Law Week Colorado (LWC) interviewed Taft’s (formerly Sherman & Howard) Cory Kalanick, chair of Taft’s Public Finance Practice Group, and Bill Peffer, head of the Mountain West Business Group, for an article highlighting the financing of the iconic landmark Stanley Hotel in Estes Park. Kalanick and Peffer discussed the intricacies of the transaction, including the public-private partnership and the negotiation process. The article also included information about the hotel’s haunting history and the cryogenically frozen body of Norwegian man Bredo Morstøl, which currently resides at the Stanley.
Taft served as issuer’s counsel and borrower’s counsel in the acquisition, with the firm’s legal team led by Kalanick and Peffer.
Peffer told LWC, “The legal team navigated some interesting demands and sensitivity around insurance and risk for the museum’s priceless artifacts as part of the deal. Aside from some of them being difficult to value, the legal team needed to work hard to ensure the parties for the deal were comfortable with the campus, management, and team.”
“Accommodating everybody and threading that needle was a difficult and challenging [thing] to do, which made it a lot of fun,” Peffer added.
“Putting together this public-private partnership was a Herculean task for sure,” Kalanick said to LWC. “And the old adage about public-private partnerships is, ‘If you’ve done one, you’ve done one,’ because every single public-private partnership is different.”
“Also, we were doing this at a time when the market was changing,” Kalanick said. “When we went to the market, it looked a lot different than when we started the deal in terms of what interest rates were doing, and what the tariff environment was — all of those things.”
Read the LWC article HERE. Read Taft’s full press release about the transaction HERE.