November 6
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November 6
November 6
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Ballot Issue 2A, the Short Term Rental (STR) tax, fully misses the mark. The administrative over-reach seeks to add 5% and 10% excise taxes to the nightly sales taxes of various categories of short term rental properties. The rationale, thanks to a financially illiterate city council, is strictly punitive. At the end of the day, this STR tax is specifically designed to discourage tourism. It will be detrimental to Aspen.
Three types of rental properties will be affected by the tax:
An “owner occupied” rental is a local’s primary residence that is rented out no more than 120 nights a year. Think of your neighbors who live here but travel a lot so they rent their Aspen home short term. With the passage of 2A, the nightly sales tax rate would increase from 11.3% to 16.3%. Your neighbor will pass this along to the renters.
A “classic” rental refers to all residential units on the rental market that are specifically not hotels or lodges, which are categorically exempt from the STR tax. The extremely broad “classic” category ranges from large, luxury homes to traditional condominiums, the small complexes you see throughout the downtown core. This category gets whacked the hardest because the tax’s wide net captures the VRBO-type rentals and “party homes” at the center of the STR debate. It will be subject to a 10% excise tax, bringing the nightly rate to an astonishing 21.3%.
Take that, owners of investment properties! City council does not like you running “mini hotels” in Aspen when you only pay residential property taxes! And as for the hundreds of other legacy condominium units that have been rented short term to people who have preferred condos to hotels for the past 50 years, council wrongly believes these are equally to blame for the negative impacts to the community such as parking, noise, traffic and displacement of locals, despite their business model never having changed. For these traditional condos, their long-time group business, families and foreign visitors will simply go elsewhere. Aspen will price them out of the market.
The “lodge exempt” condo-hotel properties, specifically Aspen Square, The Gant, North of Nell and Aspen Alps, have been detrimentally singled out. Comprised of individually-owned condos and functioning as hotels under unified brands and marketing models with comparable amenities to hotels, these properties are only “exempt” from individual-unit business licenses, not the proposed 5% STR tax. Oddly, “fractionals” like Dancing Bear and the Residences at The Little Nell which only differ from condo-hotels in that they have multiple-owner vs individual-owner deeds, get a pass on the tax.
Issue 2A was originally conceived to mitigate for negative impacts to the community from nuisance STRs, however, the perceived impacts are distinctly not being driven by the operation of traditional condominiums and condo-hotels. Issue 2A simply targets the wrong market segments. These properties have seen relatively flat occupancies over the years and the notion that their impacts to the community have increased is incorrect. If anything, these sectors are competing with STRs for staff, not generating new demand for employees. And each condo-hotel already provides proprietary housing to a large percentage of its staff.
Most notably, condos and condo-hotel unit owners pay the RETT, directly benefitting subsidized housing. Furthermore, the short term rental of traditional condos and condo-hotel units has never displaced local households.
These properties should not be subject to any STR tax.
Leading the charge to tax condominiums and condo-hotels has been councilwoman Rachel Richards. Her over-simplified rationale is that these properties pay residential property taxes (6.9%) when hotels pay commercial (27%). But, clean up on aisle five. Richards is looking solely at tax rate, not actual taxes paid. A simple analysis shows that last year’s taxes paid were equitable on a square footage basis. Property values and assessed values are derived using different methods, so to apply a commercial tax rate to a condo property, the assessor would have to value the property as a commercial one, dramatically reducing its value. Richards’ premise is fatally flawed: she’s comparing apples to kumquats as a spiteful means of soaking owners of private properties who she disdains. But it’s Aspen’s tourism that actually gets hurt.
One little-known secret of 2A is a provision that siphons nearly a third of the total revenue collected (over $3 million in year one) for “infrastructure and environmental projects,” the result of a half-baked and leading community survey that asked where the expected windfall should be spent. Tax first, then maybe fund a pet project or two.
