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Park City and Summit County officials are elated by Vail Resort's pledge this month to invest $30 million in worker housing in the Utah, Colorado and California communities where it has resorts.
"This is great news," said Park City Manager Diane Foster of Vail Resort's offer. "The City Council has identified three critical priorities — and housing is one of them.
"We don't want to be just a bedroom community, just a community of second homeowners," she added. "We're a vibrant community and we want to maintain that vibrancy. Having all sorts of people living and working in town is critical to that."
In announcing the $30 million commitment, Vail Resorts' CEO, Rob Katz, recognized the importance of that sentiment throughout the mountain communities where it has venues.
Besides Park City, those include Breckenridge, Vail and Avon in Colorado and South Lake Tahoe and Truckee in California. Vail Resorts has about 25,000 employees in all of those locations, including about 3,000 in Utah, said Bill Rock, chief operating officer of the newly combined Park City Resort.
"The success and growth of these resort communities has created a need for a higher level of engagement around employee housing," Katz said. "The availability of affordable housing is critical for the sustainability and vitality of our resort communities, and we firmly believe Vail Resorts should be an integral partner in expanding employee housing capacity."
Park City's Foster and her counterparts in Summit County, which administers the Canyons side of the resort, were especially buoyed by the next sentence in Katz's statement:
"We are hopeful this new commitment will complement our existing efforts and all of the projects that are already in the works with local government agencies."
"That's potentially significant and certainly good news to our ears," said Patrick Putt, Summit County's community development director and a former Park City official.
Putt said the build-out of Canyons Resort is reaching a point specified in initial resort approvals that triggers obligations to start supplying affordable housing.
As its largest member, Vail would lead the way as the Resort Village Master Association draws up a plan that determines "what [are] the specific needs for types of units, how they are going to function," he said, noting that about 90 units are due to be online when the resort is one-third developed, another 90 when it's two-thirds done.
In addition, Putt said, while half the 267 new units must be on Canyons property, the rest will be scattered across the county. He expects the plan to identify how some of those units will be secured.
"The additional money could create more flexibility on looking at potential sites. That's money that a week ago we didn't know was going to exist," Putt said. "I'm learning like everyone else about all of this, but I can't help but think it's a big commitment by Vail that begins to speak to them wanting to be a community partner."
Over in Park City, Foster said, Vail has inherited an obligation to provide housing for 80 workers from Powdr Corp., which was forced to sell the base property to Vail last year after losing its lease on the mountainside. She expects Vail's commitment to be for housing over and above that, adding that the resort's overture complements the city's plan to budget $40 million during the next five years to invest in community housing.
"The city is very interested in private-public partnerships," Foster said, noting an earlier venture to provide close-in housing for Park City transit workers paid big dividends.
"It's been an enormous help for us in being able to hire people," she added. "Now they're living modestly, affordably near to work. That's important to reducing traffic congestion. The issues are inextricably linked."
None of the key players is exactly sure yet what the emerging housing packages will look like.
"We're open to hearing ideas from anyone interested in working on this issue," said Park City Resort boss Rock.
"Our hope is that the commitment will leverage other resources and find ways to solve the workforce-housing shortage we're all facing today," he said. "It gives us the flexibility to work with community partners to come up with great solutions."
Helping employees
Vail Resorts also announced the creation of an EpicPromise Foundation, a charity to designed to help employees "in times of need" and with educational scholarships.
The company will put $500,000 a year into the foundation, which also is getting a one-time lump sum of $1.5 million from CEO Rob Katz. "The mission of Vail Resorts is to create an experience of a lifetime for our guests," he said, "and we do that by creating an experience of a lifetime for our employees."
Expecting to give out $750,000 a year in grants, the EpicPromise Foundation will start accepting applications in January. The first round of funding is scheduled for the following month.
Grants will help employees facing medical and family emergencies, Katz said, as well as assisting them and family members with taking undergraduate, pre-collegiate, GED and vocational classes. He noted that the foundation is separate from Vail's broader EpicPromise charitable program, which contributes $7.4 million annually to 250 nonprofit partners.