A housing crisis, workforce shortage and growth of the short-term rental market are all valid concerns with only temporary, and mostly ineffective, solutions.

When will our government representatives start to address the cause of all the problems: unabated expansion by Summit County ski areas? What else should we expect when our elected leaders are all business owners, or business promoters, who profit from allowing expansion? Every Summit ski area has expanded terrain recently or has proposed to do so. Breckenridge Grand Vacations is looking to destroy what little is left of Breckenridge, just one big parking garage now. Another few years and we will just rename the Tenmile Range Vail Inc.

Providing housing for what are mostly transient employees of Vail has taken priority over quality of life for the long-term residents that invested their lives here only to see Summit becoming nothing but a suburb of Denver.

What we need to solve virtually all of the county’s growing woes is a moratorium on all ski area and business expansion. The county has just stated that there are only 16 parcels of land left that could be used to develop more housing. If all that land was quickly smothered in even more hideous, high-density employee housing, it wouldn’t even solve the short-term problem let alone more future expansion.

There are physical limits to growth in a place where 85% of the land is national forest. We all need to accept that and act accordingly. There isn’t any road left to continue to kick the can down.