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Should Vail Resorts be ‘held to’ Ever Vail parking, housing deals in wake of lawsuit agreement?
Part of the proposed West Lionshead property in Vail (David O. Williams photo).
Editor’s note: A version of this story first appeared in the Colorado Springs Gazette. The Vail Town Council will consider a resolution to amend the Lionshead Redevelopment Master Plan tonight (Tuesday, Aug. 19) at 6:10 p.m.
It wasn’t long after Rob Katz first took the helm of Vail Resorts in 2006 that the CEO started talking about Ever Vail, a green-built ski village he envisioned as Vail’s third ski portal west of Lionshead Village that would make the ski company an “icon of sustainability.”
“That it isn’t just about building another condo,” Katz told the Vail Daily in March of 2007. “It brings something new and extra to the valley.”
Besides a third gondola onto Vail Mountain, the project was seen as a way to deal with many of Vail’s persistent parking and employee housing shortages and a means of getting skier parking off the state-owned frontage roads that parallel Interstate 70 through town.
Over the course of more than 80 public meetings, Ever Vail was finally approved in 2012 after the worst impacts of the 2008 housing collapse subsided. But those approvals would ultimately lapse in 2018, earning the visionary project the derisive title of “Never Vail”.
During heated negotiations between the town and ski company over Vail Resorts’ Booth Heights housing project in East Vail in 2022, then Vail Mayor Kim Langmaid told the Vail Daily the ski company “could build housing closer to workers’ jobs by using some of the property once intended for Ever Vail.”
Vail Resorts’ Booth Heights property in East Vail, first approved by the town council to provide 165 employees with affordable housing and then condemned by a later council to preserve bighorn-sheep habitat, wound up entangling the town and ski company in nasty litigation that was ultimately settled last year with an agreement to develop the former Ever Vail property.
Since then, the town, Vail Resorts and East West Partners – developer of Union Station and Cherry Creek West in Denver and many resort areas nationally – have been holding public “discovery” sessions and working to redo Vail’s Lionshead Redevelopment Master Plan to accommodate a new version of Ever Vail called West Lionshead.
But during that process, Vail Resorts, which received $17.5 million from the town for the Booth Heights property, has not committed to building any badly needed community housing in Vail. While it leases and owns employee units throughout Eagle County, the first and only workforce units the company has built in Vail were the 124 beds of First Chair back in 2011 – an obligation for the Arrabelle Hotel near the Eagle Bahn Gondola in Lionshead.
The town, meanwhile, has been spending taxpayer money to build and deed restrict 1,000 affordable housing units by 2027, although it’s currently 150 units below that target with no new units on the books. Since 2020, the town has spent or committed $254 million to new housing and $12.8 million to deed restricting 177 existing units through its innovative Vail InDeed program starting in 2017. Some of that money will come back via rentals and bond proceeds.
Dick Cleveland, who was mayor during much of the Ever Vail public vetting process but not when it was finally approved in 2012, said he attended some of the discovery meetings and found no hard numbers on housing and parking in the concept plans for West Lionshead.
“Meeting the minimum standards is not adequate, especially when it comes to housing,” Cleveland said in a phone interview. “[Vail Resorts] should be building housing, especially for their own employees. Unfortunately, the town has a history of making deals and then letting them out or ignoring them. Everybody is happy to let the taxpayers pay for it rather than themselves while they generate significant revenue for themselves as developers.”
Asked at a press event promoting the town’s Timber Ridge project about the post-litigation relationship between the town and Broomfield-based Vail Resorts, which owns or operates 42 ski resorts globally, Vail Mayor Travis Coggin was optimistic about the town’s new partnership with the transnational conglomerate named for the place he grew up in.
“Our relationship’s improving,” Coggin said. “I was excited when we were able to put Booth Heights behind us. I’m excited that they’re moving forward on West Lionshead. They will get to where they need to be with their employee housing. Hopefully, they’ll see it as more of an asset and we can be aligned more. But I am not going to tell them how to run their business.”
After a four-year hiatus serving as executive chairperson, Katz – the inventor of the wildly successful, multi-resort Epic Pass – resumed his position as CEO in May. The ski company and its partners in West Lionshead have been portraying the master plan that was amended for Ever Vail as being “in error”, “overly prescriptive” and too “code-like”. One advisory commission has already recommended the town council approve sweeping changes to the Lionshead master plan.
A Vail Resorts spokesperson declined to comment on whether the company will direct any of the $17.5 million it was paid by the town in the Booth Heights settlement toward housing or parking at West Lionshead, or whether there was a verbal agreement beyond the official settlement agreement on the amount of workforce housing or public parking at West Lionshead.
East West Partners’ officials involved in the concept plan did not return multiple emails seeking comment despite being listed in an official town press release on the project as a contact. Besides a new gondola onto Vail Mountain, the 12-acre West Lionshead parcel – at least conceptually — would include a 120-room hotel, for-sale residential units, employee housing, an 8,500 square-foot event center, a transit center and some amount of commercial space.
Vail town code mandates at least 50% of a major new development’s employees must be housed on site, while the other 50% must be housed within the town of Vail. The original Ever Vail project would have housed 67% of the necessary workers on site.
Former Vail Mayor Langmaid, whose council unwound the ski company’s Booth Heights housing project in favor of a bighorn sheep preserve – while also offering Vail Resorts an alternative location – said West Lionshead must maximize community benefits.
“We need more [locals’ housing], and the time to emphasize and prioritize the community side of being a resort community has arrived,” Langmaid said. “It is here. We are in it. And we need to fully commit to rebuilding and building our community so that we do have future generations of children in our schools and serving in our committees and being members of our community.”
As for public parking, the “no net loss” of 400 spaces displaced by other Vail Resorts’ projects in Lionshead — plus what was anticipated for employees – was written into the Lionshead Redevelopment Master Plan prior to Ever Vail’s approval. But as many as 1,500 spaces total were planned, as well as ski-school drop-off, a park area and a youth recreational facility.
Times have changed, along with community priorities, the developers now argue, but former Mayor Cleveland isn’t buying the potential reduction in housing and parking.
“We still need the parking today,” Cleveland said. “I don’t care how much you talk about reducing people [parking] and getting them to use alternate forms of transportation. The fact is, we still have a parking shortage on certain days of the year. Vail Resorts had made a commitment when they got significant concessions from the town to provide parking and no net loss and to increase it. They ought to be held to it.”
East West Partners managing partner Jim Telling, at an Aug. 5 town council meeting on the project, indicated much of the spending on public improvements for the lift-served hotel and real estate development will go toward roads, parking and other infrastructure as the company seeks public funding in the form of tax-increment financing.
“East West has] done just a high-level summary of what we think potential public improvements might be and they’re in the hundred-million-dollar realm, which is parking, the pedestrian mall, and the relocation of the frontage road is obviously the biggest one,” Telling told the council.
Former Vail Town Council member and realtor Mark Gordon said the developers of West Lionshead “just want to solve enough problems to get their building permit, but the town has the opportunity to actually solve real, existing problems and mistakes in the way that ski areas have been developed over the last bunch of years.
“I hope that a town that had the spine and fortitude to save a non-endangered herd of sheep will have the same or more fortitude and boldness to make sure that our last opportunity of a new base area is actually something all of us can be proud of,” Gordon added.
Following amendment to the master plan, the process of rezoning some parcels and seeking public financing options for West Lionshead is expected to take up the rest of this year and stretch into early next year before an actual development plan with hard numbers on public parking and workforce housing is filed. Simultaneously, four town council seats will be decided in November.
The West Lionshead map provided by the development partners.
David O. Williams
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