With the Trout Creek expansion project nearly complete, I want the Tahoe Donner community to know about some of the extraordinary people who made it happen.
Recently, people have been congratulating me on the expansion’s successful conclusion. They know that I served on the project task force, and that I spent many nights and weekends marshaling information, analyzing data, and writing task force white papers to push the project through the difficult final stages of Board approval.
But those who have been congratulating me don’t always know about the others in our community who made valuable and essential contributions to the project. Those are the people I want to recognize and thank today.
• Courtney Murrell, Task Force Member •
When the first Trout Creek expansion was completed in 2005, right away people saw that it was badly designed. Ten years later, while talking with staff, Courtney found the solution: why couldn’t we just knock down the walls and build out under the existing rooflines? Seeing the value in this approach, she immediately rallied staff and volunteers around this new direction. With different people carrying the baton at different times, planning and approving Trout Creek’s expansion was like a relay race. If I ran anchor, Courtney ran lead. Without her initiative, the project wouldn’t have left the starting block. Courtney’s leadership and vision started it all.
• Kyle Winther, Trout Creek Manager, Task Force Member •
Because the facility offers an extensive array of services, and because the members are so diverse in their needs and preferences, managing Trout Creek is no easy task. But Kyle excels at it. During the project’s planning phase, Kyle was a voice of wise, thoughtful, and perceptive counsel. When Tahoe Donner’s Director of Capital Projects moved out of state, Kyle stepped up to keep the project on track. For the last few weeks, he has been staying late into the night to attend to all the final details. From the beginning of this project to the end, Kyle distinguished himself with his focused commitment to making sure that everything is done just right. Trout Creek is the true workhorse of this community, and we are fortunate to have Kyle at the reins.
• Michael Bledsoe, Task Force Member •
While researching the Trout Creek expansion project, I dove into building and accessibility codes, exercise equipment safety standards, and even a court of appeals case involving gross negligence. Knowing Michael could help me define the precise implications of these technical issues, I showed him what I had found and explained my concerns and questions. A few days later we sat down over coffee and had a long, serious talk. Michael’s perspective was compelling and enlightening. During the course of this project, I had hundreds of conversations about Trout Creek. But only two of those conversations stand out as pivotal because of the insights and clarity they delivered. My conversation that day with Michael is one of them.
• Annie Rosenfeld, TD Director of Risk Management & Real Property •
The other critically important conversation was with Annie, and it changed the course of the entire project. A living encyclopedia of Tahoe Donner history and knowledge, Annie is today one of the most senior members of Tahoe Donner’s executive team. But in 2005, when the facility’s first expansion opened, she was Trout Creek’s manager. I hoped she might shed light on why certain design decisions had been made in 2005. Annie cleared up the history, and then she continued talking, alerting me to a set of issues the task force had not yet identified. If not for the insights from that one conversation with Annie, I do not believe the Trout Creek expansion project would have been approved by the Board.
• Mike Salmon, TD Director of Finance •
I doubt there’s ever been a more data-driven capital project proposal in Tahoe Donner than the Trout Creek expansion project. Mike was the man with all the data, and again and again we asked him for help obtaining the data we needed. He always came through for us. With the information he provided, we analyzed check-in data and usage patterns, sometimes looking at a decade’s worth of numbers. We even built a model to estimate usage patterns that we could not directly measure. These critical analyses would not have been possible without Mike’s help.
• Miah Cottrell, TD Director of Information Technology •
On those rare occasions when Mike didn’t have the data we needed, Miah always saved the day. When we needed a year’s worth of check-in and sales time-stamps to understand peak usage hours, Miah helped us out. When we asked for an enormous, 3-year data set so that we could study member check-ins during peak usage days, Miah custom built a data query to get us exactly what we needed. Using this data, we were able to answer difficult, lingering questions and clear up doubts that had been hanging over the project from the very beginning.
• Miguel Sloane, TD Director of Operations •
I have been told by people who followed the project that the expansion proposal appeared to be dead in the water and destined to sink, until suddenly it sprang back to life with urgency and vigor. There is truth to this perception. When the project revived and began to race toward probable approval, one big obstacle remained. How could we get through construction while maintaining reasonable service levels? Over several weeks, the task force worked with Miguel to write the mitigation plan that became the basis for everything staff did to preserve service levels over the last many months. Without Miguel’s efforts, the project would not have been able to overcome that final obstacle.
• Jon Mitchell, TD Director of Capital Projects •
Though Kyle ably held the fort after Tahoe Donner’s former Director of Capital Projects moved, everyone (and especially Kyle) was relieved when Jon arrived to take over day-to-day project management. From his very first day on the job, Jon impressed. He took charge, got up to speed right away, and immediately got things moving swiftly and smoothly. Grasping at once the big picture and all the little details, Jon proved to be a true professional who gets things done. He wasn’t part of the team that started this project, but I am grateful that Jon is part of the team that will finish it.
• John Stubbs, Task Force Chair •
I saved John for last because he deserves special recognition. As I noted earlier, the deficiencies with the 2005 Trout Creek expansion were apparent right away. When the General Plan Committee convened the first Trout Creek Task Force in 2009, they put John in charge of it. He has remained chair of that effort ever since. When I joined his task force in February 2017, he had already been working on the project for 7 years. For John, the completion of this project is the culmination of a 10 year odyssey. An honorable and admirable man, John cares so much for this community and has given so much to it. To me, he was more than the chair of the Trout Creek Expansion Task Force, he was the true soul of the project. When you walk into the expanded facility, know that you are entering a monument to his endurance and perseverance.
Long ago I learned that it’s difficult, even impossible, to get anything done without friends and comrades. The Trout Creek expansion project was approved and is now nearly complete because so many in this community who believed in a better Tahoe Donner joined together and worked together to make this improvement a reality. I have told some of their stories here, but many more helped in large ways and small, out in public and behind the scenes.
When the expansion opens in a few days, I hope you will remember all the people who made it happen. And if you see them, I hope you will thank them and congratulate them.
That’s what I will be doing.