The proposed RMNP-Estes Park Shuttle is another example of how the Town works against its businesses. When was a citizens committee or a business committee formed to approve this stupid idea? The Town seems to feel that their best friends are the Y and RMNP, while neither of them pays any tax to the local economy. On the one hand they punish out of town businesses by attempting to charge them a tax of 2% on gross sales for joining the CVB, but give services to the Y and RMNP for nothing. Businesses and locals and visitors have for years complained about the lack of parking. The Town fear is that any new parking spots will go to waste in January. Businesses, on the other hand, want visitors in the peak season to be able to find parking, have a pleasant time shopping, and enjoy their Estes Park experience.
One of the many complaints about the Town plan is that visitors using the Town/Park shuttle will take up valuable parking spots in Town, spend the day in the Park, and not spend any money locally. That should be pretty obvious. For some reason the Town sees it differently. How could that possibly be? Wouldn’t it be better to have Town/Park collaboration on activities for visitors that would bring tourists to Estes Park? That should be the focus. After all, park visits over the past 3 years are down 10%. That is both significant and alarming. What is being done to turn that around? Marsh/Pickering make grand statements that this is just a blip, but it is a major shift in behavior and is continuing its decline again this year. It appears that it is only affecting Estes Park, because at the same time overall Colorado visitation rose 5% last year alone. (Verified in a recent Longwoods study)
Where have our marketing efforts gone while Colorado resident visitors have dropped to 26% from the usual 32%? Into magazines that no one reads just as they have done for over 15 years. Why? Because it is easy and no one has been challenging them. We all need to challenge them because they are failing! They claim that visits are down because of road construction on Hwy’s 34 & 36. Not true. As if those Kansas and Texas visitors hit the road repair after a 10 hour drive and turn around and go home, never finishing the final leg of their trip to Estes Park. These are just lame excuses by a department of incompetents. Our $1 million, $2 million or whatever million they are claiming to use for marketing these days is being very poorly spent. It’s the economy, stupid! Our economy and you are failing us.
Now, the Park; with huge increases in funding due to recent gate increases, the Park has done some major facility improvements, especially in restrooms and roads. However, when is the last time you saw a Ranger in the Park? What happened to the Ranger led hikes, interpretation etc. Many visitors have suggested that the Park gives the impression that the only thing wrong with the Park is the visitors. They would rather there were no visitors so they could conduct endless studies on tree frogs and the like without all of the visitor distractions. Or perhaps they’ll conduct another (the 4th or 5th) 5 year study on elk. What they have caused with this attitude is a further decline in visitors to the Park, now below 2,784,000 and still dropping. The Park may have lost its luster which has greatly affected visits to Estes Park. This should be a wake up call that if they continue to eliminate visitor services such as interpretive hikes, fight with the horse stables and take away the ski areas, they will get the desired drop in the pesky visitors, and at the same time lose HUGE gate receipts. You can’t have it both ways. A drop of nearly 300,000 visitors over the past 3 years is a drop as much as $12,000,000 (200K to 300K for 3 years). Is the answer really to turn Estes Park into the Rocky Mountain National Park parking lot? No, and we should demand that it not happen.
