NO ROOM AT WESTERN INNS

Tourists Go Wanting in Idaho, Wyoming

By Headwaters News, 6-26-06

In this, the season of hitting the road, a couple of towns in the Rocky Mountain West are finding it hard to accommodate tourists.

Last week, the Casper Star-Tribune reported that Buffalo city officials were so concerned that construction workers on the new coal-fired power plant in Wyoming would crowd out tourists that they asked the Industrial Siting Council to make a prohibition on providing housing for the workers in Buffalo a condition of the Dry Gulch permit.

That prohibition was lifted last week, making one motel owner in Buffalo extremely happy. Mike Flanders, who owns the Z-Bar Motel figures that the construction workers will be around for nearly two years, which means he'll have two full years of a full house -- and much higher profits than a normal year when the tourist season lasts about 60 days.

Jeremy Grimm, the Buffalo planning director who pressed the state board charged doling out funds to alleviate communities' costs of dealing with an influx of workers to do something about housing the workers in Buffalo, said his intent was to get more money from the Siting Council for the tourist town, not to take business away from hotels and motels. The Council had originally allocated less than 1 percent of the estimated $21 million set aside to help communities flooded with energy workers, and after Grimm testified, Buffalo's share was increased to 2.3 percent.

But Grimm said that 2.3 percent doesn't nearly reflect the cost to the tourist town's economy, where tourists contribute $9.1 million in earnings and spend another $32 million per year in the community. Grimm said construction workers won't spend nearly as much as the tourists do.

And Grimm said, there are higher costs associated with housing energy workers, too. He cited the example of one hotel that catered to energy workers with having 20 police calls in six months.

But the hotel and motel owners disagreed with Grimm's grim assessment of the construction workers' effect on the economy. A full hotel is a full hotel, and they said, construction workers spend their money in Buffalo, too.

A resort town in Idaho is also struggling with a declining number of tourist beds, too.

But the problem in Hailey isn't itinerant energy workers--it's second-home buyers that are sending real estate prices higher and higher and enticing owners of hotels, motels and beds-and-breakfast to sell out.

An Associated Press story in the Idaho Falls Post-Register said the area around Hailey lost 400 tourist beds over the past few years, as more and more second-home buyers found their perfect vacation home in the Sun Valley-Ketchum-Hailey area. But second-home buyers spend just a few weeks a year in the area, and don't contribute as much to the local economy as the tourist trade.

Businesses in Hailey depend on tourists' spending during the summer and winter seasons to carry them through the slower spring and fall seasons. But shopkeepers in Hailey say the slow seasons are getting longer.

One shopkeeper in Hailey said he believed that the town had moved from a tourism-based economy to a second-home economy over the past few years, and another business owner predicted that the town would soon see severe season-based swings in the economy that it had not experienced for fifteen years.

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