A flamboyant itinerant Pentecostal preacher from Florida is the new owner of the former Green Mountain College campus after closing a $6 million sales agreement with a Vermont liquor entrepreneur.
Tommie Zito now owns the 115-acre campus and its 21 buildings in the heart of Poultney, which he plans to open next fall with hundreds of students as an evangelical education center that he calls Z University.
Paperwork filed with the Poultney town clerk on Monday shows that Zito signed a sales agreement with Raj Bhakta, the founder of Vermont-based Whistlepig Whiskey, who bought the former campus at auction in 2020 with sweeping plans to convert it into a world-class resort.
But after Bhakta failed to gain financing and necessary state planning permits, he announced this spring he was going to donate the campus to a Christian group with a mission of reviving the U.S. through religious faith. He announced several months later that he had selected Zito from among an undisclosed number of applicants.
But rather than donating it, Bhakta sold it to Zito for $6 million, according to property records filed with the town. That is about $1.5 million more than Bhakta paid for it six years ago.
Zito claimed this summer to have received a $1 million donation from an anonymous source to support his vision. That donation apparently served as the down payment to Bhakta, who is holding the remaining $5 million balance in the form of a promissory note and five-year mortgage with Zito, property records show.
The floating interest rate on the mortgage is set at the prime rate published by the Wall Street Journal plus 2 percent, the property records show. Currently, that prime rate is 7 percent, so the mortgage would have a 9 percent annual rate.
A $5 million, five-year mortgage at that rate would require a monthly payment of more than $100,000, or more than $1.2 million annually. Bhakta has said it costs about $1.5 million a year to maintain the campus and address years of deferred maintenance that has left many of its buildings in disrepair.
Since announcing his plans, Zito has been seeking donations. As part of that effort, he announced several weeks ago that he was inviting supporters to attend a week-long event in early November and stay on the campus, which has former student dormitories.
During a Facebook livestream last week, Zito said, “We’ll have you up all up in November. We still have some housing left … but that will be gone and we won’t have one room left.”
However, state-required inspections and tests of the campus fire safety, alarm, and sprinkler systems have not been done in several years for at least 15 of the buildings, including the former dorms, according to a review of state records by Seven Days.
“Buildings need to be inspected before Mr. Zito has people staying in them,” said CJ Garrow, Rutland Regional Manager for state fire safety. “We will need to have some meetings and inspections before anyone can stay in these buildings.”
Garrow said Tuesday that Zito had not yet contacted his office about providing potential overnight accommodations on the campus. Garrow said he has directed his staff to contact Zito to see which buildings he might be planning to use.
Zito did not respond to an inquiry about the purchase agreement, the fire safety issues on the campus, or the status of his fundraising.
In the sales agreement and mortgage with Bhakta, Zito agreed to pay for a $5 million insurance policy on the campus to protect against fire and other loss. Zito will pay the insurance premiums, but any insurance claim pay-outs would go to Bhakta. Failure to maintain such insurance would be grounds for Bhakta to foreclose on the property.
Zito walked alone through the campus during his Facebook livestream last week. In the former bookstore, he said that renovation work on the campus would “begin next week … as part of a three-phase roll-out plan.”
It is not clear what plan Zito was referring to. He did file a single-page zoning application with Poultney officials on August 20 that described the project as a “Christian college of evangelism, government, business and art.” Included with that brief description was only a single page simply listing the existing buildings.
Town Zoning Administrator Jeffrey Biasuzzi found that application to be incomplete, according to a September 8 notice to Zito. Biasuzzi wrote that the application required a site plan outlining details on how the campus buildings will be developed “for each structure and their occupancy maximums, so as to address potential compliance issues of parking and traffic.”
Zito also failed to submit $350 in zoning application fees to the town. Biasuzzi said that Zito has not submitted any follow-up application since receiving his notice.
There’s no record of Zito shepherding such an ambitious and costly project like he is proposing for Poultney, though he did create a small Bible college in Florida more than a decade ago that graduated a handful of students before he suspended operations.
Zito’s public efforts involve traveling to churches in the United States, Canada, and overseas to preach a message of personal salvation at revival meetings. Publicly, he claims to have “saved” more than 7.5 million people.
It is not clear how Zito intends to finance remaking the Poultney campus into a global hub for evangelical Christianity, including up to 1,000 students, the “world’s greatest archive” of evangelical literature, and television and podcast studios.
Zito had a ministry in Florida in the Fort Lauderdale area that filed for federal bankruptcy protection in 2010 and ceased operations amid unpaid rent and other bills.
The former Green Mountain College property is critically important to Poultney and its 3,000 residents. The campus dominates the town’s main drag, and schools have operated there for 140 years. Its closure in 2019 left a gap in Poultney’s economic and cultural life.
Zito has been encouraging supporters of his new plan to donate to his nonprofit American Awakening, saying donations are tax-deductible.
However, the Internal Revenue Service says American Awakening lost its tax-exempt status in May 2025 and posted notice of the revocation on its public website in February 2026. The IRS revokes tax-exempt status automatically when an organization fails to file annual financial reports of revenues and expenses for three consecutive years. American Awakening’s last such form, known as a 990, was filed in 2021.
That means any donations to American Awakening would not be tax-deductible. An IRS spokesperson said no further information about American Awakening’s taxable status was publicly available. Zito did not respond to an email asking him if he disputes the situation with the IRS.
“I got a prophecy that people are going to show up with donations,” he said during his livestream last week. “The Lord told me that He was going to pay for all this. He told me not to cut any corners.”
He has claimed that Poultney will be site of the first of nine evangelical schools he intends to establish worldwide in Canada, Italy, Dubai, Poland, Sri Lanka, Japan, Ireland and the United Kingdom.
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