Bulletin E-Edition:
Bachelor hopes 4 firings will help ski resort evolve
By Jeff McDonald / The Bulletin
Published: May 22. 2008 4:00AM PST“I believe that we were not reaching our full potential as a resort,” says Herwig Demschar, chief operating officer of Powdr Corp., which owns Mt. Bachelor. “We need to do a better job communicating with the community because the gap between what we charge and what we deliver is too big.”
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While locals were still trying to make sense of Tuesday’s firings of four top-level officials, the chief operating officer for the company that owns Mt. Bachelor ski area said the moves would help change the culture at the mountain.
The mountain needs to find more creative ways to handle recurrent issues with maintenance and weather-related shutdowns and communicate those challenges with the public, said Herwig Demschar, chief operating officer for Park City, Utah-based Powdr Corp., which owns Mt. Bachelor.
The company fired Matt Janney as the general manager after just 10 months and three other longtime employees as a means to overcome years of a stagnant culture resistant to change at the ski area, Demschar said.
Mt. Bachelor’s next GM will need to find a creative way to deal with an old nemesis — rime ice — which sometimes can jam the ski area’s lift equipment until the chairs have been repositioned and the ice removed, he said.
Communicating the problem to the public will be a key challenge, Demschar said.
“We don’t want to overpromise,” Demschar said. “But we have to make changes in our culture to be competitive in the ski industry.”
Trust issues
Powdr Corp. and Janney’s successor also will need to regain the lost trust of locals, who criticized the ski area this year as a result of lift stoppage problems and other maintenance-related issues, said Mike Hulsey, 61, a ski patroller at Mt. Bachelor who took last year off to recover from an injury.
“They’ve lost the faith of local skiers,” Hulsey said. “People still want to go because it’s the local mountain, but if they had a choice, Mt. Bachelor would be empty.”
Addressing the need for improved maintenance at Mt. Bachelor, the ski area will add five new full-time lift maintenance positions, build workshop space around Summit Express chairlift and provide maintenance employees with additional tools and equipment, Demschar said.
Plans started during Janney’s tenure, including a master plan initiative and a $3.4 million investment into mountain improvements for next year, would be continued under Janney’s successor, who could be hired within the next four weeks, Demschar said.
“We have to find a new GM — a new face for the mountain — it’s not going to be easy,” Demschar said. “Our main objective looking into the future is to have people saying that Mt. Bachelor has the best skiing in the western part of the U.S.”
‘Things are not where they should be’
A former coach of both the Austrian National Ski Team for nine years and the head coach of the U. S. women’s alpine team for four years, Demschar joined Powdr as its No. 2 official behind CEO John Cumming in April 2007.
“After looking at the whole thing for a full year, I believe that we were not reaching our full potential as a resort,” Demschar said. “We need to do a better job communicating with the community because the gap between what we charge and what we deliver is too big.”
Aside from Janney, Powdr fired three employees who had among them six decades of experience at the ski area: Carly Carmichael, director of marketing; Mark Perry, the food and beverage director; and Ernie Pool, director of operations.
Janney declined comment for the story. None of the other three former employees could be reached for comment Wednesday evening.
“I’ve been watching for a year, and things are not where they should be,” Demschar said. “Some people may think we’re crazy and others think it’s all good, but in the long run, we want people to be able to walk away with positive memories of their ski experience — and say they’ll come back.”
While the rest of the state’s ski areas are projected to eclipse an all-time single-season record with 1.95 million visitors, Mt. Bachelor’s visitation declined by 7 percent through its closing date Sunday, according to data released Tuesday by the Pacific Northwest Ski Areas Association.
Shocking news
The news that Janney had been fired came as a shock to Chuck Kenlan, executive director for the Mt. Bachelor Sports Education Foundation.
“From a standpoint of MBSEF, things were going in the right direction,” Kenlan said. “Matt’s communication with us was really good. There were things that came up that were not so favorable, but I saw things turning around.”
Kenlan, who had worked at Mt. Bachelor for 15 years before he became director at MBSEF, had met with Janney to discuss renewing the ski area’s summer operations, which would have kept the mountain open longer in the summer for both locals and groups from out of town, he said.
“Mt. Bachelor was willing to take a loss in the past — we were discussing ways to make it pay off,” Kenlan said. “It would be good for our organization and good for the city of Bend to put that back on the map.”
Former ski patroller Hulsey said Janney did the best he could with limited resources provided by Powdr.
“Maybe they should bring in their own people, but this is a community mountain,” said Hulsey, who served for 13 years as a ski patroller on the Mt. Bachelor National Ski Patrol at the ski area. “They’re addressing this like it is a Vale (ski resort) or a Sun Valley, but it’s not. They need the support of the local people.”
Powdr’s Demschar stressed Powdr’s long-term commitment to Mt. Bachelor and said his company will need to find someone to replace Janney who would be able to establish lines of communication with the public.
“People have to understand what the challenges are,” he said. “I know what it means to go up to the local mountain to ski with the family. We want people to have the best experiences possible.”
The company has no plans to sell Mt. Bachelor, Demschar said.
“People need to understand that we take it serious and believe in making change,” Demschar said. “We were watching it last year and saw challenges. We thought it was about time to take the next step.”
Jeff McDonald can be reached at 383-0323 or at jmcdonald@bendbulletin.com.
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