City finance director Pete Strecker recently acknowledged that occupancy numbers are trending downward, but pointed to summer 2022 nightly rates which were “way up.” He concluded that this simply “balances the books, so to speak.” No Pete, that’s more flawed logic from the city. Inflation has already dramatically raised the costs of supplies and utilities, and the Aspen lodging community is bracing for a significant reduction in occupancy with lower nightly rates amid a looming recession and global uncertainty. It’s no time to tax our traditional tourist accommodations.
Focus on the real problems. Vote no on 2A.
Be like Breckenridge, where traditional “resort accommodations” are exempt from the STR debate. Contact TheRedAntEM@comcast.net.
November 6
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The recent passage of Ordinance 14 that changed local land use policy to allow for the development of residential multi-family subsidized housing complexes in all zone districts in Aspen is already wreaking havoc in long-established local neighborhoods. In short, whether it be in the West End, off Cemetery Lane or in Oklahoma Flats, Aspen’s few remaining vacant lots are being quickly snapped up and slated for massive development that fulfills city council’s utopian decision to shoe-horn high-density public housing into incongruous, quiet confines via quick, administrative review processes.
It is widely known that Aspen’s subsidized housing program is a dumpster fire, but this latest move, which passed 5-0 in typical city council “echo chamber” fashion, is a disgusting over-reach and stunning rebuke of the Aspen Area Community Plan (AACP), our community guiding and philosophical document. In fact, the AACP is revered as the holy grail when its plans of action to achieve “community goals” suit the city and its leaders, but when its aspirational and visionary principles are applied to the vilified free market homeowners who make subsidized housing in Aspen possible, it is quickly ignored.
For all the talk of Aspen’s modesty-scaled built environment and the critical need to preserve our small town character, forcing large, dense, subsidized housing complexes into inadequate spaces in quiet residential neighborhoods is antithetical to the community values espoused in the AACP. But given the no-longer-thinly-veiled disdain for free market property owners, these neighborhoods be damned. Subsidized housing belongs everywhere now. And the result is that the AACP has become a hypocritical manifesto serving to support some and to distinctly punish others.
The central themes of the AACP, last updated in 2012, are to maintain community character and quality of life, re-evaluate the impacts of development, manage the adverse effects of development and explore zoning solutions that re-affirm our small-town heritage. Notably, this maintenance, re-evaluation, management and exploration is directed specifically at curbing and controlling free market activity, never subsidized housing development. In the city’s eyes, such development is without effect or impact, when in reality, building dense multi-family complexes in residential neighborhoods is akin to allowing a boisterous pub or gas station in those same locations: completely wrong, and detrimental to the small town neighborhood character that is so regularly referenced.
Throughout the advisory document, highfalutin community aspirations abound, but are thrown by the wayside when private property owners seek to, God forbid, preserve their quality of life and the quiet enjoyment of their properties. The AACP no longer applies to them, if it ever did. In fact, this new subsidized housing development legislation flies directly in the face of many critical tenets of the document:
Governance: The AACP states that good governance is transparent, participatory, inclusive, collaborative, civil, consensus-oriented, responsive, effective, efficient and accountable. Just because Ordinance 14 passed unanimously at the council table in no way makes the resulting legislation inclusive, collaborative or civil. In fact, it’s just the opposite. The punitive intent and overt destruction of property values is being proudly celebrated as a “win” toward city council’s wealth redistribution goals.
The Aspen Idea: The AACP reminds that we value authentic engagement with others, including civil discourse about the community we want to create and maintain. This collaboration is intended to create common ground to reduce stratification in the town. Right. The community we want to create and maintain should never intentionally support such deliberate preference for some over others. We are already seeing the opening battles of an unprecedented class war. This legislation makes things dramatically worse.
Growth Management: The AACP condemns recent growth, defined as an increase in population, jobs, infrastructure, demand for services and an increase in the size of buildings, that is inconsistent with the history, scale, density and context of our small town character.
