A Denver 2022 Winter Olympic bid may face a much stiffer challenge than the ongoing squabble between U.S. and international Olympic officials over revenue sharing. The Reno-Lake Tahoe region on the California-Nevada border suddenly became a lot more attractive.

Tahoe’s Squaw Valley, the legendary ski area that hosted the Winter Games in 1960, announced on Monday that it’s merging with adjacent Alpine Meadows, creating a ski complex encompassing 6,000 acres, which makes it larger than Vail.

The new Squaw Valley Ski Holdings LLC has no immediate plans to connect the two ski areas by chairlifts because of separate ownership of the connecting ridgeline, but Squaw Valley President and CEO Andy Wirth, a former Steamboat executive, says “that vision doesn’t escape us,” according to the Associated Press.

The move escalates the snow sports arms race in the Lake Tahoe region, where last year Broomfield, Colo.-based Vail Resorts bought Northstar-at-Tahoe to add to its massive Heavenly ski area in South Lake Tahoe. Vail Resorts recently signed Olympic and X Games gold medalist Shaun White to serve as a spokesman and train at Northstar.

Squaw Valley was bought late last year by Denver-based KSL Capital Partners, which is spending $50 million on the resort over the next five years.

The merger also increases domestic competition for the next available Winter Olympic Games in 2022. Denver Mayor Michael Hancock and Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper last month expressed serious interest in going after those Games, but U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) officials say they won’t submit a bid until a revenue sharing dispute with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is resolved. Colorado U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet earlier this month fired off a letter urging a quick resolution to that dispute.

USOC CEO Scott Blackmun, speaking in Colorado Springs recently, said it’s high time for the United States to host another Olympic Games (the last time was Salt Lake City in 2002). Bid books for 2022 would be due in 2013, with the IOC set to make a decision in 2015. Colorado and Reno-Lake Tahoe are considered the two U.S. frontrunners.

“I think 20 years is long enough,” Blackmun said, according to the Colorado Springs Gazette. “It’s important that we host the Games in the United States as a way to keep Americans connected to the team … I don’t think there are limitations on our ability to participate in a 2022 bid right now.”

Tahoe may have an advantage in that it previously hosted the Winter Olympics in 1960 and did not reject the Games after being awarded them by IOC the way Denver voters did in the early 1970s.

California hosts the second most skier days per year in the United States, according to AP, at a little over 12 percent. Colorado is the most skied state in the nation at more than 20 percent of the skier days in the nation every year.

Even if the IOC does decide to submit a 2022 bid and Tahoe wins, Colorado connections would abound. Squaw Valley is owned by the Denver-based private equity firm KSL Capital Partners, a company founded by former Vail executives Mike Shannon and the late Larry Lichliter.

Vail and Beaver Creek would likely play a prominent role in any 2022 bid for Colorado, with work already under way to add a women’s alpine skiing downhill course next to the existing Birds of Prey downhill course at Beaver Creek. All of the alpine skiing events for the 2015 World Alpine Ski Championships will be held in Beaver Creek, where the men’s course has become one of the most famous on the World Cup circuit since it was built in 1997.

Follow David O. Williams on Twitter. ]]> http://coloradoindependent.com/100770/squaw-valley-ski-deal-ups-ante-in-denver-tahoe-race-for-2022-winter-olympics/feed 2 http://coloradoindependent.com/72379/colorado-ski-industry-surging-as-national-economic-optimism-rises http://coloradoindependent.com/72379/colorado-ski-industry-surging-as-national-economic-optimism-rises#comments Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:21:20 +0000 David O. Williams http://coloradoindependent.com/?p=72379 President Barack Obama’s approval ratings this month climbed to 2009 levels based on renewed economic optimism, hope in Colorado’s high country – and to some degree the state’s overall economy – has been literally falling from the heavens. The ski industry lobbying group Colorado Ski Country USA (CSCUSA) recently reported its 22 member resorts saw a 10 percent increase in skier visits for the first part of the ski season (October to the end of December), largely because of abundant early snowfall. ]]> As President Barack Obama’s approval ratings this month climbed to 2009 levels based on renewed economic optimism, hope in Colorado’s high country – and to some degree the state’s overall economy – has been literally falling from the heavens.

The ski industry lobbying group Colorado Ski Country USA (CSCUSA) recently reported its 22 member resorts saw a 10 percent increase in skier visits for the first part of the ski season (October to the end of December), largely because of abundant early snowfall.

