Burke's big boom comes with worries
Published: Sunday, February 10, 2008
By Candace Page
Free Press Staff Writer
BURKE -- The town Development Review Board has begun to consider permits for what is described as the largest development ever in northeastern Vermont, a luxury resort likely to transform this corner of the Northeast Kingdom.
The Ginn Co., a Florida developer specializing in private golf courses and the million-dollar houses that surround them, purchased the Burke Mountain ski area in 2005. Over 10 years, it proposes to build 1,024 condominiums and homes, a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course, a spa, shops and restaurants.
"Bridgemor" -- the name is intended to evoke the state's covered bridges -- would more than double the number of people and houses in Burke, a town of 1,700. Skier visits on peak days would quadruple, from 500 to 2,000 or more.
While Ginn's $100 million plans are not out of scale with four-season resort development at other Vermont ski areas, the company's impact is expected to ripple beyond Burke's boundaries into more remote parts of the Northeast Kingdom, the state's most rural corner.
Incomes are modest in this part of Vermont. The population of many towns numbers only in the hundreds, and much of the forested landscape belongs to moose, bear and deer.
To many residents, the prospect of hundreds of million-dollar houses and half-million-dollar condominiums seems as unlikely, and scary, as an invasion of elephants.
"Growth spawns growth. Wealth attracts more wealth. There's widespread concern here about the scale of this development and how it will really change our community," resident Carol Krochak said recently.
Ginn's coming already has begun to change Burke.
Property values around the ski area have zoomed up -- a sign on the Mountain Road last week advertised 4 acres for $370,000. An independent developer just made the first million-dollar condominium sale at the mountain.
Burke has rewritten its town plan. Despite many residents' suspicion of zoning as an infringement on property rights, the town has overhauled its ordinance from top to bottom in an attempt to prevent strip development and commercial sprawl.
Neighboring towns have just begun to try to understand the proposed resort's likely impact on roads, home prices, local schools and their way of life.
Despite local doubts, there is an air of inevitability around Ginn's plans.
That's due in large part to a decision the town made in 1989, when it approved a master plan for a previous owner of the ski area. That master plan allowed 1,700 condominiums and homes.
While those plans never were carried out, Ginn says its new proposal is covered by the old master plan.
For this reason and others, Ginn's plans have not provoked organized opposition.
Many people in the region see the resort as important to their economy. Ginn says the resort will provide 300 good year-round jobs when it is fully built, for example.
The ski area -- which went through four bankruptcies in the 1980s and '90s -- is regarded as a community asset that might be lost unless high-end real estate development is allowed. Some residents also hew to the rural tradition of allowing neighbors to do what they want with their land.
Sam Sanderson, a woodworker and chairman of the Burke Selectboard, a man born in the farmhouse where he still lives, personifies the conflicting emotions.
"It's too big," he said of the Ginn development. "I wish they were gone. I wish there were cows up there -- but you can't put a fence around the town. Free enterprise comes into it."
The company's spending in Burke has flowed as freely as the nearby Passumpsic River: Ginn paid a reported $3 million for the ski area and another $8 million for 1,300 more acres near the ski area.
In one case, Ginn spent $2.5 million for 64 acres on the mountain -- land then valued at just $136,000 on the town tax rolls.
Even Tim McGuire, the Ginn project manager who joined the company after the purchases, shakes his head.
"I said to them -- 'You paid WHAT for that?'" he recounted. "We paid too much."
Ginn paid wind energy developer Matthew Rubin $317,000 to buy veto power over any wind turbines or tall buildings Rubin might want to put on land he owns atop East Haven Mountain, a nearby peak visible from the Ginn development.
Ginn's spending represents almost loose change for a company that sold $1.4 billion worth of real estate in 2004.
Ginn has built and operates resorts in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. It is planning a 4,300-acre development in Colorado with 1,700 homes and a private ski mountain.
In the Bahamas, work has begun on the $4.9 billion GinnSurMer resort with 1,800 homes and 4,400 condominiums. The development's central building, the Palace, was inspired by the castle of Versailles.
"Ginn's whole reputation is as a developer of premier resorts, high-end destinations," McGuire said. The architecture of Bridgemor will reflect New England, but the resort will deliver the same luxury and service as Ginn's Florida properties, he said.
To some, small is beautiful
Burke residents seem unsure whether they want to "dream bigger."
Like many Vermont communities, the town is a mix of people born and raised here, and transplants who came looking for quiet, rural beauty and small-town intimacy.
