2 weeks Ago By Kit Geary
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U.S. Sen.
John Hickenlooper hit stops in Colorado’s High Country on Tuesday, April 15, for what he said was in part an effort to collect stories from his constituents to help refine his understanding of the area he represents. His Breckenridge stop was paired with a tour of an upcoming nonprofit hub, and the story he got from local officials lifted the veil covering the historic mountain town with an affluent appearance to show the local workforce’s affordability struggles. Breckenridge’s tourism economy has helped the town, which has a population of nearly 5,000, wrangle yearly tax collections upwards of $35 million over the last several years.
Breckenridge and Summit County local officials and government staff members told the former restaurateur, now senator, that local employees who might fall in the middle class elsewhere deal with food and housing insecurity — and they’re not sure there’s a sure fix. “I don’t see it getting better, I don’t see the demand decreasing. I only see (more) pressure being applied to every facet of living life in Summit County,” county commissioner Nina Waters said to the senator.
His first stop in Breckenridge was a tour of the still-to-be completed Sol Center, which will be the new 18,000-square-foot home of two of Summit’s largest nonprofits, a community food market and a thrift store. Family and Intercultural Resource Center executive director Brianne Snow said the approximate $15 million project has been fully funded. Family and Intercultural Resource Center is one of the nonprofits that will operate out of the space.
She explained to Hickenlooper her organization outgrew its facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic, when its food bank went from serving a maximum of 25 people, to 480 people a day during the pandemic’s height. She said now that the number of people served a day is a steady 350. She said the gap between people’s wages in Summit and what they can afford continues to become more stark.
This has forced people into making monetary choices where they have to choose between life expenses monthly, like cutting back on groceries to make rent, she said. Hickenlooper asked if the food pantry’s products came out of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), whose budget is currently at risk with an estimated cut of $230 billion over the next 10 years. Snow said they source the food mostly from the Food Bank of the Rockies out of Denver, and SNAP isn’t involved.
FIRC executive director Brianne Snow walks Sen. John Hickenlooper through what will be the nonprofit’s new home, the Sol Center, on April 15, 2025.Kit Geary/ Summit Daily News“While our food bank isn’t directly impacted by state or federal dollars, there’s a ripple effect .
.. When SNAP is impacted, people rely more on food pantries, and so we’re just kind of waiting to see what the impact is,” she said.
Officials discussed the correlation between the cost of living and the need for many locals to have more than one job to support themselves in Summit. Waters spoke about discussions around economic diversification in Summit to create more job growth opportunities for a more stable middle class so the local wage gap shrinks. Advocates of economic diversification in Summit say there needs to be more bustling industries so the local economy isn’t solely reliant on tourism.
They also touched on the role of immigrants in the local economy.Breckenridge Town Council member Dick Carleton described the immigrant community to be “vital” in Breckenridge’s business fabric and shared his concerns regarding the national conversation around immigration with the senator. “Immigration reform path for citizenship, it feels like it’s completely off the table now .
.. these aren’t just workers in Breckenridge, these are community members,” he said.
Hickenlooper said the United States is currently in a place where even those living in areas with a low cost of living are having to work multiple jobs to stay afloat.“Society has gotten wealthier and wealthier, again, the greatest wealth in the history of the world, and yet we still have to fight like crazy to keep rent within peoples’ grasp,” he said.When asked what he was doing to work on keeping costs of living at bay, Hickenlooper said he is working on initiatives including those to raise the federal minimum wage, those to mitigate drug prescription costs and those to increase the amount of Low Income Tax Credits available to be used for affordable housing.
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