Chris Ewart in Vail's Back Bowls Tuesday. Photo by Patrick Orton/Vail Resorts

The success of the state’s multi-billion-dollar ski and winter tourism industry is tied directly to the amount of snowfall and public perception in key domestic destination markets such as New York, Texas and Illinois, as well as overseas markets in Europe and Latin America.

The 10-percent statewide increase also tracks with Vail Resorts, the state’s largest ski company and owner of Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Keystone. Those resorts are not members of CSCUSA, but earlier this month reported a similar 10-percent jump in business.

Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz said in a news release that not only are skier visits up, but people are spending more once they get to Colorado.

“Importantly, we observed strong ancillary spending, yielding gains in all categories that outpaced lift ticket revenue growth and marked a continuation of the improving consumer spending trends we first reported in the spring of 2010,” Katz said in a release.

International destinations like Vail and Aspen have seen sustained business from traditional markets like Mexico and South America, and European visitation has been solid as well – particularly among Russian snow riders.

Long-range weather forecasts are calling for continued above-average snowfall throughout January. Vail has had almost three feet of new snow since Martin Luther King Day, and Breckenridge — in Summit County – has had well over three feet of new snow, with 26 inches reported on Tuesday alone.

Denver is getting in on the economic action with Mile High Snow Week next week, featuring a Big Air Challenge freestyle competition on 100-foot-high snow ramp in downtown Civic Center Park. Sponsored by Denver Sports, the international competition features top pros Tuesday and Wednesday on a massive structure that’s 300 feet long and 80 feet wide.

Natural snow fell in abundance during rush hour Wednesday in Denver, but event organizers still cranked up snow guns in downtown Denver as the massive SnowSports Industries America Snow Show kicks off next week in the Denver Convention Center.

Reportedly on a short list of projects being eyed for Department of Energy funding, the Vail project – which would produce up to 28 megawatts of hot-water heat and eight megawatts of electricity by gasifying beetle-killed pine trees – came up short last week in its bid for a DOE grant to offset $46 million in startup costs.

The town of Vail Friday issued a release saying six projects using natural gas as a fuel source were awarded $21 million in grants under the DOE’s “Combined Heat and Power Systems Technology Development and Demonstration” program, leaving the Vail project unfunded.

Some saw the Vail project as a way to start coping with the mountain pine bark beetle that has ravaged area forests, killing millions of acres of lodgepole pine trees and presenting significant wildfire risks for mountain dwellers, ski resorts and water storage facilities for Front Range cities.

Efforts to mitigate the wildfire risk by creating defensible space for firefighters around mountain communities have led to enormous amounts of slash and dead wood clogging local landfills. European countries such as Austria, where national forests are managed more intensively, have been utilizing woody biomass for power and heat for years.

But in Colorado there have been questions about access to the fuel source, how long it will last and whether the plant in East Vail would create a steady stream of trucks hauling trees to a wood chipping facility and back to the power plant. In other parts of the country, there has been a rising tide of protest over using trees to produce power and just how much carbon is produced by the process.

Proponents argue the emissions, which are lowered by the high-heat gasification process, more than offset either the amount of carbon that would be spewed into the atmosphere by a wildfire or even natural biodegrading of a forest ravaged by pine beetles.

Vail Town Manager Stan Zemler said in the release that the U.S. Forest Service is conducting a biomass supply study to determine if there is enough beetle-killed wood in the area to sustain a Vail-sized power plant over the long haul. Results of that study are expected in September.

Meanwhile, Andrew King of Hayden, Cary, & King, who submitted the grant request, said he will keep working with the Forest Service, town and Holy Cross Energy – the local electric co-op – to find different funding sources, including other federal grants and U.S. Department of Agriculture guaranteed loans.

In the original grant application, Zemler talked about offsetting the costs of mitigating wildfire risks by creating a market for regional waste wood and positioning Vail as an eco-tourism destination. Vail Resorts, which operates several local ski areas, including Vail and Beaver Creek, was mentioned as a potential buyer for the power that would be produced.

Last week, Vail Resorts, which has positioned itself as a ski industry leader in purchasing renewable energy offsets, restoring watersheds impacted by wildfire and promoting conservation and green building, announced a new website to market those achievements. The new site is called “Echo.”

He even won the Chairman’s Award for Leadership in the ski industry, given by Colorado Ski Country USA – a statewide ski-area lobbying group based in Denver.

