Mt. Ashland at the Crossroads
By Joshua Carreon
How We Got Here
Since 1929, when the City of Ashland and the US Forest Service entered into a cooperative agreement to conserve and protect the City’s water supply, until October 2006, when the City revoked Mt. Ashland Association’s right to negotiate directly with the Forest Service, the ski resort has been a bone of contention. Like the storms that scour Mt. Ashland’s steep slopes, its history has been rough. Rescued from bankruptcy in 1991 by $2 Million of State and private funding, the ski resort became the City’s oddest asset. After all, why own a ski resort far from the City limits, that provides no direct benefit to most City residents, and stimulates only a small amount of winter visitor traffic?
Enter the perennial solution for odd assets that devolve to the City of Ashland for lack of private profitability — Mt. Ashland Association — a “nonprofit public benefit corporation” — to operate the ski resort in the public interest. MAA has certainly managed to keep the ski resort open, and is eager to engage in an expansion that would double the size of the resort, at a whopping cost of $17 Million. MAA works hand-in-ski-glove with the USFS, so much so that the Forest Service not only approved MAA’s expansion — it refused to consider the City’s environmentally softer alternative plan.
Perceived by many in Ashland as secretive, MAA doesn’t make it easy to get information about their financial plans, citing competitive risks and legal issues. Nevertheless, General Manager Kim Clark was forthcoming when interviewed by the AFP. In order to put his responses in perspective, the AFP also interviewed Eric Navickas, an Ashland City Council candidate who supports City ownership of the ski resort, but opposes the current expansion so earnestly that he filed suit in an effort to block it.
Just before these interviews were conducted, MAA won a victory when Federal Judge Owen Panner swept aside objections by the Sierra Club and Navickas, ruling that MAA could proceed with the expansion. However, a few days later, MAA experienced a reversal of fortune that puts it at a crossroads. The City had long been restive about MAA’s failure to respond adequately to its September 2005 request for a detailed business plan for the proposed expansion, and was not pleased when MAA finally submitted a bare two pages to explain its $17 Million proposal. Since the City would likely suffer substantial financial losses if the expansion failed, and the City watershed might be damaged by an unwise expansion, the time was ripe for action. On October 3rd, the City Council revoked MAA’s authority to deal directly with the Forest Service until it produces the long-promised business plan.
Although the City has said the full plan will be disclosed only in an Executive Session of the City Council, it is not clear from a legal perspective why this should be so. The citizens have waited a long time to be heard on how the interests of skiing, the watershed, and the financial risks of the expansion should be balanced. With a new City Council waiting in the wings, and an interested electorate primed to be heard, attending City Council meetings could become the new Ashland winter sport.
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