OurView
To ski or not to ski

Having followed the travails of the proposed Crossroads Ventures’ Highmount ski development in the Catskills, we offer two words by way of opinion: Build it.

And build it at the scale the developers are proposing.

The Catskill Mountains historically have resounded with the voices of far more tourists than the storied range does today. From the Borscht Belt in the south to the Irish Alps in the north, New York’s teeming, steamy alleys once offloaded entire city neighborhoods into the land of Rip VanWinkle on a regular basis. Transportation advances and increased disposable wealth proved a too-often fatal blow for resorts suddenly in competition with Miami Beach for a quick spring break and Steamboat Springs, Colo., for a weekend on the slopes. The Catskills vacation has faded from popularity like a Buddy Hackett-Shecky Greene double bill.

Enter the private sector in the form of Dean Gitter and Ken Pasternak, who want to walk the walk of economic revitalization in an area long on beauty, but woefully short on opportunity.

To Gitter and Pasternak, we say, “Let’s hit the slopes.” Buddy and Shecky’s era is past; what’s left is a swath of nature that we believe can and should be tapped to maximum advantage. And let’s keep in mind, everyone, we are not talking ore smelters and tanning factories. It’s a ski resort.

Opponents seem to believe the trickle down from building and maintaining a state-of-the- art ski resort is minimal, that all the jobs produced will be low-wage, and that the environmental impacts are too great. Their hyperbole does not fly.

We all know the only true green building is one that isn’t built and that we, as modern Americans, are all guilty of using too much. We in no way doubt the sincerity of those who like the mountains around Belleayre pristine, but we believe the scope of the landscape there, as demonstrated by the before and after photos published in Dec. 24 edition, leaves plenty of room for both nature and development to coexist.

To our eye, many opponents argue from the drawbridge school of rural love: “I got here, now pull up the drawbridge and don’t change a thing.” Are they sincere? Undoubtedly. But they universally fail to acknowledge even a hint of selfishness in their complaints. They profess openmindedness by favoring “smart” (read: “small”) growth. Something in a few tasteful Swiss chalets, perhaps, would suffice.

Concerns like loss of the night sky, depleted water resources for snowmaking and runoff are not, however, trifling concerns. At Greene County’s massive Athens Generating Plant (run by the Iroquois Gas Transmission System), opponents’ input was instrumental in cooling the turbines with air, instead of Hudson River water, which might have overheated the river. There is room here for similar grounds of input and shared agreement. Surely a ski resort, by its nature a sports-modified slice of wilderness, would want to keep itself green and all indicators here are that Crossroads has taken this message to heart with multiple accommodations to green building and runoff management. We urge Crossroads to listen to opponents’ concerns with the same openness their points of view have found with us.

Crossroads sees a great opportunity here and we do, too. Lewis Kolar, a retired Andes banker who is president of Partners for Progress, says he speaks for the silent majority by supporting the resort. He calls it “a comprehensive answer to the spiral downward.” Well said.

The separate issue here of tax dollars upgrading the state-run Belleayre Ski Center next door to Highmount is, for us, more problematic. We urge state bookkeepers to look long and hard at the numbers to determine if taxpayers are being well served. It might, in fact, be time for the always-cumbersome state bureaucracy to consider whether it should be in the ski business at all. Belleayre, while a well-intentioned sporting outlet, might be better off run by the private sector, with its sharper pencils and more adaptive approaches to uses of the land.

 

 

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