When redistricting put Eagle and Summit counties – home to Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone, Copper Mountain and Arapahoe Basin – into the 2nd Congressional District under future Democratic Sen. Mark Udall, McInnis’s connections to ski country didn’t come to an end.

Scott McInnis

McInnis is listed on the board of strategic advisers for KSL Capital Partners, formed in 2005 by former Vail executives Michael Shannon and Eric Resnick. But the former congressman and current gubernatorial candidate is refusing to release tax returns indicating how much the KSL job pays.

Shannon worked for former Vail owner George Gillett, who was forced to sell the company in a bankruptcy settlement in the early 1990s, and then went on to found KSL Recreation Corporation in 1992. With Resnick as CFO, that company acquired some of the top hotel and golf destinations in the world, including the Doral in Miami. KSL Recreation sold for $2.4 billion in 2004.

Gillett, Shannon and Resnick all maintain connections and properties in Vail, where rumors have swirled for years that one or more of them might be interested in reacquiring the publicly held ski, real estate and recreation conglomerate.

McInnis, meanwhile, is a native of Glenwood Springs in neighboring Garfield County, which he represented his entire 12 years in Congress. Garfield County is home to some of the state’s most intensive oil and gas drilling and also includes many of the bedroom communities for the Pitkin County ski resorts belonging to the Aspen Skiing Company.

According to the Denver Post, McInnis during his congressional years listed investments in a number of companies with strong financial ties to the mountain resort and real estate industries, including Alpine Bank and FirstBank. He also listed revenues from investment groups with stakes in oil and gas, real estate and water.

And he had a direct interest in Natural Gas Investors LLC, the Post reported. That company was formed by Bill Vollbracht, chairman of the board of Land Title Guarantee Co., which does significant business in mountain real estate markets and was listed by The Center for Responsive Politics as the fifth-largest contributor to McInnis throughout his congressional career.

Other past mountain money connections, according to the Post, include a $150,000 fellowship McInnis received from The Hasan Family Foundation, founded by Malik and Seeme Hasan, who own a home in Beaver Creek and are philanthropically and politically active throughout the state.

The father of Republican state treasurer candidate and former state House candidate Ali Hasan, Malik Hasan is a former Pueblo neurologist turned managed-care mogul. Seeme Hasan is a heavy-hitting GOP fund-raiser who crossed the aisle to contribute to current CD2 U.S. Rep. Jared Polis (D-Boulder), who now represents Eagle County and also has a family home in Vail.

As a private-sector attorney for the Denver-based Hogan & Hartson law firm, McInnis’s bio states: “Scott McInnis’ practice focuses on state and federal regulatory and legislative matters in a wide range of areas, including natural resources, public lands, energy, agriculture, tax, and business matters.”

Recent revenues from oil and gas investments would be particularly telling given McInnis’s frequently stated campaign promise to take a hard look at Gov. Bill Ritter’s environmentally tougher drilling regulations with an eye toward rolling them back and making things easier for the state’s natural gas industry.

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The largely symbolic Nov. 3 vote that decriminalized possession of less than an ounce of marijuana by a whopping 71 to 29 percent margin has made Breck the de facto kind capital of Colorado ski country, which has some visitors canceling trips and some business owners freaking out.

The New York Times, the news source for one of Colorado’s top domestic destination markets, last week took note of the refer madness, quoting Breckenridge Resort Chamber of Commerce spokeswoman Carly Grimes trying to quell the anxieties of vacationing families. Grimes promised, “This is not going to become a little Amsterdam.”

Yeah, too high and dry for all those canals.

Vail Resorts, which owns and operates Breckenridge ski area, chimed in by assuring guests that the ski company reserves the right to test lift operators if they appear stoned, and that employees are trained to be “hyper-vigilant” to watch for people skiing stoned or drunk.

At one time, back before the Great Recession, Vail Resorts even had a mandatory drug-testing policy for new hires, as well as a grooming policy (for hair, not snow) to keep things neat around the edges. Both were dropped when the Great American Ski Bum became extinct during the economic boom of the 1990s and resorts were having a hard time finding lifties from the U.S.

Breck – an old mining town with a reputation as one of the best snowboarding and freestyle venues in Colorado – is no stranger to controversy over keeping the party going off the slopes. In 2002, Vail Resorts eventually had to pull a national ad campaign that told snow riders, “The hill may dominate you. But the town will still be your bitch.”

