Dear Editor:
Overwhelming sentiment in Moab and Grand County is that there are already too many tourists and too many overnight accommodations.
I’ve attended meetings held by the city, the county and their consultant, Landmark Design, and listened to neighbors and other residents voice their concerns about the impacts of tourism and the ongoing explosion of hotels and nightly rentals in our community. There is less than three months remaining in the city and county’s temporary moratoriums on new hotel and nightly rentals.
Why allow more nightly rentals and exacerbate the tourism problems that are already unmanageable? No one is arguing that the projects that have been approved, but not yet built, should be denied, but this means that hotels and nightly rentals are guaranteed to grow by an additional 20% very soon. Whoa!
Our community is being consumed by the tourism industry and overnight accommodations. I hope our elected officials at the city and county will listen to the majority of the residents, rather than a handful of developers, and make the right decisions.
We can’t roll back the clock, but we can keep the problem from growing and getting worse. We’re fortunate to live in such a beautiful place with its iconic landscapes. But 3 million visitors already come here annually. That’s enough by any measure. Let’s not do further damage to the goose that laid the golden landscape egg by continuing to build more hotels to accommodate even more tourists. The golden egg is getting tarnished.
Dennis Silva
Moab
