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I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the you I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the you you you you you you you you you I'm going to do it. you I'm going to do it. you I'm going to do it. you you you I'm going to do it. the We're going to call to order this meeting at 4 or 5 or so. This is the regular meeting for March 21, 2011. First item we have is roll call, please, Rhonda. Here, why not? Here. Welcome, sir. Here. Butler. Here. Here. Here. Here. Very good. Next item on the agenda is number two for any public and non-agenda items. Is there anybody from the public that stands up? Please come to the microphone, state your name. And the reason you are here. Hi, my name is Ricky Newman. I live in Aspen, summers and winters. And I would like to bring up a matter that seems to keep getting swept under the rug, has been for many years and by the town of Snowmass and Pac-Fa and the Department of Agriculture. And that is the condition of the Crab Lunic Dogs. I've sent you all an email this week and even a correction and I have one more correction to make to that because I pride myself in getting my facts straight. My meeting with the General Manager of Crab Lunic was February 18th instead of February 12th that was on your email and I just wanted to clear that up. I like to mention first of all how this came about. I was here in 2005 when everything hit the fan and found out that the dogs were being shot in the head there when they could no longer pull the sleds and if they were not bred correctly and even if there were puppies, they were getting, pulling the herd and getting rid of them that way. Well, supposedly they're not doing that anymore. It's hard to tell because there is a whole band of secrecy around that place. And the reason I know is I saw a letter to the editor earlier in February from a lady from Maryland who was complaining, she was a tourist at what she saw there and how the dogs were being taken care of. She thought the residents in this area should do something about it. I answer her email with one of mine and said we have been trying to do something for a long time. Well, to all that, Guy Courtney, the general manager of Crablunic, responded and said that we didn't know what we were talking about, and unless we came and talked with him and found out the facts that we had no right to an opinion. So that very same day I went there to find out the facts. And that was Friday, February 11th. He was not there. They got him on the phone for me. We set up an appointment for the next Friday, which is February 18th. I went, we had 45 minutes of talking. I asked him several questions about the last six years of history and things that I read in the paper, things that I read on the website of voices for Crab Lunic Dogs, Voices for Sled Dogs. And he would give some information, other information. He did not want to give out, he did not want me to tape our conversation. The first thing I'd like to mention very quickly are all the violations that they have been not complying with to the pack for regulations through the years. And every year there are violations. And for some reason they are given a date to fix these, correct these violations. And then nobody goes back to check from the Department of Agriculture or Pack-Pah. And so things continue as they were. There might be a few improvements, but then they'll slack off. Also in 1988, Dan McKeech and the owner, pled no contest to animal cruelty in which he was found to beat a dog from between five to 15 minutes, which left broken bones in the face and abline to die. And the dog's name was Magic. It's all documented. And he played no contest. Now, every year when he applies for his license on the Department of Agriculture's forms, it asks if there's ever been anyone owner or anyone who's worked there, who's ever been brought up with animal cruelty charges. And he checks, no, I've seen the copies. He lies every year and continues to keep his license. The second thing and so it seems like it's up to the residents and the tourists that come here to be the watch dogs to try to keep bringing this up little by little letters the editors articles that kind of thing. There is no summer exercise for those dogs there. I have been checking with other dog sled operations trying to educate myself on proper dog sledding, humane dog sledding. And everyone else, excuse me, in the area that I have talked to either has a commercial sport that they use their sled dogs far in the summer, or they give them free rain to run or they give them play yards for exercise. The dogs here are kept on their 5 to 6 foot tether 7 months, 365, 7 days a week. They get off for nothing for 7 months. That is cruel, that is inhumane and I have been looking up animal behaviorists. I have two articles that I would also love to email to you. If you're interested, one from Jill Taggart, and one from Robert Fortow. They're both animal behaviorists, PhDs. And their articles have been written. Hers was just last month of this year. And his was June of 09 he not only is a PH that would be five minutes mayor. Thank you. I have question it. Yeah you only have five minutes so we're just about at the end of your time. Okay. Quickly then I will just rush on to the adoption policies there. They said they would no longer kill the dogs five years ago. And so the animal shelter has been taking some of them. None have gone through in the last two years. We don't know what's been happening to them. I asked Guy Courtney. He said they are adopting them out privately. You cannot get to their adoption page on their website. It's unavailable. He says you're doing it privately. He would not give me a list to call. He gave me one name and that person used to work at Kravlinik. And, well, you all know about the bad press. It keeps coming. And there was a letter to the editor just yesterday from a woman, a doctor who doesn't even live here. Just read the article about them going to the Alaska Idaireida and her sister is a mushroom and she could tell just from the article, things are not right there. Thank you, Ricky. I don't have any comment. One of the things we have had, I guess the coming, I do have is we have had the Department of Agriculture and we've talked about it and some of those things you do refer to happen many years ago. I happen to live right across from Kabul and I do see that they are doing better job than they used to. I think they need to be commended for some of those things because you guys have pushed it and they have done something better. And that's about it. If it's the most, Marky. I would just ask that we should have a copy of the most recent surveys that have been done since they were here. The Department of Public Health are part of that division and they there's public information they we should be able to get them without any problem and I would appreciate if we would ask our manager to put them in our mailbox I'd like to read them email is that something that the whole council I don't know but I know the market whether you do or not we need to make sure that the for telling the manager do something We're all in that vote. Jason, I would be in favor of seeing those reports and also just some background on what has happened today. I know there was a task force that was convened and a lot of stakeholders that got involved with that operation. As a new council member, I'd love to see some background information on that and where that operation stands today. I understand there were some improvements made in terms of their operation, but without ongoing follow-up, I certainly haven't heard anything about it since I've been sitting here. So I'd like to hear what's been going on since then. Okay. Anything down there, John? I would like to know what's been going on since then. Okay. Anything down there, John? I would like to know if there's been any violations or is there any further citations from the Department of Agriculture in this matter? So we're talking about the inspection reports. Yeah, that's a state survey report. Yeah, I mean, state inspection reports and annuals. Well, it's called the state survey and I can help care, but whatever. Yes, and the inspection report. It's an annual report. Well, it's called the state survey and health care. But whatever. Yes, and inspection report. If there hasn't been one, then, you know, I'm ready to move on. Thank you. Anything down there? No. We also have the right to ask that I'd like to see what's been done. As far as just read the report, they should have the Monday and this year. You want you were talking you would like to see the inspection from the state. Mm-hmm. Since we had the last meeting that was almost two years ago, Matthew. And then put a fence up around it. That's what he said he needed to do. So there was issues around the chains, issues around the wire. There was a number of things. We'll get that report. We can't hear you unless you're a doctor. I'll run it. Thank you. We'll just go from there. So there is a majority that wanted to see the last inspection report. Just the state inspection. The state inspection. You said the department of health and the department of eye culture department. No, I know. I want to be very specific what report. You know, right. The inspector who does review that for the station. And along with that, I for one would like to understand what that process was and what the intent or role of the town is going forward. I mean, they went through a process, they got some recommendations. How do we follow up on that? How do we know that on a continuing basis? We're not continuing to see backsliding and new violations coming up. Okay. No, thank you, Ricky. You're done. Anything else? Thank you. Moving on. Any other public non-gened items? Next, we have item number three, Council updates. Anything down from Fred from your side. Thank you John. Jason and Bill and I attended the Colorado Association ski talents meeting last Thursday in Denver and had some real interesting discussions and one of the items that we've been pushing for the last couple of years with CASP was how to deal with the online vacation rental sites and not collecting sales or lodging taxes for the resort communities. And they've contracted with an outfit and where are they out of Virginia. Out of Virginia, who has done extensive work on developing methodology and how to determine who's running, who's not paying and what's going on in that area. One of the things they did is they showed us demonstration of a similar setup in Summit County. And this is going to be going live at some point soon. Do you remember the date? Well, talking to Tim Gagan and Breckenridge, they have just put this online in Southern County. He's optimistic, they don't have necessarily conclusions about how it worked, how it didn't work. So I would say they're still kicking the tires on it and probably by the end of the summer they have a good sense of Is this a good product and do they recommend it to the other members of CAS so they're they've volunteered to be the guinea pigs Okay, well I like to keep moving forward again I think there's a lot of leakage in our community to lodging taxes that are not being collected and that are community to lodging taxes that are not being collected and that are absolutely due to our town because when people come to visit Snowmass Village, they expect highways that are maintained, they expect police department, they expect a fire, they expect a lot of things in our community and that's how we afford having a town is doing this. I I want to keep going forward with that. That was it. Okay. Yeah, John was stating that information. They do see that there are the trends that have been, more people are using that kind of service. So this part of the internet taxation and a few other things that they're working on so that we can help. We coops some of those dollars. I went to a besides that meeting in Denver. Saturday morning early, I drove down for a meeting at nine o'clock of the congressional redistricting process. One that you might have read from Gail Schwartz last week, or two weeks ago asking for some, you know, people coming down, checking it out. There are 10 members of the state, five from the Democrats, five from Republicans are trying to do a nonpartisan project to make things, the changes they have to do once every 10 years reflect more of what are commonalities in the district. For instance, our district currently, district three, goes from Los Animus all the way up to Moffat County. And we have Pueblo in there and so there are a number of things that they suggest that it might be done better if they can figure a way of changing some of the lines. So that's a process going on. The meeting in Grand Junction was the last meeting they were going to have in that format. They've had 10 others, nine others, I should say. And they're working on a process to have this thing done. And next, a couple months, they said. So we will be kept up to pace on that. And if you have any questions, give me a shout-and-all. Push off to you the email site or the website that they are doing with all of that information. It's kind of an interesting meeting here in the different perspectives and a lot of them are politically motivated. So be aware of that, of course. Marky. Several things. I think everybody knows about the meeting tomorrow night or the session being held at 5.30. Dr. Johnson speaking so we all looking forward to that. Tickets are nearly gone. Yeah that's a ticket only process so if you don't have tickets you can't go. Do they still have tickets? They're not very many. Okay well okay fine but at the Sunday. They're at the Sunday, it's folks. So if you do not have your tickets, make sure you get some tickets to go because it will be an excellent presentation and the task force is very busy. I encourage a lot of great comments that coming from the task force. Number two, I just want to pause for two seconds and really, really thank our community and everyone that showed up for the Barb Maybelless Memorial Service last Thursday. It was outstanding about 300 people from our community, whether to honor her spirit and all the contributions she gave to this community. And I just want to thank Dick and Barb for everything it had done for Snowman's Village. What a wonderful couple. I want a spirited lady Barb was. Then as we know, winter sports clinic is coming in to our town this weekend. And if you get a chance to volunteer, please make sure that you talk with whomever. I know there's a lot of guys that come in to the airport very disabled. They just need help. You know, pushing wheelchairs and want to have you around. So welcome to all of our vets, male and female into our community. And it's always a great show. It is wonderful to watch the athletes. So those are my three things. Thank you, Margie. Jason? Just a couple comments. I guess one more thing just to respond to Ricky's comments if I could appreciate your email and try to keep this at the forefront of our minds. Just as a suggestion, I think a couple of options for affecting change, if that's your intent, is that there are more official tax to take rather than, I mean, informing us is great and keeping us in our minds is great, but there are a couple official approaches that you would take through the town that could affect change. One would be to file a complaint of a violation of the town's animal cruelty laws, and the other would be to propose some legislative fix that would deal with the perceived problems associated with that operation. So if you wanted to go forward those are probably your two most effective routes in terms of dealing with the town. Okay, so thank you again for that. The other thing is just something I've been thinking about recently and it's something we've been talking about at the town for a long time. A paperless council hasn't gained much traction obviously. I for one I'm going to volunteer to be a paperless councilman and so I'm going to request that I don't get my notebook anymore and I will get all of my council information on my laptop so thank you very much I would encourage my fellow councilmen to investigate whether that's something that could work thank you very much. I would encourage my fellow councilmen to investigate whether that's something that could work for you as well. Thank you Jason. Okay moving on we have item number four year-end financial update. Marianne Mckowski. The highlight for this year is 2010 ended with a positive net gain in every fund of the town, whether it was holding the line on expenditures by the various department and division heads or whether we received additional revenues over budget. In addition to the 2010 actual numbers that are in here, we also have a column for 2011 revised. Those are for some items that we know have definitely occurred or we had reserved for funds that we need to spend in 2011 or a couple of wish list items. There's the general fund, the lottery fund, the marketing fund, and the excise tax fund. The funds that have those changes, there's no changes currently budgeted for the rep fund or the group sales fund for 2011. But we'll probably do another update for you in June after we get through the winter season. And there may be more changes that we discuss at that time. And probably do another update for you in June after we get through the winter season and there may be more changes that we discuss at that time. So I'll just start with the general fund and I'll just hit a couple of highlights because all the detail is in your packet and in the community and so I'll just open each fund up for questions after I hit the highlights. For the general fund, we ended 2010 with an additional almost 1.5 million in fund balance of that. We received approximately 275,000 in additional revenues. Most of that is in our sales taxes. We had other revenues that were up over budget including building permits and electrical permits. We also had a couple of decreases and that's in the transfers in from the RET fund and the road fund and those decrease because the expenditure side of parts and recreation in road also decreased. So they go hand in hand. If the expenditures were higher, the transfer in from the other funds would be higher. Does that make sense? Okay, and then on the expenditure side for 2010, again in your detail, you'll see that we were under in a number of funds. Town clerk transportation road. Now the road is showing $321,000 under, but most of that is a sweeper that we ordered in 2010. It didn't get here by the end of the year, so we reserved that, and then we spent it in 2011, so that's a change for 2011. And then the health insurance savings. The way our policy works is we are on a partial self-insured policy. So we have a maximum amount that we budget to spend. We will never go over that maximum. But if our claims are below that level, then we don't pay anything out to the insurance company. So those were savings that we had over our past policy years, some years we have savings, so the years we don't, we hit the maximum, but this past policy period was a very good policy period. And we're hoping so far this policy period, we are also tracking very well on claims very good So in your report you show we have a 387,000 you saved Budgeted to spend right that we didn't well good job to the staff Everybody healthy And then the energy efficiency healthy. And then the energy efficiency expenditure those are the Holy Cross funds they counsel approved using 220,000 of we didn't we only spent around 30 or so in 2010 the rest of it is re-budgeted to spend in 2011 to like reserve that separately out of those Holy Cross funds. Very good. Any questions on 2010? Archie. Perhaps you're going to talk about a little bit later. And that is depreciation on all the town's assets, all the buildings. Where will I see that? Nick is going to be putting something together on the replacement reserves for our bill. The whole depreciation and how we're going to expense for that. That's a new element of our capital planning. That was something that in the strategic plan discussed with you. Isn't something that we've historically looked at except for housing. And there's a depreciation schedule within housing now. The rec center with this building, we have some significant new assets and we do want to bring that information forward to you and you will be seeing that this summer as we discuss capital projects. The only other question I had was where do legal expenses outside of our great town attorney what fund would they be in. There's a. The town attorney has a program budget within his program budget. There's a line that's called special counsel. Oh, okay. And that's where we charge. And it rolls up into the general fund. It is in the general fund. It's not a big number. No. I wouldn't think it would be. You know, you know. I don't have a budget. They do not much about them. I don't have a budget. They do not much about them. I don't have a budget. This is pretty simple. I don't have a budget. I'm impressed, Rhonda. He gets nothing and likes it. When do we look at that. The beginning of that. And so then for 2011, here's the proposed changes for revenues. We have some additional revenues we're budgeting for solid waste. Those are passed through charges. We have an increase on the solid waste side for recycling since we're being charged now for recycling. That's a passed through charge from Picking County, solid waste to the town. Is this new? Yes. Yeah. Were we all informed about this from our one? Did they send out letters to the public or what? Or just happened? Yeah. It's a charge by the Picking County Landfill that's we were made aware of it this fall, but after the budget process and so in the, I think in the first quarter buildings that'll go out or in the one that goes to all the residences, they'll be informed of the rate increase for that. Thank you. More, buddy. the next one is the Tigger 2 grant the transportation applied for and received will be receiving 73,000 about 74,000 that an offset for 82,000 in expenditures. They're going to put in some fast closing parcel C doors and LED lighting in parcel C the net cost is 8200 for the town for an $80,000 project. The next two are the property taxes that were approved in November after the budget was adopted for transportation services of $357,000 and the DROCY at $200,000. We have a small reduction in the FTA grant of 2200. On the expenditure side, we added the 5750 for the ICEH funding for the consultant. The next two lines are the ones I spoke to earlier where we have to budget for those expenditures for the reserves for the Holy Cross funds and also for the road sweeper. Marianne, yes. Just correctly if I'm wrong, but the consultant was 5,000. Wasn't it? Is the 750 just other expenses? That's other costs. OK. In our food. OK. Eating costs. I take the 50, 750 out of the minutes. OK. That's a meeting number that was requested by 5K for the consultants. And then the town hall, there's some roof membrane that needs to be replaced where the leaks are occurring. We put in 16,720. The bid is 1510. We added a 10% contingency just to be on the safe side because once they get in there they may find they have to do a little bit more work. Did that rescue go ahead with leaks on this building since the day it was built? Is that something that's being worked out as a cost share with contractor and design? Or is that all being formed by the House? It was made, you know, immediately, above the council chambers. This area around it, you it, we can make arguments, but the routine inch was released, and this is something that's come up really within the last year that there's additional leakage outside of the repair that occurred directly above us. It's actually in the lobby, and it's from a membrane. But when you build a new roof, don't you get a 20 year warranty? Or no? I will check on that warranty and just confirm. Yeah, just as long as we are watching the town's money because I think when I put a roof on the divide I get a warranty for that type of stuff. Okay. Okay. John Wilkinson. I'd like to back up to the solid waste. The church is recycling. I'd like to know a little bit more about that and where that's coming from. I know you mentioned that it's a bill back from the county. Since this hasn't been done in the past. Is this for when they come? We have our own recycling trucks though that take it down to the down to the landfill. Yeah we as you know we collect all the recyclables in town of the traditional ones of paper and glass and aluminum we also collect cardboard and a couple other items but it's a charge that we experience at the landfill the specifics of which I don't know I'm happy to find out and report back Yeah, I mean we're we're still residents of picking county and we do pay into picking county for their operations as well I'm just wondering how this how they are able to do they do that for ask Oh, it's there be another it's universal throughout picking counties not just us It's universal throughout Peking County. It's not just us. Okay, yeah, I like to, you know, for being charged back for recycling. What's the benefit of that for a community? I mean, we spend a lot of time separating all of our items and making sure they get to the right bend. I mean, the landfill, I don't know if they're running in a deficit, but I know they're less trash going in, they're less solid waste fees, and it really costs more to process the recycling than actually collect it. So I'm sure it's a cost recovery item. I don't know. I just a little suspicious when we get these charge bags that were subsidizing something else in the chain, we may not, but if you could look into it, I'm sure. I'd be grateful. Jason? I'm be grateful. Just a quick question. Go ahead, Jason. I'm honed, sorry to. In terms of our fee structure for solid waste collection, remind me, we technically don't charge directly for recycling, collecting recyclables, but I assume we build that cost into our fee structure for waste collection. That's correct. So will this 39,000 be built into the future to recover? Or is this just... Yes, it will be. Yeah. So this is something that will be reimbursed to the general fund at some point? By the citizens of Somers. Yeah. As you know, we try to reflect... That's what that's reflected. We try to... Even though it's not an enterprise fund, we try to break even with revenues against expenditures with sale of waste and recycling. So this is the revenue side of that, and where is the expenditure? Spent side of that reflected, so that zero's out. They didn't give me any changes for the expenditures other than the additional stuff at the bottom, the payroll and the benefits. So we'd add a $39,000 expenditure on that? I don't know if it's a complete wash or not. They said he gave me the change on the revenues, but I don't know that he's worked out the expenditures. I get more detail on that. That's also a good reminder. That topic again from your strategic planning, you've got a topic coming to you on solid waste management. And depending on where you live, if you're in horse ranch or crossings there's an incentive for recycling but if you're coming to one of our communal drop off points there really isn't. So just good reminder that that's going to be a point of discussion in the future. The next line is the Transportation Bus Service. We're heading back in the summer bus service bit. We get put on hold pending the ballot question. Where's that, Marianne? That's down about halfway. What page? Page five. We're still on the same general fund detail page. And then we're also budgeting for the Drosti expenditure to the Pickham County Open Space of the 200,000 that were received in the property taxes for. There's 2,000 added for leadership training, which is part of the strategic goals between staff and council. That'll come back to you. That's just really a placeholder. And then other town departments, there's some additional cost for payroll benefits in solid waste. We have one of our employees that is retiring and we are hiring somebody to start before he retires so that they can do the training. And then also some additional training and travel for the clerks department, for the clerk's institute and the municipal clerk's institute. Okay. Any other questions on the general fund? Markie? I don't see any detail at all about a potential increase in salary for employees. You don't yet. It's something, though. Thank you for raising that. And I do want to thank the departments for continuing to find expenditure reductions. We're at a point, and just as a point of reference, 1% is approximately 65%. 4% is 65,000. 