PE’s role in ruining ski towns

[Buster Highmen]

All that ^ perpetuates the false narrative by virtue of exceptions, rather than the norms. Those people don't create the $1m+ housing landscape.

I would hope that there's enough people to try and diminish that narrative with the facts about the economy in the USA regarding PEs and predatory companies.

[byates1]

To be fair, I probably know the people byates is talking about by name. They were never going to buy a house, or at least keep it. They just need something to bitch about during the hours a day sober enough to realize their situation.

Fully. And that's what I'm pointing out. I'm w buster on the system etc.

[Harry]

Harry?

A lot of truth in that article. It was posted a week or so ago by Bunion in the Montana thread.

Funny that it references that 30 year old article in High Country News. Still dysfunctional, just with way more money.

My memories are good, no lift lines, riding up in a tram all by myself countless times, everyone chill. Now the lines are long, the tram is 10 times larger, and douchbags are seemingly everywhere.

The skiing remains great, I love Big Sky. But the experience is sooooo much different.

I’m glad I experienced it when I did.








Edit to add: my personal prediction is that Big Sky will be closed to the public in 10-15 years. Our society’s wealth inequality will continue to skyrocket and only billionaires will be allowed, they don’t want people like us skiing on their mountain. I know that is a sad thought, but I fear it is coming.


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[UCMERIP]

A decent read on the PE’s impact.


https://www.amazon.com/Plunder-Private-Equitys-Pillage-America/dp/1541702107/ref=asc_df_1541702107/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=693463267832&hvpos=&hvnetw= g&hvrand=12082094245102222493&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqm t=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=1016202&hv targid=pla-1876591649470&psc=1&mcid=bdbd6b07f91d334ba8b7aa043 00efdaf&gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI357-kujghQMVOTOtBh1TjABREAQYAiABEgImSvD_BwE

[sweatypowderpig]

So Jared Smith is the guy that made concerts extremely expensive with high prices and all of the "fees" associated with a ticket while locking down every venue under Ticketmaster? No wonder it's hard for a family of four to take a ski trip. Or go to a concert. Jared is a fucking genius.

i say this all the time! how is this not a bigger story?
dude ruined concerts and live music writ large, managed to jump ship to Alterra right before those congressional hearings and has escaped any controversy/flak since.
he's a fucking tool. I heard stories of him visiting Palisades before last years world cup and he did the classic CEO psychopath thing of swinging his dick around about something wrong and just hammered the resort about his perceived lack of ski racks. wouldn't shut up about it. one poor employee had to inventory all the ski racks, analyze all their locations according to his desires and create a fucking map with little red dots all over it marking ski rack locations. "Just use your fucking eyes and look for one!" At the same time, the Alterra-owner KSL's founder PE douchebag saw the VIP grandstand and made the resort erect his own private grandstand at the finish.

I'll also add that the stark contrast between someone saying ski resorts are "as complex a business that, I think, exists on Earth" and waxing poetic about the importance institutional knowledge while simultaneously crushing union organizing efforts and paying literally every single employee at every single ski resort FAR below their worth is incredibly disturbing. He also conveniently left out the 20% across the board budget cuts they demanded of every Alterra-owned resort only 3 weeks into the 23/24 season. Most large resort COOs make between 200k and 300k while managing upwards of 2500 employees and pulling in $60+million in EBITDA. Non-profit CEOs managing low million dollar endowments with one employee are making more than that! I'm not saying 20y/o lift ops need to be paid $30/hour, but the deliberate depression of ski resorts wages goes all the way from the bottom to the top. Only the PE owners rake it in. Whole industry has become a sick money extraction apparatus while most employees attempt to cling onto what little they have left as the guest/employee experience crumbles around them. Short-termism at its finest. I'm pretty sure these PE firms have run studies like the oil and gas industry about climate change, know the clock is ticking and are plundering as much as they can until time runs out. "Do the bare minimum to manage PR/compliance/litigation and fill your pockets boys!" Don't be fooled by the vast amounts of "investment," it's ultimately filling some other coffer that PE also owns.

[Upinsmoke]

Yes sir. He fucked Ticketmaster, and has been working on skiing since he took over. Fuck that guy

[muted reborn]

I guess it’s not just ski towns, but all this makes me kind of glad I’m not young now. The way things were is not how they’re going to be.

