First alumni tried to the buy the campus of Green Mountain College, in Poultney, Vermont, after the small school shuttered in 2019. Then the rumor was it would become a prison or rehabilitation center. Then came plans for a booze-filled luxury resort.
Now 115 acres in rural Vermont are up for grabs, again.
Liquor magnate Raj Bhakta has scrapped his plans to turn Green Mountain into a $100 million complex of hotel rooms, condos, and a micro-distillery, and hopes instead to donate the land to a Catholic organization.
“The right beneficiary has a vision aligned with the revival of the United States and Western Civilization,” a website seeking proposals reads. “They would also recognize this must first begin with the spiritual revival of our Christian faith.”
Around 30 organizations have already made inquiries this month, a Bhakta spokesperson said.
Bhakta and his wife, Danhee, bought the campus at auction for $5 million in 2020, a year after Green Mountain College closed amid declining enrollment and financial pressure. They later began living on the property and started a independent K-5 school there for a small cohort of students.
It was an extension of Bhakta’s eccentric entrepreneurial vision: He made a litigious exit from the rye whisky company WhistlePig and then started a boutique French brandy brand and took over a nearby dairy farm. In Poultney, he hoped to create a rural haven for tourists with a knack for exclusive spirits and small-town charm.
Now the math is no longer working. The aging campus requires roughly $1 million a year in operational upkeep, and Bhakta faced pushback on his state application to redevelop the property. Poultney — a town of roughly 3,000 person that once counted Green Mountain College as its largest employer — has battled with the Bhaktas over their efforts to lower the campus’ property taxes (Green Mountain was tax-exempt as an educational institution.)
“It’s not a secret that Vermont is a challenging place to do business,” Bhakta said Wednesday.
But the donation could return the campus to something more akin to its 1800s origins as a Methodist seminary, he added, and “the truth is that if we can find the right recipient, it could turn out to be at least as good, if not better, than whatever we had originally dreamed. I want to give it away.”
Experts say that dozens of New England colleges like Green Mountain will shutter within a decade as the college-age population declines, and fewer young adults seek out college at all. Small college towns like Poultney are poised to bear the consequences.
Green Mountain College — an outdoorsy school that specialized in environmental fields — once supported 150 jobs and $6 million in annual payroll in Poultney. After the closure, its population shrank, and the town is left without a anchor institution to guide its economic future for the second time in less than a decade.
Local business owners and organizations are vying to boost the town’s outdoor economy by expanding trails and youth programming, the Globe reported last March.
Poultney town officials were not immediately available to comment.
Diti Kohli can be reached at diti.kohli@globe.com. Follow her @ditikohli_.
