In the Front Porch Forum, Mike Anderson, owner of Petra Cliffs, rails against Ice Factor and encourages people to vote against the Moran Redevelopment proposal.
Take this for what it is worth – this is the opinion of someone whose business will likely be directly affected by The Ice Factor.
The Sad Truth About the Moran Plant: Why Petra Cliffs is no longer
involvedBurlington, VT – March 4th is “Town Meeting” day here in Vermont.
We’ll finally get to express our opinions in regards to the race for
President as well as on many other issues facing our great state. This
particular “Town Meeting” day will be especially interesting for me. Many
of you know that for the past three years I have been the owner of Petra
Cliffs, having brought it back form the brink of disaster due to
extremely poor management by the previous owner. Some of you may not even
know that we have a great indoor climbing center here in Burlington that
WAS NOT built or backed by City Hall. Some of you not did even know
that Petra Cliffs was sold. For going on 8 years now Petra Cliffs has
served the greater Burlington area the best way we know how…by sharing
our passion with the general public in a safe and education form. We
offer a year round respite to bad weather, we provide a safe and
extremely fun summer camp program to over 400 kids each year. We provide
valuable team development services to numerous schools and businesses across
Vermont and even across the country. We provide physical education
credit to home-school students and we provide for and entertain thousands
of tourists not to mention the thousands of locals that use Petra
Cliffs on a regular basis for an inexpensive family outing. This year,
Burlington residents are being asked to vote for the restoration of the
Moran Plant on the beautiful Burlington Waterfront. The proposal that you
are being asked to approve is, at first blush, one of great interest
to many people: indoor ice-climbing, a children’s museum, a restaurant,
skating rink etc…why would a facility like that ever be a bad thing?
As a matter of fact it sounded great to me too…at first. Let me
explain why I changed my mind and why you should too.Last winter I was approached by Jamie Smith, owner of the Ice Factor
and Chris Bacon, the owner of Northern Lights (who by the way is now
creating an incredible facility in Essex that we at Petra Cliffs are proud
to be a part of). Some would say that Jamie is the mastermind behind
this proposal for the Moran. We sat in Roque’s and had a nice lunch.
During that first meeting I was told that of the intention to rebuild the
Moran Plant and that the vision of that building was to build the
“First Indoor Ice Climbing facility in the United States.” I was told that
the Burlington area is “simply not big enough for two climbing gyms”
and that Petra Cliffs should consider joining in the development of the
Moran Plant…or I’d “just be put out of business”. I thought about the
conversation for a couple days and decided that perhaps it was better
to work collaboratively to create one really great facility that all of
Vermont would be proud of. Over the coming months I sat in on MANY
meetings that addressed quite a number of issues surrounding the
development idea. The most important seemed to be who would pay for what and
how much would it cost the taxpayers. The answer to that question still
has not been clearly articulated.One issue that pressed us as a group of businesses was determining what
sort of partnership would be created between Petra Cliffs, Northern
Lights and Ice Factor. Ultimately this conversation would ruin the
opportunity for us to partner. First, Chris and Northern Lights pulled out
of the deal for reasons having to do with money and who exactly was to
contribute what. I held on for a while longer while we tried to sort
out the relationship. Many ideas where shared but three floated to the
surface, each ended with idea that Petra Cliffs would stay open until
the day before opening day of the Moran Plant and then all of our
members, clients, teams, clinics; really everything we do, would decant to
the Moran and become the basis of Ice Factor’s “start-up” clientele. The
proposed value of Petra Cliffs and the method for determining that
value changed greatly over about 3 months. The most popular suggestions
made by Ice Factor to determine value were:
1) shares in Ice Factor would be based on “turnover”
2) shares were to be based on an average of 5 years profit
3) shares would be based on annual salesIt was ultimately this lack of decision that made me decide that I
could not in good faith support this project any further. I was in
California working in October when it was announced, without absolute
confirmation from me, that Petra Cliffs and Ice Factor would be working on a
“join venture” to develop the Moran Plant. When I got the call from a
friend of mine informing me of the announcement a wave of reality came
rushing over me. I realized that I would never have say in what happened
to the business. Jamie, and his colleague Phil (from Canada) had total
control and it is my opinion that asking to have Petra Cliffs involved
was more of a way to hamstring the competition than to actually have
competitions. You know, keep your friends close and your enemies closer
type of thing.Since day 1 of my conversations with Jamie, I have asked over and over
again “How exactly are we going to pay for this?” and the answer was
always the same: “We’ll charge a premium price for our services.” I
have owned Petra Cliffs for 3 years now and I know first hand the amount
of money people are willing to spend rock climbing, ski mountaineering,
ice climbing or even the possibility of indoor ice-climbing is not
worth $200 for two hours of lessons…nor is $25 a fair value for a day
pass. Who’s to say if the numbers will be this high but the $15 dollars
we charge for an adult day pass is often scoffed at. (We do not have a
seven million dollar note payable at Petra Cliffs, but we do have debt
and I can assure you that it would take me the rest of my life, and
probably my kids lives too to pay that amount of money back). College
kids, family and day visitors, at least those that live locally can not
afford those rates. It is my opinion that it is Jamie’s plan is to take
advantage of the “city money” and capitalize on traveling wealth-rich
tourists from Boston, New York and Toronto. It seems to me that no
matter how many tourists we have visiting Burlington, no matter how much
money they are willing to spend at the Ice Factor, we need to take care of
our community, our kids, and our local businesses first. Another
question I have is about jobs…at no time did it ever come up that my
staff, all of them would be placed in the Ice Factor…as a matter of fact,
I was told on many occasions that Jamie intended to bring many of his
guides and instructors across from Scotland to teach. How will that
help bring jobs to Burlington residents? I also assume that to mean he
felt my staff are not qualified to work in an establishment such as his.I think the idea of the Ice Factor is really neat…I think it will fit
perfectly in Vegas…maybe even in Boston or New York but not
Burlington. As a small business owner in such an “unfriendly to business”
state I personally struggle with the idea that City Hall would throw so
much money at a project that is foreign funded, foreign financed and
entirely foreign owned at the expense of an established locally owned,
family oriented business such as Petra Cliffs. I encourage you to make your
own decisions, research the project and on March 4th, GET OUT THERE AND
VOTE. This vote does not guarantee that the the project will happen
but it does give the Ice Factor a seat at the table and the means to
waste more of the our time wondering how long Petra Cliffs will remain
open for business once the doors to the Moran Plant swing open. This vote
gives the city permission to further investigate the project, spend
more money on the project and, while perhaps unintentional, slowly erode
the stability of my business. I live in Williston so I don’t even get a
vote, but if I did you can bet your bottom dollar that I’d vote NO on
the Moran Plant question and I’d be encouraging everyone I know to do
the same. I’m not asking Jamie to abandon his idea, I’m not asking him
to not build a name for Ice Factor here in the States…I’m just asking
you to not allow it to happen in Burlington.
February 26th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
This was very interesting to read…thanx for posting it Charity. Not being the mountaineering/climbing type, I didn’t even know that there were businesses geared to that kind of thing already in the Burlington area. I also doubt though that a company would come all the way over to VT from Europe to build a business that they didn’t think would suceed. They already built a location basically in the middle of nowhere in Scotland and appear to be doing rather well so far. It’s a shame that the local businesses and Ice Factor couldn’t come to some kind of arrangement though. I still think the Moran redevelopment plan is a good idea.