"This is a new era of cooperation."Sun Valley Mayor Dewayne Briscoe

The plan calls for Ketchum to contribute $450,000 and Sun Valley $350,000. This is approximately 25 percent of each city's receipts from the local option tax. Local option sales taxes are levied on such items as hotel rooms, restaurant purchases and retail sales other than groceries.

"At my inauguration in January, Sun Valley Mayor Dewayne Briscoe proposed that representatives of our cities get together, and I thought it was a wonderful suggestion," Ketchum Mayor Nina Jonas said. The conversation was very respectful and polite, and I appreciate his taking the initiative."

The proposed contributions are expected to go before the city councils this summer when budgets for the coming year are presented.   

The local economy also should benefit from the new 1 percent LOT for air service in Ketchum, Sun Valley and Hailey, Jonas added. The tax is expected to fund development and marketing of commercial airline flights serving the Wood River Valley. United Airlines began seasonal service from San Francisco this past winter, and will add Denver service in July. Read full press release.

Sandy Cady and Kathleen Schwartzenberger, who oversee the collection of the local-option tax receipts, have been with the City so long that they can remember when the City's first computer was bigger than both of them put together.

"The computer was on the mezzanine, and it was bigger than this filing cabinet," City Clerk Cady (see photo at right) said, pointing toward the five-foot high cabinet beside her desk. "We had one disk and one backup disk, and each one was about two feet in diameter. The technology has changed completely over the years."

Cady is truly a Sun Valley native. She was born in the Sun Valley Lodge when it housed the local hospital. She started working in the clerk's office when she graduated from Wood River High School 40 years ago.

Schwartzenberger (see photo at left), the administrative clerk, joined the City staff 17 years ago after working as a meat wrapper. "Someone asked me how meat wrapping applies to the city clerk's office," she recalled. "Well, they both involve working with the public."

Indeed, dealing with the public is a major part of her job.  Seated at a desk to the left of the City Hall door, she is the first person people see when they enter the building.

The two of them, as well as their colleagues in the city clerk's office, are used to questions that may or may not deal with City business. "When people can't find something in the phone book, they call us," Cady said. "One person wanted us to tell him what time it is according to the atomic clock. He said he wanted to be sure he was on time for a meeting." Questions are much more common about the locations of Hemingway's grave and the library.

When Cady started, tax receipts were entered in a ledger by hand. The City had minimal equipment, so Sun Valley Resort printed utility bills and she logged them by hand in the City records. Ketchum had yet to acquire its first park.

She was working for the City when the local option tax was initiated in 1985. This year, the state has started collecting the tax for the City and the first payments came in last week. The state has stronger enforcement mechanisms, Cady said, and the system also is expected to reduce the workload on City staff.

The longevity of the staff in the city clerk's office is remarkable. The other two people in the office, Katie Carnduff and Pat Bennett, have been with the City for 16 and 27 years, respectively.

"I love the camaraderie here," Schwartzenberger said. "We all like working with each other and working to help the citizens, too."

On Monday, April 7, City Council will hear a

presentation and have a discussion about  

broadband in the City of Ketchum.

Broadband is one of the best ways to boost the City's economy by attracting small businesses that can locate almost anywhere they wish, said Aaron Pearson, IS and media director of The Community Library and a member of Ketchum's broadband committee.

Examples of businesses that come to cities with high-speed broadband include film editing studios, which need to transfer large files quickly, and technology startups.

Bloomberg says that even the U.S. goal of 4 Mbps is "shortsighted," noting that South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan and the Netherlands are all looking at a standard of 1 gigibit per second.

"Think of it this way," the Bloomberg article said. "With a dialup connection, backing up 5 gigabytes of data (now the standard free plan offered by many storage companies) would take 20 days. Over a standard (3G) wireless connection, it would take two and a half days. Over a 4G connection it would be more than seven hours, and over a cable DOCSIS 3.0 connection, an hour and a half. With a gigabit fiber-to-the-home connection, it can be done in less than a minute."

Read yesterday's article in The New York Times on the "limited choice of towns with fiber."   

K.J. Savaria, a graduate of SVSEF programs, in the men's giant slalom at the Spring Series on Baldy last week.  Photo courtesy of the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation

Congratulations and thanks to Sun Valley Resort and the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation (SVSEF) for bringing the International Federation of Skiing's Western Region Spring Series to town. Contestants included such luminaries as Andrew Weibrecht, who earned a silver medal in the Super G at Sochi.

The Idaho Mountain Express editorial said it well: "Putting on national and international ski races is expensive and requires efforts beyond the day-in, day-out business of hosting recreational skiers. Even so, the national and international exposure, high-level ski and snowboard races . . . are worth the effort and expense in that they keep the ski resort on the map of places beloved by the best in the sport and on the list of places recreational skiers want to visit."

We recently learned of another Ketchum connection to the Paralympics. Mark Bathum, a visually impaired skier from Seattle, and guide Cade Yamamoto won silver medals in the super-G and the super combined events in Sochi.

Bathum has trained with the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation and his family has had a second home in Ketchum for more than 30 years. Bathum also is one of four finalists for the Best Male Paralympian award, a program inaugurated this year by the U.S. Olympic committee. Winners will be announced Monday, April 7 during the Best of U.S. Awards Show on NBCSN.  

Ketchum is believed to be leading the nation in the percentage of public capital improvement budgets earmarked for the arts. The City Council voted to raise the figure to 5 percent at a recent meeting.

Seven cities in Idaho require a percentage of capital improvement budgets to be devoted to the arts, Ketchum Arts Commission member Claudia McCain said.  The figure ranges from 1.25 percent in Hailey to 1.4 percent in Boise. Other West Coast cities have percentages ranging from 0.5 percent in Denver to 1.33 percent in Portland, she noted.  She has been unable to find another city in the country with as high a percentage as Ketchum.  Read full press release.