65,000. And 4% is in the neighborhood. Accordability. So we're taking a close look at what others are doing and what the labor market is doing. Again, you get some mixed signals in some places. You're beginning to see a recovery in some places you're not. Like to come back to you at your next financial update. It was likely first meeting in June with a specific recommendation on that. Thank you, press. Yeah, because when we do something like saving ourselves, we had $87,000, you know, I think you should be like, market thinking, looking at putting something back to the employees somehow, but it will be the third year of no raises. We'd like to say thank you. Okay. Okay, the real estate transfer tax fund 2010. We ended the year with an additional 977,000. Most of that were expenditures that were under budget because we did not buy the buses in 2010. And some of that we had to reserve for the bus purchases. In 2011, again, you have the detail page seven of your packet. We had to add in the buses that we had reserved for in 2009 and 2010. We had to add that to the 2011 budget plus the grant revenue that offsets it because all of those buses are coming in this summer in 2011. The additional year end to the funds available isn't available for spending in future years because it's already been allocated prior to the end of the year. The funds in the real estate transfer tax fund continue to drop down because we're not showing we're showing some increase in real estate transfer tax revenues but we haven't budgeted for what we used to receive in the past. When I talk to a couple of realtors it does seem to be rebounding. Our sales are a little bit so far this year going a little bit better than last year at this time, but everybody felt it was too soon to change the revenue projections and that they'd have a better idea come May. And so we'll probably have a change in those projections in June. Let me report back. Anybody have any questions? Yes, Mary, help me out here. You're showing a deficit of over a million and a half dollars. And if I'm reading this right, you're talking in your funds available, you revised budget, you have a million dollars. You're talking in your funds available, you revise budget, you have a million dollars. So are you gonna be? In the contingency. Yeah. And we continue to use the contingency all the way through right now based on our current budgets until 2015. Okay, what are the funds available? What are you gonna do to make up? Where are the funds to make up this you going to do to make up? Where are the funds to make up this deficit? I guess that's my question. Which deficit? A million five hundred fifty thousand. That's being used out of the current reserves from 2010. So because if you look at 2010, we had used some of those in the losses in replacement. And so we had to add the expenditures for that. So we're using mostly all of the funds available. I broke it out between vehicle replacement reserve and the funds available. So we had, when we did the original budget, we were showing that we were going to spend that reserve. But what I didn't do was put it up in the expenditures and show that expenditure. So because it'll happen in 2011. If you end up the end of 2011, what would you have in your reserve? In the reserve is 2,225,000. But then it drops because I had to use some of those funds available for 11 for the buses. And it's a trickle down throughout 2015. I know it sounds complicated. And all I'm trying to come up with is on December 30th, after you made all these expenditures on December 31, 2011, what are you going to have in the bank? Well, there will be 540,000 in a capital reserve account. There will be a million dollars in the contingency, and then there's going to be 685,000 at the end of the year. But that's all, the 685,000 is being used in 2012 because the fund balance decreased because I had to use the money to purchase the buses. Okay, so in 2012 the funds available is $54,000 and then it goes down to $49,000. We're tracking around $20,000. We do expect that to change as the economy starts to get back. The brick is going to make a lot of sales. We should open. If we can keep them off the slopes maybe. Jason? On the Gulf course. No reflection on my confidence in you Rick here, but... Pleading this down to 22,000 by 2015 feels uncomfortable to me and I'm wondering about how obligated we are on these bus purchases for the coming year. We already contracted for that. Yeah, through that. That's a order. I mean, it's like a 18 month delivery time frame from the time you ordered it. So we had been kind of building up the reserve in 09 and 10 and then 11 we had an expenditure for those for those buses. But the, you know, as you know, Jason, the budget continues to be tweaked throughout the year. So I'm hoping that the 20,000 does go up, but we went into these budget years knowing that this was going to be our top fund. It just seems like knowing this is the horizon that we take this down to $20,000 in our projections. It seems like it's time to throw the brakes on. The other thing that happened was the changes at the federal level with the grant funding. And that came last minute at Budget time and so we had to do last minute revisions because Dave no longer had the confidence that the money was gonna come through in those years That's probably good and that was about that was over $200,000 a year I guess the real question was it hasn't been asked is what is the assumption in terms of red revenue for them to 2015? We had in our revised budget we had budgeted 1,264,000 and we ended budgeting 1,250. So if we match 2010 actual, we'll pick up another 400,000. Watch your assumption out here. So if you come down to 22. We go to 1.5222 and 22. It's still lower than what we've experienced in the past. So would you just get busy? I just wanted to go back to Jason's. So you see it all the over, so. Which means no more than its golf season. But this fund probably more than any, we've both reduced revenue and expenditures significantly across the board. The one challenge certainly has been continued bus replacement. So, we're optimistic that this year won't be any worse than the actual performance of last year. We wanna have a little higher confidence before we change that revenue number. And like Mary Ann said, I think again, that first meeting in June, hopefully we're looking at a revised number for that. But you're right, this has been a very constrained fun and we do need to be very conservative with this. Okay, I'll open something before you go. Yeah, a couple of comments you had on the bottom of the page. Funding for a seasonal employee dedicated to town trails and no funding and budgeted for failed maintenance. Is that out of the budget for this year? A couple of things. One is this discussion kind of ductiles into the the lottery fund which is next but they are the public works, parks and trails department is looking to have a seasonal person dedicated just to the trails work. It would typically have come out of the rep fund but since the rep fund is tight we're proposing to use the lottery funds to hire that person I think. If the rep funds were flowing over, would actually be asking for two dedicated trails person now. This is an area where we've significantly cut back last year. We didn't have any. We didn't. Well, we did bear minimum maintenance when a tree fell down. We came out, but we really didn't feel like we were keeping up and you asked us to look at the lottery fund and look at how we could get creative in using it along with Holy Cross Fund. And then on the mountains, some are trail mountain maintenance. Did you want to speak to that? We have historically been up to what number hunt? 50, 50, 50, 50, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30,000. And so for the last two summers, for sure, maybe the last three summers, we've contributed $30,000 to the ski company managed by Steve Rouse to maintain the trails on the website. Well, I think there isn't any money in the parks and trails, but if it's funded by Rhett for that. Well, that's going to, I mean, it's like one of our major draws in the summertime and I just can't justify letting the non-ski company trails go to follow for the summer. I mean, it's... You mean the ski company trails? No. The ones that are off the mountain, the ones that they don't maintain. The ones that they don't maintain is actually why we're proposing to be using. The $26,000. You think that one person't maintain. The ones that they don't maintain is actually why we're proposing. We'll use $26,000. You think that one person can do all the work that they had done? No. He'd like to have two. It would be better than having zero people. Right. And when Mary Ann researched the lottery funds since the ski, the trails on the mountain are part on private property and part on public property. You couldn't use lottery funds to maintain trails on private property. That's why we're allocating the seasonal person just on the non-ski company trails. But they need maintenance as well. But right now there's no money in the budget for that. If collectively we felt better about the revenue projections come that first meeting in June, you know, that could be something that could be discussed. I've shared it a little bit with Steve Soule about timing if we didn't, if we had more resources could they be used effectively if he didn't know till that point he believes it still could divide, say at the 15K level, you know, some level of maintenance. But again, I think you have a bit of a philosophical decision to make there in terms of trail maintenance on the mountain. We've done it historically, but it is, again, something that we could look at in the first meeting in June if you feel more comfortable about revenue projections. So we're keeping a list of all those good things to talk about in June, right? We have a list of some things that if we had money and we all collectively felt good about those revenue projections, we could put back into the budget. Okay. And also I just wanted to clarify that the ski company provides for 100% of the trail maintenance and all the new trails that are over on the El Camp side. When we had this conversation last year We wanted to make sure that any Contribution this key company was for historical trail maintenance on the west Could you just describe a little more detail what that means? Okay. Okay. Jason? And then Fred? No, I don't have a good. Could you just describe a little more detail what that means? What are the effects of that that we're going to see this summer? What in terms of the trails that aren't going to be maintained? Are those unusable? Are they? Oh no, they're usable, but just going to deteriorate. Just like our own trails, you know, like the rim trail and the trails that are not maintained by the ski company deteriorated. We get ruts, we're not doing water bars to take care of drainage. If you rode the trails last year, we hadn't cut unless somebody went out there like John or other people and actually cut back the weeds on the other side, you got hit by those on the other side. So we just really haven't done anything. It's not dramatic. It just happens over time with water and no maintenance. And so when you talk about the trails on the west side of the mountain, that's Sam's knob. What are we talking about? Yeah, over on the Sam's knob area actually John could reel off the names. Village Bound, a part across mountain, the connector trail, those trails. Well, and then the rim and the rim is what I hope to you the rim and all of non-ski company ones. Okay, let's start trail. To the season starts. And those are things like, you know, we do have this community cleanup day in May. Maybe we should try to put together a volunteer program to help us with some trail work. Well, you all brought that up at budget time and there there's for example, there's a if I I can get the easement there's a rerout on the rim trail that we don't have the money to actually Fun rolling fork out to our volunteers to do it But we thought that would be we'd like to do isolated volunteer projects as opposed to Kind of higher volunteers to take care of the trails throughout the summer So that's one and there could be other projects that we could use. Wasn't sure if we could just go in you know beginning of June to clear up the trails and do the cutting back as you could do it for a you know we can project and then see what happens. Yes we could we intended to do it with our own staff and that one person. Okay well on that topic of the issue of volunteers it is something we discussed at our last budget and we now Leslie has worked with the various departments and we were kind of pleasantly surprised with the response we got for volunteers up at the exhibit center in the mall and we do have now a structure to present to you that we want to schedule. There's a budget with it, but it's like 5K in terms of a maximum cost and basically a variety of things that we could provide to volunteers based on the number of hours. So from a coffee mug to maybe a fleece, you know, if they gave us a lot of hours. So that is something we want to bring to you and hope we can generate some more volunteer activity within the community. Great. Good. Good program. Mr. Gryphon. Hi there. In the past, a rotary has also created a volunteer day for some of the rim trail and other trails. And you might want to go to Rotary and see what their intention is for this summer and how that could tie in with what you're trying to do on certain trails whether it be the rim or something else. I'd be happy to talk to the President. That'd be nice. Sign them up. Okay. Any other questions right now? Ryan. And PJ is the lottery fund I'd asked Hunt to remain here. We get about $20,000 a year in lottery funds, and our last expenditure I think was in 2008 where we used $120,000 down at the community park. So we've been building up for O8 in 2009. At the end of 2010, we have a bank of 76,000 and we're expecting another 20,000 in 2011. Based on that and based on some of the needs down at the Thru Parks and Recreation that can't be funded through the real estate transfer tax is, has provided a list on page nine of your packet of some improvements that he would like to do. So if you have any questions on the $74,500 expenditure. So this does not have any do with grants we may apply for if we want to do work around the on. This is our shareback based on the census numbers. So this may go up because our census has gone up as well. I can do a brief explanation. Bring the microphone to you and bring the microphone to your place. As was mentioned by Mark earlier, actually the town manager, we do not have a capital replacement. In some cases, a maintenance program for any of our buildings, whether it's Town Hall, the Recreation Center, a parcel C that's something we're going to be working on. For some items though at the Recreation Center that we really would like to take care of, one is basically it's five years old, the painting, and I don't know if you looked at it at least. But the staining and painting on the exterior is something we'd like to do. Last year we did do the locker room floors and they needed again. So those are those, the middle two items, to paint and stay in the recreation center and resurface the locker room floors. The water slide repair is just a minor concrete repair. We'd like to make before we get going this summer. We talked about the season employee and the last two are actually what I would call something that we actually have budgeted for the whole entryway project. We didn't take care of the exterior amenities that we felt were needed down at town park. If anybody's been down there, we don't have any benches and the only picnic tables we have are in the gazebo gasevo those old ones fall apart so what we'd like to do is by nine picnic tables and six benches and spread them out through the whole town park area because right now people are sitting on the grass and others in need for them and that would kind of finish up what i call the o8 entry-grade project uh... these benches are not going to be the same same type of uh... benches the last little longer yeah probably you know recycled material are not going to be the same type of benches that will last a little bit longer. Yeah, probably recycled material. The locker room floors, we did that last year, we're doing it again this year. Is that going to be an annual thing? It'll be pretty close to annual. We actually in the CIP, but that's down the road because we don't have any money. We'd actually probably remodel that both the women's and men's locker room and put in a different floor surface but right now it doesn't make sense to do that until we do that. Okay, anything else? Have you explored other flooring solutions that wouldn't require an annual $10,000 that could be just overly? Yeah, except we'd have to take up the floor, knockout, lockers, and that sort of thing. And so, yeah, I think we would do a different service. It doesn't make an arpanion, doesn't make sense to do it right now that way. But last year it cost $6,500 to come in less than the $10,000, but I put $10,000 in here. Okay. Any else on that section? Okay. Page 10 and 11 of the excise tax funds that ended with an additional $1.1 million. Most of that is under expenditures. I had budgeted $700,000 roughly to in case we were to buy two more of the country club townhomes. I wanted to make sure we didn't go and budget violation by not having planned for it, but we did not buy two more units. So that flowed into the year on carryover. And back to that, you know, we buy them and we sell them. It's not like we're holding inventory of housing either. Right. We buy them and we sell them. It's not like we're holding an inventory of housing either. Which people know that. We're actually making money on that again by removing the deed restriction and selling them on the free market. But we do need a budget for the expenditure. Okay. And in 2010, X-I's tax as we had budgeted 450,000 and we actually received 600 in 1000 and then the $110,000 is housing mitigation in lieu of, I think it was the timber line funds that we received. Okay. What was that related to? A development agreement or the, I think the improvements that they made. And so it was part of the resolution or an agreement that they had to pay us the $110,000 for. It's an old housing. Employee housing in lieu of, it's cash in lieu of. Right. They had a condition in the 2000 ordinance that they had to either deetric three units or pay cash and loo and they didn't do either one and so when they wanted their approval for the pool last year they made an adjustment for the consumer price index interest and came up with a price for cash and loob for that oil project in 2000. It was also an employee mitigation factor to the pool project that you can be factor in. And so that's what that 110,000 was for. Okay. And then the next line is under expenditures as the Dex remodel. I think Joe spoke to you guys about this that he hadn't finished it by the end of 2010. There was about $60,000 left in expenditures. So if you go over to the 2011 revised budget, that's the only change right now proposed for this fund is you'll finish the project in January. All right. The next fund is the marketing fund. Marketing fund ended the year with an additional $254,000. Again, sales taxes were up by about $152,000. On the expenditure side, they were under by $112,000. You can see the detail on page 13. In 2011, they're budgeting a decrease of $40,000 in their revenues. Most of that is summer concert donations. One of the donors no longer lives in this town, so they will be losing that contribution. And on the expenditure side, they've increased summer marketing by 170,000. The ICEH Discovery Center is 40,000. And the online marketing they're increasing by 20,000 and culinary arts, they are decreasing by 15,000. There's also a decrease in the revenue side and for the culinary arts as well. So most of the carryover that they had from 2010, they are budgeting to spend in 2011. Any questions for this fund? Not right now. Okay. And then the last fund I have here is the group sales fund. I'm page 14 and 15 group sales similar to the other funds ended up with a positive $188,000 in additional funds. 89,000 of that was lodging taxes. Their expenditures were down by $102,000. About 50% of that is in payroll and benefits because we were without a group sales director for a period and one sales manager as well for a period of time. That's the bulk of what their expenditures are down. A little savings in travel and training was under by eight. Contract service was under by 13 and postage was under by 15. That 188 carries up to 2011, but we haven't made any changes to the revenues or expenditures in this fund. Either, I think they're going to wait until the new sales director comes on board before any proposes to the original budget I made. Any questions? One's that gonna happen? April. Okay. And that's the- Mark And that's a quick question. On your actual 2010, you have a million in terms of expenditures, million, 87,000. The revenues were 1.09 million, which shows that there was a little positive variance there. So we go into 11. We show expenditures exceeding revenue. Is that because you haven't adjusted for another push? No, because they're proposed to use some of the reserve from the previous year. What is that $1 million, a good number? I heard that. The $1.1 million and expenditures for 2000. I know. The revenue. The revenue being conservative. Well, we're hoping it's conservative because it was based on the 2010 numbers. And so since 2009 came in over or 2010, actual came in over the revised. It would seem that if we have at least the same year as last year, then we're gonna be increasing sales tax revenues and lodging tax revenues. We were just going to wait to do that later. We'll go into the budget. Mm-hmm. Thank you for being ultra conservative. It's always nice when I answer this. Any else there? I'm from Iran. Nope. It's always nice when you're doing this. Any else there? No. Okay. Thank you for your time there. I just have one other quick question for Mary-Anne. Mary-Anne, you've been around the town for a period of time and in this position. Give me questions. Is that a slam? Just a comment. And in terms of your sense from the fiscal officer perspective, what's your degree of confidence in your predictions going forward and what do you think? Just give me your crystal ball. Your crystal ball. On revenues, I think they're pretty conservative. Okay. And so, you know, I mean, the one thing, and we've talked about it at staff level, is, you know, we know that there have been expenditures that have been pushed to the side, pushed to the side because of the economy. And as the economy gets better and revenues increase, I think we just need to be conscious of trying to still, you know, hold the line and not let a creep on the expenditure side happen just because revenues are increasing. And we build up the reserves that we've had in the past. And that's one thing that I want to see happen as well. But I also want to make sure that we also don't let our infrastructure go. That's extremely important. At some point you've got to start brushing that stuff off and bring it back on the table. And what you brought up earlier about replacement for our buildings and all, that's a reserve that we really need to start building up, not just for like the boilers and all of that, but there'll be structural stuff as well. So as you own things, you have to take care of in the long range. Also, we've held back on buying new vehicles and equipment and that also translates to personnel where they're putting a lot more demands on them and we do maintain the same number. We do have a couple of departments that we may be coming back in June that Would be proposing Editions to personnel because they can't keep up right and I think it's important to look at and understand those things Anything else rushes again. We're looking at coming back to you first meeting in June We're looking back to you first meeting in June. Again, very pleased with the savings we found and what we've added to the fund balance. As you just recognized, there has been some deferred maintenance. We still want to replenish the reserves. I just wanted to ask is and we've talked about this. We talked about it in the retreat terms of this kind of level of detail for a quarterly financial update. Is that what you're looking for, Mark? I'm going to look at a marquee. Yeah, yeah, thanks. Anybody else still? I'm delighted with this. Thank you. I mean, I think last week I just said Fred's been a little time ran. It probably would, you know, helps you as a new council member to do that. Whether, you know, Jason wants to do that or we want to do that as a Council member to do that whether you know Jason wants to do that or we want to do that as a Work session sometime to spend a little more time There's a group a lot of detail. It's very important stuff And we'll talk closer as we get into the budget season about the level of detail you want to get to and Kind of depends on the preference of council Okay, thank you Marian Marianne again. Sit our rig. Okay, next on the agenda is our FAB sales tax report. In recommendations with it. I'm messing with Rick. Russ. Let me just give a quick intro and I'll invite Mary Ann to jump in at any time during this introduction and then we'll Pass the baton on to Rick as the chair for the financial advisory board also just want to acknowledge We've got spare copies of the FAB's recommendation in the back and does council need additional copies of that So on our website I'm sorry. I just want to ask you to tell us what was on the website. Yes, I've got it. I would, I forgot mine. I'll probably take another one. Can I get a little bit of that? I think it's a real detriment to this item on the agenda that recommendations didn't go out with the council packet. I don't think they were disseminated effectively to the public. I did see Madeline's touched on some of this stuff in this week's sun, but in terms of, you know, having an open meeting about that, is that something that we should be talking about today given that it wasn't included in the packet? Again, it was a function of the timing of the FAB. It took them longer than anticipated, really give you a coherent or a recommendation that they all agreed to. We thought it'd be valuable, particularly in the context of the next topic with marketing. But I'd suggest this is a topic where real decision is needed today. I would suggest it's a median offense, strategic enough topic that you probably want to schedule a follow-up discussion. So I think we noticed the item. I think the recommendation from FAB is something you want to digest. We did attempt to put it on the front page of our website. But I want to acknowledge the FAB. This was tough. And they had to put their arms around it. So you know, your pleasure but this is just an informational report out. It's just what report we need. It's all this. It's a report out to you in terms of the direction you gave the FAB. Did everybody on council though? Yes. Arkey. Yeah. I read it. I read it when I came through. I read it in the back. Yeah, just looking ahead optimistically, if the foreclosure goes through and if base village comes on the table as we all hope it will, and if we decide to hire the urban land institute to create some sort of master plan for us, I think this kind of information is something that would be incredibly invaluable to them. Because I think once we start, we're going to have to look both at the mall and base village. So I commend the FAB for this. Let me just acknowledge the component that staff worked on and again want to thank Mary Ann and her staff for the analysis and work they did. But again, the town council asked the FAB to analyze sales tax generation by commercial area and by sector and report their findings to the town council. This was really based upon the observation that we've had a pause across the street. And what's the impact of that pause? And what has been the implications and what have the changes been that we've observed over the last number of years. So a couple of questions were asked and answered in this process. First, what's the change in sales tax in sales per square foot between 2006 and 2009. As the FAB began working on this, they only had 2009 numbers and by the end we had 2010 numbers as well and they had the benefit of analyzing that. We also looked at the square footage for commercial space and residential space with the addition of base village. And also looked at what was actually leased in terms of square footage and we've seen obviously a significant increase in base village. We've also seen some supply and demand working in the mall in terms of some secondary space going out in terms of a commercial use. Again, looking specifically at the impact of base village on retail and restaurants and all three of our commercial nodes. Again, the FAB really wanted to take a look at particularly restaurants and commercial uses. Recognizing lodging is still important, but with average daily rates declining, that that is a variable that wanted to isolate and again specifically look at retail and restaurants. Also, what was the impact of probably most significant recessions since the Great Depression on our community? One interesting observation was restaurants and retail businesses have been difficult, even in the best of times in Snowmass. We have a new member of the FAB who's had significant experience in retail and I thought that was an interesting observation just looking at Salesforce Square foot that given our seasonality this is a difficult environment to work in. Again, Carolyn and I see Carolyn in the audience and she reminded us that $400 a square foot was considered a indicative of a healthy retail environment in the base village analysis in terms of what are we shooting for? What is a good point of reference in terms of a healthy retail environment? And again in 2000 the sales per square foot was around 268 dollars per square foot again around $268 per square foot, again, for our commercial uses. Another piece of information that was interesting to look at is, again, what's the impact of the recession? You're marrying into an analysis looking at other resort communities that we often benchmark ourselves against. And again, the range in mountain communities between 2006 and 2009 range from 4%. Breckenridge appeared to be the least impacted to 12%. With an average being about 7.42% down between 2006 and 2009. Snowmass beat that average a little bit at 6.7% down. We also, just because we always like to compare ourselves to Aspen, and we did a little bit better than Aspen in terms of that drop. Physically, again, those physical changes, something that we looked at very closely between 2006 and 2009, we grew significantly with commercial square footage in our retail nodes up by over 33%. Primarily because of the addition of 50,000 square feet of commercial square footage and base village and again in base village we've seen 70% of the total approved commercial square footage approved of only about 40% of the residential square footage has been completed. So again that was one of the questions that FAB analyzed was our total supply of commercial has increased. What's the implications of that? Is it sustainable? Is it not? And then they attempted to evaluate what's the impact of the economy? The physical state we're in, and with that I will turn it over to Rick to share with you the recommendations from the group. Good afternoon. First, I want to thank the committee and staff. I'll tell you what, we worked together really well as a team. Now, staff did the Yomans work on getting us information. Carolyn did a hell of a job on a spreadsheet and numbers and other things that were very instrumental in some of the decision making. Our newest member Howard and John Borthouric, our two newest, got together with me on a subcommittee and Russ and we kind of worked through some ideas offline from the previous meeting to the one that we just had so that we could get stuff together to come back to everybody. And everybody in that on the committee gave a lot of input. And I think it's one of the best altogether team efforts I've ever seen FAB do. So I want to tell you that you got a good group out there that's really working hard to try to come up with answers. You know there's a lot of very bright people on that committee. Still on? Yeah, we got rid of the dead weight. with answers. You know there's a lot of very bright people on that committee. Still on. Yeah we got rid of the dead weight. So anyway with that in sense to answer Jason's point I'll read this if that's okay with you. Yes, Marty. Just a quick question. You've talked about the gross sales per square foot. What's the average rental rate per square foot of the three nodes? You know, I don't know if we have the information to answer that, but that does lead to one of the recommendations made by the FAA. You know, it varies a lot though. These rates are really proprietary to relationship between the landlord and the tenant. And we just don't get that kind of information. We were able to get, and I talked to all three landlords, where square footages, what they were, so we can tell square footages that was secondary that's no longer retail. We looked specifically at retail being things that sell, shops of that type, whether it be ski or other items. And we looked at it as restaurants. We did not look at it as offices and most kind of functions. The earlier reason why I'm asking is I'm trying to get a sustainability of businesses. If it's 317 square foot on what your gross is, I'm trying to figure out what the net is, so never mind. Okay. Sorry. Good luck. Talk to me visually. I thought you had kind of a range. I've been sworn to secrecy. Anyway. We start with a problem, Stephen. The basic problem from the sales tax data, the FAP reviewed is that the retail areas of the mall and base village are not sustainable. It was also recognized that based on sales per square foot, that the retail environment in the mall, which was before base village, was difficult at best given its seasonality. During the PUD review for base village, 400 square foot was considered indicative of a healthy business. Sales per square foot in the mall changed from 268 per square foot in 2000 to 317 per square foot in 2006, 279 in 2010. Base Village had an average of $186 per square foot in 2010. Rick, did you index that $400 per square foot because that must have been determined during the PUD review in 2003? We did not index it. We went with what the PUD was. I don't think we didn't. I think Howard said it was still good. Howard said that's still the figure to use because that was, you know, we're dealing also with approvals that are not finished. So we have to be kind of careful where we go as a volunteer committee of the town. So anyway, here's the bullet points on the problem statement. The recession over the last two years has made the retail and lodging environment challenging at best, particularly in a resort that depends on discretionary spending. And aside from that, when we looked at the sales tax figures for the different resorts, even the resorts that had big box stores, IE, VAL Edwards area with their big box, steamboat, things like that. They were still, they suffered to some extent proportionally the same as we were suffering. So it didn't matter whether you had large retail centers. And steamboat is kind of a retail center for a region up there. It didn't matter that either. This is something that's kind of across the whole board. Fending the same as we are. Yes. There is an imbalance between the residential and commercial mix and the mall and base village. The bed basin base village has not kept pace with the increase in commercial square footage. Given the increase in commercial square footage. Given the increase in commercial square footage, there has been a 33% increase in least square footage in both base village and the mall between 2006 and 2009. There has not been a proportional increase in guests and are lodging to support the square footage. We need more heads on beds to be sustainable. Base village is not complete. I know that's kind of a new statement, but I thought it would be. Anyway, the 6th out of the 6th and 13th new lodging units approved in base village, only 243 or 40% of them are complete. Of the 70,161 square feet of commercial space approved and base village. 