It says that limiting mass and scale limits the public financial burden of additional infrastructure and government operations and housing mitigation offsets impacts on the community: schools, roads, public transit, water, sewer and traffic. But the city does not view the development of subsidized housing as any kind of growth. Only free market development causes that! Hundreds more full-time, year-round residents will mysteriously have zero impact on our critical infrastructure.
Housing: Long cited in historical AACPs, “(subsidized) housing should be compatible with the scale and character of the community,” and notably, new subsidized housing “should demonstrate compatibility with the massing, scale and character of the neighborhood.” That is, until it’s convenient to simply ignore this clear stipulation because it no longer supports the narrative.
City council is out of control. They are hell-bent on pursuing their unrealistic subsidized housing goals at any cost, even if it means throwing out the AACP. New housing development before any comprehensive true needs assessment is virtue signaling at its worst. Instead of moving the needle to address any aspect of our “housing crisis,” which is distinctly not a shortage, such activity will cause real and lasting damage to our community, and in no way will this be limited to the wealthy second-homeowners who they hate. The desecration of the AACP negatively impacts all of us.
Destroying others’ property values will not make Aspen more affordable, just uglier. Contact TheRedAntEM@comcast.net
October 8
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In a small town known for its political squabbles and petty arguments, today we are more united than ever. United in discontent. There has perhaps never been a time when the community has shared such a palpable sentiment stemming from numerous ignorant and ill-conceived decisions by our local government. The discontent manifests itself in different ways to different constituencies, but council has been nothing if not consistent in its ability to negatively impact just about everyone.
Downtown businesses were hit with the “Living Lab” experiment on Galena and Cooper that removed 44 parking spaces and made the already precarious driving-riding-walking corridor even more treacherous. Council’s car-free downtown dream is fatally flawed until there is a place to park the cars in the first place. Instead, cars circled the blocks, looking for parking, until many decided not to come to town anymore. The experiment has recently been tweaked to accommodate more cars, but the damage is done.
Restaurants were the first to be on the receiving end of the city’s post-pandemic return to normalcy. Despite being highlighted in the AACP, the community’s guiding document, “messy vitality” is apparently no longer a community value. Innovative build-outs and street activations were shut down, despite the proprietors paying for the spaces and mitigating for subsidized housing. Unless formal plans were under way with the city to make the temporary structures permanent, all the quirky additions were removed, and with them, seats for hundreds of diners.
Families with children found themselves scrambling for childcare options in an already dire childcare market. In its most tone-deaf decision of all, city council attempted to increase childcare availability by requiring not one but two long-time local providers who rent city space in the Yellow Brick to operate five days a week as terms of their leases. For years, the cherished four-day-a-week providers had served hundreds of local families, but the new regulations forced both businesses to shut down. Today the city touts its under-construction $8 million childcare facility at Burlingame as the answer. Imagine how two round-trips each day will impact traffic, not to mention the working families who have to make them.
Homeowners have become the latest boogeymen. If you need a building permit, be prepared to wait, sometimes as long as 12-18 months. And don’t even think about a demo. There can only be six each year. In Vail, by contrast, it’s closer to two months, with apologies after 3-4 weeks. And in Minnesota, state statute requires decisions on complete applications within 60 days. What takes Aspen so long? It’s all about control and palpable disdain for private property owners. Our city hall has no discipline, no reliability and a culture that disrespects its citizens.
The Arts, including the Red Brick, were set to receive significantly more funding from the Wheeler coffers when 71% of the electorate approved a November 2021 amendment to the RETT. But when council refused to seat a dedicated arts council and allocated the arts funding itself, “arts fellowships” received only a dime for every dollar council kept to “improve city facilities.” Hardly the intent of the ballot measure.
West End residents, long besieged by west-bound, rush-hour commuters who attempt to bypass the traffic jam on Main Street and who ignore stop signs and speed limits, have implored the city to put an end to this dangerous and disruptive practice but remain in limbo as bureaucratic stalling and traffic studies are carried out.
