Like it did for the first hearing on Dec. 5, a request to annex property known as the Sugar Creek addition drew an overflow crowd to City Council chambers on Tuesday. But this time they would be going home in a decidedly different mood.
After a four-plus hour rehearing, Loveland City Council voted 8 to 1 in favor of annexing the 171-acre property and amending the city’s comprehensive plan to accommodate the developer’s plans for denser housing.
Almost unanimously, council members called the vote a difficult decision.
“One of the hardest decisions we face up here is balancing competing interests,” said Mayor Jacki Marsh during deliberations. “And property interests can be one of the hardest because you’re asking people that are used to a way of life and way of viewing their community, you’re asking it to change. So it is a balance.”
The property in question is currently vacant and lies east of U.S. 287 (Garfield Avenue), between East 57th Street on the south and Larimer County Road 30 (East 71st Street) on the north. It has historically served as farm land, but the north half of the parcel was once targeted by the Thompson School District as the site of a future high school, the plans falling through when demographics in the area changed.
Enter Black Timber Builders, a Fort-Collins based builder-developer, with a plan to annex the property into Loveland and bring up to 1,100 housing units on the site, which qualifies a medium-density per city land use standards. Currently the property is designated in the city’s comprehensive plans as estate residential and public/quasi-public.
Tuesday night’s hearing was the second for the annexation, which was initially defeated after a tie council vote on Dec. 5. Hoping to save the project, the developer’s team then asked city staff for a do-over and was granted one by a unanimous council vote on Dec. 19.
But that unanimous vote came with some strings. Among other things, the City Council members asked Black Timber to bring more detail about its future development plans for Sugar Creek, and then agree to stick with those plans through build-out.
The council also asked the developer to address concerns raised by nearby residents about traffic safety, particularly along County Road 30 and the Louden ditch that runs beside it on the south. During the initial hearing and the vote for a rehearing, numerous public commenters warned of high-speed traffic and deteriorating conditions on the road and expressed concern about adding more cars and pedestrians to the mix.
Black Timber Principal Russell Baker and Kristin Turner, a planner from TB Group, did their best to respond to such concerns, as well as the council’s demands, during their presentation on Tuesday.
They had support from city Principal Planner Troy Bliss, who argued to council that Sugar Creek will be much-needed housing to a major transportation corridor in Loveland and meets the aspirations of the city’s comprehensive plan and other planning documents for the area between Loveland and Fort Collins.
As for safety improvements on County Road 30, Black Timber is proposing an ambitious project to improve a 750 foot stretch, including a recut of the Louden ditch that will add six-feet of roadway for an enlarged shoulder and guardrail, Baker told the City Council.
A 10-foot pedestrian path will then run to the south of the ditch in the development’s 100-foot setback, he continued, comparing it to the Eagle Brook subdivision in northwest Loveland, which is bordered by another stretch of the Louden ditch.
But those improvements will require a variance from Larimer County and city standards, and that prompted complaints from several commenters. Others questioned Black Timber’s new plans to move the ditch, when earlier statements from the developer seemed to indicate the ditch company had refused the request.
Baker said in an interview on Wednesday that there was no intent to mislead and chalked the questions up to a misunderstanding.
“We never said that the ditch was not allowed to be moved,” he said. “…The reason we believed that it could not be moved were other utility constraints,” including water and power lines.
To assuage the City Council’s concerns about density, the Black Timber team also spoke in more detail about how it plans to develop the parcel.
The developer plans to offer lots of eight housing types, including single-family, duplexes, townhouses and multi-family, Turner told the council. Around 7% of the property has also been set aside for the Loveland Housing Authority to develop qualified affordable housing.
The detached housing neighborhoods will be built on the perimeter of the property and adjacent to neighboring subdivisions, she continued. With large lots, these neighborhoods will be on the lowest end of the density scale, at 2 to 3 units per acre.
Continuing, Turner told council that denser housing types will be built closer to interior roads in Sugar Creek, including future extensions of Monroe Avenue and East 65th Street. A small portion of the parcel will also be open for commercial development.
To make sure that Black Timber sticks to what it proposed on Tuesday, many of the improvements and concessions it agreed to are either in the zoning document for the property, the annexation agreement or as a condition of approval for any future development applications.
Despite another overwhelming response from commenters opposed to Sugar Creek, the proposal got a much warmer reception from the council this time around, and several members praised Black Timber’s efforts to address shortcomings in the prior presentation.
“This developer’s been asked to do things that I’ve never seen another developer been asked to do,” Councilor Steve Olson said during deliberations. “You don’t get this level of detail in an annexation. …I appreciate the tremendous work that’s been done.”
Council also seemed to have less concern about an amendment to the city’s comprehensive plan than members did in December, and many agreed with Bliss that more and denser housing is needed in that part of the city.
But Baker also faced some pointed questions about the variance for County Road 30 and the challenge in building housing that is attainable, to say nothing of affordable.
In the end, as the meeting neared its regular deadline of 10:30, only Councilor Troy Krenning voted no on the annexation, citing the future possibility that Black Timber will use metropolitan district financing.
However, like Marsh, he admitted that it was difficult to balance the developers’ rights and the residents’ rights.
“These are always difficult because the concerns of residents matter,” Krenning said. “But having a developer follow the rules matters as well.”
The annexation is not quite official yet. Still to come is a second reading of ordinances, which is scheduled for the City Council’s meeting on March 5.
