The city of Aspen is exploring strategies that would keep locally serving and community-oriented businesses in town. At a work session on Tuesday, Aspen City Council discussed ideas such as a new excise tax on development and forming community co-ops to purchase and run businesses that may be threatened.

City planner Ben Gagnon presented a scenario in which a business owner, who has paid off his or her mortgage on the property that houses the business, “ultimately ... decides to sell for the astronomical prices that are prevalent in the Aspen market.” Gagnon continued in a memo to the council: “Because of the high purchase price, the new buyer can’t get enough income from the previous use and decides to redevelop and/or change the use to one that generates higher revenues. Thus disappears the use.”

Although no specific businesses were named, Gagnon told the council Tuesday that pharmacies in Aspen are potentially in danger of disappearing. There are currently two pharmacies in Aspen — Carl’s and Rodney’s — and a third shut down to much local concern a few years ago to make way for a real estate sales center.

Mayor Mick Ireland also mentioned “a sporting goods store near Wagner Park,” which one must assume was a thinly veiled reference to the Ute Mountaineer store.

Carl Bergman, owner of the pharmacy that bears his name, said Tuesday afternoon that his business isn’t going anywhere, as his children plan to take over the business when he retires.

Despite that, “We’d be irresponsible not to realize this could happen,” Gagnon said, likening a pharmacy to an essential service that would warrant government intervention to keep it in town, if necessary. The city believes it would be better to plan ahead for these types of challenges as opposed to having to react to a situation. Such situations have presented themselves in the past. When the Isis movie theater, Aspen’s last, looked like it was going to be shut down in 2006, the city entered into a public-private partnership to preserve it.

The city has brought in Mark White, a Kansas City-based planning consultant, to advise on the overall commercial mix issue, which the city has been examining for the last year and a half.

A key to all of this is “succession planning,” in which the city actively engages owners of the desired businesses on what their long-term plans are, and explores ways to get the business owners to enter into a scheme to preserve their businesses.

Bergman, of Carl’s, said no one from the city has ever broached the subject with him.

Once the desired businesses are identified, White said, the next step is to secure the space or acquire new land, and the final step is to figure out a way to run the business.

These steps, particularly securing the land, require money. To acquire these monies, the city might consider a new excise tax on development, which would create a fund to be used to buy locally serving businesses. The concept of an excise tax currently has no consensus on council, but it was identified as a potential strategy should the council move forward with any of these ideas.

Another strategy — or a complementary one to the excise tax — is the Green Bay Packers model, in which a community corporation actually owns a particular asset. In the case of the Packers, 112,000 shareholders have purchased about 4 million shares in the team. Any profits are fed back into local charities.

There are other examples — Plentywood, Mont., and Powell, Wyo., for example — where a small town, faced with the loss of its last remaining department store, formed community shareholder corporations to open a new store.

Councilman Jack Johnson said the ideas around excise taxes and community co-ops were “fascinating,” and some of the most promising he’s heard in relation to the commercial mix issue.

“People say there is something wrong,” Johnson said of Aspen’s mix of retail establishments. “Where there’s no agreement is what the potential solution might be.”

Councilman Dwayne Romero said the city needs to be big and bold in how it chooses to tackle this issue. He envisions clustering the desired businesses together in a specific location, creating a vibrant community gathering place, or someplace “cool where the locals hang,” he said.

The council asked staff to continue researching how such a program would work and to begin gathering feedback from the community.

curtis@aspendailynews.com