What did Rusty mean?

Well, it sure sounded like Rusty was gone, gone, gone.

At Wednesday night’s Mammoth Lakes Town Council meeting (for a complete transcript of Mr. Gregory’s remarks, see below), Gregory stated, ”In two or three weeks I’ll be announcing who’s gonna run MMSA next, and Mammoth Mountain will not be run by me.”

The Sheet immediately posted this comment on its Facebook page. In less than 24 hours, it had 10,800 views.

Gregory left the meeting soon thereafter, making no further comment.

According to sources, this is what we know as of Thursday evening:

Rusty Gregory will remain Mammoth Mountain CEO.

The company is in the process of implementing a restructuring plan.

There will be a six-member upper management team at the COO-level.

Two or three of those members will come from the outside (Erik Forsell, the new Chief Marketing Officer, is one of those outsiders).

The top job at this COO-level, and the person who will be considered the Chief Operating Officer of MMSA, will go to an insider who currently works for the company. This person will also oversee June Mountain Ski Area.

Gregory will no longer run day-to-day operations, instead focusing on broader strategic goals.

A memo regarding the restructuring was expected to be sent to employees Thursday evening (and posted at www.thesheetnews.com by the time you read this), and an official announcement of these changes is scheduled for June 19.

Below are Mr. Gregory’s comments transcribed from Wednesday night’s meeting.

So tonight’s a very important night to start listening to others than us. So I’m gonna uncharacteristically stop talking about our well-documented support and the reasons for support for the TBID.

I do want to remind the Council that I made a promise to the Town in November of 2012 that I was gonna get out of the way, and that we were in a very important time in the future and the present of the Town of Mammoth Lakes municipality and the community, and that the things that were gonna be required in the future were different than the things that we comfortably have done in the past, starting with Mammoth Mountain Ski Area.

And so true to that, we’ve made a lot of changes, some of which are public, some of which are not. Howard Pickett, is here tonight, has done a great job as Chief Marketing Officer for Mammoth Mountain Ski Area; he’s going to be with the company for the foreseeable future, because we believe that we need special help to work with the TBID, to coordinate with them, if it passes, so that we can take our marketing effort, fold it into their marketing effort, so that we’re leveraging the benefits.

We made a lot of other changes. In two or three weeks I’ll be announcing who’s gonna run MMSA next, and Mammoth Mountain will not be run by me [Audience applause]. Thank you for that. I appreciate that. And we’re making a lot of changes; organizationally that are difficult to make, because for us to do things in the future, we can’t do the things the same way harder and faster and expect a different result. So it’s not a natural act for us, considering this very new program for the Town.

It’s not a natural act to put up more money at a time when people are very concerned about how expensive things are. We believe that it is the only growth strategy that we can see on the horizon, and we need as a community, on the resort side of our resort community, we need a growth strategy. All the different things we’re talking about earlier tonight; the budgets, the ability of the Town to get back, to provide for police service and town services, that comes primarily from Transient Occupancy Taxes, that comes from people visiting the community. So you’ll see us standing up for things that will add to visitation on a year-round basis, winter and summer. We think the TBID will do that.

So we’ll be quiet. It’s a very important time for you all to listen. But remember that our natural tendency to snap back to what we’ve been doing, what we’re comfortable with, what’s worked in the past, is probably not the right answer for the future. We think that this does represent the growth strategy for the future, and so please look very carefully at it. We’ll do our best to try to comply with the direction that the community wants to go in, once that’s decided here in the next couple of weeks. Thank you very much.