Killington Resort has been planning one of the largest construction projects Vermont has ever seen. Over 25 years, the ski area’s base would be transformed by the construction of luxury homes and amenities including a panoramic pool, a forest spa and fitness grove, a skating path, and a pedestrian promenade lined with 100,000 square feet of restaurant and retail space. The $3 billion worth of improvements would cement the resort’s position as one of the most valuable tourist destinations in Vermont and the nation, developers say.
But first, the Town of Killington must build new roads and water systems that would support the revitalized ski community — a $110 million investment called the Killington Forward Initiative. The money would come from a tax-increment finance district, or TIF, a public financing arrangement that enables municipalities to borrow money against the future tax revenues a development will generate. Completing the infrastructure projects and managing the complex financing is the town’s responsibility.
How’s that going?
Stephanie Clarke, the town’s consulting project manager, recently told the Killington Selectboard that staff turnover has left the town’s books in disarray and complicated efforts to run the TIF properly. The town manager has been put on administrative leave and could be fired; the latest finance director quit in June; and the selectboard has eliminated town funding for both a finance director and a staff accountant.
The town manager has been put on administrative leave and could be fired the latest finance director quit in June.
Killington has had six town managers, eight fire chiefs and two finance directors since 2022. The town is currently without a finance director, public works director, assistant town planner and fire chief.
Nevertheless, the town has made some progress, Clarke told Seven Days: Some water infrastructure, including new wells, pumps and storage tanks, and a section of reconstructed road are substantially complete. But other phases of the project that were supposed to be done by now have not even gone out to bid. That won’t happen until the coming winter, Clarke said. Last month, she presented the selectboard with a spreadsheet that listed 43 tasks that must be completed before construction can begin. At the time, the town lacked staff to complete 27 of them.
“It is reckless to continue … without significant financial guidance from inside the town to go forward and to have the right players in place,” Clarke told the elected officials.
The Vermont Economic Progress Council, the state board that oversees TIF projects, has called the town’s staff turnover problematic and warned Killington that it has “identified numerous errors and areas of concern” in paperwork submitted by the town in recent years.
Such evidence indicates the challenges a tiny town can face when it takes on a major TIF-funded project to enable private development. In Killington, which has just 1,400 residents, the situation has been complicated by dissent in town hall driven in part by allegations of ethics violations.
The resort’s owners and Great Gulf, the Toronto firm developing the new ski village, have said little publicly about the apparent disarray in the town offices.
Things looked far rosier in 2023, when more than 40 town and resort officials gathered at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Killington Forward Initiative. Selectboard member Jim Haff, then the town’s interim zoning administrator and a prominent backer of the project, stood at the front of the group and smiled broadly for a photographer.
Killington had just hired his wife, Mary Ellen Keenan-Haff, as the town’s finance director. She was responsible for forecasting the town’s finances and accounting for the Killington Forward Initiative’s grants, loans and the TIF district.
Haff himself had served a term on the selectboard between 2010 and 2013, then returned to the board in 2018 and is currently its chair. He has drawn sharp criticism for his management style. Former employees have alleged that his behavior created an untenable work environment.
In one case, a town employee filed a complaint with police, describing Haff and his wife screaming “at the top of their lungs” at then-town manager David Atherton in May 2025.
“The complainant said she was afraid to go to work and very fearful that the Select Board member and his wife’s behavior would escalate,” the police report read. “The complainant also said that other employees were also fearful to go to work because of multiple incidents of improper behavior from the couple that happened before today’s incident.” Haff later told police it was Atherton who had lost his temper with the couple during a discussion of the town’s finances.
Just weeks after the incident, in June 2025, Atherton fired Keenan-Haff, alleging financial mismanagement and costly errors. In the termination letter, Atherton said Keenan-Haff had mistakenly spent $294,000 in town funds to pay off a loan that was meant to be refinanced. (Atherton died later that year.)
Former employees say tensions between Haff and town employees escalated following his wife’s firing and came to a head during an impasse on the town budget this spring. Seeking to reduce the town’s expenditures, Haff proposed to increase employees’ share of health insurance premiums from 3 to 20 percent. In the midst of the budget debate, nine town employees unionized.
Soon after, the newly formed union charged the town with unfair labor practices because the selectboard announced it would cut three town positions. In its April complaint, the union alleged the cuts were retaliation for its organizing; the town has denied the charge.
At a selectboard meeting that month, Ricky Bowen, then a selectboard member and former longtime road foreman, lambasted Haff’s health care proposal and called the selectboard’s treatment of town employees “absolutely despicable.” He decried the proposed health care cuts in particular.
It is reckless to continue … without significant financial guidance from inside the town to go forward and to have the right players in place.
stephanie Clarke
“Boy, if that doesn’t look like retaliation and punishment for wanting to unionize, I don’t know what does,” Bowen said. He resigned from the selectboard shortly afterward.
In the meantime, Kirsten Hathaway-Olson, a former finance and HR director at the Rutland Housing Authority, had been hired to replace Keenan-Haff as finance director. Hathaway-Olson left the job in June, citing the selectboard’s poor treatment of town employees amid serious financial disorder.
“The late David Atherton made it clear that significant work was needed to address issues within the Town’s financial operations resulting from a former employee,” her resignation letter read. Hathaway-Olson declined to be interviewed but confirmed that the “former employee” was Keenan-Haff.
Haff has since publicly questioned Hathaway-Olson’s credentials and claimed that she was unable to settle the town’s finances or provide the required documentation for the Killington Forward Initiative.
