Berthoud bypasses no-growth label

BERTHOUD – Berthoud may have missed out on some of the building boom earlier in the decade, in part because of a short-lived growth cap, but development is slated to get a big boost from the U.S. Highway 287 bypass.

Along the five-mile stretch, a variety of mixed-use projects – a golf course, solar farm, and the town’s first major chain grocery – could attract hundreds of residents and several primary employers. The town has been working with many of the developers and landowners there for years.

Berthoud has also been working to improve its image in the development community. In November 2000, residents voted to cap the town’s growth at 5 percent per year. The cap was voted out in May 2003, but Berthoud Planner Tim Katers said its impact lingers. When he first started working with the town, long after the cap was lifted, he was still getting daily comments about it. The perception of Berthoud as an anti-growth community has eventually waned.

Katers is now working to streamline the building and planning codes to make them more uniform. Up until now, he explained, development standards have been decided on a case-by-case basis. The result can be a lot of time-consuming, expensive back-and-forth between developers and the town council.

A streamlined process will prove useful as builders get back into the game. For all of 2009, Berthoud saw about a dozen building permits. By early May, six had been filed.

“Everything is picking up,” Katers said. “A lot of guys took a year off, with good reason.”

Ready to move forward

Landowner Greg Ludlow has been discussing the future of his property at the southeast corner of U.S. 287 and Colorado Highway 56 with town officials for several years. He feels comfortable that Berthoud is ready to shed its anti-growth label.

“That perception very much still exists in certain quarters of the state, but nothing can be further from the truth,” Ludlow said, admitting that no-growth had been on the agenda under a different council and administration. “It’s not the same town now.”

Ludlow, a senior vice president of lending for Guaranty Bank and Trust in Longmont, anticipates the final agreement to annex his Ludlow Farms development into Berthoud will be finished by the end of July.

The first parcels of the now 300-acre farm have been in the Ludlow family since around 1930. The property still produces sugar beets, wheat and hay, but Ludlow, who specializes in agricultural lending, said the land is now more valuable for development than the potential return on investment for the farming operations.

“We’re ahead of the market, but we want to be ready,” Ludlow said, adding that the process has been taking longer than he anticipated. “We want to be all queued up and ready to go when the opportunities present themselves.”

About one-third of the area is planned for primary employment. Ludlow expects a large employer will kick off the entire development, which will also include a maximum of 600 residences.

“We’re concentrating on trying to entice a primary employer there,” Ludlow said. He is working with Denver broker Kittie Hook, who has been long involved in the Denver Metro Economic Development Corp.

While Ludlow wants to be ready when the market is willing, he also is realistic about the potential timeline for this project. He is also developing about 130 acres in southeast Longmont that was annexed in 2000. Fifty acres have been sold for commercial development, but dirt moving is on hold awaiting buildout at a planned Wal-Mart site.

Waiting for Safeway

In Berthoud, the town continues to wait for a planned Safeway development, after a couple of false starts over the past decade. A site plan has been approved to put the grocer at the northeast corner of U.S. 287 and Colorado 56.

The 38,000-square-foot store would anchor the project and be the first major chain grocer in town. The development plan calls for 20,000 to 30,000 square feet of additional retail, but the recession has put the brakes on the project.

“With the economy, we put off the probable opening for a while,´ said Brandon Basham, broker with Denver’s Basham & Associates, representing the property owners.

The company said it anticipates opening in the third quarter of 2012, with a 12-month construction timeline. Under the original timeline, the store would have been open by now, Basham added.

In the meantime, Basham is continuing to work with the town to renew a recently expired tax increment financing deal. He said a number of retailers initially interested remain in contact.

Just to the east of the Safeway project, the seven-acre Gateway Park development also awaits the arrival of the grocer. The site has six pads available and is listed by Loveland Commercial and Sperry Van Ness.

Another project in the area that has been through several iterations over the years is Berthoud Parkway Plaza, a mixed-use development with commercial, light industrial and retail. It was slated for final plat in March. However, the developers pulled the plans to make changes to the landscaping, according to Katers. Calls to the project’s developer were not returned in time for this story, but a listing on a Denver real estate website showed up to 20 pads available for between $237,000 and $3.7 million. The whole site can be had for $5 million.

Ready to break ground

Not all bypass developments are in the prep-and-wait stage. On the north end, developers plan to break ground on a unique energy-anchored project, PrairieStar.

“We’re not waiting,´ said developer Scott Sarbaugh.

PrairieStar will encompass more than 850 residential housing units of all types, the first of which are slated to go vertical in the spring, as well as about 400,000 square feet of non-residential space The center of the commercial element – office and medical and a research and development campus – will be a plaza. Plans also call for a major grocer.

“We’re talking with people and engaging companies that would like to locate in a green, renewable community,” Sarbaugh said.

The unique aspect is a planned 25-acre, four- to seven-megawatt solar farm. The goal is to make the entire development energy net zero, meaning it will produce as much or more energy than it consumes. Residents will be able to invest in renewable energy projects, adding to the value of their properties.

“We envisioned the evolution of the green industry in real estate,” Sarbaugh said. That evolution includes not only the solar element, but also gardens, agriculture and open space.

The idea for the solar-powered development came following passage of Colorado’s Amendment 37 in 2004, setting a renewable energy standard for utilities. But economic sustainability is what drew the PrairieStar developers to the site.

After seeing the development of other New Urban developments in the Boulder Valley, Sarbaugh and his business partner knew that they needed not only an artfully designed community but also the proper amounts of traffic flowing by it. A traffic study showed as many as 50,000 cars per day traveling the U.S. 287 bypass.

“In our opinion, all (the other developments) lacked sustainability and self-sufficiency because they depended on the rooftops in the community to support (the commercial element),” he said. “When you have a plaza and a mall, you can’t support that without an influx of people.”

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