Telluride ski patrollers voted Tuesday night to go on strike starting Saturday after months of failed negotiations with resort owner Telluride Ski and Golf Co.
“Nobody on patrol wants this to happen. Nobody,” said Andy Dennis, a patroller and interim safety director for the union, who participated in negotiation sessions with representatives of resort owner Chuck Horning. “We are talking about the price of a few freaking lift tickets right now. I mean, come on. I feel, personally, so unappreciated and exploited right now. They are taking advantage of us.”
In an unprecedented move, Horning announced Wednesday he will close the resort Saturday, Dec. 27, when ski patrollers are planning to strike after months of failed wage negotiations.
“Telluride didn’t make this decision — the strike nor the timing of it,” reads a statement from Horning published the day after the ski patrol union voted to strike. “We are naturally disappointed that the ski patrol made this choice during such a busy time. They have repeatedly said publicly in town meetings that if they decide to strike, it would be their ‘nuclear option.’ We are concerned that any organization, particularly one that exists to help people, would do something that will have such a devastating effect on our community.”
The statement said the resort will be working on a plan to reopen “as soon as possible.”
Telluride Ski and Golf returned to the negotiating table with the resort’s ski patroller union this week.
“We had a session. I would not say there was any negotiating,” Dennis said in an interview Tuesday before the vote.
The resort company’s latest offer for a new contract with the 78-member union was identical to the “last, best and final offer” the company made Dec. 6. All but one of the patrollers rejected that offer, setting the stage for a high-profile holiday strike. The union voted to authorize a strike in November.
Patrollers this week adjusted their proposal, agreeing to reduce cost-of-living adjustments for second- and third-year patrollers. Dennis said the patrollers’ latest proposal was about halfway between what they are seeking and what the company offered Dec. 6.
“When we talked to them last night, they did not counter. They just reissued their same ‘last, best and final offer’ that we rejected two weeks ago,” Dennis said. (The term “last, best and final” is a legal description in labor negotiations and, apparently, is not any of those words.)
On Wednesday night, the union voted and 99% of the members approved a work stoppage starting Saturday.
Telluride Ski and Golf has been owned by Horning, a Southern California real estate investor, since 2005. The company’s Dec. 6 proposal offered patrollers a new contract that increases the hourly pay of each patroller by about $4 for a median wage of $30 with a range of pay from $23.50 per hour for first-year patrollers to $46 per hour for veterans.
The union’s proposal is seeking an increase closer to $9 per hour for a median wage of $35 with a wage range from $26 to $53 an hour. That high end is for only a few patrollers who have been working at the resort for more than 40 years.
The ski patrol’s three-year contract expired before the season, and they have been working since the start of the season without a contract, which expired Aug. 31.
The union’s representatives have met with the company’s negotiating team for more than 16 sessions in the past few months to hammer out a new three-year contract. The Telluride Professional Ski Patrol Association includes six patrol supervisors who voted last month to join the union, marking a rare inclusion of managers in the growing United Mountain Workers union, a division of the Communications Workers of America, Local 7781.
“Losing someone with 10 years of experience is a huge loss,” ski patroller Katherine Devlin, the vice president of the patroller union, told the Mountain Village Town Council on Dec. 11. “It takes five years to feel confident and know every avalanche route on this mountain. It’s a slow process, and it takes time. Keeping patrollers here for a long time is essential for the safety of this mountain. We need people who have been here for at least 15 years to stay at this job.”
At that Mountain Village council meeting, Devlin and union secretary Jackie Kearney said the difference in wages between the patrollers’ request and the company’s offer was $115,000 over three years, or a little more than $38,000 a year. The cost of living adjustments the patrollers offered this week reduced the three-year difference to about $65,000.
Trask Bradbury was stoked when a Telluride Ski and Golf representative called him last week and booked a chairlift evacuation training for 30 employees. The lucrative wrap to 2025 for his Masterpoint Rope Access Solutions training program spurred him to post online about the training. That’s when he learned that the training was to prepare nonunion employees in case patrollers at the resort go on strike.
So the cofounder of the Broomfield-based Masterpoint canceled the training set for late last week. He called Steve Swenson, a former real estate broker and property manager who recently took over management of the ski area after owner Horning fired the resort’s CEO, his son Chad Horning. Chuck Horning has fired many CEOs during his tumultuous 20 years he has owned the ski area.
“We had a lengthy conversation about all the reasons why. He heard everything I said but clearly was not jumping for joy,” Bradbury said. “I have a lot of friends and colleagues that own training companies as well, and they all turned it down. I told Steve that I believed he was not going to find anyone to do the training as the word has traveled fast. He would be better off watching YouTube instructional videos, which I mentioned as a joke. It seems as if the owner and his managers are in deep trouble.”
The resort industry is closely watching Telluride. Ski patrollers at Vail Resorts’ Park City Mountain Resort walked out in late December last year, triggering a 12-day strike that left the ski area unable to open new terrain as new snow blanketed the Utah ski area. That patroller strike – the first in at least three decades for a U.S. ski area – spurred lawsuits from skiers who endured long lift lines. It also helped lead to the dismissal of Vail Resorts CEO Kirsten Lynch after the company’s stock tumbled during the collapse in labor negotiations.
On a Dec. 10 Vail Resorts earnings call with investors, company CEO Rob Katz was asked if a patroller strike would impact the company’s earnings. Vail Resorts has a partnership with Telluride Ski & Golf that allows Epic pass-holders as many as seven days of skiing at Telluride.
Katz said the partnership deal with Telluride “does not necessarily contribute to our earnings.”
“I think access to Telluride helps pass sales, which is important,” Katz said. “And obviously, yes, we’re very hopeful that they can find a way to resolve the differences.”
The Telluride ski patrollers planned to meet after work Tuesday to discuss the latest negotiation. Dennis said there is no timeline for the strike.
The patrollers opened new terrain Tuesday for hiking skiers around chairs 6 and 14. Dennis said they are working to open new runs and vacationers are crowding the slopes.
“I don’t think anyone at the ski area is anticipating what this will look like if, or when, we walk,” he said.
After Tuesday night’s vote, Dennis said the members of the union were concerned about the future and how long a strike might last.
“I think the solidarity is strong enough to hold us as long as it takes,” he said. “The support from the community has been outstanding.”