“Every world is lost. It’s all lost,” he says. “Whatever you remember, it’s gone. Forget it. One of people’s great foolishnesses is thinking, This is the way it is.”

[raisingarizona13]

A lot of truth in that article. It was posted a week or so ago by Bunion in the Montana thread.

Funny that it references that 30 year old article in High Country News. Still dysfunctional, just with way more money.

My memories are good, no lift lines, riding up in a tram all by myself countless times, everyone chill. Now the lines are long, the tram is 10 times larger, and douchbags are seemingly everywhere.

The skiing remains great, I love Big Sky. But the experience is sooooo much different.

I’m glad I experienced it when I did.








Edit to add: my personal prediction is that Big Sky will be closed to the public in 10-15 years. Our society’s wealth inequality will continue to skyrocket and only billionaires will be allowed, they don’t want people like us skiing on their mountain. I know that is a sad thought, but I fear it is coming.


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I think the most prized ski resorts with the most reliable snowfalls may not be private exactly but they're going to priced to a point that most people can't afford them within the next 30 or so years.

[BFD]

I dont know about 30 years from now. I do not expect Wolf Creek to change much in the next 10 years

[neufox47]

Increase taxes on private equity and don’t allow separate taxation with separate liability. Also eliminate carried interest / taxation of profit interest at capital gains rates or equalize capital gains and income.


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[Buster Highmen]

Increase taxes on private equity and don’t allow separate taxation with separate liability. Also eliminate carried interest / taxation of profit interest at capital gains rates or equalize capital gains and income.

Someone is paying attention
++++

[neufox47]

Someone is paying attention
++++

It would hurt personally but I’d take it.

[One (+) Sentence]

You know you’re a ski bum if you had to click on this thread to learn what ‘PE’ was…

[Meadow Skipper]

Increase taxes on private equity and don’t allow separate taxation with separate liability. Also eliminate carried interest / taxation of profit interest at capital gains rates or equalize capital gains and income.

Golf clap.

[Duffman]

Increase taxes on private equity and don’t allow separate taxation with separate liability. Also eliminate carried interest / taxation of profit interest at capital gains rates or equalize capital gains and income.


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Nailed it. Carried interest is one of the most obvious and biggest scams there is. Both parties are one time or another have been against it. But it always remains , because $$$$ talks in our legalized bribery campaign contribution system.

[Buster Highmen]

Nailed it. Carried interest is one of the most obvious and biggest scams there is. Both parties are one time or another have been against it. But it always remains , because $$$$ talks in our legalized bribery campaign contribution system.

But it isn’t just that firms benefit from the law: They take great pains to shape it, too. Since 1990, private equity and investment firms have given over $900 million to federal candidates and have hired an untold number of senior government officials to work on their behalf. These have included cabinet members, speakers of the House, generals, a C.I.A. director, a vice president and a smattering of senators. Congressional staff members have found their way to private equity, too: Lobbying disclosure forms for the largest firms are filled with the names of former chiefs of staff, counsels and legislative directors. Carlyle, for instance, at various times employed two former F.C.C. chairmen, a former S.E.C. chair, a former NATO supreme allied commander, a former secretary of state and a former British prime minister, among others.

Such investments have paid off, as firms have lobbied to protect favored tax treatments, which in turn have given them disproportionate benefits when their investments succeed. The most prominent of these benefits is the carried interest loophole, which allows private equity executives to pay such low tax rates. The issue has been on the national agenda since at least 2006, and three presidents have tried to close the loophole. All three have failed.

Most recently, in 2021, as part of his first budget, President Biden proposed to end the benefit for people with very high incomes. But as he made his pitch, private equity opposition surged, and the largest firms each spent $3 million to $7 million on lobbying that year alone. One firm, Apollo Global Management, employed the former general counsel to the House Republican caucus, a former senior adviser to a past speaker of the House, a former chief of staff to another speaker and a former senator, plus more than a dozen other former officials.

As the plan wound its way through Congress, it grew weaker, and by the fall of 2021, the proposal to end the benefit was no longer a part of Mr. Biden’s budget negotiations. Instead, Congress approved an amendment that largely exempted small and midsize companies owned by private equity firms from a new corporate minimum tax. It was an obscure but important consideration, and with it, private equity firms managed not just to protect a preferred tax advantage — the carried interest loophole, which benefited people like Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, whose income in 2022 was 50 times that of the chief executive of Goldman Sachs — but also to win a new one.

