Federal campus reaches final stage

FORT COLLINS — Contractors have started work on the fifth and final office building of the $80 million Natural Resources Research Center campus, the culmination of a project that dates back nearly 20 years.

Acquest Development of Buffalo, N.Y., is heading the construction for “Building E,” located at the south end of the 30-acre complex about one-half mile south of Colorado State University in the Centre for Advanced Technology.

The 43,500-square-foot facility will house about 164 U.S. Forest Service scientists and administrators, currently scattered across Fort Collins in three locations.

As with the first four phases at the NRRC, Building E will be owned by the developers, who will lease it back to the federal government. Project costs for Building E, the smallest office building at the Natural Resources Research Center, are estimated at $10.77 million, said Dan McPherson, contracting officer for the U.S. General Services Administration, which manages leases for government offices.

Acquest, which also developed Building C of the NRRC campus, is expected to complete Building E by September 2004, McPherson said.

As Building E comes under construction, the 100,000-square-foot Building D is nearly complete and ready for occupancy. Developers for Building D, a partnership that includes Everitt Enterprises of Fort Collins, expect to deliver the building to its tenants — the Agricultural Research Service — later this month, said Tom Livingston, an executive for Everitt.

Upon completion, the campus will span 485,000 square feet of leased space, including five buildings and an additional 26,000-square-foot fabrication shop. In all, 1,200 government employees will work at the campus, according to the General Services Administration.

The project was first conceived in the mid-1980s as a means to unify the multiple agencies of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Department of Interior that were scattered across Fort Collins. Six different agencies were previously located in 13 buildings.

After roughly a decade of planning, the project was given federal blessing in 1998, and the first building — which is home to the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station — opened in November 1999.

The project’s economic impact has apparently been two-sided in Fort Collins. The new campus has caused some of the federal agencies to consolidate staff and bring new workers to the city from other states, including California and Texas. In addition, Everitt Enterprises is the developer-owner of three of the five buildings.

The Everitt team actually made the winning bid on Building E in March. However, federal funds weren’t released until August, at which time interest rates had shot up, making the project too costly. “We were not able to honor our proposal,” Livingston said.

Furthermore, the deal enriches the Colorado State University Research Foundation, which is leasing the campus ground.

On the other hand, commercial landlords are feeling the pain of losing major tenants.

“I would say we have an overall (office) vacancy rate of 20 percent,´ said Dan Bernth, a commercial real estate broker and investor in Fort Collins. “I would say half of that is directly attributable to (the NRRC).”

Bernth said the NRRC project “certainly has precluded me from building any more office buildings in the last few years ? We probably have another three years of absorption before it gets back to 10 percent, which to me is a healthy number.”

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