RTA or SST? How to spend lift tax revenue at the heart of City’s negotiations with Steamboat Resort
- Dylan Anderson
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Both the city of Steamboat Springs and Steamboat Resort want to spend lift tax revenues on transit, but exactly which transit is up in the air.
Steamboat Ski & Resort Corp. has long committed to financially support a regional transportation authority to the tune of $1 million a year, but that commitment now hinges on the result of lift tax negotiations with the city of Steamboat Springs.
Resort officials have said they are willing to put a new lift tax in place, but they also want to have influence over how the funding from a lift tax is spent, favoring funding flowing to a Yampa Valley RTA. In this scenario, the money for the resort’s $1 million contribution would be generated from a lift tax.
But members of Steamboat Springs City Council have showed that they want at least part of a lift tax to support the city’s free bus service, Steamboat Springs Transit. They city’s bus system has had to curb service in recent years as the cost to operate buses has outpaced increases to the city’s transit budget.
Apart from the amount of revenue that a lift tax will be designed to generate, deciding how the money will be spent — on an RTA, on SST or a combination of the two — is the other primary hurdle of these negotiations.
Council member Brian Swintek, one of the city’s negotiators in talks with the resort, asked his fellow council members where they stand on this question Tuesday, adding that the Resort’s $1 million pledge for an RTA could go away if council decided to devote a lift tax solely to SST.
“They also are stating that they do not wish to hinder innovative transportation like RTA and mountain rail, which indicates they want to use that as a piece of leverage in this conversation,” Swintek said. “They’ve incorporated the RTA into this conversation as a piece of leverage, therefor that’s why this question is up here. What is our position on that, because that’s being threatened.”
City Council met in executive session Tuesday to discuss the answer to that question behind closed doors. The purpose of that conversation was to inform Swintek and Council member Joella West, the other half of the city’s negotiating team, of council’s priorities ahead of the next meeting with the resort on Thursday.
Steamboat Resort has long been supportive of the RTA effort and has a seat as a non-voting member on both the formation and technical committees working on the RTA. The resort has also helped spur the passenger rail conversation, which has taken significant strides toward reality in the last year.
A $1 million contribution to the RTA would only garner a fraction of the funding needed, as the cost of an RTA is projected to approach $10 million annually. The formation committee is currently leaning toward funding an RTA with a sales tax of between 0.5% and 1%. The question of whether to form an RTA and how to fund it is expected to go to voters in November.
As the RTA formation effort is ongoing, Steamboat Springs is pursuing two strategies aimed at diversifying the city’s revenues — the lift tax and a vacancy tax. Both are tracking to be on November’s ballot as well.
The lift tax negotiations are happening as part of a parallel process with Council’s work to bring a question to voters to form a lift tax. The thought here is, if negotiations fall apart, Council would still have the option to bring a question on a lift tax this fall — even if that comes without the resort’s support. Council has so far resisted using that latter discussion to gain leverage in the former.
“I’m looking at this as a partnership with Ski Corp.,” said Council member Michael Buccino. “We could be adversarial and just go to the jugular and actually, the citizens would probably pass a lift tax. That’s not what we’re here to do.”
Resort keeping skier days confidential
Another aspect of this discussion is what a lift tax would be based on. An earlier discussion had Council members favoring the use of skier days as a potential metric, a number the resort has kept close to the vest for years.
“We asked for that and we were told no,” Swintek said. “It’s a data point they don’t publish, that they don’t want to publish.”
Sarah Jones, Director of Social Responsibility with the Resort, said after Tuesday’s discussion that they are willing to share general figures with the city to inform discussions, but not proprietary skier numbers.
“We can still have a productive conversation without saying it is exactly this,” Jones said.
Steamboat Resort Communications Director Loryn Duke said they are committed to transparency and collaboration with the city but also needs to protect “proprietary business information.”
“As a privately held company, we don’t release our skier visits because doing so would put us at a competitive disadvantage with other resorts,” Duke said.
As part of its 2011 Master Development Plan, Steamboat Resort, at that time owned by Intrawest, shared data of skier visits for five ski seasons from 2005 to 2010, according to a 2011 Article by then Steamboat Pilot & Today reporter Tom Ross. That data showed an annual average of 960,000 skier visits over the five years, with just over a million skiers duringeach of the 05-06 and 06-07 ski seasons.
Council member Amy Dickson said skier days may not be the best metric for a lift tax, however, while pointing to skier visit data for Vail Resorts, which as a publicly traded company, does disclose its skier days.
“[Vail Resorts] reported a decline in skier visits last ski season, but an increase in lift ticket revenue,” Dickson said. “I think we need to be careful about focusing in on one data point.”
The two sides will hold their second negotiation meeting on Thursday, with part of the focus being on what is non-negotiable for each side. City Manager Tom Leeson said they also want to have each side start drafting a term sheet as well so that negotiations get moving “relatively quickly.”