Main Street moved to I-25, NoCo developers followed

As Interstate 25 became Northern Colorado’s Main Street in the late 1990s, developers started toying with plans for what would soon become the booming corridors of the region.

In the late 1990s, commercial buildings merely dotted the interchanges along the highway. Long stretches of farmland still occupied the miles between the cities and towns. Developers who correctly predicted the drawing power of the region’s only major transportation corridor then have since harvested a bumper crop of retail, office and industrial construction. The commercial market is no longer flourishing in the Great Recession, but the buildings that sprouted during the boom years have left the area changed forever.

The major commercial centers today were hardly recognizable 12 years ago. What is now Centerra was as yet unnamed. The outlet mall in Loveland was an island at the I-25/U.S. Highway 34 interchange. Harmony Road in Fort Collins was home to several major employers, but residential, retail and office spaces existed only in a city plan. Greeley development was just beginning its creep westward while the southern portions of Weld County were drawing major employers east to the interstate.

A February 1998 Business Report article dubbed the Rocky Mountain Factory Stores “Loveland’s ace in the hole.” The shops, now known as the Outlets at Loveland, helped the city’s retail sales tax collections increase 18 percent from 1994 to 1997. Development around the outlets then was limited to a few business parks miles to the north and south and the nearby offices of Factual Data Corp. – formerly based in Fort Collins – now known as Kroll.

In 1998, McWhinney Colorado Enterprises hadn’t yet acquired the 3,000 acres for Centerra, but most of the property was at least under option, and development plans were already in the works. McWhinney Enterprises announced in September 1998 that it was planning to develop 1,000 acres at the northeast corner of I-25/US 34 into “the next Interlocken,” referring to the tech-focused business park in Broomfield.

“Our goal is to have the next Sun Microsystems or Hewlett-Packard here. It will be primarily office with some research and development,´ said Chad McWhinney in a 1998 Business Report interview. “We can accommodate approximately 11 million square feet.”

As markets shift, development shifts with it. The late ’90s became a legendarily volatile time for tech companies, and today the site is home to the Promenade Shops at Centerra.

“We spend a lot of time studying best practices throughout America,” McWhinney told the Business Report recently, adding that trend tracking was very important in the early stages of the development. “Since we started in the early ’90s, we’ve been a company that pays great attention to emerging trends.”

McWhinney said that there were a few visions for the Centerra development that didn’t quite pan out. In addition to a major technology park, plans for a hotel and conference center didn’t materialize. John Q. Hammons chose instead to locate the Embassy Suites on Larimer County-owned land just north of Crossroads Boulevard. The development still benefits from the proximity to I-25 and the northern edge of Centerra.

Development along I-25 has been driven by quick and easy access in an increasingly regional economy.

“Northern Colorado continues to become a region,” McWhinney said. “Back in the ’90s, it was viewed as Fort Collins, Loveland, Greeley, Windsor, etc. as being separate communities. We saw early on that it would become a region.”

Magnet for activity

As Northern Colorado grew as a region, I-25/34 became its focal point, or as developer Craig Harrison puts it, a magnet for activity. In 1998, his Harrison Resource Corp. was working to develop acreage six miles east of I-25 known at the time as TriPointe – now Promontory.

Harrison saw in the late 1980s that I-25/34 was pulling development toward itself – Loveland was heading east, Greeley was heading west and Fort Collins was heading south.

“Everything was heading out to Main Street,” he said.

Harrison purchased 670 acres at Greeley’s western-most reaches for that reason – and because the city had run a sewer trunk line out there in the late 1980s. The property, at first called Gateway Farms, is right where U.S. 34 splits into the business route and bypass. It originally was zoned only for commercial and industrial uses, but when one of Greeley’s major employers moved in, a major rezoning included residential in hopes of attracting a national developer.

Harrison spent much of the 10 years he owned the property getting it prepared for development. During his ownership, he was approached several times by three companies looking for space – Leprino Foods, which only recently decided on an east Greeley location; ConAgra Inc., which has now morphed into meatpacking giant JBS; and State Farm Insurance. It was State Farm that started the parade to the site and got the city to open up the western portions of Greeley to residential development, which has boomed in recent years.

Harrison closed on a deal in mid-1999 to sell much of Tri-Pointe to Westfield Development Co. Inc. for $7 million, and 130 acres to State Farm to build a new 450,000-square-foot office campus.

“I think Promontory was Greeley’s answer to making a large site development-ready,” he said recently, adding that without the earlier sewer extension development would have been difficult.

‘Yellow Brick Road’

Infrastructure was a common theme for the most active development corridors. Stu MacMillan pointed out that the infrastructure put in place on Harmony Road in the late 1970s to accommodate Hewlett-Packard Co. led to the late 1990s’ boom in development that dubbed the eastern stretch of pavement the “Yellow Brick Road.”

In 1998, MacMillan, a broker with Everitt Cos., was just seeing the fruits of a years-long process that resulted in the Harmony Corridor Plan. The plan started as a gathering of the few property owners who recognized that Harmony Road was going to soon become the main gateway to Fort Collins. The group wanted design guidelines to ensure that the development that did occur would be high-quality and well-thought-out.

East Harmony Road began its transformation into what it is today in 1998. In that year, Celestica broke ground on its facility, which is now home to Intel. Symbios Inc., acquired by LSI Logic, started its facility directly across County Road 9, now known as Ziegler Road. The facility now houses several companies, including Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices.

The existence of primary employers coupled with the lack of new development space on College Avenue led to a push of retail and office development along East Harmony.

MacMillan concedes now that there is still about five to seven years’ worth of development to be done on Harmony, but he feels that the same opportunities that existed for Fort Collins on Harmony in the late 1990s exist now for other I-25 centric areas – the town of Timnath, Crossroads Boulevard east of I-25, Prospect Road and the portion of the I-25/34 area annexed to Johnstown, to name a few.

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