If Ginn has his way, Mill Stone Hill might wind up being better than the Kingdom trails in East Burke.
It's a shame, The kingdom trails are really good.
Published: Sunday, February 10, 2008
By Candace Page
Free Press Staff Writer
BURKE -- The town Development Review Board has begun to consider permits for what is described as the largest development ever in northeastern Vermont, a luxury resort likely to transform this corner of the Northeast Kingdom.
The Ginn Co., a Florida developer specializing in private golf courses and the million-dollar houses that surround them, purchased the Burke Mountain ski area in 2005. Over 10 years, it proposes to build 1,024 condominiums and homes, a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course, a spa, shops and restaurants.
"Bridgemor" -- the name is intended to evoke the state's covered bridges -- would more than double the number of people and houses in Burke, a town of 1,700. Skier visits on peak days would quadruple, from 500 to 2,000 or more.
While Ginn's $100 million plans are not out of scale with four-season resort development at other Vermont ski areas, the company's impact is expected to ripple beyond Burke's boundaries into more remote parts of the Northeast Kingdom, the state's most rural corner.
Incomes are modest in this part of Vermont. The population of many towns numbers only in the hundreds, and much of the forested landscape belongs to moose, bear and deer.
To many residents, the prospect of hundreds of million-dollar houses and half-million-dollar condominiums seems as unlikely, and scary, as an invasion of elephants.