Redundancy, Again!

Sure it’s been said before, but who’s listening? Have you noticed that whoever is talking about the marketing dollars in Estes Park uses different numbers? Paul Fishman used numbers supplied by the CVB in his presentation on Tuesday last, but when Pickering gave numbers they were different. Of course Pickering doesn’t tell the truth, but really this should be pretty easy, even for him. As a follow-up, Repola states completely different numbers in the EP Lampoon. Lisa Pogue, the Lampoon writer states that the Town budget allocation is $2.3 million to marketing this fiscal year. The CVB claims to have spent $662,594 on media purchases and some amount on other things, like the never to be discussed $600,000 in salaries. Now it isn’t Lisa’s fault, she’s just reporting the facts as she knows them. Where did the rest of the money go and how much is there really? Perhaps they spent a goodly amount on the vacation planner they claim was downloaded 59,000 times. Funny, they don’t have a vacation planner – yet another lie.

Of course we shouldn’t be too harsh. These are big numbers and it’s hard to keep them all straight. Repola is surely challenged by them, unless they include his bloated salary. Let’s see, he says that there is $1.6 million coming from the General Fund to support tourism, plus $6.675 million to support tourism services. These dollars are used to keep the downtown properly maintained, as though they wouldn’t do it if there weren’t tourists here. Hell, they don’t do it very well now. Did you hear the one about the dog poop on the sidewalk? Doylen said –“…whose dog was that we need to ticket them!” Of course that’s the answer; don’t bother to clean the poop off the sidewalk.

One hundred years from now we will be gone and there will be all new people. Will those Estesparkians be living under Home Rule? We can decide. Let’s say yes.