Park Service kills proposed policy banning bolts. Climbers and wilderness advocates are cheering.

Sneak Peek of the Week

Ski towns drop short-term rental homes from plans for a vacancy tax

Short-term rental property owners, managers and advocates got a bit of good news this week. A legislative plan by ski towns to impose the first vacancy tax on empty homes will not include homes that are rented to vacationers.

Instead, the draft legislation proposed by the 28-member Colorado Association of Ski Towns — or CAST — will focus on properties owned by far-away owners and left vacant except for a week or two a year.

“The vacancy tax bill will target the properties that are truly vacant the majority of the time with hope of incentivizing rentals and, if not, creating revenue for local housing programs,” said Margaret Bowes, the executive director of the Colorado Association of Ski Towns.

Bowes said the association removed short-term rentals from the draft legislation because “communities already have tools to manage STRs and many CAST communities feel they are striking a good balance with STRs through those efforts.”

CAST last year tried to get lawmakers to bite on a bill that would have allowed local governments to levy taxes on empty homes. The idea was the legislation would be either a tool for increasing revenue for affordable housing or spur owners to rent homes to working locals.

The association earlier this year also floated the idea of expanding the real estate transfer tax that has swelled coffers in a dozen Western Slope towns that installed the tax before passage of the 1992 Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, which prevents new taxes without voter approval. Bowes said the association will not push a real estate transfer tax — or a real estate transfer fee — at next year’s legislative session.

Short-term rental owners and advocates with rental platforms like Vrbo and Airbnb last year joined to fight legislation that would have quadrupled property taxes on vacation rentals by taxing them as commercial, not residential, properties. The legislation — Senate Bill 33 — was killed in committee. It was sponsored by state Sen. Chris Hansen, a Democrat from Denver who had previously sponsored legislation that would increase taxes on short-term rental properties. Hansen was reelected to a second term in November and a week later announced that he will resign from the Colorado legislature next month.

At an online webinar this week hosted by the Summit Alliance of Vacation Rental Managers, a public affairs executive with the Expedia Group, which owns Vrbo, said the news that CAST was dropping short-term rental properties from its vacancy tax plan was “huge news.”

But Jaclyn Terwe, with the Expedia Group that owns Vrbo, warned that legislation addressing vacation rentals would “likely be moving forward.”

“We do want you all to be vigilant,” she told the owners and property managers on the call, suggesting that a lawmaker’s amendment to the draft legislation could add short-term rental homes to the vacancy tax proposal.

Terwey said her group is anticipating legislation that would enable local communities to ask voters to increase lodging taxes from 2% to 6% and a bill that would allow municipalities and counties to levy an excise tax on vacation rental homes, possibly on top of lodging taxes.

The Outsider has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the industry from the inside out, plus indulges in the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Breaking Trail

Park Service kills plan that could have banned climbing bolts in wilderness areas

The National Park Service on Wednesday abruptly killed a nearly two-year plan to overhaul climbing policy in wilderness areas that could have led to a ban on fixed anchors.

A Park Service spokesperson said it would rely on existing regulations overseeing fixed anchors in wilderness areas. The proposal to create a process where local land managers could allow fixed anchors in wilderness even though the bolts would be considered “permanent installations,” which are expressly prohibited under the 1964 Wilderness Act, was ardently opposed by climbers and wilderness advocates.

The Park Service received more than 12,000 comments around the proposed plan, making it one of the most controversial policies the agency has ever considered.

Climbers and wilderness advocates cheered the Park Service’s reversal.

>> Click here to read this story

The Playground

How Old Spice is inspiring a rebrand at the National Ski Patrol

Stephanie Cox stepped into a mess two years ago.

“I like cleaning up messes. I like the challenge. They used to call me the sweeper,” says the chief executive of the Lakewood-based National Ski Patrol.

The former executive director of the nonprofit World Child Cancer health organization arrived at the National Ski Patrol two years ago, becoming the fourth director of the organization in only five years. The former bosses reported conflicts with the group’s member-elected board of directors. An online petition was calling for an overhaul of the venerable organization that formed in 1938. Staff were bailing after years of turmoil, which included board members twice suing their own organization. The group was losing its relevance in a quickly shifting ski resort industry.

