If Telluride had set out deliberately as a matter of public policy to kill off tourism, we couldn’t have done much better than we’ve done. We are, today, more dependent on the second home economy than ever. Sales and lodging tax revenues are flat at best. Most days and nights of the year, Telluride’s main street looks like a ghost town and the Mountain Village Core like a neutron bomb has hit.

As a result, it won’t be much fun to be the next mayor of Telluride. It’s not much fun being an official in Mountain Village these days, either, and running the Telluride Ski and Golf Co. has got to be one headache after another. After years of bad public policy decisions, the bills are coming due.

Twenty years ago, looking forward to today, this set of circumstances is not what anyone would have predicted. Back then, Telluride was a small and remote ski town and there were confident predictions that twenty years into the future we’d be a “mature” resort, with a balanced and sustainable economy. Today, that vision seems like maybe it’s another twenty years away, if it’s achievable at all.

Twenty years back plus twenty years forward is half a lifetime, a long time even for a town with a gargantuan case of prolonged adolescence.

The problem today, as it was two decades ago, is simple: not enough visitors to support the economy. The causes of that problem are also simple to identify:  we are remote and difficult to access.  But the solutions are anything but simple. We need reliable, affordable air service; adequate bedbase; and enough affordable housing.  We have none of the three, and current plans offer little reason for optimism, at least not anytime soon. Yes, some hotels are planned, but all but one are in Mountain Village, and there aren’t enough of them, and they are condo-hotels, to boot. We have an air program, but just try to book someone into Telluride for the coming winter at a price the average person can afford without taking out a second mortgage on their home, not to mention spending a full day getting here.  Employee housing?  A long lost dream, to which we’ve paid tremendous lip service.

Up in Mountain Village, dismal leadership from the Telluride Ski and Golf Co. has produced an all-out war between the master property owners association and the municipality. Most recently, the Telluride Mountain Village Owners Association, dominated by Telski, has had the staggering audacity to demand the right to master plan the town without the participation, never mind the oversight, of the municipal government. Can anyone be blamed for suspecting ulterior motives?

Meanwhile, the Town of Telluride has spent all its political energy and capital on preserving the Valley Floor, a worthy objective, but one whose achievement has come at the cost of paying far too little attention to other vital concerns. So today there’s not enough money to complete the reconstruction of the Hwy. 145 Spur, not to mention for the crucial task of investing in economic development.

Telluride has been able to pay little attention to tourism due to Real Estate Transfer Taxes, which have filled the town’s coffers for years, making sales and lodging tax less important to the town’s ability to meet the demand for service. But the decline of tourism should be of concern, not only because the taxes it generates help pay for town services, and would be critical if real estate were to slow down, but also because tourism provides jobs and supports the businesses that make Telluride a great place to have a second home.

Among the bad policy decisions Telluride has made, we rejected the Idarado Annexation agreement, losing 67 units of employee housing in the process, and RETT and property taxes that would have come to the town from second home development at Idarado. And we’ve allowed zoning changes that have cost us prime hotel sites in town.

To mature out of our prolonged adolescence, Telluride is down to one last hope: the successful redevelopment of the Coonskin base. The town has embarked on a planning process for Coonskin, but moving from the planning phase to actual construction will be daunting. It will require strong leadership, making the upcoming mayoral and council election pivotal. If we allow Coonskin – our last possible site for significant tourist-related development – to be downzoned or otherwise underutilized, then Telluride’s fate will be to become a very sleepy enclave of very big homes, with a perpetually moribund main street.

Other resorts have had to sink to true economic collapse before they understood the importance of a balanced economy and began to change course. The Telluride region is heading in that direction.  The question before voters, both in Telluride and Mountain Village, as they go to the polls in November, is whether we’re smarter than that.