According to newspaper accounts, the County’s Boyce Park ski area is “booming”. Attendance is up and revenue is up: maybe due to the attention of the Winter Olympics or the snowfall this winter, or perhaps due to turning over the functions of producing artificial snow and running a skiing operation to people who have actually done it before for a living.
Compared to what the operation was before, with intermittent artificial snow and ski lift breakdowns, the phrase “night and day” is appropriate. The season opening came earlier than past years and the plans are to stay open later than previous years.
The impetus for the change probably goes back decades as it is reasonable to think that there had to be people asking if running a snowmaking operation or a ski slope is a core function of county government, but really it took hold in 2007 when the County received the recommendations of its park revenue sources study. The report urged the County to do many things to generate revenue sources from the parks and catch up on deferred maintenance, including “…public-private partnership agreements to operate, maintain, and renovate certain special facilities, such as…Boyce Park ski slopes and center”. We initially wrote about the County’s initiatives based on this report six years ago.
Turning over the running of the slopes to a private interest through a contract does not mean that the County sold off the park. It simply contracted out the operation—that’s what could take hold with a lot of other local government functions where it makes sense.