Steamboat Springs City Council and Steamboat Resort made progress in their ongoing negotiations over a potential lift tax to supplement the city’s dependence on sales tax, with both parties outlining their “non-negotiables” and identifying areas of overlap during an April 10 meeting as they work toward a June 12 deadline to finalize a potential ballot measure.

“Each entity presented their non-negotiables. The resort really emphasized the desire for any funds to be earmarked for use rather than just go into the unrestricted general fund,” said City Manager Tom Leeson at council’s regular Tuesday meeting.

“They emphasized the need to see a nexus between the resort’s impact in the funding model that’s chosen,” he continued. “If it is funding for the SST (Steamboat Springs Transit), it should be funding for additional services above and beyond what exists today.”

Additional discussion took place regarding the meaning of the resort’s commonly used term of “innovative transportation” and clarified that the resort’s main priority is the potential Regional Transportation Authority and “solving other transportation needs either through the rail or gondola,” Leeson added.

“The revenue should be devoted to SST, both for existing service and expanded service. There should be a minimum revenue guarantee that is annually indexed, and this will most likely be going to a ballot in 2025 and a deadline of June 12th for a negotiated measure,” said Leeson of the city’s non-negotiables.

Leeson described the negotiations with Steamboat Resort as constructive, with both sides engaging in a “fair amount of discussion” around these points. City Council member Bryan Swintek said both sides were “pleasantly surprised” by the overlap in their positions. 

Council President Gail Garey pressed for clarity on what counts as an additional service. 

“Anything above what we have today,” said Swintek. “Our goal isn’t simply to replace the existing (service) and keep it as it is. The goal is to expand our service to make it better.”

Leeson said Transportation Manager Jonathan Flint laid out the current and future costs associated with Steamboat’s transit system at the April 10 meeting.

“SST is currently at maximum capacity for staff, equipment and storage, and they really couldn’t increase service without significant capital expenditure,” Leeson said, citing Flint’s presentation. “Any changes that occur now with transit service is really more of like a reallocation of services and not an increase.”

“Just to get to that modest increase, we would need a new eight-base storage facility, estimated cost at about $8 million, four additional hybrid buses at an additional cost of $3.6 million, and then about four-and-a-half full-time equivalents at $345,000 annually,” he continued. “So you can see immediately we are at $11 million, $12 million just for the capital and then an additional operating cost as well.”

“We have six or seven buses that are already probably close to being retired. They should have been retired,” said Councilor Steve Muntean. “So I think we’re at a point where we’re going to have to spend a lot of money on new buses just to replace existing buses … you’re talking $20 million for a modest (increase). Or $7 million just for the fact that we need to replace these things and they’re overdue to be replaced.”

“When Ski Corp. says, ‘We as Ski Corp. want to see this invested in innovative transportation,’ … if what we said was, ‘Well, the first thing we’re going to do with this tax is we’re going to buy the six buses to replace the ones that need replacing,’ I think that’s where we’re going to hear concern, opposition from the resort, because that is our problem,” said Councilor Joella West. “The resort has a completely different set of issues and desires.”

The resort presented data demonstrating that while visitation is growing, the visitation pattern is changing. 

“People are staying longer and there are fewer peak days,” Leeson reported. “They’re seeing fewer of those peak days, which I think they defined as over 15,000 (people), and those have decreased about 60%, primarily because of the multi-day tickets. People are staying longer so you don’t get that crunch time on a Saturday, Sunday — they’re staying three or four days longer.” 

The resort also provided growth rates that suggest relatively modest increases over time. Swintek cautioned about reading too much into the numbers, explaining that the resort used a compound annual growth rate to present their data. 

“This only tells us the amount of growth between the number of visitors 2014-2024,” Swintek said, comparing it to how grocery prices might look modest when averaged over a decade, despite sharp increases in recent years. 

“In context … the visitation is four times the amount of the population growth of Steamboat Springs,” Swintek said.

Both parties plan to bring details to their next meeting on April 28, addressing funding mechanisms, minimum guarantees, indexing and terms of the agreement. City Council and Steamboat Resort will continue to meet twice a month, said West, leading up to the June 12 deadline for a finalized ballot question.