50,633 square foot is built. 70% of the total which is approved and 43,000 and five of that is actively leased. Next point is to get serving commercial nodes are challenging to remain sustainable. There is not next point, there is not a critical mass of retailer in either the mall or base village at the present time to be sustainable. And lastly, there has been a 1% increase in gross sales within the center, base village in the mall between 2006 and 2010. However, there is more competition, more commercial space footage, least in the mall and base village making the pie smaller for those retail businesses. The sales per square foot in the mall between 2006 and 2010 were reduced by 12%. Yes, John. You mentioned here that two guests serving commercial nodes are challenging to remain sustainable. You're talking about the current level. Did you discuss what it would be like at full build out? You know, we focus really on the question that you wanted us to kind of deal with. And so we didn't go to full build out that I remember that for any conclusions, some of that entered in discussions, but it wasn't something that was of a strong enough point that it directed the group. Well, and the other problem is you don't know what full build out is going to be. Yeah, you don't know me. Just because base village is permitted for this doesn't mean that that's what's going to get built. So it'd be highly speculated on your part. Well, that's what realtors do, highly speculated. You're supposedors do. Anyway recommendations. Number one, pretty obvious. Completing base village is important. Increasing the number of lodging units and hot beds is critical to address the imbalance mentioned above. The new developer base village will most likely want to review the retail and commercial mix to Fred's point in base village and relationship to the other two commercial nodes in Fred's point in base village and relationship to the other two commercial nodes in snowmass village. If this occurs, the town should independently review new assumptions and conclusions on residential and commercial mix proposed by the developer rather than default to what was basically approved at the time in 2004. Considering number point number two, considering that it may take some time to see physical change in base village, the following recommendations are offered. The first one. To increase the number of visitors and occupancy, a new level of cooperation is needed between the town, retailers and lodging. This should investigate incentives for businesses and the town to work together to develop promotions, share information, and remove barriers to synergistically work together to improve occupancy. And the second point is without interfering in lease relationships, the town managers should reach out to landlords to help facilitate communication between landlords and tenants. Sometimes this might involve discussing a change of use, where there is vacant commercial space, it also might involve simply providing a point of reference on retail sales with the information derived from the FAB analysis. The third recommendation is pace ourselves financially with the current economy. That was a lot of your discussion with Marianne prior to this discussion. And I think that's really an important, the most important point. The town should recognize it as performed better than the average in this economic downturn compared to other resorts. Page 17 of the council packet, there's a summary of the percent change in sales tax for a number of mountain resorts. This decline in sales tax between 2006 and 2009 range between 5.5 and 12 percent decline. The average decline in sales tax was 7.42. Snowmass Village beat that average and was down as Russ said by only 6.7 percent on sales tax between those years of 2006 and 2009. Snowmass Village also reduced its spending during the economic downturn. FAB would simply remind the council that spending should correspond with the actual pace of economic recovery, which is uncertain at this time. However, an improving economic climate, if it occurs, will improve retail and lodging sustainability and we have outperformed better. We have performed better than our competitors as measured by total sales tax. You also had one question that since the FAB really looked at it, but we didn't feel the question, we didn't feel that the answer supported the question so much and the question was, has base village cannibalized the mall? That's not written in here, but we looked at that and we decided that as a group, it didn't cannibalize the mall because we are seeing a different clientele at the vicering and we have other opportunities at base billings that were not present on the mall. Now some of it may have, there may be some dollars flowing one way or the other, but overall it wasn't a direct cannibalization of the sales tax at the mall. It was just we were supporting the guests with alternatives without the intent of taking away from the existing. And that was a pretty, that was a fairly long discussion, which did not result in a recommendation, but I thought that was important for you to hear. Also, I want you to hear that not everybody was 100% on everything. We had a couple people who had summer reservation and wanted to make sure that we make our recommendations don't say go out and try to change a developer's a developer's approval process because of the man with lights decision and other decisions. We want to make sure that we're not recommending to you to do something that could be interpreted as an illegal step forward. So I mean, but there's a lot of discussions that we had that they don't really get reduced by paper like discussions you all have. It's really sometimes difficult to get the in-uendo that was given in those discussions. So anyway, thank you very much. Thank you. John, the market. On your first recommendation on the second page, you talked about removing barriers. Now what barriers did you discuss? Are there anything in particular? And then working together to develop promotions and share information, is there something that our next discussion is going to be getting into that you see that it's not being addressed that needs to be? On the barriers, you know, you've got a lodging community of I think 26 or 27 different condominium complexes, hotels and sort of other lodging type opportunities. And they're competing. And so therefore, you know, they may not want to share certain things with the marketing department because they're out looking for a specific group or going in a certain direction. Retail, you know, you've got retail competing. Also, there's barriers to, you know, you're trying to get people here, that's one thing. But maybe when we're, we have people here, and this is going to sound really crass, but remember you're talking to me, that, that, what we have to do is, we have to come up with some programs that will help the merchants in the lodging separate the guests from their dollars. And in doing that, we need to have that kind of a success by a team effort, not by you trying to do it on one person and you doing it on another person, it's the same person. Let's have it so that we do a team so we can bring people in because there is a broad spectrum of people that use stone masks. Maybe what we need to do is make sure that we're going after that broad spectrum instead of just one corner of the market. That's all. Okay. Does that answer your question, John? To some extent, it makes me wonder if it wouldn't be beneficial to have the FAB meet with the marketing special events board. Just thank you very much for bringing that up. That's happened. We are going to, we are having, we add another meeting in June, and we're going to be meeting with marketing special events in June and July to go over some things. Most of that is aimed toward budget. But if you want us to look at something else with them, we'd be happy to add that on. Just to be clear, our understanding of the direction is that you asked these two groups really to get an understanding of what they do, the metric, somewhat like the next item, so that there's a better understanding when we get into the budget process, understanding what is behind it. So it's really intended to be an educational process with the FAB so that they do understand and have a little bit higher level of understanding when they get into the body. But Rick brings up some excellent perspectives that need to be discussed at that level in a meeting like that. I'm encouraged to hear that you're considering doing that. Well, Susan is not an enemy of FAB, we're not an enemy of Susan's. I don't think if we are, maybe I should back out of the room. Anyway, but I think that will add to the door over there, Ricky. What? We got back doors from you. Yeah, well, I think we'll have a good, healthy discussion that will both educate. We have a number of new members on FAB and even some of the old folk like me, we need to be reeducated as to certain things. And marketing has been a little bit of a mystery to us because it operates under a set of rules that's different than the general budget set of rules. And as a result, it would be helpful that we understand what's going on. And we might be able to help some places, and they might be able to help us some places. So we can make sure that we work better as a team. Thank you. Markey. I have a question and then some observations on the barrier issue. Just want to play around and see if I'm going in the right place. In terms of the statement about cannibalization, did you do that by various components, lodging versus restaurant versus retail? We had the numbers all broken out when we looked at them, but when we did this one report, it did not include lodging. And the reason why was because there was only one vendor reporting sales taxes for the base village area. And so we couldn't separate those numbers from the others because then you would know how much money they're making and that information is confidential. So on the lodging side, we actually pulled that to the side and concentrated on general retail, restaurants, food, drug, and liquor, sportsy equipment, and any other retail. So those were the segments within the mall, base village and the center. So you really couldn't tell at the end of the day if you didn't have all the data whether it was catalyzed, and was really occurring. Just the general sense. We had the information broken out by those sectors, by those areas. Well, Rick, and also, Mark, he's questioned, you mentioned the pie and this pieces of the pie. Yeah, well, there's been discussion with and there's evidence coming out of the viceroy that says these, you know, for the most part, the viceroy is added a dimension to the lodging factor in Sonoma's Village. And part of that has been, we have actually cannibalized a little bit on the St. Regis to a lesser extent on the little nell and to about the same as the St. Regis on the hotel Jerome. Where these are people that because they ski out here and they've got kids and all of that, they have chosen to try it out here because they have the kind of lodging they wish to stay in. And we're not going to have anybody from, and I'm not picking on anybody when I say this, I own a timber line kind of many of them, but we're not going to have people from the timber line all of a sudden say, I'm going to spend a lot more money and jump down to the viceroy. What we're going to see. It's a different clientele. It's a different clientele. And it's actually, I think, a supplemental clientele because as that comes in and those people now spend a little bit more time here, those are dollars that would have been spent not only in Aspen for lodging, but also for retail. Those people may buy in the shops and stuff and help the shops upgrade what they're doing to this extent where people out of timber line or out of Lorowood or out of top of the village or any place else on the the the lodging community within so much that they would have choices they didn't have before and that may entice again retail dollars to be spent here. Okay I want to talk about this concept as we get into this barrier issue, let's play around with how the barrier that number one, the John was talking about, and we talk about partnering more and putting little packages together. And I have not done this, but if I chose to go in, I'm a tourist. And of course, I'm from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Sorry that they lost yesterday. But the Duke. Yeah, I knew he'd do it in my team. They almost. This was a tough, hey, the end of the game, the one. Yeah. Where are they playing soccer? First game. Ultimate. But anyway, I'm trying to, how would I navigate? I've never been to Snowmass. And I check, I put in Google Aspen Snowmass or Snowmass or Aspen's ski company. And I began to open that website. Is it going to drive me to all the package deals, or do I go specifically to the lodging, or do I see you? Is that a question we want to ask the next group? Well, I'm just trying to think, is that what you're talking about? I wouldn't know. Is that where we should be going? Is that, yeah. Yeah, that's kind of the question. And that might be one of the things that when we get together in June and July, and Susan said is nodding as mine is that we might have that discussion because there may be ways that we might have that discussion, because there may be ways that we can help them, and they can help us figure out ways that we can increase that sales tax dollar with both packaging as well as other things besides just driving people to the individual lodges. You know, the reason why I bring that up, and we saw the article just recently that Madeline had in the paper about SNOMAS sports, and I'll do respect a ski co who really helps feed all of us here. The fact of the matter is we've got all these little shops and I'd love to be able to see a menu that would maybe put together the enclave, a sports place and have a whole package deal that might be available. And that's where I was going. Is that what I want to know if that's kind of what you're all thinking about? I don't know whether we're thinking specifically of that, Marky. I think what we're trying to do is we're trying to get our arms around this 800 pound gorilla that says we need to create more sales and more sales tax for government operation. But what direction we're going to go? We're not pre-instead going in. What we're going to go. We're not pre-set going in. What we're trying to do is figure out as a team where we're going to go. I just want something in, Senna, as a traveler. I just want to make it simple. I agree with you. For us, stupid people. I just, the example I remember in the discussion was, what was that restaurant program we did two weeks back? And so the group began talking about what that looked like and could we do more of that, which was a great partnership. It was great. Between snowmast tourism and the restaurant community. So how could you incent doing more of that and then promoting that within the broader community? What are the questions? By doing this, you know, that restaurant promotion not only worked for the guests that's here, but it can drive people like me that used to going home and my wife and I have dinner together at home and that, it can drive us back out so that we have kind of a night out on the town and winter doesn't seem as long. So that's one of the things we talked about, how do we create the kind of promotions? Instead of just looking at trying to get somebody to come here and book a reservation and stay, how do we drive it so that they participate more in the different things available to them in snowman's village that helps create a better cash flow for snowman's village? One of the questions I had when we'll go to Fred Nex's, you know, past years, we had a lot more, well, we didn't have a lot more, we had more restaurant space up on the mall, specifically like the tower, where people would go into the tower, have dinner, sit down, the kids might run out, the wife might run out to the other retail place around. Did you look at the numbers from the 2000 era where we had all the restaurants and the retail and compared to what we have now How's that looking? Are you seeing any? Down turn because we've lost a good I think a very good restaurant that we used to really depend on to bring people for entertainment and restaurant We didn't get into all of these specific restaurants whether one was better than the other with the quality, but there was a discussion about just that topic. In restaurants, from what I know in my Food and Beverage days, they really need to regenerate themselves every seven years to be something to draw people in there. Whether does retail have the same kind of thing? And we did discuss that at length. We chose not to point fingers at people, but we're looking at the concept of, you know, you take them, we have three or four restaurants that have been around a long time in St. Thomas Village. And then we have brand new ones like Ben Gavenga and Garnish. And so therefore, you know, how do they amalgamate themselves as a force to go forward to keep dollars from flowing to Aspen for dinner and people stay here? And one of the things that we did talk about was maybe we'll be coming back to you to say we need to look at some type of lease or retail specialist that really has some ideas here so that we can work with that person in the town and specific type shops, whether it's a shopper, a restaurant or whatever it is, to help these individuals because, you know, all of us, most of us have been here 20, 30, 30, 5, 40 years. Sometimes it's a little more difficult to reinvent ourselves because we get comfortable. It's like my old slippers that sit by my door so I can take the dogs out. If I ever seen them public with them, they'd probably say, boy, that realtor hasn't made any money in years. Where's this grocery cart? But, you know, the point the way is is, I've seen his slippers. But the point the way is is that we get comfortable. We sometimes need some helper advice. It's not that anybody's done or doesn't show initiative. It's just that you've had a certain amount of people come in year after year. Well, also people may not be the ones coming back now. We may have to be looking at Newclient. Right. And also over the years, the ownership of the mall has changed to where it's going from owner, you know, ABC. And each time it happens, the new guy comes to town and maybe thinks he can charge more of a, you know, a higher lease rate to the last guy. And now all of our businesses that were doing okay, breaking even, making a little bit of money, maybe now they're spending more money on their leases and it's driving them out of business This is this is kind of hearsay But it's fairly accurate is that the landlords have actually worked with a number of the tenants That's good to hear on leases and things I think basically some of the people that have been going out of business have been doing it for other reasons being The volume of their business the direction of their business their age direction of their business, their age, whatever it might be. Well, yeah, I was talking to a business yesterday and they said, you know, they haven't gotten the breaks, but it's one of those things where they've been doing okay and so they say, are we being penalized because we're doing better? And that's way good, you know. Right? This is actually something I was going to say when I was going to dress the marketing and group sales report But I'll say it now because the issue's been raised and I think it's important and I think Susan and I have had this conversation in the past and I think it's important to share this with the council and I think it's important to share this with the council. And I think it's important to share this with everybody here and out there. Snowmass cannot survive on four and a half or five months worth of business in the winter. We desperately, desperately need business in the summer. And adding one more weekend event or one more special last the master something like that is simply not going to move the needle. What we need to do is capitalize on what snowmass is. Snowmass was is and always will be a family resort. The adage you come for the winter, but just stay for the summer, is not a cliche. I am living proof of that. I started coming out here in 1977. I came out here every year to ski. As my kids got bigger, I brought them out here every year. One year in the early 80s, I had the opportunity to be out here on the 4th of July. I stood in the middle of town and figured out about three weeks worth of activities I wanted to do in the three days I was here. And I said, my God, this is spectacular. I got to get a piece of the rock. And I bought my first piece of property shortly thereafter. What I am driving at is that just as you have ski vacation packages in the winter, you need ski vacation packages in the summer. You need to put together a program that takes advantage of all the natural resources we have, all the cultural resources we have, the personal resources we have, the personal resources we have, and market them, package them, and market it as a vacation package. You have, every lodge has got a list of customers, people who have come here year after year. The ski company has got a list of customers. I think you've got to, you've got to consumer base that you can start marketing to. But I think if you, what you want to do is get people out here for a week, staying in lodges for a week, enjoying themselves here for a week. My belief is to sort of paraphrase an adage. If you create it, they will come. And I think if you create a summer, marketing, a summer vacation package, people will come. And once they come here, as we all know, in the winter time, the return rate is 70%. 70% of the people who come here first time come back here. I submit to you that it will be every bit as good in the summer if not better. Because as far as I'm concerned, I travel a lot in my many years. There's not a nicer place on the planet, June, July and August than right here. And if you have something to attract people for an extended period of time, they'll come and they'll come back. I implore you, Susan. I implore the ski company. I implore the law jones to get together and come up with something that is attractive to people to get them out here. I've been in software speech for a while. Right, that's my answer to the last time. Very good, but that's a very good point. I'll look at that. Could I say two things? Sure. And then I want to ask somebody that's here at Carolyn if she has anything to add. The one thing FAB is not trying to do is to be marketing or tell marketing what to do. We are FAB and we try to help deal with the income for the town. And what we'd like to do is offer to be a part of a team, and that team is called the town of Stomach Village. And instead of, you know, they're not different sports, we're all on the same team doing the same thing all the time. But we're hoping that as we get to get it this summer, we can help in some way for whatever they need from us that we can deliver that. And then maybe we have some ideas in that discussion that will materialize into something that's gonna be a success for them, for us, and for you and the town. And that's kind of where we're going. And I think that we've had some great discussions with Hunt on some of this capital projects. I know you guys didn't like me for a while, but the point though, I'm okay. I find that totally acceptable. And my wife does too because she thinks I won't run for a council if that's okay. Anyway, but the point that I said, I think that we will find new ways of working together because we got a hell of a group in FAB and they want to help. They want to be a group in FAB and they want to help they want to be a part of Partner Pardon me a partner and some of this a player and some of this and they will continue to do Things that will help us all get better at what we do Carolyn. Do you have anything you want to add? Yeah, you need to come to either a chair up here or the microphone please Carolyn. Hello, hello. I wouldn't dream of it. I just wanted to add one thing. I think there was a lot of great work done by the finance department. We can't go into the detail that some of the questions you guys would like answered required because of proprietary information. And I guess this is kind of a minority opinion obviously. But I think what our numbers tell us is what happened in terms of the business at the mall and the base and the center. It doesn't tell us why. Anything we say about why it happened is speculation. Right. And you know, as we've been to these meetings like Colorado Association of Skeetans, we're Why? Anything we say about why it happened? The speculation. As we've been to these meetings like Colorado Association Skate Tans, we're hearing very similar stories across these other ski areas. So, and some are a little worse than we are. Thank you, Carolyn. No, no, we're all, I agree with Carolyn. Overall, it doesn't tell us why, except that when we start looking into why, we've talked to the vice-versa. We find out certain things, but it's not something that's a factual base and you can use it as a correlation. Jason? Just two things. One, I think I'm confused by your statement about cannibalization and your perception that that isn't happening. When you look at 6.7% reduction in sales tax overall, and then you look at a 12% reduction in performance on the mall, how do you reconcile that to say that the emphasis on the mall isn't a result of that? Well, some of it is you've had a change in the mall as far as a couple of businesses that supplied sales tax have left them all. You've had some retail and things that were secondary retail spaces that have come down to primary retail spaces or disappeared. Third thing is that the replacement for one of the sales tax generators, which was the timber mill, is Vanga Vanga, which is a new business and as starting as a new business, you don't always have that immediate sales tax that you would have had from an ongoing business with that. I mean, you will have some of it, but at the other side of it is you're also bringing in some other things that weren't available in the past. And keep in mind the 6.7% is all businesses that remit sales taxes to the town. We have this category that we call other category and it's when people come in here in the point of sale is here in town. It's not at a physical location in the center or the mall or base village. The sales taxes on the worksheet that's in your packet will show that the sales, the gross sales for the mall base village and the center excluding lodging actually went up by 1%. And so when you factor in things like, because you can't just move in, you can't get the snowmage club. I mean, there are other mountain restaurants and then you've got all your deliveries that are brought in down as well. So where our museum is going in right now, we was a good, you know, retail generating business. And so when that got changed to a, in my opinion, we got changed to the residential sales for the base area, we lost a lot of sales tax generation from that type of business. So when you see those things, again, back when the restaurant took off, there are things that used to really happen. When that happened to our left, I told people, you know, in the mall, watch what happens to send to the mall now that that business is gone, because you're going to see a large downturn, I believe. So, you know, a number of things, go ahead. Okay, and then second question really quickly, just if you could comment on this and whether you guys talked about it. But in your first recommendation, your last sentence says, in assuming that the developer will want to review the mix of the base village if that occurs, the town should independently review new assumptions and conclusions. And Fred mentioned it earlier, this concept of kind of a joint public private development analysis using ULI or something like that. Is this a direct comment on that concept? Are you saying that we should remain independent and not get involved in something like