Second Homeowners, our tax-paying but non-voting neighbors, have been blamed for displacing locals from in-town housing, crowding our restaurants and gentrifying our town. (No mention of their contributions to job creation, the RETT coffers, the tax base and our non-profits.) Short term rentals have already been punitively regulated because apparently no one but locals should be able to make money renting their homes. And council none-too-subtly threatens a future “vacancy tax” to further punish those not occupying their homes full time.
Subsidized Housing residents stand to suffer greatly as a result of this council’s decisions and priorities. For years, our deteriorating housing inventory has been further neglected for want of policy changes to bolster HOA reserves and undertake preventative maintenance. Decaying buildings will not fix themselves. Plus, the current focus on building hundreds of new units will add to our year-round population in significant numbers. “More” may initially sound appealing, but it also means more competition for increasingly scarce resources. After all, with just 12 bar stools at Mi Chola, where will hundreds of new folks watch the Broncos?
This is just a partial list, but you get the idea. Every sector of this community has been negatively impacted by the naïve and irresponsible decisions of this council. Blinded by their idealism and lack of real-world experience or business acumen, this group is solely responsible for making all of our lives more complicated, more costly and more inconvenient.
But we are the voters. There is a municipal election in March. It’s a sad state of affairs to be united in our discontent, but united we must remain. Together we can force the important changes we all can agree on.
Aspen deserves better. Contact TheRedAntEM@comcast.net
October 8
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Royal Caribbean’s Wonder of the Seas, the world’s largest cruise ship at 1188 feet, has a maximum capacity of 6988 guests and 2300 crewmembers. The mega-ship has 18 decks and offers eight distinct “neighborhoods,” including a central park with 20,000 plants and trees. Aboard the ship are 40 restaurants and bars, offering diverse fare from homespun southern classics to rustic Italian favorites.
In addition to the tallest water slide at sea, guests can enjoy a children’s playground, 1400-seat theater, a full-sized basketball court, ice skating rink, surf simulator and zip line, 10 decks high. The ship’s advanced wastewater purification system treats 570,000 gallons per day, complemented by a reverse osmosis desalination plant, glass crushers, a cardboard baller, aluminum can compactor and food waste pulper.
This reads like a travel brochure, but it also sounds a lot like the S.S. Aspen.
Docked at the eastern end of the Pitkin County pier, our mega-ship is home to 7700 permanent passengers who have chosen a unique albeit expensive lifestyle of adventure, eschewing life on terra firma to live where others only aspire to visit. This number is deceptive, however, because it does not reflect the ship’s capacity, which is far greater yet mysteriously unspecified. 7700 represents the full-time passengers (who reside on the various decks) and includes an unknown number of crewmembers, who earn wages and receive room and board in exchange for working hospitality and service jobs aboard the ship.
Further conflating the 7700 number is a distinct class of “aspirational” passengers who have figured out how to “work” while onboard when not cavorting with the other passengers who are heavily taxed to provide them cabins on a subsidized basis. Their work is legitimate; they’re not on vacation on this pricey ship. But although they appear busy and generate income to cover their onboard expenses, many are in no way essential to the ship’s operations. They’re neither sweating in the engine room nor working the line in the kitchen, but unlike the crew, they’re regularly found poolside and in the casino in their off hours. They’re along for the ride at a deep discount, the unintended consequence of decisions made in a bygone era.
In this post-pandemic period of rough seas, however, the S. S. Aspen’s fragile onboard dynamic has shifted and a malaise is growing, threatening the delicate balance between the ship’s physical capacity, its ability to charge its paying passengers unprecedented prices for attractive onboard offerings and amenities, and the ship’s crew’s ability to deliver them.
The ship’s officers say it’s because they’re understaffed and can’t hire sufficient crew, attributing this to a shortage of crew cabins, and speculating that these are being converted and sold to paying passengers and perhaps even allocated to the aspirational folks who covet the good life onboard.
