CARRABASSETT VALLEY — Sugarloaf will hold a public information meeting at 7 p.m. Thursday, July 29 on its plan to add 196 housing units, a new chairlift and 140 acres of new terrain on the west side of the mountain.
The meeting will be held in the King Pine Room in the base lodge.
Director of Marketing Ethan Austin said the expansion, which will take in about 460 acres, is part of Sugarloaf 2030 announced in February 2020. He did not have an estimate on the cost of the expansion.
“This is all part of our 10-year vision for Sugarloaf that we announced in February of 2020,” he said. “We called it Sugarloaf 2030. The centerpiece of the whole thing is this west mountain development, which is what the public meeting is about. It’s going to have residential developments, a new chairlift, new terrain, some limited skier services facilities, a small building at the bottom of the lift, then potentially some summer things like mountain bike trail development there and elsewhere on the mountain.”
Austin said completion for various projects was pushed back by the pandemic.
“We kept working on most aspects of the project throughout but kind of like everything it slowed the process down,” he said. “We’ve been working on planning, designs, engineering and then, obviously, getting ducks in a row to submit this application. It slows things down a bit but everything has stayed on track but I’d say everything got pushed back about a year.”
“The window for most of the project is 2021-2025,” he said.
The Department of Environmental Protection requires the meeting for the benefit of the community. Public comment on the application will be allowed, according to the public notice.
“They require, depending on the application, a public information meeting so landowners and others can come and ask questions or raise concerns about the project,” Austin said.
According to the public notice, “The application is for the addition of one ski lift, 140 acres of ski terrain, a skier services building, and 196 total housing units, consisting of 40 duplex units, 52 single-family house lots, and four condo buildings with 26 units each.” It’s proposed to be just south of West Mountain Road, and east of the West Mountain chairlift, on the west side of the Sugarloaf Ski Resort property.
For more information, go to sugarloaf2030.com.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The date of the informational meeting has been changed in this story; the date in the original story was wrong. It was a reporting error.
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