Hidden impact of second homes
Wed, 02/24/2016 - 8:30pm
News Staff
Will Shoemaker
Editor
Tourism is the Gunnison Valley’s bread and butter, right? Conventional thinking may lead one to think so, but Mike Pelletier begs to differ. Pelletier is the county’s GIS manager, and in the midst of a recent historical mapping project, he stumbled upon a study that turns the notion of tourism being the county’s biggest breadwinner on its head. That study paired with data Pelletier has collected show that the county’s second-home economic driver — if one thinks of it as such — is actually a much bigger contributor to the local economy than any other.
