This writer should have avoided the comments about ORDA's capital expenditures. I cannot stand ORDA, but NYS did not spend $144.5 million in the last fiscal year on the ski areas. ORDA is spending money on the other perennial money losers that surround Lake Placid - like Mt Van Hovenburg, Speed Skating and the Jumping Center. While Vail's CAPEX number for 2021 maybe $120 million, here are Vail's CAPEX for the prior 4 years (2020,2019,2018,2017):
Annual Capital Expenditures (in millions $) | $172.33 | $192.04 | $140.61 | $144.43 | |
Vail spends every year (as they should), unlike ORDA. The ORDA/Vail CAPEX comparison is just not valid. By the way, Vail's CAPEX is down this year due to COVID.
“Why is New York in the business of running ski areas?” said Meier. “They run everything inefficiently – what makes us think they could run a ski area more efficiently? When they have a budget gap, people like us get wiped out, or we have to go beg, borrow, steal money somewhere to do a new lift or a new snowmaking project, but the state bails them out with the new gondola. It's frustrating.”
These whiny comments are just weak excuses when there is failure. NYS has been in the ski business since the late 1940s. Stop crying about it, sell out or change the NYS Constitution. We have all watched ORDA delay replacing lifts by years, sometimes stretching into a decade. Lets not pretend that ORDA has gold plated the ski areas. Gore still has trouble opening Burnt Ridge much before mid-January unless there is big natural snowfall.
Here is more nonsense:
“It's a little disheartening to see [ORDA’s] capital budget,” Harris said. “It's a little disheartening to see their [relatively low] lift ticket prices. It's a little disheartening that they're advertising right in my backyard.”
Again with the capital budget. What this guy does not realize is Gore advertising is competing with SVT for skiers.
The bottom line is skiing is a crap business. I wish NYS was not in the ski business or in the winter sports venue business, but that will never change in our lifetimes. Watching ski area owners whine about NYS is boring and lame, especially when they have been successful in running their ski areas.
