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

Montpelier’s city council can’t pick a developer for the old Elks Country Club site, and the April 22 deadline has already come and gone.

Four developers submitted competing proposals for the largely vacant tract off Country Club Road, where Route 2 and Route 302 converge at a traffic circle just outside downtown. The parcel, wide and tree-dotted, doubles as informal recreation space for cross-country skiers in winter and frisbee golfers when the ground thaws. For Montpelier, it’s also a rare shot at directing residential growth away from the flood-prone downtown core and easing Vermont’s housing shortage.

That shot keeps getting harder to take.

At a subcommittee meeting Thursday, three council members voted to drop Pennrose, a national property developer whose proposal leaned entirely on apartments, from the running. Three developers remain in contention. The councilors couldn’t settle on a finalist, and they acknowledged openly that the April 22 target date won’t hold.

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

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

None of this is fast. The project traces back to 2021, when Citi Properties, a local agency, purchased the land and closed the golf course. A tennis group then approached the city about recreational access. Montpelier didn’t stop there: the city bought the entire property in 2022 outright, committing to a plan that would mix housing with recreational uses on the site.

That $2 million bond to acquire the property wasn’t popular. Residents complained that the purchase would raise property taxes, and that the city hadn’t fully thought through what development on the site would actually cost local homeowners and renters down the line. The city moved forward regardless.

Since 2022, Montpelier has paid $500,000 to consulting firm White + Burke to manage the process, which has included collecting resident input, drafting development criteria, and testing the soil. That last item isn’t routine. The site carries brownfield contamination, meaning whoever wins the bid will inherit a cleanup problem before a single foundation gets poured. Brownfield redevelopment across the Northeast has a long record of blowing up project timelines and squeezing affordable housing out of otherwise viable deals.

Affordability is the question none of the four developers has answered cleanly. Home prices across Vermont have climbed hard, and council members have pressed each competing team to explain how they’d keep units accessible to people who actually live and work in Montpelier now. They haven’t gotten a convincing answer yet. That’s part of why 2026 is starting to look like another year of waiting.

The stakes aren’t abstract. Getting housing built at Country Club Road would give the city somewhere to put residential growth other than the downtown flood plain, a pressure point that’s only intensified since the 2023 flooding that gutted central Montpelier. The site has capacity for hundreds of units. That’s significant in a city of roughly 8,000 people dealing with low vacancy rates and rising rents.

What Montpelier doesn’t have is more time to get it wrong. The process has already run five years since Citi Properties first bought the land in 2021. Three developers are still in the room. The councilors are still deliberating. And the field off Country Club Road still has more frisbee golfers on it than housing units.