Nederland breaks silence on Eldora purchase

Today, we're joined by Nederland Mayor Nichole Sterling to discuss the updates that you have to share with us regarding the ongoing acquisition of Eldora by the town of Nederland.

Thanks so much for joining me today.

I really appreciate it.

As always, love being here.

Yeah, great, great.

So you said that you have some updates to share with us today, so I would love to hear what you have to share with us.

I think we have a lot of very eager listeners out there who are excited to hear any updates that we have regarding the Eldora purchase.

Yeah.

So the update is that we are continuing to pursue the acquisition.

And what I really want to do is give us a little bit of some insight as to what's been happening since, you know, we were supposed to close in April.

That did not happen.

And so, you know, basically what the heck has been going on since then? And the short answer of it is that when we went to market, it was kind of exciting in a couple of respects.

One, investors were like, wow, this is neat.

And we need a couple of things in order to really structure this deal well.

And it turns out that some of the asks also made it just a better deal for us as a municipality.

One of them was we would really like a stronger security tied to the asset.

So, you know, basically what this means is investors were saying, if something goes wrong, what what are we able to capture as the asset? And we didn't have any type of security attached to the asset because we actually when we first started this process, we didn't think that we could as being a public entity and that there were restrictions involved.

And so I can get into that here in just a little bit.

But the second thing that they also asked was, hey, there's a lot of kind of debt attached to this because we had built in other things like financing some of the capital improvement projects.

And because we recognize that there are certain projects over the lifetime of the mountain that actually help it produce more revenue.

And so they said, there's a lot of debt in here.

And so one of the things that we also started to work on was reducing the amount of debt.

So One, creating a security to the asset.

And then second, reducing the amount of debt.

And then third, because we had a lower snow year, like the investors said, well, you know, it'd be really great to be able to model against this reduced snow year.