The leaves are beginning to turn, and it’s cold enough at night that the windows aren’t wide open any more. Thoughts turn to winter and skiing.
We are facing a Super El Nino winter of unprecedented strength. The weather professionals are all foaming at the mouth. It means that surely, somebody, somewhere, will experience something.
That’s about as specific as it gets. Not exactly the kind of thing you run out and buy new snow tires over if there is any tread left on the ones you wore out on bare pavement all winter last year. But it’s coming and it will be, yeah, El Whatever.
With the coming of winter, businesses are beginning to ramp up recruitment and hiring. You don’t run major ski areas or hotels without a whole lot of people. Some of them will be repeaters.
Deer Valley seems to hang on to employees year after year, suggesting that it is a pretty good place to work. Finding all those people isn’t easy. There isn’t housing for them. The commutes have become longer and less enjoyable as gas prices rise and traffic jams build.
The new stop light on S.R. 248 at the Maverick store went live this week. Chaos was the call of the day as people came around the curve from Kamas to find traffic at a dead stop sooner than usual. A few collision repair shops are conveniently located nearby.
The employee issue came to mind this week when an official from MIDA was addressing Wasatch County. He pointed out that the East Village development will require 6,000 employees to operate when completed.
I’m assuming that’s the hotels, retail, independent food and beverage operations, and probably the additional employees Deer Valley needs to run the lifts and day lodges. And snowmaking, which we learned last winter will be critical to keeping that area alive. Six-thousand people. The guy pointed out, just for reference, that when the Mayflower project, as it used to be known, was first approved in the early 1980s (yes, 45 years ago), the entire population of Wasatch County was around 8,500 people.
So where will these 6,000 people come from? The unemployment rate along the Wasatch Back is already very low, and pretty much any business you go in is looking for help.
So they aren’t coming from Heber, Midway or even Kamas Valley. They just aren’t there. Adding an hour to the commute, we could access the 1,800 or so people in Duchesne — probably half of them children and retired folks, and the rest already employed.
I’m not sure the transition from oil rig worker to masseuse in a snooty hotel spa is an easy one.
Roosevelt is another hour away, making a two-hour commute. Not going to happen. UDOT’s going to need a bigger bypass around Heber’s downtown, and it isn’t even designed yet.
Provo is a reasonable shot from East Village, a little over an hour. That might be tolerable. They might be able to tap into student labor from the universities there. But it’s still an area with a booming economy and low unemployment.
I’m not sure people will be looking to bite off a challenging commute for sort of OK wages when there are jobs available closer. The old formula of working for a ski pass died with the cheap multi-resort pass. They might have to run buses.
I have a hunch that a lot of those 6,000 employees are already here, working in Park City. If you could cut your commute in half, and never have to drive on S.R. 248 again, and have the same job you have now in a new hotel/restaurant/shop with a potential for career advancement, why wouldn’t you jump on that?
So businesses in Park City, with its parking and traffic problems, may find their employees defecting to East Village. They are building 600 units of workforce housing there. Live, work, play. And the other 5,400 commute.
If the employees are moving on, what about the customers? Locals know there is something special about Main Street. If you’re in Toledo, booking rooms online, you might see it differently.
Here’s a choice of a 40-year old property that’s a two-transfer bus ride from anything, and over there is a brand new hotel on the slopes. It might be more expensive, but eliminates the need for a rental car, and comes larded up with amenities that nobody ever thought of back in the 1980s when so much of the in-town bed base was built.
Whether it’s East Village or Canyons Village, that would seem to be where the action is to the fresh observer.
Obviously it’s not there yet with East Village, where most of the hotels are still see-through construction sites. But as they get completed, there will be a big effort to keep the guests and their wallets there, if not eating in the hotels, then in the commercial spaces around the plaza area.
Will it be as cool as Main Street? No, but you can walk there from your hotel without dealing with shuttles and schedules. Or drive to Heber/Midway for an authentic small town experience with some good restaurants. That might be cool enough.
A gondola from Snow Park’s parking lot to China Bridge isn’t going to fix this.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.