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With the current economic situation, I've been receiving a number of offers via email. But, none was so pathetic as the mysterious appeal email that many of us received last week. My B.S. antennae were instantly alerted - the whole thing sounded fake to me, like a very comprehensive advertising campaign. Well worded to hit all the high points (home values, wilderness access, local employment) and lots of gloom and doom if things don't work out for Foster/Syme. It just sounds too well constructed, and almost too intentionally conversational, to be legit. I mean, if the writer of this email is really talking privately to people with enough connections on the summit to broker a meeting about all this, then why does he feel it necessary to explain to these people who Mark Foster is? Of course, if this email was actually meant to be leaked to all the residents of Serene Lakes, some of whom might not be especially dialed in, then perhaps an introductory statement about Mark Foster, and a succinct summary of the project's proposed benefits to all involved, would be in order.
Second, give me a break: "or the window is closed forever." Sounds like a typical attempt to close a deal--"Special deal, this week only, then we're going out of business and closing our doors forever!" Puh-leeeze.
Third, do they expect us to believe that a bankrupt guy is going to spend money to fence an area the size of Royal Gorge ? Let's think about this. He wants to keep out people who already don't use it enough to make it profitable. Right. So let's flesh out this idea. Chain link probably costs $10 per foot, or about $50,000 per mile in materials alone. How many miles of border is there to that property? And how does one schlep all the steel posts, fencing, and countless bags of concrete that far out where there are no roads, over granite and through dense forest? And that's just the materials-side of things. How does he pay who-knows-how-many-guys to spend who-knows-how-long to actually put up this enormous fence? Post-holes every 10 feet or so are hard enough to dig when you're digging in dirt--is he going to dynamite his post holes in solid granite? I don't think so. But wait--it gets even better: after he builds this incredible fence, he'll be willing to pay an army of people to patrol the interior of the area 24/7/365 in perpetuity to escort people off the property! Not to mention paying his own full time crew of maintenance guys to survey the entire length of the fence continually and repair it after it is destroyed by being buried in snow and ice every year. Oh wait--if the fence is buried under snow and ice all winter, how exactly will that keep anyone off the property in the first place? I hope he didn't pay the marketing expert much for this idea.
Fourth, how is building a few hundred homes going to suddenly turn a XC ski resort that loses $1 million a year into a cash cow that he will then decide to keep open? It isn't going to happen, so giving him approval for his project will do nothing to improve the chances of Royal Gorge remaining an ongoing concern. The problem with Royal Gorge is there aren't enough XC skiers in northern California to keep it open. There are thousands and thousands of houses in the greater Tahoe area, and if there aren't enough XC enthusiasts now, his development isn't going to swing things in his favor. The truth is that if he considers the profitability of the XC ski area as his primary motivator for keeping it open or not, he's going to shut it down regardless of whether his homes are built. Why burn all the gasoline grooming the trails after every snow storm so a few people can use it? After all, R-G is a conservation community.
Fifth, who is going to spend $2 million a pop to buy 160-acre parcels in the middle of the place with the heaviest snowfall in the lower 48, with no roads, no sewer, no water, no electricity, etc. --and no XC ski resort once Foster closes it down.
Mark Foster apparently painted himself into a financial corner and is upset because no one will trade places with him. He made what now looks like a colossal mistake, and is getting swamped by the perfect financial storm. It's a high-stakes business when you speculate on real estate to the tune of tens of millions of dollars and this is the down side risk that comes with the territory, so to speak.
We know he anticipated resistance from the locals because of the spin he put on the project to begin with ("A conservation community", city-hall-type meetings, making donations to local pro-development politicians, etc.) so for him to be angry about that at this point is a waste of his energy over the reality of a situation that has come to pass which he already anticipated happening.
Let him build his fence, monitor and enforce it, and re-build it every summer when the snow melts--just in time for it to be covered over again and become as pointless as this stupid threat in the first place.
Mark Foster failed when he tried to convince us of the desirability of his project; then he failed on the regulatory front when it came to water policy; so now he's trying to strong-arm the residents of Serene Lakes into some sort of fear-based bass-ackwards endorsement of his project by telling us the alternative is like "looking down the barrel of" ... of what?
Basically what this email chain is threatening is that if Mark Foster
doesn't get his way, we will be stuck with (gasp) The Status Quo!!!
OMG - stuck with the very situation we are trying to preserve! What have
we been thinking?!!
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mountain mama