OK of CSU stadium plan called premature by FoCo city official

FORT COLLINS — An influential Fort Collins professor and City Council member said he is outraged that the Colorado State University Board of Governors is allowing a controversial football stadium plan to move forward without firm costs being identified or an agreement with the city being in place.

With the board’s Dec. 5 approval of the on-campus stadium in hand, CSU President Tony Frank must return to them in February with a plan to finance the project while keeping his original promise not to burden students, the school’s general fund or taxpayers. But for the city of Fort Collins, the question is what impact the huge facility in the city’s core will have on its budget, traffic, property values and taxpayers.

Working out mitigation of the impacts with the city only after its approval of the stadium is a backward process, Fort Collins City Councilman Wade Troxell said. He called CSU’s three-year approach to the project “Fire, aim, and now they’re ready.”

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But Frank had told City Manager Darin Atteberry in a June email that “executing an IGA (intergovernmental agreement) related to the stadium prior to knowing if we’ll meet our financial parameters for moving ahead seems premature to me.”

That still irks Troxell, who also is an associate dean in CSU’s College of Engineering. “You’re forced to pick sides,” he said. “Why couldn’t we have started this three years ago? It’s incredible that they’re so far along but they haven’t involved the city to a significant level.”

In October 2012, Frank had set a two-year goal to raise half the facility’s estimated $220 million cost through private donations, with the remainder to be covered by revenue bonds. However, the fundraising drive fell far short of that $110 million; by July only $24.2 million was in hand. At its October meeting this year, Frank offered the governors four options: to maintain Hughes Stadium as is, to renovate and expand it, to construct a scaled-back on-campus version with phased expansion as money became available, or to build the full facility on campus through a public-private partnership.

In a Nov. 29 memorandum to the board in advance of its December meeting, Frank wrote that CSU hadn’t found a suitable partner for a public-private venture, but said that the full facility could be built if he were to secure $195 million in bonds.

“I believe we can attain a CSU-owned-and-operated facility with minimal changes to the full scope of the original design that meets the fiscal standard we’ve established: the lowest risk of any negative impact on the general fund,” Frank said. “In fact, I believe it is likely that there will be no impact on the general fund, and I believe that the minimal level of risk that remains is more than adequately buffered by non-general fund sources.”

On Dec. 5 the board approved Frank’s plan on an 8-0 vote, with only board treasurer Joseph Zimlich abstaining, citing concerns about stadium costs and the resulting impacts on students.

Zimlich, the only governor who lives in Fort Collins, also serves as chief executive of the Bohemian Foundation, which billionaire philanthropist Pat Stryker formed to support arts and education in the community. Bohemian in 2009 had shelved its plan for a cluster of music venues on 12 acres of land known as the Oxbow, adjacent to the New Belgium brewery just northeast of Old Town on the north bank of the Poudre River. Zimlich’s abstention instead of an outright “no” vote drew speculation that Bohemian’s real-estate arm might want to acquire Hughes to revive the planned entertainment complex, but, in a Dec. 8 email to BizWest, Zimlich wrote that “Bohemian Cos. does not have an interest in buying the Hughes Stadium site.”

The next steps for Frank, besides finding the financing, include coming to an agreement with the city about who pays for stadium impacts off campus.

“Dr. Frank made it clear that the university is ready to be a full partner in impacts directly related to the stadium,” said Mike Hooker, CSU’s executive director of public affairs and communications. Frank has indicated that CSU has budgeted $30 million that could be used to mitigate the city’s costs, but Hooker said “that’s not to say we agree that there are $30 million in stadium-related infrastructure costs.”

At its Dec. 2 meeting, the Fort Collins City Council approved an infrastructure impact study that estimated the city’s stadium-related costs at $24.3 million — as a starting point. The figure included transportation infrastructure costs estimated at from $13 million to $22 million, and other work such as utilities to cost from $1.75 million to $2.3 million.

As discussion of the infrastructure report opened, Troxell asked the audience whether anyone was present to represent CSU. No one stood, and Troxell said “I think that’s very telling right there.”

Troxell said he believed those costs would be far higher – in the range of $30 million to $50 million, based on what he learned from other cities where universities added on-campus stadiums.

“And what about our stranded costs of transportation to Hughes,” he said. “Prospect. Drake. Overland Trail. We overbuilt those streets to accommodate Hughes.”

Troxell also cited the traffic and parking issues presented by a stadium in the city’s core. “I don’t hear that at all from the governors,” he said. “Are you going to tailgate in a parking garage?”

Troxell was part of a team of city and university officials who visited the campuses of Southern Methodist University in Dallas and the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where new stadiums were built on campus, but he said traffic comparisons were invalid. SMU is adjacent to the 10-lane North Central Expressway, he said, and freeways surround Minnesota’s campus on three sides – while only city streets would feed CSU’s new stadium. “All we’ve got are turn lanes and no vertical structure.”

Whereas Fort Collins’ new MAX bus rapid transit system can handle 2,000 riders per hour, Troxell said, the light-rail systems in Minneapolis and Dallas can handle 8,000 per hour.

The Fort Collins Area Chamber of Commerce endorsed the on-campus stadium as being good for business and a spur for redevelopment in the stadium area, but Troxell, citing the historic Sheely neighborhood adjacent to the stadium site, said “that area won’t be redeveloped unless it’s degraded.

“Will the value of the Sheely addition go down? I hope it’s still a wonderful neighborhood 30 years from now,” Troxell said.

Wondering what would happen to game traffic as a freight train blocked streets along the nearby north-south Mason corridor that separates the campus from downtown, Troxell asked, “Is Fort Collins going to be a place to come to on a football Saturday — or a place to be avoided?”

As a land-grant institution, CSU is not bound to reach intergovernmental agreements with the city about who pays for off-campus costs, However, Troxell said Fort Collins does have some leverage to get CSU to pay its share because “right now there’s little interest within the city to accommodate costs related to the stadium.”

He said he found some of the governors’ comments in support of the stadium “disturbing … They’re leaning on Frank. Presidents come and go, but universities are enduring. I’m interested in Fort Collins 30 years from now.”

But Troxell was among those opposing Councilman Ross Cunniff’s Nov. 5 motion that the council adopt a resolution opposing an on-campus stadium. “To shake your fist like Snoopy does to the Red Baron is just a paper-tiger move,” he said.

Despite his skepticism, Troxell said he has seen “some overtures. Almost to a person, the governors said it was important that the city be mitigated.”

In his memorandum, Frank wrote, “I remain convinced that there are highly viable options to deal with transportation and parking….  I have been and remain committed to (working with the city.) We have budgeted for impact costs in our models and have exchanged this information with the city.”

Frank pledged that he and Atteberry would travel to Minneapolis “to study how the city and university have dealt with stadium-related issues.”

Troxell said the city could work with CSU as it does with surrounding communities, but stressed that “we need to move quickly and put an agreement in place.

“We’re better collaborating than we are trying to compete.”

Dallas Heltzell can be reached at 970-232-3149, 303-630-1962 or dheltzell@bizwestmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DallasHeltzell.