Base Village has the best access to skiing, hiking, biking, free village shuttles, free Aspen buses and down valley transit. We live there in summer and winter.
Skico does a fabulous job on the mountain. But what they don’t talk about is the fact that Skico’s Base Village has six entities assessing Base Village residential owners with nine inadequately disclosed taxes and fees. Just two examples are:
1) Residential owners are paying $11.488 million of construction debt on the public parking and transit center while receiving none of the revenues. The developer-controlled tax district owns them.
2) Residential owners, assessed at four times the rate of commercial owners, pay 77% of the Base Village Master HOA budget for all snowmelt in Base Village for all plazas and walkways, public restrooms, the skating rink, fire pits etc.
In contrast, Skico’s Limelight hotel paid the 1% TOSV Real Estate Transfer Tax but not the 1% Real Estate Transfer Fee to the Base Village Master HOA, which equals about a half million dollars and has arranged to lower their annual assessment to the Master HOA by over $100,000 per year. The Limelight condo owners and other residential owners did not receive these benefits.
The Limelight Skico maneuvering is especially egregious because Skico, East West Partners and KSL got $20 to $40 million in additional value with the 20 condos that replaced the long-promised and never built 30,000 square foot Aqua Center as a result of the 2015 PUD amendment.
Residential owners are willing to pay a fair share, but we expect Skico and its partners to do the same.
A reluctant, but by necessity, Base Village Activist,
Pat Keefer
Snowmass and Texas