Tamarack homeowners fear closing for central Idaho resort if judge doesn’t let them intervene

Tamarack homeowners fear Idaho resort’s closing

BOISE, Idaho — Tamarack Resort homeowners fear lifts and other equipment will be stripped and sold for pennies on the dollar if they can’t convince an Idaho judge to approve their plan to take $7.9 million from a Mexican real-estate investor to save the upcoming ski season.

On Monday, 4th District Court Judge Patrick Owen heard competing salvos from lawyers for homeowners and a lender group led by Zurich-based Credit Suisse Group.

Mexico-based Inmobiliaria Las Fuentes, S.A. de C.V. has offered the loan to reopen the ski resort and to protect unfinished buildings over the next 11 months, but made a deal contingent on being repaid before existing creditors, something Credit Suisse and others are fighting. Tamarack creditors are already owed upward of $300 million.

Without new funding, said Leonard De Los Prados, one of the homeowner group’s leaders, the resort 90 miles north of Boise could share the fate of Colorado’s Stagecoach Ski Area, a major resort undertaking abandoned in 1974 after high hopes of developers and vacation real-estate buyers collapsed. Today, little more than a few lift towers there remain.

“If this doesn’t get approved, Tamarack will be sold as salvage instead of as a resort,” predicted De Los Prados.

He’s the Beverly Hills, Calif., accountant for Alfredo Miguel, the Mexican-Lebanese businessman who the second-largest investor in Tamarack. Jean-Pierre Boespflug, a native of France who controls just over 50 percent of the resort.

The homeowner group said Miguel isn’t involved in the deal with Inmobiliaria Las Fuentes.

After hearing both sides, Owen said he’ll rule soon whether to let the homeowners intervene in the foreclosure case, which he’s scheduled for a trial next March.

But even if he does let them in, it’s no guarantee he’d also approve their plan for the Mexican firm’s loan, especially over objections of Credit Suisse.

“I’m not unsympathetic to the plight of these homeowners whose property values have been undoubtedly affected, not only by the general downturn in the entire economy of the country, but more specifically by the environment of the failed resort,” said Owen. “There’s just very little a court can do about those two overwhelming circumstances.”

Credit Suisse lawyer Randall Peterman contended Tamarack vacation homes aren’t part of the lenders’ foreclosure case, so homeowners should have no legal standing to formally enter the court fight.

“There’s no nexus between the real property being foreclosed on … and the property of the intervening parties,” Peterman said. “This organization has no skin in the game.”

The homeowners fear utilities will soon shut off power critical to heating Tamarack’s unfinished buildings, possibly accelerating decay as winter sets in. They point to damaged resort roofs, dismantled and dirty kitchen facilities, abandoned offices, snow cats parked haphazardly on the mountainside — all things dragging down their investments.

“Everyone who bought anything at Tamarack Resort and continues to own anything at Tamarack Resort has an interest in the entire development,” Steve Lord, their lawyer, told the judge of why the group should be allowed to intervene.

Hans Albert, a native of Hamburg, Germany and a homeowner who was in Owen’s courtroom Monday, said securing the judge’s blessing for Mexican real-estate loan would buy time to attract a new, longterm Tamarack investor who interested in running the resort, not plundering its assets.

“We realize this isn’t a permanent solution,” Albert said. “But in these times we’re in, one year could make a real difference.”