They live in a picture-postcard landscape: three tiny hamlets separated by north-south ridges and swathes of field and forest.
West Burke is a slightly down-at-the-heels former railway depot; Burke Hollow nestles in the hills, a cluster of white houses and church steeples; East Burke, gateway to the mountain, is a wide spot in the road with a store, small inn, two restaurants, two real estate offices and a gas station
(The town is intimate but not isolated. Bustling Lyndonville is an eight-minute drive south. An Interstate 91 exit lies just seven miles away. )
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, a group of quilters sewed and joked at the community library in East Burke. Up the street, two neighbors greeted one another outside the store, Bailey's and Burke, trading news about their children. Local teens were unloading their skis at the cross-country ski area on Pinkham Road.
Though Bailey's and Burke now sells French Celtic hand-harvest sea salt and organic mayonnaise along with coffee, sandwiches and Tootsie Roll pops, the small ski area -- perhaps because of its modest size -- has not greatly changed community life.
"There's such an egalitarian feel to this place," said Joan Harlow, a former program director at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She has been visiting since the 1960s and has lived year-round since 1995 in a weathered farmhouse above East Burke.
"You wouldn't know the guy up the road won a Nobel prize or the woman down the road the other way was a well-known author. People work together," she said.
"The kind of people who buy in a Ginn development have third and fourth homes. They are looking for luxury. Tim McGuire has called it a 'grand resort.' That's a different lifestyle than the people here," she said.
In a town where modest homes sell for $250,000 or less, Bridgemor's condominiums would cost $400,000 to $500,000, McGuire said.
No price has been set for the 200 single-family home lots, but at other Ginn developments, house lots sell for $300,000 or more before the houses are built. In one Ginn North Carolina resort, a 2.3-acre lot was on the market last week for $695,000.
A 'little Woodstock'?
Chick Gagnon, 61, drives heavy equipment at a sand and gravel company and lives in a log cabin he built himself. He has "no problem" with the Ginn development.
In the next breath he says, "I think they should downsize it" and mourns the changes in town that Ginn will accelerate, from stoplights to condominiums dotting the hillsides.
"We made this place and now we won't be able to afford to live here," he said over an end-of-the-day Budweiser. "When I first came, everybody used to be so friendly. Now they snub you like, 'What are you doing here?'"
Lorraine Willy runs the Village Inn bed-and-breakfast in East Burke with her husband, George. Ginn might bring them more business, but that doesn't outweigh her dislike of the company's proposal.
"It's too big. It's too gaudy. It looks like Florida with a gazillion condos. I'm afraid they won't keep that Vermont feel," she said.
"What protection do we have for us and our quality of life?" she asked.
Not everyone has doubts. Annette Dalley, a real estate agent in East Burke, says Ginn as brought a "renewed sense of hope" to the town.
"People want the village to stay the same, but they're happy to have growth on the mountain," she said. (Her husband, Rob, put in: "We need our tranquillity. We don't want to be a little Woodstock.")
George Hayes, a retired lawyer who skis three to five days a week, sees Ginn as the mountain's savior.
"I know enough to know Burke Mountain can't stand alone as a ski area," he said. The new owners, with their deep pockets and past success at real estate development, give him confidence the place he has skied for 42 years will stay in business.
What's next
Ginn has another supporter -- the Northeastern Vermont Development Association, the region's planning and development agency.
"NVDA is delighted at the prospect of growing a traditional sector of our economy," the agency wrote recently.
At the same time, the agency said, "we anticipate there will be tremendous impacts on local infrastructure, the housing market and land-use patterns."
NVDA has launched a $50,000 impact study with Burke and six neighboring towns to assess Ginn's likely impact and recommend ways to lessen or guide the effects. Three of the towns -- East Haven (pop. 303), Victory (pop. 97) and Newark (pop. 470) -- have no zoning ordinances.
Meanwhile, Ginn is seeking approval from the Burke Development Review Board for its sketch plan -- a general layout of the golf course and housing sites. Included is a four-to-five story condominium hotel that would perch on what is now a mid-mountain parking lot with a 180-degree view of the Northeast Kingdom. The buildings themselves have not been designed, McGuire said.
"There's still a long way to go" before Ginn's development is approved, said Sara Romero, the board's vice chairwoman.
While many townspeople wish the development could be scaled down, Romero said it's too early to tell whether the board could, or would, require that.
"This is the first time we've ever done anything like this," she said. "We are learning all the time."
