juntowell@vaildaily. com
As the School District of Eagle County moves forward with its plans to bring housing to Maloit Park in Minturn, questions remain for residents of the existing domain.
Currently, Maloit Park is home to 15 mobile housing complexes occupied by district employees.
At the School Board meeting on Wednesday, March 27, many of those workers and their families spoke out, urging the district to move them to their current housing. Those who spoke have lived in their homes for 3 to 34 years.
“We are grateful for the opportunity to be at Maloit Park for the more than 34 years, where we raised our children, two proud graduates of the Eagle County School District, and where our four grandchildren now come to play with us, spend the holidays and spend the night at home. ” said resident Nancy Lindbloom.
“We implore you to destroy our homes and kindly leave the existing 15 single-family homes as they are. “
While citizens have been evicted from Maloit Park in previous progression attempts, their recent fear of displacement was sparked through a March 13 column in the Vail Daily written through Superintendent Philip Qualman.
“In April 2025, we will begin infrastructure at Maloit Park in South Minturn, and we expect these paintings to take approximately six months to complete. Maloit Park, which currently has a few cell houses housing district staff, will replace them throughout with additional complexes built for a total of 138 district-owned housing options,” Qualman wrote.
Tanya Rippeth spoke to the column and gave what she called a “very confusing and very quick” review of the house’s replacement.
“These homes aren’t just a few cell homes, they’re families. There’s 15 families of all ages, all kids, other people who have been running for this school district for years, kids who are going to grow up, come back, potentially paintings for the school district, and that legacy is very meaningful,” Rippeth says. “We chose to live there. “
Properties in Minturn have long been on the district’s radar.
Maloit Park is an approximately 85-acre site that was annexed to the City of Minturn in 2011. The progression agreement at that time reached the zoning of 46 acres of the parcel for residential and combined use, with the remaining amounts being committed to the city’s water supply. . treatment site (18 acres) and open area preservation (approximately 40 acres).
Maloit is known as a priority site in the school district’s 2020 Employee Housing Master Plan. In 2019, the district began making plans at the site. During this process, citizens were informed in May 2019 that they would have to leave until June 2020. However, when the district abandoned its initial planning efforts at the Minturn site in 2019, citizens were able to stay. In 2022, the community began reviewing the development.
The district has since moved forward with the entitlement procedure for the Array and the Board of Directors approved a budget of $258,000 to initiate the procedure in November 2022. This work included coordination with the city, blueprints and background painting, schematic design. , progression drawings, and more.
In addition, the $100 million bond approved by the Eagle County electorate in November 2023 will provide budget to begin the installation of progression infrastructure at Maloit Park.
Initial plans for 2023 noted the possibility of expanding 138 housing complexes in the complex by adding duplexes, townhomes and condos.
Sandy Farrell, the district’s chief operating officer, demonstrated that existing progression plans “effectively eliminate cellular homes. “
“ECSD is required to comply with the regulations and regulations set forth through the Colorado State Mobile Home Parks Act. This includes a relocation or relocation payment, as well as a one-year notice,” he said. “Residents have not yet considered the option of staggering the infrastructure according to whether or not it is cost-effective to carry out gradual development.
Maloit Park is unique from other housing opportunities the school district offers staff, which primarily include rental opportunities.
“What might be different in this scenario compared to other tenants in the community is that we own those selling options. We’ve invested in those selling options and spent a lot of time improving them,” said Tim Caudill, who has lived in Maloit Park for 24 years and taught at Battle Mountain at the same time.
“We’re all so grateful to have the opportunity to live there. . . But we’re not sure what’s going to happen and we’re very worried. “
On Wednesday, many citizens spoke about how the opportunity to own a home in Maloit Park has helped their families and how similar homeownership opportunities will be included in the long-term of homes there.
“We are the best example of how ECSD worker housing, in its forms, can retain workers,” Lindbloom said. Lindbloom has spent his entire 31-year career at Battle Mountain.
In 1988 and 1989, Lindbloom and her husband Carl, who works at Vail Health, lived in the district’s short-term housing unit at the Eagle Valley Bus Terminal. Then they bought their home in Maloit Park.
