Enlightened development community is big plus

Partnerships, especially the public/private kind, are more talked about than acted upon these days.

That’s why it was refreshing to find, in the course of preparing stories for a special section on Interstate 25 development that appears in this edition of The Business Report, that a spirit of cooperation between local government and private interest thrives in Northern Colorado.

Witness first the Crossroads Sub-area Transportation Study, a sleeper project that has been steaming along since June, almost entirely out of public view.

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The plan, when it is released for public consumption Jan. 22, will detail a vast network of transportation improvements along six miles of Interstate 25 corridor from just north of Windsor to Loveland.

The project includes the rebuilding of three major I-25 interchanges and an extensive overhaul of roadways along the interstate’s flanks.

Sounds like government work, right?

Only partly. The lion’s share of the $236,800 paid to consultants on the study comes from local governments. Larimer County and Loveland are in for $50,000 each. The North Front Range Transportation and Air Quality Planning Council, run by a consortium of local governments, chipped in $40,000. The state and smaller towns have contributed in smaller ways.

But here’s the news: McWhinney Enterprises, the developer of the Centerra project that promises to rearrange the landscape around I-25 and U.S. Highway 34, also put in $50,000. That’s more than the Colorado Department of Transportation, the town of Windsor and the city of Fort Collins combined.

Another landowner and developer, Connell Resources Inc., is also on the funding list at $5,000.

It is significant — in an age when land developers are routinely stereotyped as whining and moaning about regulatory agencies and local governments picking their pockets — that the biggest players in the development community open their own wallets for the public good.

True, their motives are not altogether altruistic: The work done to improve transportation systems will add many millions to the value of adjacent lands. But in so many other regions, private interests will nearly always wait for taxpayers to pick up the tabs for public projects.

Who will pay for the hundreds of millions in costs for the proposed Crossroads improvements? Ask the developers: “We’ll help,” they say. While the proof will wind up in the pudding, we’ve already seen a preview, and the news is encouraging.