Lodging, food-truck park proposed for north Fort Collins

FORT COLLINS – Fort Collins city planners will get a first look Thursday at a plan to develop a lodging and food-truck park on a one-acre parcel in north Fort Collins — a project its proponent sees as an incubator for budding restaurateurs.

The initial plan that Daniel Crisafulli, principal of the Crisafulli Team real-estate agency, will present for concept review calls for spaces for food trucks, a permanent indoor-dining and commercial space, and lodging made up of six to nine small prefabricated A-frame cabins of around 400 square feet each.

The site at 799 N. College Ave., north of Vine Drive, is zoned service commercial.

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“With ever increasing real estate prices, our food-industry entrepreneurs are moving more toward low-overhead models like food trucks,” Crisafulli wrote in his proposal. “The challenge is having a consistent location [where] customers can find them. Our food-truck market would provide a low overhead ‘home base’ for our food-truck partners.

“Our indoor space will be a large open-concept building offering indoor dining space for our food-truck patrons,” he wrote. “The indoor space would offer two half bathrooms, a commissary kitchen (another challenge for our food-truck friends, and a designated space for a cafe.

“The third section of the development will be our Micro A-Frame Village, a unique overnight lodging experience. We plan to utilize a company similar to Drop Structures or to create a unique and beautiful overnight lodging experience. The lodging experience will be enhanced by the ability to have food options onsite with the Food Truck Market, while also being seamlessly connected to the city’s trail system, parks, river, and Old Town.”

Crisafulli told BizWest that the plan is “still at the very beginning stages to see if this is possible” — so much so that he has yet to purchase the vacant property from its owners, Ed and Debbie Tamlin.

“The problem we’re trying to solve is that it is increasingly more difficult for restaurant entrepreneurs to get a foothold in this area,” he said. “This would give them a consistent spot for a loyal crowd to come back and find them. We hope to be a stepping stone for them. If they succeed, they could graduate into a bigger and better location — and if their plan is not working out, at least they haven’t dropped $100,000 to try to prove a concept.”

Crisafulli cited the popularity of the summer weeknight food-truck gatherings in City Park, but added that “the rest of the time, they’re left to bounce around to different breweries or construction sites or businesses.

“This way, they could have a consistent space to stay overnight or longer,” he said. “This way, people would know where they are, and the fewer calories your clients have to burn to make a decision, the better.

“If we can put the food trucks in a position to thrive,” Crisafulli said, “then we’re going to thrive.”

He plans to add landscaping and a canopy to the site and sees its proximity to the Cache la Poudre trail system as a plus. “We would be open to discussing connecting the city trail system through this property,” he said, “as it seems like this may be a good connecting point to Legacy Park.”

Crisafulli said he knows his plan has risks — one of which is that the north-end location doesn’t now have other attractions as Old Town, the Colorado State University area and other parts of town do. He pointed out that the city’s Transfort transportation system plans to extend the MAX fixed-guideway bus rapid transit system northward, but added that “we’re going to have to create something people are going to want to come to.”

A more-immediate challenge Crisafulli sees as his plan wends its way through the permitting process is that the property may be in a 100-year floodplain. 

“The owner believes he is not in the floodplain and that new elevations may in fact show this,” Crisafulli wrote in his concept-review application. “However, if not, what are the necessary steps we would need to take to develop our vision?”

He told BizWest he won’t know the answer to the floodplain question until surveying is completed, and that what is determined will determine how many A-frame units he can add and whether the food trucks would be allowed to stay overnight.

“We love Fort Collins for all the reasons people who live here love it,” he said. “Our goal is to create spaces our visitors will love, in which our entrepreneurs will thrive, and in which our city will be proud.”