In the middle of the summer, when local businesses are brimming with tourists from open to close, business owners typically expect to have adequate staff for what is their busiest season. Summer 2022 has been different, with several Nederland businesses and organizations suffering debilitating staff shortages.

Ned’s Restaurant on 121 North Jefferson Street recently posted a change to their hours of operation for the week of July 18 due to “staffing issues.” The beloved diner closed at 2 p.m. most days of the week, ending Friday, July 22, and is currently hiring for a server and bartender, a host and busser, and a dishwasher.

Ned’s post on Facebook specifies, “Due to the insanely busy pace of the restaurant, all applicants must be reliable, hardworking, and be able to keep cool under pressure. Competitive wages and great tips! Experience preferred.”

Staffing issues could be a symptom of a bigger problem, like the population influx to the area and the resulting housing market bubble making it extremely difficult for the local workforce to afford living here. Staff shortages could also be a harbinger of the bigger problem of Nederland growing too fast into an identity it isn’t certain of: a town suffering “resort town” problems while refusing to identify as a resort town.

“We have not been able to staff up accordingly since the Covid restrictions have eased,” Front of the House Manager for Salto Jen Turkaly told The Mountain-Ear. “We are constantly advertising to hire for café staff, both front and back of house, and it has been extremely difficult to find qualified people that live near enough to feasibly work in Ned to ease our staffing crunch.”

“We have high retention, we just have a really hard time getting people in the door. I’ve put ads out on Facebook on Craigslist and all over,” Ben Roy, head chef and co-owner of Tres Gringos, told The Mountain-Ear.

“I am so happy with the staff I have now, I am so grateful for them. They’re good at what they do; they show up, they get the job done, they’re awesome. We could use one more…maybe two,” Carrie Bladyka, front of the house manager and co- owner of Tres Gringos, noted.

“But we have scoured the plains up here and we have collected every applicant, Roy continued. “Now I’m off looking for another diamond in the rough and I’m left to take it on the chin because we can’t just not open, we can’t just cut our hours.”

Telluride, and neighbor Silverton, have experienced “out-of-towner” remote workers buying up land as a result of the pandemic, pricing out longtime residents and forcing the local workforce to live out of their campers and cars or to commute up to 100 miles to work. Breckenridge has been experiencing the same issues, as has Crested Butte, who actually halted all tourism marketing in 2021 due to their affordable housing crisis.

Executive Director of the Colorado Association of Ski Towns Margaret Bowes said of the crisis inflicting many of the 40 cities and counties that she serves, “Housing has such far-reaching consequences. It’s impacting the level of service that a mountain town can provide to their guests, and that has the potential to really impact the reputation of that town.”

Resort town communities have turned to developing lease limits and new taxes to stem the tide of the housing crisis. Eagle County, home of Vail, is trying to get ahead of the problem by instituting a loan program for property owners willing to build or renovate property that would be rented to workers at an affordable rate. Breckenridge started a lease-to- locals program in October which has converted up to 55 bedrooms from short term rentals to long term.

“Even before this recent labor shortage happened, labor was short, up here anyway, because there’s a finite amount of people,” Roy noted. “If you’re a restaurant worker you’ve probably worked at every restaurant in town.”

“A lot of people just can’t afford to live up here on the wages that we can afford to pay. They want to be here, they want to work, but they can’t find a place to live,” Roy said.

Without affordable housing the pool of eligible workers in the community becomes shallow, and when combined with a sharp change in American work ethic, or work/life balance, that’s occurred post-pandemic, it’s become increasingly difficult for business owners to find their “diamonds in the rough.” Restaurants and retail businesses have felt this the hardest, with employees wishing for better stability in work hours and pay as well as seeking opportunities in other fields that might feature childcare or remote work-from-home.

“We’re still open full business hours everyday and we rarely run out of anything and that’s because of the hardworking staff that we have. They’re awesome and I couldn’t ask for anything else,” owner of Busey Brews Kyle Busey told The Mountain-Ear. “It’s just learning how new generations think and act and how they are raised, the environment that they’re in and that we’re all in, and trying to get people to adapt. And sometimes that’s the hardest thing; as everything changes there are people who are able to work from home and stuff like that, and so there’s other options that weren’t there before.”

“I think people got a taste of what a better work/life balance was and I sort of can’t blame them for not wanting to come back…in a way,” Bladyka said. “I guess my biggest question is if people aren’t on unemployment anymore then what are you living off of? Where did everybody go?”

Apart from wanting steadier hours and income, employees in the restaurant, retail, and hospitality industries have stated a universal feeling of “being over it.” Being over the stress, being over the chaos, being over the abuse from customers and sometimes employers; being over all the negative facets of working in these chosen industries, most of which have been exacerbated by the pandemic.

For these workers the pandemic just affirmed their feelings of disenfranchisement, as they felt abandoned or too easily cast aside when their work wasn’t considered essential enough by their employers and by the nation. So when restaurants began to reopen, employers saw dwindling numbers in those reapplying for or seeking new employment in the industry.

