Phillips 66 development rebranded, additional community meetings set

LOUISVILLE — Denver-based real estate investment and development firm Brue Baukol Capital Partners, which is developing the long-stagnant Phillips 66 property in Louisville, has pivoted from its prior branding strategy and is now calling the project Redtail Ridge.

The project was formerly dubbed Nawatny Ridge, a nod to Louis Nawatny, Louisville’s namesake who helped found the community in the late 1800s.

Plans for the project center around Medtronic Inc. The medical device maker is planning a $133  million, 500,000-square-foot corporate campus on 90 to 100 acres on the Phillips 66 property, a roughly 400-acre property located at U.S. Highway 36 and Northwest Parkway. Additionally, the Redtail Ridge is expected to be home to a 1,500-home senior living community operated by Erickson Living LLC. 

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“The name ‘Redtail Ridge’ pays homage to Louisville’s historic mining tradition and scenic landscape. Founded in 1878, Louisville’s robust mineral deposits made it an important location for coal mining in Boulder Valley at the turn of the 20th Century,” according to an announcement on Brue Baukol’s website. As mines were dug in the area, the process produced “red ash” or “tailings” — a combination of discarded rock, clay, slate and low-grade coal — that was used for the town’s roads, which resulted in red dust plumes or “tails” as cars drove by.

The announcement continues: “The name also refers to the Red-tailed Hawk commonly spotted in Louisville and along the Front Range. With acres of integrated open space planned, Redtail Ridge will support the natural habitat for birds and other species that call Colorado home.”

The Phillips 66 property formerly housed the corporate headquarters for Storage Technology Corp. StorageTek sold to Sun Microsystems Inc. in 2005 for $4.1 billion, and those workers eventually were moved to Sun’s Broomfield campus. Sun was acquired by Oracle Corp. in 2010.

In 2008, Sun sold the 430-acre property to ConocoPhillips for $55.6 million. The energy company announced plans to build a clean-energy research campus that would eventually create 7,000 jobs. But the subsequent spinoff of Phillips 66 (NYSE: PSX) from ConocoPhillips brought an end to those plans, and the property was put on the market.

The land was one of the sites submitted by the state of Colorado as a potential location for the Amazon HQ2 project, with the land under contract to Bancroft Capital. That deal never materialized.

Brue Baukol officials are set to hold a public meeting Thursday to provide details and updates about the Redtail Ridge project. That meeting is set to begin at 6 p.m. at the Louisville Recreation & Senior Center, 900 Via Appia Way.