News

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The Four Seasons, a luxury hotel company with more than 100 locations worldwide, including Denver and Vail, is coming to Mountain Village.

With a building permit finalized in late September, the billion-dollar project in cooperation with Merrimac Ventures is slated to finish by 2028. The resort will have two restaurants, 52 hotel rooms, 40 hotel residences and 28 private residences, selling for $4 million to $40 million.

The project represents another step toward the “world-class” vision of Mountain Village, a vision rooted in Ron Allred, a founder of the Telluride Ski Resort.

But neighboring communities aren’t convinced. They’re sounding the alarm and asking how the development will impact housing, infrastructure and the local workforce.

Over the past year, Merrimac Ventures, co-developer with Four Seasons, purchased the Rimrocker Hotel in Naturita and obtained a four-year master lease of the MTN Lodge hotel in Ridgway for workforce housing.

Aimee Tooker, a West End resident who owns a bed and breakfast in Nucla, said losing the Rimrocker is a blow to lodging tax income.

“I believe that the businesses need to prepare themselves for what’s coming,” Tooker said. “I don’t think that they understand the implication. I’m already seeing a lot of phone calls because the hotel is turning people away, you know, for hunting season, things like that.”

Tooker said the Rimrocker was essential to West End lodging capacity, hosting everyone from highway workers to elk hunters. The increase in temporary workers for the Four Seasons, she said, will be hard to absorb.

“There is no sustainable way. We can’t, we can’t sustain any of it with our food,” Tooker said. “The grocery store is already, you know, overburdened with people because, you know, Nucla doesn’t have one, so it’s Naturita only. So our grocery store already has empty shelves, you know, and it’s just going to be, you know, quadruple worse.”

The Four Seasons project will include 10 deed-restricted employee apartments and a public benefits package for Mountain Village, including $2.5 million toward housing mitigation efforts and improvements in the Plaza areas.

For Norwood Mayor Candy Meehan, those benefits should extend beyond Mountain Village.

“A healthy West End means a thriving East End, and you can’t truly have one without the other,” Meehan said. “With that being said, there’s a stakeholders group that we’ve got together talking about the agencies and the organizations that are directly impacted. Nucla’s got one gas station. Norwood’s got one little grocery store. We’ve got kids in our school system that we’re concerned about too. What do all these things look like? So, you know, it’s an opportunity for bigger and deeper conversations, and hopefully the town of Mountain Village can understand the true depth of the ask that they’re putting on the West End.”

Meehan said she believes there is room to work together. With hundreds of construction workers expected to live temporarily in the West End, her main fear is water availability.

In July, West End stakeholders sent a letter to Merrimac Ventures and the Town of Mountain Village outlining impacts to their communities and requesting collaboration on a community benefits package to help “mitigate the inevitable impacts of supporting the workforce that our communities will be hosting.”

The Telluride Foundation, a nonprofit that has supported West End communities for 20 years, has also entered the conversation.

“I think we have a very unique moment in time to help bridge the gap of a developer who is building a massive project in Mountain Village, but is using these communities in a temporary basis,” said Jason Corzine, president of the Telluride Foundation. “There will be real impacts of adding that amount of people, driving up the needs and again, tapping already a pretty limited resource base in those communities.”

While Merrimac Ventures declined an interview request, a West End stakeholders meeting with the developer is planned for early October.

Mountain Village Town Manager Paul Wisor commended the developer for making efforts to mitigate workforce impacts.

“I think that in a lot of cases, what I’ve seen in other regions is that with projects like this, you will have a developer come in, and the workers will be the responsibility of subcontractors, and there is no coordination in terms of how those workers are being housed,” Wisor said. “And so the developer here, in this case, is actually thinking about those things up front and trying to think about housing in a responsible and organized fashion.”

Wisor said the project is expected to create 150 to 200 jobs, with a “waterfall” effect of benefits for local businesses in Mountain Village.

Brian O’Neill, one of two real estate salespeople for the project, said they plan to prioritize local hiring.

“Why not hire people who are already here and have housing and give them an opportunity to have a job with a world-class company that will have some very nice benefits?” O’Neill said.

The Four Seasons is consistently listed among the top 100 companies to work for. Wisor said this project represents another step toward building a world-class community.

“We continue to work as hard as we possibly can to do all those projects with open ears and open eyes and an open mind so that we can listen to the concerns of the region as a whole while trying to continue to build what is a world-class community,” Wisor said.

Construction activity on the Four Seasons project began Sept. 29 and is scheduled to last three years.

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