Cox landed with a plan. She started visiting ski patrols across the country. She shepherded an overhaul of the organization’s training programs. She enlisted staff and kept them onboard. She mended fences with her board. She’s now got 32,000 members across 630 patrols, including more than 5,000 pro ski patrollers.

“I invested in my team. I invested in board relationships. I traveled all over the country. This year I went to Alaska and met with patrollers. I was just listening. I had no magic bullet. I was not on a white horse to save this organization. I got in the trenches and did the hard work,” she says, decked in ski gear after meeting with ski patrollers at Copper Mountain. “You know what I learned? Patrol is about family. We recruit patrollers who are stoked to ski and they love the industry and they love the sport. But then they stay because they become part of a family. I knew I had to join that family and that’s what I did. I went to work on relationships.”

Here are a few questions with Cox, exploring new directions, a renewed mission and how Old Spice helped spark a revival of the 86-year-old NSP brand.

The Colorado Sun: In Colorado we hear a lot about ski patrollers forming unions to push for better pay and benefits for their careers. A majority of your members are volunteers. In Colorado, we don’t necessarily recognize the important role that volunteer patrollers play in the resort industry.

Stephanie Cox: “So volunteer patrollers not only started the National Ski Patrol in 1938, they also started the 10th Mountain Division, (the U.S. Army’s first military mountaineering unit). Volunteers also created every education course that has guided training for patrollers for decades, including a brand new course on outdoor risk management and we’re in the middle of creating leadership development courses. All done by volunteers. These are doctors, nurses, lawyers and medical professionals who are in all our communities and they donate all this time and professional knowledge to create new opportunities for ski patrollers everywhere.”

TCS: The National Ski Patrol is a bit OG …

Cox: What’s OG?

TCS: Old guard. Old guy. Dudes with caterpillar mustaches and skinny skis.

Cox: I think about 60% of our members are over the age of 55. So we are aging out a little bit.

TCS: So as you prepare for that next generation of ski patrollers, you’ve created NSP’s first sponsored- athlete program. … You have a 16-year-old on that team. What was the impetus for that?

Cox: So last April, I was having a meeting with my leadership team and we were talking about NSP as this iconic, legacy brand. I love marketing and I love brands. And we were talking about the question of relevancy. How do we acknowledge the past and then look to the future? And I thought of Old Spice. Old Spice was founded the exact same time as NSP and around the year 2000, they were having a real problem in the market because everybody thought about it as your grandfather’s fragrance. And there were all these new competitors like Axe. They needed a refresh and they hired some million-dollar brand agency and they decided to be irreverent and kind of laugh at themselves. And they came up with an idea to market to women with this “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” commercial that they aired during the Super Bowl in 2010. And Old Spice became the number one selling brand again. I walked my leadership team through the Old Spice commercials. I showed my division directors, my board members. I showed them how to take an 85-year-old brand and make it relevant again. And the first step was finding young people who are dynamic athletes on TikTok and Instagram.They have gone through a hundred hours of training to be patrollers and they are also competitors. We are going to give them money and give them kits and they are going to be our new ambassadors. We’ve got seven patrollers, including four women and three men, from patrols all over the country. They go out and talk to skiers and other patrollers about safety and service. We are excited. We are the new Old Spice.

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read the rest of the Q&A with Stephanie Cox

The Guide

Leadville mine waste reclamation plan drops cyanide from the mix

Nick Michael knows even the word “cyanide” fuels a sense of foreboding. It’s the poison deployed by villains in all kinds of movies. It’s also a hard-to-handle toxin used across the world for extracting precious metals from ore.

“I’ve been in the mining industry my whole life and there’s no avoiding the cyanide question,” Michael said. “It stirs a lot of emotions.”

Michael didn’t want to use cyanide in his controversial plan to extract tiny bits of silver and gold from thousands of tons of mine waste piled around Leadville.

“It wasn’t our first choice. But it’s so hard to avoid,” he said.

Then he and his partners at the 43-acre CJK Milling project on the edge of Leadville found Extrakt Process Solutions, which offers an untested possibility that could allow Michael to extract gold from mine dumps around the city without using the decades-old sodium cyanide leaching technique that leaves dangerous waste in lined tailings ponds.

