by the need for big lots and big houses. Politics were becoming more liberal, and many of those who’d spent much of their lives here felt marginalized. Some in my family were unhappy with the direction of Pitkin County, where they had been living since birth, and many conversations were laced with anger at the BOCC and local governments, in general. It was the beginning of the downvalley migration of long-time locals.

Dwight Shellman, one of the architects of the downzoning, once accused us ranchers of living on $50 million fiefdoms, as though that was uncivilized and un-American. Too bad you didn’t stick around, Dwight (RIP). Thanks in part to you, they’re worth a lot more than that now.

We’ve just battled through the disagreements and myriad discussions on the airport and whether we should expand, re-surface, or what, and finally a decision was made by the voters. We’ll move forward, sucking it up or cheering it on, but we’ll get through it. Just like we’ll do with the S-curves; maybe we’ll make a decision on that, or maybe we’ll kick it down the road another 10-20 years.

And now we’re having angst and worry about the polarization of the population among billionaires, the middle class, and worker bees; housing and raising a family in the town where we love and work. In 40 years, we’ll be fighting medical lawsuits from those whose childhoods were spent in Lumberyard affordable housing, inhaling backwash from jets at the airport.  

We’ve been down these roads before. We may not like all the solutions, but life will move on, and in the end, we’ll all be worrying about something else. In the meantime, don’t forget how fortunate we are to live in this amazing valley.

Years ago, someone told one of my uncles, who was very unhappy with the way Pitkin County was going, “You gotta find a way to deal with it, and if you can’t, you need to leave. Otherwise, it’ll drive you crazy.”

Just remember what Edward Abby said, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”