that or how does that relate to this idea? It was kind of evolved from the conversation of as the foreclosure happens. If instead of one entity you have multiple entities or even if you have one entity chances are they're gonna come in and want you to make changes and what was you have multiple entities or even if you have one entity. Chances are they're gonna come in and want you to make changes and what was approved and extend what was approved to a later date. And in doing that, I think it's in the best interest of the town for you all to be receptive to listen to that and make decisions based upon 2011, 2012, whatever the date is, versus stick to something that was approved in 2004 because that was approved and that's the line we've drawn that line in the sand, we have to keep it in the sand. We're not saying encourage other development, we're not saying encourage larger development. All we're saying is there is discussions that will come forward naturally. And I think Fred would be the first one to support that concept that somebody who's going to buy part of the development off, i.e. maybe the ski company, i.e. somebody else that, you know, the existing caretaker of the development, aloes, whatever it might be, they may want to do something different than what the original developer did, which was, whoever it was, a long time ago. Anyway, and the resulting approvals that were given at that time period. I couldn't agree with you, Maurek, and it's my belief. Remember, base village was designed as a single developer project. It is my belief that I think the bank will bid it in at the foreclosure, and I think the bank is going to look to sell it off and it's going to look to sell it off probably in pieces. I don't think any single developer is going to come back in here and buy all of base village. Well, if you're now faced with multiple developers, you've got to have an overall plan that that developer buys into. You can't have one guy coming in here and saying, this is what I want to build. Number one, he cares about what's going to happen to the rest of the place. And he can't be with two or three developers. It can't be done in isolation. One guy coming in and say, I want to build this, nothing guy coming in and say, I want to build that. It's got to be coordinated. And that's why I keep pushing this master plan. And part of the example that we continue to go back to an FAB was that if it's not in base village, it could be in the mall or it could be both. Where somebody who wants to redevelop the mall, somebody who wants to change base village, they may say there's enough commercial already here. What we'd like to do is change over this commercial. So a first floor commercial space that's not bill could end up becoming part of a residential type of Development whether it be rational or whole ownership or whatever it is and those are the kind of things that we talked about So that you know there are some in our mind preparation a Recommendation for preparation because that will alter Sales tax in the future when the ultimate full development is done Russ alter sales tax in the future when the ultimate full development is done. Russ? I was just going to say that the statement that says the town should independently review what is proposed by the developer kind of makes that argument for a more arms-length relationship rather than that. Well, we're not saying become the developer. The arms length is, you know, but you need to have a thought process and a communication process to what's best for the village going forward. And that doesn't mean you're a part of the development, but you are going to be the approval process. And being that approval process, you have to be open to listen, open to new ideas and then make decisions that are best made by the information in front of you you know and it may be exactly what was approved it may be something else who knows Mr. Dresser first and Russ I just say that this discussion that we've been having is predicated on the FAB's assumption that the new developer owner whatever a base village has come to you and ask you for Modifications and you're talking about what would happen after that happened so yeah reinforcing that first sentence assuming that yes, and I just wanted to reiterate John's point, which is the FAB did some of them independently looked at some of the cases we've been discussing and recognized that A, we've got to respect the agreements that the town has made today, but if a developer does come forward and recommends changes to that retail commercial mix and puts forward information in front of you, you may want to independently review that. And also to the point Carolyn made is, you know, there are some unanswered questions. And there was a lot of debate about is the piece of the pie getting bigger or smaller and that might be a time to verify that. But there was, I think, a thought in terms of the process that again it would be the developer moving forward and recommending something different. Mark Egan, John. Look at this. That's a very quick question for Rick and the FAB. Was there any discussion about some way we might incent some of our mall owners such as giving them a piece of their sales tax collected back that would help them improve their business or work on their business. the tax is something the town collects. We didn't go into it far enough to say the town should rebate and we're doing anything. Part of what a recommendation is to have better cooperation between the town and the private enterprises within SOMAS for a total success. And the town part of it is the town itself marketing and the other entities of the town. The private enterprises being retail the you know and so we didn't go into that specific we're just saying is that we all have to be a team as we go forward if we're going to have success. Okay thank you very much Rick. Okay now one of the items that you did look at was the revenue per square foot. And obviously that varies throughout the year and how the seasonality on that is per square foot. Did you ever graph that out or take a look at how that? We looked at it on the annual basis. You know, this would be a discussion I'd like you to have when you have the joint meeting with the marketing and group sales. Is that if we were to shift some of our money around through the season because it's obvious that where we're getting killed is in the summertime. And if we were to take our winter marketing dollars that we spend on expenditures in the winter sale and push it into the summer, what kind of effect would that have on the summer sales? So that would be one topic of conversation I'd like you to have at that joint meeting. We'll have that conversation. I mean, it's pretty much on all of our minds anyway. It's just a matter of, you know, we're not going to make their decision for them. And what we're going to do is we're going to try to work together to try to make it better for everybody. That's all. We'll probably bring that question up in the next. Yeah, that is timely. But there's two sides of that too. And you'll be talking about an in-your-next item. You know, it was something from our C and associates that when they analyzed, I think, in the comp plan, you know, when we make money, it was nearly 72%, 70% of our total income is coming from our winter months. So you can make two different arguments. One, which would be, boy, a buck spent in the winter, generates $3 or $4 in terms of a turn based on, you know, spinning characteristics in the winter generates $3 or $4 in terms of return based on spending characteristics in the winter. You could also make the other argument which is, boy, it'd be nice not to be so dependent on two or three months of the year. That's the debate you can have. The debate is, though, is that are we going to have reduction in revenue in the winter time if we were to shift the winter marketing dollars to summer? That's what kind of question I want you to look at. Right. Again, the philosophical part of that. No, I understand that. And the other side of it is that, like Russell saying, the things that people shop for in the winter time are much more expensive than what they shop for in the summer time for the most part. Also, lodging costs more in the wintertime than it does in the summer and therefore it provides more lodging tax and sales tax. And you know so there's different things like that that also you have to kind of be careful that you don't want to go too far one way and then create a you know a cavern the other way where all this stuff doesn't improve as well. My kids as well. Or balance may come up in your next discussion. Then you may not want to go home for dinner right after this. Wait for our next disaster. You can always watch. I'm going to do it. It's important. OK. A.D. Ellsville, Johnson. Thank you all for your question. I'll see you hand up in the public. Please step forward. Stay tuned in for the record. State with board your own. Clean Doyle, Pete Trebb, and the Tuss4 speaking on my own back, though. And I was thinking along the same lines of John, but taking it one step forward, I think having the baseline as to what the sales tax or the square footage rates are over the different seasons. Having that baseline now is very much going to help us in assessing how effective or what impact different marketing plans or strategies we take are. Going forward without that baseline, we're just going to be operating in the dark again. And then just secondly, I think the level of transparency and communication that has come out of this teamwork should very much be commended. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the FAB for their time and putting this together so quickly. OK. Short break. Yeah, let's take a 10 minute break. Try to get back here. Let's start off at 10 after 6. Thank you. Item number 6. This is a joint meeting with the marketing group sales and special events board. Susan, Mr. Quigley. Thank you. My name is John Quigley. I am Chair of the Marketing Board, Marketing Group Sales Special Events Board. Thank you for this opportunity for us to present to you. I'd like to take an opportunity and introduce the board that I'm very blessed to serve with. Each and every person on our board has been involved in marketing, special events, and group sales as their career of choice. We have John Henshaw, Bob Purvis, Peter Moore, David Perry, Barbara Wicks, Robert Sinko. We and myself, John, quickly, we are either active currently or have been active in restaurant, lodging, retail, development, every aspect of tourism. Thank you. For a number of years. Yes. I'll turn it over to Susan. Well, as you know, you may know that we report into Council four times a year, twice by report in two times in person and this is that First time during the year in person as we're heading into summer and the two primary things that we tend to focus on are showing you metrics of the work that we've done in the past year as well as we'll look ahead in which case it would be a look ahead for summer 2011 so we'll just kind of go through these metric slides and So we'll just kind of go through these metric slides and put a little bit of context to them, but then I think once we get through the summer piece, then it's really discussion about the relationship between board and council and any questions that you might have or suggestions. So just jump right in and feel free board. Okay. This is the agenda, financial performance, the budget by activity buckets, which we've shown you in the past. Historical occupancy, the metrics that we use on a regular basis and periodically analysis, 2011 summer programming and then the discussion we mentioned. Starting with financial performance, I won't go through all this because you just saw it, but for us it is a measure to say and show you that we were under in expenses. Some of that's due to timing. Winter spans across two different years. 10-11 and you can always get a direct mail piece out in the time frame in the previous years. We try so sometimes we don't incur that expense until the following year, but we're on target with our winter budget. And we were better in revenues as Mary Ann had already expressed. Same thing with group sales under inexpensive and over in revenue. And I wanted to put our group sales historic production slide up here to show you. In 2009, we were extremely aggressive. We bumped up the goal from 2.0 to 3.8 billion and we ended up with 5.9 million we were 155 percent of goal. I might say maybe the goal was a little bit too low that's possible but at the same time we signed multi-year agreements. We could have dogged it and hung on to that business and saved it for the next year to make our endow look better but we didn't. We just went after it just to get the business and so we performed very well in 2009. It had an impact on us in 2010 by closing those multiple years and also not an excuse but it's fair to say we were short two staff or almost half a year and that does make a difference in closing. We have the new group sales director starting April 4th. He's got all kinds of great ideas. Can't wait to dig in and he's gun hoe. And I think we're going to see some good numbers. That's the guy from Las Vegas. Yes. Yeah, he's really sharp. And what he's bringing to the table, he's a little nontraditional, which is kind of great great because he's seeing things through different eyes and not the same perspectives that we have which are valid, but some new ideas that I think we're going to be exciting. What is that guy's thing? Fred Brodsky, B-R-O-D-S-K-Y. Annual Historical Sales Text, I showed you this report last year, as it related to 2009 and I just updated for 2010. It's the story is obvious. I don't really need to explain it. Since we started our work in 2003, every year sales tax revenue is gone out. So we have to think there's some impact of what we're doing on that until the recession hit. And now slowly already coming back out. Winters, same story, continuing to rise up until the 2007-08 winter and then it dropped because of the recession and we're not quite out but I believe in 2010-11 you're going to see this turning around we've got some good success stories so far in winter marketing and summer sales tech, same story. Our activity buckets for the marketing budget there's four primary buckets that we consider and this is a debate and everybody has their own opinion on how it should work. We believe it should be balanced. So when we look at winter marketing and somebody just expressed it earlier that's where we're those three months in winter pay for summer. If we don't have a successful winter then we're jeopardizing summer we don't have enough to spend to make up the difference or already feeling the pain. Winter events, we have a great partner with the Espon skiing company. They bring in the X Games, for example, which helps us reach that young audience and build some early loyalties. So we have some dollars that are, but you'll see not quite as much as marketing, which is getting the word out, sharing the packages, getting the promotions out in the market. Summer events, we use events as triggers, and I'll share more later. We want people to come out for all the reasons to come to SNOMS, but we just did some focus groups, and what they told us was there are a lot of choices for us. So events are triggers to help us make our decision between all the many wonderful resorts in Colorado. We'll go a little bit more into that. In summer marketing, there's two pockets. If you do events, you have to tell people about them or they're worthless. You have to have sufficient event promotion for people to understand what's out there and the packages with lodging and tickets. And then there's also branding. And we can see that as well. For groups, it's pretty simple. Talk to people. Build relationships, get to know them, get them to trust you and sell them. I broke these down by category. There's a lot of pies. We don't need to go through all of them. So if you find one that strikes you and you want more information, let me know. I had mentioned that marketing really is most important to us. Events you can have all the events in the world but again you have to tell people about the events. You have to tell them about everything else that there is to do here outside of events and you have to tell them the combination. So listen what's that administration on staff? We pay building rent. Nobody else does but we pay building rent we water fanny hill so that we have a concert venue bus service of Obin beyond what used to historically be there but if we do an event it generates more traffic Then we pay for the shelves to be able to run them waste management some police overtime hours things like that that aren't our personnel You had this the 21% the 648 administrative personnel. 648 is personnel which is people and training and benefits and travel. Is does that have any overhead allocation from the town or is that just straight your budget for your staff? That's straight our budget for us. How many of these are isn't in the marketing budget? There are six group sales. There are six as well. Total feeble total. Yes. One person for each function in the marketing department. So each each department has six employees? Yes. I'm the director of STEMIS tourism. So I'm technically overbought by my budget or my salary comes out of the marketing budget because that's where we started. There are five units in marketing, if you will. There's advertising promotion, which is about the special events and sponsorship, which is Dave, Patsy Pope, Joy as PR, Mark Millig is online and Sue Whittingham is guest services. Marketing by season is fairly even. Winter cost a lot more to promote, but it's also very effective tool to get people here and in summer again it's comprised of both brand and events marketing. It's fairly even. Summer marketing, again heavy up on, it's 43% is a good number for events and that's net. The total cost they don't have it in my head, but after you take out the revenue for sponsorship and the two events that we have ticket sales, we end up 43% is on events and the rest is promoting summer through marketing. Susan, what's the seasonal bleed between winter and summer? I'm sorry? between winter and summer. Meaning that you're separating summer and winter, there must be some overlap into the other two seasons we have. Sure. Well, we don't really have two seasons from a tourism standpoint. We don't promote anything in the fall or the spring. And the reason is right now we've got 2% occupancy in May. So putting good dollars against something where people aren't open. We've got enough work to do in June, July, August, September. So let's focus on making that as strong as it can be before we start to even think about shoulder seasons. If the community believe in lettuce, think about shoulder seasons. In the last community survey, they said don't let us, may as per Maui. I think what she's saying is, June, June community survey they don't let us may as per Maui. So we've written off half of April May and half of June. Not June. We opened up the Shirley Pepper and Brew Fest first week. No, remember we have had at the board level we have had a spirited debate on that topic. We have had a spirited debate on that topic. And we look at the sales tax collections and we focus in on June through really the middle part of October. And then Thanksgiving through mid-April, close of the ski lifts. There's some board members who were very active proponents of the, we'll call a shoulder season, mid-October through that month of Thanksgiving. Mid-October to Thanksgiving and looking at the statistics and the revenue collections, we focused our dollars on what we just call summer and winter. So June through mid-October, and then Thanksgiving through the ski season. Did that? OK. And it doesn't mean that if there was a group that wanted to come here in November or such that we would turn them away, but we wouldn't put our primary focus on them because they're going to have a bad impression of snowmats if they come and nothing is open. Then they go back and now this vitality that we're trying to communicate is not there. Now if it was a group that understood that there's nothing here for you and you're just getting cheap rates and that value oriented, we'll then come on down. But there aren't that many things. We can do it in the full serve hotel, like the silver tree or the stone bridge where there's meals. Case in point, the Espen skiing company. This year I'll get the dates wrong. The Snowmass closes April 11th, whereas Highlands and Aspen Mountain are open later. The ski companies surveyed properties to see who was going to be open in snowmass for the that two-week time period so they could actively promote Uh those properties so we were we as the lodging facilities we were all contacted and I don't clarify that statement You made a second ago about who's open after April 11th Mate second ago about who's open after April 11th? Me? Flue ski. Well, you said the ski. No, no, no. The company said they're staying open. Go ahead, David. Turn it on. The ski area is a snowmass and Aspen mountain, both closed on April 10th Sunday Buttermilk on the third before that and Highlands is open for two weeks on a daily basis till until Easter the 24th So because there's one mountain open and we still want to draw people here to stay in various hotels And hoping this snowmass would be able to house some of those people and yeah, we didn't want to find out which properties We're gonna stay open and and help push any business we get there's still a trickle of business up until a lot of Easter's very late Giving you too much detail tends to be from Mexico because of the holidays and I don't know the exact number of properties most And I don't know the exact number of properties. Most of, many of us are going through a renovation or a refresh. Okay. As far as groups, as I had mentioned, it's about people. It's about relationships. And so that's why 63% of the budget is personnel. You still have to have some marketing. You have to be at trade shows. You have to have some materials to share with people that the bulk of it is our people. Groups by market might be too much detail, because this shows that we do about 26% dedicated to the corporate market. There's still room for growth there. The Association, state and National, 21% each. CME and CLE, medical education and legal education have been good groups for us. We can serve them well and those are areas that we can continue to grow as well. Opipancy? Same stories. Increasing every year. Start starts to drop down in 2008, 2009, and it's starting to pop back up again. Very confident for this winter. Summer, same story. We're much like other resorts. I don't have slides to share with you what they've done, but I can do that. Same winter, starting to come back up again. This is a report. It's in your packet. I didn't give you all these details. If it's in your package, you want it to be more easier. But this shows how we're pacing. And this is winter 10-11 pacing. And as you'll see, we're pacing up over last year. November about even December was up. A big part of that was the Kellogg group that we had signed together with the ESPN Skin Company made a difference in a very slow time. January was up. February close to average and March is just kicking it and to show you in perspective. If you look at, this is a Comparable's report to other competitive markets. We don't know who all those other people are and it's not the same resort in each of the next columns, it's whoever's in the next order at the march, which is the month that we're promoting very heavily with various promotions with the Estonian Screen Company is 67% we are pacing ahead of every other resort in our comp set. So there's some conclusions you can not scientifically but conclude that if we put dollars against March and winter it makes a difference. Does everybody understand this? I mean it's a complicated table but it's a metric to compare ourselves from a lodging standpoint with other resorts in the high country. And out of those resorts, how many of them have marketing dollars they spend and the breakdown there? I know they all have marketing dollars and several over the past two years have gone and requested additional taxes for marketing purposes to be able to try to hang on during the recession. During the recession is the time you need to be out there the most. Because if you don't, you fall down even further off the radar screen while your competitors stay out there and remain sure of voice with guests. Do we have a metric that says performance per dollar spent? Or does that exist? I'm sorry, that says what? Performance per dollar spent to does that exist? I'm sorry, that says what? Performance per dollar spent to get that performance. If we want to get that occupancy, how much do we spend to get to see that occupancy? OK. The case you wanted to point it. I didn't point that. The way that we get into metrics and the way that we measure this is we can't pinpoint each piece of activity and how it was a result, for instance, in the past. It was so easy that we didn't have all these channels to be able to communicate with people. So you ran a print ed, you had one phone number, people called that one phone number and booked. That's pretty easy to measure. You know it worked. Now we can run a print-ed. We have social media going on. We have e-blast going on. The husband-skin company is doing something. Acre is doing something. There's so many different initiatives. We can't point to exactly why people, well, they can't even pick to it. They can't point to which one it was. They might say, you know, I kind of heard about this, and then look at online, and they're probably not even going to that 800 number or that website. They're just saying, from memory, I think I'll try Aspen's Game Company, and they get there now. They might have been our ad, or our piece that got them there. And we don't care as long as they got there, and they booked. But there's some slides that can show you how it shows that it's really literally impossible to show which initiative made the difference. It's the collective, all the pieces. So what we'll do is look at this campaign had all these elements and it was successful and let's look next year and see what we do and mix it up. Did we do better or worse and alter our marketing from that regard? Yes, Robert. Just a little. This group of competitive resorts. Yes, Robert. This group of competitive resorts we Don't know who they are Well, we do know who they are but we can't break them down on here So I think your question was talking about how much do these other people spend versus what we spend and When you throw and we talk about steamboat You know the shared and then steamboat, we don't know how much they spend on marketing. We don't know what the town of steamboat spends. And I think the basic answer to question is we really don't have that information. Susan was doing a good job of explaining what we do and how we can get our numbers, how difficult it is even for us to get our numbers, but this is beaver creek, veil, steamboat, telluride, and those sorts of resource that we don't have any information on. Is this just Colorado or is it the West? No. It goes across the destination resource across the West. So, squine, whistler, whistler black home, Deer Valley, mammoth, heavenly. So, Utah, California, BC, and Colorado. But Jay, I wanna answer Jason's question. I think we can contact those municipalities and find out much like someone could find out how much snow mass spends on marketing dollars to find out what the Breckin rigid tourism and Val tourism and Whistler tourism what they spend on marketing. Given that though it seems like we have a relatively unique situation in that our conference and visitors bureau kind of idea is in the municipality. Yes. So you'd have to get both and put us from both of those. We are relatively unique in that regard. Not a traditional tourism So you'd have to get both, and both of those. We are relatively unique in that regard. Not a traditional tourist organization or a chamber. But that's a great, that's a great thing. The only anecdotal comment I would make, because I'd wondered this, if it were possible to do such a comparison. First of all, if I looked at Aspen, which is just recently, David, helped me here, increased their taxes that they then contract with Acra to get their numbers up from like 400,000 to a million or so. Is that about right? Yeah, that's about 1.4. 1.3, 1.4. So they're at about less than half of what we are if we just look that public funding that then went to the marketing activity But then I think about well gee, I mean how much marketing and does by the Aspen Institute the Aspen Physics Institute The Music Festival the blog the blog and the skiing company versus what Vail Resorts does. And we don't know. We might know what Vail Resorts does because they were public company, but trying to really figure out what in their reports is the marketing comparable would be difficult. So the anecdotal thing I kind of got a chuckle on it was admitted I was from Breckin Ridge a year and a half ago and they were putting forth a ballot issue and they were debating about what the mill would judge a vehicle what the tax rate ought to be rather and they said they were doing about a million and a half now and they wanted to sort of increase it by double the tax rate which had to be well they must want three million and we were around about three million so Breckenridge was saying we could use more and when they answered the question how much more they said about another million and a half which equal three. But you're actually a 4-3, aren't you? I'm saying what? Your budget is your expense, your budget is 4-3. Last year you spent $4,300,000. Where'd you get that number from? Adding up what group sales spent and what marketing expense? That's different. That's group sales. I think you have to compare marketing to marketing. In for instance, that's $3 million. It was not an activity that goes to group sales. I'm just saying the total spent on the two, on the, it's one organization. You may break it up, it's one organization. But the total amount that you spent was $4,300,000. That's probably correct. Well, it is correct. But I'm talking about looking at comparable other communities and expenses which are comparable to our marketing and special events. That doesn't, in their case, include sales. Okay. And I don't need to believe at this point. But your joint goal, and I actually get this from the town code. Your major goal is sales and marketing programs to attract group reservations for development of tourism, for the benefit of the town as a whole. That's your overall goal. That's what you're in business for. That's what the town code says. So, I mean, you may separate the activities, and I think they should be separated, because I think they are different activities. But the overall goal is exactly the same. Let's get on with our report, and we'll have that discussion here. Probably a little bit. That's a great, great, into Jason's question. But can you go back just a minute to that last one? You got a light for you there. Yeah, thank you. I'm just trying to understand in each For each month Okay, is that the ab is that the average this last number here, is that the average of all the groups? Okay. So the average for September was 29 and snowmass was 25 and going down each month, I mean snowmass doesn't look like it's so great. It depends on the months. We know that summer is Requires the greatest amount of work and this is just Prove that. Okay, but even in February February snowmass is 54 and the average is 56 Little Okay, I mean I'm just saying I don't think that that points out that we're doing so well If all we are is average In February in March we're up. For the winter if I can just go back to this one. We're pacing up. Okay. Overlazzy. Okay. But I mean you made a sound as though we were, we were, we should be very proud of what we were and it just did look. It's proud of March. Sorry. It's proud of March. Well good. You need to, you need to combine those. You need to combine. