If you are wiped out on a ski run at Park City looking down at your broken leg — or worse, your child’s — do you want to cross your fingers that a trained doctor happens to ski by and help you?Or would you rather have experienced, trained, professional ski patrollers respond to you immediately?I think we all would prefer that a member of the Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association be there for us.These patrollers show up no matter what the weather and snow conditions to help stabilize the injured and get them safely off the mountain. I doubt that any of us in the above scenario would be grateful that they are the cheapest patrollers Vail Resorts’ money could buy.Yet that seems to be what Park City’s corporate ownership wants for us guests and customers, given the ongoing labor dispute with the ski patrol union that’s been covered by this publication.As we all know, you get what you pay for.As a recently retired Detroit-area police officer, I worked my 25 years in public safety as part of a union. Through my union, we were able to negotiate a good living wage, health care for our families and compensation for work-related injuries. The union also protected us from any unfair labor practices by the municipality.The community we served expected us to be well-trained professionals, and our union fought for us to be paid for that.Ski patrollers are not much different than the public safety officers I had the pleasure of working with over the years. Sure, sometimes someone we encountered in our jobs would ask, “Just what do you cops do all day? Just drive around and eat doughnuts?” Well, cops spend a lot of our time creating a safe environment for you so that you never need our help.  But in the unfortunate times you do need our help, we can show up and save you in a number of situations ranging from the dangerous to the ridiculous to the sad.I see ski patrollers acting much the same. For those of us lucky enough to be skiing and snowboarding here, they create a safe environment through avalanche control, out-of-bounds markings, obstacle awareness and mitigating bad on slope behavior by skiers and boarders not following the rules. A few weeks ago, as my wife contemplated how to pick up a sizable rock that had rolled onto Home Run and into the way of holiday beginners, a friendly patroller stopped to remove it, chatting and smiling while he made the place a little safer.And most importantly in their work, if you need medical attention, the patrollers are there to help and potentially save lives.Right now, thanks to Vail’s stinginess with pay and disregard for employees, these patrollers are there for $21 an hour. That’s barely more than jobs in restaurants and retail stores that require no college education. They are only asking for a raise to $23 an hour.So to put it in Vail terms, the $2-an-hour raise times eight hours a day is $16. That’s less than the price of the bowl of chili and a beer I enjoyed on the mountain last week.I urge you to support the patrollers who work hard day in and day out, in any conditions so that you have a safe on-mountain experience and who provide quick professional life-saving care if you or a loved one unfortunately need it.It is shameful to me that Vail wants to provide us, the customers, with the cheapest possible version of that service.Brent RossGrosse Pointe, MichiganThe post Shame on resort appeared first on Park Record.