Blood-bucket (slang term for a ski patrol toboggan) chasing Denver attorney James H. Chalat, told the New York Times that marijuana had only been a factor in one skier-on-skier collision out of the hundreds of cases he’s litigated over nearly 30 years. Alcohol, perfectly legal to quaff at any mid-mountain restaurant, has been a factor many times, he told the Times.

“If somebody is stoned, that’s not helpful,” Chalat said. “It’s a dumb thing.”

Look for things to get a lot more dumb in Colorado’s high country, though, if a grass-roots group called Sensible Colorado gets its way in coming elections. The group, which backed the Breck vote, knows where its base of support lies.

According to the Aspen Daily News, 12 counties along the Continental Divide (plus Denver and Boulder) with some of the state’s more liberal ski towns supported Amendment 44 in 2006 – an unsuccessful statewide bid to decriminalize possession of less than an ounce of pot for anyone over 21.

Sensible Colorado is now targeting many of those communities for Breck-style “Legalize It” campaigns.

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The 2002 Hayman fire. (Photo courtesy U.S. Forest Service)

Speaking at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science during the announcement of a public-private partnership to restore public lands scorched in the 2002 Hayman fire, Vilsack told The Colorado Independent in an interview that the Centennial State’s efforts to lift federal restrictions on building forest roads in order to better contain fires make sense.

“Our first priority is to protect the roadless areas,” Vilsack said of the ongoing odyssey to maintain the roadless integrity of more than 58 million acres of national forest land nationwide. “But I appreciate that Gov. [Bill] Ritter has started a process to build consensus around the issue.”

In 2001, the Clinton administration pushed through a roadless rule that was quickly set aside by the Bush administration, which later allowed states to petition for individual roadless rules based on state agendas. Only Idaho and Colorado went down that route, with Idaho successfully passing its own roadless rule last year.

“As you probably know, the Idaho process developed consensus and has been successful,” Vilsack said. “It’s important to recognize the uniqueness of each situation, that each state is unique and to go forward from that stand point.”

That is more of a nod to the Colorado rule than Vilsack has previously given, and to some degree validates the ongoing efforts of the Ritter administration to protect approximately 4.2 million acres of roadless national forest in the state. Environmentalists have charged that the Colorado rule contains far too many exceptions for logging, water and energy infrastructure, ski resort expansion and energy development.

Colorado Department of Natural Resources officials argue that the 2001 Clinton roadless rule, which is reportedly closer in its protective scope to what the Obama administration prefers, was put in place before the ongoing mountain pine bark beetle epidemic, which has killed nearly 2 million acres of lodgepole pines statewide. They say there needs to be much more road-building leeway in order to thin national forests around ski resorts and other mountain communities.

The Obama administration has indicated a preference for the more restrictive Clinton rule by challenging two previous 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rulings against the Clinton rule.

Vilsack made his comments to The Colorado Independent while standing amid posters of blown-up photos of the Hayman fire and its devastation.

The largest blaze in recorded Colorado history at nearly 138,000 acres, Hayman wasset by federal forestry officer Terry Barton, who was convicted and spent six years in prison. The fire denuded the land, sterilized the soil and filled streams with ash and sediment.

Monday night, some of the state’s top political leaders, together with representatives from Vail Resorts, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Forest Foundation and the Nature Conservancy, announced the launch of a three-year, $4 million project to restore the South Platte River corridor scorched by the 2002 fire.

Besides Vilsack, other speakers included U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, Ritter and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, all of whom praised the restoration project as an innovative private-public partnership that, in endlessly budget-strapped Colorado and across the recession-wracked country, may signal the future of national forest stewardship.

The event was hosted by Vail Resorts, which committed $750,000 to the project over the next three years. CEO Rob Katz told The Colorado Independent that the company was in the business of bringing people to enjoy the beautiful Colorado landscape and so has “a real stake in the environment.”

“We thought, ‘What is the signature program that we can take up and make a difference?’” Katz said. “The Hayman project is just total habitat. This is about forest health and water quality and it serves the broader Colorado community. We could not find a more impactful project to be a part of anywhere in the state.”

The launch of the Hayman restoration project comes on the heels of news that Vail Resorts is pulling out of its wind credits offset program. The company has been a leader in buying wind-credits for the last three years.

“We’re proud of our commitment to the wind-credits program, but when we took that up it was 2006 and climate change was not on the agenda in the same way it is now,” Katz said. “We’re proud of our leadership on the issue. We were number two in the nation in buying wind credits. I think we’re No. 27 now. Vail Resorts doesn’t like to ever fall in rankings, but in this case we think it’s a good thing.”

