Real Estate & Construction  August 20, 2019

Phillips 66 site developer unveils Nawatny Ridge

LOUISVILLE — Staff with Brue Baukol Capital Partners, a Denver-based firm that aims to redevelop the Phillips 66 site in Louisville, presented preliminary plans for the project for the first time publicly Monday evening before a capacity crowd of roughly 200 residents at the Louisville Recreation and Senior Center.

While specifics about the project remain scant, one new detail emerged Monday: the project’s proposed name.

Nawatny Ridge is what Brue Baukol staffers are calling the planned mixed-use development on a roughly 430-acre plot along U.S. Highway 36 near Northwest Parkway. The name is a reference to Louis Nawatny, the city’s namesake who helped found Louisville in the late 1800s.

SPONSORED CONTENT

Business Cares: March 2024

WomenGive, a program of United Way of Larimer County, was started in Larimer County in 2006 as an opportunity for women in our community to come together to help other women.

While the name might evoke Louisville’s pioneer past, the Nawatny Ridge property has its own more modern history.

The site was the long-time headquarters of Storage Technology Corp. before the company was acquired by Sun Microsystems Inc. and Louisville operations were moved to Broomfield.

ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP) bought the land in 2008 for $55.6 million, planning to build a world-class research and training campus focusing on sustainable energy that was expected to create 7,000 jobs. Soon after, Phillips 66 (NYSE: PSX) was spun off into an independent company, which inherited the Louisville project but never moved forward, although the site had been cleared. In June 2017, Phillips 66 entered into an agreement to “sell land in Louisville to a land development company,” according to documents filed that August with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing stated that Phillips 66 was banking on a price of $50 million and expected to close the sale in the first quarter of 2018. That purchase never occurred.

Bancroft Capital reportedly had the property under contract in 2018, but the deal fell through, and the property was back on the market later that year.

The Phillips 66 land was one of the sites submitted by Colorado for the Amazon HQ2 project. Amazon eventually chose Virginia as the site of the new headquarters.

Now, Brue Baukol has the property under contract for a yet-to-be disclosed sum and has ambitious plans to revive the site.

The company’s preliminary plans call for a massive new mixed-use development featuring a corporate headquarters campus, a senior living community, hotels and several million square feet of commercial and office space, according to planning documents submitted to Louisville planners.

While no additional details about the site’s eventual corporate tenant were provided Monday, Brue Baukol staffers did discuss some of their guiding principles they plan to employ for the development project.

Those principles include a focus on integrated open spaces, multimodal transportation connections, compact development and fostering a balanced local economy, said Kathleen Fogler, an urban planner with Denver-based Tryba Architects. Tryba, which is working with Brue Baukol on Nawatny Ridge, is the trade name used by David Owen Tryba Architects PC.

The developers plan to reuse long-neglected infrastructure on the site and integrate the project with the property’s existing topography, she said.

Infrastructure-improvement plans include extending Campus Drive to 96th Street and opening Tape Drive, currently a private road within the fenced off Phillips 66 site, for public use.

Company co-founder Chad Brue stressed to the meeting attendees that the project is still very early in the development process.

“I’d liken it to if we were baking a cake,” he said. “We’ve maybe turned the oven on to preheat, but that’s about it.”

Brue Baukol plans to hold a series of additional outreach meetings with the community in advance of the Nawatny Ridge project plans going before Louisville’s Planning Commission and City Council likely later this year.

LOUISVILLE — Staff with Brue Baukol Capital Partners, a Denver-based firm that aims to redevelop the Phillips 66 site in Louisville, presented preliminary plans for the project for the first time publicly Monday evening before a capacity crowd of roughly 200 residents at the Louisville Recreation and Senior Center.

While specifics about the project remain scant, one new detail emerged Monday: the project’s proposed name.

Nawatny Ridge is what Brue Baukol staffers are calling the planned mixed-use development on a roughly 430-acre plot along U.S. Highway 36 near Northwest Parkway. The name is a reference to Louis Nawatny, the city’s namesake who…

Christopher Wood
Christopher Wood is editor and publisher of BizWest, a regional business journal covering Boulder, Broomfield, Larimer and Weld counties. Wood co-founded the Northern Colorado Business Report in 1995 and served as publisher of the Boulder County Business Report until the two publications were merged to form BizWest in 2014. From 1990 to 1995, Wood served as reporter and managing editor of the Denver Business Journal. He is a Marine Corps veteran and a graduate of the University of Colorado Boulder. He has won numerous awards from the Colorado Press Association, Society of Professional Journalists and the Alliance of Area Business Publishers.
Sign up for BizWest Daily Alerts