Vail Mayor Kent Rose Reflects on Failed 1990s Mountain Condemination

Who owns the mountain, and who pays for the snow?

That’s the question that kept Vail Town Council members up at night in the late 1980s. They weren’t just wondering about the view; they were looking at the balance sheet. The town was sitting on a potential monopoly — Vail Mountain itself — but the permit to operate it was held by George Gillett, a man whose media empire was imploding faster than a balloon in a wind tunnel.

Kent Rose, who served as mayor from 1987 to 1991, remembers the moment the idea took hold. It wasn’t a subtle whisper in the council chambers. It was a concrete plan: condemn the special-use permit from the U.S. Forest Service. Not the land. Just the right to ski on it.

“There was a time when my council had talked to some attorneys and those attorneys were convinced that we could condemn the permit,” Rose said in a 2023 oral history recorded by the Vail Public Library. “Not the mountain itself, just the permit. There were four of us that really wanted to pursue that because we thought that if we could make it a town-owned facility that we could keep it pretty much the way it was.”

Let’s look at the stakes. Gillett had bought the ski area in 1985. He pumped capital into the Back Bowls. He installed high-speed detachable quad chairlifts. The 1989 World Alpine Ski Championships had turned Vail into a global destination. The revenue stream was real. The ownership, however, was a house of cards. Gillett’s empire was funded by junk bonds. Interest rates were skyrocketing. By 1991, he declared bankruptcy.

The town had a window. A slim majority of the council, led by Rose, saw an opportunity to lock in local control before the asset was sold off to private equity sharks. They were ready to bite.

Then came the transition. Rose’s term ended. Peggy Osterfoss took the mayor’s chair in 1992. She brought in Rob LeVine and Merv Lapin. The trio still wanted to condemn the permit. They still wanted the town to run the show.

But they dropped it.

Rose called it “one of my great disappointments.” He believed that if they had pulled the trigger, Vail would still be locally owned today. Instead, Leon Black and Apollo Ski Partners stepped in. That acquisition birthed the modern Vail Resorts conglomerate, now helmed by CEO Rob Katz. The town got a world-class ski area. The locals got a tax base. But they lost the deed to the kingdom.

Why did Osterfoss and her council back down? It wasn’t a lack of ambition. It was a lack of competence.

“The thought was that we would create a board that consisted of maybe up to 30 people, 10 from the town, 10 from Vail Associates, and 10 at large,” Rose recalled. But running a ski resort isn’t like managing a water district. It’s a complex, capital-intensive beast. Osterfoss, in her own oral history, concluded the town simply didn’t have the expertise to run a resort of that scale.

So, they let it go. The permit remained with the private sector. The debt stayed with the private sector. The profits flowed to the private sector.

For context, consider the infrastructure Rose helped build elsewhere in the Eagle River Valley. As a town engineer and later a developer, he put in the roads and utilities for Eagle Ranch. He knew how to build. He knew how to manage land. But managing the entire ski area? That required a different kind of muscle.

The result is the Vail we know today. It’s not a town-owned utility. It’s a corporate asset. The decision to walk away from condemnation in the early 1990s shaped the fiscal reality of the valley for the next three decades. It meant higher property taxes for some, yes, but it also meant professional management that could handle the ups and downs of the global economy.

Rose’s regret is clear. He sees a lost opportunity for true local control. But looking at the balance sheet of the last thirty years, one has to ask: would a 30-person board have delivered the same reliability? Or would we be paying for our own mistakes with every lift ticket?

The bottom line is this: Vail chose professional management over municipal control. We got a resort that competes globally. We lost the chance to keep the profits circulating entirely within the town limits. That’s the trade-off. That’s the cost of admission for being a world-class destination.