Berthoud’s magic a not-so-well-kept secret

BERTHOUD – Anne Johnson brags about how efficient and transparent Berthoud’s development-review process is and about all the land that’s available for residential and commercial development around the town that bills itself as the “Garden Spot of Colorado.”

But let’s keep it sort of quiet, OK?

“Maybe I don’t even want you to write anything about Berthoud,” mused Johnson, who has been a planner since 1990 and community development director for the Larimer County town since February 2023. “If you write and then people say, ‘Oh, I’m going to Berthoud,’ then that’ll just mean more work.”

Sorry, Anne, but the secret’s apparently already out.

“We’ve got more developers that are seeking doing development in Berthoud, but we’re scheduled out through the first week in October before we can meet with them,” she said. “Every day, we answer the phone and say, ‘Oh, my gosh, when will this stop?’

“I don’t know the cause, other than we are 100% transparent in our process,” Johnson said. “We have a really nice, transparent, information-packed pre-application meeting with all our engineering team, our operations team members. Our planning team is there. We give developers good intel on particular properties, and they’re required to give us information about their intended use and traffic and all of the preliminary details.”

Berthoud still has a fairly rapid development review timeline, Johnson said, “but the more development that comes, that will slow down a little bit.”

That growth will come because “Berthoud still has land that can be developed within our growth management area,” she said. “We have a robust comprehensive plan that is our guiding document, and we have very clear design guidelines and expectations in our code too. We have good transportation. We have a rail line. Berthoud has water, but we’re telling developers if you’re coming to Berthoud you most likely will need to bring water.”

Johnson said Berthoud currently has 1,486 lots “that have approved infrastructure in the works or ready to go for residential,” she said, plus “4,157 lots that are going through the development review process for residential.”

One of the major residential developments is Legacy Park, formerly known as the Ludlow tract, south of Mountain Avenue and west of Berthoud Parkway. That plan includes 1,500 residential units and 40 commercial acres, Johnson said.

She added that the town has some brownfield sites that are available for industrial development, but also 102 acres of greenfield non-residential acreage going through development review for commercial uses.

“It could be six months to two years plus before all of that can be ready for action,” she said, “but we have 12 acres for commercial development that’s ready for action now.”

At that tract, on the northwest corner of Meadowlark Drive and Mountain Avenue, “they’ve got to get the infrastructure in, so it’s really close, but it’s been approved. There are seven lots available there for commercial use.”

With so much of Colorado’s growth aimed at Northern Colorado, Johnson said, “it is a challenge to maintain that feeling of a small community and still present a golden opportunity to support what is envisioned in our comprehensive plan and our land use code to develop at a high density so we can keep services and infrastructure at a reasonable cost and not have these larger lots but keep things compact. That helps preserve the land around us.

“We try to grow smart, to try to keep the cost of housing as low as it can be.”

It’s hard to please everyone, she said, especially those who want to maintain Berthoud’s small-town feeling as the demand for growth closes in from all sides.

“It’s that constant balance of wanting to stay the same and managing growth,” she said. “We’re never going to please everyone. But if we don’t grow, that’s not good either. If we adhere to the vision established in our comprehensive plan, if we adhere to our design guidelines, then we’re doing our job in upholding the future of Berthoud. It’s tricky.”

As the former director of the Nebraska Main Street program, Johnson said, “communities the size of Berthoud have a special place in my heart. There’s something truly magical here.”

So maybe news accounts of what’s happening there should be toned down a bit, she said.

“Have it be a one-inch thing at the bottom of the page,” Johnson said, “because I don’t want everybody else to know about the magic.”