The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
I didn’t realize it was so easy. If the facts and data aren’t what you like, a tantrum scream of “it’s rigged!” is all that is needed to wish it away? Ignore the facts, or better yet fire the messenger! Cool beans. Donald is a manifesting genius! Let’s use his lesson to look at a few things from this place. We all know we live in a place overflowing with rainbows and unicorns but there’s so much more! Donald’s POV is in italics…
Believe me, the clear and super safe highway paint on the road between Crested Butte and CB South is the best ever! Ever! The liberal crooked snowflakes who say they have a hard time seeing the stripes at night or when it’s raining aren’t manly enough to drive at night. Poor babies. The yellow stripes are perfectly fine if you look close enough. Get over it you low IQ complainers! Yellow isn’t really a color anyway! It’s a corrupt color. A radical left color!
Actually, a recent email to the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) was quickly returned and the response was that they’ll get around to our highway striping at the end of August and into mid-September. They said the current schedule doesn’t allow them to do it any earlier. I asked if they could do it in the spring or early summer next year given the seasonality of the big numbers of tourists that come for summer, but didn’t get a response. That’s disappointing!
What workforce housing problem? There always seem to be beautiful workers serving my happy hour diet coke with cane sugar and $200 steak and they live somewhere. Statistics tying wages with the cost of houses in the valley are rigged! Fake numbers! There’s no way those shacks in the alleys cost $3 million and my favorite waitress and good friend Rainbow McHippie makes a good living at $50K and she lives somewhere! Liberal storyline! Rigged numbers! The lazy corrupt workers just need to work harder to buy a house like mine. If you can’t make a perfect Old Fashioned, you shouldn’t be living here anyway. Plus, that big project by Brush Creek looks like a waste of money. Where’s Elon when we need him? (counting his $30 billion bonus?) We could use that Whetstone money for tax cuts for the new billionaires in the valley. Then it will trickle down to a couple cell-block units for the laziest of the working class. Problem solved! I deserve a Nobel Housing Prize!
Actually, with more people visiting and moving to this desireable valley, the prices of all dwellings go up and so do the rents. While workers are certainly making more money than they did two decades ago, the gap between what can be spent on a mortgage or rent based on income is growing wider and so fewer working folks can afford to live in CB or the North Valley close to where they work. Simple, out-of-whack supply and demand economics. The North Valley and Gunnison County as a whole have actually done a decent job percentagewise in finding ways to keep workers living near their jobs, but it is getting harder. Whetstone is giant and should help get more middle class(ish) working people and families living up here along with other projects like Homestead and Mineral Point. Then it’s probably worth taking a breath to see how it all shakes out in workforce housing land.
Speaking of Mineral Point…I love that development! I love all developments but especially ones where corners seem to be cut and money goes to companies like mine that aren’t from here! That’s good business! The best business! Why stain siding on both sides when one will do?! H-VAC, H-Schmack. Why spend money on dumpsters? Duct tape is a tool too! Good cost decisions make the libs crazy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the big, beautiful buildings. It’s a witch hunt!
Actually, Mineral Point has tripped over itself for more than a year. The project developer, Indianapolis-based TWG, promises it will be a good product when it’s all finished. Frankly, given its history and consistent flops, I’ll believe it when I see it…and driving by this week, I’m not perceptively seeing it yet. Those low-income projects have tight margins, and I can’t see how the margins aren’t getting thinner every day. They obviously could have used some successful local construction experience on the site – hello High Mountain Concepts — but chose a different path and now say they will make it all good to preserve their reputation. We’ll apparently see in March of 2026. GL.
What’s with that article in the failing Colorado Sun saying mountain towns are in a tourism and sales tax slump? We make mountain towns great again! Crested Butte is greatest mountain town! It’s busier than ever. Records are being set. Did you see that line outside the Stash at 5 o’clock on July 19? Record! If only the enemies of the people, weak nasty journalists, didn’t rig the numbers! We have so much sales tax. The best sales tax. We’ll give everyone a beautiful refund check and every CB baby will get $1,000 that will be worth two million dollars in five years if they invest in my meme coins!
Actually, the numbers in the Sun article show CB’s net taxable sales from last ski season is stout at about $74 million but that is less than overall sales recorded from the previous three seasons. Halfway through 2025, CB is 4.7% ahead in sales tax collections compared to last year indicating robust transactions.
Mt. CB bucked the trend at $44+ million in net taxable sales last ski season which was more than the previous four. Congrats! Our Tourism and Prosperity Partnership people say we’re trending up a couple percent into mid-summer which beats most mountain towns so maybe we are the greatest!
I’m tired of the lightweight lyin’ radical left lunatics saying there are too many people in the backcountry in July. Just wait until we get that backcountry working for America and we send in thousands of hard hats. We’ll mow down the trees and start pumping for minerals. That’s what that wasted, empty land needs to be used for. Let’s make the backcountry Great Again! Drill baby drill and get some real manly people back there working to keep combustion engines working for our country! I bet there’s still coal under the Bench. Stop with the weak solar farm going in. There’s coal under there! And let’s put a golf course out there. That’s real open space, not like that creepy forest with no-good animals out there!
Actually, there probably still is some coal underground around here. But the local economy right now is based on that pristine backcountry. The future world economy is shifting to renewables, so America looks to be stuck in the fossil fuel 1950s while China is about to eat our three-martini lunch. Sigh.
Our accessible nature and the peace, solitude and challenges it presents is what draws people here to visit and reconnect with their lives while making it possible for locals to live here. Yes, there are times there are too many people in the backcountry near CB and the impacts overflow as numbers rise. Luckily, we are cognizant of those impacts and have taken tangible steps to address those issues.
Donald’s got a knack for creating his own reality — and it seems his reality is to fall in line with his dark lords Stephen Miller and Russell Vought pulling the strings to mimic Moscow and Beijing when it comes to facts and figures they don’t like. But based on his flow, we live in the greatest mountain town with no problems except perhaps an excesss of rainbow-colored unicorns! See… it works! Now, knowing I really weigh a svelte 175 pounds, I think I’ll fire that corrupt lamestream scale in the upstairs bathroom!
—Mark Reaman
