Cost of Living Strips Ski Resorts, Cities of Needed Help : Colorado: Vail’s average home price of $1.2 million has priced even town executives out of the market. Telluride permits resort employees to camp in their cars.

VAIL, Colo. — For years Vail’s ski resorts have had no trouble attracting affluent fun-lovers. The problem was hiring dishwashers, maids and lift operators who couldn’t afford to live there.

Now the problem has gotten worse.

The town of Vail is having trouble filling two top executive positions that pay up to $55,000. “We had excellent candidates. Once they scoped out the housing market they said no,” said Pam Brandmeyer, assistant town manager.

Thirteen of Vail’s 16 firemen and 26 of its 32 policemen live elsewhere. And in January the Vail Valley Times announced it was cutting back, from twice-weekly publication to once a week.

“It’s no secret there’s a shortage of employees now,” the newspaper said, in its announcement.

From Jackson Hole to Santa Fe, tourism and the increasing purchase of second homes by wealthy outsiders has made housing a nightmare in the booming Rocky Mountains.

An influx of retired people, some fleeing California and other urban areas, has intensified the competition, as have modem-equipped newcomers who use computers to perform work for employers or clients far beyond the mountains.

The average home price in Aspen last year was $1.2 million. In Telluride it is $500,000 or more. In Jackson, Wyo., the average price of a home during the first half of 1994 was $561,000, up from $383,692 the previous year and $200,000 in 1989.

For the upper middle class, the housing shortage means looking for affordable homes far from where they work and then facing long commutes on mountain roads. The Telluride town attorney, Jed Caswall, whose salary package totals $79,000, is quitting because the $350,000 the bank would lend him wouldn’t buy a home in town.

“I guess we were a little naive. We wanted our own house. Perhaps it’s our Midwestern background,” Caswall said.

Caswall believes senior town officials need to live in town to do their jobs. “We didn’t want to feel like hired hands. I wanted people to see me cutting my grass, washing my car.”

For the working class, the situation is worse. Telluride has authorized car camping in one of the ski area’s parking lots for those who cannot afford housing. In Glenwood Springs, 45 miles from Aspen and 60 miles from Vail, some workers live in caves.

The region, Denver Roman Catholic Archbishop J. Francis Stafford warned in a pastoral letter, is becoming “a Rocky Mountain theme park” surrounded by “a growing buffer zone of the working poor.”

The cost of more than 60% of the births in the five-county area around Vail will be paid by Medicaid this year. Counties have to subsidize day care to help employees deal with a cost of living that is 20% or more higher than Denver.

Most families with children leave. Eighty-three percent of Pitkin County’s population is 18 years or older, compared with about half in the Denver area.

Employers are desperate. More than 200 companies were advertising for employees in recent editions of the Vail Daily. Some Vail companies are offering bonuses of up to $1,000 for those who stay through the ski season.

And Vail, which runs the biggest free bus system in the nation, is 10 drivers shy of its planned 95 full-time drivers.

“It’s been a lot worse this year. It has to do with the employee housing. We used to get 50 people (applying) for one job. It’s not even a dozen now. The wealthy people are coming and buying second homes,” said Dave Miller, co-owner of clothing shops in Aspen and Snowmass.

Former Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm, a vigorous opponent of uncontrolled growth during his three terms, says tax laws allowing the wealthy to write off second homes have exacerbated the problem.

“What is the public policy reason for encouraging second-home ownership in the mountains? U.S. housing policy is to give more money to rich people for their second homes than it gives to poor people in public housing,” said Lamm.

The government, he said, “is subsidizing greed.”