Council approves plan
After hours of discussion and public comments, the Broomfield City Council unanimously approved the comprehensive plan to develop the Broomfield Town Square on Tuesday night.
The approval culminates thousands of hours of planning and deliberation spanning years, and will move the city and county into the next phase of creating a downtown that will provide residential, retail, commercial and pedestrian spaces intersecting with a town square that will revolve around a 4 acre, $2 million manufactured lake. The 43-acre development will sit north of 120th Avenue between Main Street and Spader Way.
Members of the public still in attendance when the vote was taken at around 11:30 p.m. applauded the vote.
The board also unanimously passed a condition of approval to reduce the number of residential units from 818 to 643, in addition to removing reference to multifamily units in planning area 2, south of First Avenue, and instead list mixed-use retail/office/hotel units in the planning document.
The development plan will provide either 160 affordable housing units or allow the developer to pay fees up to $4.3 million in lieu of housing to the affordable housing fund.
A number of residents and the council directed comments toward the artificial lake that the project is designed around.
Carolynne C. White, of the law firm Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber, Schreck, LLP and the attorney representing the developer City Street Investors, responded to concerns raised by councilmember Bruce Leslie about the investment in the lake and non-water alternatives for the proposed lake site.
“From the developers perspective, the question of ‘if there was no lake what would go there instead?,’ really should be “if there is no lake what do we do instead of this project?’ because from the developer’s perspective the lake is so integral to the project that they would not be willing or able to execute the project without it,” White said.
“Yeah, we’ve heard you, if there’s no lake you walk. I’m not sure that’s the best way to address the fundamentals because a lot of what we’ve talked about are other town centers that don’t have lakes,” Leslie said. “This is a serious time around water.” But Joseph Vostrejs, cofounder and principal of City Street Investors and the developer of Broomfield Town Square, reframed White’s comment and provided a backstory.
“The city and us together held a design competition, and the design that included a lake was chosen by the city, and we subsequently entered into a contract with the city that obligates us to build the lake. You, the city, are obligating us to build this lake. I want to be cautious about characterizing this if there’s no lake we walk.
“The lake is the key to the success of this project,” continued Vostrejs. “It’s our belief that the lake is the magic key that makes this work. If you take away the lake, this is just another random main street project that you could just generically pick out of any city in the county. What we were tasked with by the focus group and by the city was to create something special for the city and county of Broomfield, something that you take a picture of and everybody says ‘that’s Broomfield, Colorado.’”
On Wednesday, Broomfield Town Manager Jennifer Hoffman said the next step would be getting the in-depth traffic studies and layout details with the site development plan finalized and brought to council, which she anticipated by the end of the year or early 2023.
After a five-year process to reach the vote Tuesday night and enter the next chapter of the project, Hoffman said it felt there was something “tangible” created.
“Now, it’s the staff’s fiduciary responsibility to bring a comprehensive packet to council so council can make intentioned, well-informed decisions,” Hoffman said. “It feels good to check this box and get to the next steps of getting shovels in the ground.”
Hopeful of a groundbreaking within the next 12 months, Vostrejs echoed Hoffman’s sentiment Wednesday.
“We’re certainly happy to have the vote in place. We started working on this project five years ago, and with the zoning in place we can move on to the site development plan,” Vostrejs said. “We’re excited about this and have hired talented engineers and ecologists to design this lake. It’s going to make it unlike any downtown or town center that we know of in Colorado.”