Contact Candace Page at 660-1865 or cpage@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com
Published: Sunday, February 10, 2008
By Candace Page
Free Press Staff Writer
BURKE -- The town Development Review Board has begun to consider permits for what is described as the largest development ever in northeastern Vermont, a luxury resort likely to transform this corner of the Northeast Kingdom.
The Ginn Co., a Florida developer specializing in private golf courses and the million-dollar houses that surround them, purchased the Burke Mountain ski area in 2005. Over 10 years, it proposes to build 1,024 condominiums and homes, a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course, a spa, shops and restaurants.
"Bridgemor" -- the name is intended to evoke the state's covered bridges -- would more than double the number of people and houses in Burke, a town of 1,700. Skier visits on peak days would quadruple, from 500 to 2,000 or more.
While Ginn's $100 million plans are not out of scale with four-season resort development at other Vermont ski areas, the company's impact is expected to ripple beyond Burke's boundaries into more remote parts of the Northeast Kingdom, the state's most rural corner.
Incomes are modest in this part of Vermont. The population of many towns numbers only in the hundreds, and much of the forested landscape belongs to moose, bear and deer.
To many residents, the prospect of hundreds of million-dollar houses and half-million-dollar condominiums seems as unlikely, and scary, as an invasion of elephants.
"Growth spawns growth. Wealth attracts more wealth. There's widespread concern here about the scale of this development and how it will really change our community," resident Carol Krochak said recently.
Ginn's coming already has begun to change Burke.
Property values around the ski area have zoomed up -- a sign on the Mountain Road last week advertised 4 acres for $370,000. An independent developer just made the first million-dollar condominium sale at the mountain.
Burke has rewritten its town plan. Despite many residents' suspicion of zoning as an infringement on property rights, the town has overhauled its ordinance from top to bottom in an attempt to prevent strip development and commercial sprawl.
Neighboring towns have just begun to try to understand the proposed resort's likely impact on roads, home prices, local schools and their way of life.
Despite local doubts, there is an air of inevitability around Ginn's plans.
That's due in large part to a decision the town made in 1989, when it approved a master plan for a previous owner of the ski area. That master plan allowed 1,700 condominiums and homes.
While those plans never were carried out, Ginn says its new proposal is covered by the old master plan.
For this reason and others, Ginn's plans have not provoked organized opposition.
Many people in the region see the resort as important to their economy. Ginn says the resort will provide 300 good year-round jobs when it is fully built, for example.
The ski area -- which went through four bankruptcies in the 1980s and '90s -- is regarded as a community asset that might be lost unless high-end real estate development is allowed. Some residents also hew to the rural tradition of allowing neighbors to do what they want with their land.
Sam Sanderson, a woodworker and chairman of the Burke Selectboard, a man born in the farmhouse where he still lives, personifies the conflicting emotions.
"It's too big," he said of the Ginn development. "I wish they were gone. I wish there were cows up there -- but you can't put a fence around the town. Free enterprise comes into it."
The company's spending in Burke has flowed as freely as the nearby Passumpsic River: Ginn paid a reported $3 million for the ski area and another $8 million for 1,300 more acres near the ski area.
In one case, Ginn spent $2.5 million for 64 acres on the mountain -- land then valued at just $136,000 on the town tax rolls.
Even Tim McGuire, the Ginn project manager who joined the company after the purchases, shakes his head.
"I said to them -- 'You paid WHAT for that?'" he recounted. "We paid too much."
Ginn paid wind energy developer Matthew Rubin $317,000 to buy veto power over any wind turbines or tall buildings Rubin might want to put on land he owns atop East Haven Mountain, a nearby peak visible from the Ginn development.
Ginn's spending represents almost loose change for a company that sold $1.4 billion worth of real estate in 2004.
Ginn has built and operates resorts in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. It is planning a 4,300-acre development in Colorado with 1,700 homes and a private ski mountain.
In the Bahamas, work has begun on the $4.9 billion GinnSurMer resort with 1,800 homes and 4,400 condominiums. The development's central building, the Palace, was inspired by the castle of Versailles.
"Ginn's whole reputation is as a developer of premier resorts, high-end destinations," McGuire said. The architecture of Bridgemor will reflect New England, but the resort will deliver the same luxury and service as Ginn's Florida properties, he said.
To some, small is beautiful
Burke residents seem unsure whether they want to "dream bigger."
Like many Vermont communities, the town is a mix of people born and raised here, and transplants who came looking for quiet, rural beauty and small-town intimacy.
