The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
19 grants awarded; Santa Crawl gets $25,000
The Mt. Crested Butte Town Council has made its recommendations for the award of the 2014/2015 Admission Tax Grant Requests, totaling $423,800.
Twelve individual entities applied for 19 different grants. The largest award was $240,000 to Crested Butte Mountain Resort in support of the air service program and CBMR’s commitment to increasing winter visitors to the valley and covering the program’s revenue guarantee.
“All of the $240,000 that was awarded to CBMR will be directly used to get visitors to the area during the winter months through airfare promotions, where guests’ airfare costs are partially offset when they also book their lodging and lift tickets,” said CBMR’s Director of Innovations and Relations Erica Mueller. Mueller added that details would be dependent on the specific promotion underway.
Jeff Moffett of Community Flights, speaking on behalf of CBMR added that, “CBMR spends considerably more than $240,000 supporting air service each year, including revenue guarantee payments, reduced airfare promotions, marketing, sales, staffing, insurance, etc.” The resort had requested $285,000 from the council for the air service program.
The majority of the grant awards were for amounts under $20,000, but there were a few notable exceptions.
Iron Orchid Events was awarded $25,000 of the $33,750 requested for its Santa Crawl, an event that encourages people to don Santa suits and step into their skis for a few laps at CBMR. Last year the event also included a pub crawl and a fair amount of beer-drinking by Santa-suit clad skiers.
Shaun Matusewicz, speaking on behalf of Iron Orchid, said the grant money would go toward promoting and increasing media exposure before, during and after the event.
“Last year the Santa ski event garnered more media attention than any other winter Crested Butte event, by a long shot,” said Matusewicz. “One photo in particular was picked up by the AP and ran in over 650 different media outlets, places from the Washington Post to the front page of CNN.com …seeing the media attention the event got, it became immediately apparent that we could use the event to help drive tourism to the Crested Butte area in general—something the valley definitely could use more of in the winter.”
In addition, Matusewicz told the council, steps would be taken to make this year’s Santa Crawl more family-friendly. Last year the council approved $7,500 for the event.
The council recommended $20,000 be awarded to the Gunnison Valley Rural Transportation Authority for a late-night bus, on the condition that the RTA seeks additional governmental support for the program. The RTA had requested $37,359 and said the money would be used to start a late-night bus route between Mt. Crested Butte and Gunnison. Councilman Gary Keiser was against the award, saying that because the RTA’s 2014/2015 budget had yet to be approved it would be better for the council to wait and see how the organization’s funding shook out, and then help fill in any gaps.
Jenny Knox was granted $25,000 for the Mountain High Music Festival, with the award contingent upon the council’s receipt of a marketing plan. Country music artist Dean Dillon spoke on behalf of the organization, which had originally requested $50,000. The event, which could be similar to Country in the Rockies, would be comprised of ten shows held over three days in January. Dillon said he will be visiting key cities and taking part in several radio segments to promote the event.
Other awards included: $3,500 for the Center for the Arts; $23,500 for the Crested Butte/Mt. Crested Butte Chamber of Commerce to be divided between Butte Bucks, a new electronic information kiosk at the downtown chamber office, an on-mountain brewers and distillers festival, and Light up the Night; $15,000 for Crested Butte Lodging; $22,075 to be divided for different programs by the Gunnison/Crested Butte Tourism Association; $15,000 for the Nordic Inn/Nordic Center partnership that was begun last year with the goal of promoting the Upper Valley as a destination for Nordic skiing; $1,725 for KBUT’s Soul Train event; and an additional $33,000 to Crested Butte Mountain Resort for the Elevated, Roost the Butte and Ultimate Snowmobile events.