Vail ski area recently fell to number three in the annual resort rankings issue of Ski Magazine, behind Deer Valley in Utah, and Whistler in British Columbia. Vail typically occupies the top spot in the annual reader survey.

Katz also said that Vail Resorts draws most of its visitors from the greater Denver area and the Hayman restoration project serves that community in a very immediate way because it will restore the watershed in a drainage that supplies water to much of the Denver metro area.

“The [Hayman restoration] protects the climate but it’s also a local project,” Katz said. He acknowledged the PR benefits among green watchers, but added that the environmentalist community would continue to “hold our feet to the fire. And that’s what they should do. We expect that.”

Environmentalists have also been critical of the state’s efforts to build more roads for fire mitigation despite the very real threat of another Hayman fire. Critics say trees should only be thinned near communities and not any deeper into the national forest.

But Vilsack on Monday was commended for taking an “all lands” approach to his job.

“The Forest Service is usually a step child” when compared to farmland in the eyes of the Department of Agriculture, said Bill Possiel, president of the National Forest Foundation. “Tom Vilsack is different.”

“Usually these private-public partnerships are about bringing recreation to Americans,” Possiel added. “This time it’s about restoration, and that’s just awesome.”

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According to Gov. Bill Ritter’s office, the project partners Vail Resorts – owners and operators of Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone, Heavenly (Calif.), and Vail – with the U.S. Forest Service, the National Forest Foundation and the Nature Conservancy “to restore forest land, repair riparian habitat and protect watersheds within the massive burn area from the 2002 Hayman fire.”

The announcement, scheduled for this evening at 6:30 at the west atrium of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, will include Ritter, Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, Sen. Mark Udall and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

The Hayman fire, sparked by a disgruntled former Forest Service employee, is held up as a prime example of the need for better forest management practices to avoid future catastrophic wildfires, particularly in areas of Colorado’s national forests ravaged by an ongoing pine bark beetle epidemic that has killed upwards of 2 million acres of trees in the heart of ski country.

The Ritter administration has been pushing for a Colorado roadless rule that would allow for more road building on the state’s largely undeveloped national forests in order to thin out dead and dying trees near ski resorts, Front Range water supplies and other mountain communities.

At the very least, if the Obama administration adopts a national roadless rule closer to the 2001 Clinton roadless rule, Colorado officials would like to see it include provisions of the state’s rule.

Vail Resorts also announced on Monday that the company is dropping its three-year commitment to wind power because of the Hayman project. Its purchase of wind credits had made Vail Resorts one of the largest corporate buyers of wind energy in the nation, but not all conservationists are convinced renewable energy credits, or RECs, do much to bolster the nation’s clean-energy supply.

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The state’s biggest ski company — owner of Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Heavenly (Calif.), Keystone and Vail — has been on a major enviro-tear the last few years, becoming the 25th largest buyer of wind energy credits in the nation, announcing a billion-dollar green-built (LEED-certified) base village called Ever Vail and dramatically chopping its power consumption.

Aspen Skiing Company officials have been more vocal and politically active on the global-warming front, testifying before Congress and backing green candidates in local rural electric co-op board of directors elections, but Vail has been making major strides under the fairly recent tenure of CEO Rob Katz.

Last year Katz announced “energy layoffs” aimed at reducing by 10 percent the $25 million per year the company spends on energy. Monday he announced the company cut energy consumption by 6.1 percent in the previous year and was on track to meet the 10-percent goal in the coming year. That initiative is far more meaningful than buying wind credits, according to Aspen-based energy consultant Randy Udall.

Vail Resorts did make somewhat of a political statement last year by contributing $500,000 to the Democratic National Convention in Denver but nothing to the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis.

(Photo/Joy of the Mundane, Flickr)

Two challengers in Holy Cross’s June 5 board of directors’ election question the disparity between the co-op’s investment of more than $100 million in Xcel Energy’s new Comanche 3 coal-fired power plant near Pueblo and the fact that the co-op’s $1 million rebate program for in-home solar installations just ran out of funds for 2009.

“They’re investing $100 million in [Comanche 3], and compare that to what they’re investing in local solar and I’d like to see the balance more toward local clean renewables and less on coal,” said Adam Palmer, the environmental policy planner for Eagle County who’s running against longtime board member and Vail realtor George Lamb.

