Jun. 30, 2003 - SNOWMASS VILLAGE, Colo.--This struggling resort wants a new village. It wants a vivacious menagerie of slopeside shops, homes, restaurants and bars. It wants to return to the days of eminence. 

And it wants the new village to fit within the town's code. No more than 230 homes. Nothing over three stories tall. 

Achieving both presents a conundrum. 

"The goals ... cannot be met through the existing land-use code," said Paul Shepherd, who is directing Intrawest's development of a 1 million-square-foot village with 635 residential units at the base of the Snowmass ski area. 

"The size of this village was designed to meet the vision of what Snowmass is and what it can be," Shepherd said of the largest single project in Pitkin County history. "If we are limited to a couple hundred units, we cannot meet the critical mass needed for a vital commercial core." 

A group of local residents and officials plans to challenge the ambitious plan, saying it threatens the character of Snowmass Village. 

"It's too big," said Jack Hatfield, a Pitkin County commissioner and former Snowmass city councilman who helped draft the town's land-use code four years ago. 

"When the council developed the comprehensive plan and rewrote the land-use code, we looked for the ability of an applicant to exceed requirements or densities but never imagined something of this mass and scale," said Hatfield, who is organizing a potential challenge that could put the issue on the ballot for county residents. 

"It's so unbelievable that an applicant could bring this into our community," he said. "All of us are in favor of having a base village here, but we are willing to challenge this project if it is not scaled back anywhere from 33 to 50 percent." 

Two years ago Aspen Skiing Co., owner of the Snowmass ski area, tapped Intrawest as a partner to develop a new village at the base. A series of parking lots and aged administrative buildings totaling about 30 acres will moor the project. An estimated 14 buildings, some as tall as six stories, are planned for about 12 of those acres. 

Nothing is set in stone. The project now is churning through the town's planning and zoning approval process. The plan is flexible and still open for molding, Shepherd said. 

Snowmass residents and business owners have long recognized the need for improvements at the 1970s- era village. Back in its heyday, Aspen Skiing Co.'s four Roaring Fork Valley ski areas commanded 20 percent of the state's skier visits, and Snowmass was the king of the valley. 

That was 25 years ago. Business at Snowmass remained strong through the 1980s and most of 1990s. But then a few years of meager snowfall triggered some introspection at Snowmass. With the dwindling skier visits -- down 200,000 visits since the 1997-98 season -- came the realization that Snowmass needed an upgrade. 

"I think those in the business community probably felt that something had to happen," said Brett Huske, president of the Snowmass Village Resort Association. 

Enter Intrawest, the gilded resort developer that has delivered many resorts from the brink by developing glamorous villages. And Intrawest has a formula. A commercial core needs a certain amount of residential units. It's a financial formula and a sustainability formula: The sale of a certain number of condos funds the creation of the village, and the rental of those units fills the shops, restaurants and bars. 

For a new village at Snowmass Village, the formula has come out to about 635 residential units nestled above 94,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space, with another 100,000 square feet of space for administrative, recreation and public areas. 

"It is a bit overwhelming, isn't it?" said BJ Adams, a local Realtor whose firm is across the street from where the new village is planned. "But I have to trust Intrawest's experience and understand that there is an important connection between how much retail and residential you can have or it won't work." 

Intrawest does have the expertise. It's in the initial phases of developing a new village at Winter Park. It's close to finishing a $500 million village at Copper Mountain. It has built a $1 billion village at Tremblant ski area in Quebec, pulling the resort from near-bankruptcy to the top- ranked area on the East Coast. It has multimillion-dollar villages under construction in France, Florida, Las Vegas, and at California's Squaw Valley and Mammoth ski areas. 

At Snowmass, Intrawest has enlisted architect Eldon Beck, the statesman of resort village design who sculpted Copper Mountain and Keystone and is designing the planned village at Winter Park. 

Beck has incorporated the Snowmass area's pastoral heritage into his design, sketching buildings such as an old saddlery shack that has been added on to for the past several decades. His plan protects the views of the mountain, pushes skiers through the village on a ski run and incorporates the typical rough-hewn beams-and-stone architecture prevalent in today's resort design. 

Intrawest will cast its commercial tenants into themed areas within the village, with the rowdy, colorful bars on the snowy beach, the restaurants inside the pedestrian village and craft shops lining the smaller side streets. 

Cars will be tucked into underground parking lots beneath the tiered village that slopes up to the snow. An aquatic center will offer swimming to the entire community. An open-air gondola, or cabriolet, will connect the new village with the old mall located up the slope. That soothes some concerns among merchants in the older village, who are worried that their dwindling business will run down the hill to the new project. 

"I'd be insane not to worry about that," said Dave Chambers, whose Goodfellows Pizzeria & Deli has occupied prime property in the old Snowmass Mall for five years. "But overall, I think this is a great thing for the community. If it involves everyone and we are all included, this will be a great, great thing." 

In future phases of the 10-year plan for the village's construction, a flagship hotel and a five-star Little Nell hotel will anchor the village. 

And in Aspen Skiing Co.'s style, the village will be built using the latest in ecologically sensitive techniques. 

"That is one of the things that is very important to the Aspen SkiCo and the Aspen/Snowmass community," said David Perry, chief operating officer for the ski company. 

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