The city of Steamboat Springs is ready to allocate $2.5 million in short-term rental tax revenue as part of a broader effort to help save Casey’s Pond from receivership.

The 124 residents of Casey’s Pond and their families along with roughly 100 employees of the senior living facility received a letter July 2 stating the owners of the property, Colorado Senior Residences, owed its bondholders $68.4 million and a Routt County judge had placed Casey’s Pond into receivership.

Council members met in executive session Wednesday as part of an emergency meeting on the pending closure of the senior living facility.

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They emerged from the session in just under an hour with a decision to approve an emergency ordinance to direct $2.5 million in short-term tax revenue to acquire use restrictions for 15 units of employee housing at Casey’s Pond.

According to the city’s attorney, Dan Foote, the ordinance appropriates “funds to contribute to support a bid to acquire Casey’s Pond. It provides findings that would justify the use of (short-term rental funds) for this purpose, which is to acquire deed restrictions or use covenants on 15 existing housing units.”

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“It also makes the findings necessary to support the decision to proceed using emergency procedures, i.e. adopting the ordinance today and having it take effect today as opposed to the usual two-step process that we go through,” said Foote.

Foote said the elements of the adopted ordinance, which would see the city enter into a grant agreement with the Yampa Valley Community Foundation to include terms of how and when the funds would be released.

“We would probably hold on to those funds until we know that there is a deal in place,” he added.

How the city’s proposed funding could complete any type of deal to save Casey’s Pond is unclear. The funding would be a fraction of the estimated $28 million to $30 million needed to satisfy bondholders.

Local officials have indicated that the Yampa Valley Community Foundation has taken the lead on organizing the funding drive.

Tim Wohlgenant, chief executive officer of the community foundation, attended the executive session remotely.

He said an offer of $20 million was previously made and rejected for the receivership deal and that he hoped the city’s contribution would only be a piece of the puzzle moving forward as the foundation serves as a “facilitator” in getting the deal done.

“With the city’s commitment, our hope is that we will be able to get funds from other major donors to contribute, as well as other entities that would be able to contribute to the overall offer,” said Wohlgenant.

“That’s our hope. We don’t have commitments yet. We have talked to a lot of individuals and entities, some of whom have the ability to put in significant funding,” he added. “If we are able to attract some larger donors, we will also try to raise money from the community, but I don’t want to start that campaign until we are much further down the path.”

Wohlgenant said the amount of money needed to save the senior living facility would likely be less than the $64 million debt.

He added that the Yampa Valley Community Foundation’s participation in forming a deal to raise the necessary money and save Casey’s Pond is “part of a collaboration” and that efforts to “raise funds from the broader community” would be delayed until enough major donors “have enough committed to make a difference.”

“You don’t want to just raise money for raising money’s sake,” said Wohlgenant, who added that anyone interested in helping with the effort could contact his office.

“Right now we are still in the kind of — we need to assemble the bulk of it first,” he said. “We have got a ways to go.”

In a brief discussion held by council members following the executive session, City Council President Gail Garey sought to “reiterate that if the deal does not move forward, the (city’s) funds remain in the (the city’s short-term rental tax fund).”

Foote explained that the city’s funds would acquire use restrictions for the 15 housing units to increase the stock of attainable housing by limiting their use to “either employees of Casey’s Pond or elsewhere in Routt County.”

“Provisions about priority, seniority and some of the typical provisions that we put in our deed restrictions, those will be subject to the negotiation once we have a better idea as to the outline of the deal,” said Foote.

“I feel as though it is easy to justify these funds being utilized to support attainable housing at Casey’s Pond,” council member Dakotah McGinlay said. “These are very essential workers in our community doing amazing work for our elder care.”

For council member Joella West, the decision to put up the $2.5 million to support a potential deal was an easy one.

“We just need to say yes to this,” West said. “It’s been a long road to get here. We don’t have a lot of time to ponder it. I don’t see any risk to the city, and that has been my concern all along as we were talking about what can the city do. This is not an untenable risk. We should just do it and see if we can make a difference.”

Council member Michael Buccino had previously expressed hesitation over contributing city funding to any potential deal to save Casey’s Pond, but he said Wednesday morning that he was fine moving forward with the ordinance as written.

“There’s no risk to allocating these funds to help save Casey’s Pond and the sense of urgency we have around this is tremendous,” council member Steve Muntean said. “I see this as a very low-risk, immediate way, or the most immediate way to have some positive impact on raising the funds we need.”

Muntean voted to second a motion offered by West to approve the emergency ordinance before council members unanimously voted to approve it.

City Manager Gary Suiter said he was encouraged that council’s decision Wednesday would make an impact.

“(Council) agreed that they had to do something,” Suiter said. “If we did nothing, then nothing was going to happen, so we had to offer up some cash, and hopefully that creates some gravitational pull for some other potential donors. I am hopeful.”