JUDGE REJECTS LAWSUIT
An Eagle County District Judge has dismissed a lastchance lawsuit filed by residents of Vail Valley’s luxury Cordillera neighborhood opposed to plans to convert their community’s centerpiece lodge into residential drug treatment facility. After a series of judicial setbacks, the administrative appeal of the county’s approval was the last hope for residents seeking to block a $136 million plan to change the Lodge and Spa at Cordillera into a high-end drug rehabilitation facility.
Residents sued the Eagle County Board of Commissioners and the former owner of the lodge over a county-approved 2009 change in the Cordillera planned-unit-development guidelines that permitted a potential medical facility at the lodge. The lodge sold last month to an investment group led by the Concerted Care Group, which plans to offer drug treatment services — to the tune of $60,000 a month — in the former 56room luxury lodge.
In his 30-page ruling issued Friday afternoon, Eagle County District Court Judge Paul Dunkelman noted that the lodge, while a selling point for buyers in Cordillera, suffered an operating loss of “several million dollars” in 2008, a year after Texas investment group Behringer Harvard purchased the building and adjacent parcel. In 2009, only 53 residents had memberships at the lodge and hotel occupancy “had dwindled to approximately half,” reads the decision. That year, Behringer Harvard secured approval to change planning documents that allowed for as many as 34 additional uses for the lodge, including “medical offices/facility.”
In 2016, three years after Behringer Harvard put the lodge on the market, Concerted Care Group emerged as “the only serious potential buyer,” according to the ruling. Residents have battled the plan since 2016, filing a $100 million class-action lawsuit arguing the project had injured property values in the affluent golf community.
A federal judge in February refused to delay the sale of the lodge, striking a fatal blow to the class-action lawsuit, which Cordillera residents dropped. That left only the District Court in Eagle County as a last chance to thwart the drug rehabilitation project.
Dunkelman disagreed with the residents on all points, including an argument that the drug rehab clinic violates zoning that requires some sort of “resort residential component” at the lodge.
“The … property will continue to be operated with resort residential use with a price tag of $60,000 per month: it’s only the proposed ‘members’ who will change,” Dunkelman wrote. “The role of zoning is to determine allowed uses, not mandate preferred uses.”
Concerted Care Group chief Noah Nordheimer said he would begin construction on the first phase of his project soon and intends to have the facility open and treating people by next summer.
“Certainly we are not out celebrating,” he said. “Unfortunately the stigma of addiction and everything people associate with it is wrong and we do feel vindicated for all the people who will have access to treatment, but we never should have gone through all this.”