As he transitions from City Manager to private citizen, Suiter said the “infusion of great wealth” is threatening the culture and heritage of Ski Town, USA.
As a city manager, Gary Suiter said he has always been counting votes. At 5-2, you’ve lost support from two council members — “A little tenuous,” he said. By 4-3, you need to be updating your resume.
That’s exactly what happened the last time Suiter was a permanent city manager in Snowmass Village. That council had gotten into bed with a developer to build out a new base area and needed someone to do the deal on their terms. The political winds had shifted. In the words of the Aspen Daily News in 2001, the council accepted his “forced resignation.”
In his words, Suiter was “fired over politics.”
“They didn’t want to hear about the master plan and our land use codes and all that stuff,” Suiter recalled. “I got fired over politics, that’s fine. That’s the risk that comes with these jobs.”
The Snowmass project was eventually pushed through without Suiter at the helm. After being built out a third of the way, the 2008 recession halted construction and the project sat untouched for much of the next two decades. In his professional opinion, “It was a pretty big mistake on their part.”
After his departure in Snowmass, Suiter said he wanted to take control of his own career and not subject his family to the politics of a ski town. He started a consulting business to help coach other city managers and ended up serving on an interim basis in a dozen different communities over 14 years.
That work is what brought Suiter to Steamboat Springs, first as a coach to then City Manager Deb Hinsvark and then the interim city manager when she was let go by city council in 2015. As the city was searching for a new permanent leader, council members at the time asked him to apply. He took the city’s top job on a permanent basis in May of 2016.
He had his eye on the community for decades, dating back to a tour to Ski Town, USA when he was still in Snowmass.
“It met all my criteria of having solid leadership at council, solid staff to work with,” Suiter said. “And, it’s a real town.”
Suiter ends his nine-year run with the city on Friday. At a retirement party hosted at Olympian Hall at Howelsen Hill on Thursday evening, he said it was the first time he was leaving such a job without being pushed out. City Council members presented him with a key to the city.
Suiter said he plans to spend his last day visiting city staff at various outposts across town.
In an interview with The Yampa Valley Bugle on Thursday afternoon from his week-old office in Steamboat’s shiny new city hall building, Suiter said he was ready to leave the city on his own terms. He has no plans to leave town.
As he transitions from city manager to private citizen, Suiter said he is worried that the culture and heritage of Steamboat has changed and continues to change.
“When you just walk around main street and you look at the people walking around, and how they are dressed and how they act… there’s a certain authenticity, a down-hominess to this place,” Suiter said. “I’m concerned about losing that over the years with the infusion of great wealth and becoming more and more exclusive.”
“I’ve seen it happen in other resort communities. I’ve seen businesses that have closed down, walked away and said, ‘this place has lost its soul,’” Suiter continued. “I’m concerned about Steamboat losing its soul and we need to do everything we can to fight to preserve that through the built environment and through the people environment.”
“We need workers here. That’s what keeps some of the funkiness and the authenticity is keeping a middle class,” Suiter said. “If we lose [the] middle class, we’re going to have an elite class and a worker’s class that are imported from elsewhere. And I’ve seen that happen in other really exclusive resort communities.”
Suiter says he watched it happen in Snowmass. When he started in the village, people would come in and work together to solve problems. He would talk to someone’s lawyer once a year at most. By the time he was forced out, he met with various lawyers nearly every week.
“A lot of people moved in. They didn’t come in and talk. They just sent their lawyers to come in and talk,” Suiter said. “It was a remarkable change. It was kind of disappointing to lose that funkiness, that authenticity from a young ski resort.”
When asked if he believes Steamboat Springs is headed down a similar path, Suiter nodded his head yes.
“I think there’s more outside investment… you’re seeing the higher-end stores come in now,” Suiter said. “That concerns me. How do you stop that? How do you stop an international investor from coming in and buying a whole block of downtown?”
Suiter recalled his time in Telluride, where there was once a line item in the budget aimed at keeping the local Ace Hardware store downtown. He said Steamboat may need to take similar steps, potentially devoting tax revenue to subsidize local businesses so they are not lost. The city's new program recognizing legacy businesses is a start, he said.
It’s also about keeping workers in town, which is why Brown Ranch is so important to the future, Suiter said. He believes the next plan needs to be a phased annexation, with maybe a fifth or a quarter of the project being approved at a time, something he believes would be an easier pill to swallow for a community that soundly rejected a plan for more than 2,200 units last spring.
“I see the beginnings of it," Suiter said, referring to Steamboat losing what he sees as the soul of the community. "It’s not already gone.”