The Optimist: Managing ‘growth’

Growth. This word has become a catch-all for our community’s most challenging problems. But does “growth” accurately capture the root issue? While it doesn’t feel this way, we do not have traditional growth in Pitkin County. The population and number of jobs has been roughly flat. SkiCo visits were down this past year. If it’s not growth in the traditional sense, what is the pain that our community feels?

A better descriptor might be “crowding out.” When crossed with relentless demand, the scarcity of residential and commercial real estate has driven significant inflation. This inflation crowds out local residents and businesses. By pushing working residents out of the upper valley, it also increases congestion on Colorado Highway 82.

Reacting to this pain, a group in our community seeks to manage “growth” through opposition to the county-approved airport modernization plan. Out of reasonable anger, opponents propose a series of complex steps to avoid Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) standards and funding. Their goal is to lock in a narrow runway layout. The FAA has told us this layout will prevent the landing of the only known replacement for the CRJ, the Embraer-175. Additionally, to forego FAA funding, the plan’s finances rely exclusively on private aviation revenue. This means we would need to keep private jet traffic high, forever, in order to pay for the runway rebuild and terminal improvements. In this regard, opponents violate our community values by trapping Pitkin County permanently in the private jet business.

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By gambling our commercial service once the current CRJ retires, Aspen would have a reasonable chance of becoming the Yellowstone Club South – only private aviators allowed. As a kicker, opponents risk an extra $160 million, or $8,000 for every county resident, by breaching our county’s contracts with the FAA on all prior grants. So we have a complicated, risky plan to gamble the welfare of 40,000 valley residents to force a maximum of 33 wealthy residents (the unsubstantiated count of Amory Lovins) to fly their smaller private jet, rather than their larger private jet. That is a lot of effort and risk for a very small win.

What if this community instead spent its energy on more direct ways to tackle the crowding out effect? Here are some ideas directly targeted at crowding out:

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Support for long-term rentals/local residential ownership

• We have a real estate transfer tax in the city of Aspen. One may be considered in Pitkin County. We could waive the tax for anyone who could demonstrate permanent local residency for 10 consecutive years or who had rented their home via long-term lease in any five years of the trailing 10 years before sale.
• We have already capped short-term rentals (STRs) via a thoughtful program. We can advance this program further to more convincingly incent long-term versus short-term rental. Related, we could more directly seek to manage “bed” growth via a comprehensive view of STR, hotel, and traditional condo bed counts.
• We can consider a vacancy tax. The tax could be reduced by 50% if the property houses someone unrelated to the owner who works for a local business (not the residence) and by 100% if it houses a second person.
• We could look at zeroing out city and county property taxes on the portion of a property dedicated to an ADU or extra room that is rented or occupied by a local worker who does not work for the primary resident. Perhaps this principle could also be applied to the transfer tax too.
• If “industrial tourism” is the problem, we could evaluate higher lodging taxes on hotels, condos, and STRs. While higher taxes may not curtail demand, the funds could be used to offset the impacts of tourism, including funding more housing.

Emphasis on local business operators over international luxury brands

• It seems time to limit further expansion of international luxury brands in the Aspen core. Other towns have rules limiting the presence of large retail chains and luxury brands. Should we consider our own? Our entire community agrees on the waste of so much Aspen real estate going to the Restoration Hardware experience.

Support for more affordable housing on the urban growth boundary

• Would we be willing to give up small portions of open land around transportation corridors and on the urban boundary? A candidate in the Aspen core would be the Aspen Tennis Club, right next to Centennial, where density already exists. Another candidate would be the Marolt Open Space. Both sites are large enough to retain much of their current use, but to add significant affordable housing. Both are walkable to the core, so housing would add little congestion to Highway 82. These parcels are so large that we could retain substantial green space and recreational use. If we are serious about affordable housing, do we have better options that do not add congestion to 82?
• If we are going to spend community energy on a ballot initiative, how about an initiative to reallocate 66% to 80% of the current and ongoing funds from the large and unusable Wheeler Opera House account, funded by the real estate transfer tax, to affordable housing? The money is there, it grows every year, and there are not enough arts projects on which to use it.

These are just a few ideas to directly address crowding out. Targeting the airport’s physical layout as the mechanism to address “growth” is an unnecessarily complex plan with negative payoff. It risks both our commercial air service and hundreds of millions of dollars. It violates our community values by tying our finances to the most polluting activity that occurs in our valley – private aviation. It has a good chance of making crowding out infinitely worse by turning ASE into a private-only airport. We have many direct tools to address crowding out. Rather than dividing, our community could come together to tackle the core problem.

Greg Goldfarb lives in Aspen.