Ballots for the general election are in the mail, signaling the end of a campaign season that can’t end soon enough. Utah has been under Soviet style one-party governance for so many years that most of us have never experienced a really competitive race. The bad part of that is the inherent corruption that comes with one-party governance. The good part is that we have not had to put up with the kind of campaign advertising that has fouled our televisions for the last month.
The candidates themselves have been pretty well behaved. The PAC money has been just hateful. The PACs supporting Mike Lee seem more obnoxious, but only because there are more of them with more money to spend than Evan McMullin’s PAC supporters. These organizations with noble-sounding names, supported by donors with concealed names, are really not useful. It’s not political discourse. It’s noise. I doubt many minds are changed by all the sound and fury.
Our Senate race is not a typical Democrat/Republican race. It’s really a Republican primary on crack, or, this being Utah, jacked up on Mountain Dew. I watched the debate Monday night and felt like they were both talking to somebody else, and that I was not even in the audience. Neither one said anything that addressed my concerns. Lee has a track record as a result of being in the Senate. He also was close enough to the Trump insurrection that he should be disqualified from office.
McMullin is an old-school, responsible conservative, sort of what the Republican party looked like back in the good old days, before things went off the rails. When he spoke, I thought, “I disagree with that.” “I don’t like that.” “There is nothing there I really want to support.” But in the end, McMullin didn’t participate in an attempt to overthrow the U.S. government, and that’s really enough. I sent him a check.
The race is within the margin of error on some of the polling. McMullin is still a long shot, but that race alone is worth the cost of the stamp to mail the ballot in. I just wish that marking the ballot early would make the ads stop.
In other news, the votes are in, and Park City Mountain is ranked dead last in SKI magazine among 30 major ski areas in the West. It’s a fall from 13th place last year. It was in the top 10 before the corporate takeover worked its magic. We all experienced it last year, and the plunge can’t be a surprise to anybody, except Vail, which probably thinks it was a rigged election. Maybe the bright side is that nobody will come this winter. That’s great for local skiing. It’s less great if you own a business in town that depends on visitors, or use local services paid for by tourist sales taxes.
The interesting thing about the rankings is that Deer Valley retained its No. 2 spot. Park City Mountain has consistently blamed their problems last year on bad snowfall, a tight labor market, and continuing COVID problems. Deer Valley experienced exactly the same snowfall, hired people from exactly the same very tight pool of available workers, and the workers from both resorts all went to the same Main Street bars after work to spread the same viruses.
The difference is management. The problems at Park City Mountain were self-inflicted. I felt sorry for Mike Goar, who was running the place last year. He’s as good as anybody in the business. Left alone, he could have fixed it, just like the management at Deer Valley quickly fixed their early-season glitches. His hands were clearly tied by the Death Star in Colorado. MBAs should not be allowed to manage recreation. It says that right in Mike Lee’s pocket Constitution somewhere.
Last year at PCMR felt like an experiment by Vail’s business school brain trust to see just how extreme they could get with cost-cutting before it caused irreversible damage. How bad does it have to get before people vote with their feet? I thought we hit bottom last winter, but when push came to shove, I bought another Epic Pass this year, so I guess there’s still room to fall.
They are trying to make some changes for this year. The $20/hour wages will certainly help. The proposed new lifts would have helped (though not as much as matching skier numbers with real mountain capacity, which is the crux of the problems), but that got stalled in a botched approval process. The paid parking will help those willing to pay, and make a mess of traffic and parking everywhere else. The city has finally decided to bring the Richardson Flat satellite parking lot on line, but with a level of bus service that more or less dooms it to fail. PCMR won’t participate because it says Richardson Flat is a terrible customer experience, which a friend said “is pretty much right on brand.” But it’s not the city’s obligation to provide parking and shuttle service for the ski resorts’ customers.
There isn’t anything below last place except maybe “did not finish.” Let’s hope things turn around. Maybe we can bounce back to 29th next year.