In a county known for its intense scrutiny of land-use plans, and a certain level of distrust for real estate developers, Chaffin Light Associates have enjoyed a more amicable acceptance than most. In fact, the company's founders, Southerners Jim Chaffin and Jim Light, were welcomed with relatively open arms when they arrived in Snowmass in the late 1970s.

With a resume including resorts and golf clubs all over the country - and developments like the Snowmass Club and the Roaring Fork Club locally - they're also known for being community minded, having helped establish such local institutions as Anderson Ranch Arts Center and the Roaring Fork Conservancy.

More recent ventures include consolidating the three real estate offices they own into Chaffin Light Real Estate, and organizing business seminars, which are offered free to local nonprofits and governments.

Chaffin and Light, along with their partner in the Roaring Fork Club, David Wilhelm, also have their eyes toward the future - and that lies in harnessing the attractions of all three Pitkin County towns into one business venture, a membership club program that includes slopeside accommodations in Aspen and Snowmass Village, and golf club lodging in Basalt.

"We believe that what we're doing is going to replace the way people are buying second homes," said Wilhelm, a commercial real estate developer for 25 years and co-managing partner of Wind Rose, the entity created with Chaffin Light Associates to develop the concept. "The second home is going to be like the rotary phone in the future. Baby boomers are saying loud and clear they want a different model."

3,000 acres

It all started in the fall of 1977, when young Jim Chaffin and Jim Light were cutting their teeth on large-acreage, capital-intensive developments in the south with the Sea Pines Company in Hilton Head, S.C. Both had vacationed in Aspen and Snowmass, and they learned of 3,000 acres for sale in the then 10-year-old Snowmass-at-Aspen resort. At the time, Snowmass' development was confined mainly to the mall area, founding developer Bill Janss' vision of five to seven mini-villages around the mountain was abandoned after his departure.

It was the beginning of a downturn in the economy, nationwide, and the types of projects Chaffin and Light had been doing in the South, in which they needed huge amounts of money for infrastructure and other up-front costs, weren't working so well. Snowmass, on the other hand, already had its water and sewer in place. It had a golf course (built very inexpensively at the time); resort marketing by the Snowmass Resort Association; and, even better, Aspen just down the road.

Pitkin County had downzoned most of the Snowmass area in 1974, reducing the potential density by 75 percent, according to Light. A two-year legal battle ensued between the county and a local landowner, and a compromise emerged from that, but the land was still desirable enough that there was some competition for it. When Chaffin and Light won the bid, they got for $7 million "everything you could see looking up the Brush Creek Valley, including some acres on the mountain, surrounding the original 600 developed acres," said Light.

When the sale closed on April 14, 1978 - nearly 30 years ago - the nascent Chaffin Light Associates had the right to build 1,899 units and were required to dedicate land for 525 employee units. At about the same time, the young resort was being incorporated - becoming the town of Snowmass Village - and town leaders approached Chaffin and Light to annex their land.

Community concepts

That kicked off a largely collaborative process that over the next several years resulted in the development of several single-family and multi-family neighborhoods up Wood Road, the Snowmass Club and some surrounding neighborhoods, the Snowmass Chapel and Community Center, the solidification of Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Real Estate, and a large chunk of the town's employee housing including Creekside and Fairway Three.

"We did all this with virtually no zoning," said Light, adding that his company went through a year of planning to see what the community wanted. He and Chaffin had been instilled with a sense of "community development," he said, in which the local population also benefits from development.

"At an early age we learned fundamentally that we were stewards of the land; careful development we saw was responsible use of the land," he said. "And that distinguishes community development from something like shopping center development."

Early Snowmass leaders remember Chaffin and Light as community-minded developers who also became part of the community, settling in Snowmass with their kids in local schools and wives getting involved in various local causes.

"Our experience with Jim Light was very favorable; he's the only developer I've seen who gives a damn how his project turns out," said Jack Schuss, Snowmass Village's first mayor from 1978-1980. "And every project he does he tries to make a contribution."

Schuss recalls a photo on the front page of the Snowmass Sun of himself, Chaffin, Light and another town official, after coming to some agreement in which the town got $750,000 from the developers, which it used to buy its first fleet of buses.

"We weren't loaded with planning officials; we just thought we were reasonable human beings and (could sit down and say), 'What do you want? What do we want?' Beautiful, isn't it?" said Schuss. "And we wanted a community. We thought we'd allow Jim development rights in exchange for some things we wanted him to do."

Here's the way Light recalls it: "Snowmass at the time knew what they wanted - they wanted affordable housing. So we put a plan forward so there was no money wasted. What we did was very cooperative; we built 55 more units than was required."

The Snowmass Club, with its golf course to attract summer tourists, was originally conceived as a type of community athletic facility and central gathering place for the town's residents. The chapel and community center, the bus system and the affordable housing, were also considered contributions that made Snowmass a real town rather than just a resort.

"(Chaffin and Light) were part of community, not like Intrawest and not like Related," said former mayor and councilman Jeff Tippett, who moved to Snowmass in 1973. "They were two young guys who came here and invested everything. They had guys who put money in but they didn't have $1 billion from Saudi Arabia backing them. It was a much different feel."

But make no mistake about it, Chaffin and Light approached their community work like a business deal. For example, Chaffin's wife Betsy got on the board of the young, struggling Anderson Ranch Arts Center and developed a business plan. The developers gave the organization some seed money, encouraging it to attract other investors, and cut a deal in which the nonprofit would have to perform well financially for three years and then Chaffin and Light would give it the land it sat on (which they owned).