“Without that housing opportunity, even in 1990 when we purchased the Maloit Park property, we would have had a hard time staying in Eagle County because housing prices were already exceeding educators’ salaries,” he said.
As such, this type of housing opportunity is “the best answer to offering long-term housing that allows the district to retain its employees, as evidenced by the longevity of many of its existing residents,” Lindbloom said, before imploring the district to charge more “employee-owned and maintained” housing into Maloit’s progression plan.
“We are evidence that Maloit Park is a successful housing style for retaining school district employees,” Kari Bangtson, a Vail Ski and Snowboard Academy instructor who has lived in Maloit since 2007, wrote in an email to the school board.
Bangston spoke from private experience about the importance of this style of housing in retaining staff.
“In my 16 years as an ECS employee, I have said goodbye to countless colleagues after they gave Eagle County a chance for 2-5 years,” she wrote. “We want to retain educators and experienced staff. “
As such, among his demands, Bangston suggested that the district purchase Maloit homes, keep them affordable, and help existing citizens create new homeownership opportunities in the development.
While acknowledging the need for more worker housing that Maloit promises to provide to educators and school staff, citizens have expressed fear for their future.
Rippeth and her husband, Eric, have lived in Maloit Park for about six years. Rippeth works for a local company and her husband has coached at Vail Ski and Snowboard Academy for nine years and 14 years in the local district. twins who are dating VSSA.
“Moving the other people who live there right now, the 15 families, seems a little pointless, almost contradictory, like you’re creating a challenge to solve some other challenge,” Rippetth said. “If you create the challenge to move us, we will now have to go through and look for housing to live in, knowing that the challenge already exists, that there is no housing or that very little housing is missing. “
“Make no mistake, we have nowhere to go,” Carullo said.
Carullo has lived in Maloit with his wife, Theresa Carullo (an interventionist at Red Sandstone Elementary School) for 11 years. When they moved to Minturn, James Carullo said the couple “struggled to figure out what we were going to do because, as teachers, we couldn’t live in Eagle, which was meant to be a capable community. “
They had to leave the county in 2012 when they came up with the opportunity to buy their home in Maloit Park.
“We were pretty much out after being here for over a decade, and this space stored us and allowed us to continue to live in a position we were looking for instead of having to retire and go back east,” Carullo said.
Today they face a potential situation.
“I’m thinking about what will happen to us if those houses fall apart for whatever reason: we’re going to have to leave. . . We are so grateful to have had the opportunity to have spent the last 11 years there because Colorado is where we chose to settle,” he said.
Spencer Messer, who teaches English and cross-country coaches in Battle Mountain, joined Wednesday through his wife, a Vail Health employee and their two young children.
“Like my neighbors, Maloit Park has given us the opportunity to continue living in Eagle County,” Messer said.
“I fully understand the ramifications of moving bonds. They’ve given you money. You need to build more homes. It’s one thing, and we’re a product of other people enjoying the benefits of housing,” he added.
However, like many of those who spoke, Messer called on the district to find a way to “build housing that doesn’t displace the 15 families who have been living there lately. “
Residents brought some features to this, adding the level of allowance and making plans so that they can stay in their homes as long as possible, making sensible use of the land and area around their homes without replacing them, and more.
“There’s room for both,” Carullo said. I know that, on behalf of all of us who live there, we would like to stay there. “
“Having the safety of our home in limbo is tense. While we know adjustments are coming, the tension is real. My husband and I wonder if and when our circle of relatives will be deported. “When will we have a year of freedom?”I would appreciate it if citizens would be concerned about the progression process. “
Because the comments were made during a public consultation, the school board did not respond to residents’ comments Wednesday. However, board members have expressed that they would like to talk about the issue at a long-term school board meeting.
In an email to the Vail Daily on Friday, Farrell said they had “no existing plan or confirmation of what would happen to existing residents. “
“We will be working with citizens, the land resources committee and the school board on what this plan will look like,” he said, adding that the district is “in normal communication” with the citizens of Maloit Park.