To give context, this is a local newspaper and therefore the audience is not general. People who live in the area this is in are already aware of a few things:
One, the vast majority of land in the valley is public land already. Huge amounts of national forest land, and additional public open space land as provided by the local governments and county governments. To make this more open space would have required too large of a financial commitment by the county to have been worthwhile. There is plenty of public land even literally adjacent to this property. Plus Old Snowmass is not a real town with people who could purchase it for local use, so that is out as well.
Two, the land as a monastery was owned by the Catholic church. Effectively it was sold because of its value and location as the return could be used by the church to hold onto other land outside of the valley. Or use it for better purposes, at least as defined by them. There are already Catholic churches in every sizable community up and down the valley
Three, any time a large chunk of land goes up for sale in this valley that is worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, you can be sure a rich prick will buy it. Every small family home in the valley sells for $1M or more. Even the local trailer parks had to band together to get $40M mortgages to save their parks from being sold. “Rich prick buys up property” is just a Tuesday out here
So I understand as an outsider you think more could have been written about these topics, but it would have been highly redundant for the local audience of their paper. The same would be true for the several other local news entities that have covered the sale over the last 2 years
To give context, this is a local newspaper and therefore the audience is not general. People who live in the area this is in are already aware of a few things:
One, the vast majority of land in the valley is public land already. Huge amounts of national forest land, and additional public open space land as provided by the local governments and county governments. To make this more open space would have required too large of a financial commitment by the county to have been worthwhile. There is plenty of public land even literally adjacent to this property. Plus Old Snowmass is not a real town with people who could purchase it for local use, so that is out as well.
Two, the land as a monastery was owned by the Catholic church. Effectively it was sold because of its value and location as the return could be used by the church to hold onto other land outside of the valley. Or use it for better purposes, at least as defined by them. There are already Catholic churches in every sizable community up and down the valley
Three, any time a large chunk of land goes up for sale in this valley that is worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, you can be sure a rich prick will buy it. Every small family home in the valley sells for $1M or more. Even the local trailer parks had to band together to get $40M mortgages to save their parks from being sold. “Rich prick buys up property” is just a Tuesday out here
So I understand as an outsider you think more could have been written about these topics, but it would have been highly redundant for the local audience of their paper. The same would be true for the several other local news entities that have covered the sale over the last 2 years