[up an down]

I think the most prized ski resorts with the most reliable snowfalls may not be private exactly but they're going to priced to a point that most people can't afford them within the next 30 or so years.

Already at that point this year

[406]

Really seems like the ultra rich and huge corporations need to pay a lot more taxes.

[XavierD]

Increase taxes on private equity and don’t allow separate taxation with separate liability. Also eliminate carried interest / taxation of profit interest at capital gains rates or equalize capital gains and income.


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The number of people I know who thought Sinema was their guardian angel a couple years ago is somewhat sickening. Of course when I asked them if they would find a new profession once their carry was actually taxed they all said no.

I don’t know if P.E. Is really the root issue killing Big Sky and other Western Areas. Much more the influx of wealth from people who decided they would much rather be in actual mountains than Mountain View CA, or Greenwich CT. The market is just moving to meet their needs over those of the people who have been working/living there. The real issue is we currently live in a world where tech/finance can produce incomes/wealth really unobtainable in other sectors with few exceptions. I do wonder if we will see remote western resorts become the exploitive company owned mining towns of the late 19th and early 20th century.

We also see relatively simple, libertarian western land laws and lack of understaffed local/federal governing bodies being unequipped to deal with a large influx of lawyered up wealth.

[XavierD]

Outside of removing carried interest loophole, I’d like to see investment real estate gains taxed at a higher rate..

Land swaps aren’t inherently bad, many of the people in this thread have benefitted immensely from them, but we do need to ensure they are in the overall public interest.

[Mudfoot]

Lived in MT when Big Sky opened and have skied it off and on through its history, including a few days last year. Have a friend who has owned a small condo there since the 1980's and I've been involved in some of her HOA and development issues. Several of my skiing friends have visited BS for the first time over the last few years and their reactions echo what I have felt since the beginning.

We have all skied multiple resorts of various sizes around the west and it just seems like the vibe at BS is unusually weird, which undoubtedly arises from the fact that it was not a town to begin with and it's location, Yellowstone Club, and other factors have led to an extended history of patchwork incongruent development. The PE events described in the article show a continuation of that pattern. I have lived and worked in several ski towns in the west and Canada and have skied dozens more. A couple years ago my wife and I considered spending a winter there and checked out living options, so I have a pretty good sense of the place and to me BS feels unlike any other. It did not organically grow from an existing town and it's small overall original 50 yr. old plan did a slow motion explosion into chaotic development on all fronts.

Big Sky has a rather low snowpack for the rocky terrain and frequent cold, flat light and foggy weather, but when it's good it has some of the best steep skiing in the country. On the other hand as far as ski towns go there is no "there" there and the future does not appear to be going in a direction to change that, if it is even possible at this point. Mo $ Mo problems.

[Bunion 2020]

^^^ For my 1st 5 years in Big Sky I was convinced that it was a giant witness protection program. Yeah, that kind of weird, but it grew on me. Everything else you wrote about (lack of a real town, plan, local government , etc...) is dead on.

Now I find it to be kind of nauseating and not getting better.

[yeahman]

Based on hundreds of conversations I've had with tourists on chairlifts at Big Sky over the years, the thing they bring up the most often is the lack of crowds and liftlines compared to other ski destinations they have visited. They can hardly believe they "found" a place like BS. They come back year after year for that reason. While a 15 minute wait at Swifty on a crowded weekend is aggravating to us, to them it's nothing. And nine times out of ten as we all know Big Sky lifts are practically ski-on. Given the lack of a ski town and weird vibe, you'd think people would not want to return over and over, but for a certain type of skier the perceived lack of crowds is their #1 priority. And these people are not tram types skiing steeps in the alpine. Just regular families and retired couples. I'd be willing to bet PE ruining ski towns etc. is stuff that never even comes across their radar.

[Mudfoot]

Until Ikon and Mt. Collective BS survived on heavy marketing to the midwest and northeast. Those folks loved the thousands of acres of intermediate groomers and think flat light is a normal skiing condition.

[plugboots]

I'd be willing to bet PE ruining ski towns etc. is stuff that never even comes across their radar.

This is the point I was trying to make. Maybe they miss the old cheap beer place, but “hey let’s meet at the Four Seasons”.