The Land Board v. the Vail Valley
| Jurisdiction | Colorado,United States |
| Citation | Vol. 50 No. 11 Pg. 14 |
| Pages | 14 |
| Publication year | 2021 |
THE SIDEBAR
BY JOHN DUNN
Once upon a time, back in 1996, the Colorado State Board of Land Commissioners (the Land Board) cut a deal with a Vail Valley developer named Bob Brotman. The deal was that Brotman would escrow $1.8 million (a lot of money back then), and in return the Land Board would convey to Brotman the “school section” of land located just south of the unincorporated Town of Edwards and just one valley to the west of the Arrowhead Ski Area (then separate from the Beaver Creek Resort). The escrowed money was to be used by the Land Board to acquire other real estate, to complete what was characterized in their agreement as an “exchange.” Five years later, the residents of Vail had learned a lot more about the Land Board and the Colorado Enabling Act through Brotman v. East Lake Creek Ranch, L.L.P.[1]
A Short History Lesson
Brotman offers a crash course on what a "school section" is and how the State Board of Land Commissioners came to exist. Essentially, the original 13 states had title to a lot of real estate. But new states admitted into the union, the first of which was Ohio, had no tide to any real estate; public lands were owned by the federal government. Somehow it was agreed, and Thomas Jefferson is rumored to have had a hand in it, that the federal government would convey to each new state two "school sections" in each township of land for the support of the "common schools." A section is 364 acres of land.
So it was for Colorado in 1876. The Colorado Enabling Act provided for the grant of school sections to this state, and the Colorado Constitution established the Land Board to manage the lands. At the time of Brotman, the Land Board was managing approximately 3 million surface acres and 4 million mineral acres of land. As background, while not really pertinent to this story, the Constitution was amended, effective January 1,1997, to increase the Land Board membership from three to five persons, to establish Board term limits, and to modify the Board's land management mission. The Land Board of today is not the Land Board of 1996.
To return to the story, the Enabling Act and CRS § 36-1 -124 then provided, and still provide today, that any sale of land by the Land Board must be at public sale after published notice, and this was not done for the Brotman deal. The Land Board's theory was that the deal was...
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