In July, town manager Patrick Cushing was placed on administrative leave by the selectboard for insubordination, including for repeatedly refusing a directive “to identify an administrative staff position for elimination and associated cost savings.” Cushing told Seven Days that his only choices would have been to eliminate the job of the finance director, a bookkeeper or the office manager, something he considered irresponsible given the town’s involvement in the major infrastructure projects.
Cushing is awaiting a termination hearing.
This year, two town residents filed separate conflict-of-interest complaints involving Haff. The selectboard called in Ingrid Jonas, a retired Vermont State Police major, to investigate.
She delivered a 14-page report in June that became public last month. She dismissed most of the allegations but found that Haff had violated the municipal ethics code by failing to recuse himself from three selectboard discussions that involved his wife, including one on a budget proposal she prepared.
“Although no individual instance identified during this investigation, standing alone, would be especially significant, the repeated nature of the conduct is noteworthy,” she concluded. “That pattern is inconsistent with the conflict-of-interest procedures adopted by the Town and risks undermining public confidence in the fairness, integrity, and transparency of municipal decision-making.”
Haff’s attorney, Andrew Montroll, responded with an 11-page letter that argued that Jonas’ investigation strayed from the original complaints and questioned her methodology.
When the selectboard met on August 10, Haff, sitting in the audience instead of with his fellow selectboard members, participated in the board’s discussion of Jonas’ findings.
“I would love to have [a motion], as my attorney had said, ‘to exonerate me.’ There is nothing there,” Haff said.
Shortly afterward, the selectboard voted unanimously to clear him of the allegations.
The town is exploring ways to fix its financial management. While the selectboard eliminated the finance director and staff accountant from the 2027 budget, interim town manager Rob Kovalesky said during a selectboard meeting last week that the town may contract out its financial management. The selectboard has indicated that six firms have been prescreened.
Clarke told Seven Days that she wants to ensure the town is tracking its expenditures accurately so it can be reimbursed with the public grants and TIF revenue for loans it has used to pay for construction.
“I never do the financial administration; that’s not my job within my scope of consulting,” Clarke said. “But in this case I’m making an exception and diving in and trying to make sure I know where all the pieces are so we can accurately move forward with confidence.”
When Seven Days contacted Haff and his wife separately, Haff responded for both, saying neither would answer the newspaper’s questions and that he would contact a lawyer if the paper called them again.
Killington’s interim town manager and the rest of its selectboard members declined to comment individually on the town’s personnel issues.
Selectboard member Roger Rivera, who has generally sided with Haff’s proposals, lost an election on August 11. He was replaced by Celia Clancy, a former retail executive and critic of the selectboard.
State Auditor Doug Hoffer said he found the turnover in Killington concerning but otherwise declined to comment on the situation. Hoffer has audited TIFs for more than a decade and is a fierce critic of the financial vehicles. In a 2025 memo, he wrote that the complexity of TIFs and the Vermont Economic Progress Council’s weak enforcement mechanisms have led to millions of dollars of serious accounting errors.
“If state employees are promoting a program and offering program participants technical assistance, and even proposing legislative changes to accommodate them, then it is unsurprising that enforcement actions for noncompliance would be exceedingly rare,” Hoffer wrote.
Miro Weinberger, the former mayor of Burlington and a TIF advocate who now leads the housing initiative Let’s Grow Homes, acknowledged that managing a TIF was difficult even for Burlington, a much larger municipality with more resources than most towns. He declined to comment on Killington’s situation but said small municipalities can manage TIF projects if they employ internal and external financial professionals.
“A smart thing about the legislation is that cities are allowed to use the TIF revenue to pay for those consultants,” Weinberger said.
To date, the resort and the developer have not publicly criticized the town’s efforts, but resort general manager Mike Solimano recently acknowledged the complications in a written statement.
“There have been some challenges within the Town,” Solimano wrote, “but the Town, Great Gulf and Killington Resort continue to communicate and work together to keep these projects moving forward.”
In 2024, a group of local investors led by Phill Gross, cofounder of a hedge fund, and Michael Ferri, who owns oil change franchises, purchased Killington Resort from the Utah company POWDR.
Great Gulf, the Toronto developer and a minority investor in the resort, plans to build Live Killington — “a vibrant, state-of-the-art brand-new mountain village, unlike anything seen before,” according to the ski resort’s marketing materials. The vision calls for a year-round community of hundreds of homes, as well as restaurants, shops and amenities. Great Gulf previously credited the town’s investment with making the project possible. In a statement, the company told Seven Days that it was working closely with the town to construct the infrastructure.
“Meaningful progress continues across several important areas of the base village project, including the Town of Killington’s foundational work on waterlines and road infrastructure, as well as ongoing planning and approvals with state and regional authorities,” the statement read.
In the July meeting when Clarke, the consulting project manager, noted that the town lacked staff to complete tasks for the project, she recommended the town pause its work.
Haff asked her about the state of the town’s finances: “Where are we on the finances? When we had a finance director and we had a town manager and we had an assistant planner…” he said, allowing the sentence to trail off. “We’re waiting for numbers.”
“From who?” Clarke asked.
“I believe we were told you were gonna put something together, Stephanie,” the chair replied.
“I was — with the town manager,” she said, referring to Cushing, who had been placed on leave. “I can’t do my job like this.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Hitting Some Bumps | Deadlines have slipped for Killington Resort’s massive redevelopment plan. Can the town get its act together?”
This article appears in August 19 • 2026.