Ridgway Judge Blocks MTN Lodge From Housing Four Seasons Workers

Telluride —A $1 billion project. Fifty-two hotel rooms. And a judge in Ridgway just ruled that the local MTN Lodge can’t house the workers building it.

On paper, the logic seems tight. In March, the Town of Ridgway filed suit against the MTN Lodge in Ouray County District Court. The argument? The property was leasing its 52 rooms to construction crews working on the Four Seasons Resort and Residences in Mountain Village. That’s an hour’s drive away. The town argued this violated local land use codes because the deals qualified as “household living” — long-term residency — in a zone strictly reserved for transient lodging stays under 30 days.

Let’s do the math on the stakes. The Four Seasons development, breaking ground in late 2025, is the first major luxury build in Mountain Village in over a decade. It includes 52 standard rooms, 43 hotel residences ranging from one to five bedrooms, and 26 private condominiums. Prices for those private units range from $4 million to $35 million. To get it built, hundreds of workers need beds. Merrimac Ventures, the Florida-based developer, has already bought and leased various cabins and hotels in the region, but they’re still hunting for more space as construction ramps up.

The owners of the Ridgway Suites LLC property fought back hard. They claimed they’d been stuck since acquiring the hotel in 2021, with winter visitor occupancy rates sitting in the single digits. Without the ability to rent to the Four Seasons crew, they argued, they simply wouldn’t survive. But Judge D. Cory Jackson didn’t buy it. He sided with the town, granting a preliminary injunction that blocks the rental agreement between Ridgway Suites LLC and the Merrimac workers.

This ruling highlights a friction point common in resort economies. Communities around Telluride and Mountain Village feel the pinch. While the luxury dollars flow inward to the mountain village, the outlying towns like Ridgway carry the burden of housing the labor force. A July 2025 letter from a coalition of officials in the western ends of San Miguel and Montrose counties echoed this sentiment, urging Merrimac to better outline community benefits. They wanted to shift the “well-worn pattern of extraction” toward “co-stewardship.”

For locals in Ridgway, the immediate impact is regulatory clarity. The hotel can no longer treat its rooms as long-term dormitories for out-of-town workers. If they want to keep the doors open, they’ll likely have to pivot back to traditional short-term tourist rentals or find a different business model entirely. The judgment forces a reset on how the region handles workforce housing for mega-projects. The money is going to Mountain Village, but the zoning rules are keeping the workers out of Ridgway’s hotels.