State offers multi-million incentives package to resort operator

DENVER — The Colorado Economic Development Commission approved a multi-million dollar loan-grant-tax incentives package Monday aimed at enticing an unnamed outdoor-recreation company — likely Alterra Mountain Co., the resort operator behind the Ikon Pass — to keep and grow its headquarters in the Centennial State. 

The state funding, which will be combined with contributions from an economic-development partner (again, this group was unnamed but is likely to be the Denver Downtown Development Authority), will also be used to support the creation of an Outdoor Recreation Hub.

The headquarters retention and OREC Hub effort is referred to by Colorado Office of Economic Development staff as Project Odysseus. It is the EDC’s practice not to identify companies that OEDIT is recruiting until incentives are accepted.

“The company behind the project is a multi-property operator in the travel and leisure sector, focused on destination-based outdoor recreation. The company is considering moving their headquarters from its current location to a new location,” OEDIT director of global business development Michelle Hadwiger said. “If the company chooses to relocate outside of Colorado, we will lose the current Denver-based employees and also the employees who would locate here as a result of their in as a result of some structural changes within the company. Other locations under consideration for the project include Salt Lake City, Utah.”

Project Odysseus “strengthens one of our foundational industries. Through one-time strategic fund dollars, we’re proposing to build a physical hub for industry, a landing place that expands jobs in the outdoor recreation sector and strengthens our overall statewide attraction efforts,” OEDIT executive director Eve Lieberman said.

Furthermore the “project would anchor a significant amount of headquarter jobs in a metro area with office vacancy rates that are among the highest in the country,” she said. Alterra’s homebase of Denver has made a slew of recent headlines — the Wall Street Journal recently called the Mile High City’s central business district “America’s Emptiest Downtown” — for its underutilized office buildings. 

Area media outlets reported last week that the Denver DDA has offered Alterra — the owner of 19 ski resorts, including Arapahoe Basin,Winter Park and Steamboat, and the major competitor to Broomfield-based Vail Resorts Inc.’s (NYSE: MTN) Epic Pass — a $7 million loan if it opts to move its headquarters from the Denver’s River North neighborhood to upper downtown, rather than relocate to Salt Lake City. 

This information chimes with details provided Monday about the company behind Project Odysseus, which, according to OEDIT deputy director Sean Houlder, will “support the recovery and stabilization of a key outdoor recreation corporate headquarters, as well as create new businesses and operations, and promote potential future growth and new jobs and street level vibrancy and activation.”

Beyond keeping the unnamed company’s headquarters in the state, the project “will help revitalize a vacant building to create a hub for outdoor businesses in the metro area and provide a landing place for key outdoor recreation businesses,” he said. 

The EDC on Monday offered a $1 million, zero-interest, five-year loan for the company behind Project Odysseus. That loan would be added to a $7 million loan offer from an unnamed economic-development partner, according to OEDIT staff, bringing the total loans offered to $8 million. Again, this information matches previous reporting about the Denver DDA’s efforts to keep Alterra in town.

“The loans will be repaid to the EDC strategic fund by our partner via a simple structure to be determined,” Gould said. “… All of the (EDC-controlled loan) funds will, in effect, be returned.”

But the loan is just part of the state’s package of enticements. The EDC also approved “a $1 million grant to our partner, who will in turn provide multiple grants of up to $250,000 to support individual company recruitment projects at the location,” Gould said. In other words, the state is providing the third-party entity (likely to be the DDA) with money to use to bring other companies to the currently vacant building that (the company likely to be) Alterra is eying for its new Denver headquarters.

The third piece of the deal is an offer of $1,924,718 in job-growth tax incentives. To receive that full amount, Project Odysseus would have to create 106 new jobs that Hadwiger said will “include research and development engineers, production engineers, sales and marketing, general administrative, information technology, marketing, finance and legal positions.”

The company behind Project Odysseus was awarded $1.74 million in tax incentives in 2019, Hadwiger said. The EDC’s annual report from 2018-2019 shows Alterra Mountain Co. was offered and accepted a $1,746,093 incentive that year, lending more credence to the theory that Alterra is the firm behind Project Odysseus.

Under that previous incentives deal, Alterra was required to create at least 132 new jobs. “They’re on track to meet the performance criteria on their current award (from 2019) and are planning continued growth,” Hadwiger said, noting that those positions do not count toward the firm’s requirement to create another 106 to receive the newly offered incentives. 

The EDC typically meets once a month, and the commission already held its July meeting on July 16. Monday’s incentives were passed during a 7 a.m. special meeting that was noticed only on Friday. Some commissioners wondered about the urgency and need to call an uncommon special meeting. 

The board of directors for the company behind Project Odysseus “has an upcoming meeting to make some decisions about siting and location,” Hadwiger said. 

OEDIT deputy director Jeff Kraft told commissioners that he expects that state officials will learn whether the unnamed firm will remain in Colorado within the coming 12 months. 

Media reports from last week indicate that Alterra’s new downtown headquarters — a specific address has yet to be revealed — could be about 65,000 square feet and house roughly 400 employees. The estimated cost of the relocation effort is $20 million.

Formed in 2017 by KSL Capital Partners and Henry Crown & Co., Alterra has experienced some leadership turnover in recent months, including the abrupt departure of then-CEO Jared Smith at the end of the most-recent ski season, a brutal one for the resort industry.

Unlike publicly traded Vail Resorts, Alterra doesn’t publish its financials or resort visitorship figures. But given the fact that the company operates ski areas in some of the same general regions as Vail, the Broomfield firm could serve as a useful comp.

A month after Vail Resorts revealed to investors that abysmal ski-season weather dampened its 2026 earnings outlook, the company said in mid-July that it plans to pivot away from its strategy of growing Epic Pass users and its global resort portfolio, and towards improving visitor experience. 

In early June, Vail reported that third-quarter sales fell 7% over the year to slightly more than $1.2 billion, “primarily driven by unfavorable weather conditions that impacted visitation and revenue for both local and destination guests, particularly at the Rockies and Tahoe resorts.”

Pass sales for the upcoming 2026/2027 North American ski season were down 10% year over year through May 26, Vail reported in June.

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