Palmer is the former environmental director for Vail Resorts and founder of the Eagle Valley Alliance for Sustainability. Lamb, a Vail-area resident since the 1970s, did not return a call requesting comment.

An e-mail circulating among Vail Valley realtors alleges Aspen environmentalists are trying to take over the 43,000 member co-op based in Glenwood Springs: “Special interest groups based out of Aspen are waging an unprecedented campaign to stuff the ballot box and take control of the board as they believe Holy Cross has not been aggressive enough on the environmental frontier.”

Palmer, a Vail-area resident since 1997, took exception to that characterization of the race: “A member of the Vail Board of Realtors signed my petition [to run for the board]. The comment seems unfounded and I’m surprised by it.”

Auden Schendler, Aspen Skiing Company’s executive director for sustainability, said his company does endorse Palmer and Carbondale pool and spa company owner Marshall Foote because the current board is not acting quickly enough on climate change.

Schendler points to this statement in a letter posted in the Holy Cross newsletter from current board president and longtime board member Tom Turnbull, a Carbondale rancher being challenged by Foote: “There is no doubt that we are witnessing a warming trend but, historically, civilization has benefited and thrived in warmer periods as opposed to ice ages.”

“We think there’s urgency behind addressing climate change, and frankly so do a lot of scientists and so does the government, so we’re not alone on that, and you’ve got the president of Holy Cross’s board saying that civilizations have historically thrived during periods of warmer climate,” Schendler said. “Well, is that the case for two of the biggest ski destination resorts in the country [Vail and Aspen]? Probably not.”

Turnbull did not return a call requesting comment, but Foote agreed with Schendler that Turnbull’s comment seems out of touch with the shifting economic realities on the Western Slope, where ranching and extractive industries have taken a back seat to real estate development and recreational tourism in recent years.

“If we’re looking at it going, ‘Hey, I’ve done a good job and so what if it gets a little bit warmer, it’s all benefiting us,’ right there it tells you that maybe he’s not looking out for the people of the valley,” Foote said, touting his business experience and the need to keep rates reasonable while accelerating the move to renewables.

“I know my business survives off the construction and the service and the people who come out here to ski and do all that stuff, so for me I’m well aware of what needs to take place to survive in this valley,” Foote said.

Holy Cross, unlike the state’s largest electric co-op, the Intermountain Rural Electric Association, does recognize global warming as a growing challenge and provides $2 million a year in rebates for solar installations and the purchase of energy efficient appliances. Its board also pushed for tiered electric rates that allow higher charges for bigger consumers.

But critics say Holy Cross engages in the same type of administrative shenanigans as the IREA, mailing rebate checks at the same time as election ballots, and under-publicizing meetings, major policy decisions and the board election process itself. Palmer said he tried to run last year but had his petition rejected — only 15 member signatures are needed — because 12 signatures were deemed to be from spouses not on the account.

“They do everything to the letter [of the by-laws], but for whatever reason it is more exclusive than inclusive,” Palmer said of the board, advocating for greater transparency.

Schendler agreed: “One of the goals is to daylight this election. This is one of the most important issues facing society, and yet very few people know about the election, candidates typically run unopposed and an extremely small percentage of co-op members vote.”

In 2006, the Broomfield-based ski, hotel, retail and real estate company began purchasing enough wind credits to account for 100 percent of the electricity consumed at its ski areas and other properties in Colorado, California and Wyoming.

Computer-processor manufacturer Intel Corporation topped the list with 46 percent of its total consumption covered by REC purchases, or 1.3 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of green power (defined by the EPA as electricity generated from renewable sources such wind, solar, biomass or small-scale hydro). By comparison, Vail Resorts’ total consumption amounts to about 151.3 million kWh.

The EPA itself comes in at 14th on the list with 285 million kWh of REC purchases, or 100 percent of its consumption. Vail ranks behind heavy-hitters like Pepsi (2nd), the U.S. Air Force (8th) and Starbucks (18th), but ahead of retail giants like Staples (27th), Lowe’s (32nd) and Safeway (36th).

REC purchases aren’t embraced by all renewable energy advocates. Some say RECs allows companies to wantonly consume energy and buy offsets from the overall grid without directly contributing to renewable generation.

However, Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz this past season engaged in an effort to reduce the company’s overall energy consumption by 10 percent through a variety of efficiency initiatives. And the company has been researching and implementing a variety of renewable energy projects, from small-scale hydro using local streams to solar panels on ski-area buildings to biomass projects.