Paying passengers, permanent and visiting alike, are boarding in record numbers, paying a tidy sum to do so, and are more demanding than ever. Every deck is full, even on the most expensive upper deck which is now the first to fill. No surprise, word is out and the wait is long for aspirational passengers who look on from shore and clamor to come aboard for a life of smooth sailing.
The aspiring passengers already aboard are the lucky ones, blending in seamlessly with the others and demanding the same high-end benefits and services: fluffy towels, frozen daquiris, Broadway shows and bottomless champagne, and further contributing to the overwhelming pressure on the already understaffed and overworked crew, among which morale is at an all-time low.
Before the S.S. Aspen hits the figurative iceberg, it’s time to turn this thing on a dime.
Sadly, it falls to the ship’s officers, today, former crewmembers and aspirational passengers themselves, to save the ship. Their judgment is often clouded by the fact they’ve never worked anywhere else and are most troubled by making decisions that might hurt the feelings of non-essential passengers. It’s clearly time for new, more professional leadership. With political will and some tough choices, the ship can still right itself.
Welcome aboard.
We have a housing crisis but it’s not a shortage. It’s time to fundamentally transform our publicly subsidized housing program in order to save it. Contact TheRedAntEM@comcast.net
October 8
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Dear APCHA board and staff:
It’s true. The community does not trust you. No amount of communication consultant’s work will change the fact that the Aspen Pitkin County Housing Authority is widely disrespected. APCHA, a $3 billion asset, can no longer effectively fulfil its obligation to the community and instead operates as a rogue social welfare organization instead of a 3,127-unit publicly subsidized housing program.
Instead of supporting workforce housing, APCHA’s numerous conflated and antiquated guidelines and policies have resulted in a corrupt bureaucracy full of entangled carve-outs, exceptions and permissiveness. Your in-the-dark operations perpetuate an archaic status quo by rewarding bad actors, enacting bad policies and practicing bad governance when you practice any at all.
What should be the source of community pride has become a shameful entitlement program, festering with corruption, secrecy, bad faith and abuse. In many cases, your own “rules” allow and even encourage this, so change them. As those whose job it is to administer a program intended to house the local workforce, you have betrayed the community by not adapting the program to dramatically changing times and ensuring its existence into the future.
Today the community has a worker shortage and it is obvious why. By refusing to independently audit our housing inventory to learn who lives in our housing, their income and employment status, in order to inform future housing decisions, you are not just ignoring the problem, you have become it.
In its current form, APCHA cannot survive. It is set to collapse under its own weight with the “silver tsunami” that will remove over 1,000 bedrooms from inventory in the coming decade, over 300-unit permanent loss (representing 450 bedrooms) from upcoming expiring deed restrictions, plans for a $500 million expenditure to build 277 units outside the roundabout at the Lumberyard with little rental housing for the workforce, program-wide underfunded homeowners association reserves responsible for severely deteriorating inventory, the pending Burlingame Phase 2 $8 million construction defect lawsuit verdict and the mysterious Burlingame Phase 3 construction delay.
This shameful chapter must end. If APCHA is ever to regain any semblance of credibility, it must be completely overhauled with a dramatically redefined mission and a new board and staff committed to new, transparent operations that provide much-needed housing, on a moving-forward basis, for Aspen’s actual workforce.
Sincerely,
Your neighbors who paid the RETT
Aspen, CO
Got an APCHA horror story? I protect my sources. Contact TheRedAntEM@comcast.net
October 8
The city’s latest boondoggle stands to capitalize on the new land use regulations that permit the development of multi-family subsidized housing in all zone districts.
On July 12, the city approved the voluntary historic designation of the unique 1950’s-era Swiss chalet and two out-buildings on an 18,000 sf lot at 949 W. Smuggler in the West End. The long-time owner approached the city to voluntarily historically designate the property in exchange for a lot split (into two parcels, 10,000 sf and 8,000 sf, where the 8,000 corner lot could be sold) and a variance to relocate an existing structure.
