The court-appointed receiver overseeing Burke Mountain is in the process of completing the sale of the ski resort to an unnamed buyer.
Michael Goldberg announced in a Wednesday press release that he was “finalizing a contract” with a bidder that “has deep roots in the community and will insure (sic) that Burke Mountain will have the stable future it deserves.”
This is the third time in as many years that Goldberg has reported the expected sale of the Northeast Kingdom resort, following similar announcements in 2023 and 2024. In both cases, Goldberg said he had received bids for the property and was planning to imminently complete the sale only to have the deals fall through.
The most recent announcement comes on the heels of a Seven Days story in which two would-be investors, Todd Firestone and Mark Greenberg, claimed that Goldberg was ignoring their offer to purchase the mountain for $10 million. Firestone and Greenberg, operating under the name Green Mountain Ski Partners, also plan to host a public forum at the Burke Community Center on Friday in an effort to whip up community support for their bid.
But in the press release, Goldberg vehemently denied he had been ignoring the two men.
“To set the record straight, I directly dealt with the Firestone Group for nine months in 2023-24 and at the last minute they attempted in bad faith to renegotiate a lower price after we had already reached agreement on terms and spent thousands of dollars finalizing a contract,” Goldberg said.
In an email to VTDigger, Goldberg confirmed that Firestone and Greenberg had been behind an initial ill-fated bid to purchase the mountain, which VTDigger first reported on in June 2023, and which he said “blew up…when Firestone sent me an email lowering his offering price right before we were about to sign a contract.”
Goldberg’s statements appeared to sharply contradict claims Firestone and Greenberg made to Seven Days that they had made multiple offers to the receiver in recent years and had not gotten a response.
The mountain resort’s value as assessed by the Town of Burke is around $20 million, according to town records.
VTDigger’s requests for comment sent to an email associated with Green Mountain Ski Partners were not immediately answered.
Goldberg declined to name the current bidder or the proposed price, but he said in the release that the deal was with “a more credible and financially capable buyer without any contingencies and at a higher price.”
In the release, Goldberg said that he expected the Burke community to be happier with the buyer he was working with than it would have been with Firestone and Greenberg and asked community members to “bear with” him as he finalized the deal.
“In my opinion, this buyer will also be much better for the community as it is committing to invest many millions of dollars into snowmaking and other improvements that will greatly improve the skiing experience at Burke and will directly benefit the homeowners, business owners and others who rely on the success of Burke Mountain,” Goldberg said.
A drawn-out receivership
Goldberg was appointed as the receiver in charge of overseeing Burke Mountain and Jay Peak, another ski resort in the Northeast Kingdom, in 2016 after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission brought a civil fraud lawsuit against Ariel Quieros, the former owner of both mountains, and his associate, former Jay Peak CEO Bill Stenger.
Quieros and Stenger had funded dramatic upgrades to Jay Peak — including a water park and a new hotel — with money from the EB-5 visa program, which pairs foreign investors with rural development projects in the U.S. in exchange for legal residency.
They were also building a hotel and conference center at Burke when federal regulators brought suits against the men, alleging they had misused $200 million of the $350 million they had raised from EB-5 investors.
Both men were also convicted for federal crimes related to a different project funded with EB-5 money — an ill-fated scheme to build an over $100 million biomedical research center in Newport — and were sentenced to prison. Stenger was released in 2023 after serving just under a year in prison, while Quieros is still serving a five-year prison term that began in 2022.
As receiver of the properties, Goldberg sold Jay Peak to Pacific Group Resorts Inc., a Park City, Utah-based company, in 2022 for $76 million after a lengthy bidding process.
Selling off Burke has proved more difficult, however.
Although the mountain has remained open to skiers, community members have argued that the resort — and the surrounding town — is losing value under Goldberg’s drawn-out receivership without a sense of direction or new investment.
Meanwhile, Goldberg has charged around $12 million in fees from the estate for the work he and other legal professionals have done during his receivership, according to court filings.
Prior to Goldberg’s announcement, more than 900 people had signed an online petition launched in January urging the receiver and the federal judge that appointed him to change the selling process for the mountain. The petition stated that the current “stalking horse” bidding process — in which an anonymous bidder sets a minimum price for an asset — was prohibiting other potential investors from making offers.
Frank Adams, a Burke homeowner who started the petition, said the appeal may have run its course now that Goldberg expected to sell the mountain.
“I view this as being a really good thing for the community,” Adams said of the prospective sale.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Court-ordered receiver says he is ‘finalizing’ sale of Burke Mountain ski resort.