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Vail Daily’s View: Time to focus on the real challenge

Vail Daily Editorial Board
Vail, CO, Colorado
newsroom@vaildaily.com

It’s the economy, …

Forget logos and slogans, even with their comic relief. Forget “affordable housing,” supposed traffic congestion, all that. Secondary stuff at best now. Mere distractions from the serious work at hand.

It’s time, past time actually, for Eagle County’s towns, special districts and county government to focus.



Focus on helping the people who live here get through a terribly difficult time.

Focus on the property owners trying to keep up with the mortgage.For the county and that litany of entities who have run up the property tax bill, that means taking a deep breath and sharing in the pain that private sector is feeling.

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Lower the property tax bill. Provide stimulus to your most valuable members of the community, the taxpayers and residents.

Call it a local stimulus,, but it’s time for a break.

The county should lead this turn, and quit defending its need to raise taxes when its citizens are struggling.

The thousand or so special districts that take their little slice out of our property tax bills should do the same.

The taxpayers must do with less. Is it unfair to ask the same of government? The time has come that progressive needs to switch to prudent. What actions will help the core community? That’s what government must focus on at this point.

In Vail and Beaver Creek, the mission is a little different, owing to the 70-percent-plus second-home factor.

For them, this means taking steps to in the short term attract more of those life-giving visitors at our headwaters communities who will in turn feed the whole valley. “Vail All the Love” was a good start. Marketing, especially in tougher times, does work.

Longer term, a friendlier eye to the right development that helps keep our architects and hammer-swinging jobs going while we as a larger community reach to diversify our economy makes a lot of sense, too.

In Vail, that means getting Ever Vail done, Timber Ridge rebuilt (and its debt off the town of Vail’s books) and a real effort to build up that “learning” and “health-care” economy the more visionary residents bring up every now and again.

We’re not sure what that looks like, precisely. But it is time to set such things as logos and slogans aside, and concentrate on the big challenge.

That would be the economy.

Vail Daily Editorial Board


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