“As Covid restrictions eased, things started to open back up. People were out and about more and we saw our business volume increase,” Turkaly noted. “However, hiring new staff has been extremely challenging over the last year and we have had to get very creative as to how we run our café operations in order for us to stay open seven days a week.”

“I’ve noticed that ever since quarantine got out people have been out with a vengeance,” Roy mentioned. “The employees have disappeared but now here are all these consumers who are like ‘we are ravenous because we’ve been stuck in our houses for a year.’ ”

“We strive to allow our employees a good work/life balance so that they can be their best at work as well as in their family life. But it has been challenging to find ways to do that and still maintain a business,” Turkaly said. “The pandemic helped us remember that in times of flux we need to be able to look ahead, be able to pivot, and get creative as we continue to strive to serve our community.”

“We do evaluations and happiness surveys every six months and the second question is ‘how is your work/ life balance,’” Busey mentioned when asked on how he strives to maintain a positive work environment. “We’ll talk about any issues and figure out if it’s a scheduling thing, or something else in their personal lives. That’s another thing that I found is really important: making sure that you check in with everybody all the time, because that’s what makes them happy. Then I have less to worry about as far as staffing issues go.”

A 2021 Black Box Intelligence survey indicated that restaurants across the country were operating with 6.2 fewer employees in the back of the house and 2.8 in front of the house compared to pre-pandemic staffing levels.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a 10.1 million increase in reported job openings in July 2021, with food service responsible for a majority of the increase. The resulting “job candidates’ market” has also caused high turnover rates in both limited-service and full-service restaurants. These trends have not stabilized and seem to have worsened in 2022.

“I think the major situation is that of the people that we have access to, or of the labor pool that still exists up here, the quality is minimal at best,” Tim Dumke of Backcountry Pizza told The Mountain-Ear. “I’m not sure if it’s the lack of work ethic that people may have or if they weren’t ever properly trained on how to have a work ethic or had a need to, but that’s definitely the number one thing that’s lacking.”

“People know that they’ve kind of got you in a spot, they know they can half-ass things because there’s nobody else to work,” Roy added.

“Some people don’t really want to adhere to our standards. There’s been a few that we’ve hired who eventually quit within three or four shifts, just no call, no show,” Bladyka mentioned. “We’ve had employees who were chronically one to two hours late.”

“It’s hard enough to just keep your doors open let alone be in a position of ‘hey, stop messing up otherwise you’re out of here’; if they’re truly ‘out of there’ then you may as well close your doors because you won’t have enough employees to stay open,” Dumke said.

Restaurants that try to keep prices “local friendly” do so as a courtesy and because they know that the tourists aren’t going to keep them afloat year round. But restaurant owners are feeling the pressure from supply chain shortages and skyrocketing distributor costs, so much so that keeping their prices low and their employee wages high enough to afford living in Nederland has become more and more difficult.

“That’s one of the biggest struggles is trying to find that balance between staying open the hours you need to in order to make enough money to continue being open and pay your bills without burning out what little staff that you have,” Dumke mentioned. “Because people will get burned out, especially those who have it in them to work.”

“There are some things, like turkey, which are super expensive, but really it’s kind of settled down and we have good relationships with our distributors,” Busey said in regards to facing any heat from supply issues. “There are occasions when we’ll run out of something because maybe it didn’t get here in time, but we really try our best to keep everything that’s on the menu on the menu.”

“We’re getting it from every angle, with the rising gas prices and considering everything comes from all over the country, it goes so deep,” Roy lamented. “The cost of fuel drives everything. Our chicken has more than doubled in price, two and a half times more expensive than when we first started. Avocados have doubled in price. We can’t just pass that along to the customer, nobody is going to buy a $12 taco.”

“Every dollar that we spend on food comes right off our bottom line and everything goes up every week. The percentage at which it’s climbing is unsustainable.”

Part of maintaining great service and affordable prices at our local businesses requires paying fair wages for staff who themselves require affordable housing to be able to live where they work. Without hard- working, dependable local staff, Nederland businesses will continue to shorten their hours of operation and customers will continue to experience raised prices and long wait times. It will become that much harder for small, locally-owned, locally-run businesses to thrive or to even stay open.

“It’s always been a thing in the restaurant business as far as finding those people who really want to work hard for something rewarding. If you build a team of people who want to work hard they will usually help shepherd other people to you who want to work hard,” Busey said. “It’s really just about trying to keep a positive attitude and instill that in everybody that’s here, including the customers and staff. It really goes a long way, I think.”

Editor’s note: To check out a listing of all of the restaurants in the Peak to Peak area, see our “Taste of the Peaks” story at https://www.themtnear.com/articles/peak-to-peak- dining-drinks-and-entertainment/. The story is updated weekly online and quarterly in print.