In his campaign for mayor, Terry Tice appears like a man living in a bubble where it’s always 1974 and anyone “with a good business plan” and a willingness to endure long off-seasons can stake out a piece of paradise.  Tice has been in Telluride over thirty years and is a beneficiary of the staggering rise in property values over that time. Indeed, he helped build modern Telluride and no doubt deserves his personal reward. But he does not seem to understand how the increase in property values has irrevocably changed this place. Now he’s campaigning on a promise to turn back the clock, his advertising slogan: “Back for the Future.”

Tice is silver tongued and no doubt intends the campaign slogan to evoke both his long tenure as a local and his sincere desire to defend what he has loved about Telluride. But the slogan says more about Terry than that it does about Telluride: he may have been the right man for Telluride twenty years ago, but unless he breaks out of the bubble he is the wrong man now. Nostalgia is not a substitute for leadership, especially not when this community faces so many daunting challenges. The last person who can tackle a community’s problems is the person who can’t see them.

Back when Terry was one of the young pioneers, the big threat to Telluride was over-development.  Then, as now, Telluride’s major quality, and its major challenge, was its remoteness. The goal of those who wanted to make this place into a utopia, or keep it one, was to prevent it from becoming like other ski resorts, a sea of condos, its economy based on “industrial tourism.” Thanks largely to the efforts of our founding fathers, including Terry, we’ve dodged that fate.  Telluride is still a place apart.

The desire to avoid over-development and to remain distinct remains strong in the community, as evidenced by the passion devoted to the struggle to save the Valley Floor. But with that victory, assuming a court doesn’t snatch it away, the threat of over-development has largely been squelched. Today, even if the last few parcels of vacant land in the Telluride region were developed to the maximum extent possible, we wouldn’t be over-developed. Or, at least, we wouldn’t be much more developed than we are today.

What Terry doesn’t seem to understand is that the victory over over-development has come at a price, most notably in that it has contributed to an exorbitant cost of living and of doing business. Possibly, that couldn’t have been helped. But the challenge before us now is to find the right plan for economic balance and sustainability.  This is an oversimplification, of course, of a complex situation. Even overdeveloped ski resorts are exorbitant places to live and work, and our present problem is certainly not under-development. We are, in a sense, cursed by all we’ve done right. The more Telluride has maintained its scale and distinctiveness, the more attractive it has become and the more the cost of being here has been driven up and up.

Our challenge today is that as a community we were so consumed by the effort to stop over-development, which we have traditionally seen as the imminent threat, that we did not attend successfully to other critical needs, notably ensuring adequate tourist accommodations and affordable housing, and now these shortages loom before us like the other shoe waiting to drop.

Take the real estate transfer tax, for example. This is a prime example of Terry’s favorite political nostrum: making development pay its own way. Telluride has feasted on RETT. But we used it simply to keep property taxes low and it allowed us to ignore the health – or lack of health – of our main street and tourist economy, since we didn’t really need the sales and lodging taxes revenues to balance the books.  If RETT is a windfall from a robust real estate economy, wouldn’t it have been wiser to use it to lay the foundation for a more balanced economy down the road?  We didn’t do that, and now we have a dangerously unbalanced economy, heavily dependent on real estate sales, second homeowners with their dark houses, and a seriously anemic tourist based revenue stream.

Today’s threat is this: without enough visitors generating sales and lodging taxes and priming the economy, we risk a steep decline. If that were to happen, the town would not be able to maintain the level of services people have come to expect. Property values could decline and the real estate economy could suffer. To avoid this, we need leadership with a clear focus on the future, not leadership that looks back.  Is it a wise move to put someone behind the wheel of our town government whose eyes are locked on the rearview mirror?

Terry argues that our economy is essentially healthy, and just needs a few tweaks. I would like him to address one question, which he should know a lot about: When the time comes for him to sell the main street building that houses the Toggery, the retail business he founded, will a new owner be able set the rent at a level that would allow the business to continue?  This is not a hypothetical question that can be answered with a flippant response: “I don’t know what a future owner would do.” Or “I have no plan to sell.” It’s Economics 101.  Can the Toggery return enough rent to justify the market value of the building?  If not, is Terry prepared to see the value of the building plummet in order to keep the Toggery in business into the future?

From my perspective, we need businesses like the Toggery. They provide jobs for locals, they generate sales tax to the town, and they provide vitality for visitors, part-time locals and full-time locals alike.

Neither Terry nor Telluride can have it both ways. We can’t prosper with both an exorbitant cost of doing business and low visitation numbers. We can’t reap the rewards of inflated real estate and turn back the clock to a simpler time when it didn’t cost so much just to survive.  

To be fair, the affliction of second home ownership squeezing out tourism (and resident locals) is not of Telluride’s making. Like other beautiful mountain resorts we are being loved to death.  Attracting too few tourists because of a lack of attractive amenities harms desirable mountain resorts across the West and in the Alps.  This is powerful evidence proves that we are not alone and that the root causes of our problems are indeed global.  Here in Telluride, we can see the “exclusive resort” syndrome at work in bigger second homes and ever-escalating prices for them, fewer hotels, stagnant tourism, a struggling retail and restaurant sector, and a workforce driven down valley, with all the attendant traffic, social, environmental, and governmental impacts. This is today’s threat.  We need answers and action plans, not someone out of touch with the economic realities of our town, who longs for a simpler, cozier, less complicated past.

I’m sorry to report this, but Telluride is past the point where we can just sit around the campfire roasting weenies and marshmallows and singing Kumbaya.

Terry: from where you stand, do you get it?