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It got to come out of it. That may be true, that just wasn't in that. The other thing that hurts us to with other resorts is we are not open in May, most of April in May, and also most of October in November and the other resorts are. They have a better balance than we do, so we don't mix a bit overall. The metrics that we use, some I'm monthly and winter and monthly and summer, we get the Occupancy Pacing Report, which is in your packet, and I just showed you one sample slide. And we use that in two ways. We look at, we use it to look forward how we're pacing to see where we might have a whole restaurant week with a result of that. And March, there was a slower week based on the whole Easter timing. And we said, well, what can we do during that week to help drum up some business locally and with guests who are here? And that's how we came up with Restaurant Week. Same thing with Bucks. We find a week week and we do what we can on a larger level. If it's a big month and it's a big hole where it shouldn't be, that's where we say, do we need to do another direct mail piece or an e-blast. So we're very nimble in that regard to make sure that we can hit those months of the report shows. We also look at it looking forward for our businesses to plan restaurants and retail needs to understand when there are people here, particularly restaurants, so that you can have enough food, so that you have perishable foods. You don't order too much, too little. You have staff on board. So we use a retail report for them to be able to plan their business during those time frames. And we use it as a look back in history. How did we do last year at these time frames? What did we do? We can we possibly draw conclusions as to what worked, what didn't work, and what we can do better. Average daily rate, Robert or Jummit, when I talk, that does make a difference with sales tax revenue. We can have the same percent of occupancy of somebody else but it depends on our average daily rate which is strong in winter and frankly not so much in summer. True. Okay. Competitive resort occupancy comparable. We do share it with you. Fails tax in segment. It comes out by the town. comprehensive comparable, I just shared with you, failed tax in segment, it comes out by the town. Income expenses against budget, we shared each month and it's in your packet, each month how we're faring against budget and skier days, obviously, in winter. Periodically, we do an analysis, the commercial space nodal productivity, which Mary Ann's group had done is very useful to us and understanding what's going on with our stakeholders. Capture and leakage. FIT and groups break down. We have done in the past when we work on some strategic plans. And then new I shared with you here for both of our stakeholders. And we've got it. For stakeholders to be able to, I hear the question left, there's assumptions made about what we do do, assumptions made about what we don't do. You can't possibly know all this because you're not sitting in our office to see all the huge amount of activity. And so we thought, well, why don't we make it easy for people who want to read it? A lot of people won't. But here it is in the document, the last year in review, more detailed than you probably ever want. But it's there for you. It's there for stakeholders. And it's for our benefit, too. So we can look back and remember what we did, what it looked like, how it performed. So there you go. We're looking at the order to that. Now I just want to introduce you to it. And just a couple of points to make our marketing, it's an ecosystem. People engage in so many different ways than they ever did before. Who would have thought the internet would be as explosive as it is now? Who would have thought all the social marketing would be going on? But it is now. So people operate in different ways. They make decisions in different ways. They find out in different ways. They do their research in different ways, and we need to be talking to them in all different levels and all different manners. And this is a third party organization, and I ask them, share with us. When we have a hard time trying to pinpoint what needs something work, share with us your expertise, and they say, because you can't, you really can't. It's Bob, your meatballs or mushrooms in the ragu sauce. Do you want to share that analogy? Are we eating? What she's talking about is this, from time to time, people talk about working at an activity and getting an ROI or getting some sort of, like you were saying, you know, a dollar per, excuse me, $HMAD$ per point of occupancy. And it is proven, at least in my experience, to be difficult to cut things into small chunks, and to evaluate a return on investment, or just exactly how many dollars you've been on what to get a point of occupancy. And I've said it's a little bit like the mushrooms and the ragged spaghetti on the grocery shelf. You don't see all the mushrooms until you open the jar when you get home and pour it out, but somehow you have to believe that making that choice, because it's the brand, it's whatever, it's past experience, it's your intuition, you know, you're getting a fair dose of mushrooms in your ragu spaghetti sauce. And that's just a very difficult concept for many people to get around. And if you're trying to hold one independent variable at measure, right, then for instance, if we were to sponsor an event and we say, gee, let's see what would happen if we just didn't bother sponsoring that event and investing in that. The event just went on itself. And we said, well, fine, what we need to do is having sponsored the event for a while. We stopped. And we just see what happens after we no longer participate. If it's an outdoor event, we have a little problem because we can't let weather change from one year to the other when we measure it. And if it's an event with features talent, we have a little problem because we can't like the promoter of that event, change the lineup of talent from a killer lineup to a social lineup. So it becomes a bit difficult. So therefore, these measures that you saw Susan talking about are typically fairly high level measures, which are indicative of activities that you believe are representative of the overall effort. Scare days, occupancy, total gross dollars, food beverage, retail entertainment, etc., etc. And then once again you can look back and say well there are some other issues the conversations you were just having with FAB that says no matter how the gross goes and I can be getting insight into how the individuals are going because we hear individuals running businesses saying, down, have a bit of a problem. If you look at the top line, Food Beverage Retail Entertainment, what the FAB said was 2006 to 2009, Food Beverage Retail Entertainment, and this village went right through the great recession and had a 1 to 2 percent increase. But I talked to people, Billy, you talked to people, it doesn't sound like they're doing as well as they were in 2006 plus a couple percent. So, then when you look at the dollars per square foot, you go, oh, see there's more to it than just absolute sales of that is how it's distributed over those individual businesses and each of those square feet. And we don't know what the rent is, but we do know they pay dollars per square foot that we do not so when their dollars per square foot and revenue goes down and the rent doesn't move much or as much guess what what's left over after rent gets the leftovers get smaller I'm looking at him because he's a retailer and I think he pays rent I know that's kind of what that's sorry but that's the rags forget anything that we just kick around. It's just the way of thinking about it. Right. I've got a question about that, and I'm not convinced by your argument, because it seems to me if you run an event, an event that's meant to draw people here from out of town. And I distinguish that from the Thursday night concerts. But if you run a brew fest or a chili fest or whatever, those are vents are designed to bring people up here. Why in the world can you not measure lodging occupancy for that weekend? You can't. Okay. And then you get some, then it seems to me, then you know whether this event is worth running or not. Because if you're spending $230,000, which you do on chili fester, brew fester or something and it doesn't produce anywhere near either that revenue or that sales tax, might you spend your money on something else? Well, I make two comments about that. Number one is you can measure the occupancy and you do know the occupancy effect of that event on that weekend. Or you know the occupancy on that weekend. You can make some attributions about that event. These are the whether or not there was I-70 was closed. These are the there was a competitive resort offering of very strong venue or very strong lineup. So but you can say, okay, that's an indicator. I don't think it's definitive. I don't think it's that definitive. It was not the end game. The other thing is you got into it and probably we should talk about this and perhaps this is part of the FAB discussion is What's income streams do you measure and put against your expenditures for marketing if it's just sales tax? You probably don't have an event that necessarily, you know pays the town back I'm not doing it. I'm sorry. You're supporting the bottom line of the businesses out of which comes the rent, which then supports the willingness of landlords to invest in properties and or reinvest in something like the mall. I guess you'd have to sort of, it seems to me, it's really complex to sit down there and try to figure out a return on investment if you spend a dollar and then you try to add up all the beneficial income streams. So you can have a notion about occupancy and say, well, I like that way that it feels like, oh, I'm not so sure, but you're not sure. But I don't know how you, because see, I don't know what John makes on here. What I do know is that John's industry is very price competitive because their marginal costs are in a room to leave it vacant is very small. John's marginal cost on selling an extra pair of skis is very different because he's got a margin that isn't equal to John's marginal profit. So I don't know all these things that these individuals will do businesses. But I do know what sales taxes were generated over that weekend. Well, I think, let me finish. Now, let me finish. Let me finish. I think we need to start knowing that. I don't know that you can. Well, I think we need to start doing that. I think we need to start knowing what bed tax over the weekend, over an event. Because otherwise, this is a fairy land. You have no meaningful metric to tell me whether you're spending this money, how effectively you're spending this money. You're spending $230,000 on chili fest. Now, if we don't have some meaningful metric either in sales tax, bed tax occupancy, I don't care what the difference in ADRs, that does many think, I mean, I'd like to know what the occupancy rate was over that weekend. And I certainly ought to be able to get that from every large owner. But certainly, if we could start tracking sales tax, we would have something where we could say this makes sense, and you ought to spend $230,000 on it. Or it doesn't make it. You spend $85,000 on the X games. We really ought to have a metric to show us what we're getting back for that. What the occupancy rate was over that weekend. What the sales tax was over that weekend. What the bet tax was over that weekend. Because if we're not getting any decent return on that investment, why in God's name are we doing it? Well let me just suggest that you could know the occupancy and we do know the occupancy. So we're in sync on that and it's there. And if you look at X games and you look at the occupancy, you can either look at the occupancy report or you can stand in line and fuel and try to get a cup of coffee, but you can measure the X game effect and it's quite significant, okay? In occupancy, you can probably not... Have you noticed that? Yes, you can probably not. No, we have this discussion with David every year because you see David represents an entity with a like those to support our teams and we don't support it quite at the level that they would request. And we have a discussion in each year, you wait and say, well, I've been seeing on the edge in weekend is quite strong compared to any other weekend. So we have that discussion. So we're in sync on that. You'll have to talk to Mary Ann and Russ about what you can know and what you can't know. And through what mechanism and at what expense about daily sales tax and lodging tax. Because we agree actually it would be good to know that if you could know that. Our understanding over time, as we've asked about that, is that it is very difficult. With very expensive, clearly is not in a system we've seen in our town or other towns that you've been associated with us. So it's, and there is some, I don't know whether there is a question or not. Someone brought it up of whether or not you are allowed to do sales tax analysis or tracking by the day. I mean, is that generally, why not getting all tangled up in it? A lot of it is a matter of getting the business owners to agree to remit the information. And it's costly for them to do that on a regular basis. When we asked last winter, we wanted to know sales tax before it was due to us. And even with that, it was sort of like polling teeth to get people to remit to us. We were hoping to get the information earlier in the month. But even with that, I'd say we probably got it on average about five days before the due date was because they don't want to have to break it out by every month now. I don't know if we could require that and be changing the code. Again, I'm not asking them to do it every month. I'm asking them to do it when there's an event run. Well, let me ask you this. Just to play devil's advocate. If you do it by an event, how do you know that that room was rented to John Doe because he wanted to come for a chilly proofest. You don't have any other reason why he's in town. So now then you've got to have them to track why specifically have you come to this town? And that takes a lot of time energy. Russ has just hand up and then we'll go back to something. Microphone please. Again, on the daily sales tax, it's something that most resort towns pound their head on, and that it's for this very issue. If you had daily sales tax, you understand, and you can correlate what the event is, what the action is, and what the return is. There have been efforts in terms of sampling. And that was actually maybe one of the ideas FAB was kicking around is could you encourage or incent that. But again, it's another point that I've heard this board just debate is you got to make sure you get to represent a number of businesses and different sectors to do that. But that's something to be looked at. The other idea is you can do survey work in terms of, and you got to be careful about the type of event and how you do that survey in terms of what's the spend when somebody comes to an event. Are the local, are they staying in a hotel and you can make some rough estimates. It's not going in a hotel, and you can make some rough estimates. It's not gonna be precise, but you can make some rough estimates in terms of, what is a typical event, certain characteristics produce. It does require a little bit of survey work. I'm sorry. Brad, go ahead, Donald Peter. I'm sorry. Red, go ahead, then, on Peter. I know for a fact that one lodging company in particular knows surveys everybody who comes in and knows where that person came from, knows why they came there. Okay, knows what ad they read or what broker they went to? I mean, $4,300,000 is a lot of money. And unless we have, it's not going to be perfect. And it's not going to be exact. And it's not going to be a precise return on investment. But unless we have institutes, some metrics to say, if we're spending this money, how effectively are we spending it? What are we getting in return for it? I'm really troubled by that. And these questions really need to be asked. And if you're troubled by trying to get into more detail and to get some more metrics, we really need to have a discussion. Let's go to Peter, and then John Wilkinson. Fred, I don't want to you somehow have the impression that the marketing board is not interested in measuring before. The absolute opposite is facts. I've been on it since day one and we have struggled with this issue from day one. We are looking for things that can measure impact. We're looking for things that can say, let's stop investing. So if you go back over the last four or five years, we have stopped investing and shut down programs because we didn't think they were performing. Bob's point, I think, the marriage point is, the infrastructure of how we keep score in this community is not easily aggregate. And Fred, this is something that every council I've been on has asked that same question. And we're not fighting you on this. I don't want to leave you with the impression we're fighting you on this. We're not. We're struggling with it as much as you are. And anything we can do collectively to get more insights into that, we're more than happy to do. John Wilkinson. Well, the one thing I can say is that the London Olympics is going to cost the city of London ten billion dollars. It's only two weeks long. They're not going to get a return on investment for room rents during those two weeks. It's the intangible thing that you can't measure that. You can't measure. Somebody comes back and says, says, oh, you know, you had the X-Games, I want to see the practice pipe up on Fannie Hill, you know, wherever it's at. So it'd be great to be able to measure that, but you can't measure the intangible. How do you figure that? They've loved it. Well, John, that's a point that I wanted to make. It's not just that event that weekend. It's the months and months of advertising and awareness for snowmess, it's out there in the marketplace whether or not anybody comes to the event. Now, I just want to point out too that it's not 230, there's a net and you probably don't know that, but for sponsorship and ticket sales. So it's a much smaller number. I'm sorry, I did. There's a net number because there's revenue from tickets and sponsorships. So for chili pepper and brew, for the two events that we produce with ticket revenue. But even if you spent 200,000 on chili and brew and you had 10 people show up, then you know it's time to call it a day. Exactly, and we've done that. Just like Peter said with West Fest, it was obvious. Marquis Point is right on, we don't know exactly why. And the reason is we don't own one transaction. We don't sell lodging. We don't own one transaction. We don't sell lodging, we don't sell lift tickets, we don't sell t-shirts or booze or anything. So we're dependent on others to share with this information. And I'll give you an example. To Peter's point, we want to measure everything we can. So we keep scratching our head and saying, what might help? It helps in marketing when we do Q-tags and unique numbers and unique you are. you are doing those things. We can ask the lodges, could you please ask people when they book, how did you hear about this? What brought you here? Are you here for an event? A vacation or a combination of them? We can ask. We don't know how easy it is for the reservation activities agents to do that. We can survey visitors and do and we frankly need to do a lot more of that. It's the only thing that gets us closer to some sense of did this work. We did it for Chillipepper a couple years ago. I think we need to do it for more events this summer. Ask all those questions and tabulate it and it may not be scientific but it certainly is a lot closer than we are now. Enhancing reporting with the booking widget because we don't book anything online and then some more current sales tax data which Marianne is correct we've asked people in the past just for event weekends would you participate and when there's not enough participating then it's pretty meaningless or if you just have the high end and not the low end and vice versa there's nothing scientific that we can conclude. Just a question for you, Susan. Steako does all this great survey work with her guests, and we kind of know where people stay. And how many days they're here? And the winter. Is that any type? Yeah, in the winter time? Is that any metric that the marketing board looks at? Where people are staying versus Aspen versus Mount Valley? We do because David puts it together and shares that with us so that we can understand the sense of what First, you want to share that because it's a really good Survey and analysis he does Yeah, we have a lot of information and we share that it's yeah, where people are staying where their origins are You know, by the way, we do know in the winter and in the summer daily occupancy and daily ADR after daily race so you can get a pretty good idea what kind of you get how do we can ask a few things did you get the from all the lodges? 85% of the units from the snowmast reporting into that end of that. And that's clear that's something we all work together on. Yeah. There's other bits of data. We index, you know, where people are coming from. You know, how we perform in Dallas. Class Angeles. You know, how they get here, what brings them here. Yeah, we have, and we share all that information. I think, you know, to reiterate what Peter was saying Fred is that, yeah, this board since the beginning has tried to gather as much measurement data and metrics as possible, because, you know, we're business people. We think like you do. We need to understand something's got to return or doesn't have a return. And so what we're business people. We think like you do. We need to understand if something's got a return or doesn't have a return. And so what we're doing now. Thank you. That one's better. Sometimes we're doing a little bit too much of this. We agree with you. If we had daily sales tax data by sector, we would love to have that. That would be a great thing. But I don't think that's immediately feasible. So we do the best otherwise. But yeah, we've got a wealth of information from our surveys and marking those she's administered, many thousands of those surveys herself. So you can derive some suppositions, okay, we spend $1,2 million or what it is, and the winter marketing is, I don't know what the magic number is. And share with that was SkiCo total is maybe 20 million, because SkiCo has so much money. Uh, sorry. Wait. So at the end of the day, this produced why number of Skier visits, and of that we've got 58% of the lodging for that particular season, right? So then from there you can say okay now if we grow the marketing budget by two or three percent will we increase the number of sales by two or three percent over previous years? Can you do anything like that to give us some index? We can look at it. I don't know that we can say conclusively. No, because now you've got all these all these hypothesis and assumptions. And I'm sure Dave does this all the time. Yeah, I, you know, measuring performance and, you know, when to invest in how that investments paying off is, is very important. And I can't speak for everyone here, but marketing is part science and part art. Right. And the science part is that you would love to be able to measure how every dollar returns. And these are some of the things that Susan and her team do to try and get those measurements. And zero in to find out if those dollars are really being spent effectively. And then we do share data on various promotions and various advertising pushes. And I'll give you one example. We've worked the ski company. I happen to work for the ski company. I'm actually the base village lodging representative, just so you know, just to be clear. I have not the ski co-represented. There is not one on this board, but I will speak for the ski company at the moment moment because I happen to work there. Our fly markets, very, very important. I'll talk mostly about winter, but we share, we work together on flyaspenstomas.com, flystomas.com. We track where all the web traffic comes from into that specific air access website, microsite, and we share the information. So we have a good idea where people are coming from and what markets, and we know when they're accessing that website. So we know if the promotion in Houston on these days spiked our web traffic on a daily basis. We know it on an hourly basis. And so I've shared some of that information with when the ski company does some of the presentations to previous councils, and we'll try and continue to share that on the community. Let's get back to the report here and I think this discussion is good but I think we want to get through this if there's any clarification on the report to get through this so that we can continue on. So I'll just share too that we do measure all the pieces of programs. You can't really see this too well but this would be when we dropped a promotion. This is how many the big spike that we got. So we measure pieces and then the bigger piece is the occupancy and sales tax revenue in groups. Any other questions on? Let's go through your report and then we'll get questions I think, because you know, we've got a little time left and I don't want to just sit here and get it back and forth. Okay. Well that was it on the metrics piece. The next goes into summer. Shall I keep going? Okay. As you know, we are struggling with summer branding. Have been for 40 years. Nobody's figured out that silver bullet, but we're not willing to accept that there isn't one. We've been working since the fall on what makes us different. There are gorgeous resorts throughout all of Colorado. Why should people take the extra time to go past all these wonderful resorts on I-7E to get here? We know once you do get here, I'm afraid you're going to buy it place. You're going to love it and you're going to return again and again, but it's had initial reason to believe why I should come here. And frankly, it has been help system in some regard and hurts us in some regard. And that's what research has told us. Qualitative and quantitative research. We've done focus groups. We're doing a survey monkey right now, so we're not making assumptions. We're getting people to weigh in and share with us if we're headed in the right direction. We have a positioning statement that's almost finalized, and I don't want to pre-empt the board approving that before I share. I'll just let you know that it sort of focuses around. And this happened before the I SAFE discovery. You're playing with the word discover, which we've used in the past, but more formally, discover yourself, discover your youth. The mountain of youth is one kind of a notion. Discover your family, discover events, discover hiking, discover your abilities on a mountain. Just all kinds of discovery, which packages up, again, not just an event, because it's going to get away from just events, but how does it work in the scheme of the entire resort and everything that we have to offer? And we should have that within a week positioning statement present to the board. We had a meeting just this morning on Creative, and I think we're getting somewhere that should hopefully resonate, and then that will be woven through everything else that we do and creating a toolkit for the community. It would love it if every time anybody the entire community citizen or business when they were talking to somebody else we had one line that we all say that's consistent. That really helps with brand cohesiveness and we're trying to land that line and hopefully people will use it. Let's bring on the summer more than last summer. Chili Peppermbrufas Fest kicks off the first week in June and we just as this morning learned that we got our bid accepted by Susan Tideski and Derek Trucks, which is a really good lineup for Chili Pepperm proof. This event, by the way, will not, it has the potential to do a JAS did, but not until it gets significant funding for the talent level. As long as we have the same budget, we'll have the same kind of talent that draws the same kind of numbers. But someday, when we've got a bigger budget, if we wanted to drop somewhere in there, then we can start getting the kinds of bands that J.A.S. has and really growing that out. Camp Candola for the second season and the rodeo, jazz, esp and snow mass. And then really excited to introduce, and I don't see it here. Thanks, Dave. It's the eco music fest and we think it's going to be a great event. It's June 2930. It goes through, I think this is last year's calendar, that's my fault. It goes through July 3rd. So we are not full July 4th weekend. Aspen is we are not. We have room to grow occupancy and we want to pick a weekend where there were people in town to give it its best chance of kicking off the right way in the first year. Can't tell you the band just by contract when bands play at other venues that are in the near vicinity, they write into their contract that we're not allowed to promote it, which is so frustrating because we want to get out there and market, but we think it's a strong enough band that by adhering to their policy, it's better than getting a weaker band and getting out there now. Is that date that you can report? Not to the middle of May. Yeah. The alternative is to take a band that's not going to draw as well, but we think this is going to, this is going to offer a better force. It's got a whole environmental aspect around it. Everything from the expo to everything that they have going on solar in such is what's going to make it a little bit different. This is last year's calendar, so I'll just kind of share with you. Last, the Mass is coming back again. The Mass opened its disc golf. We will have the exotica event. We've got antique spests isn't really an event. It's more of an amenity. It's not going to bring people here to spend the night. Culinary and Arts returns