Station break: Clear Channel confirms move

LOVELAND – Clear Channel Communications Inc.’s five Northern Colorado holdings will move – lock, stock and microphones – to a new broadcast center in Loveland next fall.

The five Clear Channel stations for years have been shoehorned into an outdated and, frankly, scruffy building at 1612 Laporte Ave. in Fort Collins.

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Plans hatched several months ago for a new broadcast center next to Thunder Mountain Harley-Davidson’s huge new showroom and service center at Interstate 25 and Crossroads Boulevard in Loveland.

Architects were drafting plans, a builder was putting finishing touches on estimates, and a lease was inked in November between Clear Channel officials and Thunder Mountain owners Todd and Shelley Erdmann – but no one at Clear Channel would publicly confirm the move until last week.

“We’re extremely excited about the potential for this,´ said Stu Haskell, general manager for Clear Channel Northern Colorado. “We thought it was critical to our business to be centrally located. You can’t get any more central to this region than that location.” 

Clear Channel operates KCOL-AM, KIIX-AM, KISS-FM, The Bear 107.9 and Sunny 97.9 out of the one-story Laporte Avenue building that has been home to KCOL, the oldest of the five, since the 1930s.

Plans call for a two-story, 15,000-square-foot building the Erdmanns will own just west of Thunder Mountain. Clear Channel will lease about 12,000 square feet, with the remainder reserved for future expansion. The design process brings together Estes Park architecture firm Thorp Associates PC and Clear Channel’s contracted architect, Luckett & Farley Inc. of Louisville, Ky.

The ground floor of the new headquarters will house sales and business offices, with swanky new studios and production space – a far cry from where DJs and talk-show hosts work now – on the second floor.

The process has not been without frustrations and, according to some of those involved, is already months behind schedule.

“We should have been working on these plans over the holidays,´ said Roger Thorp, principal of the Estes Park design firm. ” We lost two months,” he said, attributing much of the delay to the formidable Clear Channel corporate bureaucracy.

Thorp designed the cavernous log, stone and glass Thunder Mountain dealership, and is working on other projects in the fast-developing complex that is taking shape around it.

The Thunder Mountain building and others take their design cues from one of Thorp’s trademark projects, the award-winning Fall River Visitors Center at Rocky Mountain National Park.

R.C. Heath Construction Co., the builder that pursued a fast-track schedule to open Thunder Mountain early last fall, will be pressed again to get Clear Channel’s new quarters ready by next fall.

Original plans called for the broadcast center to open in time for a Labor Day Harley extravaganza, one that some people are calling the Sturgis of the Rockies, after the famed summer Harley gathering in that South Dakota town.

The “Thunder in the Rockies” rally will bring tens of thousands of Harley-Davidson riders and fans to the Crossroads-I-25 neighborhood for events at Thunder Mountain and the Budweiser Events Center, just east across I-25.

Haskell said he hoped the move would not be seen as choosing one Northern Colorado city over another.

“It really will help our efficiency in serving all of Northern Colorado, listeners and clients alike,” Haskell said. “The most important element in this thing is that we have a regional economy. Because of that, we thought it was strategic to be centrally located. Why target a market when we can target a region?”

The prime beneficiaries of the move will be Clear Channel’s 50 employees, who work nearly shoulder-to-shoulder in the Laporte Avenue building.

“It’s going to make a tremendous difference to the employees,” Haskell said. “It’s going to make a statement. It will enhance performance, and it will certainly raise the level of morale.”

R.C. Heath will break ground on the project in May, and Erdmann said he hoped Clear Channel would be on the air from the new center in October.