Lowe’s puts Cheyenne on national radar

Officials look to expand business parks

CHEYENNE — With the coming of a huge Lowe’s Cos. Inc. home-improvement distribution center, Cheyenne is suddenly on the national radar screen with site selectors and local economic developers are planning to capitalize on their new visibility.

And with Lowe’s taking up a fifth of the Cheyenne Business Parkway, officials of Cheyenne LEADS, Cheyenne and Laramie County’s economic-development corporation, are accelerating their search for additional space, anticipating more good things in the future.

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“I think we’ve stepped over the threshold and we’re into a positive growth period,´ said LEADS president Jack Crews. “We’ve created an adequate critical mass where there are enough synergies in our own economy that we’re a place where things can happen now.”

Crews credits Lowe’s with “that last half step over the threshold,” but he also credits other companies in the Cheyenne Business Parkway, such as Sierra Trading Post, EchoStar, Rex and Quark, and other LEADS recruits elsewhere in the community, such as SafeCard Services, VAE Nortrak and Puma Steel.

Growth factors in place

“We’ve got diversity, critical mass, work force, things for people to do, spousal employment opportunities that didn’t really exist a number of years ago and, again, the tremendous growth in the Front Range bodes well for Cheyenne,” Crews said.

Still, Lowe’s announcement in January that it would build its eighth national distribution center in Cheyenne already has been a major boost to the community’s visibility, according to Crews and LEADS vice president Randy Bruns.

Lowe’s plans to break ground in May on Wyoming’s largest building, a 900,000-square-foot, $60 million automated distribution center the size of 20 football fields, with a truck bay for each of the 70-some retail stores in the West and Midwest to be served out of Cheyenne.

“We’ve always fought the old perception that we’re way out there somewhere,” Crews noted. “Clearly that’s been dispelled now with a company like Lowe’s selecting Cheyenne as a location for a logistics-oriented business. Any time a million square feet of construction takes place anywhere, that gets noticed through the construction industry and the site-selection professionals.”

In fact, Cheyenne recently was named 42nd on a list of 50 “hot cities” compiled by Expansion Management Magazine from more than 300 metropolitan areas and was a “Blockbuster Deal of the Week” in Site Selection Magazine’s Online Insider.

On a roll

The Lowe’s announcement closely followed a decision by Grobet File Company of America, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of precision instruments and tools, to build a new facility in the Cheyenne Business Parkway, and late in March, Mountain Regional Services Inc. of Evanston, a leading provider of services to people with disabilities, announced it would open a branch in Cheyenne.

“We’re kind of on a roll here and it’s just going to continue,´ said Mary Roggenbuck, LEADS’ communications director.

The irony to Crews, Bruns and Roggenbuck is that Cheyenne’s assets were in place before the Lowe’s announcement, but they weren’t recognized by many people.

“This community worked hard and invested in itself, and in the case of the Cheyenne Business Park, it has continued to pony up and develop that park,” Bruns observed. “What’s changed now is that suddenly other people are beginning to be aware of what we have because of the Lowe’s announcement.”

The new recognition is even more special because Cheyenne wasn’t originally on Lowe’s list of potential sites.

“One of their team members had been in Northern Colorado and wandered up to Cheyenne and was surprised at what she saw,” Bruns recalled. “The next day they called to see if there was any chance we had any property around that could accommodate a 125-acre facility.

“The expectation was that we didn’t, but I told them we did, in fact, have a site ready to go. That surprised some of the Northern Colorado Realtors working with Lowe’s. She was here on a Tuesday, they called us Wednesday and they came up on Friday.”

That was in February of 2000, and while Lowe’s continued to investigate other sites, LEADS kept a dialogue with them “and on point after point, this community surprised them,” Bruns noted.

“It’s always nice to exceed expectations. It’s always a little frustrating when that’s because the expectations are so low,” he said. “And that’s not a criticism of Lowe’s. That’s a criticism we can make toward ourselves, kind of the Wyoming attitude of apologizing for ourselves. And I think it’s also a little bit the parochialism of Northern Colorado.”

The 917-acre Cheyenne Business Parkway still has 337 acres available divided into 35 parcels ranging from 1.7 to 46 acres that could be combined or configured to meet a company’s needs. Most are in Phase II, which was recently developed with $1.2 million from the community’s Progress and Prosperity fund-raising effort.

Lowe’s will occupy 160 acres — all of Phase III — at the east end of the parkway near the Campstool Road interchange with Interstate 80.

Additional space a priority

LEADS has now made the search for additional business-park space a top priority.

“We’re working on a major strategic plan for the next business parkway, wherever that might be,” Crews said. “Clearly, that’s critical because of the 10-year lead time that basically is required to acquire, develop and market a business park.”

Bruns said the search is “kind of focusing” on south Cheyenne but “nothing’s ruled out.”

To Crews, the critical component is available infrastructure.

“We’re looking at several potential areas,” he said. “We have to have access to reliable, high-volume infrastructure — municipal water, sewer, natural gas, telecommunications, interstate highways — and it would be awfully nice to have some rail accessibility serving the park.”

To finance the venture, LEADS is looking at the probability of another Progress and Prosperity campaign plus a “whole menu” of other resources, including local, state and federal funding, and a possible portion of a local-option sales tax.

“There are any number of opportunities out there we need to explore and develop,” Crews said.