Around the Mountains: A long-timer laments arrival of part-timers

CANMORE, B. C. — Bob Sanford is lamenting the changes in his hometown of Canmore, located at the gateway to Banff National Park, and other mountain towns set amid beautiful surroundings in the North American West.

His new book, “The Weekender Effect,” describes what has been going on at Canmore. It has more amenities, from brewpubs to golf courses, and perhaps better newspapers and, no doubt, bicycle races, hiking paths and all the rest.

But with these recreational and other amenities are accompanied by what the late historian Hal Rothman called the “Devil’s Bargains.”

“Terms like ‘amenity migration’ do not describe what happened in my town,” writes Sanford. “In my estimation, it is an outrage to characterize what is happening to the West in such egregiously simple terms. We did not experience ‘amenity migration’ in the town I live in. What was experienced was downright dispossession.”

Canmore is located an hour west of Calgary, a boom town now because of Alberta’s fabulously rich economy of oil and gas. It is located at the eastern entrance to Banff National Park.

While the population of Canmore has doubled since 1990, most significant has been the increase of part-timers, who now compose 30 percent of the total population.

Sanford maintains that “when a mountain town approaches 40 percent part-time residency, the sense of community begins to implode.”

What is now underway is “nothing less than a complete transformation of landscape and culture,” he said.

The Rocky Mountain Outlook, in reviewing Sanford’s book, believes that changes must be moderated, that local communities must exert their powers to dictate what changes are unacceptable. Complete surrender is not acceptable, he says. For example, he favors “small, locally owned businesses rather than big operations owned by outside interests that have targeted where you live as a profitable outpost of globalization.”

Ironically, Canmore’s economy long has been based on broad and non-local forces. It is located along the Canadian Pacific Railway and the TransCanada Highway.

For its first century, it was a coal-mining town. A host of the 1988 Winter Olympics, Canmore has become a major international destination that draws from both the Pacific Rim countries and the European Union, as well as Canada and the United States.

The demand for weekend homes has been fueled by the oil boom of Alberta’s tar sands. Sanford does point to the oft-observed difference between land development and community creation.

“No matter how you promote it, no matter how much spin the developers put on it, a city of wealthy weekenders will never feel or function like a mountain town,” Sanford writes. “In many ways, it is far easier to build houses and streets than it is to build the kind of local associations and cultural traditions that make it worthwhile living in those houses and pleasurable to walk those streets.”

Fleeing to new outposts — the next, best thing, which in Canmore’s case would be across the Continental Divide to towns in the British Columbia interior — is not an option, Sanford insists. “We have to stay and stand up for where we live.”

Resorts are pockets of blue amid economic storm clouds

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, who maintains his permanent home in Jackson Hole, defended the tax cuts of 2002 against criticism that it would result in major deficits and eventual harm to the U.S. economy.

Ronald Reagan, under whose presidency the U.S. national debt grew at a staggering pace, proved that “deficits don’t matter,” said Cheney. Jonathan Schechter, who writes for the Jackson Hole News & Guide, points out that the tax cuts for the rich of the Bush administration have positively benefited Jackson Hole’s economy — although, in fairness, the boom began well before George W. Bush gained the White House.

Teton County, which is where Jackson Hole is, ranked third in the country for the first five full years of the Bush administration in terms of income generated from investments. The result was “extraordinary amounts of money being invested into the community in the form of charitable donations, new infrastructure, improved services, and the like,” Schechter says.

Going forward as a nation, Schechter foresees stormy weather. But locally, he sees continued good fortune — so long as panic does not set in.

“As long as we don’t gut our land-use policies to stimulate our soon-to-be-suffering construction economy, we should continue to be a preferred primary-residence, second-home and tourism destination for people of all ilks, especially the well-to-do,” he writes.

Even locking doors can be done with just a click

PARK CITY, Utah — Automation is found increasingly in homes. At a 13,000-square-foot home in Park City’s Deer Crest neighborhood, there is little that cannot be controlled with a computer panel. A firm called S3 Entertainment has installed tough-panel interfaces that can control everything from the movie library, which has 1,000 titles, to the air conditioner, heater and probably even the dishwasher.

“Everything you see on the ‘Jetsons’ we put into this house,” joked Arthur Mayor, sales manager for the company, referring to a 1960s cartoon series about a space-age family of the distant future.

With a house that big, it might take a lot of walking to make sure all the lights are off and the doors locked, notes The Park Record. Here, it can be done from one place — and it can even be off-premises.