The 253-page State of the Aspen Area 2008 report was presented to local elected and appointed officials Tuesday night by city and county planners and a team of consultants.

One of the key findings in the economics section of the report was that “over the past 10 to 15 years, the real estate and construction sectors have become the dominant industry in the Aspen area economy, surpassing the original drivers of the resort economy — skiing, lodging and retail/restaurant.”

The report on existing conditions within Aspen city limits and the portion of Pitkin County inside the Aspen Urban Growth Boundary — which stretches from the airport to Red Mountain to Mountain Valley — is the foundation to an update of the 2000 Aspen Area Community Plan.

The AACP is frequently cited by elected officials as an influence on their decisions about whether a proposed development is in keeping with the community’s values. Adoption of an updated plan is scheduled for April 2009.

“This report is intended to start a public discussion about where we are as a community on a range of important issues,” the executive summary of the report states. “We hope to hear these discussions on the bus, on the street, in coffee shops and at public meetings.”

The full report was scheduled to be made available online today at a new Web site, www.aspencommunityvision.com [1].

A series of meetings with citizens are planned for this fall along with an extensive survey to determine how the community’s feelings about subjects such as affordable housing and growth have changed.

An updated AACP would then be reviewed by both city and county planning and zoning committees and then reviewed and voted on by both the Pitkin County commissioners and Aspen City Council.

The State of the Aspen Area report is perhaps the most comprehensive report ever assembled about Aspen, according to city planner Ben Gagnon, who worked on the project along with city long-range planner Jessica Garrow and county long-range planner Ellen Sassano.

Consultants on the projects included former city or county planners Tim Malloy, Julie Ann Woods, Gabe Preston, Mitch Haas, Leslie Lamont and Alan Richman.

The report includes 12 chapters, including ones on economics, housing, growth, environmental quality and transportation and is stuffed full of charts, graphs, statistics and facts about Aspen (see related story).

“Excellent work,” said Rachel Richards, a Pitkin County commissioner and former Aspen mayor and council member, who worked on the first AACP published in 1993 and the 2000 update.

That first AACP was only 55 pages long but articulated four major themes that have guided local land-use decisions over the past 15 years, including the goal to “create housing opportunities for 60 percent of the workforce to live upvalley of Aspen Village Trailer Park (excluding Snowmass Village).”

In 2000, that ambitious goal was changed to a goal of building 800 to 1,300 additional affordable housing units within Aspen’s urban growth boundary.

Since then, 652 affordable units have been built and another 181 units have been approved.

However, the report estimates that 1,075 Aspen-area employees have been forced to live outside of Aspen because 597 free-market units “have been converted to something other than workforce housing.”

The upgrading of free-market units from rental units to luxury units is part of the real estate boom in Aspen over the last decade.

The report finds that “from 2003 to 2006, the total (annual) volume of real estate sales in Pitkin County more than doubled from $1.3 billion to $2.64 billion, and real estate employment jumped 32 percent between 2001 and 2006.”

It also notes that there have been 10,000 building permits issued by the city since 2000. The report states that those building permits were worth at least $2.4 billion, but Gagnon said that until recently the stated value of building permits has been lower than the actual value.

“You can probably add 50 percent to that,” Gagnon said, adding that the real value of the building permits issued since 2000 was probably closer to $3.5 billion.

The report also found that 174 houses in the Aspen area have been “scraped and replaced” since 2000, primarily in the Midland and Park Avenue neighborhoods near Smuggler Mountain and in the West End and along Cemetery Lane.

Almost one in six homes in the Cemetery Lane neighborhood have been scraped and rebuilt, said planner Garrow, and the homes have grown in the process from about 3,000 square feet on average to about 5,500 square feet.

Several elected officials had suggestions on how to improve the report. Richards suggested adding more information about the source of water in the Roaring Fork River while Aspen Mayor Mick Ireland suggested basing more employee information on a recent survey of employers conducted by RRC, a consulting firm working on the report that has done extensive analysis of the dynamics of the local work force.

