A Northeast Kingdom ski resort is opening late this year because of warm weather.
Spokesman Bill Stenger says Q Burke Mountain Resort will open on Dec. 18, three weeks after most major ski areas in Vermont started their season. A new hotel at Q Burke will open after the holidays, said Stenger, who is also CEO and president of Jay Peak Resort, an affiliated company. (Skiing at Jay Peak started several weeks ago.)
“We have seen a very mild weather pattern this last three weeks and are making snow as much as Mother Nature allows,” Stenger said of the ski area, located in East Burke. “Every 10 years we see soft openings, but it can change very quickly.”
Stenger says Q Burke had a “rare water anomaly” several weeks ago when, over a 24-hour period, “withdrawal levels of the Passumpsic River went below normal withdrawal range and we suspended running until the river level recovered.”
“With the rains and snow of the past several days we don’t expect that to occur again any time soon,” Stenger says.
The snowmaking pond at the resort is now full, the aquifer is recharged and the river should be fine through the season, he says. The resort “totally” respects withdrawal levels set by the state, Stenger said, and “always adheres to what the February median flows are.”
The resort has a new fan-gun snowmaking system “that will help us quite a bit,” but Stenger said temperatures must be below 28 degrees for the equipment to be effective.
“The delay in opening the skiing product is simply the lack of suitable snowmaking weather,” Stenger reiterated.
The opening of hotel has also been pushed back “a couple of weeks,” Stenger says, in anticipation of delivery of “certain specialty equipment” this week.
One local resident, St. Johnsbury attorney David Sleigh, said he found out his Dec. 18 reservations for the hotel were cancelled last week. Staff told Sleigh the hotel would open Jan. 15.
Stenger didn’t dispute Sleigh’s assertion, but said “I personally think it will be much sooner than the 15th of January.”
The hotel general contractor, PeakCM, is finishing the final fit-up and furnishings for the hotel at Q Burke.
That Q Burke hotel project has drawn controversy with the contractor not being paid in what he considers a timely way because of a dispute between the developers and the state’s financial regulators. The Department of Financial Regulation is overseeing payments for construction costs through a third-party administrator as part of an agreement with Stenger and his partner, Ariel Quiros.
The contractor, Jerry Davis, said he is still having difficulty getting paid on time because of the DFR restrictions. He estimated that he will be owed $10 million when the hotel project is completed in the next few weeks.
The Q Burke project is one of several the developers are building and financing with money from foreign investors through the EB-5 program, which allows foreigners to secure residency in the United States with an investment of $500,000. The developers have raised more than $545 million so far.
In 2014, the state put the Q Burke and another project, ANC Bio, on hold until financial questions were answered. The state allowed gave the developers approval to go forward, with conditions, last spring.
Meanwhile, Stenger said a Q Burke investor whose application was denied by the federal government had their full $500,000 investment refunded, plus a $50,000 non-refundable application fee that Stenger says was also returned even though “we were not required to do but did as a gesture of good will.”
