Gunstock and how ideology ruins everything it touches
Posted: Aug 15th, '22, 08:23
If you're not familiar, a bunch of right-wing nuts got on the government board responsible for regulating Gunstock, a government-owned mountain in NH. The nuts tried to implement some ridiculous policies ostensibly on the grounds that government couldn't be trusted to run a private business. The senior managers for Gunstock all resigned in protest. After much public outcry, they were just reinstated. From The Storm skiing journal:
Government is not always the enemy. Sometimes government works well. A government-run business that makes $6 mil per year in profit is doing a pretty damn good job, and conservatives should get the F out of the way instead of trying to apply their ideology to everything.Despite clear shows of public support for Day and his team – hundreds of locals attended boisterous commission meetings to demand Ness and Strang resign – it’s clear that a portion of the Belknap County Delegation is unhappy with the outcome of this whole ordeal. They will keep trying to ruin Gunstock. I don’t understand why. This is a healthy business, run by a competent team, pulling in $18 million per year, $6 million of it pure profit. The ski area currently has more than $7 million in the bank, and returns 1.75 percent of its income to Belknap County – which owns the resort – each year. In 2021, that equaled $375,000.
I have so far taken an actions-based approach to this story, examining what happened while declining to explore the political backdrop that has driven this clownish sequence of events. But the story of Gunstock’s takeover is a case study in idealogues clumsily applying a generalized Government Sucks philosophy in a realm where it is neither appropriate nor productive