New Swine in Aspen

How convenient it is that the Swine flu outbreak should arrive just in time for the Aspen mayoral election. The sickness is here, rearing its ugly head like a savage birthing duckling. Our Mayor, Mick Ireland may not be perfect, but the calls for change from every direction are deceptive. The swineherds are licking their lips on the sidelines, and they have a new representative. Her taste for the grease of Fat City is fresh and desperate. Do not listen to the spin. There is a tourist running for mayor, and her name is Marylin Marks. She’s just passing through, unless we allow her and her porky ilk to successfully finalize their take over of our little mountain town. Slowly but surely Aspen has become less and less affordable for the people who actually live here. When we elected Mick Ireland, we didn’t elect a politician, or someone who wanted to be mayor so he could get a few years of fame. We elected an educated working guy who walks the walk, and rides his bike to work every day, who has tried to defend Aspen’s right to be vaguely livable for people who can only afford one home. Then Marilyn Marks came, she saw, and she started to complain. She dropped her little Red Ant right into our pants, and started moaning about the way we do things from the day she arrived. She thinks Mick Ireland is failing us by being slightly less friendly to second, third, fourth, 5th, 6th, and 7th home owners, with a few time share holders in the back field. These are her constituents. And she is out there to make them feel good about their investments. She told us she had no interest in running for office. Now she says she is willing to work for free. Clearly she wants the celebrity of being the mayor of Aspen, even at the expense of those who would suffer the charity mayor. Aspen can afford to pay its mayor, but thank you anyway. Mick Ireland is not perfect, but he understands the soft heart of our beautiful town. This whole crew of candidates, running on the platform of change, are trying to get rid of Mick, possibly because Mick is not a greedy little land grubber sucking at the fat of the land, and the new Aspen Plan is an insidious play for greed and madness, dressed as usual, in the cloak of change. What are these candidates for change, really going to change? For one thing, they are going to encourage the Aspen Police to do undercover drug operations “under necessary circumstances.” This is not a good policy, and Mick Ireland understands the Aspen Brand enough to not mess with an ethos that we have held dear since the 1970’s. He is the only candidate who said he would continue our policy of no undercover activities by police. These operations are dishonest and wrong. Aspen is not supposed to be uptight, and this has only helped our success, even as a high end resort. Undercover drug busts are bad for business. Marks, Kole, and Erspamer don’t get it. You can’t do wrong in the name of doing right. Telling a drug dealer that you want to buy drugs and then arresting them for giving you what you asked for is just plain wrong. We want locals and tourists alike to feel safe and secure in our town. We just don’t want the tourists to forget to go home at the end of their stay. Marks represents the type of newcomer Aspen elite who have made Aspen a check mark for people who just want another exclusive resort home to add to their list. She is a retired business executive, a savage whiner, a woman after my own heart. She may be giving Aspen the full play now, but it will begin to bore her. Before long she’ll be just like the rest. They spend a few days in their home around new years, then they host lots of lavish parties during Food and Wine and Ideas festival, they feel important, and that’s nice. But while they may employ a caretaker and a maid while they are gone, they are not frequenting restaurants, shopping in our shops, and most importantly they are inflating real estate prices and creating huge swaths of empty livable space where people who actually want to live in Aspen, can’t live. We don’t need a mayor who is going to be more friendly to these people. Mick is nice enough. A representative government doesn’t just represent people who only spend two months a year in their outrageously huge energy sucking houses which sit vacant most of the year when they could be housing 4 families of working locals if the space was utilized by something other than a conspicuously consumptive waste of livable square footage. We need to keep our hotels full, and so we need to encourage these high end clients to come and visit, but we need to create disincentives against them buying or building homes that will sit vacant most of the year. The Marks platform is the opposite of what Aspen needs. If we want to fix the entrance to Aspen issue, all we have to do is eliminate the line of cars that comes all the way into our town every day all the way from Rifle, and out the same way. That means making living in Aspen affordable enough for people who work in Aspen. When I was a kid, the West End wasn’t a ghost town most of the year like it is today. There were children running around the streets and lights on in the homes. Making Aspen more friendly to its workers can only help us as a high end tourist destination. True 5 star service only comes from employees who are comfortable in their situation, who aren’t worried about their hour long commute at the end of the day, or the second or third job they are going to be heading to when they finish serving your fettuccini. Great service is difficult when businesses are dependent on transient workers like many of our hotels and Skico are presently. We don’t need to become a budget destination. We should leave the lift lines in Vail, and continue to welcome the pits of the Ritz, but we need to foster a community of working people who feel they can afford to fall in love, have kids, buy a home that can appreciate at free market value, and not just work and drink themselves into oblivion before they move somewhere they can afford to have more than a ski bum life. The Ferrari driving geriatrics will still of course be welcomed, but if they own a home, our government could do something like encourage them to provide at least 1000 square feet of housing for the working population for every 7000 square feet of living space that they own and do not live in at least 10 months a year. Just an idea. As for Marilyn Marks, Andrew Kole, and LJ Erspamer, put the fat in the fire and vote for Mick. He’ll keep Aspen peddling in the right direction. As for paying too much for the BMC land parcel, it’s just a right of passage. Anyone who has ever bought land in Aspen has paid too much. Shouldn’t’ the city of Aspen pay too much as well?