Ireland also suggested estimating the cost of transporting employees from downvalley to better understand the comparative costs of not building employee housing upvalley.

Aspen City Councilman Jack Johnson said he supported Ireland’s suggestions but said he hoped the community will ultimately be arguing about values and not about the statistics and facts in the report.

bgs@aspendailynews.com

  The State of the Aspen Area 2008 report was released by city and county planners Tuesday. Here are some of the findings in the report, which is available online at www.aspencommunityvi­sion. com.
 
— There are 21,588 jobs in Pitkin County, which in 2006 had a population of 16,409. The number of jobs grew 7 percent between 2001 and 2006. Jobs in the administrative sector have gone up 63 percent, reflecting growth in temporary help services, while jobs in the real estate sector have gone up 32 percent.
 
— Under current land-use regulations, about 150,000 square feet of new commercial space (excluding lodging) could still be built within the Aspen Urban Growth Boundary. There are 1.4 million square feet of existing commercial space in Aspen, which means under current zoning the city’s commercial space is 90 percent built out.
 
— Taxable retail sales in Aspen hit $258 million in 2000, dropped to $240 million in 2002 and climbed to $327 million in 2007.
 
— Since 1994-95, the total pillow count in Aspen lodges and rental condos has dropped 27 percent, with the biggest decrease in the “economy lodge” sector, down 79 percent and in the “moderate condo” sector, down 47 percent. But despite the decrease in available rental pillows, taxable lodg­ing sales jumped 49 percent from 2003 to 2007, indicating a shift upward in prices.
 
— Since the 2000-01 ski season, Snowmass Ski Area has accounted for an average of 54 percent of the upper valley’s skier visits, with Aspen Mountain accounting for 23 percent, Highlands 14 percent and Buttermilk 11 percent.
 
— Of Aspen’s overnight winter visitors, 39 percent fly direct into Aspen, 36 percent fly into Denver (and then drive or take a van), 11 percent fly into Eagle or another airport, and 15 percent drive.
 
— The average number of frost-free days per year in Aspen has increased by 22 days over the last 50 years, and the rate of warming has been twice as fast in the last 25 years as in the previ­ous 25 years.
 
— The average single-family home price in Aspen in 2007 was $5.4 million. The average sin­gle- family home price in Basalt recently topped $1 million and Carbondale is hovering at about $600,000. According to mortgage guidelines, it is estimated that a family would need to make $350,000 a year to buy a single-family home in Basalt.
  — According to a 2004 study, 29 percent of the commuters to Aspen on Highway 82 live in Carbondale, 24 percent live in Basalt, 19 percent live in El Jebel, 16 percent live in Glenwood Springs, 5 percent live in New Castle, another 5 percent live in Rifle and 2 percent live in Silt.
 
— A 2005 study found that of the 386 children in day care facilities in Aspen, 149 of them came from families outside of Pitkin County. There are currently 297 children filling the 313 available child care slots in Pitkin County, which is a 94.5 percent capacity rate.
 
— The total student capacity in Aspen public schools is 1,800 students. In the 2006-07 school year, there were 1,414 students enrolled, with 497 at the elementary school, 418 in the middle school and 499 in the high school.
 
— There are 871 deed-restricted ownership employee housing units in the city of Aspen and 602 such units in Pitkin County. There are 1,145 deed-restricted employee rental units in Aspen and 151 such rental units in the county.
 
— An estimated 207 retirees live in local afford­able housing — that number is predicted to jump to 625 in 2017 and peak at 1,142 in 2032.
 
— Twenty-nine percent of second-home owners plan to retire in Pitkin County and 47 percent of second-home owners ranked Aspen as their first choice location for senior housing. Forty-six percent of locals over age 45 intend to retire in Aspen.
 
— In 2007, there were 1,630 admissions to Aspen Valley Hospital. There were 286 births, 464 in-patient surgeries, 1,954 physical therapy patients, and 9,139 emergency room visits.
 
— Brent Gardner-Smith