Vail Business News

VAIL, Colo.—Rob LeVine likes to joke about his long career in the hospitality industry. “I run into kids and they’ve had five or six jobs out of college,” he says. “And then they ask me what I’ve been up to. I tell them, and I can see that thumb and forefinger forming an L and going to their forehead…

“I’ve led a very sheltered career,” he says, laughing, of his 33 years with the Antlers at Vail, where he’s worked as general manager since the late 1980s, and where he landed a job right out of Colorado College as an accountant. “But I know really well how we do things.”

Over the years, LeVine also has learned how others do business, having been the 2011 chairman of the board for the Colorado Association of Commerce and Industry. He’s still closely involved with CACI.

As well, he served on Vail Town Council from 1989 to 1993. Between that, his continued time on CACI and his adherence to the front lines of local tourism, he admits Vail has done well in its nearly 50 years. But he says the valley’s future success is a matter of balance; it needs new, strong and sustainable businesses that aren’t all about the ski industry – and that aren’t completely dependent on the weather.

VBJ: So let’s talk about economic diversity.  How does that happen here?
RL: That’s the key word to me – diversity – and there’s been recognition in Vail that it’s the key to our economic health. I’ve been concerned to varying degrees that we’ve had all our eggs in one basket. And I keep saying that one of these years, God forbid, that we’re not going to have any snow. So much of our income happens in those four months of winter. It’s not an “if,” but a “when.” It’s gonna happen.

As an economic being – a community – we would be so well served to have more diversity. That’s why I worked on getting the conference center for so long. It would have been an addition that was not dependent on skiing or the weather. But I don’t want to beat a dead horse. I’m (laughing) trying to get over it.

That said, we need to find another horse to ride in addition to skiing. We’ve done a fabulous job with summer, with Bravo! and culture. But we need more of that. Health and wellness seems to be one of the pieces of the Great White Hope. I think it’s worth a shot; I don’t know of anything on the horizon that has potential like that, and we need to do it in a big way. Medical tourism. We’re not going to be a manufacturing hub.

On a related note, the Vail Symposium is doing a fairly significant three-day event in September around health and fitness, and it has the potential to be the start of something big.

VBJ: So what do you think about the proposed redevelopment of the town’s municipal site on the South Frontage Road, where Vail Valley Medical Center, Steadman Clinic and the Steadman-Philippon Research Institute have proposed a complex that includes medical offices as well as new office space for the town? Council has already fielded some objections about the use of that land.
RL: Yes, I support it. To the objections, I say get over it. The concept of “get over it” is a recurring theme, and I suspect we don’t have a corner on that market. Vail has this preoccupation that town land always has to be town land. It sounds a little like the Soviet Union.

VBJ: Let’s talk a bit about your work with CACI, and looking at the broader aspect of business development in Colorado.
RL: I’m rather optimistic – cautiously so. We are still subject to a bigger universe, if the market tanks or the debt crisis erupts. But given those unknowns, I think Colorado is well positioned from an infrastructure perspective as well as a psychographic perspective. I’m a huge (Governor John) Hickenlooper fan. He’s very pro business. He really gets it and really understands the balances and the hurdles. He recognizes that we can’t just let the gas industry drill anywhere. But he also understands that it’s a big part of our economy.  We need to protect ourselves and our environment, but not overprotect.

Manufacturing is struggling everywhere. We’re not going to bring back a lot of the manufacturing that we’ve lost, so the bigger hope is new industry. Some high-tech. We’ve got things here like wind turbines, which are big opportunities, but there are also a lot of little guys. And manufacturers have challenges here. There’s a business property tax in Colorado and it’s particularly onerous to manufacturers. It’s an equipment tax, and it can drive people into bankruptcy.

That’s just one example of a challenge. But manufacturing jobs are typically higher paying. And it’s much harder to fold up a plant than a service business. Manufacturing should be part of our collective economic recovery. It probably won’t be big in Vail, but there’s growing recognition statewide.

What is our growth going to be? Service is going to be big, agriculture remains big. Those things need to be understood from a policy perspective. What needs to be done to protect our communities, our workforce.

VBJ: What are some of the impacts of tourism that we aren’t always talking about?
RL: Well, if it’s tough on commerce to ship goods on I-70 because of  skier traffic, that’s a consequence. But a toll road is probably overkill. Again, we need to look for balance. For example, people do not understand and appreciate how impactful the Eagle airport is. It (I-70 traffic) could be a lot worse. Almost half our destination visitors in the winter come through the Eagle airport. CME, to its credit, takes a hell of a lot of cars off the road.

A monorail would be a good thing, but it’s not going to happen in my lifetime. I’m big on 100-year plans. We have a very short window of perspective. Let’s think about 30-year returns on investment, 100-year returns.

We need to improve air service, shuttle service. And that goes back to diversification. And if we can get a bunch of those people to come in May and October, we won’t need so many of ’em in March. It will distribute our traffic instead of cramming it all at once.

Another little-known fact: The Town of Vail’s sales-tax revenues come mostly in winter. Two-thirds vs. one-third. And 81 percent of our annual revenues come between Thanksgiving and April. This is not a model for success. Someone who’s objective and looking at an economic model would say that’s a recipe for disaster.

VBJ: You mentioned weather and our obsession with it.
RL: That’s another thing I keep going back to – finding what that magic bullet is. It needs to be weather independent. We have this predisposed notion here that if it’s not nice out, we can’t do anything. You’ve got to sell past the weather, and I think health and wellness work into that.

We need to find things to do where we don’t say “what if the weather’s crappy?” Even golf communities like Hilton Head, they’re less so than we are about that.

VBJ: So wrapping things up, a few words about the Antlers over the years…
RL: We started in 1972 with 70 condos… And then we started in 2000 and finished in 2002, 20 new condominiums. And we’re very proud that we have nine employee housing units in the building.

The original condos cost $29,000 and they resold for a couple hundred thousand. And all of a sudden we build these 20 new condos, some of them up to 2 million. We wondered how the older owners – there are still a few original owners – would react to the new ones.

But you can’t tell the difference today between an old owner and a new owner. There’s a story here where we try to create differences, but they’re all very supportive as a group. And we’re proud of what we do here at the Antlers in the philanthropy category. That’s a big part of our community – the fact that a teensy community can support so many nonprofits.

I think that’s pretty unique in Vail, and I think that’s part of what makes our community our community.