Fort Collins facing growth limits, challenges

FORT COLLINS — To grow or not to grow.

That is the question the Fort Collins City Council will attempt to answer in the next few weeks.

When Fort Collins’ comprehensive land-use plan, known as City Plan, was first implemented in 1997, it called for a Growth Management Area to include enough vacant land to serve development needs for 20 years into the future.

Now, with the first City Plan Update well under way, council members, city staff and a citizen’s advisory committee are facing the reality that Fort Collins is consuming its developable land more quickly than anticipated.

Growth has exceeded the projections made five years ago, and now city planners estimate that the city will run out of land suitable for residential and commercial expansion sometime between 2015 and 2020. With the current GMA boundaries in place, approximately 11,000 people and 6,000 jobs will be turned away from Fort Collins by 2025 because there just isn’t enough space.

“Realistically, Fort Collins can’t grow forever,´ said Ken Waido, chief city planner. “There’s no question that, over time, we will fill up that boundary whether it moves or not.”

The city’s GMA includes parcels in unincorporated areas that will likely be developed within urban density guidelines and eventually annexed into city boundaries. The GMA currently encompasses 48,000 acres with 12,000 of them identified as developable by city planners.

But that’s not enough to keep up with the pace of development, so the decision to be made is: Should Fort Collins expand, shrink or maintain the current GMA?

One advantage to expanding the GMA is that it provides more land for new companies to move into the area, Waido said. But a disadvantage comes with the cost of providing the same level of municipal services to that larger area. Waido questions if the city has the resources to provide maintenance to the new roads and parks, as well as things like emergency and police protection.

“Of course you don’t want to constrain the area so that you’re artificially inflating the price of the land,” Waido said. “But if we don’t grow into it someone else will,” he added, citing the creeping boundaries of neighboring Loveland, Windsor and Timnath.

Supply-and-demand function

Gino Campana serves on the City Plan Update’s Citizen Advisory Committee. He is also a developer with Bellisimo Inc. and owns several businesses in the area.

Campana agrees that if the GMA is constrained, prices will go up.

“It’s a simple supply-and-demand function,” Campana said. “If the growth rate continues, something will have to give somewhere and prices will go up.

“When prices go up it’s great for people who are 50 to 60 years old, who own a house on Mountain Avenue, have a Ph.D., are at the end of their careers and make $100,000. But if you’re 25, making $25,000 working for an HVAC company, it’s not so good,” Campana said.

Redevelopment and infill projects could somewhat sustain development interests and growth requirements, Campana said, but as long at the city does not offer incentives for redevelopment, developers will likely continue to pursue the less expensive route of new development.

“If we’re going to fix the GMA for the time being, we need to offer incentives for people to do the redevelopment projects,” he said.

John Gless, who holds a master’s degree in regional planning, also sits on the citizen’s advisory committee and agrees with Campana that the city should focus on infill and redevelopment.

“I don’t want to see infill and redevelopment projects held off for 20 years,” he said, adding that redevelopment projects like the Mason Street Corridor will stall while the city focuses on developing the outskirts of town.

Much of his concern focuses on the acquisition of open space, an issue voters have routinely supported. “When you put land into the GMA, it immediately sets the expectations that that land will be developed at a higher price,” he said. That means if the city wanted to preserve land within GMA boundaries as open space, it will likely pay more and get less, he said.

“What cities need to strive for is sustainable economies,” Gless said. “Growing forever is not sustainable.”

City planner Timothy Wilder said his office is recommending that two areas be added to the GMA. The first is Colorado State University’s Foothills Campus that encompasses about 1,700 acres on the west side of town. The second includes 1,800 acres west of the 392 interchange on Interstate 25.

The City Council will vote on the GMA boundaries at its March 18 meeting.

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