Isn’t it time Fat City tightened its belt, rather than expand it? The notion that the Lift 1A neighborhood on Ajax needs revitalized is about as authentic as the cowboy hat on the greedy, glory noggin of Jeff Gorsuch. Our hamlet is beginning to reek with the Chanel smell of its 1-percenter denizens — people who have it all and want more. You know, those folks with the business plans and the list of popular friends that know the price of everything but, apparently, the value of nothing.
Carbondale has 59 full-time employees, an annual budget of around $18 million and a population of 6,800. Aspen has a population of 6,900, 300 employees and a budget of about $130 million. The Lift One project caters only to the rich. We need more tax revenue like we need a couple of behemoth structures on Ajax filled with overpriced objects and more lodging for the affluent — not at all!
Aren’t our streets literally swept and washed with enough frequency? Aren’t our foothills already filled with enough empty mansions? Are there not yet sufficient numbers of fat-assed, leather-clad Kardashians being dumped out of giant black SUVs to totter on their stilettos across snow-clumped sidewalks into Matsuhisa? Haven’t we locked up enough spoiled and murderous celebrities misbehaving during their token, decadent sojourns to this little paradise? Are there not enough realtors per capita living here?
As to vitality, aren’t 50,000-plus daily visitors roaming around town over X Games and all summer long enough to mitigate our feelings of loneliness? Is there a shortage of geysers of Veuve Clicquot being spewed and micturated into our watershed at mid-mountain restaurants by the overdressed insecure in trucker hats? In Aspen, where visitors are always incredulous that the suicide rate is three times the national average, locals should be proud that our murder rate is so remarkably low.
Sure, let’s upgrade and speed up the Lift 1A chairlift; it’s long overdue. The new breed of robotic World Cup autotrons will either show up or they won’t. But a simple burger of a chairlift doesn’t have to be sold up and packaged to include a second patty, a supersized coke and fries, and a worthless plastic toy, all subsidized by the city, in other words, you. Have you seen the visual renderings of this proposed project? Horrible! An improved chairlift doesn’t have to include skiing into yet another developer’s narrow clusterflake of a bustling strip mall — we already have Snowmass for that. Please, let’s leave the Epic promise of Vail hell near the freeway where it belongs. Vote “no” on Lift One and the hobby horse it rode in on.
David Frank
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