P66 developer scales back density, adds housing to plans

LOUISVILLE — In response to community concerns over density, redevelopment plans at the long-dormant Phillips 66 site in Louisville have been amended to scale back the square footage occupied by office space, hotels, retailers and a senior-living facility. The revised plans also call for non-age-restricted residential units, a use not previously contemplated for the development known as Redtail Ridge. 

Denver-based Brue Baukol Capital Partners is developing the roughly 400-acre property that formerly housed the corporate headquarters for Storage Technology Corp. 

Current plans call for a total of 5.22 million square feet of new construction, down from previous plans of 6.4 million square feet. Of that current total, 2.25 million is planned for office uses, 1.8 million for a roughly 1,500-home senior-living community operated by Erickson Living LLC, 200,000 for hotels, 70,000 for retail and 900,000 for residential rental units. 

“The land area is so massive that [the total square footage] can be distributed and not be too dense,” Brue Baukol partner Geoff Baukol said Thursday during a project update web conference.

Medical-device maker Medtronic Inc. is expected to be the development’s first major office user. 

The company is planning a $133 million, 500,000-square-foot corporate campus on 90 to 100 acres. The new facility would create 500 to 1,000 new jobs in addition to the existing 500 employees already working in Louisville, according to Medtronic director of construction and engineering services James Driessen.

“I can’t think of a better tenant than Medtronic to anchor this site,” Baukol said.

In addition to Medtronic, Baukol said preliminary conversations are ongoing with other major employers who may be interested in building offices at Redtail Ridge.

Baukol declined to name the firms in question but said the companies would be “very much embraced by the community if they were to come.”

Throughout the first several iterations of the Redtail Ridge plan, Brue Baukol opted against including houses or apartments. 

“During our community outreach meetings … we started to get questions [about why] we’re not providing any housing,” Baukol said. In response, the latest plan calls for construction of 900 rental units of “entry-level, workforce and affordable housing.” 

If a developer wants “to create a place that’s vibrant and successful long term, these days you have to have a mix of residential,” he said. 

Should the Brue Baukol plans come to fruition, the Louisville site will see its first occupants in more than a decade. 

Sun Microsystems Inc. acquired StorageTek in 2005 for $4.1 billion, and those workers eventually were moved to Sun’s Broomfield campus. Sun was later 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.

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