(Dean Krakel, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Colorado ski resorts operating on public land have once again sent a record rent payment to the U.S. government. The payment for 2017-18 — based on revenues collected at 23 Colorado resorts — was $26.8 million, the highest ever.
Those payments are expected to continue reaching new highs as resort operators sell hundreds of thousands of season passes and seed year-round business at hills that once hosted only winter visitors. And the state’s national forests could start keeping more of that money under new legislation proposed last week.
Last week, Colorado’s U.S. senators, Michael Bennet and Cory Gardner, again floated legislation that would allow some Forest Service regions to retain fees collected from ski resorts inside their boundaries.
The Ski Area Fee Retention Act, which the pair proposed last year, would allow land managers in forests such as the White River National Forest — the most trafficked national forest in the country — to retain as much as 50 percent of the fees it collects from some of the world’s busiest ski areas, including Vail, Breckenridge, Keystone, Beaver Creek, Copper Mountain and Aspen Skiing Co.’s Snowmass.
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