October 1, 2026
"A dentist drill." That is how Nancy Pearce, a W/J Ranch resident who lives near the Woody Creek Raceway, described the sound of a race car circling the track behind her property, according to The Aspen Times. She told Pitkin County commissioners on July 22 that the noise had made gardening unpleasant and made it hard to enjoy her own home. Her neighbor across Highway 82, John Pappas, said he could hear the same engines from his house in Brush Creek.
Their testimony was part of a multi-hour hearing. As The Aspen Daily News reported, the commissioners never voted on the proposed denial.
As The Aspen Daily News reported, Pitkin County staff had already recommended denial. Community Development planner Franco Palumbo told the Board of County Commissioners that the proposed expansion of the Woody Creek racetrack "goes well beyond reconstruction or safety improvements," and that its cumulative scale and intensity would not be tolerable under the county's land use code. Commissioner Patti Clapper moved to adopt a resolution of denial based on that finding.
Before the board could vote on her motion, the applicant asked to withdraw. Todd Jacobs, who co-owns the racetrack with Bret Richheimer, told the commissioners he had heard enough from the public and from Clapper to know the current version would not pass. He said the better path was to pull the application, take the feedback, and resubmit through what he called "the appropriate process," according to The Aspen Daily News. The board accepted the withdrawal unanimously, which is the vote that got reported as the outcome. Commissioner Greg Poschman said he had rarely seen a proposal so out of touch with the community it claimed to serve, as reported by The Aspen Daily News.
None of that is a denial. It is a pause the applicant chose for himself, and it means there is no formal county finding on the record against this specific plan. A denial would have created exactly that kind of finding, tied to this application, on this land, under this code section. A withdrawal creates nothing. It just ends the clock on this version and leaves the door open for the next one.
The Woody Creek Raceway sits on 45 acres at 550 Raceway Road, a short drive from the Woody Creek Tavern and the trailer park and homes that make up the rest of the community. The 1.1 mile track opened in 1963 as a private circuit for local racing enthusiasts, back when street racing had recently been banned statewide. It has operated ever since as a legal nonconforming use on land zoned residential, meaning it predates the zoning that would otherwise prohibit it and can continue only within the limits of its original approval.
That original approval, granted in the early 1990s, capped racing at 24 days per calendar year and placed no limit on the hours of the facility's outdoor shooting range.
The track went up for sale in 2025 with an asking price of $23 million, marketed as a blank-slate opportunity for a buyer willing to modernize a facility Chris Bendon, a partner with BendonAdams who is helping manage the redevelopment, described as being in "desperate need of repair," as reported by The Aspen Times. The sale closed on June 24, 2026, for $17 million, a cash transaction to brothers-in-law Todd Jacobs and Bret Richheimer. Their redevelopment application had actually been filed months earlier, on November 17, 2025, ahead of the closing, first under the entity Mount Adams Capital LLC and later carried into the July hearing as Raceway Fund LLC, with Jacobs listed as principal on both filings.
The version of the plan that reached the Board of County Commissioners on July 22 proposed rebuilding the track in a new layout and adding what county reporting described as nearly 250,000 square feet of new construction. An opinion piece from W/J Ranch neighbors Pearce and Behrhorst put the total higher, counting underground space, at more than 300,000 square feet and compared it to the footprint of two Costco stores.
The operational changes went in two directions at once, which is easy to miss if you only skim the noise complaints:
The applicants also built in a sustainability pitch: solar power intended to get the facility close to net zero, and $10,000 a year committed to an electric bike fleet so residents and guests could reach the seasonal RFTA stop in Woody Creek or the Brush Creek park and ride without driving. Pitkin County's Open Space and Trails board reviewed those commitments and concluded, in a letter to Community Development, that the capital project's impacts were incompatible with the trail use and conservation values already protected on the adjacent open space land. The letter did not block the application on its own, but it added another county body's name to the list of skeptics before the hearing even started.
Not every voice at the hearing opposed the project. Pitkin County Sheriff Michael Buglione said the facility would give first responders training infrastructure the county currently lacks, including a place to teach teenagers to drive in winter conditions. A supporter described a therapeutic racing program that uses electric vehicles with children with autism. Liam Heath, who grew up in the valley, told commissioners that racing at the track as a teenager led him to study mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley. Aspen City Council member John Doyle summarized the tension from the other side, saying the project carried too many private benefits and far too many public impacts.
The distinction matters because of what each outcome would allow the applicant to do next. A formal denial, the kind Clapper's motion was headed toward, becomes part of the county's decision record for that specific application. Anyone bringing back a substantially similar proposal would be arguing against a documented finding that the concept itself was incompatible with the Woody Creek Master Plan and the surrounding neighborhood's character.
A withdrawal avoids that. Jacobs said as much in the room. He framed the move as taking what the board and the public had said and returning through the normal review process, not as abandoning the project. Nothing in the county's action that day prevents Raceway Fund LLC from filing a revised application built around the same 45 acres and the same underlying goal of a modernized, expanded members-only facility.
Susan Taylor, who moderates the Woody Creek Caucus, raised questions about the plan weeks before the hearing. At a caucus meeting on June 25, she asked what kind of facility would require housing for up to 20 full-time employees, and she questioned whether that housing should be counted as a community benefit. The applicant's materials, for their part, described the racetrack as a way to diversify the local economy and provide jobs without adding to local housing pressure. County staff later weighed the full proposal under the nonconforming-use rules and recommended denial, and the applicant chose to revisit the plan.
For anyone living in Woody Creek or Old Snowmass, the practical takeaway is that this file stays open. The Woody Creek Caucus and the Brush Creek Landowners Association were both active participants in the process that just concluded without a decision, and they are the groups most likely to hear first when a revised application is filed with Pitkin County Community Development. The specific numbers worth tracking if a new version appears are the same ones that drove opposition this time: the race day cap, the total square footage, and whether the employee housing count keeps climbing from one draft to the next.
The track itself is not going anywhere in the meantime. What changes, if anything, is the paperwork behind it, and that paperwork is where this story will actually get decided.
If you are weighing what a development story like this means for property values or day to day life in Woody Creek and Old Snowmass, Stephanie Lewis follows this market closely and is glad to talk through what it might mean for a specific property. Book a private consultation.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
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