National Western Center.
Denver city officials behind the $1 billion project are looking to get the site-clearing and road-building work underway.
Denver city officials behind the $1 billion National Western Center project aim to get the ball rolling on construction early next year when they bid out a mega-contract for much of the site-clearing and roadbuilding work.
After five years of preparation on the sprawling project, that contract — with an estimated value of $250 million or more — is the largest of several that are moving forward in coming months. Officials from Denver Mayor Michael Hancock’s Office of the National Western Center on Tuesday are unveiling a “baseline schedule” that projects the first two phases will be complete by 2024, instead of taking the full decade that had been projected.
The estimated project total has actually decreased in recent months to $1 billion from nearly $1.1 billion. NWC executive director Gretchen Hollrah last month told the Colorado Economic Development Commission that several changes to the site plan had reduced the city’s portion of the project to $765 million from $856 million. Those changes also closed a remaining financial gap.
Colorado State University has received $200 million in state funding for its contributions to the Stock Show campus, which include an equine sports medicine clinic and the CSU Center.
The city, CSU and the Western Stock Show Association aim to expand the stock show complex into a 250-acre, year-round tourism, event, education and agricultural innovation center.
Hollrah said Monday that the new baseline plan firms up the scope and cost estimates that were loose projections two years ago when voters approved Measure 2C, extending car rental and lodging taxes to help pay for the project.
The faster construction timeline also helped lower costs.
“By shortening our timeline for construction, we can reduce our projected costs,” she said in an interview.
Hollrah’s office plans to put out an initial solicitation for potential bidders for the largest contract by the end of December, she said, with the formal bid request following early next year.
Dubbed the “Horizontal Portfolio Integrated Construction Contract,” it includes the cleanup of the South Platte Riverfront, sitewide infrastructure and utility work, investigation and remediation of contaminated soil, the consolidation of two freight rail spurs that run through the site en route to industrial customers, and the construction of new roads and bridges over the river connecting neighborhoods to the NWC.
All of that work is needed, Hollrah said, before the city can break ground on the first major “vertical” components, new livestock and equestrian centers. That may not happen until 2021.
Several future phases that aren’t yet funded include a new 10,000-seat arena to replace the Denver Coliseum, an expo center and retrofitting the 1909 Stadium Arena to turn it into a market.
Here are other recent developments on the initial phases:
• The National Western Center office has begun soliciting smaller design and construction bids in recent months for the initial phases, including reconstruction of Brighton Boulevard north of Interstate 70. At the same time, the city and its partners are preparing to form the separate National Western Center Authority to operate the campus.
• Given the size of the upcoming site-preparation contract, City Council members have pushed Hollrah and other city officials to mandate a local hiring program. Hollrah says the bid documents will require competing firms to detail their workforce plans to meet that goal.
• As part of the baseline documents that Hollrah will present to a council committee Tuesday, her office has released a new site plan. There are several notable changes, including moving a formerly off-site parking structure underground — beneath new stockyards — and moving the Water Resource Center that’s planned by CSU and Denver Water from the riverfront to the northeast part of the campus.
• Hollrah said talks with the Denver Rock Island Railroad, about consolidating its two spurs, now favor keeping the spur that’s nearer to the river instead of the one that runs through the middle of the campus.