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Ferry’s affront to Front Rangers must end

Staff Reports

I am writing merely to set the record straight. Facts after all trump opinion, and they especially outweigh baseless speculation.To distract readers from the important substance of the Front Range issue, Kaye Ferry this week in another local newspaper both glorified and spread a rumor about our supposed plan to raise local merchant season pass prices by $100-200, and then to blame it on her. This is an irresponsible and untrue charge. In fact, Vail Resorts has not yet even decided our 2003-04 merchant pass prices, and the entire issue will only reach my desk for final approval in the next few weeks. However, even now, I can say categorically that pass prices will not rise by the $100-200 she speculated. Importantly, and as context for that decision, over the past few years, we actually have decreased the merchant pass price of our own volition by a significant 20-25 percent below 1997 levels!Vail Resorts truly believes in keeping skiing affordable for Coloradoans, including for locals. But as I said last week in the Vail Trail (“Hey, Kaye, what in the world are you doing?” Vail Trail, Aug. 22, http://www.vailtrail.com), what we do not believe in is insulting Front Range skiers in their Front Range media. After all, one careless comment printed in the Denver Post can offend one million people.Kaye Ferry may think she doesn’t insult Front Rangers in the Denver newspapers, but the facts speak for themselves. On June 29, in a story headlined “Retailers at Vail: Business Downhill” under a picture of Kaye Ferry, the Denver Post had the following caption, “Kaye Ferry, Vail Chamber of Commerce president, is among retailers concerned that ski passes are luring too many day skiers and hurting business.”And citing only Kaye Ferry by name on this topic, the Denver Post wrote again on Aug. 20, “Vail’s pricing comes as retailers in the town’s ritzy village bemoan the deluge of weekend warriors who don’t spend like vacationers. Retailers, facing steep declines in visitor spending, are concerned that the Front Range weekend crowds, which pack the town’s parking garages, streets and villages, are damaging the town’s appeal for out-of-state visitors.”To be fair to Kaye, she has been focusing primarily on the parking situation. But unfortunately she does not understand that the press is not interested in her nuances, her parsing of words or her un-printed explanatory letters to the editor. The press interprets her words without subtlety, and therefore reports her comments, as well as those of others in the Vail community, as a broadside attack on Front Range visitation.But is Kaye playing fair with us? Not only does she misreport our merchant pass price intentions, unbecomingly she also slings some mud in the process, And, in having written a long story about the parking situation in Vail, she conveniently leaves out any mention of the very public pledge of $4.3 million that Vail Resorts has offered to the Town of Vail to build a fourth plate on the Lionshead Parking Structure to help resolve this very problem.Of course, most of the above is just a smokescreen that distracts from the critical central issue: If the perhaps unintended but nonetheless reported message is that the welcome mat is not out for Front Rangers in Vail, then the Front Range might just stay away which undoubtedly will hurt all of us here terribly.Adam AronChairman and CEOVail Resorts


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