“This stuff is pretty environmentally friendly, from what we understand,” said Michael, of Extrakt’s patented chemical process. “It breaks down. It doesn’t leave remnants. No one has a crystal ball and it’s a very new technology, but it’s really exciting. Our preliminary leach testing results are incredible. We are practically ending our process with drinking-water quality on some of these early tests.”

The proposal to fire up the dormant Leadville Mill in the California Gulch tributary of the Arkansas River has galvanized a vocal group of Lake County citizens who are urging the state to deny approval for the reclamation project.

Michael has a pending application with the Colorado Department of Reclamation, Mining and Safety that would allow him to truck as much as 140,000 tons of ore a year from mine waste dumps piled at dozens of locations around Leadville to the mill he and his partners bought in 2008. The mill has a 2014 permit from the state to process a smaller amount of ore using a different method. The investors behind CJK Milling are asking the state to amend the mill’s reclamation permit to increase the amount of ore it can process using cyanide leaching. The CJK Milling plan does not include mining ore, but gathering it for processing.

Locals in the headwaters of the Arkansas River are wary of a return to mining in a growing community that has spent decades working to mitigate the damage from the hundreds of silver, lead and zinc hardrock mines that dot California Gulch. They are not keen to see dozers disturbing slag piles that have been remediated and trucks hauling that mine waste across town.

In the 1980s the Environmental Protection Agency designated the mine dumps around Leadville as a Superfund site, launching a more than 50-year-old cleanup project. The EPA’s sixth five-year review of the California Gulch Superfund site found that decades of work to clean runoff flowing from miles of mine tunnels across the 18-square-mile site has prevented hundreds of tons of cadmium, lead, copper, manganese, iron and zinc from flowing into the Arkansas River every year. The work also had cleaned soil and reduced the community’s exposure to metals left over from more than 140 years of mining. More than 90% of the cleanup of the thousands of mines around Leadville has been completed.

“All those EPA protections are working. We are protective of our historic heritage in Leadville and mining is our heritage,” said Ruth Goltzer with the Concerned Citizens for Lake County group that is scrutinizing the CJK Milling proposal, noting that the plan to remove slag piles on the east side of town is inside a National Historic Landmark District. “We have so many questions.”

>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read this story

White River closes its Glenwood Springs office due to lack of staffing

The White River National Forest, the most trafficked forest in the country, is closing its office in downtown Glenwood Springs due to a lack of staffing.

As the agency faces a looming budget crunch — with plans to suspend all seasonal hires next year — the 2.3 million-acre White River can not find staff to work in the forest’s headquarters.

“We are looking for solutions to our staffing issues,” said White River Forest Supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams in a statement announcing the closure. While Christmas tree permits can be secured online at recreation.gov, anyone seeking permits for things like cutting firewood or mushroom harvesting needs to visit district offices in Rifle or Minturn. The Aspen-Sopris District Office in Carbondale is closed until its new building opens next summer.

Yet the forest is a primary economic engine fueling not just prosperity in places like Aspen and Vail, but some of the highest home prices in the country. The closure of the forest’s main office comes as the White River’s 11 ski areas prepare for holiday crowds. Those 11 ski areas — including some of the busiest in the country owned by corporate giants Alterra Mountain Co., Aspen Skiing Co., Powdr and Vail Resorts — regularly log more than 6.6 million visits a year. Recreational visits account for 96% of the White River Forest’s annual $1.6 billion economic impact in the communities on its borders, the largest economic contribution of any forest in the country.

All that recreation also spikes nearby housing prices, which in turn makes it nearly impossible to house Forest Service workers. The White River Forest has long struggled to attract and retain workers, largely due to the cost of living in the communities it surrounds. A high percentage of potential employees who are asked to join the White River Forest turn down the job because of the lack of affordable housing anywhere near the forest.

The White River is working through a long-term management plan that will mitigate the impact of ever-surging recreation while maintaining access, protecting watersheds and sustaining wildlife habitat. And now it’s got a smaller budget, fewer workers and one less office to get all that done.

— j

The Colorado Sun is part of The Trust Project. Read our policies.

Corrections & Clarifications

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.