Fort Lupton embraces downtown vitality

FORT LUPTON — On June 21 more than two years of planning came to fruition when the Fort Lupton City Council approved a ?Getting Down to Business? master plan.
In the spring of 2002, the city council created the Business Corridor Ad Hoc Committee. Members included local business owners and representatives from other city departments and committees.
The committee formed in response to a new Safeway grocery to be built outside of the existing business corridors. Brian Grubb, Fort Lupton?s city planner, said it was the first time a ?significant business? located outside of the traditional corridors. The concern was that older, more established business areas would become less frequented and eventually become dilapidated.
According to Bruce Davis, committee chairman and owner of Fort Lupton Amoco, the goal of the committee was to increase awareness of the downtown.
?We certainly don?t want it becoming a ghost town,? Davis said. He said the plan is proactive in that there are few vacancies in the downtown area right now. The plan is meant to prevent vacancies from occurring.

Business corridor protection
?When a big box comes in, it destroys the pricing structure,? Davis said, adding that his concern is that big retail chains will put smaller local businesses out of business. He said that by protecting the business corridor and the downtown area the city will be able to attract more small businesses.
The committee worked to put together a comprehensive business corridor master plan that would address funding mechanisms, capital projects and marketing and coordination. The committee called the plan ?Getting Down to Business.?
The plan contains a list of 23 action items that are listed in relative priority and contain goals that have already been accomplished, are in the process of being accomplished, can be done immediately or are evolutionary goals that will take 15 to 20 years to accomplish.
A public square is one item the plan calls for. A possible location for the square is the corner parking lot of the Bank of Colorado at Fourth Street and Denver Avenue. According to Jeff Winston, president of Winston and Associates, the bank might be interested in leasing the site to the city at a nominal rate. Winston said the public square would include a plaza and a fountain.
The budget for the plan is $52,000, but Grubb said they anticipate being under budget. Donations for the plan came from numerous sources. The chamber of commerce, the Fort Lupton Development Corporation and the Department of Local Affairs each donated $8,000 and the former Vectra Bank donated $1,000. The rest of the tab will be picked up by the city.
?The highest priority is to get a dedicated funding source in place,? Grubb said. ?We will be handicapped if we can?t get a revenue stream in place.?

Implementation costs unknown
There is no actual estimate for the final cost of implementing the plan. Winston said the cost is highly variable since some very expensive projects could be done cheaply through donations and assistance. For example, Winston said one possibility for the plan is a gateway statement over the bridge on Colorado Highway 52. He said the Colorado Department of Transportation has helped to fund similar beautification projects elsewhere and could be a source of funding for this and other transportation improvements.
The city of Fort Lupton hired Winston to draft the plan. Winston served as urban design consultant for the town of Vail for almost 20 years. He also did the streetscape plan for Golden, a plan for urban renewal for Lakewood and a master plan for renewal for Sheridan.
Another way to reduce costs is to encourage the area business owners to make improvements to their own property that follow the style guidelines laid out by the plan.
One building in the downtown has already undergone renovations to meet the plan?s style guidelines. The office of family practice doctor Selwyn Spray underwent renovations in 1997, within months of Spray acquiring the building. He said he was informed that the building would not meet the city?s standard for the area. Grubb encouraged Spray to follow the guidelines that the future plan would set out so he would not have to revamp the façade again.
Fort Lupton resident Don Patton is planning to build a two-story multi-use structure following the design guidelines of the plan. He described the project as ?one building with a three-building look.? Designer Brett Vaughn Moyer, formerly of Cowperthwaite Architecture LLC of Denver, said following the guidelines ?gives a new building an old look.?
Patton hopes to break ground on the building in July. The building will have 5,000 square feet of retail space on the first floor and five apartments on the second floor.
After two years, numerous drafts and several public hearings, the plan finally received approval. Grubb cites several factors for the slow process of developing the plan. He said the plan involved the coordination of numerous entities and combined public and private funding ? a recipe for delays.
Although the plan was slow to develop, implementation is quickly getting underway. Improvements to the intersection and traffic signal at Colorado Highway 52 and U.S. Highway 85 have already been completed. In addition, the Saint John building at 710 Fourth St. received designation as a historic site during the same city council meeting when the plan was finally approved.

on Facebook on LinkedIn