Nederland residents push back on Eldora sale at town meeting
Nederland’s plan to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars to buy Eldora ski area drew sharp criticism from residents Tuesday, with speakers warning the deal could put the small mountain town’s finances at risk.
“I ask you to please be honest with the fact that you’ve put a $2.5 million bet on a roulette wheel,” resident Dallas Masters told trustees Tuesday night during public comment. “The end result, if we don’t actually do this deal, is potentially a $1.9 million deficit in the general fund.
“This is unprecedented for a town this size. You’re putting many things at risk.”
About a dozen residents urged trustees to abandon the acquisition, arguing the risky deal would divert money and attention from the town’s core responsibilities.
The town’s board of trustees continued to defend the yearslong effort, saying they have information they cannot yet share publicly and arguing that abandoning the deal now could squander the $2.5 million the town has already invested.
“I can’t blame you all for feeling highly distrustful of us,” Billy Giblin, a trustee, said. “Having to operate in the dark has not been something that I’ve enjoyed or I don’t think any of us have enjoyed. It doesn’t feel right and it has to be the way we’ve had to operate because we want this to succeed.”
Giblin said the town’s leaders know more about the deal than they can disclose and that the town would recoup its investment if the acquisition goes through.
“But I think to just pull the plug on this or end it now is really to just flush that $2.5 million down the toilet,” he said.
The town of 1,500 is coming up on the two-year mark in its effort to buy the Boulder County ski area from resort operator Powdr. Yet its ability to finance the $120 million purchase — plus more than $100 million for capital projects and reserves — has drawn scrutiny from lenders.
The initial plan was to establish an enterprise fund — essentially a government-run business — with revenues from the ski area paying down the debt. The Nederland board of trustees in January approved a $120 million purchase and as much as $225 million in bonded debt.
But the town’s plan to borrow more than $200 million to buy Eldora is faltering as interest rates climb and prospective creditors question its ability to handle the debt burden.
On Sept. 30, Nederland Mayor Nichole Sterling said one of the biggest challenges the town was working to resolve was giving bond investors confidence that the bonds will be repaid, and to prove its viability, the town was asking for $20 million in donations.
But after using artificial intelligence to comb through all of the details related to the sale from its inception, Masters, a former Nederland trustee and aerospace engineer who said he uses AI tools and open source AI in his work on a daily basis, said based on his findings, that reassurance can’t be made.
A Nederland resident is scrutinizing the deal
Masters began looking into the acquisition in detail “because you’re talking about buying a $120 million resort, a very complex business enterprise, and the town has a budget of only $3 million and limited staff,” he said in an interview with The Colorado Sun on Tuesday.
Over time, he grew worried about how much the town would run up in bills just trying to get through the due diligence process, and although trustees told him last year his fears were well founded, he said, they also told him the costs would be rolled into the bond, which raised another “nagging issue” for him.
But it was Sterling’s comments Sept. 30 that made Masters start his deep dive into the acquisition using Claude by Anthropic to gather information. Based on his questions, Claude created a database of 50,000 pages of documents all tied to the deal and all traceable on a webpage Masters built: eldorarecord.org.
The gist, Masters said, is that the town has already spent $1.2 million in acquisition fees and estimates it will pay another $1.3 million if it doesn’t proceed with the deal.
That could create major problems for the town in the coming year, he said, if it ends 2026 with a $1.9 million deficit in its general fund. And the more he reviews Claude’s findings, he said, the more he believes there’s only a 5% chance the sale will go through. So he believes the town should back out of the deal now and reserve $100,000 to potentially pay a financial adviser to help them figure out how to deal with the coming deficit.
He also wanted to understand what the trustees knew as they proceeded with the acquisition: “How did we get in this situation? Did the trustees not understand the financial risk of basically spending all this money and not understanding that if it didn’t go through, that it would hit the town’s books? I found very little evidence that the trustees understood that, and very little evidence that the town manager and the town attorney ever really broached that subject objectively with the board.”
“And the big issue is really the town board, whose probably first responsibility is the financial health of the town, failed to pay attention, failed to comprehend the risk that they were putting the town under by expending all this money for the acquisition, and not planning for what happens if the acquisition doesn’t go through,” he said.
Masters is asking the board of trustees at its Nov. 5 meeting to adopt a resolution he drafted that would halt further Eldora acquisition spending, require a final accounting of what the town owes, and require a board vote for any new engagement or further spending.
Sterling said in an email Wednesday to The Sun that the town is a part of several confidentiality agreements, including with Powdr and Alterra, that limit what the town can share about the transaction, but will continue to share “when permitted to do so.”
If the sale happens, the plan is for Powdr to manage the ski area for two years before the town takes over operations. The town has said it is working with the Forest Service on a new special-use permit to operate the ski area on federal land. Alterra Mountain Co. pays Powdr an undisclosed fee for every visit by an Ikon passholder.
She acknowleged the challenge in gaining residents’ trust with the agreements in place, but said the town planned to discuss how it will address any potential shortfalls at the November meeting.
In response to Masters compiling his own set of records, she said: “Keep it up, Dallas.”
“I believe you’re selling this town to private investors”
Some residents said during Tuesday’s meeting that the acquisition would distract trustees from their primary responsibility: serving Nederland’s residents.
Barbara Davis, a Nederland resident and former mayor of the town of Dillon, urged trustees to call off the deal immediately and move on. Drawing on her experience in local government and corporate positions, she questioned whether trustees could effectively manage both the town and a ski resort.
“I elected you, all of you sitting here, to run the town and be stewards of our town,” Davis said. “And quite frankly, I’m not sure you are.”
Kristen Conrad, another resident and former trustee, echoed Davis’ comment that the town’s leaders are not qualified to execute such a complex deal, citing the board’s high turnover rate.
“Doing something this complicated takes years of expertise and even how to run the town, much less a ski area,” she said. “It takes people knowing how the town is run, the history of the town, and we don’t see that happening on this board.”
Conrad said the deal amounted to gambling with residents’ money and plans to add summer recreation to Eldora could divert business from downtown Nederland to the ski area.
“I believe you’re selling this town to private investors, you’ll be answering to them, not us,” she said.
While a lone resident came out “strongly in favor” of the acquisition due to its potential financial benefits, most residents opposed the idea — including for reasons related to wildfire risk.
“I firmly believe that most people in Ned and most of you on the board don’t understand the risk that Nederland faces, especially if we have a fast-moving wildfire that comes through,” said Matt Bitters, a wildfire scientist and Nederland resident.
In response to residents’ concerns about the money at stake, Trustee and former mayor Kristopher Larson said the town’s ongoing costs have declined, though the acquisition still requires staff time and some legal work.
Trustees are expected to share “a more detailed financial look” on the potential deal in a meeting scheduled for Nov. 5, Larson said.
Sterling said the town’s 2027 budget including the general fund and financial outlook will be discussed through the public budget process starting Nov. 9.
