Washington – Chairlifts at ski resorts on public land – including several in Colorado – have long been advertising-free because of a U.S. Forest Service ban on outdoor ads. But this season, restraining bars on lifts at Aspen sported pitches for credit cards, hotels and airplanes.
The Forest Service has ruled that lift chairs are “interior spaces” and allows ads so long as they face inward.
The change comes as the Bush administration proposes giving corporate donors more recognition for their financial donations to national parks in the form of naming rights, sign age and plaques bearing their logos in the parks.
Environmental groups see such changes as an effort to commercialize public lands.
“The Bush administration approach has been to get greater corporate involvement in the management of (public) land,” said Jeff Ruch of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. “It’s precisely the opposite of the purpose of the land.”
But the ski industry says the lift-bar ads are not a major change, since advertising has been allowed inside gondola cars at ski resorts for years.
“The whole point is that it’s no different than what’s inside a gondola car,” said Geraldine Link, director of public policy for the Lakewood-based National Ski Areas Association.
She said the experiment has been a hit at Aspen, where the chairlift ads are accompanied by trail maps. That saves people from having to take off their gloves in cold weather to fumble with paper maps.
“We do expect to see more of them in the future,” Link said.
While ads are now allowed on chairlifts at all Colorado resorts on public lands, Forest Service officials said they were used only on Aspen chairlifts this season.
Most ski areas in Colorado and across the West operate at least partly on national forest land under long-term leases.
In return for the use of public land, ski areas generally have to minimize their visual impact on the environment. For example, in addition to being advertising-free, lift towers must be non-reflective.
Ed Ryberg, who recently retired as head of the Forest Service’s winter sports program in the Rocky Mountains, said the ban on advertising had withstood many challenges over the years, until it met with the persistence of Matt Jay.
Jay crafted the trail maps printed on plastic in his parents’ basement in Indiana. In 2000, Aspen Skiing Co. agreed to put them on its chairs, with ads offsetting costs. But the Forest Service, citing the ad ban, ordered them removed in 2001.
But Jay wouldn’t give up. He started lobbying his way up the Forest Service chain of command.
“He kept going until he got a friendly hearing,” Ryberg said.
That friendly hearing, Ryberg said, was by David Tenny, an appointee at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service. Tenny handles many politically sensitive development issues involving the Forest Service for his boss, Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey.
“My experience with Dave Tenny is that he thinks if there’s a buck in it, we should do it,” Ryberg said. He said Tenny overruled professional Forest Service managers who recommended maintaining the full ban on chairlift advertising.
But Dave Holland, who was the Forest Service’s director of recreation in Washington when the matter was reviewed, said he took a liking to Jay’s idea with no prompting from his political superiors.
“I thought it was a good opportunity to provide an environmental message,” he said.
Rey denied that he and Tenny usurped the Forest Service’s professional decision- making process. “This is a case where the agency has gone through the normal process,” Rey said.
Jay said his lobbying success didn’t come from connections but rather through old- fashioned persistence.
“I drove to Washington, D.C., in my Subaru two or three times, called up and got the meetings,” Jay said. “If I call Sen. (Wayne) Allard’s office or my representatives, that’s what the country’s all about.”
The Forest Service solicited public comment through the end of last month on the new ad rules.
The policy expires May 25, 2007. By then the Forest Service will have to decide to change the program, extend it or end it.
Online: Comment on this story, and read more Denver Post Washington coverage, at our D.C. Web log: denverpostbloghouse.com/washington
