Dallas visit offers rail-center view

FORT LUPTON – The economic future of southern Weld County came into sharper focus during a mid-April mission to a huge Union Pacific rail transfer center near Dallas, similar to one proposed for a 600-acre tract south of Fort Lupton.

Officials from Brighton, Fort Lupton and Upstate Colorado Economic Development spent about 90 minutes touring the $100 million intermodal terminal that opened in September 2005 on the southeast edge of the Dallas metroplex.

There, the group learned how 750 trucks daily move in and out of the sprawling center, taking containerized cargo off Union Pacific trains arriving from Los Angeles and shipping it throughout a region with a 250-mile radius.

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“The basis for that facility is to bring in containers from Long Beach, then break them down for distribution,” Upstate Colorado President Larry Burkhardt said.

A build-out plan for business parks that are adjacent to the Dallas rail center will put 7,000 people to work and fill 15 million square feet of commercial and industrial space, Burkhardt said.

After Burkhardt and others, including Brighton Economic Development Corp. Director Susan Stanton and Fort Lupton Planning Director Tom Parko, met with Union Pacific officials and toured the rail center, Burkhardt said a picture emerged that told the group most of what they needed to know about the Fort Lupton plan.

Already, $40 million is being spent on design and engineering studies for Union Pacific’s proposed project that would span a half-mile-wide, two-mile-long stretch along the east side of the Union Pacific tracks that run along Weld County Road 27 just south of Fort Lupton.

RTD plays role

The door to the project opened in late January when Union Pacific signed an agreement with Denver’s Regional Transportation District to explore ways to move UP’s two rail yards north and northeast of Union Station in lower downtown Denver.

The RTD board, with an eye toward launching high-speed rail service that would link Union Station with Denver International Airport, approved the $40 million to study the Fort Lupton site for the relocation.

“We’re all very impressed with the time and effort RTD has spent on this,´ said Dick Hartman, Union Pacific’s special representative for Colorado and Wyoming. “We have a number of hurdles to get over. There’s this big ‘if’ in the design and engineering study, and that would be a finding that this idea is way out of our cost structure.”

Other big “ifs” include questions about the ability of the region’s highway system to accommodate the traffic that the center would generate.

“You would assume some improvements would be made to the transportation infrastructure,” Burkhardt said.

Development pays way

As with other large commercial projects – the 1.5 million-square-foot Wal-Mart distribution center in Loveland, for example – highway improvements in the immediate vicinity are made with the user chipping in a major share of the cost.

Burkhardt said, on the basis of conversations he has had with developers and public officials in Texas, that the stakes were high enough for commercial users to bear a share.

“I talked with a developer there who was planning 6.5 million square feet of space on a 356-acre site” adjacent to the UP intermodal center. “He said it would bring 3,500 new jobs.

Burkhardt said the Dallas center performs 150,000 “lifts,” or cargo transfers, annually. Around all that freight-handling activity grows a commercial community that distributes, stores or assembles all the goods, usually from Asian sources, in the shipping containers.

A developer near the Texas center last year built 700,000 square feet of warehouse space on spec, a prospect unheard of in any other circumstance, Burkhardt said.

“It’s now fully leased by Procter & Gamble,” he said.

The RTD-funded engineering study of the Fort Lupton project will be finished in November, Harman said. Burkhardt added he saw little standing in the path of the project.

“I don’t know of any roadblocks at this point,” he said. “The engineering study is under way and, assuming they don’t find any red flags, we move on to the next step.”