Mountain Village voters overwhelmingly rejected a controversial plan to allow voting by nonresident homeowners whose properties are listed under limited liability companies or trusts.
The community of vacation mansions and workforce apartments above Telluride incorporated in 1995 with a rare rule that allowed nonresidents to vote in local elections. It is the only municipality in Colorado – and one of only a handful in the country – that allows nonresidents to vote.
The town board last year decided to ask voters to consider an amendment that would expand voting to owners of LLCs and trusts that own homes in the resort town.
The proposal – a first for Colorado – was contentious, with locals fearing wealthy absentee owners would seize control of the town.
“We are sort of charting new territory here,” said Mountain Village Mayor Marti Prohaska at a June 2024 council session where the amendment was first discussed.
Mountain Village voters cast 411 ballots in the Tuesday election. That’s out of 998 ballots issued to residents and property owners. And Question 1 about establishing voting rights for nonresident homeowners whose properties are held in LLCs and trusts failed 253 to 156. (A nearly 100-vote win is a landslide in Mountain Village, where, for the third election in a row, a town council candidate won their seat by one-vote.)
The ballot question addressed a common lament for mountain town homeowners whose property taxes pay for a bulk of local services. But if those owners are not residents of Colorado, they cannot vote. It’s part of the trade-off for owning mansions in mountain towns. Except for Mountain Village, which has a population around 1,100 full-time residents.
The idea in Mountain Village was that more wealthy owners are shifting assets into trusts and companies that limit liability and can ease the transfer of those assets between generations. Those owners were asking for a chance to vote like their nonresident neighbors.
Roughly 1,160 homes in Mountain Village are owned by people using their names and about 1,260 properties are owned by LLCs. Another 200 are owned by trusts. The average home in Mountain Village sells for $2.2 million, which is double the average price five years ago, reflecting a similar price increase in Colorado’s high country since the pandemic.
While it may appear that there was a rare alignment between local residents and second-home owners in Mountain Village, it’s important to note that the people who were really driving this proposal – people with homes owned by companies and trusts – could not vote.
“They wanted to be able to vote like their other second-home owner peers and they were not able to participate,” Mountain Village Town Manager Paul Wisor said. “The folks who were most vocal on this issue did not vote in this election.”
