BURKE – Michael Goldberg, the court-appointed receiver overseeing Burke Mountain Resort, has asked a federal judge to sign off on the sale of the Northeast Kingdom ski resort to a local group for $11.5 million.
In a Friday court filing, Goldberg asked Judge Darrin P. Gayles, who has presided over the mountain’s receivership in federal court in Miami for almost a decade, to grant final approval for the deal with Bear Den Partners, LLC.
The group is a consortium of parties with long-standing ties to the ski area, including Burke Mountain Academy, an elite ski school located in the area, and Ken Graham, whose family briefly owned the mountain in the early 2000s.
Bear Den Partners also includes the Schaefer family, who own the Massachusetts ski mountain Berkshire East and the Catamount Mountain Resort in New York. The family would oversee resort operations at the resort, according to preliminary development plans shared with VTDigger.
“The Receiver unequivocally states that in his opinion Bear Den Partners is the best possible purchaser for the Burke Mountain Resort and believes that this agreement is in the best interest of the investors, the employees and the Burke ski community,” Goldberg wrote in the filing.
If approved, the sale would wind down Goldberg’s nearly decade-long receivership of the resort. Gayles first appointed Goldberg as receiver of Burke and Jay Peak, another Northeast Kingdom ski area, in 2016, when federal regulators brought a civil enforcement suit against the mountains’ former owner, Ariel Quiros, and Jay Peak CEO Bill Stenger.
At the time, the two men were funding upgrades to both ski resorts with money from the EB-5 visa program, which pairs foreign investors with rural development projects in return for legal residency status. Regulators accused them of misappropriating $200 million of the funds they had raised in what became the largest investor fraud case in Vermont’s history.
Earlier this month, VTDigger reported that Goldberg was in the process of finalizing a contract for the sale of Burke Mountain Resort with the group, although no price had been made public at the time.
Burke Mountain’s value is assessed by the Town of Burke at about $20 million, according to public records, which is substantially higher than the $11.5 million price tag.
But in the court filing, Goldberg said the mountain has been “negatively cash flowing” for the entirety of his receivership and has a slew of deferred maintenance obligations.
Bear Den Partners has also indicated it plans to put $30 million overall into developing the resort in the long term, according to the filing.
“We look forward to adding our expertise to the mix and taking Burke to a level where we know it can excel for years to come,” Ken Graham said in a press release Friday. “My family has been part of the Burke community for the last 50 years, and we are really excited to help write the next chapters at Burke for decades to come.”
In the filing, Goldberg also asked the court to waive a requisite auction process that would allow other bidders to make offers for the mountain, calling such a process “very risky and not in the best interest of the receivership estate and the investors.”
Goldberg had previously attempted to sell the mountain to at least two other buyers only to have agreements fall through at the last minute. In the filing, Goldberg suggested that opening the mountain up to new bids would threaten to tank the deal with Bear Den Partners, who agreed to buy the resort on the condition that there would be no auction.
“Bear Den Partners needs to close this transaction quickly and start making capital improvements to the property in order to complete them before next ski season,” the filing states.
In 2022, Goldberg sold Jay Peak to the Utah-based Pacific Group Resorts Inc. for $76 million after an auction process, and most of the proceeds from the sale went to defrauded investors.
It’s unclear how much of the money from the Burke deal would be allocated to investors, but in the filing, Goldberg said the sale would allow him to “make further distributions” to the defrauded parties.
Goldberg also wrote that Bear Den Partners had indicated it “would be willing to allow the EB-5 Parties to benefit from the job creation expected to result from Buyer’s intended investment.”
