For more than 35 years, tourists have played at Seventh Mountain Resort while snow, wind, rain and sun tore at the siding outside.

The iconic condominium resort’s common buildings, including its convention center, restaurants and pool house, all got extensive renovations four years ago, financed by INNspired LLC, the Eugene-based partnership that runs the resort operation and owns many of its residential units. Individuals own the balance of units.

But most of the resort’s 20 residential buildings are showing their age, said Rich Tanguay, a board member of the Association of Unit Owners of the Inn of the Seventh Mountain.

The cedar exteriors are dry, faded and warped. The top of a wall on one of the buildings is wrapped in plastic.

The buildings are going to get fixed, and fixed soon, the association’s board decided this fall. But who will pay — and how much — is an issue that is sowing considerable angst among the condominium owners who will have to foot the bills.

How much?

The association’s board, led by Chairman Jordan Papé, whose Papé Properties Inc. is a leading partner in INNspired, and newly elected board members John Lietz, Keith Dagostino and Thys Heyneker voted on Nov. 7 to assess INNspired and the resort’s other 103 property owners a total of $17.75 million to pay for residing, reroofing and other work on the resort’s aging buildings, according to a memo posted on a unit owner’s Web site by Tanguay and fellow board member Dr. Peter Bours.

The size of the bill has caused some shock, Tanguay said. At that level, individual unit owners could be responsible for between $40,000 and $120,000, depending on the size and location of their unit. And multiple unit owners will be responsible for much more.

“I do know that there are a lot of very upset and confused unit owners,” Tanguay said. “This came as sort of a bolt of lightning to them, and the sum of money is just very large to a number of people.”

The underpinnings of the bill, and its timing, have also raised some hackles.

The $17.75 million figure was based partly on an architectural estimate of potential renovation costs, said the association’s general manager, Bill Friedman, who’s also the owner of a local bookkeeping company and a Bend city councilor. But no contractor’s bids have been solicited or submitted. And even with hard bids, the ultimate cost of repairing old buildings could rise or fall once the work starts, depending on what is found behind the siding, Friedman said.

Timing

Exactly how the ultimate costs will be divided depends, in part, on the timing of the assessment.

The reason?

When the association signed a sublease with INNspired to run the resort and renovate its common areas four years ago, the association agreed to compensate INNspired for the cost of replacing the common buildings’ exteriors — which are technically owned by the association, Friedman said.

The repayment, it was agreed, would come in the form of credits against future assessments. However, under the terms of the lease, INNspired is entitled to a credit of up to about 35 percent of any assessment that is instituted before Dec. 31, 2007. After that date, it’s entitled to a credit of only about 11 percent.

The board referred the timing of the assessment to a vote of the resort’s owners.

If the owners vote “yes” in the inn’s conference center on Sunday, the assessment will be levied this year, due either immediately or in three annual installments over the next three years.

If they vote it down, the assessment would presumably take effect later.

Dissenting board members Tanguay and Bours are trying to round up support to defeat the early assessment. But, according to a note they posted on a resort owners’ Web site, they don’t consider success likely. The association’s votes are divided according to the proportion of total square footage owned, which means that INNspired controls around 46 percent of the vote, according to the memo from Bours and Tanguay.

That means that most, if not all, of the remaining owners would have to vote against the 2007 assessment date to defeat it, Tanguay said in a phone interview Tuesday. But no more than 76 percent of the resort’s owners have ever voted on any measure before, he said, and the Thanksgiving weekend timing of this vote, combined with the short notice, will make it tougher to round up a large head count.

Tanguay, for example, won’t be able to make it: Every flight from his home in the San Francisco Bay Area to Bend was booked over the holiday weekend.

The difference between a 35 percent credit and an 11 percent credit on the $17.75 million assessment could amount to as much as $4.26 million.

Whether that much will actually be credited, Friedman noted, is anyone’s guess at this point. INNspired has never given the association a bill for the cost of the exterior work it paid for on the common areas, he said, so no one knows how large a credit will be requested or owed.

Papé was on vacation this week and couldn’t be reached for comment.

Lisa Kirbs, a spokeswoman for a group called Concerned Owners Inn of 7th, declined to comment Friday on advice from the group’s attorney.

Friedman said he has informally contacted a couple of local bankers who indicated that they would likely be willing to come up with loan packages to help the inn’s condo owners cover their assessment bills, once the timing and amount of the assessment’s payments are finalized.

Eventually, Friedman said, renovation work could improve property values throughout the resort, or at least improve salability.

But for now, concern over the assessments is piling another roadblock in front of unit sales, along with the generally sodden real estate market, Tanguay said. He put one of his two units on the market in February and got no takers, despite a series of price drops.

“There just is not a lot of movement with all the uncertainty out there,” he said.