Industry News
At the end of a hearing over the Park City Mountain Resort (PCMR) eviction issue in Silver Summit’s 3rd District Court on Thursday, Judge Ryan Harris granted a request by Talisker Land Holdings to evict PCMR.
Talisker will be legally able to evict PCMR on August 27th, 2014 if the judge signs the papers that day. PCMR has fought this whole thing tooth and nail and they have lost.
Goodbye PCMR, hello Vail.
Talisker has chosen Vail Resorts to take over the lease once PCMR has been evicted. PCMR owners have bought the majority stake in Snowbird ski resort in the meantime.
Why it’s still complicated: because while PCMR leased most of the mountain from Talisker, they do own the base of the mountain – including some ski lifts, a parking lot, maintenance facilities, snow making equipment, and a lot of buildings.
“These parties are bound at the hip and this is a resort that is integrated with the Talisker land and the PCMR land and we have to make a deal,” PCMR attorney Alan Sullivan
So, PCMR and Vail and Talisker are going to have to make a deal here. So far, PCMR has threatened to dismantle the lifts it owns and do everything it can to screw Vail over so it won’t be easy for Vail to step in. Who does that hurt? The common skier. We’re confident that they’ll not do that. It would be the absolute rudest thing they could possibly do and would have powerful local as well as national backlash.
PCMR hopefully doesn’t want to ruin Christmas for everyone and is now talking about cooperation with Vail and Talisker.
“We’ve been given a real prompt by the court to resolve this case and do it quickly and we’re very hopeful we can do that. There’s lots of options to consider and we’re certainly willing to do our part.” – PCMR attorney Alan Sullivan told Fox 13
Why is all this happening? Because PCMR made an enormous clerical error and failed to renew their lease on time in 2011. They were two days late when they submitted their lease renewal on May 2nd, 2011. That’s it, as simple as that. Biggest clerical error in ski industry history? Most likely. Especially since they were enjoying the best deal in the ski world paying only $150,000 per year. Most ski resorts pay around $3-4 million per year to lease this much land.
Talisker is being hard on PCMR by not letting them renew a couple days late, but this is most likely about money. Talisker likely said: “Ok, you’re lease is late, no biggie, but we want $4 million per year now instead of $150,000 per year, cool?” Then PCMR likely said: “No way, not cool. See you in court!”
PCMR threw the first stone by suing Talisker once negotiations to renew the lease failed. Talisker then called Vail Resorts on the phone and said “Hey, Vail, if you take care of this lawsuit, we’ll give the lease to you.” Vail responded by saying “Oh, nice one.” And that takes us right up to today’s eviction of PCMR.
Once the eviction goes through, Park City will have 60 days to bail. They’ll have to dismantle 9 entire chairlifts, and remove all of their property from Talisker’s land. The work is estimated to take 33 weeks and cost $3,570,000.
Unless PCMR and Talisker can reach an agreement. This is what we want. Agree on something guys and leave the lifts where they lie. Please.
Park City Mountain Resort, one-time Olympic venue, is considered a crown jewel of Utah’s multi-billion dollar ski industry. The resort employs about 4,600 people and generates millions of dollars each year for the Park City economy. Sullivan said 25-percent of all out-of-state ski tourism visits PCMR. – Fox 13
thanks for putting it in skier terms miles!!! seriously, what a huge mistake!! i wonder if that person (who forgot the date) got fired–or because of the way the world is so backwards–maybe they got a promotion?
Rumor has it that person got paid a very large amount of money to make sure the lease was not renewed in time.
Very interesting, Blair. Any other details? Thanks.
Does this mean they are going to start building epic terrain parks at the bird?
More than likely never.
We don’t need to build “Epic Terrain Parks” … We already built lifts that access the epic terrain park that is the whole mountain.
Seriously why would you want big piles of snow and metal pipes when you have the epic terrain of the Bird?
ALSO on a more serious note (Not that I was kidding before) it all has to do with water rights. Snowbird owns next to nothing when it comes to water rights. Salt Lake County does because of the water shed. Your typical Xgames/ Dew Tour park requires 100 MILLION gallons of snow. In a typical season, Snowbird only makes 80-100 Million gallons of snow for the whole mountain.
So with Snowbirds lack of water rights, Snowbird pays Salt Lake County for every gallon they use, which in return melts and goes back to the springs and streams for the county to sell to you again! So basically Snowbird doesn’t want to waste water on over-rated piles of snow.
PCMR wasn’t two days late in renewing the lease. The lease required 60 days notice to renew. They were actually 62 days late.