Fried: If Timnath Jumps Off a Cliff, Should Fort Collins Follow?

Our City Council stood up for residents last week by rejecting a request to upzone the northeast corner of Prospect and I-25 from industrial to commercial in order to accommodate a regional shopping center. The vote broke along all-too-familiar 4-3 lines; as usual, the majority is being attacked for doing the right thing.

The southwest corner of the intersection has already been rezoned and acquired by Colorado State University for renewable energy manufacturing. AVA Solar was supposed to build a new plant there, but found an existing facility in Longmont instead. The northeast corner should also become a green campus.

Legally, rezoning requests must be compatible with our overall City Plan and the I-25 Subarea plan—this proposal simply did not fit. Even the upzoning proponents admitted as much, when you cut through their consultant-speak. They argued their proposal was consistent with the city's plans … once you amended those plans. By that logic, a square is a circle … once you cut off the corners. So why put a shopping center there? Just because the property owners—who knew the zoning when they bought it—wanted to make more money?

Then there was the argument put forth by City Councilman Diggs Brown, who said, “I would really like to poke Timnath in the eye by putting this shopping center right in their front door.” Yeah, that's a good basis for regional planning.

Not every gateway to the city has to look the same, and not every I-25 interchange needs a shopping center. Mulberry Road is heavily commercial, and will only get more so. The Budweiser brewery dominates Mountain Vista. Harmony Road is rapidly filling in, with malls and offices and hotels springing up in every field, and a proposed high-rise mixed use development at the southwest corner likely to soon transform that intersection. Prospect is the most unspoiled of our gateways, with the Visitor Center, the Natural Areas and river trails beyond that, eventually leading to CSU. Do we want Prospect remain a unique portal to a unique city—or become a generic Big Box Highway Mall on the fringe of Anytown USA?

There are few places left in the city zoned for industrial uses with their higher pay and benefits. Where are all the green collar jobs in the New Energy Economy going to go? Service and retail jobs rarely pay a living wage. If we are going to develop new retail, why not put it on College Avenue, in the Mason Corridor, or at the half-empty mall?

The question for all of us is should we cooperatively plan our municipal future, guided by our long-term vision and represented by our City Council, or should we let growth-happy councils in Timnath, Windsor and Wellington make our decisions for us? Those towns provide generous taxpayer-funded developer welfare (euphemistically called “tax incentives” when the prospect of making profits should be all the incentive you need), and don't charge impact fees sufficient to cover the cost of growth. In other words, they are saddling their residents and future taxpayers with debt to enrich politically powerful moneyed interests cashing in right now. Why copy them out of fear?

Many of us reject the vision of I-25 as “Main Street” for Northern Colorado, as the growth boosters love to say. Their vision is our nightmare. Our vision is city-centered growth, with community separators in between and abundant public transit, not auto-dependent sprawl like the places from which so many of us fled, where one city blurs into the next. There is no there there.

Mulberry is a better place for a regional shopping center. It is already heavily commercial, already four lanes, at the intersection of two state highways, and its interchange needs less work.

If people want a united City Council, math suggests the three in the minority switch their votes to join the four-person majority, rather than the other way around.

About the author Eric Fried knows the way to San Jose at eric@pvgreens.org.