Health Care & Insurance  March 23, 2025

‘Years in the making’: Redtail Ridge to finally break ground in April

Infrastructure work to begin on former StorageTek campus

Redtail Ridge rendering.
An artist’s rendering of a portion of the Redtail Ridge development in Louisville. Courtesy Sterling Bay.
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LOUISVILLE — After more than a half-decade, dozens of government hearings and votes, a name change, an ownership change and a special election, the sprawling Redtail Ridge mega-development in Louisville is expected to break ground in April.

“The project has been delayed from our expectations,” Rodney Richerson, a managing principal with Redtail’s master developer, Sterling Bay LLC, told BizWest last week. “… But we’re really excited to officially move forward. This has been years in the making.”

For the better part of six years, developers have their sights set on building a 2.6-million-square-foot biotechnology- and health care-centric business park on the roughly 300-acre Redtail Ridge property, which was previously home to a massive Storage Technology Corp. campus.

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Denver developer Brue Baukol Capital Partners LLC bought the Redtail property from Phillips 66 (NYSE: PSX) in 2020 for $34.93 million, and began planning a development project that at the time was called Nawatny Ridge. As part of a July 2022 real estate transaction conducted by a series of holding companies, Sterling Bay acquired the site from Brue Baukol for just under $128 million, Boulder County warranty deeds show. When Sterling Bay entered the picture, the developer added plans for flex-lab-office spaces aimed at biotechnology tenants.

Concerns from residents — mostly centering around flattening of the site, traffic, the size and location of public spaces, sustainability and economic viability — nagged the project, which was eventually redubbed Redtail Ridge, for years, culminating in an April 2022 special election in which Louisville voters repealed a previous approval of the project by city officials. 

After the election, allowable development on the site reverted to a set of land-use guidelines approved in 2010, and Sterling Bay has since worked through the city’s entitlement and approvals process in an effort to finally begin development on the Redtail site.

Sterling Bay, in partnership with Piper Sandler Special District Group, recently secured $88 million in general obligation bonds that will fund some initial horizontal infrastructure development on the site. 

“We’ve worked with them on other projects around the country, specifically a Chicago project,” Richerson said of investment bank Piper Sandler & Co.’s public finance team.

“Once we had final construction pricing on (infrastructure work), we went to the market for the bonds. It was actually very well received. We raised about $88 million, which is a little bit higher than what we anticipated — it was actually oversubscribed.”

The first phase of infrastructure work is expected to take about 18 months to complete. It will include extensions of “three roads, all the water and sewer utilities that are needed, as well as some intersection improvements,” Richerson said. 

Redtail Ridge
Redtail Ridge. Courtesy Brue Baukol Capital Partners LLC

Mortenson Co. will provide construction services, and architecture firm Perkins & Will will do design work for the initial horizontal development phase.

Richerson said Sterling Bay expects to begin vertical development in late 2025. The first buildings that are likely to be delivered are a roughly 100,000-square-foot flex facility for life-sciences users and a pair of roughly 150,000-square-foot advanced manufacturing buildings.

“It’s probably a little bit too early to talk much about leasing activity. But we’ve had some inbounds” from potential future tenants, he told BizWest. “We have really not marketed it for lease aggressively — we were waiting to see when we actually break ground. So now we have some visibility for the groundbreaking and delivery times, we’re really starting the marketing effort and we’ve had a few inbound inquiries for development opportunities.”

One user that appears assured to eventually call Redtail Ridge home is AdventHealth Avista, which is expected to build a new hospital on the site to replace the existing facility at 100 Health Park Drive.

AdventHealth had been under contract to purchase a roughly 40-acre tract within the Redtail property for about three years. That deal was finalized in February. Boulder County real estate records show that Redtail Ridge Portfolio LLC, an entity registered to the Chicago address of Sterling Bay’s offices, sold the parcel to Portercare Adventist Health System, an entity registered to AdventHealth’s regional office in Greenwood Village, in mid-February for $34 million.

Hospital leaders have long said that Avista suffers from accessibility issues. The hospital’s vulnerabilities were highlighted during the Marshall Fire in late 2021.

The site is accessed only by Health Park Drive, which dead-ends at the hospital. Over the years, the hospital has been unsuccessful in securing a new interchange off of U.S. Highway 36. Poor access adds to the time required to reach the facility, making it difficult to attract new patients.

Additionally, Avista’s landlocked location does not offer opportunities to expand, hospital officials have said, with the community missing out on potential new services because the hospital has no room to grow. A new hospital at Redtail Ridge would provide Avista with a far larger market service area, putting it closer to a wider population base.

“We’re really thrilled to welcome AdventistHealth to the site. Their presence really aligns with our vision, so we’re really looking forward to working with them,” Richerson said. “They’ve been side by side with us and a big supporter (throughout the Redtail planning process). It’s very important for them to move forward and relocate their hospital, but at this point we don’t really have specifics of their timing.”

Centura Health’s Avista Adventist Hospital has occupied its campus at 100 Health Park Drive in Louisville since 1990. Christopher Wood/BizWest

After more than a half-decade, dozens of government hearings and votes, a name change, an ownership change and a special election, the sprawling Redtail Ridge mega-development in Louisville is expected to break ground in April.

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A Maryland native, Lucas has worked at news agencies from Wyoming to South Carolina before putting roots down in Colorado.
Categories: BizWest Cover Story Health Care & Insurance Life Sciences Louisville Real Estate & Construction Today's News AdventHealth Avista Hospital Brue Baukol Capital Partners LLC Redtail Ridge Sterling Bay LLC
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