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Vail Daily’s View: Vail not in position to give raises

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

The town of Vail is handing out raises to its pub-lic servants while many other workers in the town and valley are suffering pay cuts, having their hours cut back, seeing their benefits trimmed or getting laid off.

Wages are increasing for town of Vail employees, while businesses in the town and county are watching their revenues plunge as they have to tell hardworking employees they are out of jobs.

Yes, the town government’s employees also work hard and no doubt deserve their raises, too. But so do countless other dedicated local archi-tects, carpenters and ski instructors who deserve to still be employed or working full-time ” and that also goes for the two people the town itself laid off recently.



The town, and particularly its top officials, should be satisfied they are getting decent pay-checks and pump some of that money back into the local economy in some form of stimulus.

Most merchants are seeing double-digit drops in revenue compared with last year, and no one, not in the valley or anywhere else, is predicting a sud-den, rapid economic recovery by next ski season.

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The town says it has ample reserve to fund rais-es and weather the wider storm, but no one’s sure when the storm’s going to end. The town would be wiser to fund efforts such as more aggres-sive marketing to keep the local economy afloat.

Vail should be figuring out ways to give money back to the people it’s supposed to be serving rather than taking advantage of the situation to hand out raises.

Unfortunately, this is yet another example of government ” federal, state and local ” being tone deaf in a time when people in the communi-ty are anxious and suffering. They seem to forget where the money for those raises came from.

editor@vaildaily.com

OUR VIEW


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