The Aspen Modern program, the voluntary designation of significant 20th century historic assets as determined by HPC, enables an owner to negotiate variances and other concessions from the city in exchange for formally designating a property as a historic landmark.
The benefit to the community in this instance is the preservation of a truly historic asset. HPC agreed, approving the proposal, however, in the process, they identified unusual and seemingly unethical “right of first refusal” language that would exclusively enable the city to purchase the newly-formed 8,000 sf corner lot. HPC ordered this condition struck from their resolution. It’s in the minutes. But two weeks later, the city reinserted an “exclusive 30-day window to negotiate with the owner” back into the proposed ordinance for council’s approval.
The city’s interest in the 8,000 sf lot in the West End, previously zoned R-6 for single family homes and duplexes, should come as no surprise. Now that housing can be developed anywhere in town, the city likely wants this parcel for a multi-family subsidized housing development. Neighborhood character, parking pressures, public feedback, mass and scale be damned, these are the new rules. Thankfully, the owner is not compelled to sell to the city. But should they reach an agreement, we’ll likely see Ordinance 13 in action, and an indication of how devastating its city-wide impacts are soon to become.
Many questions surround this revelation of the city negotiating favorable circumstances for itself. Where did the “first right of refusal” originate? Who over-rode HPC when the designated deciding body struck it? Why should the city have this undue advantage? Such conditions have no place in Aspen Modern negotiations. This proposal was an obvious “yes”; a straightforward win-win for the owner and the community, but the city has managed to muddy the waters. The 30-day exclusive negotiation window begins soon.
There is interesting case law that relates to the city’s questionable tactics. Koontz vs St John determined the government is liable for “a taking” when it withholds a permit until the landowner agrees to dedicate personal resources to a public use. Landowner Koontz requested a permit of the St John Wastewater District to develop some of his land that was designated as wetlands. St John had jurisdiction and agreed to issue the permit on the condition that Koontz place a conservation deed on the rest of his property and to do some mitigation work in the form of funding improvements to nearby government-owned land. Koontz agreed to the deed but not to the mitigation work. St John denied the permit application.
Koontz sued, citing the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. A trial court found in favor of Koontz and the Florida appeals court affirmed. Later, the Florida supreme court reversed. In 1994, in a 5-4 vote, the US Supreme Court granted certiorari, holding that the government may not conditionally approve land use permits unless conditions are connected to the land use and are proportional to the effects of the land use. Such demands (asking for property or money from an applicant) place an undue burden on the applicant which diminishes the land’s value
and violates constitutional protections against having property taken without compensation.
In our case, the property owner got what he asked for and only had to agree to a special negotiation period, not a sale, so a lawsuit is unlikely. However, the sketchy initial “first right of refusal” and later exclusive 30-day negotiation window definitely sound like a bribe. “If we approve this proposal, then we get first dibs on the new lot. And now that we can build subsidized housing on any lot in any zone, and since we don’t have to mitigate or pay fees like everyone else, and since we can pay any price you ask with public funds, we’re your buyer.”
Ordinance 13 is set to impact every vacant lot in the city. The city is the only developer willing and able to build subsidized housing when the numbers don’t pencil. Worst of all, the surrounding neighborhoods will sadly bear the long-term brunt of this newly permitted development, including the associated decrease in property values.
The voluntary historic designation of 949 W. Smuggler should have been a straightforward victory for the owner and the Aspen Modern program. But the city’s self-dealing adds an unfortunate asterisk. It’s hard not to see the true motives of a punitive government that seeks to redistribute wealth by devaluing neighboring properties and, in so doing, destroying neighborhoods.
And they’re coming to a vacant lot near you.
The city’s agenda appears very different from the community’s. What is going on?
