Montpelier's Old Elks Country Club Site: What Comes Next?

Montpelier may finally know what to do with the old Elks Country Club property. The answer, four years in the making, isn’t simple.

Four developers have pitched competing visions for the nearly vacant tract off Country Club Road, where Route 2 and Route 302 meet at the traffic circle just outside downtown. The site, a wide field dotted with trees that draws cross-country skiers in winter and frisbee golfers in warmer months, could eventually hold hundreds of homes. For Montpelier, it’s a potential fix to a stubborn housing crunch and a way to shift residential growth away from the flood-prone downtown core.

Getting there has been messy.

At a city council subcommittee meeting Thursday, the three councilors cut one developer from contention. Pennrose, a national property developer, built its proposal entirely around apartments, and that was enough to knock it out. Three developers remain. The councilors couldn’t agree on a final pick and acknowledged they won’t make the original April 22 deadline.

Not great, given that this process has already stretched five years.

“I think it’s really worth taking a pause and making sure we get this right in terms of process,” said Ben Doyle, a District 1 city councilor.

The delays aren’t surprising to anyone who’s followed Country Club Road closely. The whole saga traces back to 2021, when Citi Properties, a local agency, bought the land and ended golfing on the property. A group of tennis players then approached the city about recreational use of the site, but Montpelier went further and bought the entire property outright in 2022, with plans to develop both housing and recreational space.

That purchase didn’t come cheap or quietly. The $2 million bond to acquire the property drew sharp criticism from residents who said the city couldn’t absorb the higher property taxes that buying the land, and later developing it, would require. The city pushed forward anyway.

Since then, Montpelier has spent $500,000 on a consulting contract with White + Burke to run the process, gather resident feedback, test the soil and find interested developers. The soil testing matters because the site has brownfield contamination, one of several infrastructure challenges the city would need to solve regardless of which developer wins the bid. Brownfield redevelopment across the Northeast has historically stalled projects like this one, where the cost of cleanup can shift the economics of affordable housing sharply.

The affordability question is, frankly, the hardest one. Home prices have climbed steeply across Vermont, and critics have pushed all four developers to explain how they’d keep the final product within reach for local buyers and renters. The councilors haven’t gotten a satisfying answer yet. That’s part of why the deadline slipped.

Montpelier’s situation mirrors pressures playing out across the Upper Valley and much of northern New England. Small cities with limited land and aging infrastructure are trying to add housing stock while managing flood risk, fiscal constraints and community opposition. Country Club Road is Montpelier’s biggest bet on solving that equation in one place.

VTDigger first reported on Thursday’s subcommittee meeting and the broader history of the Country Club Road project.

The three remaining developers have each submitted detailed proposals and sat through question-and-answer sessions with the subcommittee. What kind of neighborhood Montpelier residents actually want built there remains an open question. Dense and walkable? A mix of ownership and rental? Heavy on green space? The community feedback gathered over the past few years hasn’t produced a clean consensus.

The city council subcommittee will now push past April 22 to keep evaluating. No new deadline has been set publicly.

What’s clear is that the stakes are real. Vermont’s housing shortage has worsened consistently, and a project this size, on city-owned land with direct municipal involvement, doesn’t come along often. Getting it wrong would be costly. Getting it right could set a model for how other small Vermont cities approach the same problem.

For now, the grass at Country Club Road stays empty.