GLENWOOD SPRINGS — Developers of the proposed base village at Sunlight Mountain Resort are considering their options after the Garfield County Planning and Zoning Commission rejected their plan for a commercial and residential development at the foot of the ski area.
“It’s in the developers’ hands,” Sunlight General Manager Tom Jankovsky said on Thursday. “They haven’t given us any indication one way or the other. We could appeal to the Board of County Commissioners. We could resubmit. Or we could pull the application.”
Developers were planning a base village of 830 residential units on 468 acres. The planned-unit development also included 110,000 square feet of commercial space. Developers had pitched the village as a “luxury development” critical to raising the money needed to revitalize the aging ski area.
“We have to go back and evaluate where we are,” said Mike Dooley, vice president of Sunlight Mountain Development LLC, a division of Florida-based Exquisite Development, said after a meeting that ran late into the night on Wednesday. The company’s purchase depended on Garfield County approving the plan.
The developers appeared in front of the commissioners asking them to rezone the property to a planned unit development. The new zoning would have allowed them to avoid a number of county restrictions. Their plan called for more than doubling county height limits from 25 feet to 58 feet, allowing buildings to take up more space on lots and shrinking the minimum lot size.
Mike McCormick, a principal in the development, said the financial success of the project was “based on density,” but he said financing for the project was not in question.
“We’re hoping to continue forward,” he said.
Sunlight officials have said the new development is critical to bringing in the money to revive the fading family resort, running on aging lifts, limited snowmaking and facilities past their prime. Sunlight board President Richard Schafstall has said the ski area has lost $1 million in the past 11 years while other small resorts in the state have thrived.
“Sunlight’s an aging ski area,” said Sunlight ski area General Manager Tom Jankovsky. “Most of our infrastructure is from the 1960s. We’re a 1980s-type ski area trying to operate in 2008.”
Their plan met with steep opposition from Senior Planner Fred Jarman, who said it failed to provide affordable housing, despite 50 proposed employee apartments, or make adequate improvements to the dilapidated Four Mile Road that leads to the resort, including the so-called Dead Man’s Curve, which winds above Four Mile Creek.
“When you hear the car go into a creek, it’s a sound we’ve all gotten used to, all you can do is hope there’s not another dead one,” said Commissioner Jock Jacober, who lives near the curve and worried more traffic would only heighten the danger. Jacober criticized the project, although he could not vote on it because he missed a previous site visit.
The Glenwood Springs City Council opposed the plan over worries about impacts on city roads.
Project engineer Louis Meyer said details about transportation, transit, water and other concerns would be hammered out later in the development process. He criticized county staff for not expressing their concerns to the developers earlier in the process.
But Jarman told commissioners that those details were too important to leave unsettled before they approve the PUD.
“I’m torn here. I’d love to see Ski Sunlight thrive,” said Commissioner Bob Fullerton, before the commission voted down the plan 5-0.
For some commissioners, the question underlying the project was whether or not it was really a recreational development, as the developers said, or if it was strictly a residential and commercial project that happened to be near a ski area.
Developers said they planned upgraded ski lifts, snowmaking, a new on-mountain restaurant and other facilities, but none of those appeared in the PUD. Many improvements would require Forest Service approval because much of Sunlight is on federal land.
“There’s not a single ski lift in this plan,” Jarman said.
Jankovsky said the upgrades were slated to begin no earlier than the summer of 2010, because of the time needed to gain Forest Service approvals. With or without the development, he said, this winter at Sunlight will be “business as usual.”
dfrey@aspendailynews.com