They live in a picture-postcard landscape: three tiny hamlets separated by north-south ridges and swathes of field and forest.
West Burke is a slightly down-at-the-heels former railway depot; Burke Hollow nestles in the hills, a cluster of white houses and church steeples; East Burke, gateway to the mountain, is a wide spot in the road with a store, small inn, two restaurants, two real estate offices and a gas station
(The town is intimate but not isolated. Bustling Lyndonville is an eight-minute drive south. An Interstate 91 exit lies just seven miles away. )
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, a group of quilters sewed and joked at the community library in East Burke. Up the street, two neighbors greeted one another outside the store, Bailey's and Burke, trading news about their children. Local teens were unloading their skis at the cross-country ski area on Pinkham Road.
Though Bailey's and Burke now sells French Celtic hand-harvest sea salt and organic mayonnaise along with coffee, sandwiches and Tootsie Roll pops, the small ski area -- perhaps because of its modest size -- has not greatly changed community life.
"There's such an egalitarian feel to this place," said Joan Harlow, a former program director at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She has been visiting since the 1960s and has lived year-round since 1995 in a weathered farmhouse above East Burke.
"You wouldn't know the guy up the road won a Nobel prize or the woman down the road the other way was a well-known author. People work together," she said.
"The kind of people who buy in a Ginn development have third and fourth homes. They are looking for luxury. Tim McGuire has called it a 'grand resort.' That's a different lifestyle than the people here," she said.
In a town where modest homes sell for $250,000 or less, Bridgemor's condominiums would cost $400,000 to $500,000, McGuire said.
No price has been set for the 200 single-family home lots, but at other Ginn developments, house lots sell for $300,000 or more before the houses are built. In one Ginn North Carolina resort, a 2.3-acre lot was on the market last week for $695,000.
A 'little Woodstock'?
Chick Gagnon, 61, drives heavy equipment at a sand and gravel company and lives in a log cabin he built himself. He has "no problem" with the Ginn development.
In the next breath he says, "I think they should downsize it" and mourns the changes in town that Ginn will accelerate, from stoplights to condominiums dotting the hillsides.
"We made this place and now we won't be able to afford to live here," he said over an end-of-the-day Budweiser. "When I first came, everybody used to be so friendly. Now they snub you like, 'What are you doing here?'"
Lorraine Willy runs the Village Inn bed-and-breakfast in East Burke with her husband, George. Ginn might bring them more business, but that doesn't outweigh her dislike of the company's proposal.
"It's too big. It's too gaudy. It looks like Florida with a gazillion condos. I'm afraid they won't keep that Vermont feel," she said.
"What protection do we have for us and our quality of life?" she asked.
Not everyone has doubts. Annette Dalley, a real estate agent in East Burke, says Ginn as brought a "renewed sense of hope" to the town.
"People want the village to stay the same, but they're happy to have growth on the mountain," she said. (Her husband, Rob, put in: "We need our tranquillity. We don't want to be a little Woodstock.")
George Hayes, a retired lawyer who skis three to five days a week, sees Ginn as the mountain's savior.
"I know enough to know Burke Mountain can't stand alone as a ski area," he said. The new owners, with their deep pockets and past success at real estate development, give him confidence the place he has skied for 42 years will stay in business.
What's next
Ginn has another supporter -- the Northeastern Vermont Development Association, the region's planning and development agency.
"NVDA is delighted at the prospect of growing a traditional sector of our economy," the agency wrote recently.
At the same time, the agency said, "we anticipate there will be tremendous impacts on local infrastructure, the housing market and land-use patterns."
NVDA has launched a $50,000 impact study with Burke and six neighboring towns to assess Ginn's likely impact and recommend ways to lessen or guide the effects. Three of the towns -- East Haven (pop. 303), Victory (pop. 97) and Newark (pop. 470) -- have no zoning ordinances.
Meanwhile, Ginn is seeking approval from the Burke Development Review Board for its sketch plan -- a general layout of the golf course and housing sites. Included is a four-to-five story condominium hotel that would perch on what is now a mid-mountain parking lot with a 180-degree view of the Northeast Kingdom. The buildings themselves have not been designed, McGuire said.
"There's still a long way to go" before Ginn's development is approved, said Sara Romero, the board's vice chairwoman.
While many townspeople wish the development could be scaled down, Romero said it's too early to tell whether the board could, or would, require that.
"This is the first time we've ever done anything like this," she said. "We are learning all the time."
Contact Candace Page at 660-1865 or cpage@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com