Colorado Real Estate News
Litigation over, Wolf Creek project still isn’t a certainty.
The developer of southwestern Colorado’s proposed Village at Wolf Creek and the owners of the Wolf Creek Ski Area have settled their lawsuit — but that’s no guarantee the village will get built.
The Village at Wolf Creek is planned to be a base village for the ski resort.
Village developer Leavell-McCombs Joint Venture — an Austin, Texas, group whose principals include Bob Honts and San Antonio billionaire B.J. “Red” McCombs — has declined comment on the project’s status. Calls to Honts and McCombs weren’t returned.
Honts told the Pagosa Springs Sun last week, when the lawsuit settlement was announced, that the resolution was amicable, and “that’s all I can say.”
“Nobody knows where it goes from here,” said Hunter Sykes, ski area campaign coordinator for the Colorado Wild environmental group of Durango. “They’ll be starting from scratch, if they go through with it.”
Required approvals for the project, which has been in the works for more than 20 years, range from plat approval by Mineral County to access and utility easements, according to the project’s website. They also include U.S. Corps of Engineers wetlands approvals and road access permits from the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT).
Among entitlements the project already has received are wetlands map approval from the Corps of Engineers and preliminary plat approval from Mineral County.
“They have a way to go before they get to building permits,” said Les Cahill, Mineral County land use administrator. “They’ve got to put in infrastructure first. … It’s raw land at this point.”
The developer also needs to reapply for permission to build the access roads.
Colorado Wild sued the U.S. Forest Service over the possibly detrimental environmental effects, including harming endangered lynx in the area, of access roads through a national forest the service approved for the Leavell-McCombs project. The suit was settled in February, when the Forest Service agreed to conduct an environmental assessment of the roads, which is expected to take 18 months.
http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/2008/06/16/story10.html?b=1213588800^1649990