In building 99 employee units at Creekside - a huge amount for Pitkin County at the time - Chaffin and Light sold the land to the town for $1 and guaranteed the construction loan, as the town had no credit at the time.

First base plan

Almost since its inception, Snowmass has felt the lack of a central base area, where most mountain resorts concentrate their development.

"We always used to say (in giving directions), 'Go to the Conoco, and ...'" said Light. "It was hard to know where you were."

So in 1980, Chaffin and Light developed a plan for a base village centered around a tall hotel. It was controversial because it would eliminate a day-skier parking lot, said Light, and neighboring property owners sued over the tall hotel. Another base proposal was eventually approved through the town's land-use process, but Chaffin and Light's main investor, the Bowery Savings Bank, ran into major financial problems and bowed out of a $30 million commitment to the base village in the mid-'80s. That ended the first concrete attempt at creating a base area development.

The FDIC took over Bowery's holdings, which as part of the settlement between the partners included all of the unbuilt land Chaffin and Light had originally bought. CLA retained the Snowmass Real Estate building and business on the mall, the rodeo land, the Conoco parcel and some other miscellaneous assets. Another development group, headed by Norman Perlmutter and Gene Golub, bought the land for $20 million in 1988 and eventually developed the 1,600 acres that is now the Divide, Horse Ranch, Two Creeks and the Pines. They also owned the base village land for a while, but sold it to the Aspen Skiing Co.

For many, that was the end of community-minded development, at least for a while.

"Perlmutter and Golub had no feeling for Snowmass," said Schuss, adding that many people in town were concerned about the emerging trend of high-end, single-family home development under the new landowners.

Light stayed in Snowmass and Chaffin left in 1990 to head up a development in Spring Island, S.C. Throughout the '80s Chaffin and Light had continued to do some resorts in the Southeast, and in the '90s turned their attention in Colorado to downvalley and beyond.

A partnership with Wilhelm led to the development of the Roaring Fork Club, on former ranch land that was annexed into Basalt in the mid-1990s. A development of 48 cabins and 12 suites in a membership club structure, the Roaring Fork Club was at first greeted with skepticism by the town, which shunned Aspen-style, high-end second-home development. But club members are not generally accepted as being an important part of Basalt's seasonal economy, and as part of the approvals Basalt got the nonprofit Roaring Fork Conservancy, some public access to the river, and a place to host events.

In 1999, the company started on the 83-single-family-home Park East project in Glenwood Springs, and in 2000 bought 3,600 acres for 37 single-family homesites on the dead-end side of Telluride where an old mine used to operate.

To the Winds

Throughout this time, Chaffin and Light learned a few tough lessons about development: not to get overextended financially, and how picking bad partners can have widespread negative impacts. In developing the Roaring Fork Club, they learned another valuable lesson.

After pre-selling 25 of the three-bedroom cabins, the developers surveyed the new members and found that the lodging would be used only about one-quarter of the year. So they added a fractional component to the remaining cabins that Light said increased occupancy and thus was an economic benefit to the town. The Roaring Fork Club also allows owner members to stay in other cabins if the one they own is full.

And that's what led to an altogether new idea that Chaffin, Light and Wilhelm are now pursuing, along with other financial partners, under the name 32 Winds.

Taking the fractional concept and stirring it up to become more of a "lodging membership" program, Wind Rose (the partnership developing the 32 Winds program) bought land at the Lift 1A base of Aspen Mountain for a lodge development and is under contract to buy Building 11 in Base Village at Snowmass. (The Aspen land is currently part of a public master planning process for the whole base area.) A proposal to expand the Roaring Fork Club with eight new cabins is currently going through Basalt's land-use process.

The concept, one that's never been done before in the Roaring Fork Valley, is to offer "lodging memberships" to buyers that would give them the option of staying in slopeside accommodation in Aspen or Snowmass, or at the Roaring Fork Club in Basalt. If one lodging option is full, chances are one of the other two would be available. The slopeside lodges will have "lockoff" units so they can be used based on the size of the party that's coming.

Asked why potential buyers would want the option to stay in all three communities when in the past guests have shown loyalty to one town or the other, Wilhelm replied that "70 percent of the people who come to Aspen ski Snowmass. Some people think in the summer that the Roaring Fork Club is most desirable. So you have the ultimate in flexibility relevant to the amenities this valley has to offer and it's all in one package."

Light said the partnership believes the program will achieve much higher occupancy than any of the components on its own, although potential buyers do have the option of buying into just one or all three. The 32 Winds program also includes properties in California wine country and Los Cabos, Mexico.

"The towns of Aspen and Snowmass, they're the big winners because the towns will be more active," said Wilhelm. "They won't have the Red Mountain syndrome where places are empty all the time."

But the Wind Rose partners still have to convince three groups of development-weary town officials that their plan is good for Aspen, Snowmass and Basalt. Plans for Aspen and Snowmass haven't entered the public process yet, and land-use approvals take quite a bit longer now than in the past.

Light and Wilhelm are confident of their prospects, and if all goes well, hope to be underway in Snowmass and Basalt next year, and in Aspen the following year.

Things are quite different now than in the early days of developing 3,000 acres of untouched land, although for Light, it's the evolution of community development.

"We're in the urban renewal business in Aspen and Snowmass," he said.

lutz@aspendailynews.com [1]