for the second year. Some runs, some chalk it up. JS Labor Day with Big Line Up with Steely Dan and others being booked. October Fest isn't a huge event. It's there to be able to spread the gap between Labor Day and Bloonfest and Winefest because if we were to not put something there, it would give the retailers the opportunity to say, yeah, I'm not going to bother staying up in two more weeks because they're ready to get going at that point. Can anything move? Susan, on the culinary arts, did you change the weekend from what we had last week? We did. Okay, so it doesn't conflict with Anderson Ranch. It does not. Again, Susan, just to be clear, ECO or EMO is that's being funded by the producer. That is not our event. We are any producer who wants to bring their event here. We roll out the red carpet. We hold your hand. We fill out your paperwork. We work with the red carpet, we hold your hand, we fill out your paperwork, we work with the town, we want you to bring events here. Because frankly, I don't know how many other resorts have to produce so many events on their own. We don't have, as someone had mentioned, the Espen Music Fest and we say it's not back here, but when they advertise, they say it's in Espen. Same thing with Sanha Fech Play and film fest and all those cultural organizations helped the Agra market that we promote those, but they don't promote us. So we'd love it if people could bring their events here. They can use our stage and we'll wave the fee. It's just what we keep trying to do. And I think Emo is a very success story in that regard. They were up again. They were looking at many, many locations around the country, they narrowed it to four, they came out here and we just wowed them to death and they said this is where we need to be. So that's me was a success and we finally got a producer to come here and say yep, snowmess is our home and they're also going to promote next summer this summer which says they want to be long-term. Very good. Now time for good questions. Okay. So, I'll start. Dave, as you can tell, I do come from the private sector and I'm, you know, I look at this as a director reviewing the annual operations of the sales and marketing department. And the first thing I look for is revenue. Okay, not your budget revenue, but what did you produce for the company? And to this interest, the company is the town of Snowmass and the merchants and large owners of Snowmass. That to me is the company. So my earlier question said, I'm going to press the sub-or. I really directed it, show me the money. What have you produced? How have you fulfilled your mission that I just read to you before for the citizens and business owners of this town? And I'm struggling with that. And again, the town code says you're supposed to annually provide the town council with a business plan that includes relevant performance standards. That's your obligation and we are supposed to approve your budget. I don't have this relevant standards. I know what you do. I know how you do it. But I don't know how effectively you do it. Okay? I don't know what kind of bang for the buck I'm getting. Now I agree marketing is part art, part science. So you get a pass at a bunch of stuff. And I know you do things that are a smile factor. Again, the Thursday night concerts, the kids chalk on the mall, that's a smile factor for the citizens of Snowmass and I don't expect a return on that investment. But I've got to find some relevant standards that I can say it was worthwhile you're spending this money because this happened. We got greater occupancy, We got greater sales tax. Those are measures I need to feel that I'm doing my job stewarding the money of the town of Stomach Village. Group sales doesn't get any pass, because you've got to straightforward job. Your job is to go out and get groups to come here. Pretty straightforward. Now, and again, I'm running a cash-faces business here. I know what you spent on group sales. I don't know what revenue came in as a result of that expenditure. You give me bookings, but I assume those bookings are out a year or two years. If you book somebody, book the group in 09 or this year, my guess is they're probably going to come in next year. The number I need, and this is the number you ought to be able to get me, is cash in the door from January 1st to December 31st. Now, let me tell you a couple of rules. It seems to me if you book them in, obviously if you booked them in 2010, they came in 2010, you get credit for that. If you booked them in 2010 and they're coming in 2011, you don't get credit for that because they could cancel. Again, I'm a cash face, it's a county. If you book them in 2009, they come in 2010, you get credit for it. If you book them in 2008 and they come in 2009, 2010, you get credit in 2009, you get credit in 2010. What you don't get credit for, and I don't know how you calculate because there's no detail. What you don't get credit for is if you book them in 2009, they come in 2010, you don't do a thing with respect to them. You don't make a house call, you don't do anything, and they come back again in 2011. Because what sold them that was being here, was being in the town of Snowmass, and the ski company, the lodges, whatever. But there was no activity on your part that caused them to re-book. Now, can you get that data for me? So I can make some sense out of what you're doing. What all the data, I'm just gonna put a little devil's advocate here with you, okay? I understand the logic of where you're going and it seems like it should be pretty black white. Now, if they booked them in 2009, so then they'd have to get the lodging revenue that was produced out of that. Is that on a gross or net? They would need to know what restaurants they went to. No, no, no, no, because I think you could extrapolate that. In other words, I think the- How can you extrapolate that? Well, because there are statistics as I talked to this with Russ. When people come in book here for a week, you can roughly guess, and I'm only talking about lodging, I'm not talking about restaurants, but you can roughly guess what they'll spend on restaurants, what they'll spend at the grocery store, what they'll spend on ski rentals. Then you've got to get the whole picture to say, your $1 spent on group sales produced this for the town. Right, and I'm saying you can extrapolate that. You know, there are averages when people come here for a week. This is a conversation I have with Russ that you have a sense of what they'll spend on the restaurant in here and what they'll spend on the restaurant, you know, in here and what they'll spend on the bars and what have you. But this is the key. The key is the lodging. That you know. Fred, we do know the lodging that comes through our office in the contracts. There's also group sales that are made outside of our office that we were involved in because we put the trade show together where we spoke to them or we advertised to them. I just want to clarify, they don't come back just because it came here in light that you still have to sell them. You have to meet them. You have to greet them. You have to continue to sell them or everybody else is trying to get them as well. If you have to sell them every year, you get credit for it every year. Yes. Well, again, I think the metric, the metric we have because it is something that is measurable. In most cases is, you know, what was the book? We certainly know what actually happened in a particular year. In other words, did that book fall through? You know, so that's a number that's there. And we incent each of our people to, they have a group goal, and they also have an individual goal in terms of returning business, but also new business. The only piece that you might hear a debate about Fred is that I think in most cases it takes work, and in fact in the last couple of years, and I defer to John or Robert, it's taking more work and consistent work to bring return business back. I have said, if you add to go out and pitch every year to get them to come back, you get credit for it. I mean, that's a pretty small point. But what I don't have is the number. Susan, would you share with Fred the difference between sales and production and how you have historically tracked sales and production? Sure. This slide is, I'm sorry, this slide is production. This is what was booked in that year for any time frame going out because people aren't typically booking next month with the group. So that's where the work happens and you want to book multiple years if you can do that. Sales in the year for the year is something different. So when it's realized, there's another slide and I can share it with you that shows what's realized in each year. So it was booked here. Again, I'm the director. I'm looking cash in, cash out. But that's what I can give you. That's all I'm asking for. Right here. We haven't seen that. The misnomer in this discussion. Excuse me, for second. I think we need your package, right? It's in here. It's $3.54. But the misnomer is, the town of snowmast does not book business. The town of snowmast does not contract business. If you want to be party to my contracts, please. I look forward to that opportunity. The function of the group sales effort is changed significantly with the transition of the group sales effort from SRA to the town. SRA booked business and would contract business that they were liable for specific performance. The town of Snowmass group sales department does not do that. They have no assets to enter into a contract for a conference. I've met with Fred Bratsky on this topic and we do need to come up with a measurement of success for the group sales effort. Much like the Denver Convention and Visitors Bureau does or other entities such as the town where they don't enter into contracts. Is it leads that they generate that turn into business? You know, quality leads. Any salesperson can open a book and say that 4,000 people, I gave their properties a lead and they couldn't book it. No, I'm with you for it. A qualified piece of business that has the potential to come to Snowmass, but the town sales department is reliant on how the vice-royer, the crestwood or the silvertry, or collectively, we come together as properties. And sometimes it's very frustrating for the town group sales effort that they've done everything possible. And then for reasons that the properties declined to participate, the business goes away. But I just wanted to correct this idea of entering and contracts or booking business. The town really doesn't do that. Unfortunately, for one of the things you are trying to drive is the town should be doing business, the government should be doing business like a business and we just don't have that opportunity. You know we've been looking at that for since you know beginning of time and we just do not have that those same abilities that businesses do. You know you just can't stay there and say, today, my sales were this. People with certain reasons aren't going to tell you that. Whether they're pocketing half of it, they're not showing it, sharing it. There's a number of reasons that that happens, and we're not going to get it. So you're driving yourself into a position where we've all done, I think, we've all been in this time. We've all asked you similar questions, and that's why it's important to go through it. But there's a certain point we've got to have some faith in the people we have assigned to do the job, rest in the back to Fred. I just wanted to throw it back to Susan in terms of being clear about what we are measuring here. And in terms of business standpoint, Fred, I think we can best achieve your interest in looking at both cost and what's happening with that money. John is absolutely right. That salesperson upstairs doesn't at the end of the day have the ability to book it into a space or book his hotel rooms, but we do have the ability to measure performance in this area. We can get into a bigger debate on events, but I just want Susan to be clear about what we are measuring. Yes. get into a bigger debate on events, but I just want Susan to be clear about what we are measuring. For groups? Yes. We're measuring production. Which means what? What we've generated leads for the lodges, for at one point in time, for any time in the future. That got booked. That got booked. That got booked. That got booked. And what does it see? The group sales department leads qualified horses to what they believe are appropriately full troughs, but they can't make any better. Welcomeing barns. Welcomeing barns enough. It is not a mystery, is it, that if you lead the group to the barn you know whether they booked there or not and all I'm asking for is that metric. That there it is. So that's dollars. So that's it. So that's dollars 3.54 beans what million dollars of business. Business value of lodging revenue doesn't include any non-lodging revenue, stop me gang if I get it wrong. No non-lodging revenue was average daily rate times daily occupancies, three and a half million dollars worth of lodging revenue. Now how much did John and Robert drive to the bottom line to show to their respective boards of directors I don't know. But against a revenue measure. Now what Susan is saying is she now watches the year in which it was booked production. And then you track the year in which it was realized sales. So you know what was booked, produced in a year, and then you know out over time. That's what she was saying. She might book one group for Produced in a Year, and then you know out over time. That's what she was saying. She might book one group for three years in a row. That'll show up total dollars for those three years might show up in production. But it won't show up, as you said, in sales until it actually shows up and the money changes hands. Okay, so maybe I am beating a dead horse if I don't understand it. I'm liking this horse stuff. I mean, I'm the last guy in the room you think would be feeling this way, but I'm feeling poor Fred. I mean, you know, we got to get some way because you should be comfortable as the steward of the money exercising your fiduciary duty, which is the primary role of counsel, that there's some way to get a feel for all All I'm suggesting to you is Fred, I don't think it can be as precise and definitive and absolute as you sound like you're seeking. But I think you can get a feel for it. And if you're willing to accept that a somewhat more rarefied feel would be good for you, and I think we have something to work. See, I, with David and his art and science, I've always said, and you know, that was my career. Look, if you want to have a conversation or where the arts, where the marketing is not art or science, and you want to argue with one or the other, I don't think we have much to talk about. We get a lot of fun talking about, if it's an artistic science or a scientific art. Now we got a lot to talk about. Because that's realizing it's made up of two components, one of which is more definable than the other, one is which is more intuitive than definable, right? So if you're there, it's either an artistic science or a scientific art and you just want to get maximum science out of whichever it is, I think that's what Peter was trying to tell you. We've been doing that since Peter and a few others gave birth to this thing. And we are, it doesn't show, because maybe we've lived it. But we are as frustrated as you are, that it can't be as well defined as we, you, would all like. All I'm saying, all I'm asking is $3.54 million came in, dollars worth of revenue came in between January 1st and December 31st is that right? That's correct. That's not my question. I have a job. Don't know. I want dollars in. That's right. That's what I'm saying. That's sales. Can you tell me what that number is? Yes. I think we got it though that's it. That's another metric you want to see. It's it. It's already done. Yeah, faces. Yeah. Yeah. Look at it every board. We review those numbers at every board. Tell us. If you want to see that, we can send it to you. I mean, we actually see a lot of stuff that we don't necessarily think you want to see all of. What you're telling us, you'd like to see group sales activity measured in production, year, book, and sales, year, realize. And we say, oh, well, we see that. So you say, can I see it? The answer is yes. Thank you. But I didn't think of hearing that far off on this. It's a great meeting. Don, quickly, then, John. Welcome to me. Fred, that's exactly why we're meeting here. So there's some information that we're not giving you that we know and we have debated. And we will, as a result of this meeting, give that information to you, including when I meet with the new Director of Sales for the exact metrics that you're talking about is how do we define, again, measure success for the group sales effort and show you us information that an effort today by sales manager could result in a piece of business that's coming in in 12 and how we measure that is the contracts that are reported back to the town from the properties. So it's um we forecast that revenue once a property indicates that there's a contract. We've got 15 minutes left in this discussion, so let's see what we can do to. That actually is that way, into the next topic was a discussion on what you want. And the delegation of responsibilities and accountability. Yes. That's discussion between the Board and the Council to decide. Does anyone know these things that you're looking for? We've gone through this discussion about financials and all that stuff every year. Actually, John Wilkinson had a question first. I do have a question for Fred actually. I'm not on the floor. Do you want to go over here? I'm on this side. I just want to know, given all this information that you're requesting, if they were able to give it to you today and see this is that, what would you do with that information? I'm just kind of... Well, I'll tell you exactly what I do with it. I'm looking at the world as a very new normal. And life has changed markedly for everybody, individuals, companies, towns, countries, everybody is re-examining what they're doing. Just because you've done something for the last 10 years, doesn't mean you should continue doing it. So what I would be doing, and you all say this is what you do, but if I was sitting there doing, I'd say look at, does it make sense to spend $230,000 on proofests? It gets some indication that does it move the needle? Does it move it a little? Does it move it a lot? But if it's not moving it a lot, I'd start thinking something else to do with that money. And I guess I would encourage you to program a summer vacation plan for people. I mean, the whole point of this is because things have changed so much to rigorously examine what you're doing. Try to get, I know it's an art and everything else, but try to get as meaningful a metric you can on the things that you're doing. So you say to yourself, does it make sense doing it? Because $4,300,000 is a lot of money. And that's my only point. One of the things that this last weekend, week, we were in Denver, speaking with the Colorado Association of Speetans. And we got hit by a fishing expedition. By a couple of attorneys. We were trying to justify communities looking at things like orbits, travel losses, the differences between when you, Silvertree, allow expedient orbits those guys to buy a block of rooms. And then they up sale the price. The town's apparently aren't seeing that dollar as a sales tax revenue stream. So these groups are trying to go out and trying to make a case that we should be buying their services. When we go online ourselves and look and compare your rates that you're selling for a good rate for your room and we look at these guys, they're very similar rates. My question is, are we, are this something that we should be investing in going down and and hook it in with a group like that to say, hey, we're losing, you know, $100,000 a year. We need to, you know, invest in you 50. And then hopefully in the following years, we're going to see a return on that dollar or is it just a someplace where we shouldn't be? So much smiling if you want to increase your marketing expenditure you could. How does that work? It SRA used to have a SIN Res decided to get out of that business. It's a distribution channel that we use. We're mindful as an individual property, we're mindful of the rates that are on Expedia, et cetera, because if they're too low, and I'm forecasting a group piece of business at $100,000, and then I have a lower rate in Expedia. Now I'm forecasting $100,000. I think I'm up $20,000 in FIT, and really I'm down money because that rate on Expedia or Orbits is actually lower than my group rate. So I've lost money. So we're very mindful of that distribution channel and keeping it all level. As a property, we would prefer that they book direct because our yield is better. So if we could not use those distribution channels as much, we would prefer not to. Days, Ben. I can tell you how. Microphone. I can tell you how we handle it. If we sell a room to Expedia for if it's a $100 room if we sell it to them for 80 bucks we charge Expedia tax on a hundred bucks. So the town has got exactly the same amount of money as if they could. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay going through. Okay. Yeah, we were being pitched to be part of a class action suit against the four distributors. They were saying, oh yeah, you're gonna make all this back settlement on what they should have been paying in lodging taxes over the past several years. And thank you for bringing that up. So let's talk and you know about what's going on in changes or how things are going. Are there changes that we as a town should be making with the makeup of the board? Things have come up to us in the past. This isn't the right board. We're not doing stuff right. Well, we do appoint new people every you know, every, every couple of years when an opening comes up, maybe, you know, and I think it's very good that we have that flexibility to do that. Personally, I'm feeling very comfortable with the makeup of the board. I enjoy seeing John and Barbara there. I think that because you guys are now are the people who are going to go out and talk to folks. And so, you know, Barbara and I had a little discussion of the day and I really appreciated are the people who are going to go out and talk to folks. And so, you know, Barbara and I had a little discussion of the day and I really appreciated that. And so I think she goes out and talks to folks. I know John talks to folks. So, you know, Peter, all you guys sit there and don't just wait for them to come to you. I know you all go out. So I think in my thinking today, you know, the makeup is a good makeup of the retail lodging and at large folks who have the experience. So, you know, is there anything that we want to talk about in that area? It'd be helpful, John, but can you refresh us how the board respects you compared to our other commission and our committees? Well, there's only this board in the part-time residence, so the only ones that have. I don't want to call them territorial, but by business or association science. Okay. So, part-time residence you have. Single families, condos, etc. The other ones are not. And when they're advisory boards, they don't have to be residents at the time. Change this to an advisory board back in 05. But we added a qualification that they be residents or employed in the town. So in other words, you couldn't, on another board, you don't have to be either. The composition is seven members. And it's kind of complicated because it was part of a negotiated composition based on the eventual dissolution of SVRA, which we all thought was going to be sooner than later. But the seven members are one nominee of the Snowmass Village Losing Industry, nominated from the lodging businesses that were members of the SBRA, by virtue of the covenant or other restriction on the real property upon which the business was operated. A nominee of Snowmass Village, lodging nominated from the lodging businesses in Snowmass Village, and a nominee of lodging industry, nominated from the lodging businesses in snowmass village and a nominee of Lodging Industry nominated from the lodging businesses in base village. So that's three lodging and one is SVRA base village and then another one. I This isn't what it says, but it's basically an at-large lodging business in snowmass village One nominee of the retail industry one nominee of the food and beverage. Two members at large and one ex officio member, which is actually an eighth member, and we don't have one at this point. Mm-hmm, but then on home. So that's the composition of the board. Then there's two advisory committees that are to be appointed to assist the board. One should be made up of substantially members of the lodging. And the other one is to me is intended to be composed of members from related industries that support the success of the marketing group sales and special events board, including representation of specific industries such as the transportation, entities as Acro, ski company, snowmass lodging association, snowmass resource association, snowmass, stay-assman snowmass, non-profit cultural organizations and the like. Then we have the terms are rotating now. There was a provision to set that up and then There's a provision for nominations which the town Other than at the very beginning we haven't it's really been basically applications and if you fit into that category You have bill as you said we striven to keep that balance there and That's that's the composition portion. Okay. Excuse me. I have a comment on the composition of the board. First of all, I'm going to speak as an Aspen skiing company person and represent. And I've been on the board once in one scene or another since its inception. And the ski company has a very good working relationship with Susan and her staff. And it's something that Susan can be proud of, because I think the coordination level is good. I want to say that first. However, it's been kind of accidental or semi accidental. The ski company actually has had a seat on the board or a person representing who's been me. To be honest, I think it would be more transparent and probably more straight up if ski company actually had a seat on the board. Why? Well I could tell you why. We're the biggest marketing partner, we're the biggest sales partner, we're the largest employer in town. We certainly don't dominate the board, as you could see. I don't. People dominate me. So I think it would be probably a wise step for the town to consider adjusting to make up the board to actually officially include this key company at some point. I'm not saying you need to do it immediately. We've been well-represented. No complaints about that. But I also think at some point in the future you might want an official representation in that regard. I think it would be a mixed sense. I'm wondering if you're in the room. I was going to go there. Thank you. You know Bob. It might be beneficial if I can quickly just give you a little bit of history from day one. It was a five-member board. There was one lodging, one food and beverage, one retail and two at large. As it came out of and transitioned this marketing, special events activity from SBIRA, that was done by your council predecessor at the time on purpose to balance food and beverage retail and lodging. Because it had been seen, frankly, as somewhat of a concerning imbalance between the perspectives and the weight of those perspectives that had been around at the recent history just before the change. It was also said that, well, each of those business sectors should be represented, but there would be two at large representatives who had no business industry sector by this. So there was a great deal of thought, I don't know, given by that council, as to how to put the board together in such a way that there would be balance and there would be equity. And then the board challenged itself, actually, to represent the sector that you were appointed to represent in terms of acting as a communication link back and forth between the sector and the board so that the sector knew what the board was thinking about and the board knew what the sector thought of that. But the challenge was that each member, remember Peter of the board, when coming to vote would not vote his sector or her sector or their corner, but would vote that which was best for the village as a whole. So you were a sector representative except for the two of us. But when it came time to vote, you should have put your sectors best for you and best foot forward. But you were going to be challenged by your colleagues if you were seen to be voting with a bias by your sector rather than in response to what was best for the village as a whole. Now as John, as he always does, elegantly put forward, there was a bit of negotiation between the sitting council and the SRA some years later because remember we had two ex officio members on that first five member board, ex officio skiing company exios, remember Brett Husky and the SVRA because group sales stayed with SVRA for a few years. And so when group sales came over and there was another ballot issue which brought the lodging tax of 2.4 into the town along with the sales tax which had been an assessment of SBRA of the 2.5 percent of that net. Then that, that, quote, negotiation resulted in some way forward about things that you all painfully know, call slivers and the pool site and also a couple more lodging seats. And the eventual, as John pointed out, dissolution of SVRA. So that kind of, we went five with two ex officio as I explained, and then at the time, sales came over, there was all these other issues that entered into a negotiation process that resulted in a seven member board. Now, I for one, have always felt that David was correct in what he said. It seems to me that, you know, the six of us who wouldn't be SkiCo could probably take care of David if he didn't go along with in the best interest of the village as a whole, having represented the Ski Company perspective. And I've always been comforted that one way or another as the Ex officio ski co representative or as baseville is lodging we had a person who could speak to and be spoken at about the ski co perspective on this board. Thank you Bob. John, did you ever hand up? Okay. One of the things that's been going through discussion from a number of people are why is the town spending any money during winter for winter marketing with the ski company? Shouldn't we be taking all those dollars in putting into things we don't have people coming to summertime? You know when we spend dollars with the ski company how do we know those dollars are being used in snow asks? When we have the perfect storm issue, we had a number of calls say, hey, my business isn't there. I'm not getting the ability to get in there. And I think you guys did a good job when you heard that ski company trying to make things work for people. So those are some of the things that I've been hearing in the last few months. So let's take the