A Denver Post analysis of direct aid to individuals, businesses, nonprofits and local governments in all 64 Colorado counties found that none saw more money per capita than Pitkin County, home to the quintessential ski town of Aspen.
Patrons eat dinner together in shipping containers for outdoor dining at Meat & Cheese Restaurant and Farm Shop in Aspen on Tuesday, March 29, 2022.
“Almost overnight, our unemployment rate went from under 4% to over 25%,” recalled Pitkin County Manager Jon Peacock, who worked with county commissioners to create immediate assistance programs by drawing on their county reserves. They gave out $1.5 million in less than three months to help residents keep up with housing and food costs.
Combined, Pitkin County had the highest share of federal assistance directed at small businesses in Colorado, at 62% of its total. As a group, mountain resort counties received half their federal dollars in business loans and grants, The Post’s analysis found, compared to just 38% for metro counties and only a third for rural, non-resort areas.
But McQueen said she depended most of all on her own grit. That meant getting creative and trying out new ideas, such as starting a granola business, called“Honestly, I’m here but for the grace of God — that’s all I have to say. Looking back, I had no clue,” she said. “At the time, everything was bad. I felt horrible for all the other people who had to close their restaurants.
Not all was harmonious, of course, particularly when it came to working out public health restrictions that deeply affected restaurants and the lodging sector. Pitkin County at times had the state’s most stringent restaurant capacity limits. In late 2020 and early 2021, as the county’s case rate led the state, it required visitors to sign an affidavit attesting that they’d received a negative COVID-19 test result prior to their trip.
The impact “was startling, because it was immediate,” Sand said. “What we noticed is that everybody counts on , and when that month disappears overnight, they had nothing — they had nothing to fall back on. We’re not necessarily low-paid people. We’re talking about successful ski instructors and people who work in well-paying jobs. It was across-the-board. People really had no Plan B.”Colorado received close to $66 billion in pandemic aid. We tracked where that money went.
Peacock, the county manager, said the early county relief programs were part of nearly $6 million in reimbursements it was able to get from local government aid programs in pandemic relief bills passed by Congress. The county and the city of Aspen also used their distributions to put together local aid programs for businesses that supplemented the federal aid.
Homelessness is among the problems the county has tried to address, Peacock said, including more money for shelter programs. For more than a year, through last fall, Pitkin County set up a safe outdoor space at a park-and-ride north of Aspen, where 30 or more people at a time took up residence in recreational vehicles and heated tents.The federal money helped with the triage.
“One thing I can tell you is that every single dollar of aid went into the payment of all the employees,” said De Baets, an Aspen resident.
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