dollar spent in the winter time. Why wouldn't they be better spent throwing all the money to try to get business in the summer time? Can somebody speak to that? I think there's probably a few people that could speak to that. I'll just address one point, maybe a misconception. This board does not give money to the ski company that's spent on marketing. That doesn't happen. Sizzling can probably elaborate. So it's not like the board gives money to the ski company to market winter. It does not happen. There's cooperation and discussion about what the marketing plan should be and where it makes sense to cooperate. For example, if the ski company is advertising in ski magazine and ski in magazine and Susan chooses to advertise in alternate months so that we don't step on each other's toes or extend the advertising for example. But Susan makes her own decisions, her own expenditures, and the ski company makes theirs. So they're separate. The only exception to that would be there's contributions made for events. For example, the Winter X Games, there's a contribution on an annual basis. That is paid to the ski company because we have the overall financial responsibility for that event. David, can I just clarify, I wouldn't consider it a contribution. Microphone. I wouldn't consider it a contribution as much as sponsorship. We get something back for it. Yeah, fair enough. So anyway, just to clarify that, that's how it works. But as far as spending money on winter versus summer, I think there's others around here. Better qualified to meet a comment on that. Canada, that was a criticism I heard as well. So are you telling me that the marketing board does not give, like, X amount of dollars to the ski co for joint marketing? None. Okay, thank you. Because that truly was a criticism I heard as well. I have heard it too, so it's fair to ask the question. I can share with you, we collaborate as David says because we can get more paying for our buck. We will sit down and decide we will be in this issue of this publication and you will be in that one. We just promote snowmast, we will ask them so much but that's twice the leverage for us. Another example is in this past winter we did fly us in snowmess and fly snowmess. So we had a billboard in Edson Houston and the S.K.N. company did it in Chicago so we benefited from what they did. We took that same creative and we multi-purpose it for our purpose so we only paid for Houston but it only said fly, so miss. We all saved money on the creative, we all saved money on the buy, et cetera. Thank you. So in the regard to the sponsorship for the winner X Games, we're kicking in 85,000 a year. How much does the city of Aspen contribute to that? City of Aspen contributes $100,000 a year. So that would be by 15. Just in general, I want to say that the level cooperation, both financially and otherwise, for an event as major to this community as the X Games, has been exemplary. I mean, the fact that this board in this town has approved that expense, the sponsorship of the X-Games. It's been very much appreciated. It's been part of that success. Well, the EOTC, the elected official transportation committee also kicks in 50,000 a year to subsidize bus services that benefit everyone on that. Bill, go back to your question. I think one of the reasons that there has been probably an emphasis on winter is that we have a very compelling value proposition that differentiates us from a lot of other competing resorts. As Susan said before, we're still working on finding as compelling more, hopefully, a much more compelling way of differentiating ourselves in the summer. So I think it's a practical matter, even if we shift it all of our money to summer, we wouldn't get the results that we get now because we just don't have the value proposition. Right, I guess the average daily rate for the winter time is much higher than the summer time. And so, you know, as we said earlier with the FAB, it sounds like the dollar spent we're getting more bang for the buck, even, you know, it seems to be a shorter area for that wintertime dollar. John and Fred. Bill, and Council, we talked about that exact topic in terms of allocation of resources at our last board meeting. Should we be moving more funds out of the winter into the summer. And what we heard from the public who attended the meeting is please don't give up on the winter because we have seen slippage as a resort. In January, in February, March were doing very well this year because of how the calendar fell with things such as carnival. Next March, Carnival, excuse me, next year, we'll have a challenge with March because we don't have Carnival that's now in February. So we as a marketing board are looking at some of these measurements such as sales tax collection and we're seeing how as you alluded to we need to keep funding winter because the return is great and if we can create enough momentum going into the summer it'll help our retail restaurant lodging sector to get through the summer but we evaluate that at every board meeting. Very good, Fred. Yeah, I just, I've talked to Russ about this, and I've talked to a bunch of people about this, and this is this idea of a summer vacation package, and according to Russ, a lot of ski resorts have looked at it and haven't done anything about it. If you want to be in a vanguard, if you want to do something that nobody else is doing, it seems to me this is a perfect, perfect thing to be doing. And it can be done not a dime of capital expenditure. Yes, you've got to be creative in your programming and yes, you have to be creative in your marketing, but you don't have to spend a nickel to build anything. And it seems to me like such a logical thing for us to do that I implore you, I plea with you to think about it and see if it makes sense and see what you can do. Thank you. Anything else from the board here right now? I'll go to the people in the audience who have some hands up back there. Let's go to Mary, then Colleen. Hi, I'm Mary Harris with the Timberline condominiums. I agree that we don't wanna put all our eggs in one basket. And I think we have to have a balance of winter and summer. And winter really is where we make our money. So I'd hate to give up any of that marketing. I do think, however, we have a lot better idea of who our guests are coming in the winter time. Part of it's the ski co-marketing, but I think all the lodges constantly, constantly, we can tell you where our people are coming from. And so with the Aspen ski company, we have, we really know what's going on in the winter time. Like John said, we know Carnival. March is going to be more of a, you know, a challenge next March than it was this year. So we know the good days, the bad days, the ups and the downs. The summer, however, I don't think we know. I believe what you said Fred, more packages are good, but I also think conferences, conferences, which, you know, with the group sales, I would love to see more detail because if I know that the group sales for the town is booked a million dollars for July of next summer And I'm gonna know that that looks pretty good or if there's two million in August I'm gonna know that that can be pretty good But right now because we don't have those details and I know we've been working We've been talking a lot about getting those details. I need those details so that I know what's on the books So that I know as a lodging property where I need to go. If the solvetry is full for all of July and August, I'm thrilled because I might get some of that overflow. However, if John has no business, I know my work is cut out for me more. So I would encourage you to get more details, especially in the summer. I also encourage you to measure the events. Surveys, ask for surveys from the retail restaurants and the lodges. I guarantee you, my reservation staffs ask every single person that they have on the phone. What event are you attending? Are you attending a meeting? Are you coming out? What brings you to Snowmass? We don't have all those details when they book online, but you can usually figure out what they're coming from. And I think we can slowly start to build this summer idea of who our guests are and where they're coming from. But I think it's we need a lot more details in order to get to that point. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Do you guys do surveys and that you can help encourage all the lodges to do that that would be very helpful? I guarantee you they all know their numbers and where they're coming from for the most part. Thank you. Colleen? Colleen Doyle again. This is echoing so I apologize. I think what it's, I've been to a lot of these meetings where the marketing board has come. And I think that's very helpful. I think the discussion and the question for us tonight is probably the best level of communication and inquiry that we've ever had. So I commend you on that. And I think it's important to pursue it in that vein. A lot of this has been addressed. So I'm not going to go over it. I have some subquestions that we can bring up later. We're over the time. No, that's where I'm going. The spirit of what I do want to say is towards making this a destination point that truly benefits the community. And that's the spirit in which my questions are offered here. So just quickly on some of the things that haven't had, I think it would be very helpful in terms of transparency and communication to have an executive summary. I'm very into and I come to a lot of these meetings, but the level of information is wonderful to have as a subset, but having an overview for the public to really get a sense of what's happening would be very helpful, very clear, very concise. Second, the question I'm left with after the discussion today is a question for council. Is this an appropriate function for town and if so at what level? And I'm just going to leave that for you. We don't have time to get into this. And then the other thing that I want to raise, which has not been raised as part of the task force, and I'm not speaking for the task force, but as part of that process and as part of the process as a petriot rep. I've been asking, what is Snowmass Village? What is the vision? We've talked in the aspiration statement. We've talked in the comp plans. I've been a part of all of that. I've heard that but then I see and what I hear Is a level of communication and I guess at 4.3 or 4 million dollars. I Expect to have a better sense of this the communicator the confusion that I'm hearing is Like Billy raised not too long ago. Is this snowmass or is this snowmass village? Is this snowmass tourism? Is this aspirin snowmass? Is this the marketing and special events board? And again, I'm very tuned in and I'm still confused. What is the message? What is the vision? And I would like some clarity on that as we're going forward, especially as we're talking about how do we incorporate what's new in the town, too, with the ICH Discovery? How do we congeal that and bring it together into one real clear vision and one real clear message that everyone is kind of together on? Thank you. Thank you, Colleen. Thank you, boss. Great thing that the board would like to say to the council that you haven't had the opportunity to. We've touched on this a couple of times, but I just want to assure you that the question you raised, the questions that you asked the financial advisory board are things that we discuss in each of our meetings, that we take our stewardship of this money very seriously and we know that our efforts affect the economic health of our community, the community that we choose to live in and we take our responsibilities very seriously. Is it possible for the council to get copies of your minutes of the meetings to see, you have minutes that you... Yes, we should public minutes. Well, I understand that, but I just, you know... Well, it used to send them to you. Yes, so actively send them to you. Do you want me to add the planning commission? Yes, Russ. Well, that was a question I just had, and I know Susan was team that up at the interfore presentation is I think previously these two boards agreed to verbal face to face is like this and to boards and again, I think that's something that can continue to be worked on in terms of what form is that written report, but does that work? I'm just thinking if we just can see you can see, you know, go over your minutes just because, you know, a lot of us are going, well, we don't even know. You're talking about this stuff. And if we can get in our minds and we can respond to people who may be questioning, you know, right now, one of my questions is the relationship we have in the summertime with the ski company and this gondola program we're dealing with has a three-year window. And we talked about, is this something that's appropriate for the town to be doing in three years? Maybe we're gonna be spending some money or becoming that discussion again and saying, is it appropriate to do that? And it's something I hope you guys have talked about or we'll talk about so that we can, you know, not make those decisions in the back room because I do believe personally that we need to be investing in some of helping be partner with the ski company and some of these things. And I think these guys do a hell of a job and if you go to the X-Games you see the ski company putting so much energy into that and it helps all of us, again at the cast meetings people go gosh we wish we had that and I say well it takes a lot to do it and it's a lot to do with that group doing it and the community that loves it so you know again you know this weekend we're having the DAV folks come to town and it's going to be a real exciting around here and when you see people in the wheelchairs walk around, pat them on the back, say thank you, because it's something that I get the opportunity to see every year. And it's really exciting. I know most of you do. So they're learning something here, they're taking something home. And I think it's a great, if we can facilitate more money to help us find somebody, so it's a different subway. we can facilitate more money to help us find somebody, so it's a different subway. But anything else we want to... I think twice a year, I should think it should be quarterly. I don't know if that's possible. Twice a year, I think it's okay. Well, I'm just bringing it up. Talks to the crew. Go ahead. I think you're going to say that. I was going to say that if you're going to go to plan or a port you need to change something. Change it because right now the ordinance provides annually a business plan that includes relevant performance standards and make quarterly reports two town council showing performance of the approved business. That's what I thought we did last year at the airport. Well I think actually the last time you were here you agreed to twice a year. Yes. I see your face to face and then court of order. Court of order really reports. It says prior to making a report to council, I'm marking a special events for town council will mutually agree to a report format. So we mutually agreed I believe. Okay Jason. I don't recall that map that it would be a face to face reported meant that they really are really important. I don't recall that map that it would be a face-to-face report. It meant that it would be a riddle report. I think we just had an agreement that you folks were be happy with it twice a year. Now, if you want to think about doing it once a quarter and ask for that, I mean, I kind of recall that you would pass your minutes to them and do a face-to-face twice a year. Okay. That was my recollection. Has Bacon changed that? Yeah. Well, Jason, just to latch on to the first part of that statement, which was the strategic plan or the business plan that needs to be developed, without that, the quarterly reports don't report on metrics that we've agreed to or that we've decided are meaningful necessarily. So I think that would be a great first step to develop that report. Does that exist? Has that ever been developed? Since we part of the budget. It's the basis for the foundation of the budget. But is there a written guide? Can you read with that? annually provide Tom Council with a business plan that includes relevant performance standards. It seems like there should be some more dialogue around that. During the time that the budget is run that dialogue and it's taken place, if it should change in character for instance, if some of Fred's notions and your notions should be included and that's fine. I think that, because you're talking about a plan of action and the financials that go with it. So I think it would be best to talk about those at the same time. And then the quarterly reports can be taken in that context. Earlier before I say well given what we agreed, boom. That's what I mean. How's it going? There should be agreement in terms of the format and what that looks like. Yeah. The format and the relevant standards. I read that earlier and I don't know what the standards are right now. What's the definition of relevant standards? Well, for me, a relevant standard is something that demonstrates performance, both economically and artistically. Work on that. Thank you very much for your time. Can I just ask, can I just add one comment? I just want to let you know that the Ice Age Discovery Center opened last Friday sort of quietly and since then we've had so many people come through we're up to over 1,100 people have come through in one week. Tomorrow is our grand opening so please stop by any time during the day. We'll have refreshments and kids programming for Bowdoin and Zane, and I hope you can make it. Very good. Thank you again for your time. Thank you, all. Thank you. In all your future time you're going to spend in. Fair, man. No. Stick around, Bob. I'm really about an hour ten minutes Don't break again Every two hours would be nice. Oh, yeah, let's take a break I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the Item number seven. Special discussion, the Salt Drift Store use of public land. Leslie's name's on this one. Okay, we're here before you today. Just to discuss your role as land owners. And a concept we want to propose to you and if we like it say go ahead and go forward with the appropriate TP process. Background is late last fall early winter of 2010 we were approached by Julia Pratt who's a co-owner of the Salt thrift store. I don't know if any of you guys have frequented down there. It's next to Big O Tires. They started in 2008 as a nonprofit and with a very green attitude towards things, all of their, aside from covering the operating costs, everything they make is donated to area nonprofits, wooden shelters, green initiatives in the valley. They helped back the greenhouse at the Carmendale High School. And so Julia contacted me and said, you know, we'd love to have a presence up in Snowmass. And we'd love to discuss a mobile donation site in Snowmass because we don't have anything like that here. People have to drive down valley or in to ask to take their stuff. And so we talked about it. And I talked to Russ about it, the operational procedures. The most likely spot was the contestant parking lot at the rodeo grounds, which is town owned. We had initially talked about doing a trailer in the just the recreation center parking lot, but it would interfere with ski co-parking in the winter kind of BMS because taking up three spots is actually a lot of money during the winter parking. So we thought the overflow lot would be safe. I got a picture too late for a packet, so let me just have rest. That's the size of the truck. It's just your basic small. Here we got it. Okay, awesome. You have it. You all size with a banner and just quick details on the logistics of it. We're looking at, they're looking at parking it twice a month on its Tuesday for a couple hours from I think 12 to 3 having it manned by their staff. So muscle behind the others. So if someone can come up, they come with a couch or they come with something heavy, there will be someone to actually put it in a truck. Robert Rolf, I don't know him, but I'm thinking some of you do. He's a long time local here. He's actually volunteer at the consult thrift store now. And he has offered to sort of be the warm greeting friendly person that give people the donation receipts and tell them what the mission of a Souther Store is. And financially how it may benefit the town is the Souther Store has a partnership with a bailing company. So they bail all of their stuff. They sell their bail goods to other stores across the country and it's not stuff's also donated internationally. And this company they work with said, gosh, some of the best stuff comes from the roaring fork of all you, and it's their stores. So they really want to work with us. And Julia has proposed, and I don't know what that number is actually mean. I have to get a little bit deeper in it, but two cents a pound for every donated bull pound that comes from Stomach Phillips, you can track that. And we're thinking since there really is no line item for green initiatives here in town, that money can hopefully be used as public education, public awareness for recycling and green initiatives here in town. So we are just looking for, obviously wanna answer your questions that you have and if it's something inappropriate use the public land, We are just looking for, you know, obviously want to answer your questions that you have. And if it's something inappropriate use the public land, if we can go forward with the TUP process for it. And we're looking at about a year to kind of test the water or just see if it works. I talked to, and I ran up by the Environmental Advisor Committee. They love the idea. And I also talked to Hunt and Peckler as far as parking in public works and therefore the idea hunt's excited about it because it cuts down and they don't spend a lot of money throwing away stuff that's left at the dumpsters but it would take away some of the costs that they have to you know get rid of a chair or a TV that's left out at the dumpsters if you know locals don't swipe it first. Yeah, because I, you know, at the divide I was looking at my window one day and I see this land rover pull up and I watch it and scale gets out. Open to the dumpster door, it doesn't take anything in there and all of a sudden I turn around I see her legs up in the air and she's hanging down there with her Gucci heels on and going, what an ex going on here. Funny. Yeah, that actually happens a lot. That happens a lot and you see that. I'm surviving in Picking County too. So I have a question for you relative to the Aspen Thrift Shop. Yes. You talked to a long time volunteer Joanne Post. Is she representing the board of directors of the Aspen Thrift Shop? I called her and I asked to speak to management and told her exactly what was going on and what we were doing And I didn't get any further than Joanne And so she and I had that conversation and I told her exactly what we were doing You know we have relationship with the Aspenthrift Store and the fact that they you know back scholarships and they donate here in the community And we have that longstanding relationship so we weren't looking to step on their toes. And her feedback to us was they just don't have the time money resources. It's not in their plan to be able to do a mobile donation center to actually physically drive a truck, have it manned, bail it, sort it, and that kind of stuff. So we can do, we can talk to the board of directors and see if that is something that they would like to do, but I didn't get past your end in many courses. I was getting a hand at some point. Well, the other question I think you're getting to is that if we do this, unless we've been going to the Aspen Thrift Shop, because it will be convenience here. So that was a concern, because I think they do support a lot of things like, you know, you know, just a lot of things in the valley. Sure. And as does the basalt thrift store, I don't know if you were able to read the affin times article that I attached and they do fund a lot of stuff also in the Roorndtork valley. Okay. John, we'll come back here. I got a couple of questions for you. Actually, last week there was a big leather couch in our dumpster. Is it not? Is it nice? A couple of items. There's going to be somebody there to sort because I don't want it to become a dumpster area. Right. And that you may need to have a dumpster down there anyways for things like if somebody leaves a set of tires or regular trash in that area. I think that's one thing you have to watch out for down there. Hunt has a dumpster up at the Public Works Department that takes electronics. Computers, televisions, are you going to be looking, are they looking for that kind of items? I guess what we need is a list of what they are looking for for recycling. Okay, and we can do that. Right now I don't believe they will take electronics at this site and that's part of once they do apply for the TUP, there will be, you know, all that stuff detailed listed and I am as far as the public relations job with the town, I will sort of be responsible for communicating this to the public because I kind of see it as a public service and saying, you know, there's a new service here in Stoam Ascent. So I will be the one communicating it. And with that, we will say, this is what the Salt Territor will take. This is what they will not take. And hopefully people won't give them their trash. Well, that would be great. I really support this. I think it's a great idea. I'd like to have some people more convenient for the people in Snowmass Village. Because I know at our house, we stockpile our stuff for a, you know, like once every three months trip to the thrift store. Right. And be nice to them. Cloud or some of our closet sooner than that. So. Yeah, and a people here don't have cars either so it's difficult for them to get to ask them. Tell me how it drops stuff. I'm going to head on this. Marky? I would really personally, I think it's extremely important that we understand what the Aspen thrift shop if they support it and I would suggest that we postpone it until we have a clarification on that from their board of directors. Understand this is really your first step. All we're asking for is your consent for you to consider this later. I mean, all the time for use. I'm not even going to- They're going to have to come up with all their details and their plan, what they're going to accept, all those things in the future. They don't even want to begin that if... We're not even willing. Right. And so they could answer Marquis' question in the meantime before they actually come back with the... This bill is... Well, it will certainly be something that you would want to consider when you hear their application for an annual temporary use program. So, again, your acting as a landowner today is this something essentially you want to consent to an application you've been for? Okay. I won't vote on anything right now. I don't have enough data. Hello. Okay. You're not authorized. No, I think it's one of our discussion points at our last meeting. We wanted to know what they asked me for a shop. They supported, they don't support it. And I, you know, Joanne's great, but I don't know if she's speaking for the board and I think that's the piece that I was hoping to see in this report. Okay. Hi. Jason? That said, the annual temporary use permit, we can limit the timeframe on that if we want. And given the time that we have now and the upcoming end of ski season, when you see a lot of turnover, a lot of people moving out of it. You're going to see an influx and a huge volume of materials that potentially could go and be diverted through this program. I'd be in favor of seeing something on a very short term basis move forward just to get something in place for the end of the ski season to capture all of that way. We don't want an empty bailess in there in May when no one's around. Put your right, Jason. You can control the term if you want to look at this as an experiment. You can say it's blank for longer. But I hear what you're saying. You'd like it sooner or later. Or let's do an experimental test run. I mean, let's see it from April 15 through the end of April and see what kind of volume they get we capture that Meaning and you've got a meeting before the end of ski season John dresser There is a administrative temporary If you gave your consent, the thrift store could apply for that. We didn't see that over the last 10 days. It could be from the period of 10 days or 10 days. And then they could morph that into annual request. You could address Marke's concerns. In terms of a permanent one, we could have this happen for the end of the ski season. Well, should I get a Sunday donations, whatever you want. You could address both those concerns. And it would only be a ten day event. You would ask for information and you could use that time frame to get information back from the Aspen Grishot more. Thank you, John. No, I think it's a great idea. I agree, Varky. I think we do need to get very input. I mean, there's a particularly worthwhile organization. But in principle, I'm certainly a favor going forward with this. Well, I'm, you know, I think it's a great idea. I just want to step on the proposed. Right. I'm also in favor of going forward with a, you know, a period when we want to take the next step to say, test John, the rest of us suggested, and we'll go forward with that also. But I think there are a few questions for the long term. We should make sure they're answered to our satisfaction. So I'd most consent to... Yeah, I agree. If this council is willing to consent to them including the use of your land in the application, that's all they're asking tonight. Like a motion to allow the consent of the use of the land for their application. So it's a mental administrative temporary use. You're allowing them to do it. They can decide whether they want to stay in the administrative. Wait a minute. Are we doing 10 days? Are we doing an entire year? No, 10 days. You're taking some work. You're taking some work. Well, it's concerning to use of a 10-day window for use of our property until they get a little more information to give us the full understanding of what's going on. Second? Is there a second over there? Second. Second. Second by Fred. For the discussion, all those in favor? Aye. Those opposed? Aye. Four to one. Second by Fred for the discussion all is in favor. I those opposed 4 to 1 So you want to withhold your consent for them to include it in an annual application or you want to give them consent to file that application as well I believe that with this 10-day window they will I believe that with this 10-day window they will have the ability to put together some information that they can then probably apply for a annual permit at that point. But this will get us through the end of the season I would hope. You'd have to find out if there's enough interest for them to just really do it. Well, I would imagine they have the trailer and also already. I don't think they have to go and buy anything. If they do they might not want to do it. There will be a communication issue. You know we would need to communicate out your two opportunities. I think you could infer that there is a support and counsel from majority as long as you know a few other questions might be a full counsel supporting it but it sounds like it's a good way of reducing the load 10 days or a short term is there a majority? Is there an interest in filing the TUP application? Recognizing you get to decide on that Sure, it's certainly answering the question mark Yes, yes, yes, yes, okay, that's three consent of council three at least Moving on Resolution number 19 series 2011 Timberline and Stonebridge condo reop waiver request Mr. Kittle, welcome again. Hey everybody. Okay. Mark, they call the overtime you're getting. Yeah, I'm just loving every minute of it. That's what he needs. Well, Rossi, how many take the lead on this center? Sure. Basically Timberline and Stonebridge have both asked for waivers on their re-op fees and both agreed to offsite renewable. And I believe you guys have the letters. I don't have them in front of me. And again, the reason for that is the current ordinance does not allow for offsite. Correct. It's on site generation only. OK. So right now, at this point, we have, well, staff has said that there is a re-op fee after some configuration of the application and numbers you looked at to the tune of $20,252 for the timber line. Correct. And $8,387,000 re-op fees for the Stonebridge condes. Yeah, that's correct. We did have a piece of paper passed out to us at the meeting, which has some explain these things. What we have here, you wouldn't mind. What have you got there? It's the big clear is your John Wilkinson requested. How was the fee calculated? Okay. This is for the timber line only. Timber line only. I can't really consider how it was calculated. This is for the timber line only. Timber line only. The same thing. We don't have the information for stone bridge. And this information was not part of the packet. That not get put in. No. They didn't have any of them. The stone bridge I generated this chart. Guy to help people fill the line. And that's like a pass out around. Yes. All right. On the timber line, condos, calcs, we had 2934 square feet of snowmout, and then we worked to feed at $34 divided by the boiler efficiency. And that works its way all the way down for the pool, spot two, and spot three, and come up with a sub total of 259663 and then the bottom three numbers are exemptions. This block exemption at three square feet per unit per the original ordinance. 99 units times three give us 297. Sposored 176 per unit. Again, the blotters are all at 89%. Existing spas that they had in place was 615 square feet. And we exempted that. And then less the life safety. There's two sets of stairs, two ramps, and then the perimeter of the pool for three feet from the edge of the water. Three feet is a standard accessibility in the International Building Code. And pools by the way are one of the more dangerous elements of a lodge and a hotel. So based on all those calcs we ended up with $20,252 owed in Rio of Fee's. And I believe Kim Rilline would like to go through the collective CEC and put the SOAR panels off site. That's what the letter says. I have a couple questions for John Dresser. Go ahead. On the resolution, they have both of the requests on one resolution. Is that okay to include them both or should be two separate ones? I think it's okay with putting both on there. That's why I was preparing that way. If you want to deny one and approve the other, considering that they're basically identical, we could amend it and you'd have to make finances to why one's appropriate and the other isn't. Thank you. And then, uh, Disseren need to be an evidence of payment. I know it says that we're going to make a contribution but is there. I currently have a copy of a contract between Tim Relein and CEC. I don't know that it's been executed or not yet. The way we're conditioned on them making the payment so if they don't execute their contracts they owe the reout fees. Okay. Thank you. Other discussion? Let's go through the resolution then. Well, actually I have a few points. Mark on your calculations for the spa credit and the spa exemption. That seems like a double dip in terms of spy exemptions. How do you reconcile? Well, one was existing. They had existing. They had existing 615 square feet. They never did receive a spaw exemption in the beginning. And where is the language that pertains to an exemption for preexisting? In the original ordinance? Three square feet per unit. That's the exemption that you get. Right. But on the already existing that they've replaced now with the new, it seems like you're saying, you get the credit for the existing plus, you get the credit for three square feet on top of that. Correct. Where is that described in the original ordinance? That's how that's to be applied. Well, you get the exemption. That was the only one allowed unless you had, unless you wanted to put it towards snowmelt or the swimming pool. They elected to put it towards the spa's. And then that's where those numbers came from. The existing 615 square feet was the old, which got added in up above, spot two and spot three. We took out the old one, if they would have left the old one in, we would have had to count it, see. Whereas in this one we didn't. This would be old one's gone. The old one's gone but replaced. Yeah, we've added those in up above spot two and spot three. We couldn't charge them for the one that was already there that they've torn out. We give them a credit for that. I guess they already had, I don't believe, I don't know if it was one or two, but they totaled 615 square feet. The original. Okay. I mean, I guess I have a little bit of a problem with the way this is being presented. We haven't been given anything in terms of plans or understanding of what the project entails at this point. Well, I don't think we ever gave you guys plans, do we? No. Yeah. We don't see that. We let staff do those that part of the job. You know, that's cool, but micro, and we, I look at it, that's more of the micromanaging issue. You know, we have them with the set of codes and we expect them to follow the policies. And we don't look at that level. Well, I guess the question is in terms of how you evaluated the criteria for life safety exemption. When you look at the design of their pool, the pool is built roughly three feet off of a vertical wall and so you have one side of the pool that is obviously accessible from kind of that main interinstruction. So most of your life says the accessibility to that pool would be from that side of the pool. So it makes sense that you would have an accessible path from one side of the pool. 50% of perimeter of that pool backs right up to a wall. I'm wondering what the criteria is that says you need to maintain that as a life safety access when it's not a high traffic area there's no reason. Well there'll be people getting in and out of the pool. That's what I thought. That was my criteria. And if it was eye-stopped and slick then... They'd have problems. Yeah I thought that would be a life-saved issue. This is one area that... This is the part... and they have problems. Yeah, I thought that would be a life-saved issue. This is one area that... This is the part... The Regent policy. That I didn't like. I think Mark would like to make this very explicit so we don't get into these sort of debates in the future. Right, I didn't want to be... You know, there were several areas in the code that said that the Chief Building Confacial could decide. And that's the parts that I was trying to eliminate. Yeah, this part that speaks to the fee exempt area and the life safety exemption says that your fee exempt area only applies to driveways and aprons, right? Unless there's a life safety determination, then that fee exempt area can apply to decks and walkways. So you've done the calculations to know that they're within the cap that they would have been allowed under that. Yeah. That's what this is describing. And these figures were also done by their engineer, which was married. Could you help me with HPG attack? Did these numbers to begin with? They calculated the square, everything but the life safety. That's the part I did. And. Okay. I guess I'm still not clear on the it feels like a double dip on the spa credit. You have existing 615 square feet. And then on top of that, you get three square feet additional. The spa exemption per unit has never been figured in on this project ever. Even in the past, well that's that's what this says right here is five exemptions per unit at three square feet per unit. Correct. That's why I include it down. And then the existing spa is gone now We've added them back in with spot two and spot three. Has that changed? I'm not sure that this is being applied in exactly the correct way. This code. You're taking a collective calculation of. That's why I'm trying to call it a tool collectively, to some total, and then you're applying that credit across the entire project to say they can do that with snow melt they can use that for snow how they can use that for it can only do that one time that's three square feet they could have used that or they could have used a 50 square feet per unit per snow melt but they didn't elect to use that one that would be a double dip. I guess the double dip I see is on the existing spot plus. See that's where the original ordinance is vague. Didn't give me any direction as to existing elements. So how are you applying this on an equitable way? I mean the obvious side of the other applicants that have come in and paid these fees. Same way. Same exactly. So you've been consistently using this method? Yeah. If they had something existing like a thousand square feet of snow melt, they would get a credit for that if they were intending to apply some more onto a covered, onto a tack or something. But to then allow an additional X square feet on top of that seems like the redundant. You're allowing more than was intended by this ordinance. I don't believe these calculations are doing now, but you're allowing for the existing plus you're allowing for an additional 3 square feet per unit. That's per the order. Versus just saying you get an exemption for three-spot fee per unit or you get an exemption for your existence. That doesn't state that in the ordinance. So that's something we should clarify going forward. I think that's the time to do that in the future. Yeah. Anything to make this easier is going to help. We don't want to drive, get more gray hairs up there. Yeah. Is there a motion to accept resolution 19? No. That's Fred, second by Marky. Discussion of the ordinance, resolution of eight. May it change us, alterations? Public comment? Hearing none, all those in All right, thank you. All right, thank you. All right, thank you. All right, thank you. All right, thank you. All right, thank you. All right, thank you. All right, thank you. All right, thank you. All right, thank you. All right, thank you. Moving on, we've got a manager's report, Russ. Just one acknowledge we've got some public discussions that are underway this week regarding the ICE age in Tusk Force. You have a new couple around, Russ. Even you? Come around. It's catchy. So we've had a chat on Sunday, had a chat today with a number of people in the business community, and then our next forum. Where we're asking the community to tell us what their thoughts are for the future, for this discovery on Thursday, at 430 at the Discovery Center. And then tomorrow evening, if tickets are still left at Sundance, there's a presentation of five third. What is the time is the grand opening of the center? Is there a ribbon cutting thing then? Or I think there's a ribbon cutting. I think it's a lot of work. It's just a lot of work. Okay, the day EOTC meeting is canceled. Wait, wait, wait. I'm sorry. I just wanted to mention on the ICH Discovery, there was a special on Channel 4 in Denver. 830, Saturday. Yeah, we watched in the first 10 minutes was a infomercial about toothbrushes. But which was appropriate since we see a lot of mastic on teeth. But it was really good if you happen to catch it, it's really well done. Yeah, it was. Except they referred to snow masses near asp and so maybe we should change the name. He's even good about putting on all the little specimens snowmatch. Yes, they did. I'd give him credit for that. That's all I have. You're John Wilkinson's home. Okay. Other than your population has increased by the US census. We don't think that's necessarily reflective of reality but but more of the sampling date. I'm framed that occurred to you in 2000. We need to, that'll be beneficial. We need to change the sign then. We'll get John Baker right on that. The one down here, it says the total. Yeah, the stamp model. Yeah, it's still there. These would be washed off a little bit. It's kind of dirty. It's back to the city, yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. OK. Anything else else? Of Russ's information, pending actions. When would we become at what point does a town become a city? How much the population have to be? I don't think we have to wait. Oh, good. Good. Mr. Brick, we're both like you and Anna Village. So we're covered. We're lucky to be called a villain. All right. Next we have the agenda for next council meeting for April 4th. Anybody see anything there? Do they want to? Plenty commission did finish a recommendation for you on housing mitigation. So item six is on. Very good. And we've got an hour and a half for the renewable energy all set program fees. We really like to make that black and white. We want to get a discussion and action. Okay. Make sure we get in those issues that were brought up tonight with Mark and. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. Jason's got a really good opportunity to talk about our environmental perspective as a council. You know, I see us moving counter to trends across the country, across the globe. And we can talk about it then. We need to talk about that. We actually have two agenda items that we can fit that discussion into the Environmental Advisory Committee and the REAP. Right. Very good. And I'm sorry to say in the last item we had two members into the Environmental Advisory Committee and the Realtors. Right. Very good. And I'm sorry to say in the last item we had two members of our Environmental Advisory Committee here ready to comment on that last item that weren't given an opportunity. Oh, they were. You heard? You said anything from the public, and they sat quiet. Yeah, so don't make that comment again unless you are willing to stand by it. I guess you just kind of rushed through that. No, I mean quite catch that. No, but we got two items on the environment and you're right. You'll have an opportunity to talk about philosophy, but also we also want to deal with mechanics. Yes, we need to. OK. Moving on for approval of meeting minutes for February 22, 2011. I did my homework good, but I do have a change. John. Moving on for approval of meeting minutes for February 22nd, 2011. I did my homework, but I do have a change. John. Page 88 line 86. It was putting Mary Harris, saying she stated that the changes in the re-op ordnance is not the best interest in the community. I think she just said the re-op ordnance is not in the best interest to the community. Because we were talking the changes at that point. So what are couple things? Do you want to verify her for a second? Yeah, this is a great case. Verify those via granicus. Yeah, that was the only change. Thanks again for the excellent minutes. Ms. Clerk. You're so good to me. Madam. Madam. On 143. Go ahead, Markey. There's a spelling error established as poof of color capital residency on my 143. You want to R there? I like the poof personally. Oh, I like the poof personally. I like the poof personally. Other than that. I guess he's going checker wouldn't check that one. Oh, there's a word of a poof. I have to tell you that I actually copied that off of Joe's memo. Well, I didn't say Joe, Joe does feel properly. Okay. All, uh, motions to approve. Mr. Fred, second by Markey. All those in favor? Aye. And a second by Markey. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Thank you. Moving on, Council comments, committee reports, calendars. Start down with Jason. I'm not in the report. Thank you, sir. Markey. Well, the last meeting I wanted to talk just briefly about some comments that have come to me from some of our community now only to commercial people going through innovation as well as homeowners are going through innovation. The perception out there is that the process is very cumbersome. It requires a lot of hoops. And I don't know if that's true or not. The question becomes one, should we just have our tell manager and maybe Chris Conrad sit down with a small group of individuals to get some input as to how we might improve as a town. If A, do we need to improve? Or are there issues? Is there some way we can get far more efficient in the process? So I mean, I'm just putting it out there. Those are because people knew we would have done through a renovation. And I know- Like a residential single family type of renovation or a commercial. Both sides some of the commercials who've recently gone through some renovations are talking about some of the hoops have had to jump through. If the thing that they say if we only would have no one ABC and they it might have been far more helpful. It sort of sounds like that maybe we know do we have a checklist for people to when they think about doing something they're going to have to jump to this hoop that hoop and or something smaller you know that's a informational sheet that says you need to provide you know these basic the all these things to have a complete application so they don't have to do. You have that and what the anticipated fees might be or you know, what's the timeline, how long it takes to reach that? I think there is a checklist, I know for a PUD, you know, modification which many of our commercial properties are within a PUD, you know, one of the things you start off the process with is a pre-efficient meeting and that's the purpose of that. Now are we achieving that a purpose or satisfying all the customers you know that would be something to debate and talk about? That's not what they're talking about. I think there's what you can do is stack three more books on top of this the same size because they're referred to by reference in here. Let me call it electrical building code. And those are all, I mean. But is that what you're talking about, Mark, there's the planning process that gets you the entitlements and then there's the building permit process? They're talking about every, from the point where they decided that they might want to do a renovation to their maybe perhaps to their own Individual properties or commercial properties and how long it took them to get to the process all the various steps they need to go through. Some from start to finish. Start to finish. Oh, always happy to talk to customers, but just want to. I think a flow chart idea might work. And I would consider talking to somebody who's gone through the process recently and just say, OK, well, we've heard that there's issues what might we want to consider. I don't know if I'm willing to change our code by any means, but having the knowledge of what to expect. It's a healthy thing, I think we have. I did it as a community development director periodically, just on a flow chart, the process, talk about what works, what doesn't work. I think it's a policy call if you want to change it. Maybe one in, you know, right? Jason? I think there's actually diagrams in the code that flow chart for the process. But I don't think those you know it's like that pre application You know when you sit down and say What's it gonna cost me to apply six hundred bucks and you know what kind of time frame can I at this point in time expect to get through the Planning process or that in the building you know plan review process and they can say You know right now our backlog is 45 days or, you know, that. So. Understand that most people don't go through a planning process. They have entitlements on the street building. They go straight to Bullewer Met and a zoning check. They don't have to go through a planning process like a PUD or an amendment or anything like that. It might happen in commercial settings, but just think how many you've had come before you in the past two years. I mean, it's been, we're not backed up at all. Things are moving. Well, Markey, think of personal experience. Planning part of it. Yeah. No. You think a personal experience. Planning part of it. Yeah. Now, complying with their building codes, mean if someone tries to do that on their own, it's gonna be a nightmare. Right. Because these codes are so difficult. I'm not talking about our code. Just the processes are in our code. But the other three books that I'm talking about, you really need professional help. So Mark, how long did yours? I don't even remember hours now. I remember. I'm sure you'd probably do. No, it was more than a few days. I think there's people that have talked to a Tom. I can give you a list of people have talked to me. They'd be very interested in just sitting down. It's a healthy discussion. I think it's always a healthy discussion. If we can learn from our community, how we can improve, I'm all about it. And I believe there's nothing to improve. So what's the action? I'm just asking for a sit down. Sounds like you're asking to have a little dialogue with some development or view customers. That sounds like a good idea. Okay. All right. Anything else, Markey? No, I'm just going to ask, where are we here? Here anymore on the foreclosure on the 30th? We've heard recently, I think John heard from Mike Tandy recently, but I'm still hearing that date is holding right now. And I sold him my breath, but I'm hearing it is holding. I saw Lance Cote the other night and asked him the very same question. His kind of was all the attorneys involved are anticipating it's going to go through. Okay. Okay. I've got a couple things. involved in our participating is going to go through. OK. OK. I've got a couple things. People have what do we have in place for memorials? Did somebody want to benches or art or something? It's our understanding that council, this was a couple years ago, wanted to dial down. And I think we frankly were getting a little cluttered in terms of immorial benches. So that's not something that we've offered or pushed or even thrown out as an option. But then this recent discussion happened where, you know, town park needs a number of benches so that could be an opportunity for a finite number of them. Okay. Me as a manager of the pines, if I had somebody come to me and says, I'd like to put a bench somewhere up in the woods, you know, outside my, you know, it's all owned by this house at the building envelope. Is there a application process that I've got to go through to really do that because it's over the 30 to 36 inches. What made it not over 36 inches? I think it's 30 actually. So I really have to go through the process to do that. The other thing was in our art walk, is there a place that you know we could say hey one of this art walk from You know Top of village down to the base village or you know wherever the art walk does go There are opportunities put memorials in in an art walk We have a concept for that art walk and it's gone through the arts advisory board That would be something different to add memorials into it. The last thing I have is I've got a call from somebody who would like to donate some time doing yoga classes to the people who are coming to do the dig. And they'd like to see if they could, you know, use the rec center as a location or as a picture-curt Johnson. But what this person was talking about is that people who are digging and bending overall day long, it might be good to stretch them out and allow them that opportunity. So I said I would bring it up to say, the town would be willing to maybe look at the space for these folks. It's a great idea. Sure. To allow them to, you know. I think they could use this room. She's looking at trying to get the sport, to sponsor this for her to pay her to do it, but she doesn't want to charge these guys, but she has some people who are willing to do idea. I mean, we're happy to hook up. We've had a number of people in the community have offered to cook. The scientists and the volunteers while they're here and to the extent we can open up the community and extend our welcome to them. I'm sure we will. Good, yeah. So I knew that there was a yoga space above that place and someone has as a commercial. There is a new yoga But yeah, if it's not right center about used to do that. Is it that same? I don't know. Okay. I don't know John yeah, I got a couple items. I met last week with a car to go program and ask them You know what the cars to go program is is that it allows people that don't want to own a vehicle, pay the ongoing maintenance operational costs, that you sign up to the program and once you get qualified, you can reserve a vehicle for an hour or two. It's not meant to compete with rental car companies, but it works very well in Aspen, and they're actually expanding it to second homeowners the people that don't want to have a car at their residence and I was wondering if that's something that we might want to consider doing in snowmass but in conjunction with the program in Aspen. Well there was a car pulled out in front of me this morning as I came down far away and this car to go cool but they can drive in anywhere they want right anybody and snowmask and participate in that car to go prognosis so it's not so it may not be we would oh no no no no there's no place to have one station here isn't a place you need to park yeah in their current this is something know, John was with me when Chatted with David Peckler and they did approach the town there. It's been some discussions. There was a discussion about potentially making that available at Mountain View or places where we have affordable housing. So there hasn't been any discussions though with staff in the last three years. But the time has gone a lot. They grudge. Do you know the concept whether that requires a town investment to purchase the vehicle? I don't know. No, thanks. They have a fleet right now of about 10 vehicles. The city of Aspen though invested in them. Yeah, but I'd like to... You just want to have a dialogue with him to see if it's something that would make sense for the program that we can partner with on. That's concurrence with the council. Sure. We are. I mean, that's great. Yeah. OK. OK. One of the discussions we had the three that wanted to do that over three knots at the the cast meeting last Thursday Gail Schwartz and Roger Wilson who is our House District 61 representative wants to have a town hall meeting in our town hall and I don't know if we've gone any further on it since so yeah Yeah, we've been working with them. The only you'd like to do this on a Saturday, it's just logistically, we can figure it out. So he's request anybody can come and request the use of town hall. It's just logistically having somebody open it up, close it, and clean it. Well, he is a replacement for Kathleen Curry who represents a district fairly well. I think it would be good opportunity for him to meet a big part of his constituency. So if we can make it work out, of course, Gail Schubert. I don't know. I want to keep that door open so we can have them here. And then another thing at the cast meeting was the mayor of tell you right brought up this issue that I've experienced over the years is that if you order a cell phone, if you like for rising, you have a PO box and your street address doesn't match up with the PO boxes. And I would say- I just deliver it to a physical address, I say. Yeah. And they need a physical address to deliver it. So that's why they wouldn would deliver it to a physical address. Yeah. And they need a physical address to deliver it. So that's why they wouldn't deliver it. So there is this John's talking about program that the postal services has out to where you can put your community in there to where these things will work out. So that's where we do that. That's basically giving the US Postal Service our personal map with addresses. Yeah. We have that available. It's identifying your community. Yeah, it's basically a GIS layer. We're literally a community. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a PO. Yeah, so I'd like to see us do that. Because if I've been frustrated and I met you. I've been frustrated. I's kind of an interesting idea I hadn't. I didn't occur to me until the meeting. My parents used UPS. They're all going to the Internet and avoid the taxes. Yeah, that's right. Anything else done? Nope, that's it. Fred? One last thing I do have is, in our future discussions of development, I was thinking it would be appropriate to ask the group down in basalt, the A&R 11s. Oh, am I? Group to come talk to us about what's happening with electric cars. It is no mass village place that we should be asking for developments like the vice for who put something in to put in a credit card type place where people like they buy a vault they can come and put their car into this place and we know where it is and it's a you know it's a little device but I think that there is a program that Avery's group has and I talk about that and it would be nice if we could have them at a meeting whether it be a work session to come talk to us for you know time frame they think it needs because you can go on the website and you've got a lot of stuff there and I thought we appropriate to have some discussion before we get into the development applications. It sounds like an idea of the progressive council. Sure. Okay. That's it for me. Is there a... So... No, no, no. Before we do that one, I was wrong. There's some of these people putting here. We need to meet an executive session. The attorney has said to me earlier tonight that we have a short little discussion. So I would like to say the town council will now meet an executive session pursuant to CRS 24-64024 and Stomas College Municipal Code sections 2-45C to specifically discuss two items. Determining positions relative to matters that may be subject to negotiations, developing strategy for no-go-diosciations, instructing negotiations, pursuant to CRS 2464024E, and SMAs Village Municipal Code Section 2-45-C5, and conferences with an attorney for the purpose of receiving legal advice on specific legal questions pursue it to CRS 2464024 C and Stomach Philge Municipal Code Section 2-45 C2. Is there a second to that motion that I made? Second. Is it all those in favor? Aye. What was that? Cooker? John Wilkinson Seconded. I made the motion. Thank you all the favorite I post let's go to the small conference room please. Somebody opposed. Nobody opposed. Well there's a reluctance. There's reluctance exception. Don't be too good to get out of here immediately. Oh my gosh, I'm a green. you you you